San Giovanni Rotondo Padre Pio Shrine

1. What Is Actually at the Shrine

San Giovanni Rotondo holds one small friary church, one large church built beside it in the 1950s, one far larger church built below them on the slope in the 1990s and early 2000s, a working hospital, and the body of a canonised saint. Every one of those five things exists because of a single friar who arrived on the mountain in 1916 with a chest complaint his doctors never pinned down, a poor record of health, and no expectation of ever leaving again.

The shrine repays a visitor who knows the order of the buildings, because they were added one after another as the crowds grew, and each of them answers a different question. The sixteenth-century church of Santa Maria delle Grazie is where the events happened. The friary attached to it is where he lived. The church of 1959 is where he celebrated Mass in his last decade and where he was buried for forty years. The hospital across the road is what he asked his followers to build with their money. The church of Saint Pio, consecrated in 2004, is where his body lies now, in a lower church whose walls are covered in gold mosaic.

Most pilgrims walk the site in the wrong order, start at the biggest building, and never find the choir loft where the whole thing began. Walking it in the order below takes about half a day and makes sense of everything.

2. The Town and the Gargano

San Giovanni Rotondo sits at around 550 metres on the southern slope of the Gargano, the limestone spur that sticks out into the Adriatic above the heel of Italy, in the province of Foggia. The Gargano is dry, stony, and full of caves. Sheep tracks called tratturi run across it. Before the twentieth century the district was poor even by the standards of the Italian south, and its people worked small fields, kept animals, and emigrated.

The town takes its name from a round building. A small early Christian baptistery on a circular plan, dedicated to St John the Baptist, stood here, traditionally held to occupy the site of an older pagan building, and the town grew up around it as San Giovanni in the Rotonda, John's church at the round place. The rotunda survives in the old part of the town, well below the modern shrine, and almost nobody who comes for Padre Pio ever sees it.

Why This Corner of Italy Was Already Holy

The Gargano was a pilgrimage country long before 1916. About twenty-five kilometres east along the mountain lies Monte Sant'Angelo, where a cave sanctuary dedicated to the Archangel Michael has drawn pilgrims since the late fifth century. It stood on the medieval road to the Holy Land, and pilgrims heading east from Rome would climb to the cave before taking ship at the Adriatic ports. Padre Pio is reported to have urged pilgrims who came to see him to go up to the Archangel as well, and the two shrines are still commonly visited together.

That older pilgrimage explains something about the newer one. The Gargano has been a place where people walk uphill to meet something for fifteen hundred years. The road to Padre Pio's friary runs along a mountain that already had the habit. For the wider Italian picture, see the guide to pilgrimage sites in Italy, and for what a pilgrimage is in Catholic terms, the guide to what a pilgrimage is.

3. How Padre Pio Came to This Friary

Francesco Forgione was born on 25 May 1887 at Pietrelcina in the province of Benevento, in Campania, the son of a farming family. He entered the Capuchin novitiate at Morcone in January 1903, taking the name Fra Pio of Pietrelcina, and he was ordained a priest on 10 August 1910. His health was poor from the start. He spent long stretches back at Pietrelcina because the friary regimes made him ill, and he was called up and discharged from military service more than once during the First World War.

He came to the friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie at San Giovanni Rotondo on 28 July 1916, went away again, and returned in September of that year. The friary was chosen partly for its mountain air, which his superiors hoped would suit a friar with a chest complaint. He never lived anywhere else afterwards. He died in the same building fifty-two years later.

A Small House on a Bare Hill

The friary he arrived at was tiny and remote. It stood a couple of kilometres above the town on a track, surrounded by stony ground and a few cypresses, with a community of a handful of friars and a church that could hold perhaps a hundred people at a squeeze. There was no water supply worth the name, no electricity, and no reason for anyone from outside the district to come.

Within twenty years the same building was receiving pilgrims from across Italy, and within forty it had a hospital beside it, lodgings for pilgrims around it, and organised crowd control at its doors. Nothing about the site changed. What changed was that people wanted to confess to the friar who lived in it.

