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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Pffft…Clearly, “Catholic” Bob Ferguson never heard the story of St. John Nepmoucene.
Clearly.
Ferguson is NOT a Catholic. By approving this law from a position of authority, he is now an apostate, a traitor to the Faith. Disgusting. And REAL Catholics know that a priest will NEVER break the seal of the confessional. No matter what the crazed leftist nut jobs on the West Coast pretend to vote into law.
The left, hard at work again to prove they are more commie than the communists themselves in trying to destroy faith and religion in the US.
Ferguson is NOT a Catholic. By approving this law from a position of authority, he is now an apostate, a traitor to the Faith. Disgusting. As are the Catholics who voted for him. REAL Catholics know that a priest will NEVER break the seal of the confessional, no matter what the crazed leftist nut jobs on the West Coast pretend to vote into law. If people are ill-informed enough to vote Dems back into power over the next several years, this is an example of the very sick agenda we can expect them to continue pushing onto the American people. Add this piece of legislative idiocy to the same leftist basket pushing men into womens sports and locker rooms, trans surgery for minors and open borders.
He is “not a Catholic” when the Church says “he is not a Catholic “ . Do you go in and out between every confession? Are you no longer Catholic if you are still in grave mortal sin? Isn’t it the prerogative of the Magisterium to make such pronouncements iabout public figures? Many also made Such pronouncements about the late Pope. Are they not being Protestants?
Magisterium
Surely you know that certain actions result in self excommunication. I would think allowing passage of a law to undermine the sacraments would qualify. Some high churchmen cant see sin right in front of their nose. Thats how biden made hay with his supposed devout Catholicism.
Catholic Ferguson was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world (Wikipedia).
Indeed, ahead of his time. The new progressive Catholic who will reshape the Church to fit into its appropriate place in our world. An offshoot of the Biden, Pelosi, Durbin mindset. Although Ferguson is so advanced that even Cdl McElroy would condemn him on this matter. Apparently he’s well versed in the faith but obviously places his intellectual acumen above doctrine. All the more reason why the Church requires a saintly Roman pontiff with intellect to sufficiently address the challenges facing Catholic doctrine.
If I’m not mistaken, Donald Trump was also on that list! Birds of a feather?
TDS can be treated.
Did Ferguson consult a canon lawyer to see if signing such a bill, which attempts to undermine a sacrament, is grounds for excommunication? Is he ignorant enough to think that Catholic priests will comply with an unjust law?
One of the ways of sharing in another’s sin is “By command. Or, in other words, don’t force someone to do something sinful.”
So he certainly should qualify for the same penalty as the one that applies to a priest who breaks the seal of the confessional.
Right on.
This is a cock-eyed bill. What penitent would testify against a priest that he confessed abuse in confession? He would thereby incriminate himself. In the end, it would be a priest’s word against an abuser’s word.
That said, this law will likely cost the church a pretty penny, fighting and defending anyone charged through its enactment.
I live in Washington state. It has been my perception that in the Archdiocese of Seattle, there was not much rallying against the bill. There was more some seven or so years ago when the state legislature attempted to pass a similar bill and failed.
This time, private or ecumenical church-affiliated human rights grassroots groups did most of the heavy lifting against passage of the current law, to no avail. The fact that the institutional church seemed not too involved speaks to its complacency and failed zeal. It is perhaps preoccupied with consolidating parishes into families with the next step to determining feasibility–which properties and facilities are best de-sacralized and sold. That’s what’s happenin’.
For sure, this case will end in the Supreme Court. It infringes upon the free exercise of religion.
Sadly, in a worst case scenario, the Stalinist/gestapo/KGB state enforcers could send in “ringers” to the confessional, make a bogus confession, and then wait to see if the priest reports it in. If this bill is not suppression of religious freedom, I dont know what is. I think any Catholic who voted for the reps who approved this bill should be pronounced excommunicated immediately.
I would say now that priests will be in fear the law, as a recording can now be made of a confession by any number of small electronic devices, and a “reconciliation room” rather than blind traditional confessional particularly vulnerable since both parties can not help but be able to accurately describe one another.
