Seven women are on death row in Texas. All have been convicted of murder. And all are lay affiliates of a Catholic religious order.

The women get up at 4 a.m. every day for personal prayer. At 3 p.m., they sing the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.

They aim for a communal life of contemplation and charity in an unlikely setting — and in a manner far removed from how they acted when Deacon Ronnie Lastovica of the Diocese of Austin first started visiting the unit in late 2014.

Deacon Lastovica told the Register that when he first met them, they were often “at each other’s throat.”

What happened?

Members of the Waco convent of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star started visiting them in December 2021, at the deacon’s request.

The sisters and the prisoners made an instant connection, Deacon Lastovica said, which has grown during the past three years.

One of the convicts was already a Catholic when the sisters began visiting. Five others have since joined the Church. A seventh identifies as a non-Catholic Christian. But all seven, said Deacon Lastovica, have become oblates of the order, meaning they follow some of the practices of the sisters, including some of their prayer regimen.

Compared to how it used to be, the atmosphere of women’s death row is now unrecognizable, the deacon told the Register.

“The biggest change I’ve seen is that they’re living other-centered lives. They’re no longer living a me-centered life,” Deacon Lastovica said.

Deacon Lastovica, 68, retired pastoral care coordinator for the Austin Diocese, visits the women’s death row in Gatesville, Texas, at least once a week. He’s one of hundreds of Catholics involved in prison ministry in the United States whose work was recently elevated in prominence by the head of the Church.

Pope Francis, who has made more than a dozen visits to prisons during his pontificate, opened a Holy Door at the chapel of Rebibbia Prison in Rome the day after Christmas, two days after he initiated the Jubilee Year of 2025 by opening a Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Pope, who concelebrated Mass in the prison chapel, quoted Matthew 25:35-36.

“We have to accompany the prisoners,” Pope Francis said. “Jesus says that on the day of judgment we will be judged on this: ‘I was in prison, and you visited me.’” (See related story on this page.)

Feeling the Call

In the wake of the Pope’s prison visit Dec. 26, the Register spoke with Catholic prison-ministry workers around the United States about their work and about the Jubilee Year that began on Christmas Eve.

Jubilees, which occur at least every 25 years in the Catholic Church, offer extraordinary opportunities for remission of punishment for sin (known as indulgences; see related story on page 10) through pilgrimages to holy places or other pious acts.

Jubilees have roots in Scripture, including Isaiah 61:1-2, which describes “a year of favor from the Lord” as including a commission “to proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners.”

The “release” Catholics in prison ministry aim for is spiritual. They acknowledge that the vast majority of prison dwellers are in jail because they hurt other people — some grievously. But volunteers say they feel drawn to share with inmates the good news of Jesus’ offer of forgiveness, mercy and healing to those who ask for it.

“Pilgrims of Hope” is the theme of Jubilee 2025.

‘Minister of Hope’

“And in the prison you’re really trying to be a minister of hope for the people who are there,” said John Imbimbo, 30, a third-year seminarian for the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who has been visiting a prison near Philadelphia’s St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, which he attends, since September 2024.

“There’s a sense that you’re loving this person in their suffering, no matter what they’ve done,” Imbimbo said. “My aim is to really love the people in front of me, and to encounter Christ in them.”

John Chick, director of prison ministry for the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, which sends about 150 volunteers into most of the 38 state prisons and 17 county jails in the diocese, regularly visits Union Correctional Facility in Raiford, Florida, which houses (among others) prisoners condemned to die.

Of the 276 men on death row in Florida, 67 are on the list of inmates who request visits from Catholic prison-ministry workers, Chick said. Three or four death-row inmates have become Catholics during the past few years, he said.

Chick, 42, told the Register that powerful spiritual experiences draw him back to prisons time and again.

“My first encounter was at Florida State Prison, which is a pretty tough environment, and I experienced Jesus in a way I hadn’t anywhere else,” Chick said. “The Holy Spirit is present there in a way that you cannot put words on or explain.”

Some inmates say they can feel it, too — and feel the opposite reaction, as well.

On a Saturday morning in 2021, Chick said, he and another volunteer stood in a walkway outside the side-by-side cells of two men. Though not silent, it was relatively quiet.

“The second we started praying with these two men, the noise and disruption that was on the wing above and the wing below, you could just feel the agitation,” Chick told the Register. “It was a feeling and a noise all at the same time that did not like what was going on where we were.”