Dates for the life of Padre Pio (birth 25 May 1887, entry into the Capuchin novitiate 1903, ordination 10 August 1910, arrival at San Giovanni Rotondo in 1916, death 23 September 1968, beatification 2 May 1999, canonisation 16 June 2002) follow the biography published by the Holy See at the time of his canonisation and the records of the Capuchin friars of the Province of Foggia who staff the shrine.

4. The Old Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie

The old church of Santa Maria delle Grazie is a plain sixteenth-century friary church of a kind you could find in a hundred Italian towns, and it is the most important building at the shrine. It is small, low, and dim, with a single nave, a wooden ceiling, a stone floor and side altars. The Capuchin friars built it with their house in the middle of the sixteenth century, and it was still the parish-scale church of a very small community when Padre Pio arrived.

Standing in it is the corrective that most visitors need. The shrine above it can hold a stadium crowd. This room could hold the population of one village. Everything that made San Giovanni Rotondo famous happened in a space about the size of a school hall, in front of a congregation that on most mornings was made up of local farmers and a few friars.

What to Look At Inside

Three things reward attention. The altar where he celebrated Mass for his first decades here, which is the same altar in front of which the crowds of the 1920s and 1930s stood for hours. The confessional boxes, which are marked. The stairway to the choir loft above and behind the sanctuary, which is where the events of 20 September 1918 took place and which is the subject of the next section.

The Mass itself is the thing to understand about this room. Padre Pio's Mass was famously long, often well over an hour, and people travelled from other regions and slept outside to be present at it. He offered it in the older Latin form for almost all of his life, and the guide to the Traditional Latin Mass explains what that rite is and how the Church now regulates it. What drew the crowds was the way he prayed it. Witnesses described long pauses, visible distress, and a man who appeared to be somewhere else. The Church makes no ruling on any of that. What the Church teaches about the Mass itself is set out in the guide to the Catholic Mass, and it applies to his Mass exactly as it applies to the one in your parish.

5. The Choir Loft and the Crucifix

The choir loft of the old church is the most specific place at San Giovanni Rotondo. On the morning of 20 September 1918, Padre Pio was praying there after Mass, in front of a large painted crucifix, when he received the visible wounds in his hands, his feet and his side. He bore them for the next fifty years. The loft is a raised wooden gallery reached from inside the friary, furnished with plain choir stalls, and the crucifix is still on its wall.

He wrote an account of what happened to his spiritual director, Padre Benedetto of San Marco in Lamis, on 22 October 1918. In it he described a figure whose hands, feet and side dripped blood, a terror that he thought would kill him, and finding when the vision ended that his own hands, feet and side were pierced and bleeding. He asked repeatedly, in that letter and afterwards, to be relieved of the visible wounds while keeping the pain. He was not relieved of them.

What the Wounds Meant to Him

Padre Pio treated the stigmata as an embarrassment and a burden. He wore half-gloves to cover his hands. He avoided discussing the wounds, refused to display them, and was reported by his brethren to be sharply irritated by anyone who came to look rather than to confess. Habits and half-gloves he wore are kept in the shrine museum, and they carry the stains.

Catholic theology has a settled way of reading a case like this, and it is worth stating because the loft is where people get sentimental. The stigmata are a private grace given to one person, and no Catholic is required to believe in them. The Church teaches that public revelation closed with the death of the last apostle, and that private revelations and extraordinary graces do not add to it or improve it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 67). Holiness came through fifty years of obedience under investigation, and the Church canonised him for that life.

The theological content of the wounds is in St Paul: a Christian carries the dying of Jesus in the body, and Paul writes to the Colossians that he completes in his flesh what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of the body, the Church (Colossians 1:24). Nothing is lacking in the sacrifice of Christ. What is lacking is the share of it that each Christian is invited to carry. That is the frame in which a Catholic reads the loft.

6. The Confessional and the Queue

The confessional is the heart of what happened at San Giovanni Rotondo, and it is the part of the shrine most likely to change a visitor. Padre Pio heard confessions in the old church for roughly fifty years, for many hours a day, in numbers so large that the friary eventually ran a booking system with numbered tickets and a waiting list that could run to several days. Men were heard in one place and women in another. The boxes are still there, marked, in the old church and along the sacristy corridor beside it.

