FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:
This essay was published in New Polity Issue 5.1 (Winter 2024). Subscribe for all our best essays.
I do believe, and hold quite strongly, that if one man murders another, steals something (however valuable), neglects payment to a creditor or landlord, drives without a license, sells cocaine (powder or crack), or in any manner gets it so punishment is coming to him; he should be able to flee to a Catholic church, confess, do penance, and be saved from capital and corporal punishment—that he should be interceded for by the deacon, priest, bishop, or relevant ecclesiastical person, who should (a) stave off the cops and (b) work to secure pardon and mercy for the criminal. I affirm what Augustine said of priests, that “it is part of our priestly responsibility to intercede on behalf of the guilty and to be offended if we do not get what we asked for, as if we do not get what pertains to our office.” [1] I would keep—if anyone would let me—the letter and spirit of the Sardican Council (c. 343): “Since it happens often that those who suffer injury ... or those, in fact, incurring any sentence, flee to the mercy of the church, these are to be aided and indulgence is to be petitioned without delay.” [2]
The details—how long should the criminal’s sanctuary last? shall there be any exceptions?—I would leave to local custom.
Sanctuary appears idiosyncratic only if it is judged by the common sense of the last three hundred years—in which time, let us in all humility remind ourselves, Christian people held such august opinions as “prisons reduce crime,” “breastfeeding is bad,” “eugenics will save the white race,” and “hey, Jim, we should tear down that theater and build another parking lot.” If we consult a more extensive average of Christian thought, we’ll find that the total weight of opinion tips the scales in my direction: from AD 1 to sometime around 1600, the laws and customs of Christendom agreed with the law of Emperor Charlemagne, that if “anyone spontaneously flees to a priest and by giving confession wishes to perform penance, he shall be excused from death.” [3]
But that was then, and this is now, as the philosopher once said, and there is no question that the restoration of the custom of sanctuary would require a changed world—not merely a changed law. But that the world must be changed is at this point a humdrum point. Even public school teachers tell their students to “change the world”—though presumably not so much as to close the public schools. I simply accept their mandate. Anyone who argues for a particular law or custom or social arrangement is, in the same breath, arguing for the kind of world that could accept such a law or custom or social arrangement. That a law is received is part of what makes it a law; that a custom is accepted belongs to the definition of custom; if a social arrangement were not social it would amount to nothing more than a command to “dance!” from an overbearing wedding DJ—and could be ignored as such. [4] Throughout the Middle Ages, sanctuaries were effective only insofar as they were surrounded by neighborhoods ready (and rough enough) to keep them [5]—and that we are neither rough nor ready enough to keep criminals in and avengers out of our churches, I’ll grant. To argue for sanctuary is to argue for a world in which the boys want sanctuary, in which they feel in their bones the truth expressed in that 8th-century legislation of the Bavarian Duke Odilo:
No guilt is so grave that life will not be conceded on account of fear of God and reverence for his saints, since the Lord said, “Who forgives, it shall be forgiven him; who forgives not, neither will it be forgiven him.” [6]
We could wax bleak here, and imagine the goodness and reasonableness of sanctuary as something entirely out of reach for the irreligious dimwits God has granted us for neighbors. Without the premise that a church is sacred—or that anything is sacred—how could we, the money-grubbing schmucks of modernity, come to the conclusion that those who flee to a church should be granted asylum? But there is a remnant of Christendom in the world, a place where the logic of Christianity is allowed to play out, and even flourish, for a time. Within the family, doctrines otherwise held to be vain superstitions are cherished as true and obviously so. That some have authority over others, that strength is for the sake of helping the weak, that the common good is higher than the individual good—all of this is stringently denied in public and yet accepted in the “privacy” of family life. Why this is so is not our subject, but that it is so is undeniable. Like most Christian institutions—i.e. marriage for love, common land, debt forgiveness, trial by ordeal, etc.—“sanctuary” only appears nonsensical on the condition that you forget ever having been a child, that brief, golden time when “sanctuary” was as common as the crimes that necessitated it.
Christianity is a political movement, inaugurated by the Incarnation of Christ, to extend the love experienced in the family upwards and into every level of human society, until every relationship of power can be warmly described as one that subsists between brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, and so on. Because it would break open the family and spill its logic over every nation, people, and tongue, it should hardly surprise us that its saints describe sanctuary in familial terms, as a particular achievement of a broad, ambitious “familiarization” of all the earth.
