By Ed Langlois

Archbishop Vlazny with inmate, Jeff Tiner.

From a windowless cell at Oregon State Penitentiary, a Catholic death row inmate evangelizes across the world.

A former white supremacist, Jeff Tiner is now inspired by a humble African saint. He resists publicity for himself, saying he wants only to spread the story of St. Josephine Bakhita far and wide. He uses most of this time and resources to support the Canossian Sisters, the religious community St. Bakhita joined more than a century ago.

At one time, Tiner had other priorities. In 1993 in Springfield, he allegedly shot a man in consort with a woman who wanted the victim out of the house and away from her children. Tiner, court records say, disposed of the body in a remote area of the Cascade Range. He had been in trouble with the law before and bore tattoos of a swastika and the words “White Pride.”

Years after being convicted, inmate Tiner was sitting despondent in his cell. A letter appeared under his door. The writer, calling herself his “Swiss Mum,” informed him that Jesus, Mary and Josephine Bakhita loved him.
Huh?

Tiner tried to throw what he considered a zany screed into the waste bag, but it fell short. He bent over to grab it for another try and it felt as if the letter jumped into his hand. He placed it on his desk and returned to other projects. But the letter nagged him and he felt a small stir of the soul.

Tiner wrote back to the stranger, telling her that he did not know he was Swiss and inquiring about this Bakhita woman.

As time went by, he received more letters and pamphlets from his Swiss friend, a lay member of the Canossian order who had read about death row inmates on the Internet. She taught him about the Sudanese saint.

Born to an important family in the Darfur region in 1869, Bakhita was kidnapped at age 6 by Arab slave traders. Treated brutally, she was sold and resold five times, falling at one point into the hands of an Ottoman army officer who marked her as his with scars and tattoos.

Sold to an Italian diplomat when she was still a teen, she went to Venice and met the Canossian Sisters, an Italian order that had been founded in 1808. Bakhita sought baptism in 1890. A court later found that Italian law did not recognize slavery and so she was freed.

She chose to stay with the sisters. By 1896, she professed vows. She served for years in northern Italy, becoming known for a gentle spirit and holiness. Children called her “Our Brown Mother.” She died in 1947 and was canonized in 2000.

“My own story is unimportant,” Tiner says, preferring instead to talk about the saint who changed his life. “Her story pierced my soul.”
After reading about St. Bakhita, the condemned man felt hope.

“I came to understand that I, too, could come back to life, spiritually,” he wrote in a 2006 article for the Canossian Sisters’ magazine. “I could be rescued from slavery to sin and find redemption and joy in the arms of Jesus and Mary.” He felt Bakhita leading him down a path toward Jesus, he says.

“I am no longer waiting to die,” Tiner declared. “I am alive in Christ Jesus.”

Tiner was baptized in 2005. Because prison officials refused to allow him into the main chapel, the chaplain asked two guards to fill a large laundry tub with water and wheel it to death row.

“There, in shackles and handcuffs, I was baptized in the water that flowed from the side of Christ, made new in the Holy Spirit,” Tiner recalls in a letter written to Auxiliary Bishop Ken Steiner.

The summer after his baptism, Archbishop John Vlazny came to the prison and confirmed Tiner and four other prisoners.

For the past six months, Tiner has written regularly to Bishop Steiner, signing his letters, “Mama Mary loves you!” Bishop Steiner admits that he has caught the Bakhita fever. He even wrote his Christmas column in The Sentinel about her.

“I am very impressed with the conversion of this man, especially his missionary spirit,” Bishop Steiner says.

Another member of the hierarchy holds St. Bakhita in high regard. When Pope Benedict issued an encyclical on hope this year, he prominently cited her as a role model of the virtue. Tiner sent the pope a letter of thanks.

With Deacon Allen Vandecoevering and St. Edward Parish in Keizer helping, Tiner started the grassroots Bakhita Project to help the Canossian Sisters. The women, who wear simple gray habits, have worked in Sudan since 1996, teaching children who are refugees from the long warfare there. They also provide food and health care for families. Through benefactors of the Bakhita Project, Tiner and his associates have so far helped build classrooms at St. Francis School in Khartoum. They have paid for a brick school and women’s center in a desert refugee camp and provided food and supplies for several thousand children attending school in tents. The project is also seeking to raise $45,000 to pay for a new bus to transport students in the desert where temperatures can reach 130 degrees.

Sister Severina Motta, who serves in Sudan, wrote to Tiner a year ago to tell him what gifts can mean there.

“I would have never thought that children can be overhappy with just a few sweets, biscuits, drinks, soap and a little ball,” she wrote just after Christmas. “You must have seen their exploding happiness. They ran along the street carrying the little bag on their shoulders, then they danced and sang under the hot sun.”

The lay Canossian and several Canossian Sisters who work in Rome have been sacramental sponsors for Tiner on his faith trek.

“I consider myself very fortunate in being one of Jeffrey’s pen friends because of his most edifying spiritual life,” writes Canossian Sister Velia De Giusto. “He shows an unquenched thirst for becoming more Christ-like.”

One nun in Singapore, moved by Tiner’s writings, refers to him as a “lay Canossian brother.”

“Has anyone ever done so much and from behind prison bars?” Sister Mary Siluvainathan wrote in her order’s magazine.

“These Sisters remind me so of Mother Teresa of Calcutta,” Tiner writes in a letter to The Sentinel. “They all refuse to get side-tracked by governmental blather. They crawl right down into the mud to save the poorest of the poor and the little ones.”

Tiner’s influence has spread on death row. He was confirmation sponsor for Conan Hale, convicted of a 1996 triple murder. It was Hale’s sacramental confession to Father Tim Mockaitis that in 1996 was recorded by Lane County jailers, setting off an international argument on religious freedom.

When he met Hale, Tiner could tell the new inmate was distressed, “infested” with demons. Tiner prayed for him, even holding a crucifix up in front of Hale’s cell and seeking the help of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This would be a big job.

The next day, Tiner saw Hale crying tears of contrition. The death row veteran asked permission to teach the faith to the new man. Over time, Hale seemed like a new person. Hale’s confirmation was arranged and the presider was to be none other than Father Mockaitis, an arrangement Tiner calls “beautiful symmetry.”

Hale, whom Tiner calls “a refurbished soul,” now creates and sells art to help support the Canossian Sisters and other religious communities. Three other inmates have gotten involved in the Bakhita Project. Tiner is teaching the rosary to another troubled prisoner.

His fond hope is that the Bakhita Project continues to spread beyond the penitentiary fences. The Holy Names Sisters Foundation printed up a brochure on the project. The flyer is making its way out to Catholic parishes in the area.

Tiner’s deep faith, Deacon Vandecoevering says, has granted him a kind of freedom. “This conversion has been an incredible thing for me to witness,” says the deacon. “It has been sustained. Once Jeff converted and was baptized, he shed all these layers of sin and became the child of God he was meant to be.”

To learn more about the Bakhita Project, go to www.sainteds.com and look at the feature pages. Aid can be mailed to The Bakhita Project/St. Edward Church, 5303 River Road North, Keizer, OR 97303.