365 Days With Saint Pio

365 Days With Saint Pio is a small daily-quote app focused on St. Padre Pio — one short reading every day of the year, along with a biography and a media gallery.

The main view is a daily quote from St. Pio with a short explanation or testimony underneath. A push notification can remind you each morning. The Life and Works section runs through the biography piece by piece — his early life, the stigmata, the bilocation accounts, the healings, the founding of the hospital at San Giovanni Rotondo. There's also a photo gallery and the option to share quotes by email or social.

What I appreciate is the steady rhythm. A single quote a day is small enough that you actually read it. Over a year you end up with a slow, real introduction to a saint whose life is otherwise hard to summarize — Pio's story has so many strange and dramatic pieces that book-length biographies can be hard to start.

Good fit for anyone with a devotion to Padre Pio, for parishes named after him, for spiritual directors who want a small daily Padre Pio nudge for a directee, and for older Italian-American Catholics who grew up hearing the stories from grandparents.

It's a single-saint app. If Padre Pio isn't already on your shelf of favourites you may find a year of daily Pio narrow. The translations from the original Italian are also a little stiff in places — readable, but not literary. And the biographical material is reverent rather than critical, which is appropriate but worth knowing going in.

Free, by Digital Vanilla. Available on the App Store: 365 Days With Saint Pio. A nice slow-drip way to spend a year with one of the great modern saints.