What Do Catholics Look Like? What Prison Ministry Taught a Convert.

Ten minutes before the communion service was scheduled to begin on that early Saturday morning in 1985, Sr. Jackie and I processed through the institutional green hallways of the St. Louis Medium Security Correctional Facility, known locally (and infamously) as “the city workhouse.” Although built in the 1960s, it had earned its nickname due to both its austerity and a century-old city ordinance that allowed forced labor as payment of fines. These days, not much work was done there and the women we were visiting mostly just survived while awaiting trial.

I was an idealistic and passionate 25-year-old volunteer with a local criminal justice organization, and I carried my guitar case in front of me like a shield. I walked in the wake of the diminutive but mighty Sr. Jackie and marveled at the way she expertly worked her way through the matrix of checkpoints and heavy steel doors that made me jump every time they clanged shut.

A guard ushered us into a common room, where we gathered chairs into a circle. I looked around for something to use as a makeshift altar and place to set my Bible, a couple of candles, and the small gold ciborium, a covered container used to store and transport the Communion hosts that had been consecrated at a Mass earlier that morning. There was nothing in or about the room that even remotely said “chapel” or “altar.” I spotted an empty plastic trash can in a corner and flipped it over. Sr. Jackie nodded, as if saying, “That’ll do.”

I had my doubts. Just a few years earlier when I converted to Catholicism from my mainstream Protestant upbringing, my catechetical instruction had been sparse compared to today’s yearlong process of initiation. But I knew my new faith was anchored in a belief in the “real presence” of the risen Christ in the Eucharistic meal. I knew that only Catholics who believe this and who are in a state of grace (free of any serious sin not yet absolved by going to confession) should receive Communion. As a lay Eucharistic minister, I was permitted to take the consecrated host and distribute it to places like hospitals and prisons. As long, of course, as the recipients were Catholic.

(Jesuit Curia)

So given all that, something inside me wondered what Jesus would think of being laid upon an upturned trashcan. But we spread an altar cloth across it and that seemed to help. I set the ciborium on the newly christened altar and noticed how it caught a spark of light from the harsh overhead florescent fixtures. Just then, about 10 tired-looking, disheveled, toughened-by-life women shuffled into the room and slumped into the chairs. I quickly looked them over, trying to imagine for a fleeting scary and sacred moment how they ended up here. My imagination failed me.

Then a staggering question occurred to me: Just what do Catholics look like, anyway? How was I to know? I guessed I would figure it out when I needed to. Certainly they would reveal themselves to me somehow. I had a great respect and hunger for the Eucharist. I believed that Christ was truly present in it. But I wasn’t so sure that I could hold others to that same level of belief or make any judgements about withholding the sacrament from them if they didn’t somehow measure up to my expectations. I swallowed and pressed on.

Man playing an acoustic guitar

“Let’s begin this morning, as we always do, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” I said as I crossed myself. A few of them did the same. A few. I wasn’t taking notes about which ones. I pulled my guitar across my lap and began with a song, former Jesuit Tim Manion’s then relatively new hymn “This Alone”:

One thing I ask, this alone I seek,
To dwell in the House of the Lord all my days.
For one day within Your temple heals every day alone.
O Lord, bring me to Your dwelling.

The women didn’t seem to know the song, but their bodies began to sway a little as their eyes closed. I hoped the song would open up in them the thought that they, too, could find and dwell with God, even in the midst of their current incarcerated, seemingly hopeless lives. I got to the third verse:

Wait on the Lord and hope in His mercy.
Wait on the Lord and live in His love.

And there was my theme: Hope. Sr. Jackie and I took turns proclaiming the Scripture readings, leading ultimately to Jesus’ gentle invitation to come to him with hope during life’s toughest times: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” I gave a mini homily of sorts, a few comments about the possibility of hope in Christ, a warning that God doesn’t always take away the burdens but, rather, helps us carry them. Some of the women leaned in closer. Others leaned back, arms crossed, as if doubting what this young white guy might know about despair and darkness. At least that’s how I took it.

Next, as was the practice established by Sr. Jackie and earlier volunteers, I invited the women to join in the conversation. What were their own experiences of despair and hope? Where was God and God’s promise of hope in their lives? When have they felt carried? Slowly, nearly one-by-one, they began to tell stories of abuse, abandonment, drugs, loneliness, depression, desperation, crime and, eventually, incarceration. Nearly all spoke of family, of children, of brave women who had raised them and who had often instilled in them a faith they had at one time believed would see them through life. Until life itself happened.

They were broken, aching, searching, yearning souls looking for something to hold onto, something to transform them into something new.

Something shifted in and around me. The common room had become holy ground and their stories sacred scripture. They continued their liturgy of shared experience and pain for about 20 minutes, leaning in closer to one another to hear better, to find common meaning, to perhaps begin to feel like, for once, that they were not alone. We all couldn’t have been more different and, yet, we were so much alike in our brokenness, our yearning, our desire for something more.

Nearly all had shared and no one had spoken for about 30 seconds. I drew a breath to speak and close out the conversation but then saw the one woman who had not yet spoken raise her bowed head and part her lips ever so slightly. She was young, about my age but perhaps a little older. She was small and frail, still the girl she had once been in some ways. The lines around her eyes and her down-turned mouth revealed a deep sadness. I waited as she gathered her words, not wanting to rush whatever the Spirit was stirring in her. A few of the women turned to face her. Some did not. They knew her story as well as I did. It had been all over the news. Three young daughters, killed by their mother. Then she spoke, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I think that’s what happened to me,” she said. “I just lost hope.”

The air was sucked from the chapel. All eyes closed in near-unison. My lips quivered and my eyes became moist. I cleared my throat and sought words but found none, and I was glad of that. Glad I resisted the urge to fill the silence with some platitude. We sat in the sacred quiet for a few more minutes, with all of those big emotions that surround matters of life and death hanging heavily around us like clouds. At last, I said, “Let’s move on.”

Last Supper by Roy Thottam, SJ (Jesuit Curia)

I read aloud the biblical story of the Last Supper, recalling for them what happened in that upper room the night before Jesus died. I explained to them how the Communion bread had already been transformed into body at the morning Mass. Whether or not they knew the story they appeared enraptured by it. “Do this is remembrance of me,” I prayed, and they responded with silent or quiet acknowledgement and bowed heads.

At the workhouse, there was so little they could do on their own. Every waking hour was controlled. But this they could do. They could join the story. They could remember. They could believe. They were hungry for this. I could see it in their eyes. They were broken, aching, searching, yearning souls looking for something to hold onto, something to transform them into something new.

This, I realized, is what Catholics look like. Or should. And just as in every other Catholic church throughout the world, no questions were asked, no baptismal certificates were required. No proof of a state of grace is possible. Those who came forward held out their hands to receive the Lord until, finally, she stood before me, a small sense of hope of forgiveness lingering there on her still-parted lips as I said to her: “This is the body of Christ.”

She hesitated, then held out her hands to receive the host. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I prayed that I would someday be such a Catholic.

Steve Givens is a retreat and spiritual director and a widely published writer on issues of Catholic-Christian faith and spirituality. He is the executive director of the Bridges Foundation, which brings Ignatian spirituality and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola to everyday life for those in the St. Louis region. He is also a musician, composer and singer who lives in St. Louis with his wife, Sue. They have two grown and married children and five grandchildren.

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