Who was St. Dismas?
Everything the Church knows about him fits in five verses. Luke says that "two other malefactors" were led out with Jesus to be put to death, and that at Calvary they crucified him "and the robbers, one on the right hand, and the other on the left" (Luke 23:32-33). Then:
And one of those robbers who were hanged, blasphemed him, saying: If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering, rebuked him, saying: Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art condemned under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil. And he said to Jesus: Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom. And Jesus said to him: Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:39-43, Douay-Rheims)
Luke does not name him. The name Dismas comes from the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal text that Vatican News dates to the fourth century, which says the soldiers "hanged the two robbers with Him, Dismas on the right and Gestas on the left." It is a tradition, not Scripture, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. Tradition also gave him his adjective: Vatican News's German edition says he is called the good thief to set him apart from the other criminal crucified next to Christ.
We do not know what he stole, how old he was, or whether he had ever heard Jesus preach. We know what he did in his last hours. He told the truth about himself: "we indeed justly." He defended an innocent man when it cost him nothing and gained him nothing. And he asked for one thing, to be remembered. Pope Francis, at a general audience in 2016, said that "in the end, he regretted what he had done," and that by looking at Jesus he "managed to steal Heaven." Preaching at Asti in 2022, the Pope put it in six words: "a criminal becomes the first saint." At the end of his life, Francis said, the thief "discovered anew the fearless confidence of children."
Why Catholics pray to St. Dismas for prisoners, the condemned and the dying
No pope has declared him patron of anything. Vatican News calls him patron of prisoners and of the dying. The Catholic Encyclopedia's 1911 list of patron saints names him for "persons condemned to death." The Archdiocese of Baltimore calls him "patron saint of prisoners on death row and reformed thieves." The patronage is traditional, and it needs no explanation: he was a condemned prisoner, and he was dying, and that is when he was saved.
American Catholics have built that devotion in stone. At Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, Father Ambrose Hyland, the prison's chaplain from 1937 to 1953, raised the Church of St. Dismas, the Good Thief, between 1939 and 1941. The Diocese of Ogdensburg's newspaper calls it "the first free-standing church built entirely behind prison walls in this country," and prisoners made much of its sacred art. When Bishop Terry LaValley celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary Mass there in 2017, he told the inmates: "If this church is about anything, it is about hope." In Atlanta, Deacon Richard Tolcher named the Catholic chapel of the federal penitentiary the St. Dismas Chapel and went on to lead the archdiocese's prison and jail ministry; of Christ's words about visiting prisoners he said, "It really is a command. He doesn't suggest." Dismas Ministry, based in Milwaukee, has served incarcerated Catholics for more than twenty-five years with free Bibles, catechetical study books and courses, and other spiritual resources; it now reaches prisons in all fifty states and ten to twelve thousand Catholics a year. Its executive director says they call it "the forgotten work of mercy."
What a Catholic asks of him is what he asked for himself. Pope Francis said in 2016: "To the one who is nailed to a hospital bed, to one who lives locked in a prison, to those who are trapped by war, I say: look at the Crucifix." And: "no one is excluded from the forgiveness of God." For the dying, his story is the Church's plainest promise that it is never too late. At Asti the Pope said that those who trust like the good thief "learn to intercede," and that "intercession, asking the Lord to remember, opens the gates of heaven."
How to pray to St. Dismas
His day is March 25. It is not on the General Roman Calendar, and March 25 is the Solemnity of the Annunciation, so there is no Mass of St. Dismas in your parish; Vatican News simply lists him among the saints of the day. The nine days before, March 16 to 24, fall in Lent, which suits him. Good Friday, the day he died beside Jesus, is his day in all but name. Pray to him any night you need him.
Pair the prayer with what he did. He confessed his guilt out loud and specifically; if you can get to Confession, or a chaplain can come to you, go. Go to Mass if you can. If you are facing charges or waiting on a sentence, prayer does not replace a lawyer: keep every appointment and tell your counsel the truth, as Dismas told it. If someone you love is dying, ask for a priest and the Anointing of the Sick, and do not wait for the last hour. If fear of death has taken over your days, talk to a doctor as well as to the saint; and if you are thinking of ending your life, call a crisis line or emergency services now. Then say the prayer below, and ask him for the one thing he asked for.