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He moves through each step as if
he were a part of the machinery,creasing paper folds with a leadfilled
jar, stacking copies in
homemade wooden bins, securing
each stack with 20-pound
weights.When he glances up at the living
room wall, there’s Padre Pio, the
revered stigmatic – now St. Pio da
Pietrelcina – on eight identical,
varnished homemade plaques. Eight
might seem redundant, considering
the collection of angels and Madonnas that
fills his home. But to Falco they reinforce the invisible threads that guide his days. They take him back to the southeastern hills of his native Italy, back to a mind-bending time 46 years ago when he spent 11 days waiting to meet Padre Pio. And they remind Falco that he is not the saint in the house, but the servant, the well-intentioned, twice divorced sinner who admits to former mistresses and rarely goes to church. “There’s an understanding between me and him,” he says, nodding up to his Padre Pio wall. “I say, ‘I’m very poor in prayer. My work is my prayer, OK?’” He knows it’s okay. After all, Padre Pio, who died in 1968, is the ideal saint for the unconventional devotee. A figure venerated by the masses since word spread in 1918 that he bore stigmatic wounds, Padre Pio was investigated repeatedly by the Vatican for rumors
of fraud and sexual misconduct. He
was even banned from saying Mass.
Years later, he would be canonized
by his most famous devotee, Pope
John Paul II, who once asked him to
pray for a cancer-stricken friend.
That friend attended the canonization
Mass last Sunday.
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ECHO OF A MIRACLE
It was the echo of a miracle that brought me to Falco’s door. My mother, a cancer patient, received a Padre Pio booklet from a friend days before undergoing kidney surgery three years ago. But even her doctors were stunned when the tumor, which at first sight looked like “your garden variety renal cell carcinoma,” turned out to be benign. A miracle, my mother believes, now in her seventh year of battling a breast cancer metastasis that, by most calculations, could have wiped her out long before the kidney surgery. Even her cancer doctor would later travel to San Giovanni Rotondo, the remote Italian town where Padre Pio lived, and pray in gratitude. My mother celebrated by taking her favorite excursion, a day cruise on a casino boat. Back home, the edges of her Padre Pio booklet curled from so much use. If Padre Pio was working overtime for my family, I wondered who was working overtime for him. On the back of the booklet, I found the phone number for Vincent Falco,305-673-8403. I wondered what his
story
might be. He must be a very holy man,
I imagined.
HARD AT WORK
The day I visited his home, I found
him at his duplicator-printer, running
copies of his booklet in Spanish. A
Panasonic boom box pumped an
Earth,Wind & Fire tune: “Every
man has a place, in his heart there’s
a space, and the world can’t erase
his fantasies…”
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But there wasn’t
enough room for Falco’s vivid
storytelling and the prophecies of
Earth, Wind & Fire, even in a
context so laden with cosmic
illuminations. Falco snapped around
and clicked off the boom box – “Shut
up, you!” The booklet-maker commands
a dizzying amount of numbers. He
has printed 2.7 million booklets in English,
Spanish, Portuguese and Italian since
he began this work eight years ago,
sending them to churches, doctors’
offices, pizzerias. He expects to hit
the three million booklet mark
by year’s end. He knows it takes
1,040 of the English booklets to fill
a shipping box, but only 920 of the
Spanish, Portuguese or Italian
booklets to fill the same box, because
“you know, in our Latin languages,
we like to talk more.” He keeps
monthly tabulations, pinned in neat stacks
to a corkboard. Even when he talks
about the things that cannot be
measured – such as love, pain, faith
and fancy – he punctuates his stories with detailed references to distances, quantities, the exact degrees of angles. The only number he will not discuss is the amount of money he has spent making the booklets, for which he accepts only shipping charges. “How much money do you think I’m taking with me when I die?” he’ll ask. Unlike the numbers, he finds the printed words a challenge. Ever present though they are in his work, they often elude Falco, a self-taught man who grew up in his family’s coffee bar in Naples and came to be known for making intricate nativity scenes, complete with grottos and waterfalls. For the words in his booklet, which he reproduced from a prayer book he bought in San Giovanni Rotondo in 1956, he relies on a good typesetter.
