"Making Saints, (Re-)Making Lives: Pilgrimage and Revitalization in the Land of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina"
Based
on nearly three years of multi-sited ethnographic research, this dissertation
represents the first truly systemic anthropological examination of the immensely
popular cult of Catholic saint and stigmatic Padre Pio of Pietrelcina
(1887-1968) from its origins to today. Canonized in 2002, Padre Pio was a
twentieth-century Capuchin priest who has become one of the Catholic world’s
“most revered saints”—to whom more Italians and Irish pray than to Jesus, Mary,
or Saint Francis—thanks to his Christ-like suffering and stigmata, supernatural
abilities, and the foundation of a technologically advanced research hospital,
the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, at his monastic home in the remote San
Giovanni Rotondo (Italy); today his cult boasts a global network of powerful prayer
groups, a shrine complex featuring monuments by Italy’s leading contemporary
artists and architects, and a mass media empire that nets over 120 million
euros annually. While in many ways Pio can be described (as critics have sometimes done) as a classic “Southern Italian saint”—a medieval thaumaturge
who engages pre-Tridentine forms of popular religiosity—a close analysis of the
emergence of Pio as a “revitalization prophet” (Wallace 1956), his particular
“victim soul” theology, and the struggles and negotiations between a number of
“epistemic groups” to define and utilize the saint reveal that his movement and
subsequent cult is a historically and culturally situated product of the tumultuous
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This dissertation was successfully defended on April 23, 2012 and copies can be obtained from ProQuest. However, research is ongoing and I would love to hear from pilgrims and devotees of Padre Pio!  
 If you or anyone you know has a story about Padre Pio to share, or if you are traveling on a Padre Pio pilgrimage, please contact Michael.
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