He had a reputation as a hard confessor. He was blunt, he cut people off, he sent penitents away and told them to come back when they were serious, and there are many accounts of him naming a sin the penitent had left out. Those accounts belong to the life rather than the site, and the guide to St Padre Pio deals with them. What matters for the place is what he was doing when he did it.

What Was Happening in That Box

A priest hearing a confession is exercising the authority Christ gave the apostles on the evening of the resurrection: whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained (John 20:23). The Catechism describes the priest in that moment as the sign and the instrument of God's merciful love for the sinner, and says that when he celebrates the sacrament of penance he is fulfilling the ministry of the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost sheep (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1465). The absolution given by Padre Pio was the same absolution given by any validly ordained priest with faculties, no better and no different in its effect.

That is worth saying plainly at the shrine, because the pilgrim standing in front of an empty box can slip into thinking that a particular confessor produced a particular grade of forgiveness. The queue at San Giovanni Rotondo was a queue for the same sacrament available this Saturday in every parish on earth. The guide to confession and how to make a good one walks through it step by step.

There is one honest use of this room. Padre Pio's entire pastoral method was to get people to confess their sins and to keep confessing them. A visitor who tours the confessional and does not go to confession has toured a piece of furniture. Confession is heard at the shrine in a number of languages, and going while you are there is the single most appropriate thing anyone can do at this site.

7. The Friary Corridor and the Cell

The friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie is a working Capuchin house, and part of it is open to pilgrims. The corridor of cells on the upper floor is preserved, and Padre Pio's own cell, where he died in the early hours of 23 September 1968, is kept with his bed, his desk, his chair and a number of his belongings behind a glass screen. The friars set what is open and when, and the route is signposted from inside the complex.

The cell is small, whitewashed, and almost empty. There is a narrow bed, a table, a crucifix, a jug. The point of a Capuchin cell is that it contains nothing. The Capuchins are one of the three branches of the Franciscan first order, formed in the 1520s as a reform seeking a stricter return to the poverty of St Francis, and their houses are deliberately bare. The corridor makes the argument better than any explanation of the order could.

A Friar Under Obedience

The other thing the corridor communicates is that Padre Pio was a man under authority for his whole adult life, and that his superiors used that authority against him more than once.

The Holy Office investigated him repeatedly. In 1923 it issued a declaration that the events attributed to him were not established as supernatural, and it directed measures to reduce public attention. A plan to transfer him to another friary in the same year was abandoned after the people of San Giovanni Rotondo reacted with something close to a riot. Between 1931 and 1933 he was forbidden to celebrate Mass in public and to hear confessions, and he obeyed, celebrating alone in an internal chapel. The restrictions were lifted in 1933. A further round of restrictions followed an apostolic visitation in the early 1960s, and they were relaxed under Pope Paul VI.

He complied with all of it without public complaint. That record is the reason the Church could later canonise him with confidence: a man whose obedience held when the institution he obeyed was treating him as a suspect. Anyone who reads the shrine as a monument to a maverick has read it backwards.

The Holy Office declaration of 1923, the suspension of his public ministry from 1931 to 1933, and the restrictions imposed after the apostolic visitation of the early 1960s are documented in the acts of the Holy See and in the published positio of the cause for his canonisation, which was examined by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints before his beatification in 1999.

8. The Church of 1959 and the Old Crypt

The larger church next to the old one was built in the 1950s because the sixteenth-century church could no longer hold the crowds. It was consecrated on 1 July 1959, and it is the building most photographs of Padre Pio's later Masses were taken in. It is a broad, bright, mid-century Italian church with a wide nave and clear sightlines, designed for large congregations who came to see a single friar at a single altar.

Padre Pio died on 23 September 1968 at the age of eighty-one, in his cell, holding his rosary. Witnesses recorded his last words as the two names he had repeated all his life, Jesus and Mary. He was buried on 26 September 1968 in the crypt of this church, in a tomb of dark polished stone at the foot of the stairs, and he lay there for the next forty years.

The Old Crypt

The old crypt is still open and it is still a place of prayer. For four decades it was the destination of the entire pilgrimage: people came down the steps, touched the slab, left notes and photographs, and went away. The body was moved out in 2008 and the crypt kept its character as a quiet chapel below the 1959 church.

