I had great hope about the movie Padre Pio directed by Abel Ferrara. The name Padre Pio means Father Pius and I had great hope because Shia LaBeouf, who plays the starring role, told reporters that playing the part moved him to become a Catholic.

However, this movie is pornography and other kinds of degrading deceit and I am shocked that some Catholic reporters don’t warn the public. Shame on them!

Ferrara put nudity and pornography in the movie—and the movie never gets to the miracle that made Padre Pio famous.

Except for a bad shot near the end, Ferrara never tells the history that Padre Pio bore The Stigmata, otherwise known as bearing the same wounds that Jesus suffered during His crucifixion.

In that bad shot, Ferrara puts a small and aged male’s hand on one of Padre Pio’s shoulders and the wound on the hand looks like a cheap dropping of candle wax fashioned into a scab.

If you want to ponder The Passion of Jesus Christ and His physical wounds, please watch true documentaries about His shroud, which is His burial cloth. I say this because the sacred cloth is a miraculous negative photo that reveals the physique of Christ and the miracle of His resurrection. Way back in the 1980s, I saw The Silent Witness on TV and it changed my life because it is scientific proof.

Thus, it helps us to understand saints like Padre Pio and Divine Revelation in The Bible. Thus, it helps us to believe in The Holy Eucharist and the sacrament of Holy Communion with Christ.

Back to Shia LaBeouf: He isn’t believable as Padre Pio because he speaks with an American accent, while every other voice in the movie has some sort of European or Italian accent. He isn’t believable because of what he says.

What the living heck?! Every critic should have noticed this, but I haven’t seen anyone mention it.

Satan and his minions tried to tempt Saint Padre Pio with pornography like they tried to tempt The Angelic Doctor Saint Thomas Aquinas centuries earlier.

In Ferrara’s movie, a mother goes to Padre Pio for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but she is insincere. In the confessional, the mother confesses lewd sexual sins that no one in the audience should hear. Instead, the character could have simply confessed a non-graphic name of the sin. In fact, the character lusted for her young teen-aged daughter. Enough said.

Then Padre Pio screams: “Shut the f-ck up! Say Christ is Lord. Say it. You say Christ is Lord. Get out! Get out!”

That didn’t happen, dear people. Instead, the devil and his demons viciously beat and injured Padre Pio.

Padre Pio kept the Seal of Confession, which means he didn’t reveal what sinners confessed to him.

Depending on the circumstances, a priest could recommend that a sinner’s penance is to pay back stolen money or confess the crime of murder to police.

Furthermore, Ferrara could have portrayed Satan’s futile temptations with camera angles guarding the modesty of all actresses and actors, but he portrays some of Padre Pio’s life with nudity.

Namely, he shows the devil giving Padre Pio a vision of a naked woman, and he shows Padre Pio naked and frantically fleeing the devil.

Given Ferrara’s bad direction, we don’t know whether Padre Pio is conjuring the porn by his own volition. What a mess! What a crime against Padre Pio and Jesus Christ.

The real Padre Pio had the gifts of reading minds and reading souls. Thus, he knew if people had withheld confessing their sins.

Furthermore, Padre Pio stunned unrepentant sinners by demanding that they confess those sins if they wanted absolution from him and forgiveness from Christ.

If you want to know Padre Pio, I recommend the book Following Padre Pio: A Journey of Discovery from Pietrelcina to San Giovanni Rotondo by Bret Thoman, O.F.S.