St. Dismas, Thief

[Died c. 30] FEAST DAY: March 25

Christ was crucified between two thieves—all four gospels bear witness to this. But St. Luke’s gospel fleshes out the scene a bit, giving “the Good Thief,” the man tradition names Dismas, a few lines of dialogue.

The scene opens with the three men hanging on their crosses. “The Bad Thief,” the man tradition names Gestas, reviles Jesus, saying, “If thou be the Christ, save thyself and us.” That’s when Dismas speaks up. “Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil.”

Then, addressing Christ, the dying Dismas says, “Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom.”

Jesus replies, “Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise.”

The scene is brief and poignant, and although the Good Thief doesn’t say much, it is interesting to note that he has more lines than other, infinitely more popular New Testament saints. St. Jude, the enormously popular patron saint of impossible causes, is on record as speaking only once and very briefly in the gospels. Even stranger is the case of St. Joseph, Christ’s foster father and the Blessed Virgin Mary’s husband, who in the entire New Testament never says a single word.

From a very early date Christians found these silences and gaps in the stories of such significant players frustrating. An entire body of literature sprang up to answer the inevitable question “And then what happened?” The term for these narratives is apocrypha. They are writings that, in spite of their popularity with the early Christians, did not make it into the canon, the official list, of the books of the New Testament. Most of these works were omitted because they taught unorthodox doctrine (the so-called Gnostic gospels fall into this category). Other apocryphal works may have been perfectly orthodox in their understanding of the nature of Christ and his mission in the world but passed along stories about Mary’s and Joseph’s family backgrounds and the infancy and childhood of Christ that the early Church knew to be untrue or could not substantiate. The stories, or legends if you prefer, of St. Dismas are not theologically suspect, but it is certainly impossible at this point to say what, if anything, in these stories actually happened.

The earliest apocryphal work to attempt to flesh out the story of the Holy Family and St. Dismas is The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior, dating from around 600. The book covers Mary and Joseph’s journey into Egypt with the Christ Child to escape Judea’s murderous King Herod, their return home to Nazareth a few years later, and Jesus’ early childhood.

As Mary and Joseph wander through Egypt, looking for a safe place to call home, the local people warn them about a certain stretch of desert that is teeming with robbers. Hoping to pass without being detected, Mary and Joseph decide to travel by night. As they make their way through this dangerous territory, they see two highwaymen blocking the road ahead of them. Worse still, they realize that they have stumbled right into a robbers’ camp: all around them dozens of cutthroats lie sleeping. The robbers watching the road are Dismas and Gestas.

Gestas is ready to get down to business and take anything of value the Holy Family has on them, but Dismas intervenes. “Let these persons go freely,” Dismas says, “so that our comrades may not see them.” It’s a strange request from a hardened criminal, and Gestas dismisses it out of hand.

So Dismas makes his request more attractive. “Take to thyself these forty drachmas from me,” Dismas says. Then he sweetens the deal by taking off his valuable belt and promising that to Gestas, too. The drachmas and the belt are an offer Gestas can’t refuse, so he stands aside and lets the Holy Family go, free and unmolested.

Before they continue on their way, Mary prophesies to Dismas, “The Lord God will sustain thee by his right hand, and will grant thee remission of thy sins.” But the Christ Child makes an even greater prophecy. “Thirty years hence, O my mother,” he says, “these two robbers will be raised upon the cross along with me, Dismas on my right hand, and Gestas on my left: and after that day, Dismas shall go before me into paradise.”

But this isn’t the only ancient work to fill out the Dismas story. The Gospel of Nicodemus, a fourth-century apocryphal work, picks up Dismas’s story where St. Luke’s gospel leaves off. The Gospel of Nicodemus takes us down to the underworld during the three dark days Christ lay dead in his tomb.

According to Catholic theology, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in Eden, the gates of Heaven were shut and would not be reopened until the Savior died and rose from the dead. During those long centuries the souls of the righteous went to Limbo, a level of Hell where they were spared the sufferings of the damned but were denied the beatific vision of God. When Christ descended into Hell, as the Apostles’ Creed says, he liberated the souls of the just and led them to Heaven. In the Middle Ages this moment in the history of mankind’s salvation was known as the Harrowing of Hell; it was a popular subject for mystery plays, with Christ entering like an all-powerful warlord ready to besiege a city. In spite of all the demons arrayed against him, Christ batters down the heavily fortified gates of Hell and releases the souls held captive there by the devil.

In The Gospel of Nicodemus, as the holy men and women who lived and died before the coming of Christ gather together for their long-awaited journey to Paradise, Enoch and Elijah see a man coming toward them dressed in vile clothes with the sign of the cross on his shoulders.

“Who art thou?” they ask, “for thine appearance is as of a robber; and wherefore is it that thou bearest a sign upon thy shoulders?”

The stranger is Dismas, of course, and he answers, “I was a robber, doing all manner of evil upon the earth. [But] I beheld the wonders in the creation which came to pass through the cross of Jesus when he was crucified, and I believed that he was the maker of all creatures and the almighty king, and I besought him, saying, ‘Remember me, Lord, when thou comest into thy kingdom.’ And forthwith he received my prayer, and said unto me, ‘Verily I say unto thee, this day shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ And he gave me the sign of the cross, saying: ‘Bear this and go unto paradise.’”

At some point—when is hard to pinpoint—interest in St. Dismas segued into devotion. He became the patron saint of thieves specifically and criminals in general. The saint received a bit more attention in 1961 with the release of the movie The Hoodlum Priest, starring Don Murray as the tough-guy Jesuit Father Charles Dismas Clark, who served as a kind of missionary to street gangs and convicts. Under the patronage of St. Dismas, Catholic chaplains operate a ministry to incarcerated men and women.

As is often the case, we can see the depth of devotion to St. Dismas through the life of another saint. Father Emil Kapaun of Pilsen, Kansas, who is being promoted for sainthood, was a military chaplain during the Korean War. In November 1950 the North Koreans captured him and 1,200 American fighting men. The American POWs got so little food they were on the verge of starvation, so every night Father Kapaun crept out of the barracks to steal corn, millet, and soybeans from the guards’ storehouse. Before Father Kapaun went out on his “foraging” forays, he prayed to St. Dismas, the Good Thief.