In the spirit of Easteride, here’s an Here’s a very interesting story about the Irish love affair with Saint Padre Pio, whose exhumed body has been made available for public viewing in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy.

Colm Keane has written a new book that explores both this Irish love affair with this beloved saint of the Church and the various miracles that have been attributed to him. Looks to be an interesting read.

The veneration of saints down through the ages has always involved a curious mix of faith and devotion mixed with marketing and capitalism; any read of church history will show numerous occurrences of this sort of thing since the earliest martyrdoms of its saints. Various Protestants may find this kind of thing amusing and worthy of scorn, but in my view it is surely no more worthy of scorn than their own repeated failures over the years to try and “get back” to the “original church” through their own schismatic actions, as if out of division you can make a whole.