Pope Francis pens preface to US death row chaplain’s book on death penalty

Pope Francis addresses the faithful during second vespers on the feast of Our Lady of the Snows at the Basilica of St. Mary Major on Aug. 5, 2024. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Aug 19, 2024 / 14:15 pm (CNA).

Pope Francis commended an American chaplain’s work with death row inmates as a ministry that reflects the “deepest reality of the Gospel” in a new book preface on the death penalty.

The pope personally penned the introduction to “A Christian on Death Row: My Commitment to Those Condemned” by Dale Recinella, a lawyer who has ministered to death row inmates in Florida as a lay Catholic chaplain for more than 25 years.

Pope Francis calls Recinella’s work as a chaplain on death row a “passionate adherence to the deepest reality of the Gospel of Jesus, which is the mercy of God.”

“Dale Racinella has truly understood and testifies with his life, every time he crosses the threshold of a prison, especially the one he calls ‘the house of death,’ that God’s love is boundless and immeasurable,” Pope Francis wrote in the preface of the book to be published Aug. 27.

“And that even the most heinous of our sins does not mar our identity in God’s eyes: We remain his children, loved by him, cared for by him, and considered precious by him.”

Death row ministry

Recinella had been working as a high-powered lawyer in the 1980s when he began reassessing how he had been using his gifts and his skills up to that point, identifying a strong desire to give back. 

Together with his wife, Susan, Recinella got involved in a ministry helping the homeless and AIDS patients, where the organizer of the ministry approached Recinella to see if he’d be willing to go even deeper.

“He asked if I would be willing to come to his prison and start seeing men that were terminal with cancer and AIDS,” Recinella recalled, speaking to CNA in an interview in 2020.

“And what I didn’t have the courage to tell him was I’d never been in a prison; I had financed prisons on Wall Street all over the country, huge prisons, but I’d never been in one and had no desire to go in one.”

Recinella’s family helped to convince him that he should take the plunge in the early 1990s.

“It was Susan and the kids quoting Jesus from the Gospel in Matthew 25 that convinced me that if my faith was really guiding my life, that Jesus had said when we visited the least in prison, we visited him, but when we didn’t, we had refused to visit him. And so I figured I’d give it a shot,” he said.

It would be a couple of years before the idea of death row specifically really crossed Recinella’s mind, when he and his family ended up moving to the small town of Macclenny, Florida. That town just happened to be the home of the state’s death row prison.

Recinella was shocked at the harsh conditions he encountered when he first set foot in a death row prison.

“The very first thing that struck me, my first experience was, ‘I can’t believe we’re still doing this in the 20th century,’” he recalled, noting that despite the Florida heat, the inmates were not given air conditioning.

Recinella eventually decided to give up the practice of the law so that he could minister to the death row inmates.

Ministering to condemned criminals has not proven easy. Recinella recalls being assigned to a serial killer who had killed young women of a similar age to Recinella’s daughter.

“I was not ready to handle the spiritual challenges of dealing with the level of human suffering that we’ve experienced in street ministry, AIDS ministry, prison, ministry, and death row ministry,” he said.

Recinella found the strength to do it through conversations with a trusted priest and through the sacraments, he said.

In addition to spending several days a week visiting inmates himself, he has also trained other people to do prison ministry and has acted as a witness for nearly two dozen executions.

Recinella told “EWTN News In Depth” in 2021 that among the people he has ministered to when they are dying — whether they are homeless, lawyers, politicians, or inmates — everyone has asked for mercy in their dying moments.

“I’ve never had anyone ask me to pray for God to give them justice,” he said. “Everyone, even if they didn’t think they had faith, when they’re facing the end of the tunnel, everyone has asked me to pray with them for God’s mercy.”

Pope urges abolition of the death penalty

Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 to state that the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” (CCC, 2267). 

In the preface to Recinella’s book, Pope Francis underlined his strong opposition to capital punishment, saying that “the death penalty is in no way a solution to the violence that can strike innocent people.”

“Capital executions, far from bringing justice, fuel a sense of revenge that becomes a dangerous poison for the body of our civil societies,” the pope said.

Pope Francis emphasized how he wants the Catholic Church’s 2025 Jubilee Year to be a time for “all believers to collectively call for the abolition of the death penalty.”

The death penalty has been abolished within the European Union and more than 140 countries. 

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and the United States were the countries with the most confirmed executions in 2023, according to Amnesty International.

“States should focus on allowing prisoners the opportunity to truly change their lives rather than investing money and resources in their execution, as if they were human beings no longer worthy of living and to be disposed of,” Francis wrote.

Pope Francis met Recinella and his wife in a private audience at the Vatican in 2019. The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life bestowed on Recinella its first Guardian of Life Award in 2021 in honor of his decades of service and ministry to death row inmates.

Recinella’s new book will be published by the Vatican Publishing House on Aug. 27. He is also the author of “When We Visit Jesus in Prison: A Guide for Catholic Ministry.”

CNA staff writer Jonah McKeown contributed to this article.