c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Rev. George R. Castillo left a comfortable pulpit in Shaker Heights, Ohio, to bring hope to felons _ men the rest of society hopes never to see again.

The former pastor of East View United Church of Christ resigned nearly a quarter century ago to become a federal prison chaplain. His wife, Muriel, gave up a job she loved, teaching English at Shaker Heights High School. For awhile, George Castillo said, he thought they had made a mistake.

“Shaker Heights provided a comfortable ministry of visiting homes and hospitals and working on my second master’s degree,” Castillo said. “I was preparing to be there for the rest of my pastorate _ they loved me and I loved them. Oh my gosh, we were honeymooning.”

But, he added: “Sometimes you like a little challenge.”

The nature of that challenge is captured in “My Life Between the Cross and the Bars”(G&M Publications), a book Castillo has written about his 20 years in prison ministry. He was the second black man to become a federal prison chaplain. The Castillos spent $23,000 of their retirement savings to publish the book themselves this winter.

In its 294 pages, Castillo is frank about the many times he stumbled. Nobody was more surprised than the chaplain when a distillery was discovered in the ceiling of his penitentiary chapel. He was conned into breaking a rule for a gay couple. He was burned by prison politics.

During Castillo’s early years at “the Big A,” the Atlanta Penitentiary, five churches pooled resources to buy a house to lodge the visiting relatives of inmates. Adults paid $3; children $1. Within a year of the ribbon cutting, the place was a brothel.

Through it all, Castillo learned. He stuck to his deep Christian belief in redemption. He was stubborn that way. If he was shaken to find out the vicious details of crimes these men committed, he was not sorry he had closed his office door and counseled them alone.

“People are people,” the 66-year-old Castillo said in a phone interview from his home in northwest Florida. “I always treated them as gentlemen. I always stood up to welcome an inmate into my office, to make him feel human. I always asked him to sit down. And I never had any trouble with an inmate in my office.”

One enraged convict who pounded Castillo’s desk with a paperweight did cause the chaplain to inch his telephone closer to his elbow. But as he broke up fights and foiled suicide attempts over the years, Castillo never was injured.

“He has a genuine love of people,” said daughter Marcelle Castillo, an Atlanta lawyer. “He is a very, very forgiving person to the point that it frustrates me at times because it strikes me as a sort of naivete. But then I think about why we are on this Earth _ to love one another _ and I see my father living out that love.”

As a Christmas gift, Marcelle Castillo gave her dad a videotape of the film “Dead Man Walking.” She liked the study of the difficulties in abiding with society’s worst criminals; he was drawn to the portraits of the families of both victims and killers.

“These people are the second victims of the crime,” Castillo said. “We in the religious community should also put our arms around these families and say, `We love you. We will help.’ In all my years in prison, I couldn’t stand being in the visiting room when the visits concluded. The children cry, `Daddy, Daddy, don’t leave.’ I could never listen to that.”

Castillo’s own father did leave, when the boy was 7 and the family lived in what is today the Central American nation of Belize. Philip Castillo died of pneumonia, leaving his 36-year-old wife destitute with seven children. The family went hungry. The oldest boy secured work in their rural post office for $1 per week. George himself was farmed out to harsh, distant relatives. When he immigrated to New York City at the age of 21, his culture shock was profound.

“I was mystified by everything around me,” Castillo writes, “the tall buildings, heavy traffic, people rushing, subways, electricity.” The year was 1952, but Castillo never had used a telephone, radio, television or kitchen appliance.

Like many immigrants, he wasted no time grabbing the bottom rung on the employment ladder. He took work at a diner.

“I quickly became the company joke after being caught by fellow employees putting my tips in the cash register,” Castillo remembers. “I couldn’t believe that people would give their money away after paying for food.”

Castillo joined the Air Force, which mislabeled him “untrainable.” He persevered and worked his way through the University of Maine and Bangor Theological Seminary in Bangor, Maine. During one stretch he juggled three part-time jobs: fill-in preacher, janitor and bowling alley manager.

To his frustration, his Caribbean work ethic clashed with the outlook of the typical American convict. In general, prisoners much preferred nudie magazines to books, Castillo writes. Only rarely did a felon have the discipline to work toward a correspondence degree.

“I don’t mind building prisons if we teach the inmates something,” said Castillo, who advocates linking sentences to finishing vocational training. “If you commit a crime, you are going to pay for it. But we must teach a better life while you are in there. Society needs to face that 90 (percent) to 95 percent of the people incarcerated this moment will be walking our streets again.

“I look forward to the day when the American people can walk their streets freely without looking over their shoulders.”

To that end, Castillo fills his retirement volunteering at Head Start and the NAACP, and tutoring children and serving on the boards of mental health associations in two counties.

Daughter Marcelle said, “I hope this book shows readers what Chaplain Castillo stood for: We must do good for others when we can and see good in others when they come into our lives.”

To order “My Life Between the Cross and Bars,” send a check or money order for $25.45, which includes shipping and handling, to G & M Publications, P.O. Box 657, Shalimar, Fla., 32579.

MJP END LONG