Some years ago, I was preparing a meeting with a group of young people from the parish of Saint Galla (to be precise, it was Tuesday, February 6, 2007!); the theme of the meeting was the same as the title of this “post”. I rarely throw away sheets from meetings I have prepared, and so now that I am settling into the new parish and a new office, this sheet came into my hands. I would like to share it, because it is an interesting collection; but putting it online, besides sharing it with others, also becomes for me a way to find it more easily later.
– biblical figures
In the Bible we find some examples of innocent people in prison: Joseph the dreamer; the three young men Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego; John the Baptist; Saint Paul (who gives himself the title of “prisoner of Christ Jesus”: Eph 3:1; 4:1; Col 4:3; 2 Tim 1:8; Phil 1:1; 1:9). For all of these, the experience of prison was an occasion to live entrustment into the hands of the Lord.
– Prison and Conversion (Jacques Fesch)
I certainly do not mean that it is prison as such that changes people; quite the contrary. However, I think it is interesting to recall the testimony of a prisoner who lived through an experience of conversion. Jacques Fesch had his own personal encounter with God while justly imprisoned for a crime he had committed, and he rediscovered his faith. Jacques Fesch was born on April 6, 1930, in St. Germaine-en-Laye, near Paris, into a wealthy family of Belgian origin. Raised as a Christian but weak in character and led astray by the example of his father, an atheist and cynical successful banker, at 17 he lost his faith and set out on a journey devoid of ideals and moral restraints. At 21 he married Pierrette Polack in a civil ceremony; she was expecting a child by him. After the failure of various attempts at work, he left his wife and daughter, sickened by a meaningless life in which he could not find happiness.
He dreamed of escaping the suffocating reality around him and of going sailing in the Pacific and, in order to obtain the money needed to buy the boat, he planned a robbery of a money changer. But someone raised the alarm and, in the panic of the chase, Jacques killed a police officer and was arrested. Thus began a long Calvary which, after three years of pre-trial detention, would lead him to a death sentence, on the very day of his twenty-seventh birthday, and finally to the guillotine on October 1, 1957. But in the solitude of his cell Jacques was touched by grace and encountered “the One who tirelessly awaits those whom he loves and who was waiting for me to arrive, stumbling under the weight of my cross”; he encountered the love and mercy of God, and discovered in his own person that the Cross of Christ “is the testimony of God’s love for us”. “With eyes fixed on the Crucified Christ” he would laboriously climb his Way of the Cross in order to become “ever more in his image”, until he arrived with Him at the summit of Calvary, at the summit of Love:
“I meditated well on the Passion this morning and drew much strength from it. Besides, I shall have to come a little closer to Jesus crucified, since I too, although wholly unworthy, will have the grace of living my little Golgotha.” (Diary, September 13, 1957).
His writings from prison, published beginning in the seventies, would reveal an unsuspected aspect of Jacques’s personality and of his extraordinary journey of faith, also bringing about numerous conversions. On September 21, 1987, the Cardinal of Paris, Jean Marie Lustiger, would open the diocesan inquiry with a view to beatification.
Prison comes close to martyrdom when it is lived as a testimony to faith in Jesus, and one who experiences it is considered a “confessor of the faith,” that is, one who confesses faith in the Lord not only with his lips but also with his very life.Saint John of the Cross, for example, lived through the humiliating experience of prison, and moreover at the hands of his own confreres. John was born in 1542 at Fontiveros in Spain; when he was 21 he entered the Carmelites. The religious life of the convent did not correspond to his expectations, and so he thought of changing Order, perhaps of going among the Carthusians, who had a more eremitical style of life. In 1568 he met Saint Teresa of Jesus (Teresa of Avila), who awakened in him an interest in a reform of the Order of Carmel. His confreres, however, opposed him harshly, even going so far as to put him in prison for nine months in an attempt to make him renounce the Reform. In the darkness of the prison of Toledo he wrote his most beautiful mystical poems; his later best-known writings, namely the “Ascent of Mount Carmel,” the “Dark Night,” the “Spiritual Canticle,” and the “Living Flame of Love,” are commentaries on those original poems of his. The sufferings he still had to endure in the years that followed helped him to be united even more deeply to God and led him to the summit of the mystical life. He died on December 14, 1591, in the convent of Ubeda. In the year 1726 he was canonized and in the year 1926 he was proclaimed Doctor of the universal Church.
