America Turns 250, but This Is Not the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

The United States of America was born on the Fourth of July in 1776. There is no greater tribute to this Land of the Free than the words of its National Anthem.

July 1, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I have been pondering what to write as the nation in which I write marks 250 years in existence on the world stage. All thoughts kept bringing me back to our National Anthem and a reflection on it that I wrote in 2023. This nation and the entire free world were finally emerging then from the global Covid pandemic. Perhaps I needed more time to write of this then because our very freedom had been on the chopping block in both Church and State. We had surrendered far too much. So in this post I want to further examine the National Anthem, all four stanzas of it, three of which most of us do not even know. And then finally I want to add a reflection by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who gave us some very candid and pointed thoughts about the nature of freedom and what we stand to lose if we allow it to be set aside.

Readers in the United States may recognize the second part of my title this week as a line from the Star-Spangled Banner, our National Anthem: “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.” It was composed during a battle in the War of 1812. Thirty-six years after the American Revolution in 1776, the War of 1812 was called by some the Second War for American Independence.

In 1814, two years into the war, a British warship bombarded Fort McHenry in the Port of Baltimore. The part of the text of the famous poem that became our National Anthem was composed on the spot by American lawyer and poet, Francis Scott Key. He was aboard a British frigate under a flag of truce to negotiate the release of a prisoner. While aboard, a fierce battle broke out between British and American warships.

As the smoke of battle cleared at dawn, Francis Scott Key was so inspired by the sight of an American flag still intact aboard a battered U.S. ship that he wrote down what he saw. His “Star-Spangled Banner” appeared in a Baltimore newspaper. Then its first stanza was set to music to the tune of a popular pub drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” It became the National Anthem of the United States by an act of Congress only on March 3, 1931.

Few people seem to know that the famous poem that inspired the U.S. National Anthem had four stanzas. Only the first was set to music. Nonetheless, at age eight I was one of four fourth grade students required by our teacher, Miss McNeil, to each memorize a stanza for an Independence Day school assembly. I was fortunate enough to draw the first stanza which was the most familiar and easiest to memorize. I remember imagining at the time that Miss McNeil might actually have been present when Francis Scott Key composed the text in 1814:

“Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there .
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

“On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposed,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half concealed, half disclosed?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
’Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“Oh! Thus be it ever, when free men shall stand
Between their beloved home and war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

— Francis Scott Key, 1814

Independence Day and the State of Our Freedom

Not to abruptly change the subject, but for this 250th Anniversary of Independence Day, I want to examine what the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has done with our cherished freedoms. When I first wrote of this in 2023, we were still frozen in place, despite it being summer, over the politics of a pandemic. Freedom was never free, so justice requires that we honor it.

In observance of our Nation’s 250th Anniversary, Catholic League President Bill Donohue published a brief but brilliant essay, “Religious Roots of American Freedoms.” It was a stark reminder of what we stood to lose, or lose sight of, during the dark days of the Covid pandemic. We went awry over those years when the threat was not so tangible a thing as bombs dropping, but rather the tiniest of things: a virus that emerged in China.

Lest someone take umbrage with that last thought, the evidence now seems much clearer that Covid originated from a laboratory, though likely by accident, in Wuhan, China. That said, I must remind myself and all of us that China is the Peoples’ Republic, but Covid was not the peoples’ pandemic. The good people of China live under the hammer of an oppressive communist regime. The people of China had nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic nor with their government’s response to it. I wrote of that response in “Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media.”

What I find so ironic, however, is not what China did with it, but with what America did, and by that I mean all of America. Perhaps the best commentary on the state of our post-pandemic freedom as we emerged from three-plus years of government Covid policy is a statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. It was published on May 18, 2023 in a Supreme Court Order halting a lawsuit filed to continue Title 42. If you have not heard or read this before, it is because the free press suppressed it. The statement is a bold assessment of post-pandemic truth:

“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of the United States. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.

“They threatened violators not just with civil penalties, but with criminal sanctions as well. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

“Federal executive officials entered the act too, and not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace safety agency to issue a vaccine mandate for working Americans. They threatened to fire non-compliant employees and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

“At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another.”

— Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, May 18, 2023

Churches, Casinos and Liquor Stores

At a time of intense public anxiety, churches were deemed “non-essential” by government officials in many states. Justice Gorsuch pointed out above that state government officials “closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.” In New Hampshire, where I am a guest of the State, churches were forced to remain closed even while all the liquor stores remained open — even on Sunday. No one pointed out that in New Hampshire, the State owns all the liquor stores.

But the saddest oppression came later. When constitutional civil rights lawsuits in various states succeeded through the courts in reopening churches with reasonable safeguards, some of our own Catholic bishops instantly replicated the heavy hand of government to keep them closed and inaccessible. On June 10, 2020, I posted “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.” My own Bishop issued a chilling decree.

