Voices from Solitary: Loneliness and Faith at Christmastime

December 25, 2012 By 14 Comments

Picture1The following essay comes from Brian Nelson, who spent 12 years in solitary confinement in Tamms supermax prison in Illinois. Released in 2010, he now works at the Uptown People’s Law Center, which has been instrumental in the battle to close Tamms–a battle that has at last proved successful. Some prisoners have already been moved out of Tamms, while others await transfer, and the supermax is expected to be empty by January 4, 2013. For more of Brian Nelson’s descriptions of his time in solitary, click here.

I was raised as a Catholic at St. Benedict Church in Chicago. Throughout my life I have maintained my beliefs. While confined in prison I was able to continue to practice my faith: Going to Mass, celebrating the Sacrements. I was also able to celebrate the Holy Days as prescribed by the Catholic Church. Celebrating the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ was a high point each year. At the beginning of Advent I was raised to begin to prepare myself for the Christmas celebration that was shared by the Communion of Saints (this means celebrating Mass together on Christmas Day). The joy of seeing the love on each others face as we celebrate the birth of Our Lord, giving the sign of peace to each other, was a highlight of the season. Even as I was held in prison, I had free access to the chaplin everyday and our priest was at the prison regularly.

In March of 1998 that changed, as I was placed in a supermax prison. When Tamms opened it was designed strictly for sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and as a tool to break all family ties as well as brainwash men into believing they have been abandoned by everyone. Needless to say, I was shocked by the attack upon my religious beliefs upon arrival at Tamms. No longer would I be allowed to attend Mass. No longer would I be granted privacy to say confession to the priest without a correctional officer listening over the speaker in every cell. At times I was even denied my Holy Bible and my Breivary ( prayer book). I was told I was not allowed to fast, nor abstain from eating meat. For months I was denied a Rosary. All this regardless of what the Catholic priest told the prison was proper. Sadly he was ignored by Tamms administration.

Surprisingly, this made my faith stronger and, yes, more meaningful. I spent hours studying the history of St. Benedict and began to study the Order of Cistercian of Strict Observance. These are followers of the Rule of St. Benedict. I copied the Rule of St. Benedict three times as the work in the Rule prescribes. I read the Holy Bible completely numerous times, and regardless of what prison officials did to stop me, I fasted, and followed the teachings to the best of my ability. I spent hours praying every day.

Yet I have to admit, at times during the Christmas season I felt depressed and unconnected to other Christians. The Tamms mail room intentionally withheld mail until after Christmas so men felt abandoned and alone. There was no Mass or celebration. Yet my loving mother would do all she could to make Christmas special. I would receive an Advent calender weeks ahead of time. She would send religious books and she would visit. Other members of the Christian community would also try to reach into the dungeon and share the Word with me. Every man at Tamms would receive Christmas cards from Uptown People’s Law Center as well as The Tamms Year Ten Committee, to try to demonstrate that even though we were in solitary confinement we were not alone. But Christmas would come and there was no feast, no Mass, no Communion of Saints; there was no family gathering.

I was alone in a Gray Box as are thousands of men and women held in solitary confinement in America. Not even allowed a simple phone to tell of families we love them and Merry Christmas. As children we were raise with the joyful expectation of Christmas morning. Of being with family and loved ones and celebrating our Lord’s birth. Yet in solitary you don’t have these hopes of these loving moments. What you have is raw faith and depression in solitude, and never can you express this to those you love and who care about you, because then you would spoil the Christmas celebration for them. To express the loneliness would to become the Grinch that stole Christmas.

Yet at times, praying, I felt all the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all the Christians celebrating. At other times I felt the affects of the Gray Box and complete abandonment. Also I felt the anger at  those Christians that treated other Christians as I was being treated. How could they be Christians and treat other human beings so evilly? Then I would pray and pray for and end to such barbaric treatment and for the guidance to be able to help to end the madness of solitary confinement. Christmas is a time of joy yet so many men and women are being tortured in solitary confinement on Christmas day! What would Our Lord Jesus Christ say about this?

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Santa Was in Prison and Jesus Got the Death Penalty

December 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday.