Consider Eutropius—eunuch, consul of the Roman Republic (c. 399), and political plotter par excellence—who fled for his life to the sanctuary of bishop St. John Chrysostom’s church. Eutropius had previously sought to curtail the privilege of sanctuary. The fact that he now “ran for refuge to the holy furniture” tickled golden-tongued Chrysostom to no end. [7] Noting that the spectacle of a ruler-turned-fugitive had pulled in “as large a gathering here today as at the Holy Paschal Feast,” he made a sermon of the poor sucker “now dragged down from so high a pinnacle of power, cowering with fright, more terrified than a hare or a frog, nailed fast to yonder pillar, without bonds, his fear serving instead of a chain.” [8] And how naturally Chrysostom speaks of the event as a family affair:
This displays the bright aspect of the Church: in that having received her enemy as a captive, she spares him, and when all have despised him in his desolation, she alone like an affectionate mother has concealed him under her cloak, opposing both the wrath of the king, and the rage of the people, and their overwhelming hatred. [9]
The image of the mother concealing her child is no idle metaphor, but a sign of Christianity realized, incarnate, and with all its teeth. The familial sanctuary which everyone knew as a child had been successfully extended into the world. A grown man could obey Christ’s command to “become like a little child” and so attain the security of the “kingdom of Heaven.” He could run to his mother.
As an often-sinful child, I frequently relied on “sanctuary.” Braving “being found out” and its consequences did offer the slim chance of “getting away with it”—but the chance really was slim. It was far better to find the courage to acknowledge my fault—I, I, wretch, debauchee, stole the bottle of wine—; to apologize in advance of being caught, to run to Mom in advance of Dad, or to Dad in advance of Mom, or to both in advance of a sibling and there to spill, there to apologize. When the offended teacher, irate neighbor, or wounded sister found me, they did not find me as a rebel, but as one already reconciled to the business of being good.
This worked in my favor. Every authority likes to punish the actively rebellious. “Gentle parents” may do well to suppress the urge, but they could hardly deny that the urge is there to be suppressed. We have all experienced a positive desire to, through stern word or smack, put an end to some unhinged screeching or any other offense to human decency and custom. But punishing the already reconciled is no fun at all. The crime has been confessed, the rebel seeks reconciliation, and punishment seems rather late to the game; a formal act, without spirit; a balancing of the accounts rather than an active smackdown of wickedness into the impotence proper to it. Parents punishing children who have already flown to the mercy of the family tend to justify it rather wearily, as a pedagogical opportunity (“she should know that there is still a consequence for her actions”) or a juridical necessity (“rules are rules”). They may even forgive the child entirely—at the very least, they tend to punish carefully and without harshness.
Christianity extended this—the deflated wrath of the parent who finds the child already penitent—out of the family and into the workaday world. Chrysostom describes a scene played out in living rooms the world over:
As soon as the Emperor knew that [Eutropius] had hurried to this asylum, although the army was present, and incensed on account of his misdeeds, and demanded him to be given up for execution, the Emperor ... shed streams of tears from his gentle eyes, and having reminded them of the Holy Table to which the man had fled for refuge he succeeded at last in appeasing their wrath. [10]
Augustine, defending the Church’s practice of interceding for thieves, said: “The purpose [of sanctuary] is not that the property of another might not be restored but that one human being not uselessly rage against another.” [11] By the early Middle Ages this concept of “useless rage” had been formalized to indicate all those punishments afflicting “life and limb,” as evident in Charlemagne’s extension of the benefit of sanctuary to his recently-conquered Saxons: “And on account of the honor of God and the Saints and reverence for the Church [you shall] concede to [the criminal] his life and all his members.” [12] Sanctuary laws allowed for the resolution of blood feuds—the Lex Frisionum commands that “a feuding man shall have peace in the church, in his home, going to church, returning from church, going to court, and returning home from court” [13]—just as the child’s flight to a sympathetic parent allows him to face a reasonable, measured time and place for restitution rather than hazarding the uncertainty of “being found out.” [14]
Sanctuary is not and never was a grant of impunity. To confess always expresses a willingness to “take your licks,” though with good hope of a reduced sentence; as in the family, so in Christendom. Customs vary, but generally speaking, according to English common law, if a criminal fled to a church, the temporal authorities could take his property, fine him, demand restitution, or force him to “abjure the realm”—in which last case, barefoot, wearing white sackcloth and carrying a wooden cross, he would make his way to his assigned port and from there quit England. They couldn’t drag him from the church, afflict his body, or kill him, without breaking the law themselves and being seen as sacrilegious bastards to boot.
