As I walk toward the razor wire and the fence, I wonder why I’m going to prison again; every Friday morning since 1991 I’ve made this journey.
As I walk toward the razor wire and the fence, I wonder why I’m going to prison again. Every Friday morning since 1991, I’ve made this journey.
Ahead of me a black pickup truck drives around the prison. I can see his shotgun clamped to the dashboard, ready for use. The truck driving around the prison 24-7 replaces the guard towers of old.
I enter the principal entrance. Every staff member and every inmate goes through this entrance. Like all prisons, there’s only one way to get in. This is Matsqui Federal Prison, a high-medium security prison about thirty miles outside Vancouver, B.C..
The officer checks to make sure I have nothing electronic on me no cellphone, no camera, no tape recorder. He checks me for metal and then I enter the prison proper. First a pleasant place greets me — the administration area and the warden’s office — but then I continue down a short walkway and the door slams behind me. Step forward and another door opens to a place where there is no fresh paint and no flowers along the walkway. I’m in the inmates’ part of the prison.
I stop a minute. How did I get here? Almost 50 years ago I was a young Catholic priest. I look back on myself as I was then and realize, to my horror, that I wasn’t even a Christian. I wore a Roman collar, but it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t make decisions on what I thought Christ would want.
In the early sixties, the Vatican Council II was held and it urged Catholics to read the Bible as our Protestant brothers had done for years. I started to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. What a revelation. The angry God of my childhood gave way to a Jesus who preached love. Over and over — God is love. Love your neighbour. I began to take it seriously. It was 1965 and Martin Luther King Jr. was marching from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. I joined the march and for the first time I felt like a Christian. People shouted at me from the sidelines, “You’re gonna die, preacher.” That was okay, because I was willing to die for my faith. At the end of the march, King talked. What an inspiring man. “Don’t hate our oppressors, show love toward them. But stand up against evil.”
I went back to my parish in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. I was on fire with the message of love. And then, suddenly, a jolt; the delegation of parishioners had heard that I was preaching King’s message and had gone to the pastor of my parish and said, “Either you get rid of that nigger-lover priest or we won’t give you another dime.”
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