Pope Francis will visit a prison on Holy Thursday to wash feet of inmates

Pope Francis is scheduled to visit a prison known for holding ex-Mafia who turned into state witnesses on Holy Thursday to wash the feet of the inmates as part of his annual ritual to exemplify papal humility.

The pope will be traveling to the south of Rome on April 13 to visit the Paliano prison and celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper, a liturgy in which the priest emulates the moment Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, The Tablet reported.

The prison, located in the province of Frosinone, houses many of Italy's "collaborators of justice," who cooperated with anti-mafia investigators to shave time off from their sentences.

The Vatican announced that the Mass at the maximum-security facility would be "strictly private" due to security concerns.

The pontiff made history in 2013, just after his election, when he visited the Casal del Marmo youth detention center in Rome and washed the feet of the inmates, including females and non-Christians. During that time, the liturgical law only permitted men's feet to be washed in the ceremony.

He washed the feet of women again in 2015 when he visited Rebibbia prison in Rome. Some of the women who participated in the ritual were reportedly moved to tears by the experience.

The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments amended the Roman Missal in January 2016 to allow for women's feet to be washed in the ritual. The decision was reportedly made in collaboration with the pontiff.

"For some time I have been reflecting on the rite of the washing of the feet, which forms part of the Liturgy of the Mass of the Lord's Supper, with the intention of improving the ways in which it is put into practice, so that we fully express the meaning of the gesture made by Jesus in the Upper Room, his gift of self until the end for the salvation of the world, his boundless charity," the pope stated in a letter to the congregation's prefect, Cardinal Robert Sarah.

The Roman Missal's text, which previously read "the men chosen are accompanied by the ministers," has been modified to say "those chosen from among the People of God are accompanied by the ministers."

Last year, Francis visited a center for asylum seekers in Castelnuovo di Porto, where he washed the feet of refugees, who included Muslims, Hindus and Coptic Orthodox Christians.

The pope started the tradition of taking the Last Supper liturgy to the underprivileged when he was still the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, where he would conduct the rite in hospitals, hospices, and drug addict rehabilitation centers.