“When you become priests, go to prisons, it is a priority,” was the appeal that Pope Francis made to a group of Spanish seminarians. The Holy Father also reminded us that people are imprisoned not only in physical prisons but also in ideological and moral ones that end up distancing people from God.
On November 16, the Holy Father met with the seminarians of the dioceses of Pamplona, Tudela, San Sebastián, and Redemptoris Mater in Consistory Hall.
“Your archbishop was very excited about this audience and told me that you were appealing to the affection I have for prisons so that I would also grant you this audience,” the Holy Father began in a brief improvised speech.
However, he reminded them, “The seminary is not a prison, it is a place to learn that a priest is a man, a human being who wants to redeem, like your Mercedarian archbishop, a redeemer of captives; because a priest cannot be anything other than a living image of Jesus, the Redeemer with a capital R.”
The Pontiff explained that this means many things, “but one very specific thing is that we must go down into the prisons; certainly into the government prisons, to offer those who are in them the oil of consolation and the wine of hope, but also into all those prisons that imprison men and women in our society: the ideological prisons, the moral prisons, those that create exploitation, discouragement, ignorance and forgetfulness of God.”
Pope Francis reminded them that since he was a bishop he has celebrated the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday in prisons.
“I remember that, in a footbath — that prison was for women — I was washing a woman’s feet and when I was going to move on to the other one, she grabbed my hand, leaned close to my ear and said, ‘Father, I killed my son. ’ The internal dramas in the conscience of those who live in a prison. When they are priests, they should go to prisons, it is a priority. And all of us can say what I feel: Why them and not me?”
“You are going to receive the priestly anointing and it is to free the captives, those who are chained, without realizing it. Chained by so many things: by culture, by society, by vices, by hidden sins,” he said.
In your ministry, do not make distinctions between persons.