Just as it extended the familial pattern of de-escalation, Christianity extended the pattern of intercession that comes concomitant with all appeals for mercy. A child cannot confess his crime to members of his family without drawing them into his corner. The criminal “Boy” becomes “Boy-who-has-confessed-to-Mom.” When Dad confronts Boy, he confronts him with and through Mom, who presents the Boy to him, i.e. “Boy just told me that he was the one who drank the bottle of wine we were saving for, etc.” And because Dad likes Mom, and because Mom is raising her eyebrows in that way, the possibility of ferocious punishment becomes—untoward.
Our courts and legal proceedings strive, or at least pretend to strive, for a systematic, rational form that does away with intercession—with all the personal, maternal power invested in the words, “Don’t worry, officer, he’s with me.” [15] The Church did otherwise. She extended this intercessory phenomenon, making it, as we have seen, the duty of clerics to remind those seeking justice that the sinner in question was “with” them. To rip them from the altar was an injustice not merely against the penitent but against the Church to whom he ran. Once a criminal was inside the church, his pursuers would have to deal with those who had just heard his confession and given him absolution. The Lex Visogothorum (642) contains what Karl Shoemaker calls a “typical provision showing the role churchmen were expected to play in sanctuary cases.”
“Let no one presume to touch those who have fled to the church or the doors of the church,” began the royal law, “but let the pursuer seek out the presbyter or deacon in order to receive recompense.” It then fell to the “representative of the church [to] intervene before the pursuer,” urging him “to grant forbearance and ... indulgence” to the wrongdoer. Over the following centuries, church canons echoed these pronouncements. Canon 39 of the Council of Mainz (813) ... exhorted churchmen “to strive to obtain the life, members and peace” of wrongdoers who fled to a church. [16]
What a scandal, if an angered father were to rip his child from his mother in order to administer what he determined to be a just punishment! We would rightly conclude that there was something bitter in the relationship between the husband and wife, and would be sympathetic if the latter was “offended,” as Augustine put it, that she did not get the mercy she wanted. And this we (I) do conclude about the “death” of sanctuary: that, by the 16th century, the marriage of lay and spiritual power, which once peacefully passed criminals between them, had come to resemble a divorce. Defenses of sanctuary were reduced to complaints about the “rights” and “liberties” of the Church. Attacks on sanctuary saw Mother Church as an impious exception to the otherwise total and seamless sovereignty of royal power over crime. [17]
Obviously, the Protestants are to blame. The dissolution of the monasteries destroyed most English sanctuaries. What was left—the so-called private sanctuaries—were wiped out by Henry VIII, who replaced them with a new system, based on the Old Law, in which eight cities of the realm served as “cities of refuge.” The king re-imagined the spiritual power of the Catholic Church as now pouring forth from the temporal power’s hand—thus it was the father who ripped the child from his mother. [18] But this is crude history, and only a part of the whole story. Karl Shoemaker locates the intellectual death of sanctuary in a resurgence of Roman Law within (Catholic) canon law, in which “[i]n stereotypical fashion, a rhetorical indulgence of ancient Roman law had been revived by medieval jurists, cast as a juridical principle, and made to flourish throughout the textual tradition.” [19] Looking, not to Jesus, nor even to Augustine and Chrysostom, the canonists of the 13th century popularized the Roman maxim, “It is in the public interest that no crimes remain unpunished,” which became a guiding star in matters of crime and punishment.
This truism gave a new purpose to punishment. Canonists began to argue that punishment was in the public interest, not because it brought the criminal toward penance and reconciliation, but because it deterred further crime: as Shoemaker writes, “In fact, some fifteenth-century jurists radicalized the position by stating: ‘No one prudent punishes because there has been sin. They punish so that there will not be sin.’ ” [20]
This attitude was utterly at odds with the attitude that nourished the custom of sanctuary. Taken absolutely, it meant that any reduction in punishment was de facto a harm to the public and an incitement to further crime. And thus, not just England, but confessionally Catholic countries and even the papal states curtailed sanctuary, viewing it as a custom devoid of all common sense.
