By Matthew Gambino • Posted October 9, 2025

Ten years ago Pope Francis visited Philadelphia greeted by crowds both wildly cheerful and silently prayerful. If you took part in any of those events you likely remember them well.

Memories of sight and sound punctuate the poetry of nostalgia, and nostalgia has its place. But what can we learn from moments we look back upon with fondness? Can we put them to use today?

One moment of that memorable visit is one that few people witnessed because it took place behind the walls of a prison.

As I recently reviewed the text of his talk to about 100 men and women at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Northeast Philadelphia that late September day in 2015, the words struck me as those from a prophet.

He spoke to the inmates as a pastor and a brother to share in their “difficult time, one full of struggles,” and “to make it my own.” He came to pray with them, he said, “and offer our God everything that causes us pain, but also everything that gives us hope, so that we can receive from him the power of the resurrection.”

After relating the Gospel scene where Jesus lovingly washes the feet of His disciples, Pope Francis told his assembled brothers and sisters that Jesus seeks out everyone because the Lord “wants to help us resume our journey. The Lord goes in search of us; to all of us he stretches out a helping hand.”

All of that could be expected of a pope visiting a prison. But his next words, I believe, were meant for more than those prisoners.

“It is painful when we see prison systems which are not concerned to care for wounds, to soothe pain, to offer new possibilities. It is painful when we see people who think that only others need to be cleansed, purified, and do not recognize that their weariness, pain and wounds are also the weariness, pain and wounds of society.”

In the washing of feet, the Lord meets and heals us so we can rejoin everyone “at the table” of society, “the table from which he wishes no one to be excluded. The table which is spread for all and to which all of us are invited.”

The words present a challenge: All are invited to the table – and not only those on the path of conversion as they pay a debt to society.

“All of us have something we need to be cleansed of, or purified from. All of us,” Pope Francis said. “May the knowledge of this fact inspire us all to live in solidarity, to support one another and seek the best for others.”

Our work then is to “support one another” as brothers and sisters. The work of Jesus is to save souls and to save us “from the lie of thinking that no one can change,” Francis said. “Jesus helps us to journey along the paths of life and fulfillment. May the power of his love and his resurrection always be a path leading you to new life.”

It’s become fashionable in our time to consider prison detainees as deserving of a hard life, and in prison, the harder the better. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that if detainees are in prison, they are “bad people,” undignified and despicable, not deserving of dignified treatment, perhaps even life itself. At best, the thinking goes, they need to be cleansed but not me.

Anyone who has from their heart offered pastoral ministry to incarcerated people knows they are children of God, created in his likeness with a dignity equal to that of anyone, including those who hold the above views.

That was the point Pope Francis made on our American soil a decade ago, which cries out across time to us now.

Today people languish in jails having been charged, convicted, and sentenced to serve time in prison. Other people languish in jails absent this legal process. Yet they remain children of God, brothers and sisters with dignity.

The late pope reminds us Catholics marking October as Respect Life Month that the Lord Jesus “wants us to keep walking along the paths of life, to realize that we have a mission, and that confinement is never the same thing as exclusion.”

The lesson from a decade ago stays with me: My mission is to keep walking my own path of conversion every day, never excluding my brothers and sisters who are both different and so close to me. We give and receive help from one another with all our pains and our hopes, gathering at the table of the living God.