IMAGE: CNS photo/Vatican Media
By Cindy Wooden
ROME (CNS) — Before washing the feet of 12 prisoners, Pope
Francis told them and hundreds of inmates to remember that Jesus constantly
stands before them with love, ready to cleanse their sins and forgive them.
“Jesus takes a risk on each of us. Know this: Jesus is
called Jesus, not Pontius Pilate. Jesus does not know how to wash his hands of
us; he only knows how to take a risk on us,” the pope said March 29 during
his homily at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.
Pope Francis celebrated the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s
Supper at the prison and washed the feet of a dozen inmates. Four were Italian;
two were from the Philippines; two from Morocco; and one each from Moldova, Colombia,
Nigeria and Sierra Leone, the Vatican press office said. Eight of the 12 were Catholic; two were Muslim; one was Orthodox; and one was Buddhist.
In his brief homily before the foot-washing ritual, Pope
Francis explained to the prisoners that in Jesus’ day, the job of washing feet
was the task of a slave. “There wasn’t asphalt or cobblestones, there was
dust and people’s feet got dirty,” so before they went into a house, the
slaves would wash the person’s feet.
The Gospel recounts Jesus washing the feet of his own
disciples “to give us an example of how we must serve one another,”
the pope said.
Another time, he said, Jesus explained to his disciples that
kings want to be served.
“Think of the kings and emperors back then, so
many were cruel, they insisted on being served by slaves,” the pope said.
But Jesus told his followers: “Among you, it must not
be like this. The one who rules must serve,” the pope explained.
“Jesus overturns the historic and cultural attitudes of
his age — and of today, too,” Pope Francis told the inmates. Jesus says
that “the one who rules, in order to be a good boss, must serve. I often
think — not of people today because they still are alive and can change their
lives, so we cannot judge them — but think of history. If many kings,
emperors, heads of state had understood this teaching of Jesus, instead of
ruling, being cruel, killing people, if they would have done this, how many
wars would not have been fought?”
In his earthly life and still today, the pope said, Jesus
goes to “people who are thrown away by society, at least for a while,”
and he says to them, “‘You are important to me,’ and Jesus comes to serve
us.”
“The sign that Jesus serves us today in Regina Coeli is
that he wanted to choose 12 of you today for the washing of the feet,” the
pope said.
“I am a sinner like you, but I represent Jesus today. I
am his ambassador,” the pope said. “When I kneel before each of you,
think, ‘Jesus took a risk on this man, a sinner, to come to me and tell me he
loves me.’ This is service. This is Jesus. He never abandons us. He never tires
of forgiving us. He loves us so much.”
The pope celebrated the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in the
rotunda of the prison, a small central area formed from the intersection of
various wings of the jail.
The prison is designed to house just over 600 inmates, but currently
houses more than 900 men. Some 65 percent of the inmates are non-Italians,
Vatican News reported.
At the end of the Mass, a prisoner publicly thanked Pope
Francis for his visit and said the inmates would try to do, at least
symbolically, what he recommended at his general audience at the Vatican the day
before: celebrate Easter by splashing water on their eyes to look at the world
with fresh eyes.
The 81-year-old pope responded by confiding in the prisoners
that, like many people his age, he is developing cataracts and will have an
operation next year to fix them.
But, he said, as life goes one and people get busy or make
mistakes, they can develop “cataracts of the soul” that prevent them from
seeing the world with the hope that is born of Jesus’ resurrection.
“Never tire of renewing your gaze, of having that
cataract operation on your soul every day,” the pope told the prisoners.
He also insisted that jail time must be a time to prepare a
person to return to society and live as good citizens and that the penalties for
crime must be “open to hope.”
“There is no just penalty that is not open to
hope,” Pope Francis said. “That is why the death penalty is neither
Christian nor human.”
Pope Francis began his visit in the prison infirmary,
meeting with prisoners there. After the Mass he was scheduled to visit the prison’s
Section VIII, a protected area of the facility for inmates convicted of sexual
crimes and other inmates who could be in danger in the general population.
The prison is less than two miles from the Vatican and is no
stranger to hosting a pope celebrating Mass. St. John XXIII visited in 1958,
Blessed Paul VI in 1964 and St. John Paul II went in 2000.
The Mass March 29 marked the fourth time Pope Francis
celebrated the Holy Thursday Mass in a detention facility. In 2013, for his
first Holy Thursday as pope, he celebrated in a juvenile detention facility. In
2015 he presided over the Mass and foot-washing ritual at Rebibbia, Rome’s main
prison, and in 2017 he went to a prison in Paliano, some 45 miles from Rome.
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