From the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, prisoners have emerged in Pope Francis’s daily prayers and Mass intentions. On Good Friday, with many around the world confined to their homes, prisoners will offer a glimpse into their own permanent quarantine during the Vatican’s Via Crucis prayer.
Each year Pope Francis tasks a different person or group with writing meditations for his Way of the Cross prayer on Good Friday, the day on which Christians commemorate Jesus’s crucifixion and death.
This year, the meditations were organized by the chaplaincy of the “Due Palazzi” House of Detention in Padua, Italy. Authors include prisoners, family members of prisoners, a catechist, a civil magistrate, volunteers and a priest who was falsely accused of an unspecified crime and later acquitted. The Vatican published the full text of the meditations earlier in the week.
In an April 10 letter thanking the prisoners for their meditations, Pope Francis said he “took residence in the folds of your words and I felt welcomed at home. Thanks for sharing a piece of your story.”
Written in the first-person, each offers a personal story recounting resentment, anger, guilt, despair and regret, as well as hope, faith and mercy.
Reflecting on Jesus’s condemnation to death, one prisoner condemned alongside his father to a life sentence said that to date, “The harshest condemnation remains that of my own conscience: at night I open my eyes and I desperately search for a light that will shine upon my story.”
I wonder what is the effect of the Pope’s prayer, on behalf of the people, when he is simply reciting something that someone else wrote? What can the great “Hail Mary” do for a person in need of a Life-saving, among the other writings that they use for “prayer”? Mary was a human being with a humble heart, that is all.
Nothing comes from the minds of those people, which is the ground that God sows His seeds of Life from their conscience, where He connects to them. Could it be that they are not connected to Him at all? Isn’t that the reason He said:
“These people honor Me with their lips but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, speaking as doctrines the commandments of men”
I believe that God has had enough of those churches’ practice of religion in His name, no wonder He sent a deadly sickness to shut them down this year. But are they taking heed?