Some 1,500 pilgrims will fly from Ireland over the weekend to attend the canonisation of Padre Pio in Rome. Prayer groups and individuals will be flown to Italy on special flights, which tour operators have put on for the occasion.
The Irish Director of the Padre Pio Office, Ms Eileen Maguire, is to conduct a reading during the ceremony, planned for up to one million of the saint's followers from around the world.
"Some of the flights went out in the middle of this week but most will be flying out Friday and Saturday," Ms Maguire said. "It is going to be such an enormous occasion.
"Padre Pio has a huge amount of followers world-wide and particularly in Ireland, I feel, because he lived during our time. He only died in 1968 so a lot of people would have lived while he lived.
"A lot of people would have known about him or seen him or even met him and he had a special way of stretching out to people.
"I myself got involved with the office when his assistant, Father Alessio, came to stay with me and my family in our home just a year before Padre Pio died.
"He was over studying English but when he was here Padre Pio died. Father Alessio went back to Italy but he returned and stayed with us for over a year."
Ms Maguire will make the journey to Rome, where the Pope will canonise the former monk on Sunday. Padre Pio is best known for carrying stigmata, which allegedly appeared on his body in 1918 when he was just 31.
His brother monks claimed they found him after a Mass at their church in the friary of San Giovannie Rotondo with blood pouring from five wounds in his body.
The impoverished monk attempted to remain anonymous but soon gained followers world-wide. He was said to lose a capful of blood a day throughout his life, worked 18 hours a day and often wouldn't eat for weeks.
Followers who came to see him in his friary claimed he had worked miracles on them but in the 1960s the church stopped him preaching.
He was even investigated by the Vatican over allegations that he had female lovers. They eventually concluded that they were lies made up by his enemies. He was recognised as a genuine stigmatic in 1978. Following his death, miracles which were said to have been performed during his life, continued. In 1983 the Vatican appointed an investigator to see if he should become a saint.
The canonisation ceremony is to be broadcast live on RTÉ on Sunday.