“As Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester understanding my responsibility to issue liturgical norms by which all are bound (Canon 838:3), I hereby decree the public celebration of Mass remains suspended ... until such time as I deem it prudent to modify [this] decree.”

In a state that led the nation in opioid overdose deaths among young people (and still does) deaths by overdose substantially outpaced deaths by Covid ten to one. The closure of churches never took into consideration the hopelessness to which it contributed. The year of the Bishop’s decree saw 250 deaths statewide from Covid. All but 65 of its victims succumbed in nursing homes where government failed to protect the elderly. In contrast, the same period saw 2,500 fatal overdoses from street drugs.

In some areas, Masses were relocated to online only and the reception of Communion became impossible. When court challenges opened up churches, some state governments — and later even some bishops — required Catholics who chose to attend Mass to register their name, address, and signature at the church door. This was not the Nazi occupation of Poland. This was the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Some priests were removed from ministry for openly defying these edicts. One priest friend famously challenged his bishop’s edict to “Just do it in the Parking Lot,” by responding “No. And … Hell no.”

In a Wall Street Journal / NORC poll published in April, 2023, 39-percent of Americans reported that religion was “very important” to them. This was down from 48-percent just four years earlier in 2019 before the pandemic. In 1998, this figure was 62-percent. Covid had the effect of accelerating a pre-pandemic trend in which Christians, and especially Catholics were slowly becoming disenfranchised from the practice of their faith. Even after Covid this trend continued as the Catholic hierarchy barred Catholics from the observance of Latin Mass, and even from kneeling to receive the Eucharist.

In March, 2023, the Pew Research Center released a study reporting that the percentage of U.S. adult Christians who participated in worship at least once per month was 43-percent. This was down from a pre-pandemic report of 49% in 2019. However, 22-percent of the respondents in 2023 reported that their “participation” was either online or on television. Of interest, Catholic parishes that kept congregations engaged throughout the pandemic using social media and streaming parish services to their own parishioners have retained more of their communicants than Catholic parishes that just rode the wave and remained closed.

The great downside to streaming Catholic Masses online is that it habituated the practice of many faithful to take part in worship without reception of the Eucharist which is central to the Mass and to the identity of Catholics.

An interesting story developed out of China while American Christians wrangled with our post-pandemic commitment to faith. All 63 members of an Evangelical Chinese Christian congregation escaped communist China, the first parish ever to do so en masse. In response to increasing oppression by the Chinese communist government, the entire parish community fled China, first to South Korea, then to Thailand, and then to the United States.

Aided by Freedom Seekers International, a Texas nonprofit that helps people flee religious persecution, the group submitted applications to the United Nations Refugee Agency in Bangkok. Having overstayed their Thai travel visas by one year, the group had to be deported, but Thai police worked with the U.S. State Department to deport them not back to China, but to Tyler, Texas.

The Chinese communist government viewed the church as illegal and threatened to shut it and its religious school down. Rather than risk the loss of their faith community, the 63 members of this small congregation decided unanimously to preserve their faith and flee their country. Here in America, we have never faced the forced choice between God and country.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts about freedom:

Religious Roots of American Freedoms by William A. Donohue, PhD

The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media

Latin Mass and Altar Rails Are Under Siege in North Carolina

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

An AI Analysis of Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

The April 18, 2000 murder of Pornchai Moontri’s mother, Wannee, on the Island of Guam still cries to Heaven for justice. This new AI forensic review provides hope.

June 24, 2026 by xAI Grok

Writing for The Wall Street Journal on November 7, 2025, Mike Cherney penned an insightful essay entitled, “A Campaign to Make Guam the 51st State Is Gaining Traction.” To help make the case, the author cites the geopolitical strategic importance of Guam:

“As US competition with China intensifies, the Pentagon is building up Guam as a hub for its security strategy in the Pacific. It is upgrading bases, moving more troops to the island and building a multibillion-dollar missile defense system to guard against a possible Chinese attack.”

I have long had a personal interest in the affairs of Guam as recent articles published on this site reveal. Hovering in the dim distance in the background of this important story about the political status of Guam is another story that impacts the public image of Guam and its people. From my standpoint, any ambition for statehood or major changes in the US administration of Guam must first address a lurking problem in the administration of justice. That problem was laid out in a November 7, 2021, Guam Daily Post report on the extraordinary number of Guam’s unsolved ‘cold-case’ homicides.

