CNS PHOTO | DARON DEAN Chaplain Dale Recinella talks to inmates about suffering during religious education instruction at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Fla.

Dale Recinella played the financing game like a fiddle, even working through Christmas one year to secure the complex arrangements to finance a new stadium for football's Miami Dolphins.

Yet he turned his back on the twin rushes of high pay and high power to minister to some of the most downtrodden: poor people with HIV and AIDS, and eventually prisoners on death row.

Recinella chronicled his journey in a new book, Now I Walk on Death Row.

"The book is not so much about the death penalty than it is about seeking the answer to the question: Did Jesus mean what he said?" Recinella said in an interview.

As a volunteer chaplain, he teaches inmates about "living Gospel values authentically in our lives and in situations we encounter day in and day out.

We have 110 inmates. . . . They change over every year. It is an extremely valuable program.

Those (in the program) who are released have a much better chance of making it."