This True Story written by
Annie Calovich is from the
Catholic Culture site. This is a real life example of Almighty's GOD'S love for the lonely lost sheep. There is no sin that JESUS CHRIST will not forgive. All you need do is ask for forgivness with a contrite heart and JESUS will be Faithful to wash you in HIS most precious blood.
A monk, Brother Vianney-Marie Graham of the contemplative Clear
Creek Monastery in Hulbert, Oklahoma, had long been praying for inmates
on Death Row because he considered them "the abandoned of the
abandoned."
He had a famous precedent for his prayers. St. Therese of Lisieux had
prayed for the conversion of the notorious and unrepentant killer Henri
Pranzini in 1887 and was able to read in the newspaper of his
last-minute grab for a crucifix as he approached the scaffold. He kissed
the wounds of Jesus three times before being guillotined.
In 2001, Brother Vianney-Marie decided to ask his superior for
permission to write a few inmates, "to tell them not to despair, to tell
them that God's mercy is available to them no matter what their
crimes."
In deciding whom to write, Brother Vianney-Marie sought out the worst
cases. He started with James Malicoat, a man who had brutally killed
his 13 month-old daughter through a series of beatings over two weeks.
"When I first saw the crime, I thought, 'He needs a friend more than
the others. Everyone is going to shrink back because the crime was so
horrendous,'" Brother Vianney-Marie said.
He received permission from his superior to write to Malicoat, and
did so for the first time on the feast of the Assumption, 2001. Malicoat
took a month and a half to respond, dating his letter October 1, which
is the feast of St. Therese.
Brother Vianney-Marie wrote faithfully to Malicoat and two other
inmates once a month. "I would talk about their families, the way they
were brought up," he said. "They would talk about themselves."
The monk said it was like shooting arrows in the dark, making contact
with the worst of society's offenders from a cloistered Benedictine
monastery. He had no idea where — or how — the arrows would fall.
Contemplative monks such as those at Clear Creek rarely leave the
monastery. The monks work and pray in obscurity. Brother Vianney-Marie
has a certain identity to outsiders only because he can be seen from the
road tending the monastery's chickens.
Brother Vianney-Marie wrote to the inmates for two years. Then he
decided to ask permission to go to Death Row once a year to visit them.
"I wanted to have at least some contact, so that they could see that the person they're writing to is a real person," he said.
He received the permission.
"He's been a monk for quite a while," said the prior of Clear Creek, Father Philip Anderson. "We wouldn't let a novice do it."
Visits to Death Row
Brother Vianney-Marie's first visit to Death Row, two hours away at
the super-maximum-security penitentiary in McAlester, made him
physically ill. "The atmosphere was so bad," he said. But he became more
accustomed to it as time went on, and he used the infrequent visits to
try to draw the inmates out of themselves.
He would tell prisoners in his letters and in his visits "not to
worry, to be calm. The devil's going to try to tempt you to despair.
Trust God and say you're sorry to God and the victim. It's got to be
asked for earnestly."
He first met Malicoat on Sept. 17, 2003. Despite the fact that the
monk picked the inmates for their awful crimes — and commensurate need
for mercy — rather than their capacity for religion, they treated him
with respect, and he was able to sense in them an instinct for God while
he talked to them on a telephone from behind a thick glass window.
"I was always amazed that they were extremely polite. There was no
foul language, which was absolutely great. I think later on they
realized their unique opportunity to have a religious on their side. In
the long run they said, 'There's a monk, and he's going to be there for
the worst.' Subconsciously they would think in the long run this friend
is going to get me out of a bind. An eternal bind."
Malicoat at first hesitated to talk about his crime. He said he was
afraid of scandalizing the monk. But eventually, after Brother
Vianney-Marie told him stories of the despairing people he used to work
with at a factory before entering religious life, Malicoat unloaded a
tale he'd bottled up for years.
Brother Vianney-Marie says that many prisoners on Death Row don't
have a high school education or a family. They have a hard time even
putting a sentence together coherently. Malicoat, he says, didn't know
why he killed his daughter, named Tessa. He had been beaten as a child.
He didn't know for sure who his father was. He was married but had been
living with another woman, the mother of his child, when Tessa died of
her injuries February 21, 1997. The mother was serving a life sentence
for allowing the torture.
"Until that moment, he had been five years on Death Row and hadn't
spoken to anyone about his crime," Brother Vianney-Marie said. He could
see that the unburdening was a great relief to Malicoat. And then he
thought to ask a question that might get deeper into the killer's mind
and open it up.
"Do you talk to Tessa?"
The look of shock that passed over Malicoat's face — the only time
Brother Vianney-Marie had seen him emotional — told the monk not only
that Malicoat never thought anyone would ask him such a question, but
that he had indeed been talking to his dead little girl. It was similar
to the way Catholics talk to the saints.
"What do you say?" the monk asked him.
"Tessa, do you forgive me?"