At the time of that writing, there were 103 unsolved murders on Guam’s list. One of them should be a great concern to our readers. Number 70 on that list is the as-yet-unsolved murder of Pornchai Moontri’s mother, Wannee, who was beaten to death in Guam at age 47. All the elements of that shocking crime were exposed by me in a 2022 article at this site entitled, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

My article circled the globe moving many hearts about this tragic story. What it failed to move was the administration of justice in Guam, which touts a new cold-case task force to investigate or reinvestigate the cases on this list.

In the four years since I wrote, “Getting Away with Murder,” many Guam residents have read and shared that account, but to no apparent avail.

Most recently, a reader submitted that article for a forensic review from the advanced AI model xAI Grok. The result was staggering, and I have decided to publish it here, in its raw form without any editing, as our weekly post. I am very open to suggestions about what we now do about this lingering grave injustice.

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xAI Grok Forensic Review of a Guam Cold-Case Homicide

xAI GROK:

Synopsis

The article, titled “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam” and written by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae (published September 14, 2022 on beyondthesestonewalls.com), examines the unsolved 2000 homicide of Wannee Laporn Bailey in Talofofo, Guam (Guam Police Department Cold Case #70). It frames the crime within the broader story of severe sexual and physical abuse inflicted on Wannee’s sons, Pornchai Moontri and Priwan Moontri, by their stepfather, Richard Alan Bailey. The piece argues that Bailey murdered Wannee shortly after their divorce was finalized, when she was pressing for the enforcement of court orders on alimony, asset division, and restitution. Wannee (age 47) was beaten to death; the autopsy showed broken ribs causing internal damage and a broken wrist (defensive wound). Bailey reportedly notified police that she was missing, then claimed to have found her body himself. The article contends that Guam authorities conducted an inadequate investigation at the time and that Bailey evaded accountability despite a clear motive tied to silencing Wannee and avoiding exposure of his abuse. Bailey was later convicted in Maine (2018) on 40 felony counts of gross sexual assault against the sons but received only probation and sex-offender registration — no prison time. The post calls for the case to be reopened with “new eyes,” highlighting systemic failures in Guam’s handling of cold cases (103 unsolved homicides noted in 2021 reporting).

Key Details Relevant to Investigation

• Victim: Wannee Laporn Bailey (née Laporn), Thai national, age 47 at death on April 18, 2000.

• Suspect Identified: Richard Alan Bailey (former Vietnam-era helicopter pilot, later FAA controller in Guam; resided in Westlake, Oregon as of the warrant period ~2017).

• Motive: Financial obligations from the divorce decree; preventing Wannee from exposing years of documented child sexual/physical abuse.

• Opportunity/Timeline: Bailey was in Guam; Wannee made a frantic call to her niece on the day of the murder with Bailey shouting in the background (recalled in a 2016 interview). The niece later reported Wannee saying words to the effect of “If I am found dead, Richard did it.” Bailey quickly sold property and left Guam after the death.

• Prior Conduct: Extensive 1989–1990 Maine records (Youth Center, DHS) document the sons’ abuse allegations; sheriff interviews with Bailey were superficial and did not include victim or witness statements. Bailey also sent a letter to the judge in Pornchai’s 1993 trial and allegedly had Wannee deliver threats to Pornchai in jail.

• Other Notes: Pornchai Moontri (the author’s friend and fellow prisoner at the time) was a victim of the abuse and later convicted in Maine of a separate 1993 homicide (influenced by trauma). No physical description of an unknown assailant is provided; the article focuses exclusively on Bailey as the perpetrator.

Assessment: Sufficient Information for Identifying a Person of Interest Under Current Professional Investigatory Standards?
Yes—decisively so.

Modern US law-enforcement standards (including those applicable in Guam as a US territory) for designating a person of interest in a cold-case homicide rely on reasonable suspicion supported by specific, articulable facts — not proof beyond a reasonable doubt or even probable cause for arrest. Factors typically weighed include motive, opportunity, means, prior similar conduct, witness statements, timeline alignment, and behavioral indicators. The article supplies all of these in detail and with verifiable documentary anchors (divorce decree, Maine abuse records from 1989–1990, autopsy findings, 2016 niece interview, Bailey’s 2018 Maine conviction). It explicitly names Richard Alan Bailey, provides his biographical identifiers, last known residence (Westlake, Oregon), and a clear circumstantial chain that would allow any competent investigator to:

1. Locate him (or confirm current status).

2. Obtain his criminal and civil records.

3. Re-interview living witnesses (niece, Pornchai, Priwan, Bailey’s sister).

4. Review preserved evidence (autopsy, original case file, divorce records).

This meets or exceeds the threshold used by agencies such as the FBI’s ViCAP or cold-case units for opening or prioritizing an investigation. Notably, the article itself cites a 2017 arrest warrant issued in Oregon based on the sons’ interviews — further evidence that law enforcement hasalready treated the information as actionable. The piece does not claim to be a formal police report; it is advocacy journalism. Professional investigators would still independently corroborate statements, seek any remaining physical/forensic evidence (DNA, if preserved), and rule out alternatives. However, nothing in the article is vague or anonymous; it supplies a fully identifiable suspect with a coherent investigative theory.

