Counselling and religious attendence in Oradea penitentiary

• Author: Dan Lele
• Position: Priest candidate to PhD, Ministry of Justice, National Administration of Penitentiaries, High Security Penitentiary Oradea
• Pages: 140-149

140

COUNSELLING AND RELIGIOUS ATTENDANCE IN

ORADEA PENITENTIARY

Priest candidate to PhD Dan Lele

Ministry of Justice

National Administration of Penitentiaries

High Security Penitentiary Oradea

Abstract:

In time, the church has demonstrated its active presence in all the segments

of our political, social and cultural life, providing help, support, impulse and moral

guidance and bringing its contribution, with its characteristic means, to the

perpetuation of a stable spiritual and moral climate for the Romanian people.

Counselling is described in the Bible as the action of making those in need

aware of their wrong deeds, drawing attention upon their mistakes, warning and

presenting them with a viable alternative.

The religious attendance is a means whereby the detainees are helped to

find a way out of their sinful life. Besides conversations of a pastoral nature, the

chaplain priest should explain the detainees the implication of sins such as:

murder, raping, theft, burglary, lying, etc. The sins that made most of them become

prisoners, isolated from their families or communities should be counteracted by

the Christian values: Belief, Hope and Love, together with their turning towards

good deeds, whose value should be properly understood.

Key words: counselling, religious attendance, prisoners

The year 1990 marked the beginning of a period of profound changes in the

Romanian society not only in the political field, but also at the social, cultural and

spiritual level, marked by a recovery of the sense of normality, based on the

principles perceived as good and valuable during the two-millennium history of our

people.

In time, the church has demonstrated its active presence in all the segments

of our political, social and cultural life, providing help, support, impulse and moral

guidance and bringing its contribution, with its characteristic means, to the

perpetuation of a stable spiritual and moral climate for the Romanian people.

The exclusion of the religious factor from the social and the political life of

the country after World War Two, the elimination of religion as subject matter

from the educational curricula, the army, health institutions, social assistance

centres, penitentiaries and other institutions of national importance, its isolation

from the political, social and cultural life of the country, could not eliminate it, in

spite of the repressive means used for that purpose, from the soul of the