As more than 3,000 Americans sit on death row, we revere the birth of a godly man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking.

Less well known is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break.

Nicholas was the 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra (in present-day Turkey). Under the Roman emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians, Nicholas spent some five years in prison–and according to some accounts, in solitary confinement.

Under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Nicholas fared better until the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. There, after having a serious theological argument with another powerful bishop, Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped the man.

It was illegal for one bishop to strike another. According to an account provided by the St. Nicholas Center: “The bishops stripped Nicholas of his bishop’s garments, chained him, and threw him into jail. That would keep Nicholas away from the meeting. When the Council ended a final decision would be made about his future.”

Nicholas spent the night praying for guidance, and was visited by Jesus and Mary. “When the jailer came in the morning, he found the chains loose on the floor and Nicholas dressed in bishop’s robes, quietly reading the Scriptures.” It was determined that no one could have visited or helped him during the night. Constantine ordered Nicholas freed and reinstated as the Bishop of Myra, and his feat would later be declared one of many miracles performed by the saint.

Saint Nicholas lived on to serve the poor during the devastating famine that hit his part of Turkey in 342 AD. He is reported to have anonymously visited starving families at night and distributed gold coins to help them buy scarce food.

Here in the United States two thousand years later, Christians go to church to worship an executed savior and shop to commemorate an incarcerated saint. And most Americans give little thought to their 2 million countrymen who are spending this Christmas behind bars.

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“God’s Own Warden”: Inside Angola Prison

July 28, 2011 By 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: The latest issue of Mother Jones magazine includes James Ridgeway’s long article on Burl Cain, warden of the nation’s largest prison, and possibly its most notorious. The former slave plantation is known for the fact that 90 percent of its more than 5,000 prisoners will die behind bars, and also for holding two members of the “Angola 3″ in solitary confinement for nearly 40 years. More recently, it has also become known for the “miracle” wrought by its controversial warden, who is said to have transformed the prison with the help of Christianity.

It took the threat of an ACLU lawsuit for James Ridgeway to gain access to Angola. The resulting article offers an alternative narrative on the miracle at Angola. The opening section of the article follows; the full article can be read on MotherJones.com.

It was a chilly December morning when I got to the gates of Angola prison, and I was nervous as I waited to be admitted. To begin with, nothing looked the way it ought to have looked. The entrance, with its little yellow gatehouse and red brick sign, could have marked the gates of one of the smaller national parks. There was a museum with a gift shop, where I perused miniature handcuffs, jars of inmate-made jelly, and mugs that read “Angola: A Gated Community” before moving on to the exhibits, which include Gruesome Gertie, the only electric chair in which a prisoner was executed twice. (It didn’t take the first time, possibly because the executioners were visibly drunk.)

Besides being cold and disoriented, I had the well-founded sense of being someplace where I wasn’t wanted. Angola welcomes a thousand or more visitors a month, including religious groups, schoolchildren, and tourists taking a side trip from their vacations in plantation country. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s possible to drive up to the gate and tour the prison in a state vehicle, accompanied by a staff guide. But for me, it had taken close to two years and the threat of an ACLU lawsuit to get permission to visit the place.

I was studying an exhibit of sawed-off shotguns when I heard someone call my name. It was Cathy Fontenot, the assistant warden in charge of PR. Smartly dressed in a tailored shirt and jeans, a suede jacket, and boots with four-inch heels, she introduced me to a smiling corrections officer (“my bodyguard”) and to Pam Laborde, the genial head spokeswoman for the Louisiana department of corrections who had come up from Baton Rouge to help escort me on my hard-won tour of Angola.

Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl   Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once   known as the bloodiest prison in the South,  into a model facility. Among  born-again Christians, Cain is revered  for delivering hundreds of  incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the  nation’s largest  maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, “with an  iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” To Cain’s more secular  admirers,  Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the  nation’s  booming prison population at a time when the notion of  rehabilitation  has effectively been abandoned.

