Pope Urges the World to Soften Stance Against Prisoners

Nine days after a riot in one of its cellblocks, Pope John Paul II said Mass at an overcrowded prison here Sunday to dramatize his call for a worldwide reduction of jail sentences.

“In the name of Jesus, who came to liberate us, I ask authorities for a sign of clemency toward all prisoners during this Jubilee year,” the Roman Catholic leader declared at Regina Coeli, Rome’s oldest jail.

Convicted and accused felons trembled and broke into tears. Some served as altar boys, sang in the choir, received Communion from John Paul and kissed his ring during the two-hour papal visit--one of the more emotional events of the Jubilee, the Vatican’s millennial Holy Year celebrations.

John Paul has made pardon and redemption central themes of the Holy Year and has called repeatedly for abolition of the death penalty. In a message to world leaders June 30, he said: “A reduction, even a modest one, of the terms of punishment would be for prisoners a clear sign of sensitivity to their condition.”

There’s no indication yet that his appeal has been heeded. But here in Italy, where the Vatican’s views can sway secular leaders, it has set off prisoner protests against conditions behind bars and demands in Parliament for a general pardon or amnesty to relieve overcrowding.

Hours after John Paul’s appeal last month, fighting broke out at Regina Coeli, leaving 25 guards and three prisoners injured. In prisons around Italy, which hold 14,000 more inmates than the 40,000 they were built for, other inmates set fire to bedsheets, banged on pots and pans, and refused to eat their meals.

Knowing in advance of the pope’s prison visit, the center-left government scrambled last week to address the overcrowding problem. But with conservative lawmakers opposed to an amnesty, the best it could do was decree $1.2 billion in spending for new prisons and more guards.

Many of Italy’s prisoners are illegal immigrants, and the decree gives the government more leeway in deporting those who commit crimes.

Standing before the pope and prisoners Sunday, Justice Minister Piero Fassino said the government will “respond to the discomfort of those in prison without contradicting the requirements of legality.”

With hundreds of extra guards to protect him, John Paul warned in his homily that prisons must not be used as a means of “social retaliation or institutionalized vendetta.”

“Punishment [and] prison make sense only if, while affirming the needs of justice and discouraging crime, they serve man’s renewal,” he said. Confinement, he added, must offer inmates “the possibility to reflect and change their lives, in order to fully become part of civil society.”

Sixty-five of Regina Coeli’s 900 inmates and scores of black-uniformed guards exchanged greetings of peace at the nationally televised Mass in a freshly repainted atrium of the men’s jail, whose name translates as Queen of the Heavens. Other prisoners were allowed to leave their cells to listen from hallways or watch on large TV screens.

A small group of female prisoners from another institution was brought in for the Mass.

Standing under a crucifix hung for the Mass, a prisoner held up a Spanish-language sign for TV cameras: “God loves everyone. Clemency.”

Prisoners were not the only outcasts seeking the pope’s blessing over the weekend.

Tens of thousands of gay men and lesbians, some of them practicing Catholics, marched through Rome on Saturday to protest the church’s condemnation of homosexual acts and to demand laws in Italy against anti-gay bias.

Vatican officials had lobbied openly to have Italian officials stop the march.

But only Sunday did the pope himself speak out, voicing “bitterness” for what he called the marchers’ “affront to the Great Jubilee and the offense to Christian values in a city that is so dear to the hearts of Catholics all over the world.”

Reading from the church’s catechism to pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, John Paul said that homosexuality is “objectively disordered” but that homosexuals should be treated with compassion and respect and not be subjected to “unjust discrimination.”

Italian politicians opposed to gay rights legislation applauded the pope’s rebuke. But many commentators asked why the Vatican hadn’t dedicated a Jubilee day to homosexuals, as it has to other groups.

“It would have been proof of a real ecumenism and rich generosity in this year of pardon,” Corriere della Sera, a leading newspaper, said in a front-page editorial Sunday.

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REMEMBERING PRISONERS

Bishops worldwide, including Cardinal Roger Mahony, say Mass for the incarcerated. B1