Obviously, there is a whole history to explore here, but for our purposes, it suffices to point out that the innovation of the canonists and the actions of the early modern monarchs represent a decisive break in Christianity’s hard-won continuity between the family and the wider world in which it is embedded. Within the family it is manifestly untrue that “it is in the public interest that no crimes remain unpunished.” This should be obvious to any father who has uttered anything like the words, “If the money is back on my desk by 2:00, I won’t look into it.” Similarly, this should be a no-brainer to the mother who has come to despise that aspiring Gestapo agent—the tattletale who unnecessarily reveals petty crimes. As a child, I had some half-baked notion that my parents wanted to punish my high crimes and misdemeanors. As a parent, I now know that they did not. In fact, one of the most annoying characteristics of a criminal child is the way they oblige their parents to punish them. What a parent wants is peace, and punishment only insofar as it is a means of securing it. The weariness that comes from being obliged to devise some suffering—what shall I take away? What limb afflict?—is not caused by any lack of feeling for the dignity of the parental office, in which one is at once chief prosecutor, judge, jailer, and torturer. It stems from the punishment’s inability to procure peace.
Peace is a matter of the heart—that state of communion that subsists between people who, each in their own way, will the good of each other. Punishment can defend this peace, but it cannot produce it. No quality of reproach, no quantity of spanking, no grounding or griping—however stern—can make a child will the good of all: “For no one is good out of a fear of punishment but out of a love of righteousness.” [21]
Because of this, the child’s flight to sanctuary is far from some sneaky loophole, some get-out-of-jail-free card. If it were, it wouldn’t work—fakery blows back into flame whatever will to punish sanctuary sought to snuff (and this is as true in the living room as in the medieval texts). Rather, an appeal to sanctuary is as blessed a relief for the punisher as for the criminal. What parent doesn’t feel pride and joy when a child spontaneously confesses a fault? (Watch them suppress their smile, reminding themselves to be stern amidst an interior rejoicing that their kid has a conscience.) The child running to sanctuary achieves what punishment can only wish for—his heart is reconciled to the common peace of the family. He wills to belong to it once more. He turns home.
For this reason, Augustine could praise the punishments that the Church meted out to sanctuary-seeking criminals, not as lesser versions of “real,” “secular” punishments, but as better and more effective punishments:
For we remove from the fellowship of the altar certain persons whose grave sins are public ... in order that by doing penance and by punishing themselves they may appease him whom they held in contempt by sinning. For someone who truly repents does nothing else but makes sure that the evil he did does not go unpunished. [22]
The Church, across all her eras of self-perception, is the society of the world, the sacrament that effects and symbolizes the unity of all men, the gathering place to which the diverse and disparate world goes to be One Thing, all about one business of a singular faith. (Biblical proof of this is so common that it is easier for you to check into a hotel and consult the Gideon Bible than it is for me to list it.) Suffice to say that, when a celebrity longs for “world peace,” she longs for the Church who is not merely a unity between the nations, but the unity of the nations, not merely a group within the world but the “soul of the world,” not merely one among many but the many as one; “One body and one Spirit ... one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:1–6).
This means that whenever some ne’er-do-well escapes to a Catholic church, confesses, and is reconciled, he has reached the goal that all punishment and law strives for—the “return” of the criminal from the individualism of crime into the peace of society.
Imagine if every city had a center of its communal life: a warm, glowing tavern, entrance into which absolutely confirmed that a man was “one of us,” “one of the boys,” “about the same business,” “going the same way,” and on and on. For over a thousand years, the Church simply was and was recognized as this peace. Sanctuary was not a matter of “touching base” but of touching the very fire of the common good, the thing that the whole society was all about. It alleviated punishment because it better achieved the purpose of punishment—not the sullen conformity of a bruised body, but the absolute conformity of the heart, freely reconciled with the common thing, which was called, until recently, the Church.
Throughout the Middle Ages, to cherish and respect sanctuary was seen as the sign of a pious and powerful ruler. This was not some arbitrary custom, but—again, again—an extension of the love and logic of the family into the world at large. The good father desires peace, not punishment for its own sake, and in this he images God in whom “mercy triumphs over judgment” (Jas 2:13). [23] He yields to pleas for mercy and the intercession they inspire not because he is weak but because he is not so boorish as to demand the use of a means when he has, displayed before him, in the whimpering, confessing child, the end of all his paternal power.