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He found the tattered
booklet as he dug through and old box some years ago. The discovery brought back a flood of memories and a long-forgotten inner voice that had
stacks
to a corkboard. Even when he talks
about the things that cannot be
measured – such as love, pain, faith
and fancy – he
DEVOTION: Retired
Miami Beach plumber Vincent Falco looks at a painting of Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, at right. In the last 10 years, Falco has produced and shipped more than 2.7 million prayer booklets with the words of the Capuchin friar, who died in 1968 and was canonized last
punctuates his stories with detailed
references to distances, quantities,
the exact degrees of angles.
The only number he will not
discuss is the amount of money he
has spent making the booklets, for
which he accepts only shipping
charges.“How much money do you think
I’m taking with me when I die?” he’ll ask.
Unlike the numbers, he finds the
printed words a challenge. Ever
present though they are in his work,
they often elude Falco, a self-taught
man who grew up in his family’s
coffee bar in Naples and came to be
known for making intricate nativity
scenes, complete with grottos and
waterfalls. For the words in his
booklet, which he reproduced from
a prayer book he bought in San
Giovanni Rotondo in 1956, he relies
on a good typesetter.
He found the tattered booklet as
he dug through and old box some
years ago. The discovery brought
back a flood of memories and a
long-forgotten inner voice that had
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resounded at critical moments inhis life.
Falco first heard this voice in
1956, five years after he left his
native Italy for the United States
with his new bride. Shortly after he
moved to Miami, he was recruited to
the U.S. Army and sent to Germany.
After a two-year tour, he stopped in
Italy to visit his family.
During that visit, he met an
odd, sickly woman who frequented
his family’s bar. Perplexed by her
mysterious condition, he went to
see a well-known medium in
Sorrento. The medium sent him to
see Padre Pio. “I said, ‘What the hell is a Padre
Pio?’ I kind of rejected the idea,” he
recalled.
But the same night he returned
to Naples, he says he felt “something pulling me like a
magnet:” Come see Padre
Pio. Come see
Padre Pio. He
hopped a train to Foggia, the closest
station to San Giovanni Rotondo,
intent on making a quick trip. But that would be the start of a
decades-long journey. Shortly after
the train left the platform, he felt a
tremendous joy.“I cried tears like Niagara Falls.
It was beautiful,” he said.
Once there, he says he was led
by instinct and unseen forces, “like
a puppet.” He describes days spent
in a trance amid a multitude, a blur
of characters and pre-dawn Masses.
Finally, on the 11th day, they
called his number, “1,256.” He
slipped into a small confessional
where Padre Pio sat, and knelt at the
friar’s side. “He showed me the statue of
Michael, the archangel, and told
me he was protecting me,” he
recalled. “Then Padre Pio told me, ‘You must go back to where you
belong.’ ” Falco knew that meant the
United States, where his wife
awaited. He spent the next few years
building a life in Miami, making a
living installing sprinkler systems,
constructing a home and office on
Northwest 27th Avenue.
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Echoes
of miracles come often to the Miami
Beach home where Vincent Falco, retired
plumber, woodworker and inventor extraordinaire,
spends his days making prayer booklets
devoted to Padre Pio, the Capuchin friar
and controversial mystic canonized into sainthood
last week. Falco hears stories about
sick people healed by the words of
Padre Pio, words the 73-yearold devotee
reproduces, free of charge, by the
millions and ships out to faithful
around the world. When he hears such a
story, he’ll offer a polite nod. “Oh,
that’s very good” he’ll say
before returning to his painstaking
mission and to the boggling contrasts
of his life. It
is a detail-driven life marked by equal doses
of mathematics and mysticism. He spends
hours hunched over complex machines that
duplicate, collate, staple and fold Padre Pio’s
rousing words into crisp, 5 1/2
x 4-inch