Additional Comments

The writing is clear, heavily sourced, and emotionally powerful, effectively linking Wannee’s death to decades of documented family trauma and institutional oversights (Maine authorities in the 1989–1990 period and Guam police in 2000). It raises legitimate questions about investigative diligence, especially given Guam’s high number of unsolved homicides and the fact that Bailey left the island quickly after the crime. As of 2026, public sources continue to list the case as unsolved, with no reported breakthroughs.

That said, the article is written from an advocate’s perspective (MacRae has long championed Pornchai Moontri’s cause). It relies heavily on accounts from the victims’ family, which, while credible and partially corroborated by official records, would require fresh, independent validation in a formal re-investigation. No new forensic breakthroughs or direct eyewitness testimony to the murder itself are presented — only strong circumstantial evidence.

Overall, this is a well-constructed public call to revisit a cold case that, on the facts presented, appears to have had a viable suspect from the outset. It would give any current Guam Police Department cold-case detective or federal partner (e.g., FBI Violent Crimes Against Children or cold-case task force) an immediate, named starting point for renewed inquiry. If the goal is justice for Wannee Laporn Bailey, the information here is more than sufficient to justify official action.

The House That Wannee Built

In the year 2000, after Wannee found the courage to divorce Richard Bailey on the Island of Guam and return to Thailand, she began building a small house on her family property where Pornchai was born. The partially built house in the photo above was the result of her dream to recover her sons and restore what had been taken from her. She had to stop work on the house in 2000 to return to Guam to seek the Court’s enforcement of its divorce rulings regarding restitution to Wannee and her family, Court rulings that Bailey simply ignored. She wanted the funds so she could complete the house for Pornchai to live in at some unforeseen future. She did not know she was going to her death.

Pornchai and Father John Le visited this house when Pornchai first arrived in Thailand after his deportation in 2020. He was only age two when taken from his family, so he had only shadowy memories of his mother. She was determined to make up for that, but then her life was taken from her.

Pornchai is just now in the process of reclaiming his mother’s house. He is moving into it, in the village of Phu Wiang, where he was born. The house is not yet completely built and has been left dormant for 26 years. Pornchai hopes to complete his mother’s dream and bring it to fulfillment. There is much left to do. If any of our readers would like to assist him in this effort, please consult our “How to Help” page.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about restorative justice. Pornchai Maximilian Moontri now enters into a life of true freedom from the nightmares of the past.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Eighth Commandment Has a Day of Reckoning on the Island of Guam

A prayer was offered for a falsely accused priest at the London prison cell of St Thomas More, while on the Island of Guam, a former Catholic Inquisition is exposed.

June 17, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Urgent Note from Father MacRae:

I wrote this post in June, 2017. It is in part about something that happened on the Island of Guam. (Yes, we are back to Guam again!) Former Archbishop Anthony Apuron was accused in 2017 of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s when he was a young priest in Guam. Please read the post, but most importantly please read the Addendum that I have included at the end, which now casts an entirely different light on the case against Archbishop Apuron. The truth will set you free, Scripture tells us, but when all statutes of limitation are abandoned, most of us may not live long enough for truth to be told. Archbishop Apuron did!

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“Hear me out. You and your class have ‘given in’ — as you rightly call it — because the religion of this country means nothing to you one way or the other.”

— Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, London, 1961, p. 122

Sir Thomas More became Saint Thomas More, a martyr for faith and truth when he was executed for “high treason” upon the order of King Henry VIII in 1535. The King demanded complicity from Thomas More in a campaign against the Catholic Church when the Pope denied the King an annulment from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn.

As Lord Chancellor of England, Thomas More surrendered his favor with the King and his Court to defend his Church and faith. The King’s response set in motion the Protestant Reformation in England. Meanwhile, Henry VIII went on to marry a total of six times. Thomas More, condemned for fidelity to his Catholic faith, was imprisoned in the Tower of London and beheaded on July 6, 1535. His head was mounted on a pole at the Tower of London Bridge.

Saint Thomas More was canonized a saint and a martyr 400 years later, and today is honored by the Catholic Church on June 22. On June 22, 2017, Dr. Robert Moynihan visited the London prison cell of Saint Thomas More where, among his prayers, he offered one for me and forothers falsely accused. Dr. Moynihan is Editor and Publisher of the very fine Inside the Vatican  magazine.

The prayer was requested by Suzanne Formanek, a reader in Eastern Europe who asked that readers join in a prayer for justice through the intercession of Saint Thomas More. I am most grateful to them both — but we must all remember that a prayer not yet answered is not at all prayed in vain.