Now if sanctuary seems unreasonable to moderns, it cannot be because we think we have found a better way. We are all of us tacitly responsible for maintaining a system of “justice” that amounts to an expensive experiment in incubating and proliferating crime. We Americans boast the largest and most extensive prison population mankind has ever seen, one which does not even pretend to achieve what sanctuary laws at the very least preached: that forgiveness and reform are possible. Prison hardens hearts, introduces petty criminals into greater and more entrenched networks of crime, and only succeeds at producing rampant recidivism—70% of all prisoners are arrested again within five years of their release. [24]
No, sanctuary is not inconceivable because tit-for-tat sentencing and the ever-expanding prison system have proven to be wonderful alternatives. There are no sanctuaries because there is no social recognition of the reality and power of the Catholic Church. Now, on the one hand, this is simply obvious. The Church has no authority within liberal states—therefore, it may not provide sanctuary to criminals. On the other hand, to say “there is no Church,” or that “its power is suppressed,” is to say that, within liberal societies, we do not believe that we all belong together in a common project. Liberalism, even in its own self-perception, is the sustained denial of any common good. It conceives of “society” as an extrinsic amalgamation of individuals free to pursue their own self-construed ends. There is no team, no project, no business that we are all about, no core of belonging, no common good, no Church—only the various churches, construed as an array of options awaiting the private choice of individuals who may or may not enter into these limited “communions.”
While the medieval criminal could “return with his whole heart,” confessing, doing penance, and signifying his commitment to the common thing, the liberal criminal has no common thing to return to. Those who break with the laws of liberal societies cannot signify their reconciliation with society, for the simple reason that “society,” within liberalism, doesn’t exist. The “peace” outside of the prison is the same as the peace within—that is, no peace at all, but only a competition of individual desires, held in check by a sovereign state. For a criminal to recommit himself to the “common thing” of his liberal society amounts to him saying, “I will pursue my own self-interest and make a compact to enter into social relations when it seems to best serve my own self-interest”—which is, of course, the same thing he could have said as a person deciding to commit a crime.
Within liberalism, punishment has no intrinsic relationship to reform—for liberal societies are proudly predicated upon the belief that there is no form of life to be re-formed to. Rather, modern punishment fulfills the “new direction” of the 13th century canonists—its only logic is that of deterrence. The reason there is no sanctuary for criminals is the same reason that they can be punished with two or three life-sentences: punishment has no transcendent reason for being outside of itself.
Marc Barnes is the editor of New Polity Magazine. He lives in Steubenville, Ohio, where he and his wife own a small grocery store. This piece was featured in Issue 5.1 of New Polity Magazine. For all of New Polity’s best work, subscribe to it today.
Notes
[1] Augustine, “Letter 153: Letter of Augustine to Macedonius,” in Letters 100–155: The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, part II, vol. 2, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003), 1.1 (p. 391).
[2] Quoted in Karl Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400–1500 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 22. This essay is in debt to Shoemaker’s insightful work, and references liberally and fondly the sources he provides.
[3] Quoted in Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime, 84.
[4] See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 97, A. 3, especially his reply to the third objection: “For if they are free, and able to make their own laws, the consent of the whole people expressed by a custom counts far more in favor of a particular observance, than does the authority of the sovereign, who has not the power to frame laws, except as representing the people.”
[5] “The potency of such loci at particular junctures remained primarily a function of the strength of feeling in the neighbourhood group. The outcome was a medieval institution of sanctuary, which, while it owed its forms to the jurists of Church and State, remained dependent for its operation on the local community” (Gervase Rosser, “Sanctuary and Social Negotiation in Medieval England,” in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding [Oxford Academic: Oxford, 1996], 61; cited in Edward John Everett, “Sanctuary in Sixteenth-Century England,” [PhD diss., University of Cambridge: King’s College, 2021], 15). A good example of this can be discerned in Alcuin’s letters to Charlemagne, in which he describes an escaped convict who was defended in his claim of sanctuary by “the beggars gathered from every part of the city, ready to defend their protector” St. Martin, whose church the convict fled to, for “it is a natural thing anywhere to resent disrespect to one’s saints” (Stephen Allott, “The Case of the Escaped Convict” [Letters 114 and 116], in Alcuin of York, c. AD 732 to 804: His Life and Letters [William Sessions Limited: York, England, 1974], 120, 125).