What I had heard about Cain, and seen in the plentiful footage of  him, led me to expect an affable guy—big gut, pale, jowly face,  good-old-boy demeanor. Indeed, former Angola inmates say that prisoners  who respond to Cain’s program of “moral rehabilitation” through  Christian redemption are rewarded with privileges, humane treatment, and  personal attention. Those who displease him, though, can face harsh  punishments. Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning former Angolite  editor who is probably Angola’s most famous ex-con, says when he first  arrived at the prison, Cain tried to enlist him as a snitch, then sought  to convert him. When that didn’t work, Rideau says, his magazine became  the target of censorship; he says Cain can be “a bully—harsh, unfair,  vindictive.”

“Cain was like a king, a sole ruler,” Rideau writes in his recent memoir, In the Place of Justice.  “He enjoyed being a dictator, and regarded himself as a benevolent  one.” When a group of middle school students visited Angola a few years  ago, Cain told them that the inmates were there because they “didn’t  listen to their parents. They didn’t listen to law enforcement. So when  they get here, I become their daddy, and they will either listen to me  or make their time here very hard.”

Another former prisoner, John Thompson—who spent 14 years on death  row at Angola before being exonerated by previously concealed  evidence—told me that Cain runs Angola “with a Bible in one hand and a  sword in the other.” And when the chips are down, Thompson said, “he  drops the Bible.”

Who is the man who wields so much untempered power over so many human  beings? I wanted to find out firsthand—but when I requested permission  to visit the prison and interview Cain, back in 2009, Fontenot turned me  down flat. Cain, she said, was not happy with what I had written about  the Angola Three, a trio of inmates who have been in solitary longer  than any other prisoners in America. Two years and much legal wrangling  later, I was here at Fontenot’s invitation, ready to see the Cain  miracle for myself…

Read the rest on MotherJones.com.

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, corrections industry, cost/budget issues, death row, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, life without parole, Louisiana, media, older prisoners, physical effects, political prisoners, politics of punishment, popular culture, psychological effects, race, retaliation, sentencing, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

Easter As a Story of Criminal Injustice

April 25, 2011 By 3 Comments

We missed this post yesterday, but it’s too good to pass up so we’re sharing it a day late. This is from Scott Henson’s Grits for Breakfast, which provides the blogosphere’s best coverage of the Texas criminal justice system. 

Easter is strikingly filled with criminal justice themes, isn’t it? The Christian religion was essentially founded on a repudiation of Roman capital punishment. Easter celebrates the sinless Man-God killed for His beliefs who triumphed over the grave, mooting, even while respecting to the end, the earth-bound laws that condemned Him. Jesus, a blameless man executed, is the all-time poster child for the innocence movement. Corrupt and biased prosecutors prevailed in His case because of a judge’s personal indifference and deference to the mob. Christ’s betrayal by Judas was the archetype cementing into Christian values a lingering distrust of snitches and informants. Romans accused the disciples of grave robbery. St. Peter committed assault with a deadly weapon in the Garden of Gethsemane then thrice lied about his identity to avoid arrest. And taken as a whole, the passion story documents Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution all taking place in an incredibly short span, as though criminal convictions could be obtained as quickly in real life as on an episode of Law & Order.

Christmas is a story about family. Easter is a story about a wrongful criminal conviction, the misapplication of the death penalty, the overweening power of the state, and the irrepressible urge of humanity to resist it.

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Filed Under: death row, due process, political prisoners Tagged With: , , , ,

Santa Was in Prison and Jesus Got the Death Penalty

December 25, 2010 By 7 Comments

As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday.

As more than 3,000 Americans sit on death row, we revere the birth of a godly man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking.

Less well known is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break.

As we described in one of our earliest posts on Solitary Watch, Nicholas was the 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra (in present-day Turkey). Under the Roman emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians, Nicholas spent some five years in prison–and according to some accounts, in solitary confinement.

Under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Nicholas fared better until the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. There, after having a serious theological argument with another powerful bishop, Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped the man.  

It was illegal for one bishop to strike another. According to an account provided by the St. Nicholas Center: “The bishops stripped Nicholas of his bishop’s garments, chained him, and threw him into jail. That would keep Nicholas away from the meeting. When the Council ended a final decision would be made about his future.”