An Opening for God's Grace
While Brother Vianney-Marie looked for and seized windows through
which to reach Malicoat, the prisoner warned him not to push religion
too hard. The monk sat patiently on the other side of the glass
separating them and listened to Malicoat talk about his worries for his
family, especially his mother, as they waited out the years until he
would be put to death.
Between his visits, the monk wrote faithfully, urging Malicoat to
pray for the right disposition and teaching him how to pray a perfect
act of contrition. It was a painstaking three years of building
confidence, holding back so as not to turn him off, awaiting openings
for God's grace to slip through. The inmate would respond fitfully,
often depressed.
"You're not there every day so you have to really pray," Brother
Vianney-Marie said. "The friendship was spiritualized. I had to accept a
weight on my shoulders. You have to be very open."
In a letter dated June 26, 2006, Malicoat informed Brother
Vianney-Marie that his execution had been set for August 22 at 6 p.m.
The monk's last full-length visit with him occurred on July 5. Brother
Vianney-Marie referred to him, as he had often done before, as "my
little Pranzini."
"Being a non-Catholic, he tried to understand. There was a nun who
was praying for Pranzini. He understood the correlation there." At this
point, Malicoat told Brother Vianney-Marie that he didn't mind being put
to death. "He said, 'I've done things I'm not proud of. I'll have to
present that to God.'"
That was just the kind of window the monk had been waiting for. "It
opened it up to God's mercy. God always gives you those little moments.
You have to be on your toes."
Brother Vianney-Marie told Malicoat that he was confiding him to the
intercession of four people: Our Lady of a Good Death, St. Therese, St.
Maria Goretti — because she had been murdered as a child and had
forgiven her killer before she died, and her killer had repented — and
an obscure child-martyr of the Catacombs, St. Bonosa.
Brother Vianney-Marie's prayers had never been the only ones directed
to God on Malicoat's behalf. His brother monks joined theirs, and the
community of the lay faithful that has sprung up around Clear Creek
Monastery in northeastern Oklahoma was praying, too. Brother
Vianney-Marie had asked a blind girl in a wheelchair to offer her
prayers for Malicoat.
Enlisting St. Bonosa
St. Bonosa added another chapter to the story. Her remains had been
found late for an early-Church martyr — on March 27, 1848, in the
Catacombs of St. Praetextatus in Rome. Fontgombault Abbey in France,
Clear Creek's motherhouse and a part of the Solesmes congregation of
Benedictine monks entrusted with preserving Gregorian chant after
Vatican II, was entrusted with the relics of St. Bonosa. During an
anti-clerical wave that swept France later in the 19th century, the
monks of Fontgombault were dispersed, and the relics were brought to the
United States for safe-keeping.
It had been only in 2005 that the relics had been rediscovered, at a
monastery in Idaho, and plans were made to have them brought to Clear
Creek on August 30, shortly after Malicoat's execution. Brother
Vianney-Marie enlisted St. Bonosa in his cause.
On July 20, Malicoat's lawyers informed Brother Vianney-Marie that
the inmate's family minister would not be able to attend the execution.
Malicoat had agreed to have a priest and Brother Vianney-Marie assist
him instead.
It took a couple of days for the news to sink in. Then Brother
Vianney-Marie realized that "everything is going to be possible now." He
wrote Malicoat a long letter about Catholicism, losing some of his
hesitancy, "explaining the faith in a gentle way and hoping he would
have the right disposition. Telling him how to pray and ask for divine
mercy and the forgiveness of the others he has offended."
"I told him a little bit about confession: that the priest has the
faculties to absolve. It would be possible to make an act of faith in
the Church. Then confess. The minimum for a Catholic that enables this
vital sacrament to go ahead," he said.
Malicoat did not write back this time. It's Brother Vianney-Marie's experience that prisoners that close to death quit writing.
Father Kirk Larkin is the assistant pastor of a parish in Ponca City,
Oklahoma, who had done prison ministry before his ordination. That had
been a while. Out of the blue, one of Malicoat's lawyers contacted him
about assisting at the execution. It caught the priest off-guard.
"At first I said no," Father Larkin said. His previous work had not
prepared him for anything like this. "Then I thought, 'Maybe God has
called me to do this.'"
He joined Brother Vianney-Marie in taking up the burden of Malicoat's
soul, and several days were added to the agony. The execution was
delayed to August 31. The monks found out that the arrival of St.
Bonosa's remains would be delayed as well, to the same day.
The Final Days
In the days leading up to the execution, Brother Vianney-Marie had
nightmares. On the night before it, he was so exhausted that he finally
slept.
Malicoat did not. On August 31, the priest and the monk drove down to
the penitentiary, arriving a little after 10, and proceeded to H-unit,
the home of Death Row. Malicoat's lawyers met them with the news that
they weren't sure Malicoat would confess to the priest or even see the
two men.
"He was so petrified," Brother Vianney-Marie recalled. "He said, 'The
last time I confessed it got me Death Row.' You just don't know the
tension these guys are under."