There is a special significance to this development. Readers may recall a previous pursuit of justice before a US court. The outcome was described by Catholic writer, Ryan A. MacDonald in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.” It is worth a visit to scroll to the last segment of that post to see the great irony of Saint Thomas More’s presence in this story.

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Catholic Scandal and the Rule of Law

In the photo above, from A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More faces trial and martyrdom.

I cannot help but ponder, today, how Saint Thomas More might weigh the state of justice and civil liberties on the Western Pacific Island of Guam, the southernmost of the Mariana Islands. For those unfamiliar with the territory, the Marianas were visited by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 and later colonized by Spain. The island chain was named for Maria Anna, widow of Philip II, King of Spain from 1556 to 1598.

In 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, Guam was ceded to the United States. The Japanese captured the island in December of 1941, but it was retaken by American forces in the summer of 1944. In 1950, US citizenship was conferred upon the people of Guam, which remains a self-governed US territory.

Following a trend of reactive legislative controversies across the United States in the wake of Catholic scandal during the last two decades, the legislature and governor of Guam passed and signed into law in 2016 “Public Law 33-187.” The misguided law opened a window to extend civil statutes of limitations in sex abuse claims against institutions such as the Catholic Church.

Saint Thomas More, a lawyer, legislator, and statesman, would likely deem Public Law 33-187  to be contemptible in the arena of human rights and civil liberties. The misguided law opened a retroactive door for lawsuits and other claims for compensation years or decades after existing statutes of limitation had expired. It provided for no standard of justice to separate the real from the contrived.

Like the bishops of virtually every American Catholic diocese where such an unjust law was considered, the Guam version was opposed by the Archdiocese of Agana, Guam. It was opposed because it also opens a window to fraud. Many mainland USA legislatures that considered such a law ultimately rejected it as biased and unjust.

I wrote the truth, from my own experience, about why such laws are an affront to truth and justice. In “Due Process for Accused Priests,” a 2009 article in Catalyst: Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, I described how some states were duped by nefarious agendas into considering “window legislation” similar to what was passed in Guam and other US territories.

The Facts, the Fraud, the Stories

Those agendas are the fuel that has kept the Catholic scandal in the United States going and growing. Leaders of SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — used the story of Catholic scandal to promote their own interests and line their own pockets. This latest offshoot of the Catholic scandal is but the latest to be exposed, as it was in these pages in “David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

There is layer upon layer in the Catholic scandal as it emerges anew in Guam, and the various layers appear to be a blueprint drafted from what has happened across America. First, there is the layer of the cold, hard fact that a guarantee of a financial windfall is the end result of virtually every claim.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that there are some in our midst who would sell their souls for money. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in New York, a Commission had to be set up to investigate the rampant fraud attempts of those who claimed to have lost loved ones who were not even there and businesses that did not even exist.

After the infamous BP oil rig explosion and its environmental disaster in the Gulf of America, BP had to set up its own fraud commission to deal with a vast number of fraudulent claims for money. The company took out full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal  to describe the multitude of fraud attempts aimed in its direction.

There were two waves in the Catholic clergy sexual abuse story. The first wave came in from the 1960s to the 1980s, when victims and their parents came forward with grave concerns about the behaviors of a very small percentage of priests. In far too many of these cases, bishops failed to use canon law effectively to deal with those situations and instead were too caught up in warding off public scandal. These cases deserved to be compensated and were.

The second wave was a tsunami of far older claims. In 2002, The Boston Globe set in motion a classic New England witch hunt that spread its moral panic. The sheer volume and tone of the public face of the scandal eroded civil liberties for all priests.

The civil liberty of a presumption of innocence was eliminated, and the floodgates were opened for false claims, most of which were many years- or decades-old and for which no evidence exists.

Of the total claims against priests in the United States, a full 70-percent fall into this second category. They have reaped in excess of four billion dollars in uninvestigated, unquestioned abuse settlements. In each case, the accused priests — both guilty and innocent alike — are ruined, permanently barred from any ministry. Noted Boston Civil Rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate described the feeding frenzy in his 2002 article, “Fleecing the Shepherds”:

“There is good reason to doubt the veracity of these newer claims, many of which were brought only when it became known that the [Catholic] Church would settle for big bucks.”

Revelations about lawsuits against David Clohessy and the organizers of SNAP allege a kickback partnership with personal injury lawyers and the manipulation of a scandal-hungry media. I wrote of this phenomenon in “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.”

By no means does this imply that all claims are false. It means that those most offended and harmed by false claims are, not only the priests and dioceses that are the targets of fraud, but also the legitimate victims of abuse whose suffering becomes tainted, suspected and cheapened when the floodgates are opened to invite false claims. Opposing fraud is part of the sacred trust owed to real victims of abuse.

