Jeanette Salerno

Padre Pio's Christmases Jeanette Salerno

Padre Pio loved and anticipated Christmas like a child, all year round, all his life--from his youth, when he would carve and shape the Holy Family Nativity figures, to his Army days during the First World War, when he was forced to outwit bureaucratic rules to be able to say Mass on Christmas morning, to the many Midnight Masses on the windblown Gargano mountain, when he seemed tp bring the newborn Infant Jesus to life before the townspeople. His Midnight Mass became a legend. The Crib was everything to Padre Pio. He holds it up to us in simple but luminous words. and once he points out some true meanings, we are there forever. We cannot look away..