Dale Recinella (C) accepts the Pontifical Academy for Life’s Guardian of Life Award from Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia (L) and Cardinal Wim Eijk (R), Sept. 28, 2021. / PAL screenshot
Denver Newsroom, Sep 30, 2021 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
Dale Recinella, a Florida lawyer who has ministered to death row inmates for decades, was given an award honoring his service on Tuesday at the Vatican.
The Pontifical Academy for Life bestowed on Recinella its first Guardian of Life Award Sept. 28. In accepting the award, Recinella said he sees the honor as “a profound statement by our Church” about how important the lives of death row inmates are.
“When I have men [on death row] who want to become Catholic, I ask: why? And they say: because that’s the Church that wants me,” Recinella said.
In the mid-’80s, Recinella was working as a high-powered lawyer, first as a partner in a law firm in Miami and then as a supervising attorney at a “very significant law firm” in Tallahassee.
Though Recinella’s family life and career were stellar, by any measure, he began reassing how he had been using his gifts and his skills up to that point. A desire began to stir in both Recinella and his wife; a desire to give back.
So Recinella and his wife Susan got involved in a ministry to the homeless. At that time, one of the biggest problems facing the homeless people Recinella encountered was AIDS, and they ended up taking the state training, through the local AIDS service organization, to get certified to work with people with AIDS.
Eventually, the organizer of the ministry approached Recinella to see if he’d be willing to go even deeper.
“He asked if I would be willing to come to his prison and start seeing men that were terminal with cancer and AIDS,” Recinella recalled, speaking to CNA in May 2020.
“And what I didn’t have the courage to tell him was I’d never been in a prison, I had financed prisons on Wall Street all over the country, huge prisons, but I’d never been in one and had no desire to go in one.”
Recinella’s family helped to convince him that he should take the plunge in the early 1990s.
“It was Susan and the kids quoting Jesus from the Gospel in Matthew 25 that convinced me that if my faith was really guiding my life, that Jesus had said when we visited the least in prison, we visited him, but when we didn’t, we had refused to visit him. And so I figured I’d give it a shot,” he said.
It would be a couple of years before the idea of death row, specifically, really crossed Recinella’s mind, when he and his family ended up moving to the small town of Macclenny, Florida. That town just happened to be the home of the state’s death row prison.
Recinella was shocked at the harsh conditions he encountered when he first set foot in a death row prison.
“The very first thing that struck me, my first experience was, ‘I can’t believe we’re still doing this in the 20th century,’” he recalled, noting that despite the Florida heat, the inmates were not given air conditioning.
Ministering to condemned criminals has not proven easy. Recinella recalls being assigned to a serial killer who had killed young women of a similar age to Recinella’s daughter.
He found the strength to do it through conversations with a trusted priest and through the sacraments, he said.
“I was not ready to handle the spiritual challenges of dealing with the level of human suffering that we’ve experienced in street ministry, AIDS ministry, prison, ministry, and death row ministry,” Recinella said.
“And that’s what we’ve learned is: this is really meant to be done in ‘gangs’ if you will, by ‘gangs of Christians’ doing the gospel. And so we’ve had to make sure that we have a community of accountability that’s calling us to be honest with ourselves, and for me with death row, that is to make sure I’m dealing with the suffering in the way our Church provides for us to do it.”
Once Recinella realized he had a heart for prison ministry, he quickly realized that he could not continue to minister in death row prisons as a practicing lawyer. So, although he kept his law license active, he gave up the practice of law to minister to the death row inmates.
In addition to spending several days a week visiting inmates himself, he has also trained other people to do prison ministry, and has acted as a witness for nearly two dozen executions so far.
Florida, especially the northern part and the panhandle, falls squarely in the Bible belt— which consists mostly of southern states, with Baptist majorities.
Since 1976, nearly 90% of all the executions in the United States have taken place in this region. In fact, Recinella found during his research that just 2% of US counties account for over half of all the executions in the US since 1976. In recent years counties in Texas, Missouri, and Florida have routinely topped the list.
The fact that support for capital punishment remains so strong, especially in parts of the country where it seemed to Recinella that nearly everyone was Christian, troubled him.
So several years ago, Recinella wrote a book identifying 44 requirements of the death penalty when it was the law of the land in Israel— such as a ban on circumstantial evidence, treating all offenders equally, establishing unquestionable guilt, et cetera.
“I identified 44 absolute non-waivable requirements of the biblical death penalty that had to be met before it could even be considered,” Recinella said.
By contrast, he found that the death penalty, in Florida and the US, fulfilled none of those biblical requirements. Last year, Bishop Felipe Estevez of St. Augustine released a pastoral letter calling for an end to the death penalty, quoting extensively from Recinella’s work.
Recinella’s experience over the years has also shown him just how inequitable the death penalty can be— how it disproportionately affects people of minority races, and how those who are poor are less likely to be able to appeal their conviction.
For example, his research found that a prisoner is more than ten times more likely to be executed if it was a black defendant and a white victim, than if it were a white defendant and a black victim. In Florida, nearly 40% of the death row is black, out of a population that is 15% black.
“This is the real death penalty; it’s not the thing that the death penalty supporters think it is,” Recinella commented.
