Who knew?

There, in San Giovanni Rotundo, Italy—the  small town made famous by the greatest mystic since Francis of Assisi, namely Padre Pio—was another second mystic, all but unknown, of immense spiritual power, this one female.

And this mystic was tremendously close to the saint from the moment Pio set foot in town and even before.

We speak here of Lucia Fiorentino, visionary, stigmatic, and suffering soul.

Just a year younger than Padre Pio, Lucia was born and raised in San Giovanni and met Saint Pio before he settled into the famous monastery for five incredible decades. In fact, even before his assignment to that monastery, Padre Pio went to Lucia’s home. He was brought there by his spiritual superior.

It’s an extraordinary and largely unknown story. Born on June 20, 1889, Fiorentino was noticed as special, if quietly—intensely special—from her earliest years.

In 1906, we come to learn (from a new book, The Diary of Lucia Fiorentino: Mystic, Visionary, and Early Spiritual Daughter of Padre Pio), Lucia had a vision of an immense tree in the atrium of the Capuchin convent and heard a voice say, “This is the symbol of a soul who is now far away but will come here. He will do much good for this village. He will be strong and well-rooted like this tree.”

An understatement, to put it mildly.

But prescient?

Lucia herself, since that youth, had received visions and locutions from the Lord, the Blessed Mother, and a relative.

She too suffered those “wounds” of Passion (hers the invisible but intensely painful type of stigmata).

It was less than a month later that Padre Pio arrived in San Giovanni and stayed for a week, meeting Lucia, who became a tremendously close spiritual daughter, for the first time.

This was a young woman who, among endless other encounters, witnessed Padre Pio’s stigmata (on bandageless hands) right after it started.

Lucia’s–in her hands, heart, and feet–manifested a year (1919) after his (beginning on July 4, 1916, a victim-soul of reparation).

She was a friend, a spiritual daughter, and a fellow mystic who, upon directions from the Heavenly Father, burned most of her correspondence with the saint. Odd as that sounds, it was an act showing her fidelity to Jesus alone.

In her diary she wrote that she “offered a sacrifice to Jesus: I burned many letters of spiritual correspondence [between me and Padre Pio] that I kept with holy affection. Thus, I detached myself and felt freer. God alone is the master of my heart.”

In the saint’s proximity, though, she felt as if in the presence—the actual proximity—of Christ.

And his advice, it was said, was as phenomenal as anything else. (Just six letters remain.)

Raptures. Prophecies. Phenomena on a daily basis.

The extraordinary story, and her diary (more on that later) are being made available by Spirit Daily [see below]. She passed into eternity on February 16, 1934, decades before Pio. On her deathbed she told her sister-in-law, Filomena, “Tell the father ]Padre Pio] that I offered myself as a victim in the Sanctuary of San Michele for his liberation… My life is not worth as much as his; he can do more good for souls than me.”

That’s the famous cave a short ways from San Giovanni.

A month later, Pio–who had gone through years of suppression by his archbishop–was freed to again hear Confession and celebrate public Mass.

[resources: The Diary of Lucia Fiorentino: Mystic, Visionary, and Early Spiritual Daughter of Padre Pio; imported from Italy]