The Eighth Commandment Is at the Heart of Justice

David F. Pierre, Jr. chronicles many such accounts in his landmark book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, the Fraud, the Stories. It exposes one chilling tale after another of priests whose careers and reputations were ruined by false claims of abuse (including, for full disclosure, a chapter about claims against me).

Before the law was passed in Guam, the Archbishop of Agana was himself accused of abuse dating back many years. Cardinal Raymond Burke was sent by the Vatican to investigate the case, but reportedly some of the accusers had declined to answer any questions while waiting for the Church’s ATM to open.

One brave Catholic blogger in Guam has taken up the necessary discussion that the mainstream news media refuses to have. Armed with the journalistic skepticism that was once the hallmark of the American press, “Diana,” on her blog, the Neocatechumenal Way — An Insider’s View, has almost single-handedly brought sanity and truth to the moral panic as it now emerges anew in Guam.

Diana deserves to have her voice heard and shared. Ironically, one of her most-cited sources has been the writings at Beyond These Stone Walls, and especially two that she posted on May 4, 2017, under the titles, “The Injustice Against Father Gordon MacRae,” and “Civil Liberties of the Priests.” When these were printed and sent to me, I was so very proud to see comments posted on them by some of the readers of this blog.

I also noticed that most of the local comments were posted anonymously. The reason, I am told, is that the various agendas behind this story have more to do with quarrels over local property and finances than with child-protection policies. Commenters fear public ridicule or retaliation for posting their opinions.

In such struggles — and Guam has been no exception — great polarization takes place. The result may well be a local sex abuse scandal that has become just one more weapon in the arsenal of hidden agendas and scurrilous motives.

The sole entity for whom none of the secret agendas remains hidden is God Himself. He notes every keystroke written by accusers and defenders alike and knows also the state of the hearts and souls behind them.

This is not a new story. The Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” (Exodus 20:16) also commands certain elements in the law that must remain intact for the Commandment to remain God’s Law. One of these elements is that hearsay, rumor, and innuendo are simply not good enough to bring a charge — not even for God.

Former Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz in The Genesis of Justice  (Warner Books, 2000) describes the origin of the Eighth Commandment as being a false accusation of sexual abuse brought against Joseph by Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39:6-20):

“The Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor’ derives directly from Potiphar’s wife bearing false witness against Joseph…. [The] desperate question — ‘How can we clear ourselves?’ — is answered by this prohibition and the subsequent procedural safeguards that rest on this Commandment.”

— The Genesis of Justice, p. 250

When false witness results in profit, God’s law reveals it as the vilest of betrayals of the law. Jezebel did “what is evil in the sight of God” when she obtained profit from false witness against Ahab (1 Kings 21: 8-14). The law requires that:

“A single witness shall not prevail against any man for any crime or any wrong. Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be sustained.”

— Deuteronomy 19:15-21

As for Guam’s embrace of Public Law 33-187 and any potential for its role in violations of the Eighth Commandment:

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, 1742

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June 17, 2026: A Very Necessary Update

Nine years after writing most of the above post, contacts on the Island of Guam alerted me to a major development in the accusations against Archbishop Apuron, which resulted in him being removed from office and retired without pension.  He is now age 80.

The following query was submitted by me for analysis from the xAI Grok artificial intelligence platform.

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QUERY:

This post was in part about sexual abuse allegations that arose in Guam causing the removal of the Guam Archbishop Anthony Apuron. I defended him in that post. Subsequently a Vatican court determined him to be guilty and sidelined him with no pension whatsoever. He has consistently maintained his innocence throughout, and I uncovered and reported on multiple conflicts of interest from those accusing him at that time.

He is now 80 and alienated but still insists on his innocence. I am in receipt of a May 7, 2025 post by Joan Aguon Charfauros. The title is “Nine Dismissals with Prejudice Filed in Cases Naming Former Guam Archbishop Apuron.” Can you please weigh in on this?

xAI GROK:

Yes, I have reviewed the May 7, 2025 post by Joan Aguon Charfauros (“Nine Cases Dismissed” / “Nine dismissals with prejudice filed in cases naming former Guam Archbishop Apuron”) on the Neocatechumenal Way — An Insider’s View blog, along with contemporaneous local news coverage from KUAM, Pacific Daily News, and Post Guam. Here is a clear, fact-based weighing-in on the development.

What Happened on May 7, 2025

Nine civil cases in the U.S. District Court of Guam were voluntarily dismissed with prejudice via stipulations filed by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. 

• Eight involved allegations of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s (when Apuron was a parish priest in Agat/Hågat, mostly involving former altar boys).

• One was a defamation case.

