The Faithful

[Mosby]

The Faithful

René and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened.


With its decaying two-story homes and grazing cows, Bello looks like just another sleepy suburb of Medellín, Colombia. Thirty years ago, though, it was known as la capital de los sicarios, the capital of the assassins. Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín cartel, which supplied most of the world’s cocaine, recruited many of his sicarios from Bello, paying them to eliminate his adversaries. Mostly teenagers, they rode motorcycles, prayed to La Virgen María Auxiliadora, and killed their victims in the streets. René Cano grew up in Bello at the height of Escobar’s reign.

Born in 1978, René was the child of a textile factory worker and a housewife, both observant Catholics. At 13, he was so tall and self-possessed that he passed for an 18-year-old and, by his own description, was sexually precocious. He could talk anyone into anything. When his father announced one evening there was no money, nothing for dinner, René ran outside with a chair and came back with cash.

His cousins were sicarios and so were his neighbors; almost everyone he knew was on drugs. His mother understood it was only a matter of time before René would join them, and she feared for his life. “Don’t hang out on the corner,” she told him one day, “because they will come.” Five minutes after she called him into the house, men gunned down seven boys on the spot where he had been standing. The stench of their deaths lingered for weeks.

To keep René off the streets, his mother enrolled him in an after-school music program. He learned to play the saxophone and the clarinet and joined a youth orchestra. But there was too much poverty and hopelessness for jazz to heal. René started to feel an unbearable emptiness, a lack of purpose in just surviving. He had witnessed countless murders, had lost most of his friends. For a brief period, anger propelled him into a revolutionary fervor. He joined leftist protests, burned cars, and threw rocks at the police.

Soon anger was replaced by depression. One desperate night when he was 18 and sickened by his life, by his promiscuity, he heard a voice on the radio: “You who are listening to me, pursue God! He will fill in the void you are feeling.” The next morning, René wandered around Bello until he found himself at the door of the Iglesia Cristiana para la Familia, a Pentecostal church. Then he was inside the meeting hall, among several thousand believers who were singing and shouting, speaking in tongues and fainting, and, all at once, he felt at ease.

https://story.californiasunday.com/colombian-church-orthodox-judaism