You write “Hmm, you sure about that? Gemelli said he pretended to be a doctor, obtained their trust, and talked with Pio at length.”

Gemelli never “said he pretended to be a doctor.” Throughout the article, you make assertions like this but it is not clear what you are basing them on. Here is what Gemelli said in his third report:

“In 1919 [the exact year is 1920], while passing through Foggia for military service..., I went to San Giovanni Rotondo, accompanied by the secretary of the then Bishop of Foggia. The latter, after having explained to me the facts as he knew them, expressed the desire that I examine Padre Pio and then report back to him the results of my observations. He did not hide from me that what he knew, especially from information he had received from the Bishop of Manfredonia, made him skeptical of the supernatural nature of the facts presented by Padre Pio. However, he wanted a calm word... I felt it my duty to accept, and I went and stayed for two days in San Giovanni Rotondo, a guest of the Capuchin Convent. I had the opportunity to see Padre Pio several times and to converse with him at length. I also conversed at length with the former Provincial, Padre Benedetto, who was Padre Pio's guardian, so to speak. I also examined Padre Pio's wounds, which were shown to me, with great satisfaction, by Padre Benedetto and with a certain stagecraft. I did not undergo a neurological examination... because a clinical examination in the conditions I was in (without comfort, without aids) could not have been free of inconveniences.

On the other hand, patients of this kind can only be studied when one has the opportunity to follow them over a long period of time. As crucial indications for me, I was able to gather some valuable psychological data through careful questioning. For this reason, I spent a long time conversing with Padre Pio and Padre Benedetto. To have the opportunity to engage in spiritual discussions and gauge the depths of Padre Pio's mystical life, I showed myself convinced of the reality of his sanctity and divine gifts. Padre Pio ended up opening up to me with great confidence and providing me with valuable information that enabled me to form a clear judgment. I cannot say I have completed an exhaustive psychological examination, but I have gathered enough to guide my own orientation on the case. [...] While at first I was welcomed to San Giovanni Rotondo with undisguised distrust, and the friars treated me with suspicion, later they allowed me to see and examine him with complete generosity. I can indeed say that I received a warm and friendly welcome in San Giovanni. I was invited to take advantage of my trip to speak to the people, which I did with the participation of the entire population. I mention these details to demonstrate that the assumption from which Dr. Festa starts in his criticism (namely, that I was not allowed to examine Padre Pio) is false. I will add something else: I maintained the attitude of a convinced person. This was the only way to insinuate myself into the hearts of the religious. And I received as gifts some diapers soaked in Padre Pio's blood; I received photographs of him with the request not to show them to anyone "because Padre Pio would be upset"; and from the Padre himself I received a brief autograph, affectionate in form but insignificant in content.”

So, Gemelli never claims he was ‘undercover’ or that he concealed his true identity from the friars during this visit. In this report, according to Gemelli, he was there as a guest of the convent to carry out a psychiatric investigation at the request of the secretary of the then Bishop of Foggia. He claims that he was deceptive during the visit, but only in that he pretended to be more sympathetic to Pio than he was. The problem is that his testimony in the report is contradicted by both earlier and later testimony by Gemelli and many other witnesses:

In the first report, Gemelli wrote “I have approached Padre Pio, without any intention of studying him, and without doing any medical examination….” That not only contradicts his later claim to have examined Pio, it also contradicts his claim to have gone to the convent with the intention of studying Pio at the request of the secretary.

Gemelli contradicted this claim later in life too. He went out his way to write the following in a letter to a journalist in 1957:

“I read in the latest issue of your newspaper an episode that concerns me. According to your writing, I had asked to examine Padre Pio’s stigmata, and having been refused, I had not failed to express my complete perplexity to the appropriate person. The episode is false; **I never asked Padre Pio to examine the stigmata, also because no one ever asked me to do so.** Such an examination would have required a long stay on my part in San Giovanni Rotondo and a whole series of scientific tests. This, to re-establish the truth of the facts.”

