As most have heard by now, Padre Pio’s body went on display yesterday, to mark the 40th anniversary of his death. And the New York Times takes a closer look at what that may mean for the people of his hometown, San Giovani Rotondo:

The only visible parts of Padre Pio are his fingers, blackened now 40 years after he died. The palms, which once provoked sharp debates over how they came to be marked with the same wounds as Christ’s, are covered by his famous half gloves (replicas of which can be bought here for $8, or for $4.75, a Padre Pio snow globe).

The face is made of wax, a convincing likeness, gray beard and all.

“It left me breathless,” said Rosa Michitelli, 60, a nurse who as a girl attended Mass celebrated by Padre Pio, then a Capuchin monk suspected of fraud and self-promotion by the Vatican but since his canonization in 2002, Italy’s most revered saint. “It was just like when he was alive.”

Ms. Michitelli spoke just after seeing Padre Pio’s body, which was put on display here Thursday. She was one of the first.

Some 750,000 people have made reservations to see him between now and December — a testament to his enduring popularity, a thirst for something immediately spiritual that the Roman Catholic Church often does not provide and, it cannot be ignored, the need to expand tourism in a town that while attracting eight million visitors a year has too many hotels and not enough tourists who actually stay the night.

“This is an opportunity we have to turn religious tourism into mass tourism,” said Massimiliano Ostillio, who is in charge of tourism for the region of Puglia, which makes up the heel on Italy’s boot.

Occupancy rates for the 125 or so hotels in this town where Padre Pio lived for more than 50 years are the lowest in Italy, Mr. Ostillio said. He said he hoped that the large number of people expected to come to see Padre Pio might stay longer, then explore the rest of Puglia (not to mention possibly buy more Padre Pio thimbles, statues, key chains, rosaries, alarm clocks, plates and candles), just as visitors to the shrine of St. Francis in Assisi spill over into the surrounding region of Umbria.

Holy places are always like this, a mix of money and real devotion, more so in recent years in Europe as an aging population flocks to shrines like Lourdes in France and Medjugorje in Bosnia in ever larger numbers. They represent, many experts say, a sort of concrete spirituality — a sickness to be cured, a favor granted — all unbound by the institution of the church.

The church, said Antonio Socci, an Italian expert on Padre Pio, “is the world of the human, for good or for bad.”

“But in the case of saints, it is the tangible presence of God,” he added.

And so the church has often looked with suspicion on modern miracles and their workers, perhaps most so in the case of Padre Pio, born Francesco Forgione in 1887 in the small southern village of Pietrelcina. Around 1911, as a young and exceptionally devout priest, he wrote that he began to experience something disturbing.

“Last night something happened which I can neither explain nor understand,” he wrote to a friend. “In the middle of the palms of my hands a red mark appeared, about the size of a penny, accompanied by acute pain in the middle of the red marks.”

The wound spread to his feet and his side. Soon his stigmata became famous, attracting huge numbers of pilgrims and enough money that he eventually built a hospital that was once the biggest in southern Italy. Popes had various opinions of him, however, the harshest being John XXIII, who, a recent book contends, considered him a fraud and a womanizer. In 1960, the pope wrote of Padre Pio’s “immense deception.”

A Vatican doctor called him “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited people’s credulity.” Many suspected that his wounds were caused by carbolic acid, which, one recently unearthed document contends, he once ordered from a pharmacist.

But Pope John Paul II, who had confessed to him in the 1940s and who canonized more saints than any other pope, had a different view. He canonized Padre Pio, who died in 1968 at age 81, before what had been reported as one of the biggest crowds that had ever traveled to Rome.

Padre Pio, now officially St. Pio of Pietrelcina, has since been accepted by the Vatican, and the crowd here seemed to have no doubt about the legitimacy of his wounds. (He has been credited with other powers, like levitation and bi-location, the ability to be in two places at one time.)

“He was suffering,” Concetta Crescenzi, 65, who visited Padre Pio with a German friend in 1966, said during a Mass on Thursday that marked the opening of the crypt with Padre Pio’s body in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. “He had blood coming out of his hands. If you saw it, you would believe it.”

With that, Brunella Pardini, 69, stood up from a chair nearby. “This is a demonstration of its truth!” she proclaimed, surveying the crowd that had come for the Mass. “Blessed are those who believe without seeing!”

Continue reading for more details about life in the village.

Photo: by CNS/Reuters