Conversion is a Foretaste of Our Own Resurrection

Among our active members, we count an untold number of currently incarcerated prisoners, varying from the “short-timers” to the “lifers.” But one thing that they have in common is that they have turned their lives and surrendered to Our Lord, and pray Our Lady’s Rosary for themselves, for their fellow prisoners, and for us. This profound conversion is not only possible, but precisely part of the reason why Our Lord came to Earth. Let us recall that He proclaimed that the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled, in part when He is sent “to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:19a). Physical incarceration in Scripture, like physical illness, is a visible symbol of the greater spiritual reality underneath: to loose us from slavery to sin, to heal us from our spiritual illness – and both of these point to our resurrection that last day, and everlasting life in God in the world to come.
And so I wish to share the story of one Dominican friar, himself a somewhat hesitant convert to preaching the Good News to captives, courtesy of our English Dominican Province and the Godzdogz blog. Please, in your charity, pray for those who pray for you as well. Pray for those incarcerated in need of conversion, and for all their families and loved ones outside the prison walls and their healing. May God shatter every chain of sin in our own lives!

Jean-Joseph Lataste was born in Cadillac, near Bordeaux, in France in 1832. After his study, he became a civil servant. While working in various cities around Bordeaux, he was an active member of the Society of Saint Vincent of Paul. However, since he was a child, Jean-Joseph was thinking about a possible vocation to the priesthood. During his study in Bordeaux, he got to know [Fr. Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, OP] and turned to him when he started to deepen his vocation to religious life. Eventually, Jean-Joseph Lataste joined the Dominican Order in 1857, some 18 years after Lacordaire, who had re-established it in post-revolutionary France.
As a young friar, Jean-Joseph was trained for the priesthood in the Saint-Maximin priory, in South East France. On the occasion of the transfer of relics of Saint Mary Magdalene to the priory, it was revealed to him that the greatest sinners have within them everything needed to become the greatest saints.
In September 1864, he was sent to preach a spiritual retreat at the women’s prison in Cadillac, near Bordeaux. He went there with skepticism and all the preconceived notions one might have pertaining to the incarcerated. But during the retreat there was a transformation in him. He was the first to be converted by what he preached. While praying with the prisoners in front of the Blessed Sacrament, he came up with a radical idea for that time, to found a new religious congregation for women coming out of prison. The answer he proposed was called the House of Bethany. He wrote:
The Gospel tells us that at Bethany there lived two sisters: Martha of inviolable virtue and Mary Magdalene who had been a sinner. Jesus loved to come and rest in their home, where one served him and the other listened to his words. He made no distinction between them – or did he…? It is rather Magdalene who is preferred. Martha is surprised and Jesus answers kindly but still gives preference to Magdalene: ‘You worry and fret about so many things; yet few are needed, indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the “better part” and it is not to be taken from her.’ (Luke 10:41). What was the better part? It was that Magdalene loved more. She who had been a sinner had advanced further in the way of divine love than Martha, the model of virtue. When God loves us and gives us his grace, he does not ask us what we have been; he is only concerned with what we are – not with how far we have fallen, but with how much we love. He judges us only on the strength of our love. Happy are those whose past urges them on to a greater love, and happy those others who, in a sort of rivalry, redouble their own efforts in order not to be left behind (Lataste, Les Réhabilités).
He preached another retreat in Cadillac in September 1865 and found the same prisoners who had remained faithful to his spiritual directions. He was able to say: “here I saw marvellous things!”
The House of Bethany was founded on 14 August 1866 in Frasnes, near Besançon, in eastern France. Its originality is that the community is constituted by former prisoners and other women with an irreproachable past, living the religious life together, to the extent that it is not possible to distinguish between them. On Christmas day 1868, Jean-Joseph Lataste celebrated Mass in the House for the last time, and was blessed in giving the Dominican Habit to the first former prisoner, little sister Noël. But Jean-Joseph fell sick and died on 10 March 1869.
In his booklet, Les Réhabilités, he wrote:
Now you understand our aim and the means by which it can be achieved. You have seen the problem and you have seen how it can be solved. These [prisoners] are worthy of your compassion. It is for you to give them some recompense for those long years of prison. Dishonored in the past but long ago rehabilitated before God, they must now be rehabilitated before humanity. They must be saved, not only from the past dishonor, but from that inevitable return to crime; they must be saved, not only for this life, but for eternity; they must be saved out of love for him who said: ‘The Son of man has come to seek and to save what was lost.’
On 27 June 2011, Pope Benedict XVI approved the beatification of Jean-Joseph Lataste, which was celebrated on 3 June 2012 in Besançon.

The Rosary  is one of the most powerful devotions entrusted to us by Our Lady, and in these turbulent times, it remains a sure path to peace, conversion, and deeper love of Christ.
Pope Leo XIV

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