You are suspicious of Benedetto’s testimony on the grounds that Gemelli accuses him of being “in on it.” Besides the fact that this is question-begging, you omit context that makes his testimony extremely credible: “Father Gemelli, as a doctor, never visited Padre Pio. I would point out that the witnesses remember all the details with absolute certainty, as if the event had occurred yesterday, and all can confirm this under oath, because all, with the exception of Father Gerardi, Conventual Minor, are alive and can be questioned.” So, Benedetto was invoking the testimony of literally everyone at the convent - people that were available for questioning, so he clearly wasn’t just lying about what they would testify to.

Dr. Festa claimed that Gemelli never examined the wounds. He wasn’t an eyewitness, but he spoke to Gemelli himself about his visit before he wrote his 1926 report. “When I presented him the real situation Padre Gemelli appeared impressed and moved, and asked for another meeting between us… However after several months this meeting has never happened and he keeps sentencing without having examined and studied….” Also, your criticism of Festa’s credibility is laughably silly. His suspicion level is double that of Gemelli because “ the timing makes him look motivated & tryhard” So, after writing his official medical reports, the fact that he wrote a lengthy response to somebody else’s attack on Pio means he is a ‘tryhard’ and this makes him suspicious? WTF are you even saying dude?

Regarding Gemelli’s claim that Pio was a subject of very limited intelligence, you write “This claim was in Gemelli’s original 1920 report (so ‘now claimed’ is a mischaracterization).” Can you please quote the statement in the first report that you think makes this claim? The closest thing I can find is the claim “He seems a man with a restrict field of conscience, lowered psychical tension, monotonous ideation, abulia” but none of these come close to the language of the third report.

You write “In both reports Father Gemelli found Pio to be of unsound mind (for which he used the term “psychopath,” but not in the way we use it)… both reports he commended Pio as otherwise devout, yet was compelled to play along with the pragmatic ploys of his superiors, and at their direction.”

In the first report, Gemelli wrote “Padre Pio is a man of truly elevated religious life, an exemplary man. Having introduced myself to him, without his realizing it, with innocent artifice, I subjected him to a psychiatric interrogation; there are no signs of the mental illnesses with religious overtones that could be alleged in the field, but Padre Pio does not display any of the characteristic features of a mystical life either.”

Then, in later years, “Monsignor Mario Crovini, when he still did not know Padre Pio, one day in Rome, while he was driving Father Gemelli to the Holy Office very cautiously asked him for his opinion on Padre Pio; and he replied that Padre Pio was ‘self-destructive, a deceiver, a psychopath.’ Father Luigi d'Avellino, in the aforementioned report sent to the Father General, also states that Father Gemelli, during a meeting in Rome, had spoken of Padre Pio as "proud, a psychopath, and a self-destructive person.’

You write “Finally, among Ethan’s curious omissions is the fact that during Pio’s interview with Rossi, Pio while sticking to his story on the stigmata nevertheless openly disowned a number of miracles that folks had been claiming of him and by him.” People made up miracle stories about Padre Pio, yes, but Pio also confirmed many of the stories too. In my post, I take it for granted that people understand that whenever there is a miracle-worker, that legends are going to crop up around him. This is not relevant to any of the evidence that I present in my article - and it does not at all refute my claim that there is overwhelming evidence. It is just fallacious to think that the fact that some cases are poorly supported is a refutation of my claim that there are cases that are well-supported.

You write “Now hold up. It wasn’t a random woman. Maria De Vito was a pilgrim and the cousin of pharmacist Dr. Valentini Vista, who had visited Pio in 1919 after correspondence lapsed.” This is hilarious. Hold up. She wasn’t a random woman. She was the cousin of a pharmacist that visited the convent after he stopped replying to her letters. You can see how shallow their relationship was based on the fact that she did not honor Pio’s request for secrecy and then turned around and ratted on him to a bishop. That’s how close this relationship was.