Meet the Man Behind ‘Padre Pio’s Stairway to Heaven’ on the Matterhorn
French mountaineer Patrick Gabarrou has completed more than 300 first ascents, many in the Mont Blanc massif. In 2015, Gabarrou opened a route up the Matterhorn’s south face and named it “Padre Pio, a Stairway to Heaven,” honoring the Italian saint. The route extended a climb he had opened in 2002 and fulfilled a promise made with his climbing companions after they reached the summit. A documentary following Gabarrou’s ascent was screened during the International Zermatt Summit for the Common Good in September.
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French mountaineer Patrick Gabarrou, 75, spent 13 years developing a route up the Matterhorn’s south face and dedicated it to Padre Pio. The climb reflects a career of more than 300 first ascents and a personal faith that he expresses through route names, prayers and his work as a guide.
Gabarrou first became fascinated by the Matterhorn as a teenager, after reading books about the Alps at a religious boarding school near Paris. He later became a mountain guide and opened several routes in the region, including “To Departed Friends” and “Free Tibet.”
After attending Padre Pio’s canonization in Rome in 2002, Gabarrou spotted a prominent rock formation on the Matterhorn’s south face. He dedicated it to the Italian friar, whom he admired, as a tribute to someone who “builds a bridge between heaven and earth.”
That summer, Gabarrou and his climbing partners began opening the route, naming it “Padre Pio Prega per Tutti” (“Pray for All”). The project took at least five attempts over 13 years; on Aug. 6, 2015, Gabarrou reached the summit by the route, which by then extended about 1,300 meters and included more than 40 rope lengths.
He returned in 2016 to climb the route in one continuous effort, spending four days on the face with two guides from Chamonix. Three Italian climbers later made its first winter ascent in 2022.
Gabarrou says the name “Padre Pio” came from a prayer he and his companions often repeated, and from a promise to dedicate the route to the saint if they reached the top. He has also named routes “Deo Gratias” (“Thanks Be to God”) and, in 2024, “Mary, Gate of Heaven,” which he described as his final route on Mont Blanc.
He says he asks his guardian angel to watch over each climbing group and recites an Ave Maria at every summit, honoring a promise to his Italian wife. While he has tried to bear witness to his Christian faith without proselytizing, he believes the mountains can prompt reflection even among people who do not share his beliefs.
Gabarrou says he remains committed to guiding and particularly values sharing the rope with others. He lives in the Alpine town of Saint-Sigismond and continues to guide in the Aosta Valley, Savoie and Valais.
Mountaineering as a path to spiritual transcendence and virtue
Mountaineering can become a path toward spiritual growth, but not simply because a person climbs high or endures hardship. Its deeper value lies in how the climber learns humility, self-mastery, courage, solidarity, and reverence for creation—and in whether these experiences open the heart to God. Popes Paul VI and John Paul II describe the mountain as both a demanding school of human virtue and a possible aid to Christian formation. The summit may be a powerful image of transcendence, but it is not itself the Christian destination: that is life with God, reached by following Christ.
Climbing confronts a person with limits: fatigue, uncertainty, exposure, and the need to judge what can safely be attempted. Pope Paul VI praised mountaineering not as “frivolous display” but as a difficult pursuit requiring self-mastery. He said it can foster fraternity, service, mutual help, simplicity, and sustained physical and spiritual discipline.
“Mountaineering, understood as you wish—not as frivolous display, but as the difficult conquest of ever more challenging goals, in self-mastery—can be a formidable school for the maturation of strong human personalities.”
That insight helps distinguish virtue from achievement. Reaching a peak is an accomplishment; virtue concerns the kind of person one becomes in pursuing it. Courage, for example, is not recklessness, and perseverance is not stubbornness. The mountain’s challenge can invite discipline and resolve, but it can also expose vanity, impatience, or a desire to prove oneself. The spiritual value lies not in treating danger as inherently holy, but in letting the undertaking educate one’s character.
This education is social as well as personal. Paul VI highlighted the “help and generous assistance,” solidarity, service, and fraternity learned in mountaineering, and he specifically honored guides and mountain rescuers who risk themselves to protect others. The mountain can therefore test whether strength is used only for individual accomplishment or also for the good of companions. A climber’s willingness to turn back, assist someone in difficulty, or accept another person’s judgment may be a more meaningful sign of maturity than standing on the summit.
The mountain can also unsettle ordinary self-importance. Its scale, silence, and beauty may help a person see both the grandeur of creation and the smallness of the human creature. Paul VI describes the climber, faced with mountain majesty and changeable weather, as becoming more conscious of being a creature before God: small, yet held by a good and provident Father. John Paul II likewise connected the Alpine landscape with deeper knowledge of God the Creator and of the human person.
This humility is not self-contempt. It is a more truthful sense of one’s place: neither master of nature nor meaningless speck, but a human being dependent on God and responsible for how creation is treated. Paul VI’s address also praised those who protect the Alpine environment, including its flora and fauna. A contemplative response to mountain beauty, then, should lead not merely to admiration but to gratitude and care. To love the mountain spiritually is to resist treating it as a disposable backdrop for personal achievement.
John Paul II used the challenge of climbing to illuminate a broader human calling. Mountains “provoke” people to make an effort to surpass themselves, he said; but the physical effort points beyond itself. The deeper call is from God, through Jesus Christ, toward a destiny that is supernatural and yet fully human.
That distinction matters. Christian transcendence is not simply getting above ordinary life, escaping the body, or feeling uplifted by a dramatic landscape. It is being drawn beyond self-sufficiency toward God, while becoming more truly human through Christ. The climb can serve as an analogy for this journey: effort matters, but it does not make a person the author of salvation. The Christian path is a response to God’s call, shaped by following Christ—including through the Cross, not only through moments of success. John Paul II explicitly joined the image of spiritual ascent to Christ’s Passion and Resurrection.
For that reason, a mountaineering experience can support spiritual formation without automatically producing it. Paul VI calls it a possible “aid” to authentic Christian formation, and says the encounter with the mountain can awaken a sense of God’s immensity. An aid is not a guarantee. The same climb could nourish gratitude and humility, or intensify pride and self-absorption. What matters is how the experience is interpreted and lived.
John Paul II observed that climbers undertaking more ambitious and risky routes generally travel in groups, and described this way of climbing as “synodal”—a shared journey. The image resonates with Christian life: people do not reach holiness by private effort alone. They need companionship, mutual responsibility, and a willingness to listen.
In mountaineering, this has practical as well as spiritual force. Training, sound preparation, appropriate guidance, and attention to companions are not opposed to courage; they help make courage responsible. Paul VI praised the training needed for the activity and the assistance offered by guides and rescuers. The sources do not set out a detailed moral code for mountaineering, but their emphasis on self-mastery, service, and mutual aid rules out treating avoidable danger to oneself or others as a spiritual achievement.
A Christian approach to mountaineering can therefore ask more than “Did I reach the top?” It can ask: Did this experience make me more humble before God? More attentive to the people who relied on me? More grateful for the beauty of creation? More disciplined in ordinary responsibilities after returning? Paul VI praised climbers who, despite their love of the mountains, continued to fulfill their civic and professional duties. The spiritual meaning of a climb is not confined to the mountain; it should bear fruit in daily life.
The summit may offer a striking moment of perspective. But in Christian understanding, transcendence is not measured by altitude. A climb becomes spiritually significant when its effort is joined to humility, its beauty to praise, and its difficulty to service and love. The mountain can point beyond itself to God—but the deepest ascent is the one by which a person, following Christ, becomes more capable of loving God and neighbor.