Pope Francis writes foreword to US death row chaplain's book on the death penalty

Vatican City, August 19, 2024 / 2:15 p.m.

In the foreword to a new book on the death penalty, Pope Francis praised the work of an American chaplain with those sentenced to death as a service that reflects the “deepest reality of the Gospel.”

The Pope personally wrote the introduction to “A Christian on Death Row: My Commitment to the Condemned” by Dale Recinella, an attorney who has been a lay Catholic minister to death row inmates in Florida for more than 25 years.

Pope Francis describes Recinella's work as a chaplain on death row as “a passionate adherence to the deepest reality of the Gospel of Jesus, namely the mercy of God.”

“Dale Racinella truly understood and testified with his life every time he crossed the threshold of a prison, especially the one he called 'the house of death,' that God's love is limitless and immeasurable,” Pope Francis wrote in the prologue to the book, due out August 27.

“And even our worst sins do not affect our identity in God’s eyes: we remain his children, whom he loves, cares for, and considers precious.”

Ministry of Death Row

Recinella had been working as a successful lawyer in the 1980s when he began to rethink the way he had used his gifts and skills and discovered a strong desire to give back.

Together with his wife Susan, Recinella was involved in aid work for the homeless and AIDS patients. The organizer of this work approached Recinella and asked him if he would be willing to do more.

“He asked me if I would be willing to come to his prison and visit men who were terminally ill with cancer and AIDS,” Recinella recalled in an interview with CNA in 2020.

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

Recinella's family helped convince him to take the step into professional life in the early 1990s.

“Susan and the children quoted Jesus from Matthew 25 and convinced me that Jesus said that if we visited the least of these in prison, we would visit Him, but if we didn't, we would refuse to visit Him if my faith really ruled my life. And so I thought I would give it a try,” he said.

It wasn't until Recinella actually started thinking about death row that he and his family moved to the small town of Macclenny, Florida, which happened to be the site of the state's death row prison.

Recinella was shocked by the harsh conditions he found when he first entered a death row prison wing.

“The very first thing that struck me was my first experience: 'I can't believe we're still doing this in the 20th century,'” he recalls, noting that despite the Florida heat, the inmates had no air conditioning.

Recinella eventually decided to give up his work as a lawyer to devote himself entirely to caring for those sentenced to death.

(The story continues below)

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Caring for convicted criminals proved to be no easy task. Recinella recalls being assigned to a serial killer who had been killing young women Recinella's daughter's age.

“I was not prepared to face the spiritual challenges that come with the level of human suffering we saw in street ministry, AIDS ministry, prison ministry and death row ministry,” he said.

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

In addition to spending several days a week personally visiting prisoners, he also trains others to become prison chaplains and has witnessed nearly two dozen executions.

Recinella told EWTN News In Depth in 2021 that of the people he has cared for in their dying phase – whether homeless people, lawyers, politicians or prisoners – each one asked for mercy in their final moments.

“No one asked me to pray to God to grant them justice,” he said. “Everyone, even if they thought they had no faith, asked me to pray with them for God's mercy when they were at the end of the tunnel.”

Pope calls for abolition of the death penalty

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

In the foreword to Recinella's book, Pope Francis underlined his firm opposition to the death penalty, saying: “The death penalty is in no way a solution to the violence that can strike innocent people.”

“Death sentences do not bring justice but rather fuel a sense of revenge that becomes a dangerous poison for the body of our civil societies,” the Pope said.

Pope Francis stressed that he wants to make the Catholic Church’s jubilee year 2025 a time when “all believers will come together to demand the abolition of the death penalty.”

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

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

“States should focus on giving prisoners the opportunity to truly change their lives, rather than investing money and resources in executing them as if they were people no longer worthy of life and who must 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 presented Recinella with its first Guardian of Life Award in 2021 in recognition of his decades of service and care for those sentenced to death.

Recinella's new book will be published by the Vatican Publishing House on August 27. He is also the author of Visiting Jesus in Prison: A Guide for Catholic Pastoral Care.

CNA writer Jonah McKeown contributed to this article.