This year the FSP international student community of Via Borgo Angelico, Rome, celebrated the birth of Jesus with the 420 female prisoners of Rebibbia Prison.
It was a very different reality from the university environment in which our sisters are usually immersed, yet it served as a door to open their hearts to the many people spending Christmas behind bars. Fr. Gianluigi Poirè, the Franciscan priest who serves as chaplain of the female wing of the prison, welcomed our sisters and told them that the women had made a leather purse for the Pope as a Christmas gift and that he had personally delivered it to the Holy Father.
Soft light illuminated the small chapel in which the Daughters of St. Paul, the Missionaries of Charity, some lay volunteers, a State representative and a good number of prisoners celebrated the Christmas Liturgy together. Our sisters were surprised to discover that they were allowed to be in close contact with the prisoners, many of them young women from different parts of the world. Some of them were also mothers. Our sisters spent this very different Christmas in a climate of fraternity, perhaps one closer to the original situation in Bethlehem, because on the floor of the chapel, the baby of one of the women lay sleeping on a bed of straw.
At the end of the Eucharistic Celebration, the FSPs offered each of the women the gift of the Gospel according to Matthew because that particular Gospel recounts the genealogy of Jesus, which includes a number of women from all walks and conditions of life.