Vatican City, 11 July 2015 (VIS) –
After celebrating Mass in the chapel of the archbishop's residence,
the Pope visited the Santa Cruz-Palmasola penitentiary where he met
with various groups of inmates – men, women and young people
imprisoned for both petty and serious offences. The men's Pavilion
PS4, where the meeting with the Pope took place, is open for daily
visits and hosts around 2,800 detainees, whose family members (around
1,500 per day) are able to live with them in a sort of village
protected and managed by the inmates themselves through a “General
Regency” led by State security staff.
The Pope was received by the director
of the penitentiary, the chaplain and Msgr. Jesus Juarez, head of
prison pastoral ministry of the Episcopal Conference of Bolivia.
After hearing testimonies from some of the detainees, he addressed
those present.
!I could not leave Bolivia without
seeing you, without sharing that faith and hope which are the fruit
of the love revealed on the cross of Christ”, he said. “Thank you
for welcoming me; I know that you have prepared yourselves for this
moment and that you have been praying for me. I am deeply grateful
for this”.
He continued, “You may be asking
yourselves: 'Who is this man standing before us?'. I would like to
reply to that question with something absolutely certain about my own
life. The man standing before you is a man who has experienced
forgiveness. A man who was, and is, saved from his many sins. That is
who I am. I don’t have much more to give you or to offer you, but I
want to share with you what I do have and what I love. It is Jesus
Christ, the mercy of the Father.
“Jesus came to show the love which
God has for us. For you and for me. It is a love which is powerful
and real. It is a love which takes seriously the plight of those he
loves. It is a love which heals, forgives, raises up and shows
concern. It is a love which draws near and restores dignity. We can
lose this dignity in so many ways. But Jesus is stubborn: he gave his
very life to restore the identity we had lost.
“Here is something which can help us
to understand this. Peter and Paul, disciples of Jesus, were
prisoners too. They too lost their freedom. But there was something
that sustained them, something that did not let them yield to
despair, that experience of darkness and meaninglessness. That
something was prayer, both individually and with others. They prayed,
and they prayed for one another. These two forms of prayer became a
network to maintain life and hope. And that network keeps us from
yielding to despair. It encourages us to keep moving forward. It is a
network which supports life, your own lives and those of your
families.
“When Jesus becomes part of our
lives, we can no longer remain imprisoned by our past. Instead, we
begin look to the present, and we see it differently, with a
different kind of hope. We begin to see ourselves and our lives in a
different light. We are no longer stuck in the past, but capable of
shedding tears and finding in them the strength to make a new start.
If there are times when you experience sadness, depression, negative
feelings, I would ask you to look at Christ crucified. Look at his
face. He sees us; in his eyes there is a place for us. We can all
bring to Christ our wounds, our pain, our sins. In his wounds, there
is a place for our own wounds. There they can be soothed, washed
clean, changed and healed. He died for us, for me, so that he could
stretch out us his hand and lift us up. Talk to the priests who come
here, talk to them! Jesus wants to help you get up, always.
“This certainty makes us work hard to
preserve our dignity. Being imprisoned, 'shut in', is not the same
thing as being 'shut out'. Detention is part of a process of
reintegration into society. I know that there are many things here
that make it hard: overcrowding, justice delayed, a lack of training
opportunities and rehabilitation policies, violence. All these things
point to the need for a speedy and efficient cooperation between
institutions in order to come up with solutions. And yet, while
working for this, we should not think that everything is lost. There
are things that we can do even today.
“Here, in this rehabilitation centre,
the way you live together depends to some extent on yourselves.
Suffering and deprivation can make us selfish of heart and lead to
confrontation, but we also have the capacity to make these things an
opportunity for genuine fraternity. Help one another. Do not be
afraid to help one another. The devil is looking for rivalry,
division, gangs. Keep working to make progress.
“I would ask you to take my greetings
to your families. Their presence and support are so important!
Grandparents, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, couples, children:
all of them remind us that life is worth living and that we should
keep fighting for a better world. Finally, I offer a word of
encouragement to all who work at this centre: to the administrators,
the police officials and all the personnel. They carry out a vital
public service. They have an important responsibility for
facilitating the process of reintegration. It is their
responsibility to raise up, not to put down, to restore dignity and
not to humiliate; to encourage and not to inflict hardship. This
means putting aside a mentality which sees people as 'good' or 'bad',
but instead tries to focus on helping others. This will help to
create better conditions for everyone. It will give dignity, provide
motivation, and make us all better people.
“Before giving each of you my
blessing, I would like for us to pray for a few moments in silence.
Each of you, in whatever way you can. I ask you, please, to keep
praying for me, because I too have my mistakes and I too must do
penance. Thank you”.
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