We can also recall the victims of the concentration camps, among whom some figures of saints stand out: Saint Maximilian Kolbe (August 14, 1941), Saint Edith Stein (August 9, 1942).
“On August 15, 1975, the Solemnity of the Assumption, in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), I was invited to go to the Presidency Palace, the “Independence Palace.” There I was arrested. It was 2:00 p.m. At that moment, all the priests and religious men and women had been summoned to the Opera House, in order to prevent any reaction on the part of the people. Thus there began for me a new and very special stage of my long adventure. I left home dressed in my cassock, with a rosary in my pocket. During the journey toward the prison, I realized that I was losing everything. All that remained to me was to entrust myself to the Providence of God. Even in the midst of so much anxiety, I felt great joy: “Today is the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven.” From that moment on, it was forbidden to call me “bishop, Father…” I was Mr. van Thuan. I could no longer wear any sign of my dignity. Without warning, I was being asked, even by God, to return to what is essential. In the shock of this new situation, face to face with God, I heard this question addressed to me by Jesus: “Simon, quid dicis de me? – Simon, who do you say that I am?” (cf Mt 16,15). In prison, my companions, who were not Catholic, wanted to understand “the reasons for my hope.” But they asked, in all friendship and with good intention: “Why did you abandon everything: family, power, riches, in order to follow Jesus? There must be a very special reason!” My jailers, on the other hand, asked me: “Does God really exist? Jesus? Is it a superstition? Is it an invention of the class of oppressors?” Then it was necessary to give explanations, in a comprehensible way, not with scholastic terminology but with the simple words of the Gospel.” After my arrest, in August 1975, I was transported during the night from Saigon to Nha Trang, a journey of 450 km, between two policemen. The experience of life as a prisoner began: I no longer had a schedule. A Vietnamese proverb says: One day in prison is worth a thousand autumns in freedom. I experienced it: in prison everyone awaits liberation, every day, every minute. In those days, in those months, so many confused feelings tormented my mind: sadness, fear, tension. My heart was torn by being far from my people. In the darkness of the night, in the midst of this ocean of anguish, little by little I awakened: “I must face reality. I am in prison. If I wait for the opportune moment to do something truly great, how many times will such occasions present themselves to me? There is only one thing that will certainly come: death. We must seize the opportunities that present themselves each day, in order to perform ordinary actions in an extraordinary way.” In the long nights in prison, I realized that living the present moment is the simplest and surest path to holiness. From this conviction a prayer was born: “Jesus, I will not wait; I live the present moment, filling it with love. A straight line is made up of millions of small points joined one to another. My life, too, is made up of millions of seconds and minutes joined one to another. I arrange every single point perfectly and the line will be straight. I live every minute perfectly and life will be holy. The path of hope is made up of little steps of hope. The life of hope is made up of brief minutes of hope. Like you, Jesus, who always did what pleases your Father. Every minute I want to say to you: Jesus, I love you, my life is always a “new and eternal covenant” with you. Every minute I want to sing with the whole Church: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…”
Cardinal van Thuan knew how to draw strength from the word of God. Not having a copy of the Bible with him, he managed to have a young boy secretly bring him a few small pieces of paper on which he was able to write more than 300 phrases from Sacred Scripture that he remembered by heart. He testifies to us that “the word of God, thus reconstructed, was my daily vademecum, my precious treasure chest from which to draw strength and nourishment.” He knew how to live Christian love for his persecutors; his affability toward his jailers eventually won them over to his friendship. He knew how to find in the prison, he says, his “most beautiful cathedral.” He lived the abandonment of Jesus on the Cross, but at the same time entrustment into the hands of the Father. He felt the hardship of prayer, but he knew how to live its essence in abandoning himself to God. With the Russian Pilgrim he sought to live in this way a constant prayer; he sought to be prayer. He managed to have wine brought to him disguised as medicine so that he could secretly celebrate the Eucharist and unite himself to the offering of Jesus.