As for who might do such a thing, a molester is already a twisted individual, and a recorded but unreported confession of molestation then leaves the priest vulnerable to manipulation/extorsion, and likewise vulnerable to any attempt by activist media who could make the rounds of confessionals with false confessions and then post “shocking exposés” on lack of compliance with the law.
These law attempts are clearly unconstitutional state attempts to regulate religious practices, and are bad juju for too many reasons to list. Hopefully, this will now make its way up to the Supreme Court. As without it being struck down, there is nothing to prevent the state from requiring recordings of all confessions, which would destroy anyone going at all, same as this law will stop molesters from confessing their sins.
This act could be a blessing in disguise. If the sacrament were to return to priest and penitent both shrouded behind a veiled screen, the priest could not know and could not certify the identity of anyone who confessed anything to him.
You mean to say that all confessions are not done behind the screen? How backwardist is that? Do those same people receive Holy Communion in the hand while standing as well?
Yes.
Very.
Yes.
😀
Actually, it’s what the late Pope would call “forwardist.”
I was thinking along the same lines. If X confessed behind the screen and the priest had no idea who he (or she — such things do happen) was, what’s the priest supposed to do? Go to the police and say, “Someone confessed to abusing a child.”
Police: Who?
Priest: I don’t know.
Police: Name of victim.
Priest: I don’t know.
Police: Where?
Priest: I don’t know.
Police: When?
Priest: I don’t know.
It might read like something from a Monty Python skit, except it’s not funny. Do people who craft such legislation even know how Confession works?
If I were a priest, I would go to prison before I would violate the seal of the Confessional!
Not to sound snarky, Karen, but if you were a Priest you would have NO CHOICE. To violate the seal of the confessional is to incur instant excommunication and your soul is in a state of mortal sin.
Any governor who calls himself a ‘catholic’ (small c) and who signs legislation like this has also excommunicated himself by an action like this, and if Bishop Daly doesn’t do the honors – ASAP – then he too is in serious (spiritual) doo-doo.
Are we to assume that perverts have such tender consciences that they will run to the confessional to seek forgiveness? Are there any cases of priests shielding confessed child abusers and freeing them to go on and on with their abuse? And how is the government going to discover what anyone confesses? Will the sinner blab to the police what he confessed? Surely the priest will not.
This law is an excuse for the government to intrude on the sacred, and an attempt to bully and intimidate the Church.
In a world where the price of truth is too often bartered in the marketplace of influence, we must all tread carefully among those who wield power — be they politicians, educators, or merchants of ideologies. Authority, when stripped of virtue, becomes an empty vessel, and titles, when proclaimed without deeds, ring hollow. If one professes to be Catholic, we should all learn to ignore the mere label affixed in conversation, “I am Catholic”. Instead, we need to evaluate each individual on the degree of light radiating through action — a faith lived, not merely spoken.
As an aside, I think this lens of seeking for Light should be used to evaluate all individuals; not to condemn, but to identify those that inspire and are empowered by the Holy Spirit to lead.
What’s disappointing is that Seattle archbishop Etienne has been relatively silent on this, whereas he was very vocal on his disdain for deportation of illegal immigrants (the three Washington bishops issued a joint statement that was read in all the parishes). He was also the first bishop to voluntarily close down parishes for covid. This mentality is rife in this diocese and Seattle Catholic schools are not helping tomorrow’s generation. Ferguson is a graduate of Bishop Blanchet H.S. so of course everyone thinks he’s adequately formed in the faith. Especially himself.
Any public comment yet from the apostolic successors in the Yakima or Seattle dioceses?
Spokane’s bishop did alert his diocesan parishioners to oppose the bill. I have not seen or heard Seattle’s archbishop say anything….the Heal Our Church group has been publicly calling for the archbishop to meet with them; he may have done so, and he may have urged parishioners to oppose the bill, but I have neither seen nor heard any such reports. I typically read bulletins and newsletters from three different Seattle parishes, and I have seen nothing in any of these in 2025. I do not read the diocesan newspaper, so perhaps there was something there….
