The exclusive via Crucis of prisoners on Good Friday

Since the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic, prisoners have emerged in Pope Francis' daily prayers and mass intentions. On Good Friday, with many others around the world confined to their cases, prisoners will offer a glimpse into their permanent quarantine during the Via Crucis prayer at the Vatican.

Each year Pope Francis assigns a different person or group to write meditations for the prayer of the Via Crucis on Good Friday, the day on which Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of Jesus.

This year, the meditations were organized by the chaplaincy of the "Due Palazzi" detention house in Padua, Italy. The perpetrators associated with prisoners, family members of prisoners, a catechist, a civil magistrate, volunteers and a priest who was falsely accused of an unspecified crime and assigned acquitted. The Vatican published the full text of the meditations earlier in the week.

In a letter of April 10, thanking the prisoners for their meditations, Pope Francis said that “he has stayed in the folds of your word and I feel welcomed at home. Thanks for sharing a piece of your story. ”

Written in the first person, each offers a personal story that tells of resentment, anger, guilt, despair and regret, as well as hope, faith and mercy.

Reflecting on the death sentence of Jesus, a prisoner sentenced alongside his father for a life sentence sentenced to this day: “The toughest sentence remains that of my conscience: at night I open my eyes and desperately look for a light on where my story will shine. "

"Oddly enough, prison was my salvation," he said, adding that many times he feels like Barabbas - the criminal freed while Jesus was sentenced. If others see it that way, "this doesn't make me angry," said the prisoner.

"I know in my heart that the innocent, condemned like me, came to visit me in prison to teach me life," he wrote.

A prisoner accused of murder wrote of the first fall of Jesus while carrying the cross, saying that when he fell and took someone's life, "for me that fall was death". Recalling an unhappy childhood that led to anger and resentment, the prisoner said he did not realize that "evil was slowly growing inside me".

"My first fall failed to realize that goodness exists in this world," he said. "My second, the murder, was really his consequence."

Two parents whose daughter was murdered spoke of the living hell they have experienced since their daughter's death, which not even justice has cured. However, when despair seems to take over "the Lord comes to meet us", they said, adding that "the commandment to perform acts of charity is a kind of salvation for us: we don't want to surrender to evil"

"God's love is truly capable of renewing life because, before us, his Son Jesus suffered human suffering to experience true compassion".

Reflecting on the compassion shown by Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus carry his cross, another prisoner said that this is seen every day in unexpected places, not only by the volunteers who come to help the prisoners, but also by his cellmate .

“His only asset was a candy box. She has a sweet tooth, but she insisted that I bring it to my wife the first time she visited me: she burst into tears at that unexpected and thoughtful gesture, "said the man, adding," I dream that a day I will make him able to trust others. To become a Cyreneus, bringing joy to someone. "

Another prisoner who ended up dragging his entire family to prison after drug dealing led to a series of tragic events saying that “in those years I didn't know what I was doing. Now that I know, I'm trying to rebuild my life with the help of God. "

A prisoner who wrote about the third fall of Jesus recalled the many times children fall when they learn to walk. "I am coming to think that these are the preparations for all the times we will fall as adults," he said, observing that inside the prison, "the worst form of despair is to think that life no longer makes sense."

"It's the greatest suffering: of all the lonely people in the world, you feel the most lonely," he said, and reflected on the day he hopes to meet his granddaughter out of prison and tell her about the good she has found while there , not the wrong done.

A prisoner's mother reflected on the moment when Jesus meets his mother, Mary, saying that after her son's sentence, "Not for a moment," she was tempted to abandon him.

"I feel my mother Maria close to me: it helps me not to despair and to face pain," he said. "I ask for the mercy that only a mother can feel, so that my son can come back to life after paying for his crime."

A catechist who reflected on when Veronica wiped her face from Jesus said that, like someone who works daily with the prisoners, "I wipe away many tears, letting them flow: they flood uncontrollably from broken hearts".

“Their tears are those of defeat and loneliness, of remorse and lack of understanding. I often imagine Jesus here in prison for me: how would he dry the tears? "Asked the catechist saying that Christ's response to them had always been" to contemplate, without fear, those faces marked by suffering ".

A prison teacher, writing that Jesus was stripped of his garments, observed that when people come to prison for the first time, they too are stripped of many things and are "helpless, frustrated by their weakness, often deprived of even the ability to understand the evil they have done. "

Telling that Jesus was nailed to the cross, a priest who was falsely accused of a crime and spent 10 years in prison before being acquitted after a new trial said that he often re-read the gospel passages of the crucifixion and death of Jesus.

Like Jesus, "I realized that I was a guilt-free man forced to prove his innocence," he said, noting that the day he was acquitted, "I found myself happier than I had been ten years before: I have personally experienced God who works in my life. Hanging on the cross, I discovered the meaning of my priesthood. "

Speaking of the balance between justice and hope, a civil magistrate who writes about Jesus who dies on the cross said that he distributes sentences, but true justice "is possible only through a mercy that does not crucify an individual forever, but becomes a guide for help him get up and realize the goodness that, for all the evil he has done, has never completely died out in his heart. "

“It is not easy to confront someone who has succumbed to evil and inflicted immense harm on others and their lives. In prison, an attitude of indifference can create further damage in the story of someone who has failed and is paying his debt with justice, "wrote a correctional officer, saying that every person can change, but he must do it in his own time and this time it must be respected.

A religious brother volunteering in a prison said he was grateful for the ministry. "We Christians often fall under the illusion of feeling that we are better than others," he said, observing that Jesus spent his life among prostitutes, thieves and lepers.

"Even in the worst of people, he's always there, however obscure their memory of him is," said the volunteer. "I just have to stop my frenetic pace, stop in silence in front of those faces ruined by evil and listen to them with mercy."