ROCKLAND COUNTY, N.Y. (OSV News) ─ Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, retired archbishop of New York, brought palm fronds and prayer cards featuring a crucified prisoner during a pastoral visit to Rockland County's Eugene J. Grogan Correctional Facility on Palm Sunday.
The March 29 visit continues Cardinal Dolan's custom of visiting correctional facilities close to Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.
"I'm a prisoner too," Cardinal Dolan told The Good Newsroom, the New York archdiocesan news outlet. "We're all prisoners to sin and death. And Jesus told me to hang around with prisoners, and I always do what he tells me."
The resplendent red vestments for Palm Sunday worn by Cardinal Dolan and his concelebrants brightened the drab multifunction room in which they celebrated Mass. At the beginning of the celebration, Cardinal Dolan blessed palm fronds and distributed them to the administrators, officers, and incarcerated persons in attendance.
Cardinal Dolan focused on the lessons of the day's Gospel and Holy Week. On Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem with the crowd waving palm fronds to welcome him. But, Cardinal Dolan said, five days later, the same people called for him to be crucified.
"We all have Palm Sundays, and we all have Good Fridays. But we also all have Easter Sunday," Cardinal Dolan said, reminding those in attendance of the hope of the Resurrection.
After Mass, Cardinal Dolan greeted each of the seven incarcerated men who attended, talking with some in their native Spanish, and presented each with prayer cards featuring St. Dismas, the thief who was crucified next to Jesus, saying, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42).
He then spent time greeting and talking with administrators and staff. Cardinal Dolan also touched his crucifix to the rosaries two of the men were wearing or carrying.
Concelebrants of the Mass were Msgr. Emmet Nevin, dean of Rockland County and pastor of St. Aedan Catholic Church in Pearl River, and Father Ryan Muldoon, secretary to Cardinal Dolan and the director of the archdiocesan Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. They were assisted by Deacon Samir Mobarek of the Church of St. Augustine in New City.
"(Cardinal Dolan) has always been emblematic of not leaving people behind," said Louis Falco III, sheriff of Rockland County. "We teach the people in our care that they are not bad people just because they did a bad thing, just like our Catholic faith," he said.
The Eugene J. Grogan Correctional Facility is the only such detention center in Rockland County. It is considered maximum security, as it holds incarcerated men, women and minors until they are tried and sentenced.
Only incarcerated persons serving sentences of one year or shorter will do their full term at Grogan. Although the facility has a capacity of over 300, currently only 140, mostly male, inmates are in residence, Falco said.
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Steven Schwankert is senior editor of The Good Newsroom, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of New York. This story was originally published by The Good Newsroom and is distributed through a partnership with OSV News.
