Angelus News | April 21, 2023 | Vol. 8 No
On the cover: Christ pulls Adam out of “limbo” while surrounded by other biblical figures in a late 13th-century painting (artist unknown). St. John Chrysostom famously wrote about Easter: “Forgiveness is risen from the grave.” But what does that mean for us? On Page 10, Mike Aquilina details how history, Scripture, and the experience of the apostles reveals forgiveness as the Resurrection’s most tangible result. On Page 14, Jennifer Hubbard recounts how her 6-year-old daughter’s murder in the Sandy Hook shooting led her on a journey to do the impossible.
On the cover: Christ pulls Adam out of “limbo” while surrounded by other biblical figures in a late 13th-century painting (artist unknown). St. John Chrysostom famously wrote about Easter: “Forgiveness is risen from the grave.” But what does that mean for us? On Page 10, Mike Aquilina details how history, Scripture, and the experience of the apostles reveals forgiveness as the Resurrection’s most tangible result. On Page 14, Jennifer Hubbard recounts how her 6-year-old daughter’s murder in the Sandy Hook shooting led her on a journey to do the impossible.
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A second group of 2,000 detainees were moved overnight to the mega-prison Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) on March 15 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. A first group of<br />
detainees had been moved to the prison on Feb. 26. | HANDOUT VIA GETTY IMAGES<br />
A DESPERATE REMEDY<br />
In El Salvador, at least one bishop is speaking out against a<br />
brutal crackdown on suspected gang members.<br />
BY MSGR. RICHARD ANTALL<br />
When it was time last month<br />
for Cardinal Gregorio Rosa<br />
Chavez to preach on the<br />
43rd anniversary of the death of his<br />
friend and mentor St. Oscar Romero,<br />
the retired auxiliary bishop of San Salvador<br />
chose to address a very controversial<br />
topic in the country right now:<br />
the “state of exception” that allows the<br />
government to lock up thousands of<br />
gang members without due process.<br />
These “domestic terrorists” are to be<br />
housed (or better said, warehoused)<br />
in the recently opened “Terrorism<br />
Confinement Center.” This megaprison<br />
will be the world’s largest with<br />
a capacity of 40,000, surpassing the<br />
Silivri Penitentiaries Campus in Turkey,<br />
which supposedly has more than<br />
22,000 inmates. (Turkey, it should be<br />
noted, has a population of 84.6 million<br />
people, more than 14 times that of El<br />
Salvador.)<br />
The gangs in El Salvador have a monstrous<br />
record of mayhem and violence,<br />
their criminal activity penetrating<br />
almost every sector of the country’s<br />
economy and people’s daily lives. In<br />
the little town where I was pastor for<br />
many years, El Puerto de La Libertad,<br />
hardly any small business escaped<br />
paying protection money.<br />
It was a way of life. One “pandillero,”<br />
as the gang members are called,<br />
charged my compadre — a store owner<br />
whose son with Down syndrome is my<br />
godson — $50 a week. The average<br />
daily wage in El Salvador is estimated<br />
at $12 a day.<br />
This same gang member later went to<br />
prison for the murder of the wife of a<br />
Mexican agent of Interpol who worked<br />
in El Salvador. Ironically, he had been<br />
contracted by the wife, who was in love<br />
with her children’s swimming instructor,<br />
to kill her husband. The “pandillero,”<br />
on a motorcycle, rode up to the car<br />
of the couple at a traffic light and shot<br />
22 • ANGELUS • <strong>April</strong> <strong>21</strong>, <strong>2023</strong>
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