Nicholas spent the night praying for guidance, and was visited by Jesus and Mary. “When the jailer came in the morning, he found the chains loose on the floor and Nicholas dressed in bishop’s robes, quietly reading the Scriptures.” It was determined that no one could have visited or helped him during the night. Constantine ordered Nicholas freed and reinstated as the Bishop of Myra, and his feat would later be declared one of many miracles performed by the saint.

Saint Nicholas lived on to serve the poor during the devastating famine that hit his part of Turkey in 342 AD. He is reported to have anonymously visited starving families at night and distributed gold coins to help them buy scarce food.

But here in America two thousand years later, Christians go to church to worship an executed savior and shop to commemorate an incarcerated saint, with little thought to their 2 million countrymen who are spending this Christmas behind bars.

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Our Father Who Art in Prison

June 21, 2010 By 7 Comments

Sweatshirt for sale in the Angola Museum gift shop reads "Angola: A Gated Community"

You sometimes have to wonder why the state of Louisiana doesn’t just transform Angola prison into a year-round Christian camp meeting. As I’ve written before, under the tutelage of Warden Burl Cain, Angola has become a place where the only kind of rehabilitation on offer is Christian redemption.

I respect any kind of spiritual life prisoners might turn to for guidance or comfort. But pushing a particular doctrine on the ultimate captive audience is something else altogether. Fifteen years after Cain’s arrival at Angola, there are seven evangelical churches on the prison’s grounds. Its educational programs, inmate organizations, and to some extent even the venerable prison publication The Angolite are all dominated by a Christianity that leans powerfully toward the Southern Baptist Church. At today’s Angola, being a self-proclaimed Christian–or better still, becoming a convict preacher–appears to be the best way to gain the kinds of special privileges that make prison life more bearable. Anyone who isn’t interested is free to rot in a hell on earth–presumably in preparation for their eternal fate, since few men emerge from Angola’s gates alive.

Yet the press tends to eat this stuff up, celebrating Burl Cain as a visionary who has transformed hardened criminals into hard-working, God-fearing souls. He has done this by governing the 5,000-man prison plantation, as one Baptist publication put it, ”with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.”

The latest homage to Cain appeared Saturday in USA Today, in anticipation of Father’s Day. It seems that the warden has instituted programs to help prison dads–that is, some prison dads–spend more time with their kids. Lest anyone think this is being done simply to bring some humanity or even joy into the lives of prisoners and their families, the article reminds us that it also serves a sociological purpose.

More than 1.7 million children across the USA have a parent in U.S. prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of children with a father in prison grew by 77% from 1991 through mid-2007. And those children are two to three more times likely to wind up behind bars themselves, says Christopher Wildeman, a University of Michigan sociologist who has studied the effects of imprisoned parents.

To try to snap that trend, Angola and other prisons across the country sponsor two programs aimed at reconnecting prison dads with their children: Returning Hearts, a day-long carnival-like celebration where inmates spend eight hours with their kids, and Malachi Dads, a year-long training session that uses Bible passages to help improve inmates’ parenting skills.

Inmates must show good behavior to participate in the programs, Warden Burl Cain says. Once they feel reconnected to their family, their attitudes improve, he says. Around 2,500 inmates have participated in Returning Hearts since it began in 2005. Malachi, which started in 2007, currently has 119 men.”The ones who were problematic before are not problematic anymore,” Cain says. “Prison didn’t straighten them out; their kids straightened them out.”

I am all for encouraging more contact between prisoners and their kids. And technically, only one of these programs requires inmates to be Christians; the other simply requires “good behavior.” But former prisoners have told me that at Angola, the shortest route to proving good behavior runs straight through the alter. If you have not embraced Jesus–and specifically, Cain’s Jesus–things can be quite a bit more difficult.

Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore has been at Angola for three decades, and spent most of them in solitary confinement. Like the members of the Angola 3, Whitmore was active with the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and believes his relegation to permanent lockdown has to do with his political beliefs. The unit where Whitmore resides is called CCR–Closed Cell Restricted–which is Angola’s name for long-term solitary confinement.

