The precise reason Padre Pio refused absolution to a woman who had an abortion and why he eventually granted her absolution
SOURCE
Throughout
my adult life I've been surrounded by young female friends who tell me
that they view me as a Latin Mass Catholic who takes sin and the sin of
abortion in particular too seriously. They wear rictus smiles and claim
it's not really so dire a sin when a woman employs a doctor to slaughter
the little one inside her because she wants to prioritise her career or
doesn't want a child with her current boyfriend. Or they reiterate the
reason that I heard from the lips of hundreds of women when I was with
them during their crisis pregnancies: that they can have a baby and
provide for one, but they do not feel ready.
In response I have often tried to
defend the Church's teachings on the gravity of abortion as a mortal sin
by reminding my coffee companions and colleagues that Padre Pio took
the sin of abortion so deathly seriously that he was known to have
refused absolution if a penitent confessed to having had an abortion.
While this has led to the smiles melting from faces and shocked silence
(and to my temporary satisfaction at having had the last word) I have
unwittingly portrayed abortion as the unforgivable sin. In wider circles
of the global Catholic Church if most people assume that Padre Pio never gave absolution when a woman or man confessed involvement in procuring or having an abortion, it may discourage
post-abortion women (and men) from confessing abortion, they may think
it is a stain on their soul that can never be wiped clean. They may also
feel painfully at odds with Padre Pio, if the great mystic refused
absolution to others, had they darkened his confessional, would he do
the same to them?
It was the late Dónal Enright who gave me his eye-witness account. Dónal was a dear friend of Padre Pio's.
As his name suggests, Dónal was an Irishman who hailed from the same
part of Ireland that I hail from, Cork. During Padre Pio's lifetime, Dónal spent many long days at San Giovanni de Rotondo, ever ready to lend assistance to Padre Pio mostly by comforting and be-friending
penitents who were trying to save their souls with the help of Padre
Pio's window to their souls, enlightening them as to what they had done
wrong and what they needed to confess.
When he was still living I visited Dónal at his home in County Cork, I
asked him pointedly if he had known a woman who had been refused
absolution because of having had an abortion. Dónal told me of one such
post-abortion woman who gave him permission to re-tell her story.
Dónal first met her mere minutes after
she had left Padre Pio's confessional. She was in great emotional
distress having been refused absolution. She was, however, receptive to
meeting Dónal who greeted her calmly with his soft Irish lilt. Dónal
offered her the chance to talk things over with him and she agreed.
Dónal did not pry - and did not ask prying questions - an atypical
Irishman one might say. But the lady felt at ease in his company and
volunteered the information that she had suffered much following her
abortion, and knowing it was a sin, she took it with her to Padre Pio's
confessional, but Padre Pio had refused her absolution by saying to her,
"you are not truly sorry for your sin". This is the key: Padre Pio
could see her soul and could see that she was not sufficiently contrite
or "truly sorry" to use Pio's exact words.
Emotional guilt, the sort that causes
distress and depression and genuine contrition where we are sincerely
sorry to God for offending Him - are different and in their pure forms
entirely separate phenomena. After being refused absolution, the lady
had to pray for contrition. Interestingly, it is when offering the
Mystery of the Rosary 'The Scourging at the Pillar' that we ask for true
contrition for our sins. In my view true contrition and the personal
cultivation of it has not gotten much attention in the Year of Mercy
which ends this November.
