Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Susan De Bartoli opens with a question most Lenten readers quietly carry: what cross, exactly, is the Lord asking me to carry this year? Her answer is to hand the reader over to Padre Pio of Pietrelcina and let the Capuchin friar's own letters do the guiding. Drawing on Pio's correspondence, De Bartoli traces fifty years of a man who treated each day as a 'little Lent' — not as grim endurance but as deliberate union with Christ's Passion. The book moves through six weeks, each opening with a Marian reflection and closing with one of Pio's encounters with a consoling angel, and the days between examine his childhood consecration, his teenage calling, the stigmata, his spiritual battles, and his mystical touches. The audience is anyone who wants a Lenten companion who has already walked the road they are walking and left a map in his letters. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Pio's childhood experiences of consecrating himself to Jesus and Mary, traced here from his own letters, illustrate the Catholic understanding that the person is oriented toward God from the beginning — not merely corrected toward God later. The book reads that early consecration as the activation of an original ordering already present in the child's soul, not as an imposition from outside. - **Fallen**: De Bartoli does not soften Pio's spiritual warfare. His battles against the powers of evil and the physical sufferings accompanying the stigmata are presented as real encounters with disordered opposition, not merely psychological distress. This preserves the full weight of the Fall's consequences — bodily, spiritual, and moral — and refuses to aestheticize suffering into something merely picturesque. - **Redeemed**: The organizing logic of the book is that suffering offered in union with Christ becomes redemptive rather than merely tragic. Pio's intent to 'offer himself for souls' is not presented as heroic voluntarism but as the specific mechanism by which the Redeemed state operates: grace transforms what concupiscence and disordered passion have wounded, and the cross becomes the instrument of that transformation rather than its obstacle. - **Justice (sacrifice)**: The book trains the reader in the virtue of sacrifice by giving it a concrete object each day — Pio's chosen act of union with the Passion — rather than treating sacrifice as a generic spiritual attitude. The reader is asked before beginning to name their own cross, which moves sacrifice from the abstract to the personally obligating. - **Prudence (docility)**: De Bartoli's method is essentially one of apprenticeship: she positions the reader as a spiritual child accompanying a spiritual father. This is docility in the classical sense — the willingness to let a wiser guide shape one's judgment — and the book's weekly Marian framing reinforces that the reader is not navigating alone. SECTION THREE The most natural conversation partner is Therese of Lisieux's *Story of a Soul*[^1], which shares with De Bartoli's book both the epistolary method of accessing a saint's interior life and the thesis that suffering, when surrendered rather than resisted, loses its power to isolate: 'I no longer wish either for suffering or death, yet both are precious to me.' Where Therese arrived at that disposition through her 'little way' of spiritual childhood, Pio arrived through the physical extremity of the stigmata, and the two routes illuminate each other as distinct but convergent paths through the same Purgative passage. Pope Benedict XVI's[^2] collected audiences in the corpus add a further register: his reading of Maximilian Kolbe's martyrdom as the demonstration that 'only love is creative' supplies the theological grammar for why Pio's chosen suffering is presented throughout this book as generative rather than merely penitential. ## References 1. Therese of Lisieux (n.d.). *Story of a Soul*. — "I no longer wish either for suffering or death, yet both are precious to me." 2. Pope Benedict XVI (2024). *Wednesday Audiences (Collected Writings)*. — "Hatred is not a creative force: only love is creative."
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book treats suffering not as a problem to be managed but as a participation in Christ's Passion, giving Padre Pio's stigmata and spiritual battles concrete pedagogical weight for the reader's own Lenten examination.
- ✓De Bartoli's weekly Marian-themed openings situate the reader within a maternal, ecclesial context, grounding individual ascetic effort in the broader communion of the Church rather than in private willpower.
- ✓The structure of the six-week journey — from Ash Wednesday's 'dust' to Easter glory — maps directly onto the Purgative-Illuminative-Unitive arc, allowing the devotional to function as a genuine formation text rather than only an inspirational one.
- ✓Padre Pio's childhood consecration to Jesus and Mary, foregrounded early in the book, illustrates how the theological virtues can be cultivated through concrete early acts of self-donation, making virtue formation intelligible across the lifespan.
- ✓The inclusion of Pio's mystical encounters — angelic consolations, spiritual warfare, mystical touches — preserves the full supernatural anthropology of the person without reducing the spiritual life to psychological self-improvement.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠Readers without a guide or confessor may struggle to distinguish between consolation and aridity in their own prayer, since the book draws heavily on Pio's extraordinary charisms; a brief orienting note on discernment of spirits would reduce the risk of misapplication.
- ⚠The six-week Lenten frame, while pastorally effective, means that material this dense — stigmata, passive purifications, mystical warfare — arrives in concentrated daily doses without extended commentary on Pio's sources in Franciscan and Carmelite tradition.