During an audience with Spanish seminarians on November 16, 2024, the Pope asked the future priests to visit inmates of prisons. However, he explained that he was referring not just to literal prisoners who are convicted criminals. He also spoke of those trapped by “all those prisons that confine the men and women of our society: ideological prisons, the moral ones, those that create exploitation, discouragement, ignorance or forgetfulness of God.” Francis insisted that priests, in the image of Jesus, are called to “free prisoners.”
“The seminary is not a prison,” the Pope began by telling seminarians from the dioceses of Pamplona, Tudela, and San Sebastian. “It is a place where you learn that a priest is a man, a human being [...], a redeemer of prisoners; for a priest can be nothing other than a living image of Jesus."
“Always be ready to bless, to liberate”
Pope Francis asked the seminarians — who usually study for at least six years before being ordained priests — to go to prisons and console prisoners. He recalled how, since 1992, on Holy Thursday of Holy Week he has washed prisoners' feet.
Underlining “the inner dramas of the conscience of those who live in prison,” the Pontiff told the seminarians that on one occasion a woman whose feet he had just washed told him that she had killed her son.
Pope Francis gave the second part of his address to the seminarians’ archbishop in written form for them to read later. In it, he expands on this idea of ministering to literal and figurative prisoners.
Referencing the Gospel of Luke, he reminds them that they are called to serve all people — prisoners or not — equally. “[I]n our apostolate we cannot make distinctions between people, even if they are strangers or even enemies, because for God we are all His children.”
Although some people don’t understand Jesus’ ministry to the marginalized, he said, “You, on the contrary, be always ready to bless, to liberate.”
Pope Francis will visit the Rebibbia prison in the south of Rome on December 26 to open a “holy door” on the occasion of the Jubilee 2025. His last visit to a prison was last spring: During his trip to Venice, he visited a women's prison and spoke with 80 inmates.