Most pilgrims now go to the lower church of the Renzo Piano building and never come down here. That is a mistake worth correcting. The old crypt is dim, small, and the least crowded place in the whole complex, which makes it the best place on the site to actually pray.

The Canonisation

The cause opened after his death and moved through the ordinary stages. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 2 May 1999 and canonised by the same pope on 16 June 2002 in St Peter's Square, under the name Saint Pius of Pietrelcina. His feast day is 23 September, the day of his death.

Canonisation is a specific act. The Church does not manufacture a saint by it. She solemnly proclaims that a person practised heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God's grace, and she proposes that person to the faithful as a model and an intercessor (Catechism of the Catholic Church 828). A canonised saint is held to be in heaven, and the Church asks the faithful to seek that saint's prayers. Two miracles attributed to his intercession were examined and accepted in the course of the cause, one for the beatification and one for the canonisation. The guide to the saints and why Catholics honour them sets out the whole process, and the guide to miracles and how the Church verifies them covers the medical scrutiny involved.

9. Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza

Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the Home for the Relief of Suffering, is a large general hospital standing across the road from the friary, and it is the part of the shrine that surprises first-time visitors most. Padre Pio founded it. The project was launched in 1940, built over years on donations that arrived in small amounts from people he had confessed and from the prayer groups attached to him, and the hospital opened on 5 May 1956, twelve years before his death.

His reasoning was concrete. The Gargano was poor and had almost no medical provision. Sick people either travelled a long way to Foggia or went without. He wanted a hospital that would treat them near home, in decent buildings, with good equipment, and he was explicit that the sick person was to be received as a person rather than processed as a case.

Whose Hospital It Is

Padre Pio was a friar under a vow of poverty, and he owned nothing. He was consistent that the hospital was a work of the Church and that it did not belong to him, and its ownership was placed with the Holy See. It operates today as a Catholic hospital and a recognised research institute, with departments well beyond anything the district could have supported on its own.

The theology behind the building is the plainest thing at the shrine. Christ's compassion toward the sick and his healings of every kind of infirmity are a sign of the coming of the Kingdom, and the Church has always read the care of the sick as a direct command rather than an optional extra (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1503). Jesus identifies himself with the sick and says that what is done for them is done for him (Matthew 25:36-40). James tells the Church to call the presbyters to pray over the sick and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord (James 5:14-15).

The hospital is a working clinical site with patients in it, so it is not a place to wander around. Seeing it from outside is enough, and the point registers in about a minute. A man who was best known for supernatural claims spent the last third of his life raising money for beds, an operating theatre and a laboratory. The guide to why God allows suffering deals with the question the building answers in bricks.

The hospital gives its own foundation date as 5 May 1956 and describes its status as a Catholic institution linked to the Holy See and recognised in Italy as a research hospital. Details of its history and current work are published by Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza and by the Capuchin friars of the shrine.

10. The Church of Saint Pio

The church of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina is the enormous modern church on the slope below the friary, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and consecrated on 1 July 2004. It was commissioned in the early 1990s because the shrine was receiving crowds far beyond what the 1959 church could hold, and it was built to take a congregation of several thousand inside with a large open parvis outside for the overflow at major feasts.

The building is worth looking at properly. Its plan spirals in toward the altar. The structure rests on great arches of pale local Apricena stone quarried on the Gargano, radiating outward like the ribs of a shell, with the widest arch spanning around fifty metres. The roof is copper, weathering green. The whole thing is set into the slope so that it reads as low from above and vast from below, and the stone is the same stone as the mountain it stands on.

The design of the church of Saint Pio is the work of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which publishes the project details including the stone arch structure and the seating capacity. The consecration date of 1 July 2004 is given by the shrine of Santa Maria delle Grazie, San Giovanni Rotondo.

What Pilgrims Make of It

Opinion divides sharply and has done since it opened. Some pilgrims find the church cold, too large, and a strange container for a friar who lived in a bare cell. Others find that the sheer span of stone does what a great church is supposed to do and that the spiral pulls the eye to the altar without a single distraction on the way.

Both reactions are reasonable and neither is a doctrinal question. The Catholic tradition of building large has always run alongside the tradition of building small, and the same order that produced this church produced the cell upstairs. Walk both in one afternoon and let the contrast stand.

