Pope blasts ‘invisible walls’ in bringing youth festival to jail

Francis celebrated an emotional penitential liturgy inside Panama’s main youth lock-up, the Las Garzas de Pacora detention centre.

In a twist, he was also hearing the inmates’ confessions inside confessionals made by the detainees.

It is all part of Francis’s belief that prisoners deserve the same dignity as everyone else – as well as hope.

“There are no words to describe the freedom I feel in this moment,” one of the inmates, Luis Oscar Martinez, told the Pope at the start of the service.

In his homily, Francis recalled that society tends to label people good and bad, the righteous and the sinners, when it should spend its time creating opportunities for them to change.

“This attitude spoils everything, because it erects an invisible wall that makes people think that, if we marginalise, separate and isolate others, all our problems will magically be solved,” he said, again making reference to the walls that seek to divide people rather than unite them.

“When a society or community allows this, and does nothing more than complain and backbite, it enters into a vicious circle of division, blame and condemnation.”

Francis has made a tradition of visiting prisoners during his foreign visits, and has long made prison ministry part of his vocation to minister to the most marginal in society.

Last year, he…