«Every day in here is a Friday of passion. Will there be a resurrection?”. The question of a prisoner met in prison these days is a punch in the stomach. We know the living conditions of our penitentiaries well (and this newspaper has been echoing it for some time). The number of suicides – already twenty-eight this year, the last one just two days ago in the Sassari-Bancari prison – is just the tip of a gigantic iceberg that speaks of overcrowding, violence, precariousness, limited opportunities for work and study. For many, for too many, article 27 of the Constitution – according to which punishments must aim to re-educate the convicted person – remains a mirage. There is therefore more than one reason to give in to despair.
Yet hope can remain stubbornly alive. Hannah Arendt wrote that “men, even if they must die, were not born to die but to begin again”. What allows us to start again, even when everything around us seems to be conspiring against this possibility? In these days we relive the memory of a fact that is at the origin of an inexhaustible hope: the sacrifice of those who shared our pain, the pain of everyone, and offered their lives to redeem the evil that lives in each of us.
Dying for love seems inconceivable in the culture that we breathe and that we ourselves nourish, yet it is the legacy that Christ has left to humanity. And his sacrifice – we must have the courage to say it bluntly and without the fear of upsetting those who don’t believe in it – is the only source of hope, the only resource that allows us not to remain nailed to the fragility that accompanies every human existence .
It applies to everyone, and in a more burning way for those serving the sentence in prison for the evil they have committed.
Man cannot be reduced to his error, in the heart of every person lives a longing for happiness that no adverse situation – not even the darkness of a cell – can extinguish, because this longing is something ineradicable, it is inherent in the nature of every person. person. And this yearning is met by the embrace of a God who shares the human condition right down to its intimate folds, to give meaning to every moment of existence, even to pain. Pope Francis expresses it directly and effectively: «To the man who suffers, God does not give a reasoning that explains everything, but offers his response in the form of an accompanying presence, of a story of good that joins every story of suffering to open a passage of light in it . In Christ, God himself wanted to share this path with us and offer us his gaze to see the light in it.”
If Jesus, on the day of his death, promised Paradise to the good thief crucified next to him, there is hope for all prisoners.
And it is the same hope that can fuel the existence of each of us.
