Please make note of our new location for our weekly Adeodatus meetings.

St. Rita’s Parish Rectory (South Phila.) and the Bevilaqua Center (Kensington)

Please join us weekly on Wednesday evenings from 7:30-9 P.M. at St. Rita’s Parish Rectory 1166 South Broad Street (at Ellsworth) in South Philadelphia. Use the rectory door on the left of the Church. Welome!  (Call ahead 215-331-3640 to check for cancellation due to weather, etc.)

In November of 2011, (Thursday, November, 3rd), we will begin our monthly support group for families of inmates as well as ex-inmates themselves. This will be our next step in an attempt to foster healing in the broken relationships that result from crime. We will meet at the Bevilaqua Center, 2646 Kensington Avenue (Kensington and Lehigh Ave) from 7:30-9:00 P.M, and will meet monthly on the first Thursday of each month. All are welcome

Adeodatus is a spiritual program helping those recently released from prison adjust to and remain in society through prayer, support and understanding of Christ. Meeting once a week in communal fellowship, it is the belief of Adeodatus that every person is good and worthy of another chance in life, and that in helping them we help their families and ourselves.

Click here to read our Prison Ministry newsletter.

Could it ever be sufficient for a perpetrator, someone who had committed some of the most dastardly and gruesome atrocities, to be allowed to get off scot-free as it were with only a confession, a full disclosure, since, as it happens, the act under which we operated did not require that the applucant should express contrition or remorse?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu
No Future Without Forgiveness, p. 49 1999

If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times and says, “I repent,” you must forgive him.

Jesus
Luke 17:3-4

God forgives, but (not without) repentance.

Muhammed
The Sayings of Muhammed, 209

The unwillingness to admit that we have been hurt is one of the major impediments to forgiving.

Robert D. Enright, PhD
Forgiveness is a Choice, 2001

If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.

Jesus
Matthew 6:14-15

People will sometimes forgive you the good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you.

W. Somerset Maugham
A Writer’s Notebook, 1949

You saw his weakness, that he’l ne’er forgive.

Friedrich von Schiller
William Tell, 3.1, 1804

Ministers ask: Is it possible for God to forgive Man? And when I think of what has been suffered- of the centuries of agony and tears, I ask: Is it possible for man to forgive God?

Robert Ingersoll
The Foundations of Faith

Of God we ask one favor,
That we may be forgiven-
For what, he is presumed to know-
The Crime, from us, is hidden.

Emily Dickinson