When they learned their 23-year-old son Michael Echaniz had been murdered in March 2022, John and Sharon Echaniz began a journey through the stages of grief, and (although they admit there is work to be done) they offered their son’s killer forgiveness.
Father Stephen Gutgsell, of Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, has died after being attacked in the rectory of his parish.
Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, one of the speakers at the press conference, stopped several times during his remarks to collect himself.
Page Zyromski remembered how God had challenged her to forgive Stephen Todd Booker, who brutally murdered her great-aunt in 1977.
“Rachel publicly forgave her son’s killers before his body had even been found. And it’s that act of forgiveness that has gone on to change life after life in the 20 years since.”
Most of the 18 Catholic missionaries murdered in 2022 were not carrying out high-risk missions when they were assassinated but were simply “immersed and submerged in the ordinariness of their lives and their apostolic work,” said the editor of Fides, the Vatican’s missionary news service.
Police said the women were murdered as part of a ritual conducted for the wealth and prosperity of an individual.
Pope Francis praised the life and work of Sister Luisa Dell’Orto, an Italian missionary who was killed June 25 in Haiti, and hailed her as a martyr.
