One of our members writes of his experience:

 

We were in the process of joining the Catholic church. Our son attended Catholic school and was approaching First Communion so I started taking the RCIA classes and, as a formerly non-practicing protestant, I had a lot of questions. The RCIA classes were gradually answering those questions.

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As a side note, it was a challenging time. The Great Recession had just hit. Money was exceedingly tight and the month-to-month struggle was quite a strain (a great understatement)! I dreaded going into work and facing it all. My wife had gotten me a book on Padre Pio entitled “Pray, Hope and Don’t Worry” thinking that it could be what I needed at the moment, though she (and I) knew next to nothing about Padre Pio. I remember reading the book and learning about Padre Pio’s many gifts including reading of souls, bilocation, levitation, prophecy, etc. One unusual charism he had was scent of sanctity. This was a scent that many people experienced in the presence of Padre Pio. Also, if someone was not in the saint’s presence – or even far from him – they would still experience the scent. When they did, they knew that the saint was actually with them and was praying for them, something he would confirm when he next saw them. People continued experiencing the scent even after his passing from this world. The scent was described in the book as being the scent of flowers…but not any specific flower according to most people who experienced it.

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Not long afterwards in RCIA we were learning about the communion of saints. I, somewhat naively, decided to try this out and see if the saints were, indeed, listening! I began praying to Padre Pio to help me and my family through those dark and highly stressful days and to just let me know he actually heard my prayers.

One day shortly thereafter my wife, young son and myself returned home after being gone all day. Instead the house was dripping with an overwhelming scent. I was concerned. My wife is very sensitive to scents and I knew this would give her the equivalent of a sinus headache within minutes. I have a very poor sense of smell so for me to smell it strongly the scent had to be overpowering to everyone else! I started searching for the source…like maybe a candle or something, but even that would make a scent so strong.  Oddly, neither my wife or young son seemed to notice and were simply going about their business. I wandered around the house searching, becoming more and more puzzled. I remember thinking to myself “the scent smells like flowers, but I can’t pick out a certain flower” because if I could pick out the flower, that would have been a clue to its origin. Suddenly the line from the book came flashing through my mind. To satisfy myself I virtually bolted into the living room and went over to my wife and son and said “don’t you smell that?” They looked at me with confused faces. I stammered, trying to explain, but gave up. The moment I had associated the scent with Padre Pio, it began to dissipate very, very quickly after being so strong for five minutes to ten minutes. I went back to the room when I first smelled it and got one more whiff…and then it was gone.

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Suddenly the gravity of it all came to me. The scent fit the description of Padre Pio’s scent of sanctity. There was no other explanation. Being a person of science I continued to search, and there was no source for the smell. And also, there was no reason for why it would so suddenly completely dissipate (no open windows as it was late November). My wife and son never did experience it, so this was intended only for me. The conclusion – after eliminating all other options – was that Padre Pio had been there. He was praying for me. The communion of saints was real. Quite frankly, if that was true, so was everything else that this based on…the Catholic faith, the Eucharist, all of it had to be true.

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I still think of that evening when Padre Pio dropped by our house in Lancaster County and gave me one of those small slaps on the side of the head he so often gave as if to say “Yes, we saints are here, you dolt! You and your family will be OK. Just followed God’s will.”

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Oh, and by the way, we made it through the Great Recession, survived a career change, and everything turned out all right in a way I could never have expected.