ROCKFORD—”I’m delighted to be with you on this Christmas day,” said Bishop David Malloy to the nearly two dozen men gathered before him Dec. 25 in an empty cell block on the fourth floor of the Winnebago County Jail.

“I look forward to it,” the bishop added, calling the responses by Catholics to the past Christmas Masses “very heartening to me.”

“It is the Church who has come here to be with you,” he said to the men. “Everybody on the outside kind of felt like they were part of it.”

As in previous years, Bishop Malloy reminded the men of the hope for a better future and recalled for them his experience after the Christmas Midnight Mass last year at the cathedral.

A young man came up to shake his hand and to say that he had been at the bishop’s first Christmas Mass at the jail in 2013.

The man had completed his sentence and was taking steps to get his life in good order, the bishop said. Bishop Malloy told the inmates that the young man’s Mass attendance and ongoing practice of his faith would help assure that new future.

Looking at “the full meaning of Christmas,” of the sin of Adam and Eve and our own sins, Bishop Malloy said that “the whole story of Christmas is the story of second chances ... None of us had a right to a second chance, and here it is” in the person of Jesus born into the world to save us.

He invited the men to try to see themselves in the shepherds who were the “first to come and see the son of God in the world. We share with them whatever is good and whatever is not so good” within ourselves.

Bringing along all their faults and failings, those shepherds left the manger scene “resolved to love their brothers and sisters,” the bishop said, expanding on “that sense of conversion ... that sense of resolve that whatever (bad things had) happened, be done with it!”

Quoting Pope Francis, Bishop Malloy charged the men to not give up, to not waste their time in prison but instead to spend time reading the Bible and to “find yourself in some of these people and situations” therein.

“You need prayer ... to help and to strengthen you,” he said, encouraging them to “interact respectfully” with each other and with prison staffers who also have their burdens and their family concerns.

“That change of heart, it’s the reason” for the Mass, for Christmas, he added before concluding, “To all of us, a very blessed Christmas.”

Following the Mass, as Bishop Malloy greeted and chatted with each man individually, some of the men expressed that they were “very happy” and that it was “very joyful to be here” at the Christmas Mass.

“It is an honor,” said one man. “The last time I was in front of a bishop was in high school.”

Bishop Malloy was assisted at the Mass by Deacon John Huntley, Laura Ortiz and Jim Brooke, all of whom minister at the jail through Bible studies/Catholic fellowship sessions. After the prisoners were escorted out, the little group walked through the corridors toward the public exit.

One of them noted that the men already had asked if Bishop Malloy would be back to say Mass at Easter.