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/262023/spokane-bishop-urges-voters-to-oppose-bill-that-forces-priests-to-break-seal-of-confession
This has the same likelihood of succeeding as seeing women priests in the future. They might as well sign in a law to do that too. Meaningless.
Kathleen. I admit that I am confused by your comparison of women priests and the proposed Washington state civil “law” on confessions. The Church has full control by suppressing gender specific prelates. I don’t struggle with the confession secrecy, but I object the not offering half of God’s creation and the heavy lifters’ Holy Orders.
Well, fortunately for all of us, Morgand,your objections, like your progressive ideology, are irrelevant to the discussion.
Here’s MorganD being patronizing again.
No, MorganB, the Church has absolutely no authority to ordain priestesses. It has never had the authority and never will. Our Lord did not will it or He would have made provision for it. And, please, spare us any “Oh, but it would just have been too much against the culture of the times and that’s why He didn’t!” drivel. Informing one’s followers that one is God the Son and that in order to have eternal life they must eat One’s flesh and drink One’s blood isn’t exactly in keeping with the culture of the times, either, and yet He did it. And many of his followers said what a hard teaching that was, and left him. Just as so many deeluded people now leave the Church because it doesn’t fit in with their particular culture of moronic feminism and mindless support of abortion.
God gave equal opportunity for salvation to men and women. Surprisingly, God, in His superior knowledge and will to morganD, created them in a manner to assume different burdens in life, even defining some specifics. Believing women are necessarily of greater burden than men is juvenile obsequious pandering, inherently insulting to women.
I, along with many others I’m certain, am eagerly awaiting seeing a Priest in handcuffs – which he should INSIST ON, on the evening news because he refuses to violate the seal of the confessional.
From there it will be quickly picked up by Newsmax, Fox News, MSNBC, and, I’m certain, those worthies on The View will be eager to share their wisdom on the subject with us – the gum-chewing public.
To quote Sonny & Cher – The Beat Goes On.
We could use a few martyrs these days. Persecution unites the faithful. Apathy & complacency have brought us to the low point we’re at currently.
Want to sign up to be one? Perhaps on some other issue?
A Catholic Reform Group called Heal Our Church gave testimony in the Wa. State Senate hearing, supporting the bill. Another member who testified in support of the bill was a priest, retired, from the Diocese of Milwaukee, who has publicly supported the breaking of the confessional seal in cases of abuse. Fr. James Connell was stripped by his archbishop of his faculty to absolve and hear confession in the RCC. You can find more info online about misguided Washington Catholics supporting this bill and subverting Catholic teaching, healing, reconciliation.
Members of the Heal Our Church group are about as Catholic as the Roman Catholic “Womenpriests” fringe group of radical leftist women attempting to seek “ordination”.
I am wondering how a confession can even be licit, if one’s Penance does not require that one makes restitution to the injured party when a criminal crime has been committed?
What, pray tell, is a “criminal crime”? That is, as distinct from a non-criminal crime, for instance.
Ferguson appears to be yet another ape in the ape of the church about which Fulton Sheen warned us.
There are a few hundred total priests in Washington State. It is very difficult to get a law passed. Note the maniacal focus on a few people. This is not a shot over the bow for Catholics. This a shot into the bow.
Wake up!
For the record, on May 4 Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle was quick to make a response (after testifying earlier). Part of which reads:
“Once the state asserts the right to dictate religious practices and coerce information obtained within this sacrament – privileged communication – where is the line drawn between Church and state? What else may the state now demand the right to know? Which other religious practices will it try to legislate? Why is this privileged communication between priest/penitent the only one singled out? Why not attorney/client? Doctor/patient? Spouses?”
There are laws that make exceptions to doctor/patient and attorney/client privilege. One issue here with Sacramental Confession is that it is not a civil matter but a soul matter. Those who have committed serious crimes, be they child abuse or murder or ? arson or …. and who may be legitimately struggling with remorse and fear will now be afraid to tell any priest to save his soul. A question I have for priests is what would you say to a penitent who confesses such crimes but has avoided civil responsibility for his crimes. A good priest may be the right person to guide such a sinner to true repentance and turn him/her self into the civil authorities to make restitution and accept his penance from the state as best can be so that he can be spiritually absolved from his sins.