"May all the crosses of your life become as a bouquet of Roses." - Padre Pio

Here are penetrating words that Padre Benedetto (Padre Pio’s spiritual director) wrote to Padre Pio in 1918, it is noticeable that Our Lord is leading Padre Pio to share in the Passion of the cross and into glory.  The passion of Jesus is the entrance into glory for Padre Pio, this defines his whole life and this is where, as a spiritual Father he brings all his children, and this is why we pray with him:

Padre Benedetto hit the mark when he defined this mission and the charism of which we are speaking by the concise and forceful expression, “a vocation to co-redemption.”  On 27 August 1918, in his reply to Padre Pio’s letter of the 21^st of that month, in which he told him of the mystical phenomenon of transverberation and his consequent painful anxiety, Padre Benedetto writes as follows:

“All that is happening to you is the effect of love. It is a trial, it is a vocation to co-redemption and hence a source of glory […] The Lord is with you.  He is with you: patient, suffering, eager love, crushed and trampled upon, heartbroken, in the shadows of the night and even more so in the desolation of Gethsemane, he is associated with your suffering and associates you with his own.

This is the whole fact of the matter, this is the truth and the only truth.  Yours is not a purgation but a painful union.

The fact of the wound completes your passion just as it completed the Passion of the Beloved on the Cross.”

This “vocation to co-redemption” of sinful mankind was carried out by Padre Pio through his participation in the sufferings of the crucified Lover who chose him to be a victim of love and suffering.

From  "Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, Letters I", by Fr Gerardo Di Flumeri OFM Cap.