“The death penalty is in no way the solution to the violence that can affect innocent people. Capital executions, far from delivering justice, fuel a sense of revenge that turns into a dangerous poison for the body of our civil societies. States should be concerned with allowing prisoners the possibility to truly change their lives, rather than investing money and resources in suppressing them, as if they were no longer worthy of living and to be disposed of.” This is what the Pope said in the preface – anticipated by Vatican News – to the book “A Christian in Death Row: My Commitment alongside the Convicted” by Dale Recinella, published by Lev.
In the book, which will be released on Tuesday, August 27, 72-year-old Recinella, a successful attorney on Wall Street, recounts his experience since 1998 accompanying death row inmates spiritually as a lay chaplain in some prisons in Florida with his wife Susan.
“Jesus is capable of revolutionizing our plans, aspirations, and perspectives,” writes Pope Francis in the preface, and “Dale Recinella’s human story, whom I met at an audience, got to know better through the articles he has written over the years for L’Osservatore Romano and now through this heart-touching book, is a confirmation of what was said: this is the only way to explain how a man, with much different goals to achieve in his future, became the chaplain, as a lay Christian, husband, and father, of those sentenced to death.”
“A very difficult, risky, and arduous task to practice – emphasizes the Pontiff -, because it touches directly the evil in all its dimensions: the evil done to the victims, which cannot be repaired; the evil that the convicted person is experiencing, knowing their certain death; the evil that, with the practice of the death penalty, is instilled in society.”
According to Francis, “the Jubilee should engage all believers to ask with one voice for the abolition of the death penalty, a practice that, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, ‘is inadmissible because it attacks the inviolability and dignity of the person!’ (n. 2267)”
To support this thesis, the Pope also cites Fëdor Dostoevskij, who in his novel “The Idiot,” “impeccably synthesizes the logical and moral unsustainability of the death penalty, speaking of a death row inmate: ‘It is a violation of the human soul, nothing else! It is said: ‘Do not kill,’ and yet, because he killed, others kill him. No, it is something that should not exist.'”
Francis speaks of Recinella’s action as “a great gift for the Church and the society of the United States, where Dale lives and operates. His commitment as a lay chaplain, especially in such a truly inhumane place like death row, is a living and passionate testimony to the school of God’s infinite mercy.”
And he concludes: “I would like to express a sincere and moving thank you to Dale Recinella because his chaplaincy in death row is a tenacious and passionate adherence to the most intimate reality of the Gospel of Jesus.”
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