The Lower Church

Beneath the main church is the lower church, a broad, low, gold-lit space whose walls and vaults are covered in mosaic scenes from the life of St Francis and the life of Padre Pio, made by the Centro Aletti workshop in Rome. At the end of it, in a chapel finished in gold mosaic, lies the body. That is the subject of the next section, and it needs to be said carefully.

11. The Body, and Why It Is Not Called Incorrupt

The body of Padre Pio is displayed in the lower church of the church of Saint Pio, in a crystal casket, dressed in a Capuchin habit, with the face and hands visible. The Catholic Church has never declared that body incorrupt, and the shrine does not describe it that way. What pilgrims see is a body that was exhumed, examined, treated by conservators, and given a lifelike silicone mask over the face.

The sequence is public and was reported at the time. In March 2008 the tomb in the old crypt of the 1959 church was opened as part of the preparations for the fortieth anniversary of his death, with the permission of the Holy See. The remains were recognised, examined by a medical team, and conserved. Public veneration of the body began on 24 April 2008. In 2010 the body was transferred to the lower church of the Renzo Piano building, where it remains. In February 2016 it travelled to St Peter's Basilica in Rome at the request of Pope Francis for the Jubilee of Mercy, alongside the body of St Leopold Mandic, both of them famous confessors.

What the 2008 Exhumation Found

Church authorities described the condition of the remains publicly and without varnish. Domenico D'Ambrosio, then archbishop of Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo and papal legate to the shrine, said that the upper part of the skull was largely skeletal while the chin was well preserved and the hands looked as though they had recently been cared for. No stigmata were found on the exhumed body, which matches the accounts of his last days, in which the wounds are reported to have closed and left the skin clear.

The March 2008 exhumation, the condition of the remains, and the beginning of public veneration on 24 April 2008 were announced by the Archdiocese of Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo and the Capuchin friars of the shrine, and reported at the time by the Catholic and Italian press. The transfer of the body to Rome in February 2016 for the Jubilee of Mercy was announced by the Holy See.

The Mask

Because the face had deteriorated, a lifelike silicone mask modelled on photographs of Padre Pio was made and placed over the features before the body went on display. The shrine has been open about this since 2008. Anyone who tells a pilgrim that the face in the casket is untouched flesh is passing on a story the shrine itself does not tell.

This matters for two reasons. The first is honesty. A shrine that overstates a physical claim hands every sceptic a free weapon, and the Church has enough real evidence in this case to have no need of an invented miracle. The second is theological. Incorruption has never been a requirement for sanctity, it is not counted as a proof of it, and it is not part of any canonisation process. The bodies of a great many canonised saints decayed in the ordinary way, and their sanctity is untouched by that fact. St Bernadette Soubirous at Nevers, whose body was found in 1909, 1919 and 1925 to have decayed very little, was also given light wax coverings for the face and the hands before being placed on view, and the guide to the pilgrimage to Lourdes sets that out.

12. The Via Crucis, the Museum and the Prayer Groups

Three further parts of the shrine are easy to miss and worth the time. A monumental Way of the Cross climbs the wooded hillside above the friary, with large bronze stations set along a path that winds up the slope. Walking it takes the better part of an hour at prayer pace, and it is the quietest ground on the whole site.

The Way of the Cross is a Franciscan devotion by origin. The Franciscans were given custody of the holy places in Jerusalem in the fourteenth century and spread the practice of walking the Passion in stations across Europe for those who could never reach the city. A hillside Via Crucis at a Capuchin friary is the family devotion in its natural setting. The guide to the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross covers the original route in Jerusalem and the fourteen stations as they are prayed today.

The Museum and the Relics

The shrine keeps a museum of objects connected with Padre Pio: habits, the half-gloves he wore over his hands, bloodstained cloths, letters in his handwriting, liturgical vestments, his correspondence with his spiritual directors, and photographs across five decades. Displays change and the shrine controls what is shown.

The letters are the exhibit that repays the most attention. The written record of his interior life is large, it was produced for his directors under obedience rather than for publication, and it is far more anxious, dry and self-accusing than the confident wonder-worker of popular devotion. A man who is reported to have read souls spent decades writing to his superiors that he could not tell whether God had abandoned him.

