Ministry to Those Soon To Be Killed

“Really? Should our standard of moral action be that we’re not as bad as the criminals in our midst?” asks Dale S. Recinella, the Florida bishops’ chaplain to prisoners on death row and in solitary confinement, interviewed in America. The chaplain’s major concern, he had explained, is the horrible conditions in the prison — they don’t, for example, have air conditioning, in Florida — while some people defend the conditions by saying ““It’s not as bad as what the criminals did.”

He describes his opposition to the death penalty (and the ineptness of the biblical arguments for it), ministry to those in solitary confinement, and the problems of the mentally ill, among other subjects. Among them are his and his wife’s care for the families of those being executed, “these families that nobody cares about”:

Here in Florida, the family of the condemned are not allowed to be present when the execution takes place, even though the chaplains are allowed to be there. We found out that the family usually goes back to a motel and watches on TV to see if the execution takes place. Only the condemned man’s lawyer and spiritual advisor are present for him. My wife Susan said “this is horrible” and started making herself available to be with the families. She found that even those families who weren’t Catholic usually wanted to be in a quiet and sacred place when the execution happened.

So then St. Mary Mother of Mercy parish — the only Catholic parish between Jacksonville and Lake City, located just 15 miles from the death house — started providing a place for Susan, the parish priest and the family to pray. . . . Sometimes I come straight from the death house to join them at the parish.

They also minister to the victim’s families, who may families people care about but not families people know how to help:

One of the things my wife Susan and I always mention is that every occupied death row cell, whether the man inside is guilty or not, represents a horrible crime where someone’s loved one has died. Susan and I also minister to families of murder victims and we’ve been shocked to realize how isolated many of them are. People don’t know how to touch that pain and so they stay away.

So we always end our presentations with a plea that Catholics in parishes find ways to minister to the victims of these horrible crimes and to their families. Find ways to offer the true healing of community, love, compassion and walk with these people through a horror that hit them like a lightning bolt out of the blue. These people are in every parish and every community. We need to be creative about bringing real healing to these suffering people in our midst.

The interviewer, a young Jesuit scholastic named Sean Salai, who is associate editor of the magazine, has done a whole string of very good interviews, the subjects including Dawn Eden, the crime writer James Lee Burke, Paul Elie, Fr. James Schall, George Weigel, James Carville, Mary Gordon, Ramesh Ponnurru, Michael O’Brien, and the Vatican astronomers. See the list here.

My thanks to my friend Anne Barbeau Gardiner for the link.