Prisoners in CCR have no opportunity to spend long days with their children on Angola’s spacious ground. But they are supposed to have access to a limited numbers of ”contact visits” with their families–which simply means they can sit with them in a guarded room, not separated by bars or glass. According to a recent post on the blog maintained by Whitmore’s friends, even these visits do not always take place as planned.

Recently inmates housed at Louisiana Penitentiary’s CCR…units have been denied normal contact visits and privileges. Even after contact visits have been approved and some visitors have travelled across the country at considerable expenses…Inmates at LA State Prison are allowed ten (10) people at any time on their Approved visiting list. This list constitutes those individuals who have completed the prison’s necessary paperwork and who have submitted to a comprehensive police background check. Upon acceptance the applicant is listed on the inmate’s approved visiting list and may then visit up to 2 times a month…

Contact visiting is the normal policy for inmates at Angola. Only those inmates assigned to punitive housing units are restricted to non-contact visits. While CCR is a non-punitive housing unit, CCR inmates are allowed only 2 contact visits a month. All other visits received in a month by CCR inmates are held in CCR’s non-contact visiting booths (small, closet like spaces with inmates and visitor separated by a thick mesh screen). The reason given for this policy is the lack of visiting space for large numbers of contact visits on the RC CCR unit…Consequently, only 5 contacts may be scheduled each visiting day for the roughly 90 inmates housed in CCR.

Given such limited space for contact visits at CCR the units policy requires inmates to submit requests for approval often months in advance to reserve an available date. When a CCR inmate submits a request for contact visitation he is merely reserving a date. On that date any visitor from his visiting list who arrives – up to a total of 5 – may enjoy a visit under normal contact visiting procedures. This requirement is merely to insure that no more then 5 contact visits are scheduled for any visiting day. CCR inmates are NOT required to also seek approval for those visitors, since they are already on the Approved visiting list.

Whitmore claims that in some cases, “Visitors, upon arriving at Louisiana State Prison are being allowed into the prison–but upon arrival at the CCR unit–being denied a contact visit and forced into non contact visiting booths” because, they are told, they lack the proper approvals. So for these fathers and sons, mothers and wives, there will be no heartwarming family reunions, except in adjoining boxes across a wire screen.

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Filed Under: Louisiana, media, political prisoners, race, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Mark of Cain: God and Man at Angola Prison

January 7, 2010 By 13 Comments

The Associated Press today put out a laudatory piece on Warden Burl Cain’s program of Christian education at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The article, which was picked up by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and dozens of other publications, is sure to advance Cain’s reputation as a great prison reformer.

The AP piece depicts Angola as a onetime den of violence and despair that has been transformed by Cain into a safe and orderly community where “everyone has a job” and where “students crowd into classrooms to study toward a college degree.” The prison’s bloody past, Cain tells the AP, was “all because of a lack of hope”–a situation the warden has treated with the dual remedy of education and redemption, in part through a degree program in Christian Ministry.  

There’s another side to this story, of course, and it’s a whole lot grimmer than the AP piece would suggest. More than 90 percent of the 5,200 men Angola will die there, thanks to the states harsh sentencing policies. Much of the work on the 18,000-acre former slave plantation consists of backbreaking labor in the cotton, corn, and soybean fields, presided over by armed guards on horseback. Some inmates do not work at all because they are kept in isolation in their cells, in the prison’s notorious Camp J disciplinary unit or in long-term solitary confinement. (Among Angola’s most widely known prisoners are former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, members of the Angola 3, who have been in solitary for more than 37 years.)

An inmate’s fate at Angola depends upon how he measures up to the warden’s standards, which are rooted firmly in his personal religious dogma. Cain believes that there is only one path toward rehabilitation, and it runs through Christian redemption. (According to Herman Wallace, Cain has at least once offered to release him from solitary if he renounced his political beliefs and accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.)

“The warden says it takes good food, good medicine, good prayin’ and good playin’ to have a good prison,” an assistant warden told Truthout in 2008, “Angola has all these.” To make sure there is ample opportunity for “good prayin’,” Cain has raised funds to construct 18 Christian chapels on the prison’s grounds. (One of several recent corruption charges against Cain involved shaking down a contractor for a donation to the prison chapel fund.) 

