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The plan had begun on Jan 23, starting at Bang Kwang central prison near Bangkok, with 563 inmates seeing their shackles unlocked and removed for the last time. At the end of May, some gathered for a ceremony, led by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, to officially kick off the policy, kick off the chains, and put the shackle era to an end for good.
The Vatican communiqué issued after the meeting between Pope Francis and the President of El Salvador, Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena, expressly mentions the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. If any further confirmation was needed about the speeding up – since the arrival of the new Pope – of the beatification cause for the prelate who was gunned down by death squads in 1980, that arrived promptly. And not just in the form of a statement by some influential figure or other, but with a phrase written in black and white on a high-level, official document, like those which are published after visits by heads of state to the Vatican.
Last fall, Dwain Adkins was about to be released from prison after serving a six-year sentence for aggravated assault. He had no family to return to on the outside and had not been accepted into a halfway house. “My biggest fear was being homeless,” he said. “It was hard for me to fathom that. It tore me up.” Finally, one week before his release, Adkins got word from Dismas House in Nashville that he would have a place to stay. “Dismas gives guys like me an opportunity, and for that I’m grateful,” he told the Tennessee Register, newspaper of the Nashville diocese.
In jails we found many young minors behind bars without proper recreation, education, exercise, food, sanitation and legal assistance. This is the secret shame of the Philippines, hidden away from the media and the public; hundreds, if not thousands, of children suffer humiliation and deprivation of sub-human jail conditions every year.
Proclaiming God as Creator means, first of all, saying that He is the origin of reality, of the whole universe. He is the origin of life. We also say that God acts in history. He is not a spectator who enjoys to see how we fare in life and perhaps enjoys our troubles. No! God hears the cry of the poor, sends a Liberator, prepares the ground for incarnation, and sends His only Son.
