WORLD
DAY OF PEACE 2016
Catholic Peace Fellowship
Deacon Tom Cornell
Pope Francis has designated January 16th
World Day of Peace this year in an especially moving appeal for the things that
make for peace. He declared indifference
a fundamental spiritual problem, indifference first of all to God, then
indifference to our fellows and to the fate of our common home in defiance of
the Two Great Commandments. It is all
too easy to be indifferent to men and women in prison. They are not like us, we assume. We are respectable, hard-working, law-abiding
citizens; they are not. “If they didn’t belong there they wouldn’t be
there,” some will say. “This is a free
country,” they argue, “and everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in
a court of law, and we have the fairest laws and the most honest courts in the
world.” And the kicker: “If you can’t do
the time, don’t do the crime.” The fact
remains that the United States has less than five percent of the world's
population but almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. The US is number one all right! China with four times our population comes in
a distant second.
Pope Francis has long made prison ministry a mainstay of
his vocation. On nearly every foreign trip he has made he has visited prisoners
to offer words of solidarity and hope, and he still stays in touch with
Argentine inmates he ministered to during his years as archbishop of Buenos Aires. And Francis has gone farther than his
predecessors in condemning the death penalty, saying there is simply no
justification for the death penalty today.
He has called for its world-wide abolition. He has called life prison
terms a "hidden death penalty" and solitary confinement a "form
of torture" — and said both should be abolished as well. "Jesus tells us that love for others —
foreigners, the sick, prisoners, the homeless, even our enemies — is the
yardstick by which God will judge our actions….
Our eternal destiny depends on this.”
I remember a conversation I had with the associate warden at
Danbury federal prison in 1968. “You are
an educated gentleman,” he told me. “You
will soon learn that most of the men in here are good for nothing. They’ve always been good for nothing, and
that’s all they’ll ever be. Good for
nothing!” And so that’s the way he and
the rest of the staff treated us, as good for nothing. 1968 was the most tumultuous year across the
globe since 1848, and although I had helped to conceive it, for better and for
worse, I missed half of it. I missed the
police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I had to see what I saw of it on TV in a
Mafia dorm. The Mafia guys rooted for
the cops. “Kill the ______
hippies!” I was lucky to be assigned to
that dorm because it was safe there. Rape
is a constant threat in prison. When an
effeminate man was assigned to our dorm and one fellow declared “he’s mine!”
the Mafia boss told him that if there were any force involved he would wake up
the next morning with his throat slit. Nothing happened.
The maximum sentence for violation of the Selective Service law is
five years and $250,000 fine. Most men
convicted under the draft act as I had been got two to three years. I must have had the shortest sentence in
Danbury, only six months, for burning my draft card. But it was horrible, even if it was
“baby-time,” as the inmates called it. Even so, I value the experience. Without it I would not understand the
suffering of people behind bars. It is
unremitting boredom. No one in jail is
happy, guards included. Prison guards
have the shortest life expectancy of any occupation. And the cooks! Unhappy people cannot cook. The food was terrible; whatever they cooked
they ruined one way or another.
Preaching on this subject has little if any positive effect on
parishioners. REC does! REC, Residents Encounter Christ, is a
Cursillo based three-day retreat program that brings eight or so parishioners
into a prison for a couple of over-nights so that they can share their faith
journeys with prisoners, called “residents” rather than convicts. Mostly middle-class white men share their
lives with mostly poor men of color. They
laugh together at the silly games woven into the program. That’s the best part for me, to hear them
laugh. You don’t hear much of that in
prison. And we find that we have much
more in common than not. We come to see
these men as brothers and sons, if only for such a short time. It is forbidden to have any on-going
relationship with the men. It’s here and
now and that’s it!
Who benefits from this
program, REC, the prisoners or the parishioners? You guessed it, the parishioners of
course. They cannot fail to notice the
disdainful glance of a prison guard when he sees a civilian carrying a
Bible. These church people are advocates
for the inmates! That’s not what the
guards want! Most importantly, the
parishioners come to realize how little correction there is in the correctional
system, how little penance in the penitentiary, how little justice in the
Justice Department. Then they are open
to questioning how much defense there is in the Defense Department.
Ask your pastor if he knows how to contact a REC organizer. If he doesn’t, call the chancery office. Visiting the prisoner is a corporal work of
mercy. Praying with the prisoner is a
spiritual work of mercy. In the end, the
merciful will be shown mercy. W
.
