Prison ministry, Synod offer insights into the lives and faith of Catholic inmates
The Director of Chaplains at a New Jersey penitentiary told Father Joseph D’Amico he had 10 minutes. She locked the door to the broom closet, walked away, and left him alone in the cramped area with a man seeking penance. The man was an inmate at the prison, but also a parishioner of Father D’Amico’s.
For Father D’Amico, who is the director of Prison Ministry for the Archdiocese of Newark and pastor at St. Anastasia Church in Teaneck, that moment was perhaps the most striking illustration of prison ministry before the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything changed in March 2020.
When he returned later that month, he was giving confession and spiritual direction in a room where inmates and lawyers met – masks hanging by a thread from prisoners’ faces, plexiglass between them, air circulating beneath and above them.
That visit itself was a rarity during the pandemic. But there was a reason why the prison permitted it just that once.
“They would be incarcerated in their cells 23 hours of the day, and the one hour a day that they would let them out, they would just fight,” Father D’Amico said. “All that aggression would wreak havoc. So, they invited the Catholic chaplains to offer confession, and I tell you even a lot of the non-Catholics just came to talk about their relationship with God, ask for a blessing and ask for a sense of peace.”
While prisons have relaxed mandates slightly since then to allow occasional small gatherings, restrictions remain for inmates in their worship and receiving of sacraments. In one penitentiary, Catholic Mass can only be celebrated Saturday at 8 a.m. with limited occupancy.
“Because it’s an ecumenical chapel, believe it or not when you look at the list of who reserves the chapel, Satanists and Atheists also reserve the chapel. Because when you reserve for one, you reserve for all. The Catholics are unable at the moment to attend Mass on the Lord’s Day,” Father D’Amico said.
Father D’Amico is quick to mention that, despite their incarceration, he has witnessed the fervor and strength of inmates’ Catholic faith.
Before the pandemic and gathering size limitations, that same chapel was filled with 50 men (the maximum capacity) who would sing, pray, and decorate the altar. Father D’Amico calls it “their own local parish,” and in his ministry, he has seen marvelous displays of faith from “hardened criminals who have done really bad things.”
He has seen a Crip gang member evangelize a Blood gang member and invite him to pray the rosary with a former neo-Nazi.
He has seen an inmate hold open a hymn book for a deaf inmate so he could sign the songs along with everyone else at Mass.
Now, during a time when access and ministry are still restricted in prisons, insight into the thoughts and concerns of Catholic inmates may come from another source: the Synod.
While it is clear to Father D’Amico that Catholics care about their faith within the walls of the prison, it is also clear that they consider faith life on the outside, too. He notes that some of them have Catholic families whose experiences in the Church concern them. For others, they worry about fitting into the Church when they do get out.
“They are very interested [in the wider Catholic community]. They know what’s going on in the Church,” Father D’Amico said. “They have opinions about it. The fear of some of these men, heavily tattooed and scary looking, is what’s going to happen when they’ve served their time, and they’re sitting down in church next to somebody that just doesn’t look like them.”
There are four county jails and two penitentiaries, East Jersey State Prison and Northern State Prison, within the Archdiocese of Newark area. The Archdiocese submitted Synod surveys to one penitentiary and one county jail. Prison chaplains printed out and distributed questions, which inmates completed individually.
The questions were:
- What can the Catholic Church do to draw people back to the Church, especially Sunday Mass?
- How well does the Catholic Church listen to its ”flock” to make decisions by including those in the peripheries of parish life?
- In what ways can the church enable the voice of the members of the church, as well as those in the peripheries of the church, to be heard and to participate in the decision-making within the Church?
- As Catholics, how well do you think we are actively answering our baptismal call to evangelize in our daily lives to preserve, unify and be an example of our Catholic faith for others to follow?
- What can we as Catholics lay people, encouraged by the Church to do more, do to preserve and unify the Catholic Church?
- What actions do you hear the Holy Spirit asking the Church to take in the 21st Century to attract people back to the Church?
The bulk of their responses can be summed up in two words: access and action.
Inmates generally felt that the Church isn’t doing a good enough job reaching inactive or less active members of the Church and that it listens to its flock only “somewhat well.”
One inmate expressed that the Church should become more digital and accessible by creating an app where Catholics can call or chat with religious advisors on varying issues. And on the parish level, he suggested boxes in churches and frequent pulpit announcements encouraging people to speak with their priests.
There is also a great sensitivity within the walls of the penitentiaries to current social issues and how much the Church wades in. There is a desire to see more church leaders visibly leading in their communities, the Synod results showed.
As one inmate put it in the survey: “Provide a shoulder for those hurting to lean on. Use the public media to speak against discrimination, advertise in media houses like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox about the reality of God…be visible where people are suffering. As much as possible, the local Church should respond to the needs of the community where it is situated.”
One commonality continued to surface in Synod reports: the desire for a welcoming Church at all levels, from clergy and leadership, as well as parishioners.
Addressing lay people, an inmate said: “Invite people to your church activities, love both the poor and the rich, show no discrimination, be patient with people who are struggling to become spiritually mature, and encourage them.”
The simple plea to be welcoming echoes the larger Archdiocesan Synod results – but perhaps it is even more poignant coming from people who may not ever have the chance to be welcomed by a local parish.
If they are released, there is that “fear” that they won’t be accepted, Fr. D’Amico said. But as the Synod results show, they also feel a sense of hope.
Featured image: A priest prays with a death-row inmate in 2008 at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Ind. (CNS photo/Tim Hunt, Northwest Indiana Catholic)
