There is a place, more than any other, where Don Marco Pozza learned the grammar of the human soul: the prison. Not a symbol or a poetic image, but his prison in Padua, the Due Palazzi prison, where he has been a chaplain since 2011.
It is there that he passes through corridors of silence and waiting, between cells that smell of iron and concrete, and voices that intertwine in the – impossible – search for harmony. For years, immersed in what he himself calls «homeland prison»Don Marco says that precisely in that hidden world he understood the most radical profession of the Gospel: staying close to those who everyone has stopped looking at.
«A prison homeland, today, is my panoramic point of the world», he writes in his latest book, Honey and onionspublished by Edizioni San Paolo: a text that mixes theology and news, spiritual diary and reportage of the soul.
For Don Marco, prison is a desert. A place where no excuses are exchanged, where the truth of man – whole, sharp, sometimes cruel – resurfaces.
«Before encountering this reality», he says, «I thought that the Gospel was a beautiful story, perhaps the most beautiful, but that it had nothing to do with our daily lives. Now, however, I know that the Gospel is a reality that happens every day. The big difference between being a priest only in the parish and being one in prison is that in church you often have to explain the Gospel. In prison, you have to watch it happen.”
Chaplain, priest, but also writer, journalist and television personality, Don Marco is one of the most original voices of the contemporary Italian Church. Ordained in 2004, he trained in the diocese of Padua and then obtained a doctorate in fundamental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, with a thesis on the relationship between theology, literature and imagination.
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