Freeing Prisoners
( Hope in a Prison of Despair by Evelyn De Morgan - found here ) “Since apostolic times, the Church has seen the liberation of the oppressed as a sign of the Kingdom of God. Jesus himself proclaimed at the beginning of his public ministry: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives’ ( Lk 4:18). The early Christians, even in precarious conditions, prayed for and assisted their brothers and sisters who were prisoners, as the Acts of the Apostles (cf. 12:5; 24:23) and various writings of the Fathers attest. This mission of liberation has continued throughout the centuries through concrete actions, especially when the tragedy of slavery and imprisonment has marked entire societies. Between the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries, when many Christians were captured in the Mediterranean or enslaved in wars, two religious orders arose: the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of ...