Likewise, inmates at Angola can gain access to higher education only by embracing Cain’s brand of Christianity.  According to the prison’s own web site, while Angola offers literacy and GED classes and technical training in things like auto mechanics, horticulture, and welding, the only college degree program it offers is in Christian Ministry from the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. Only a few hundred prisoners are admitted to his program. 

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits challenging some of Angola’s policies as constitutional violations of the prisoners’ freedom of religion; in one statement, the ACLU remarked: “Cain’s job is to be Warden of Angola, not the Chaplain of Angola.” But even some Christians would find Burl Cain’s vision of both human and divine justice unsavory.

A glowing 2008 article in the Baptist Press praised Cain for ”govern[ing] the massive prison on the Mississippi River delta with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” The iron fist includes Cain’s determination to keep certain “dangerous” prisoners in permanent lockdown, a condition that many have denouced as torture. Cain also presides over the state’s executions. The Baptist Press article noted Cain’s special dedication to delivering souls from the death chamber into the hands of Christ. When he supervised his first execution as warden, Cain said, “I didn’t share Jesus” with the condemned man, and as he received the lethal injection, “I felt him go to hell as I held his hand.” As Cain tells it, “I decided that night I would never again put someone to death without telling him about his soul and about Jesus.”

In fact, Cain will get an opportunity to put his mission into practice a few hours from now, when the state of Lousiana carries out its first execution in eight years, in the death chamber at Angola prison.

This post was written in collaboration with Jean Casella. Full disclosure: We have written several articles about the Angola 3 for Mother Jones. Last year I also requested permission to  interview Burl Cain, as well as Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, and to  visit Angola; all requests were denied by the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

Filed Under: death row, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, political prisoners, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Santa Was in Solitary

December 24, 2009 By 1 Comment

Most people know that Santa Claus is derived from St. Nicholas, an early Christian saint beloved for his kindness and generosity. What hardly anyone knows is that Nicholas acquired sainthood not by giving alms, but by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to breaking out of solitary confinment.

George Pappas Sr., writing in Ohio’s Zanesville Times Recorder, tells the full story:

[St. Nicholas ] was a 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor who is mostly associated with the legends of his tireless work to help the poor families during the great famine (342 AD) which plagued this part of Turkey. The Jolly Old Bishop was known for his nightly and anonymous distribution of gold coins to aid starving families who were no longer able to afford to feed their children….

A lesser known legend is more serious and very relevant to the issues facing our American way of life in 2009.

It turns out that St. Nicholas had some serious theological differences with Arius, the Bishop of Alexandria, over the exact nature of the divinity of Jesus Christ. (Arias believed he was not made of the same stuff as God.) They argued over it at the First Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. According to Pappas:

The debate proceeded with “required decorum” until St. Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped Arian to the floor.

It was a sin in Canon Law to strike another bishop. St. Nicholas was excommunicated, stripped of his vestment (ornate individually handcrafted bishop robes) and locked in solitary confinement under guard.

The council could now proceed without this very troublesome and now excommunicated bishop. It appeared certain that Arian would have a majority of the 299 remaining bishops support his Arian philosophy.

The next morning, as the session of the council was beginning, it was interrupted. A guard had come from the prison where St. Nicholas was jailed and reported that he had gone to check on the prisoner and found the door of St. Nicholas’ cell open, his chains removed and he was kneeling in prayer fully clothed in his bishop’s vestments. The immediate response of the council was to find who had committed this act of defiance against the will of the council. Investigation yielded no one who could have done this and the vestments stripped from St. Nicholas were exactly where they had been placed. St. Nicholas wore the exact same ornate vestments. It would have take months to fabricate new vestments.

Pappas finds a moral in this story that might well apply to advocates who work for the often unpopular cause of prison reform.

St. Nicholas believed so much and cared so much that he was willing to risk all to challenge the “politically correct notion” of decorum to defend and expound true and honest beliefs. He was ahead of his time and teaches us a timeless lesson about integrity and passion for the truth.

Filed Under: solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , ,