Saint Mary’s Catholic Church here in Dubai, United Arab Emirates has an active prison ministry. Volunteers regularly visit inmates to provide them with services like spiritual guidance and assistance such as handicrafts. Some of the products made by the incarcerated were sold in a fundraising campaign at the church patio during prison awareness week.
At Mass on the October feast of the ministry’s patron, Saint Maximilian Kolbe (universally celebrated on the 14th of August), the priest offered a word of acknowledgment for those who spent time serving their brothers and sisters behind bars.
The ministers also distributed prayer cards that bear an image of Saint Maximilian on one side and a “Prayer for Prisoners” on the other, which in part reads: “Lord, stretch out your healing hands and touch all our brethren in prison and help them to lead a renewed life.”
The image of the saint features striking objects in the background, including a stretch of the fence around the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, where Saint Maximilian, one of those confined because he was a friar and a Pole was put to death by injection of carbolic acid. This happened after he volunteered to stand in place of one of 10 men whom soldiers lined up for execution in their outrage over the escape of some prisoners.
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Today in the Vaticano, Agence France Presse reported, a thousand prisoners and 3,000 family members, prison staff and volunteers will walk through the Holy Door of the Basilica di San Pietro.
The convicts come from the United Kingdom, Italy, Latvia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, South Africa, Sweden and Portugal. Tomorrow, they will attend Sunday Mass led by the Holy Father.
This papal gesture of welcoming prisoners, some of them under life sentence, powerfully brings to life the Church’s teaching on the seven corporal works of mercy. They are, to recall: to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, visit the sick, bury the dead, give alms to the poor and visit the imprisoned.
A careful reading of the Passion of our Lord would remind anyone that Jesus Christ, in accepting the cup of suffering, cast his lot with prisoners. In Israel, in the city of Jerusalem that I was blessed to visit on pilgrimage last year, one can come close to at least three traditional places where He was incarcerated: the place where Jesus was held before his audience with Pontius Pilate in one of the churches of the first station of the Via Dolorosa, in a cell close to the cell of Barabbas, maintained by our Orthodox brethren and in a dungeon beneath the Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu. There, Jesus was held captive after his arrest and prior to his appearance before the Sanhedrin.
In the dungeon, one can read in several languages the text of the haunting 88th psalm. In this prayer, one can enter into the spirit of the Christ who was imprisoned. The psalm closes with the line:
“Friend and neighbor you have taken away: my one companion is darkness.”
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One of my former spiritual directors, a Colombian missionary priest once said: Often the only difference between people in jail and the ones outside is that those who remain free did not get caught for wrongdoing.
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At the end of our lives, we will all appear before our Divine Judge.
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In 2011, the year of his installation, I joined Cebu Daily News’ Play! Pool in an interview with Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma.
When we found out that he wrote his doctoral dissertation on eschatology or the last things, I asked him how he would explain hell to the modern man who has a hard time countenancing the idea of eternal damnation.
I take the liberty of reprinting this abridged version of his answer:
“Like it or not, your decisions will have an effect on your life. If you jump off a bridge, you’ll break your leg. You abuse your health, you’ll get sick. This is the reality of hell. You decide to be always away from God, to be not open to love and to be disrespectful towards, spiteful towards or distant from your fellowmen — how long could you be like that? That decision becomes definitive. A point comes when there’s no turning back.
“It’s like gelatin. The moment it hardens, that’s it. If you refuse the offer to live a meaningful, loving life, if you refuse God’s offer of love, that is your decision. In the end, if you find yourself away from God, that’s your hell. Who do you blame? You don’t blame God.
“Some people say, ‘How can the God who is love not listen to the plea of this child knowing that he would like to go back in the end?’ A hundred percent true. But the mystery of decision is — the moment it becomes definitive, a person whom you think will make a plea will never do so.”
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At least four children have been killed in the Philippines’ drug wars. These children embody all those who were killed on mere suspicion, without the benefit of a trial, those whom our society would rather exterminate in the search for a false security, which goes along with a refusal to see that even prisoners have a claim to mercy.
On the 27th of August, CNN reported the killing of a five-year-old girl in Dagupan City.
On this 31st of August, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported the killing of a four-year-old girl in Guihulngan City.
On the 21st of October, PDI also reported the killing of a seven-year-old girl in Malabon City.
On the 26th of the same month, the same paper reported the killing of a 17-year-old in Quezon City.
So far the official response from the highest official in the land is that children who perish in the drug war are but “collateral damage.”
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“Lord, when did we refuse to stand up for you when you were being killed?”
“I tell you solemnly, whatsoever you did to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did to Me.”