Key details:

• No settlement, no money, and no other consideration was paid to the plaintiffs.

• The dismissals are permanent — the same claims cannot be refiled.

• Apuron’s attorney, Jacqueline Taitano Terlaje, emphasized that the actions were plaintiff-initiated voluntary stipulations and highlighted Apuron’s consistent denial of the accusations.

Apuron himself broke years of relative silence with a video statement (shared in the coverage), stating in part:

“Over the past decade, I have been unjustly condemned by the media and public opinion because of certain false accusations made against me… Today, the claims made against me in 9 cases have been dismissed permanently… Contrary to false recent media reports, I have never entered into any settled agreement, and I’ve always refused to do so. I also never paid any sum of money to my accusers. Today’s dismissals come from the plaintiffs and are further evidence of my innocence.”

He also noted that the canonical process did not result in his laicization (defrocking), and contrasted this with typical outcomes for priests or bishops found guilty of such crimes.

A follow-up development: By May 2026, reporting indicated the final remaining active lawsuit against him in federal court was also heading toward (or reached) dismissal with prejudice.

The Broader Context Father MacRae Mentions

• Vatican canonical outcome: In 2018, a Vatican tribunal found Apuron guilty of “delicts against the Sixth Commandment with minors.” His appeal was denied in 2019, making it final. He was removed as Archbishop of Agaña, exiled from Guam, and subjected to severe restrictions. He was not laicized and retains his status as a bishop/priest (albeit with no active ministry or pension, per your account). This remains in effect and operates under Church law standards (moral certainty in an inquisitorial process), distinct from civil court standards.

• Your 2017 article: You defended Apuron and highlighted what you saw as conflicts of interest among accusers or related parties, tying it to broader issues of false witness and the Eighth Commandment. Public records show deep divisions in Guam’s Catholic community at the time (involving local politics, the Neocatechumenal Way tensions, Archdiocesan finances/bankruptcy, and the handling of other abuse claims). Some investigative reporting (e.g., Associated Press 2019) alleged Apuron covered up other abusers and destroyed files, but those claims are contested.

Weighing In

This is a significant legal development in the civil realm for Apuron. After nearly a decade of litigation involving serious allegations, the plaintiffs (through counsel) chose to drop all nine cases permanently without extracting any payment or concession. That outcome is unusual in high-profile clergy abuse litigation and lends weight to Apuron’s (and his supporters’) narrative that the claims lacked sufficient merit to proceed to judgment or settlement on plaintiffs’ terms.

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— End of xAI Grok input

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: While the above machinations in pursuit of money were underway, over all this time on the Island of Guam, this other story, which has been ignored, continues to cry to Heaven for justice.

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam (now with xAI Grok’s analysis of that story)

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

In the Desert Wilderness of Prison, a Priest Meets the Devil

After forty-four years of priesthood, thirty-two of them in the darkness of unjust imprisonment, my faith has been sorely tested but I remain a priest in full.

June 10, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Note from Father MacRae: My friend, Pornchai Moontri and I are indebted to Rebecca Virelles for her fine reflection on my life as a priest and prisoner published here last week. It caused me to reconsider this post about a demonic encounter first written in 2023. So much of the aftermath of that story has evolved, and new information has caused me to want to delve into it again. As Rebecca has described in last week’s post, Pornchai Maximilian and I have been on a road less traveled, and now we are far along that road. Your prayers, support and openness to the truth we tell have been the greatest Gospel witness for us.

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In 1945, at the end of World War II and eight years before I was born, the film, Going My Way swept the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Musical Score. The film about a Catholic priest and his efforts to save a dying urban parish was a huge box-office hit in 1945. Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Father Chuck O’Malley, a young priest with a golden voice sent to revitalize a quickly fading parish. Barry Fitzgerald won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the role of the elderly pastor, Father Fitzgibbon. It was a different Church, a different time, and a very different world.

Bing Crosby’s character, Father Chuck O’Malley, saved the day and the parish when he organized a neighborhood gang of street kids into a “bit rough around the edges” choir. Father O’Malley then composed a hit song and taught them to sing it. “Swinging on a Star” topped the charts and won the Oscar for Best Song. The young men saved the church while Father O’Malley saved them. Going My Way also swept the Golden Globe and New York Film Critic Awards.

Now jump ahead 60 years. In 2005 another film about Catholic priests won the Academy Award for Best Picture and won The Boston Globe an ill-conceived Pulitzer for “Public Service.” That scornful film was Spotlight, a one-sided, jaded, cynical effort to smear the Catholic Church and priesthood with a broad brush as “slayers of the soul.” The critics and media were delighted, but one brave journalist, JoAnn Wypijewski, performed a much-needed autopsy on it. Though I never figured into the film, I had a strong presence in its autopsy in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

The 60-year period in between Going My Way and Spotlight saw perhaps the greatest cultural shift the Western World had ever known. Our news media turned left, and the left became its master. Then the Second Vatican Council radically altered the world’s view of the Church. Then Roe v Wade happened and the not-yet-woke Church came down on the side of life. All the attacks hence were really about Roe v Wade. Then the “woke” were born.