[6] Quoted in Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime, 84.
[7] John Chrysostom, “On Eutropius, the Eunuch, Patrician and Consul,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), 2 (p. 250).
[8] Ibid., 3, 4 (p. 251).
[9] Ibid., 2–3 (pp. 250–1).
[10] Chrysostom, “On Eutropius,” 4 (p. 251).
[11] Augustine, “Letter 153,” 5.20 (p. 401).
[12] Quoted in Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime, 74.
[13] Ibid., 80.
[14] This was a Jewish justification of “sanctuary” in their own law. The “cities of refuge” were available to the unintentional or intentional murderer as a way of gaining a trial rather than facing the “avenger of blood.” “Rabbi Yosei, son of Rabbi Yehuda, says: Initially, either one who killed another unintentionally or one who killed another intentionally would hurry and flee to the cities of refuge, and the court in his city would send for him and would bring him from there to stand trial” (Talmud, Makkot 10b:13).
[15] The rationalizing spirit that produced the modern prison system is apparent in many bitter effects, but the one most pertinent to this essay is our country’s decision to “set” punishments for each and every crime through the United States Sentencing Commission, essentially reducing the judge to a computer in a dress—he obediently assigns “base numbers” to crimes that correspond to a detailed table of predetermined punishments. This is the polar opposite of the medieval and, really, the historical attitude toward crime and punishment, which, while often corrupt and cruel, was fundamentally open to judgment: not simply of the crime but also of the person and circumstance.
[16] Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime, 65. This extends a Talmudic tradition that describes rabbis being sent out of the city of refuge to speak to the blood redeemer on behalf of the murderer:
[T]he statement of the Torah scholars to the blood redeemer can be explained as it is taught in a baraita: And they will speak to him about matters appropriate to him. They say to the blood redeemer: Do not accord him treatment appropriate for murderers, as it was unintentionally that he came to be involved in the incident. Rabbi Meir says: The unintentional murderer too speaks [medabber] on his own behalf to dissuade the blood redeemer, as it is stated: ‘And this is the matter [devar] of the murderer, who shall flee there and live’ (Deuteronomy 19:4), indicating that the murderer himself apologizes and speaks to the blood redeemer. The Sages said to Rabbi Meir: Many matters are performed more effectively through agency (Talmud, Makkot 10b:11, emphasis mine).
[17] Obviously, this critique continued into the modern era, what with its aspiration to a total, rationalized system of punishment: “[T]o multiply such places of asylum is to create so many small sovereignties ... where laws have no say” (F. W. Maitland and Francis Montague, A Sketch of English Legal History, [London: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1915], 71). Cited in Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime, 2.
[18] For this view, see Edward John Everett, “Sanctuary in Sixteenth-Century England,” 16–17: “[T]he Crown became the fount of mercy, dispensing it directly (whether through royal pardon or secular sanctuary), rather than through the intermediary of the Church by way of royal charters and grants. The principles of sanctuary had not been destroyed, but transferred (in a somewhat diluted form) as an exclusive component of the royal prerogative.”
[19] Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime, 163.
[20] Ibid., 164.
[21] Augustine,” Letter 153,” 5.16 (p. 398).
[22] Ibid., 3.6.
[23] This, appropriately, was Alcuin’s defense in the case of the escaped convict (mentioned in footnote 5 above). “So I urgently lay it upon you, my dear sons, to prostrate yourselves before the feet of my Lord David [i.e., Charlemagne], the most just and serene Emperor, begging that when the bishop comes you may make our defence and dispute with him whether it be just for a prisoner to be forcibly haled from a church to face the very punishment from which he sought sanctuary ... and whether the saying of the Lord, ‘Mercy is exalted over justice’ (Jas. 2.13), is being observed.... How can the venerable father say that a prisoner who is a sinner should not be received in church? If sinners are not to enter church, perhaps no priest will be found to say mass or sing the responses, except one who has just been baptised” (Allot, Letter 114, 121).
[24] Madalyn Hayden, “Recidivism Rates in the United States versus Europe: How and Why are They Different?” (honors thesis, Western Michigan University, 2023), https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4677&context=honors_theses#:~:text=Recidivism%20rates%20are%20a%20good,of%20prisoners%20will%20have%20reoffended.