But at 10:45 a.m., under their own tension, the monk and the priest
were ushered in to see Malicoat. After days of trying to conjure up what
the killer would look like, Father Larkin was relieved to see a human
being on the other side of the glass. Brother Vianney-Marie had never
seen him look worse. Malicoat was slumped over for terror and want of
sleep. "It's inhuman," the monk said. He was given about an hour with
his last visitors, and Brother Vianney-Marie wasted no time. He made
quick inquiries about Malicoat and his family and then introduced him to
Father Larkin, telling Malicoat that he could make an act of faith and
confess to him. He gave Father Larkin the telephone.
Malicoat told the priest he didn't want to confess.
"James was truly concerned about other people more than himself at
this point," Father Larkin recalled. "He told me, 'Father, I don't want
to burden you with the horrible things that I've done and that have been
done to me over the course of my life.'"
The priest, with nothing rehearsed, trying to pry open the window
that Brother Vianney-Marie had cracked, turned to the Profession of
Faith. He went through the Creed point by point, asking Malicoat whether
he agreed with each article.
Brother Vianney-Marie, his active participation relinquished, could
hear only the priest's side of the conversation. He was in agony. When
Father Larkin turned to apostolic succession and how a priest could
forgive sin, the monk imagined how much time the explanation could eat
up and couldn't take it any longer. He got up and went to the back of
the room, where he paced and prayed the rosary out of earshot.
"It was a terrible weight," Brother Vianney-Marie said. But at the
same time, "I never felt so much support of prayer of others as on that
day. It wasn't me who was there. It was everyone who was there."
Back at Clear Creek Monastery, the relics of St. Bonosa had arrived.
The monks were processing with them toward the chapel, chanting the
Litany of the Saints — and praying to the child martyr for the man who
had made his own daughter the same.
As the monks were entering the chapel with the bejeweled casket of
bones, Brother Vianney-Marie looked up from his prayers in H-unit to see
Father Larkin raising his hand in blessing over James Malicoat. The
monk had no way of knowing whether this was absolution. But he could be
pretty sure.
"I just knew it was his confession," Brother Vianney-Marie said. "I was ready to jump through the ceiling."
A few minutes later and Father Larkin was beckoning Brother
Vianney-Marie back to Malicoat. Their half an hour apart had closed a
chasm. And opened the window.
"All of a sudden, he had this weight off his conscience," Brother
Vianney-Marie said. "I told him, 'I don't think you're my friend, you're
my brother.' He has all the same graces. I said, 'Are you ready to go?'
and he said, 'Yeah.' There was a peaceful tranquillity. He realized
what he had done and was man enough to accept the consequences."
Brother Vianney-Marie at that point became the last friend in the world who would speak to Malicoat.
"I wanted to make sure that the last contact from the outside, which I also meant for his mother, was 'I love you.'"
The priest and the monk went on to witness the execution that evening.
"It was vulgar," Brother Vianney-Marie said. "He was pretty brave." Malicoat's last words were to ask forgiveness.
"When I was watching it I was saying, 'Jesus, Mary, Joseph save him. Take him to heaven.'"
Father Larkin said the horror of the death could be seen in the
reaction of the monk and Malicoat's lawyers. "They were physically hurt
when he was executed."
None of Malicoat's family was there to witness it.
"It was true: He had been abandoned in prison," Brother Vianney-Marie
said. "At the last moment, God's grace was offered and accepted. Which
is a rarity. It doesn't always happen."
Hidden Monks and the Power of Prayer
The changes monks effect by their prayer and sacrifice are of the
profound, culture-changing sort G.K. Chesterton referred to when he
said: "Whenever monks come back, marriages will come back."
In exceptional cases, a monk can have a direct influence, but "the
power comes from the power of prayer behind him," Clear Creek's prior,
Father Anderson, said.
"You have a contemplative order whose purpose is just prayer and not
ministry, but there's an overflow into the world. Most of it is
invisible, in souls. Once in a while, God lifts the corner of the veil,
and you see how it works."
Brother Vianney-Marie, he said, "was God's secret agent on Death Row."
After the execution, the monk returned to the monastery that night to
find out about the timing of Malicoat's conversion with the entry of
St. Bonosa's relics into the chapel.
"You can't imagine something more beautiful," he said.
It wasn't the only convergence of events. Brother Vianney-Marie found
out only later that Malicoat's death had occurred on the same date,
August 31, that St. Therese's Pranzini had been put to death.
"You can't tell me these saints weren't praying for James," the monk said.
To Father Larkin, the monk is "a real hero" who allowed himself "to
be put into that situation with no concern for himself or the
aftereffects, to be there for a convicted child killer.
"He was concerned for this man's soul when most people want to take this guy off the face of the earth."
While Brother Vianney-Marie said he could understand such a reaction,
Father Anderson said of Malicoat, "his soul is immortal. Christ died
even for him. Regardless of the horrendous act he'd done to his
daughter, he's the lost sheep. Our Lord wouldn't care what he'd done —
He'd go after the lost sheep."
A few days after the execution, Brother Vianney-Marie received a
letter from Malicoat dated August 29, two days before his execution. In
it the doomed man had written: "You will see, prayer is never in vain."
