John Echaniz stood before the man who killed his son and told him that he hoped to see him someday in paradise.
Michael was 23 years old and had just graduated from Christendom College when Mathew Wiessing took his life in March 2022. On January 10, at the hearing where he was sentenced to 40 years in prison, his parents did not seek revenge. Sharon, his mother, could not be present: she was undergoing chemotherapy. Even so, she wrote her own reflection on forgiveness to be read that day.
John says he did not find those words alone. He drew on the meditations of Saint Cyprian of Carthage on the Our Father, the prayer he has prayed all his life and which, he says, he now understands differently. They have six other children, and all of them learned from their parents that forgiveness can also be spoken aloud, in front of the person who hurt you the most.
