In the late 1960s, one of my younger brothers and I shared at least one goal. We both wanted to send a ball over the wall at San Quentin State Prison.
If you managed to do that, one of the prisoners there would paint your name on the wall at the place where the ball had passed.
The San Rafael Little League, as this column has noted before, played its games in that era inside San Quentin. Some prisoners there, who were called “trustees” because they were allowed to live on the grounds of the prison but outside the high walls of the main lockup, umpired our games.
They did a great job.
The Catholics among them — as well as those within the main lockup — also belonged to the same parish we did. That was St. Raphael — home to Mission San Rafael Arcangel, one of the Catholic missions founded in California by Spanish Franciscans more than 200 years ago.
A story that ran in the San Francisco Examiner on April 23, 1934, carried this headline: “150 Confirmed at San Quentin Rites.”
“Following a high mass celebration which jammed San Quentin prison’s mess hall with the 3,000 inmates, Archbishop Edward J. Hanna yesterday presided at confirmation of 150 prisoners,” it said.
“It was San Quentin’s annual confirmation ceremony,” said the story. “For it, prisoners in the San Quentin furniture shop had constructed a special throne for the Archbishop. The mass was sung by Father Thomas F. Millett of St. Raphael, assisted by Prison Chaplains, Fathers George A. O’Meara and William J. Meade.
“Four prisoners served as altar boys,” it said.
On Oct. 24, 1960, a story in the Examiner carried this headline: “140 Confirmed — $170,000 Catholic Chapel Dedicated at San Quentin.”
“The new $170,000 Catholic Chapel at San Quentin Prison was dedicated yesterday and put to immediate use in confirmation ceremonies for 140 inmates,” the Examiner reported.
“Auxiliary Bishop Hugh A. Donohoe of the San Francisco archdiocese conducted the dedicatory service and gave the special solemn pontifical benediction for the new facility,” it said.
“The program dedicating the chapel, which is soon to be followed by construction of a new Protestant chapel, was under the supervision of Rev. Daniel McAllister of St. Raphael’s Church in San Rafael and Rev. Edward J. Dingberg, the prison chaplain,” it said.
There is no doubt that the ability of clergymen to provide services at San Quentin and to regularly interact with the prisoners there had a positive impact on those men.
Yet that lesson has apparently not been learned by the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri.
That is why the Archdiocese of St. Louis has filed a lawsuit in federal court against some officials in Ste. Genevieve County as well as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and ICE Acting Director David Venturella.
The Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center is currently being used to detain not only local prisoners but also individuals being held by ICE.
“The Ste. Genevieve detention center houses approximately 150 civil immigration detainees, who are federal detainees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’), in addition to other state and local offenders,” says the lawsuit filed by the archdiocese. “Since mid-2025, about 3,000 different ICE detainees have been housed at the detention center.”
“The jail imposes a visitation policy that treats Catholic clergy — who want to visit detainees to offer them spiritual counseling — differently and worse than it treats other visitors to the jail,” it says.
“The posted FAQs state: ‘Clergy must visit during regular visitation hours/days. Clergy visit will be as any other visit: 30 minutes in duration, no contact visits, first come/first served ... Absolutely no items ... or religious materials, etc. will be passed during visitation.’”
“NO CONTACT VISITS ARE ALLOWED,” it says.
The “NO CONTACT” policy,” says the archdiocese in its lawsuit, “means that clergy and detainees are not physically present in the same room and are separated by a glass partition.
“This visitation policy effectuates a total ban on clergy offering (and detainees receiving) the Catholic sacraments, including communion and confession, and severely limits the basic spiritual counseling that clergy may provide (and which detainees desperately seek),” says the lawsuit.
“Federal ICE detainees at the jail have repeatedly asked to see a priest and to receive the sacraments,” it says. “The Sheriff of Ste. Genevieve County, his Chief Deputy, and his Jail Administrator have refused to permit it, citing their visitation policy.”
“Defendants also include senior officials of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (the ‘ICE Defendants’), who have acquiesced in and enabled these violations by weakening religious-liberty protections at contractor facilities and refusing to enforce even the diminished standards that remain,” it says.
“In November 2025, Bishop Robert Barron, a member of the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission, contacted senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security and raised the Catholic Church’s concerns regarding detainees’ access to the sacraments,” it says. “Those officials assured Bishop Barron that the matter was ‘under careful review.’
“More than ten months later, that review has not resulted in any action to address the ongoing denial of sacraments to ICE detainees.”
If a maximum-security prison, like San Quentin was in the 1960s, could allow its inmates to attend Catholic mass and receive the sacraments in an onsite chapel, surely a county jail holding immigration detainees today can allow those detainees to receive the sacraments in that jail.
Mullin should take action immediately to see that this happens.
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