“We saw to it that prisoners in jail were taught reading, writing, religion and a trade of some sort. With this in mind we had workshops set up in jail, for experience had shown us that many men turn to crime because they have no trade and don’t know how to make an honest living”
(Aut 571).
SERVE GOD IN THE MOST NEEDY
The words of Jesus continue to be a non-renounceable demand for those who carry the name of Christians: “I was in the prison and you visited me.” Jesus took upon himself the sufferings of the world: the sick, the left out, the depreciated, the emaciated, the hungry; also the imprisoned. He was really Incarnate God. The great majority of the inhabitants of the planet live in the condition of these categories and human situations which appear only in the pages of violence in the press, or not even in them.
St. Anthony Mary Claret knew to be at the side of these poor, the marginalized, the sick, the sinners…. The prisoners were not an exception. Already in the Jesuit novitiate in Rome he used to go weekly to preach to the imprisoned (cf. Aut 165). In Cuba he took care that those imprisoned in jails acquire some training and job by means of different workshops (cf. Aut 571). In Madrid, he used to visit habitually the prisoners (cf. Aut 637).
The saintly Archbishop did not remain imprisoned in his Archbishop’s Curia of Santiago de Cuba, but got out to meet the lost sheep, human beings who needed help. In his years of Madrid (1857-1868) while not living in the palace surroundings , he was not so ‘caged’ as he was lamenting at times or as we might imagine somehow. He was invested with sufficient freedom to move about – he himself demanded it as a condition to accept the responsibility of royal confessor to get out to meet the most needy.
To accompany a marginalized, console a sick person, visit an imprisoned is to accompany, console and visit Jesus! How much time has passed since you had no more encounter with Him?