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Naked As A Jailbird
Richard Shaw tells us:
“Naked as a Jailbird is made up of jail experiences taken from a journal I have kept since my teenage years. Entries record my reactions to persons and incidents in the context of each entry. Some entries have been rearranged from chronological to thematic order to imbue the chaos of jail life with some continuity.
My intent here is to be an initiating guide, as was Virgil to Dante, greeting initiates with a cordial, “Welcome to hell,” or less absolutely, “to purgatory,” or less mythically, “to this hate factory filled with people who don’t want to be where they are — inmates, and staff and, not infrequently, chaplains.” Readers, like a touring Dante, are left to form generalizations and conclusions on their own.
I still minister in jails and prisons. The journal excerpts in this account are from the first decade of my ministry when I still maintained a sense of shock about what I was encountering.
Because these excerpts are one aspect of an ongoing journal kept by a parish priest also teaching and coaching track in a high school I have included peripheral Journalistic references to school and parish activities to place the jail excerpts in situational context. I wrestled about beginning them with references to the sudden deaths of two fellow parish priests with whom I
was stationed. I included these because their deaths were part of the circumstances that led to my initiation to jail ministry.
In the journal I make shorthand references to the Albany County and Rensselaer County jails as ACJ and RCJ. In transcribing entries I was hesitant about including verbal obscenities that are the air one breathes inside jailhouse walls. Without them the narrative seems, well, naked. I compromised, employing crossword puzzle blanks that will allow readers to fill in whatever works best for them.
I retained the actual names of individuals only if they were also published in newspaper accounts of the day. I have changed the names of individuals who are able to remain anonymous.
Chaplains to the Imprisoned; Sharing Life with the Incarcerated
“Shaw has provided a candid and accurate assessment, offering an historical perspective as well as addressing the issues of the present moment… I recommend it for all Correctional Workers from administrative personnel to line staff.” – Rev. John P. Noe, Supervisory Chaplain, Federal Correctional Institution, Ashland, Kentucky
“…A powerful amalgam of personal experience, exhaustive historical study, and sophisticated survey research. Shaw does a masterful job… a first-rate scholarly work on prison and jail ministry that should be read by anyone interested in prisons and prison reform,” – Timothy J. Flanagan, Dean of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University.
Writing from the perspective of a ministering Catholic priest Richard Shaw, still in Jail and Prison ministry after four decades experience, relates of Naked as a Jailbird that the journal experiences shared are mostly from the first decade of this ministry, ‘…when I still had a sense of shock.’ What is shocking as well is that each related incident can be so perfectly placed into this present moment of time, or be set back thirty eight hundred years to when Joseph’s brothers sold him into a prison to survive by dealing with other inmates.
Dagger John: The unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York
“This us a delightful book and you will love it. It is the story of exciting times and a remarkable man… Father Shaw’s pen moves fast and gracefully tracing his career… A fascinating trip into the last century. You will turn its pages eagerly”- Bishop Patrick V. Ahern, National Catholic Reporter.
“It was hard to put down this fast-moving account of the…hard-nosed battler for the rights of the immigrant Irish in the middle decades of the 19th century… dealings with pre-Civil War Nativists, angry clergymen, apostates, bigots, fellow bishops, politicians, popes, and his own poor, belligerent but fiercely devoted Catholic Flock.” – Bernard Casserly, Syndicated Catholic Columnist.
“Everyone should read ‘Dagger John’ .. by Fr. Richard Shaw…It’s a treasury ..reminding us of what it was like to be Catholic, and even worse, Irish Catholic a century and a half ago in New York.” – Cardinal John J. O’Connor, Catholic New York
John Dubois: Founding Father
“As he did with Dagger John… Richard Shaw.. has give us another interesting biography of one of our pioneer American Churchmen… John Dubois, born in 1764 in pre-Revolutionary France,.. ordained to the priesthood in 1787 and assigned to the huge Parisian Church of St.Sulpice… escaped the bedlam of post-Revolutionary France by emigrating to the United States… [where he] ministered to Catholics spread through the southern part of the State of Virginia … Named to the See of New York, whose dominant Irish population was rather vocally opposed to the appointment of a ‘foreigner’ … he struggled for the next 16 years to serve his people… He was buried under the sidewalk in front of Old St. Patrick’s and his remains lay forgotten for the next 134 years. Shaw is always kind, sympathetic and fair… a loving tribute to an important and forgotten American Churchman.”
Theological Studies
Pentecost Eve
Pentecost Eve – The Council of Vatican II unexpectedly and very suddenly hit most American Catholics with huge cultural and religious changes when many of them were least prepared to accept these. Father Richard Shaw researched popular rather than academic sources from the twelve month period (October 1961 – October 1962) before the opening of the council, revealing a composite ‘view from a pew in 1962’ that explains much about the levels of readiness for the changes in the Church that was about to happen.
Elegy of Innocence
“Eschews the exotic settings and cameo appearances by popes and presidents that are stock-in trade. Shaw seems to content to point on a smaller canvas, and the resulting portrait is remarkably true to life and strangely compelling. The prose style is rough-hewn, even inelegant, but somehow it seems well suited to narrate the lives of these earthy characters. James Johnston, America.
There are plenty of laughs in the … poignant and warmly humane story of Dennis Hogan… A lovable Irish-American schlemiel…; a rookie priest assigned to chaplain’s duty who has to do his growing up after he already has the collar on and people are calling him father. To anyone who wonders what draws a man to so hard a life… and what keeps him in it even though he is not up to it… Shaw’s elucidation of the pull of faith is about as enlightening an answer the questioner is going to get. – Leslie Hanscom, Newsday.
“We understand Dennis Hogan so well because he is not so much a priest as an Everyman figure” – Best Sellers
What Andrew Greeley did to sensationalize the priesthood, Shaw does to illuminate it. Publisher’s Weekly.