COMMENTARY: The wrongly imprisoned, like Cardinal George Pell, the Carmelite martyrs and Jimmy Lai, use the arts to raise their hearts to God, offering a certain interior freedom, even contact with the transcendent.
Jubilee 2025 begins with the opening of a door to a prison. Not to let the inmates out, mind you, but to let the Pope in.
Soon after opening the Holy Door at St. Peter’s on Christmas Eve, Pope Francis will visit Rome’s Rebibbia Prison on Dec. 26, where a Holy Door for the Jubilee will be opened, too.
Several recent news items have highlighted the role of arts for prisoners — literature, sculpture, drawing and music.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, himself a poet and prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, presented on Tuesday some of the jubilee’s art projects. At Rebibbia, the Holy Father will see a sculpture entitled, Io Contengo Moltitudini (“I Contain Multitudes”). It is a collaboration between the Italian contemporary artist Marinella Senatore and some 60 men and women serving time at Rebibbia.
The dicastery is also commissioning artists to create works at other prisons, both in Italy and abroad. One such will be at Regina Coeli Prison, close to the Vatican and site of a celebrated visit by St. John XXIII on Dec. 26, 1958. It’s likely that the date of Pope Francis’ visit to Rebibbia this year was chosen to evoke that earlier papal visit.
Prison life is by necessity regimented and suffocates individuality; prisoners are given numbers, which sometimes take precedence over their names. This can diminish the creative spark of culture and discourage reflection and expression, noted Giovanni Russo, head of the Department of Prison Administration for the Italian Ministry of Justice, speaking at the same press conference as Cardinal Tolentino.
Rebibbia — Sculpture
“Each prisoner who was called to write, to risk contributing his or her own message or idea was basically given the right to be a person who is different from the others,” said Russo about the Rebibbia project. “And this is the sense of humanity that this project accomplished.”
Russo’s description of the project’s fruit echoed themes from St. John Paul II in the Great Jubilee 2000. There was a special Jubilee for Prisoners that year, and the Holy Father wrote a special message for the occasion.
“At times prison life runs the risk of depersonalizing individuals, because it deprives them of so many opportunities for self-expression,” John Paul wrote. “But they must remember that before God this is not so. The Jubilee is time for the person, when each one is himself before God, in his image and likeness.”
Cardinal Pell — Literature
The arts make space for that expression about which John Paul wrote, expression that helps prisoners maintain their identity, both as persons and disciples.
Amongst the prison arts, literature has pride of place. Christian prison literature is vast and is the most common form of artistic expression permitted prisoners, whether in letters or diaries. The first Christian prison literature was written by St. Paul and constitutes several New Testament epistles.
The recent publication of a new biography of the late Cardinal George Pell by Tess Livingstone was an occasion to recall the most recent contribution to the genre, the three volumes of Pell’s Prison Diaries. Entitled Pax Invictis, Livingstone’s book is a third-party complement to Cardinal Pell’s own prison literature, an admirable example of an incarcerated man losing neither his identity nor his faith.
The Martyrs of Compiègne — Music
This week Pope Francis declared the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Compiègne — Mother Theresa of St. Augustine and 15 companions — to be saints by means of an “equipollent canonization.” The new saints were executed during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The papal decree means that they may be immediately venerated as saints; their feast day is July 17, the date of their deaths by guillotine in 1794.
The 16 nuns are linked in pious remembrance with sacred music. While imprisoned they sang hymns, to praise God and to strengthen their common resolve. History records that they sang at their execution until their voices were stilled by the falling blade.
The Carmelite martyrs are best known in the Catholic imagination due to stage and opera. Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos wrote a screenplay about them, Dialogue of the Carmelites, but it was found unsuitable for film. After his death it became a play and, in 1957, an opera of the same name by Francis Poulenc. The climatic scene on stage — as well as in film adaptations — has the nuns singing the Salve Regina as they process, in quasi-liturgical fashion, toward the “altar” of their execution.
While the Carmelites were victims of lethal hatred, their singing manifested their trust in Providence, and the opera written about them makes it clear it is they, not their executioners, who prevail in history — and eternity.
Jimmy Lai — Drawing
Sadly, but not surprisingly, there was no mention at the Vatican press conference of the most famous Catholic prison artist in the world, Jimmy Lai. The Hong Kong businessman, publisher and democracy activist has been imprisoned for four years, and his trial is now underway for “sedition.” The Chinese patriot and devout Catholic is a victim of political persecution.
For reasons perhaps related to the secret accord between the Holy See and Beijing, the Vatican says nothing about Lai’s case, to the immense frustration of his international alliance of admirers.
It was especially painful that Lai was overlooked precisely at a press conference celebrating the power of art in the lives of prisoners. In prison, Lai has been doing pencil-and-crayon drawings of biblical scenes. He sent his friend George Weigel one of the Annunciation, entitled simply “Yes!”
The Catholic University of America installed another of Lai’s prison works earlier this year. A drawing of the Crucifixion, it was blessed and remains in the St. Michael the Archangel Chapel.
“The Jubilee reminds us that time belongs to God,” wrote John Paul in 2000. “Even time in prison does not escape God’s dominion. Public authorities who deprive human beings of their personal freedom as the law requires, bracketing off as it were a longer or shorter part of their life, must realize that they are not masters of the prisoners’ time. In the same way, those who are in detention must not live as if their time in prison had been taken from them completely: even time in prison is God’s time.”
The arts — writing, sculpture, music, drawing — lift the spirit upwards, often for sacred purposes. For those in jail, the arts offer a certain interior freedom, even contact with the transcendent, in the very profane world of prisons.
Catholic prisoners — Cardinal Pell, the Carmelite martyrs, Jimmy Lai — use the arts to raise their hearts to God, while their bodies remain imprisoned. Prison art is particularly powerful during a Jubilee year, and the decision to celebrate it — absent, regrettably, that of Lai — early in the Jubilee year is welcome.
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