Three days before Easter. Four days before dying. As had now become his tradition of Holy Thursday, this year Pope Francis also wanted to “wash his feet” of the people inMpeded. Metaphorically, because the forces did not allow him to preside over the solemn celebration of the “Coena Domini” Mass. Thus, on April 17 he went, almost without being announced, to Regina Coeli, the prison of the first entrance in Rome, a stone’s throw from the Vatican. It had already been in 2018. An anticipated meeting just the day before, and which involved 70 prisoners. Moreover, the prison population of Regina Coeli had sent to Pope Francis, in the days of his last hospitalization to Gemelli, last March, a greeting letter (which Christian family He had published exclusively), in which the Pontiff was invited to visit the penitentiary in via della Lungara. And Pope Francis collected the invitation.
For Francesco, going to prison was a custom of his pontificate: in the juvenile prison of Casal del Marmo, on the Holy Thursday of 2013, only two weeks after the election to the papal throne, he celebrated the mass and washed his feet at twelve young prisoners, including two girls, a Christian and a Muslim, leaving a very powerful image: he, who have committed people who have also committed crimes and also thanks to this gesture. human and spiritual proximity can find one’s dignity. But if God’s mercy is for everyone (“Who am I to judge?”, Another of the statements he loved to repeat), then could not be missing the caress and consolation of Peter’s successor also in this corner of the world, between bars and blinds, almost always forgotten by the chronicles.
The one between the pope who came from the end of the world and the prisoners immediately manifested himself as a particular bond. “Every time I enter a prison, I wonder why you and not me”, is the famous phrase that he always repeated, in his numerous visits to Italian penitentiary. And, with this, it meant that the fall and error are a possibility for each of us; That whoever commits a crime is people like us. Like him. He who “caressed” them until the end, the prisoners: at his funeral, next to the heads of state and government, there was a delegation from the prison of Rebibbia, the institution of punishment where on 26 December 2024 Pope Francis wanted to open a holy door of the Jubilee of hope (the first time in the history of the Jubilees). In addition, some of them were present in Santa Maria Maggiore, with a special permit by the surveillance magistrate. Many more, thousands, gathered in front of the TV of Italian prisons, to follow the funeral. And in favor of the guys imprisoned in the juvenile prison of Casal del Marmo in Rome, the Argentine pontiff left 200 thousand euros, practically all his personal money.
Against life sentence, which defined a “hidden death penalty” in the discourse addressed to the jurists of the International Association of Criminal Law, in 2014, Francesco expressed himself several times (reiterating two principles: there Caution in Poenam and the Primotum Principii Pro Homine). Moreover, a few months after his election, in July 2013, he abolished the imprisonment for life in the Vatican, and at the same time introduced the crime of torture and sanctioned the “right trial”. Over the years, he has spoken of people detained as goats of the speakers, caution in the sentence, of racist criminal law, without moralism or pietism: simply, recalling the constitution and sense of human dignity that is of everyone, even of those who have stained themselves with a very serious crime. In the early years of his pontificate, he had received the prisoners of the Opera prison at the hearing, which produce the hosts in the project “The sense of bread”, of the Casa dello Spirito and the Arts Foundation, chaired by Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori. Just to testify, in fact, that hope must always have the last word. Moreover, turning in 2019 to the International Association of Criminal Law, Bergoglio had warned against the drift of those who see in the penalty “The only medicine for all social evil”: “In recent decades”, he said, “it was believed to be treated different diseases with the same drug: repression. It is not justice, it is laziness. It is the surrender of those who prefer to manufacture goals at the start of building communities “.
Pope Francis launched a challenge: to transform prison from a place of curse, punitiveness and revenge to redemption space. And also in this case, in addition to the words there were the actions: with the bubble “Spes non confundit“, he asked the governments to grant detainees, during this Jubilee of hope, the amnesty of penalties. He had already asked for it on the occasion of the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, in 2016. To accommodate the invitation of the Pope, however, were only Cuba, Paraguay and Mozambique. On November 6 of that year, during the jubilee of the prisoners who collected groups of all Italian prisons in San Pietro,” Possibility to make mistakes: everyone. In one way or another we were wrong. And hypocrisy means that you don’t think about the possibility of changing life: there is little confidence in rehabilitation, in reintegration into society. But in this way we forget that we are all sinners and, often, we are also prisoners without realizing it “.
There are those who said that the warning of Matteo’s Gospel (“I was prisoner and came to see me”) found in Bergoglio not a simple echo, but a “government program”. Forgiveness, hope, attention to the person and dignity were the figure of his thought on prison. But not only. With reference to the function of the penalty, always in the hearing of 2019, he proposed the transition from a justice based on remuneration to a justice based on repair, whose model is the evangelical icon of the Samaritan: “without thinking about persecuting the culprit because we assume the consequences of his act”, he had explained, “assists the one who was seriously injured on the edge of the road and takes on his needs”. It is the synthesis of the paths of reparative justice, introduced only for a few years, thanks to the then Minister Marta Cantarbia, in the Italian system. That become reality in all Italian prisons would be the most beautiful way to commemorate Pope Francis.