“The real death penalty is a monstrosity, it’s error prone, it’s full of mistakes and human failings, and yes, we get it wrong.”
Recinella says his years of death row ministry have led to many deep friendships, positive relationships with prisoners, and numerous conversions.
“Susan and I, since coming to death row, I think we’ve accumulated about 30 some either godchildren or confirmation godchildren, and those are long-term relationships,” he said.
“The Gospel brings us into long term relationships with the people who are suffering and who the world doesn’t want relationship with.”
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When will Cardinal Fernandez be investigated for his published account of an erotic conversation he claimed to have had with a sixteen year old girl? That is hardly appropriate pastoral behavior.
Exactly, Lucy.
I’m pretty sure he’s not the one to be in charge of issuing pronouncements on any kinds of moral issues, contemporary or ancient.
The epically failed Bergoglio imbroglio grinds on.
And on.
And on…
Around the same time Francis will be called to account for his frivolous disregard for safeguarding the Deposit of Faith.
We must differentiate between the man and his work to some extent. Michelangelo, who created the famous fresco “The Creation “ in The sistine chapel , was far from being a saint. We must also allow for repentance and change. We never know what is in the heart of a man.Ones past doesn’t necessarily determine his future. We must also remember that sometimes bad men do good things and good men do bad things. Life is very messy and multi dimensional and we must be careful in passing judgment. In this case let’s see what he says and take him at his word, not reading his motives into it.
“The Argentine cardinal in his interview with EFE argued that “people who are concerned” about his work will “be put at ease” by the new document.”
To me it sounds like a habitual (sadly) Vatican’s line: “I say something that violates the Church’s teaching and all are shocked and demand explanations; I will explain nothing but to pacify them and to regain credibility I then say something in a line with the Church’s teaching on another topic so all would sigh in relief.”
This works only for those with a fragmented memory i.e. who are unable to remember bashing when they are given flowers after it, even if it is a years long cycle (bashing – flowers, bashing – flowers etc.).
The words of Fernandez and those who cover him mean nothing to me until he repents and removes his ‘FS’ and pseudo-mystical staff. Noteworthy, being on alert and discerning possible deception is not only exhausting but also damaging for a spiritual life. It is an abnormal situation when a believer should be on guard against deceptions and heresies… in his own Church.
It is detrimental for a soul not to be able to trust those who in a normal situation are supposed to be trusted. It is like not trusting your own father.
I’m with you on this, Anna.
We read: “The Argentine cardinal in his interview with EFE argued that ‘people who are concerned’ about his work will ‘be put at ease’ by the new document.”
Four easing questions about the new document:
1. Does it replace the Natural Law in its entirety with only a shortlist of prohibitions?
2. Does it explicitly support the “Catechism,” or does it confuse? Is “Veritatis Splendor” still ignored, of possibly now dismissed as a “special case”–like all of continental Africa, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Peru, and parts of Argentina, France, Spain, etc. (re Fiducia Supplicans)?
3. Is the document consistent with “Il dono della vita” (“Respect for Human Life in Origin and the Dignity of Procreation,” John Paul II/Ratzinger, February 22, 1987), or not?
The standing document offers direct and succinct answers to direct and numbered questions submitted by “episcopal conferences or individual bishops, by theologians, doctors and scientists, concerning biomedical techniques [….and in] conformity with the principles of Catholic morality.”
4. Does the document really put the disrupted Church “at ease”–by rescinding the verbose novelty in Fiducia Supplicans? Or, are the lips of Cardinal Fernandez silent? Rescind or re-sinned?
Good points. I fear that even if it seems to support orthodoxy, it will not be on the basis of innate natural law, but it will undermine moral truth by making it seem like Catholic idiosyncrasies.
I read the opening title to this piece that reads: “Vatican to publish document on ‘moral questions’ regarding human dignity, gender, surrogacy” and immediately thought it was intended as satirical.
Having tragically abused so many physically, the plan is to selectively abuse all of us theologically. This is at the hardened heart of clericalism, the very antithesis of service.
The next pontificate has its work cut out for it in clarification.
Praying for clarification though “morals” are often the umbrella under which non-religious or broadly religious societies categorize and classify what they hold to be truisms about healthy attitudes and behaviors.
The Catholic Church teaches Truth “authored” by God the Father, embodied in the Person of Jesus Christ, and moved in the currents of consciences by the Holy Spirit.
The former–morals–may bend, be distorted, or even introduced or eliminated depending on the egoism of humans; the Church teachings are immutable with respect to the fundamental knowledge and understanding of the person and personhood.
Moreover, since the origin of the Church, incredibly wise and able theologians have developed and shared Truth, emulated by great saints. Always present in authentic doctrine has been the dignity of all persons, as they are created in the image and likeness of God. (It has been individuals who for whatever reason have disrespected their own or others’ being.) Later generations have express fundamental and foundational truths in novel or timely ways to best evangelize the populace of any give time period, but the essence remains constant.
We shall see about this document…yes?
I will not read the document. Possible Heresy is not my cup of tea. Anything coming from Jorge Bergoglio or his Vatican henchmen are not to be trusted. Period.