The prisoners recognized it immediately.

“They stopped us and said, ‘Do you see what’s happening?’” Chick recalled. “And they said, ‘This is what happens all the time when we’re in the Spirit here.’”

Opening the Door

At Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City, Deacon Greg Werking often conducts a Communion service for inmates on Saturday afternoons based on the Scripture readings for that weekend’s Sunday Mass. Volunteers and inmates discuss each reading. At the Prayers of the Faithful, inmates are encouraged to offer prayers for their family members.

“They feel like it’s a safe place where they can say, ‘I’m vulnerable. I need help. I’m worried about my children,’” Werking said. “I think it’s kind of beautiful.”

The Jubilee message isn’t passive, said Deacon Stuart Longtin, who has visited inmates in the Diocese of Fargo, North Dakota, since 2000 and often preaches to them.

“I always use ‘opening the door,’” Deacon Longtin said. “You know, the door out of this place — you’re the one who has to open it, so you don’t come back here. Now, Jesus is on the other side of this door. But he’s not going to open it himself. You have to make the effort.”

Some prison-ministry programs use the structure of Cursillo, a type of three-day retreat that began in Spain during the 1940s and relies on predetermined lecture topics designed to draw listeners to participate.

One of those is the Kairos prison-ministry program in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, where Tony Coriaty, 76, a longtime volunteer, told the Register about a member of the gang MS-13 whom he met a few years ago. The man, in his 40s, had been transferred to the federal prison in northern New Hampshire because he was a troublemaker.

The man attended the program’s multiday retreat, but he made it clear he had no intention of participating.

“He wasn’t really interested in what we had to say, but over the weekend, you could see a change taking place,” Coriaty said.

By Sunday, the last day of the retreat, Coriaty said, “He was smiling.”

“He talked about how his life was changed just in those three and a half days because he never really experienced a lot of acceptance as he did in that brief amount of time,” Coriaty said.

For the next retreat about six months later, Coriaty said, the man volunteered to be a servant, performing menial tasks.

“He smiled at me, and he said, ‘You know, I pray for you guys every day,’” Coriaty said.

Seeking Christ

In the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, volunteers have been visiting inmates at Barnstable County Jail and House of Correction on Cape Cod since 1993, as part of a program called Residents Encountering Christ.

Volunteers give talks on Scripture, family, charity, goals, and the need for forgiveness for past transgressions, among other things, and inmates are encouraged to share, as well.

“You give testimony in your life about why you have confidence in Christ and why they should have confidence in Christ,” said John Sullivan, who has visited the jail weekly for about 15 years.

He said he was nervous the first time he went, wondering how it would be to interact with prison inmates.

“I discovered they’re just like anybody else — they want to know Christ. They want to find Christ in their life,” Sullivan said.

The volunteers periodically offer full-day retreats at the jail, which include an opportunity for inmates to speak to a priest.

“Almost everybody goes,” Sullivan said.

“Some of the priests who come in there weep when the men make their confession. It’s very emotional,” Sullivan said.

Conducive to Conversion

Father Riley Williams, pastor of Holy Name Church in Fall River, Massachusetts, who has gone to the jail almost weekly since 2016, said that for some people jail is conducive to conversion.

“What I’d say is a lot of people in jail are there as a result of the circumstances of their life up to that point. And being in jail gives them a time for reflection and to think about the bigger questions in life, which gives them an openness to faith,” Father Williams said.

Organizers of prison ministry in some parts of the country told the Register the need for volunteers is greater than the supply they currently have and that it’s difficult to get overworked parish priests to come to prisons.

But several participants also talked about how prison work has changed their lives.

Theresa Brosnan, 82, a widow and retired schoolteacher on Cape Cod, goes to the local jail every week. For the past 15 years, she has led the ministry’s outreach to prisoners after they get out of jail. For many years, that included a cookout in August at her home for volunteers and ex-cons.

Her involvement began with a discomfiting invitation from a friend to help out at a three-day retreat at the jail in September 1995.

She didn’t want to go. But she went. And it changed her life.

“I don’t know, I just felt that miracles were happening,” Brosnan said. “I saw people that believed in nothing, and then they completely turned around.”

“When I came home, my husband said, ‘You’re a different person. I want what you have,’” Brosnan recalled. “And from that time on, he did it with me.”