The Prayer Groups

The Gruppi di Preghiera di Padre Pio, the Padre Pio Prayer Groups, began in the 1940s in response to papal appeals for prayer during and after the Second World War, and they grew into an organised association of lay groups that meet for prayer under the guidance of a priest. They are attached to the shrine, they have approved statutes, and they were a major source of the small donations that built the hospital.

The groups are the reason a visitor sees so many parish banners at the shrine on feast days. They are also the most transferable thing at San Giovanni Rotondo. A group of lay people meeting weekly to pray together and to fund the care of the sick can be started in any parish on earth without permission from anybody, and the guide to Catholic prayer and how to pray gives the shape of it.

13. How to Pray at San Giovanni Rotondo

The shrine works best when it is walked in the order the buildings were built, with prayer attached to each stop rather than a camera. The sequence below takes roughly half a day and gives every part of the site something to do.

The One Thing Not to Skip

Go to confession while you are there. Every other stop on that list is optional. Padre Pio spent fifty years in a wooden box absolving people, and he is reported to have told penitents that he would wait for them at the gates of heaven. A pilgrim who photographs the confessional and leaves the sacrament alone has missed the entire point of the mountain.

Combining the Trip

San Giovanni Rotondo sits naturally with two other places. Monte Sant'Angelo, the cave sanctuary of the Archangel Michael on the same mountain, is the older pilgrimage, and Padre Pio is reported to have sent people up to it. Pietrelcina, his birthplace in Campania, keeps the family house and the places of his early years, and it is a long drive west. Pilgrims coming from further afield often join the shrine to a wider Italian route that takes in the pilgrimage sites of Rome and the tomb of Carlo Acutis at Assisi. For those who cannot travel at all, the guide to making a virtual pilgrimage sets out what the Church says a pilgrimage is for and how to make one from home.

14. What the Church Does and Does Not Claim Here

San Giovanni Rotondo rests on a canonisation, and that is a different kind of judgment from the one attached to an apparition shrine. Getting the distinction right prevents most of the confusion around this site.

What the Church Has Judged

The Church has judged the person. Padre Pio was beatified on 2 May 1999 and canonised on 16 June 2002, after his life, his writings and his virtues were examined at length by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and after two miracles attributed to his intercession were accepted. In canonising, the Church solemnly proclaims that the person practised heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God's grace, and she proposes that person to the whole Church as a model and an intercessor (Catechism of the Catholic Church 828). The act is definitive, and it settles that the saint is in heaven and may be venerated publicly everywhere. The Church did not canonise the stigmata, the reported bilocations, the fragrance, or the reading of souls. She canonised the man.

What the Church Has Not Judged

The extraordinary phenomena attached to his name have no separate ecclesiastical verdict, and the Holy Office declared in 1923 that the events attributed to him were not established as supernatural. Nothing in the canonisation reversed that declaration or turned any individual reported wonder into an article of faith. A Catholic is free to be entirely unconvinced by any particular story about him and remains fully within the Church's teaching, since private revelations and extraordinary graces do not belong to the deposit of faith (Catechism of the Catholic Church 67).

How This Differs From an Apparition Shrine

San Giovanni Rotondo is not a Marian apparition site and no apparition decree stands behind it. That distinction matters because the language people use about apparitions has changed. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, under which the Church ordinarily does not declare an alleged apparition supernatural at all, and instead reaches one of six conclusions: nihil obstat, which permits and encourages devotion without declaring supernatural origin; prae oculis habeatur; curatur; sub mandato; prohibetur et obstruitur; and declaratio de non supernaturalitate. Under those norms the Dicastery granted a nihil obstat to the spiritual experience connected with Medjugorje on 19 September 2024, in a note titled The Queen of Peace.

The six conclusions listed above are those of the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on 17 May 2024. The note The Queen of Peace granting a nihil obstat in the case of Medjugorje was published by the same Dicastery on 19 September 2024.

None of that framework applies to this shrine, because no alleged apparition is in question here. The comparison is included so that pilgrims who visit several shrines in one trip know why the language differs from one to the next. The guide to Marian apparition sites and their approval status sets out the whole framework and where each case actually stands, and it is the page to read before repeating anything you hear on a coach.

15. Frequently Asked Questions