Padre Pio’s Healing Presence

The devotion to Padre Pio was introduced to my husband Pete by Ramon and Deedee Rodriguez, who, together with Carol Teodoro, brought the stigmatist saint’s relics to Pete’s Capitol Medical Center room in February 2007, soon after his stomach cancer was excised by surgery.

During his ten years (1997-2007) as a diabetes and stroke patient, Pete was paralyzed on the left side. He patiently underwent rehab twice a week all those years. While he was trying to walk without his leg braces, he had a bad fall and broke his hip. He underwent surgery during which a steel plate was inserted in his hip. Later he also lost his right vision to cataract and eventually, glaucoma. And perhaps because  he had not stopped smoking, he also contracted emphysema.

Already then, with his usual tongue-in-check humor, he claimed his “exclusive franchise” on the above afflictions. Nevertheless, his conditions went from bad to worse.

On January 31, 2007, a day after he sang at my birthday celebration in my TV program, “Venta 5”, Pete vomited blood. After a sense of tests, he was diagnosed with stage 2 gastric cancer. He went under the knife twice for gastrectomy. It was during this ordeal that his path was lit by Saint Pio.

In between confinements, Pete was able to join the family for milestones. I remember him asking his doctor for a “one-day pass” in order to attend the baptism of our youngest grandchild Sabrina on March 12, 2007. True enough, a day after, he again vomited blood and was rushed back to the ICU. His emphysema had worsened, warranting regular liquid extraction from his lungs.

Meanwhile, his diabetes was exacerbated. From maintenance medicine, he had graduated to insulin shots. As a stroke patient, we had to be vigilant about his fluctuating blood sugar count. Subnormal levels or hypoglycemia would predispose him to coma. This meant sugar supplements from midnight to dawn contrasted by insulin shots the rest of the day, during which his blood sugar would shoot up to alarming levels.

Well meaning relatives and friends gifted Pete with statues and novenas to St. Pio. While not particularly fundamentalist and ritualistic, and decidedly not taken to novenas and religious favors, Pete was nevertheless a spiritual person. He was upright, fair and noble, never self-righteous nor imposing with religious practices.

It was a mild surprise, therefore, that he would join me at dawn prayers to St. Pio, after our routine blood pressure tests, sugar count, force feeding, and administration of an average nine tablets each time. He had begun to sleep clutching the small statue our niece gave him. Occasionally he would kiss the image. Perhaps at the saint’s instance, he had gone back to Confession and regular Communion. And when he would feel surges of strength, we would wheel him to Sunday masses at the St. Pio Centre in Libis.

Pete’s general condition deteriorated. His cold and cough persisted. Vomiting continued, he weakened considerably, lost his appetite completely and became less lucid and communicative. He had also lost around 60 lbs. by July 2007. After additional tests while in and out of the hospital, his cancer was found to have metastasized to the lungs and the brain and was now terminal at stage 4.

The ensuing days were marked by brokenness, bodily for Pete and emotionally and psychologically for our children and myself. We prayed hard to the Lord and asked St. Pio to intercede for us in mustering quick courage to disclose to Pete his real condition. We believed we had to tell him immediately as not doing so would be shortchanging him of the truth. But how to tell him. There lay the rub. Until St. Pio came to the rescue. He armed us with courage and practically put words in our mouths. It was then we knew that our family’s relationship with St. Pio had reached immense proportions. We were only the better for it.

Through Pete’s last days and amidst the numerous private and group prayers, we did not ask St. Pio to help cure Pete’s various afflictions. That we left in God’s mighty Hands. We asked instead for the miracle of enlightened knowledge and understanding of God’s will for him, capped by a constant and unflinching faith in God’s wisdom, no matter that we could not always understand why things were happening the way they were. We begged not that Pete be relieved of his pain and suffering, but that he be given the strength and perseverance to bear them and surrender them to the heavens. We asked for the grace of sanctification for Pete. And finally that, in the end, in God’s own time, that Pete may be rewarded with His loving embrace.

Pete’s death at 4:15 pm on August 9, 2007, was marked by a quiet serenity amidst grief, pain and hushed prayer. It was a sad but beautiful departure from his human suffering; with peace and muted hope illuminating what was otherwise a dim and somber ICU.

That was St. Pio’s miracle of healing. To this day we continue to thank him for it.