Priest retires in protest of rule about religion in prison

The Rev. Tom Suss spent a recent afternoon at the McNeil Island prison near Tacoma, Wash., loading the contents of his office into his Hyundai Elantra.

For more than 15 years, he served inmates of all faiths as prison chaplain. But the 63-year-old Catholic priest chose to retire a year and a half early rather than work with a troubled heart.

He's leaving because he disagrees with new rules that allow state inmates to simultaneously choose multiple religious affiliations with the flick of a pen.

The most recent figures available show that 39 inmates at the McNeil Island Corrections Center had designated multiple religions as of Feb. 21, and officials say that number has gone up since. The combinations include Protestant/Catholic, Jewish Orthodox/Seventh-day Adventist, Buddhist/Protestant/Sikh, Asatru/Catholic.

The contradictions were too much for Suss.

"I'm not a martyr," Suss said. "There's no hidden message here. I met my Waterloo. I had no other choice. I could not accept a pagan/Catholic."

Prison Superintendent Ron Van Boening said Suss' departure will be a loss.

"He provided very good service as a chaplain for all faiths," he said. "We will miss him."

A replacement has not been selected.

Suss took a voluntary leave from his job at the beginning of the year and in the months since has been hoping the concerns he and other chaplains had expressed about the new policy might be resolved.

Suss knows that even with the new rules, he would not have to perform any priestly duties that went against his faith, such as giving Communion to someone claiming to be both pagan and Catholic. But the principle of inmates being allowed to claim multiple and seemingly contradictory faiths was not something Suss could get past.

"It isn't just the Department of Corrections," he said. "This is a secular department, which is part of a secular society. I can't expect them to see the importance and impact of this policy."

Federal law says prisons shouldn't be in the business of testing the sincerity of inmates' faiths. And, of course, not everyone agrees with Suss that it's impossible to belong to multiple faiths.

What hurt him most, Suss said, was that the greater religious community, including his own archdiocese, did little to stand with him in challenging the new rules, which were put in place at the end of 2007 after an inmate sued.

"My own Catholic newspaper, The Progress, has never had one word about this issue," he said. "That's hurtful. I have never received one word of encouragement or support from my own archbishop. How can I expect the secular world to get it when the religious one doesn't see the importance of what I stood for?"

Greg Magnoni, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Seattle, said the church did support Suss and noted that the archbishop wrote to Corrections chief Eldon Vail about the new rules.

"He was very much in support of Father Suss' position," Magnoni said. "The archbishop said it's a contradiction and an impossibility to be both a pagan and a Roman Catholic."

The archbishop agreed that the policy put Suss in an "intractable ethical conflict," he said.

At the heart of Suss' quandary is whether an inmate should be able to simply choose a religion or whether one must be accepted by a community of faith.

Anyone not incarcerated is free to go down to the local Catholic shop and buy a rosary or a Bible, Suss said. That person can go to another shop and purchase amulets or crystals held sacred by pagans. But that doesn't make one a member of either group. To be accepted into a faith, one must go through rituals and be welcomed by the community, he feels.

"Only the membership process, as authorized by the legitimate tradition, can say whether someone's of that religion," Suss said.

(E-mail Ian Demsky at demsky(at)thenewstribune.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)