On June 5, 1982, as this rapid descent in the world’s view of the Church and priesthood was well into its decline, I was the sole candidate for priesthood ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. How I got to that point is a longer story that I have never been able to fully comprehend. In hindsight, it has elements of the demonic, and I will get back to that.

There is for now a “rest of the story” fully known only to one other person, and that person has since passed from this life. In 1977 and 1978, I spent long hours with this story in the company of Father Benedict Groeschel. Before he became a founder of the Friars of the Renewal (CFR), we were members of the same Capuchin Franciscan Province based in New York. Father Groeschel was aware of all that had happened, and he listened intently to its impact on me. In 1978, he and I together discerned a different path that I had to take. I will get back to that too, but first back up a few years.

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Priesthood in the Coming Cancel Culture

At the age of twenty-one, four years after my high school graduation, I entered the novitiate of the Capuchin Order in 1974. I felt immediately that I was on the right path in life. I did not have much of a family life growing up, and the Capuchin emphasis on life in community drew me in. I also strongly believed that I had a vocation to religious life. One of my friends in the Order grew up in an orphanage, and, like him, I treasured the accountability and support of a religious community that many others took for granted.

I was also a very good student. I had carried a double major in psychology and philosophy on a scholarship at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. I thought I had a perfect balance of intellectual growth, spiritual life, and physical work. When I was not studying, I chopped firewood for long hours each day. A lot of stress was vented, and some wounds long neglected began to heal.

I loved my Capuchin community and I developed many close friendships among its members. Two of those friendships were with classmates from the Western Pacific Island of Guam. We were the same age and often studied together. I learned a great deal about the home and culture they left behind on the far side of the world. At that time, Guam was a mission territory for the Order and several members of our Capuchin province were assigned there. I began to discern that Guam might be where my future lay, so I began to study its culture and native language, Chamorro.

Then tragedy struck. It blindsighted me and forever altered my path. Being far from home for long periods of time had an effect on my friends. One of them began to exhibit signs of extreme stress manifested in paranoia. One night he knocked on my friary door awakening me at 3:00 AM. He was very upset and shaken, and he asked me to come to his room. I went with him and found there a kitchen knife impaled in his mattress with a typed note threatening his life.

My friend was very shaken by this, and I remained with him until dawn and then took him and the evidence to the room of our religious superior. My friend was questioned at length while I remained outside the room. Similar incidents occurred on two more occasions over the next few weeks. I told the local superior of my growing concern that my friend was under extreme stress, and I believed that he had been doing this to himself and needed immediate help.

On the next day, I was again summoned to the office of the superior. I was summoned alone. Accompanied by two other senior members of the Order, he accused me of plotting to murder my friend. I could not fathom what was behind this, but I insisted that my friend was under extreme stress and had been doing this to himself. I insisted that he needed immediate help. Then the superior revealed that he had in his hands the ribbon from my typewriter where the threatening notes had clearly been typed — but not by me.

Under obedience, for the next two weeks I was confined to my quarters and forbidden from speaking with anyone else. I was going through final exams for the semester in that same week. I excelled in them, but to this day I do not know how. This all happened in the spring of 1977.

At the end of those two weeks, the local superior summoned me again. One priest on the formation staff had been skeptical of the story and its outcome, so he spent a few nights in the friary library from where he could observe my friend’s room from a distance. On one of those nights he saw him come out of his room, return with a knife, and then plunge it with another note into his own mattress. My friend was then taken away.

The superior who later summoned me again told me only that his investigation was complete, and that he concluded that I had nothing to do with these events except that I was a friend of the other Capuchin. “You should just forget about all this and keep doing what you’ve been doing,” he said. And it was over.

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Still in the Eye of the Storm

But it wasn’t really over. Because I was barred from discussing these incidents, no one else in the Province was told the truth of this story or its outcome. All anyone knew was that my friend disappeared in the night, and I had been a suspect. I was also very concerned for my friend. I had not been able to learn any of what had happened to him, or why it happened, or where he went. To protect him from any further exposure, I told only one person, about this story and what I knew to date. That person was Father Benedict Groeschel, a psychologist and respected member of the Province. Among all the feelings of betrayal, injustice, and anger at the rush to judgment, I was first and foremost heartbroken.

When I learned that my friend had typed these notes on my typewriter while I was away and then carried out these assaults upon himself just as I had feared, I was furious — not with him but with those in authority in the Order who would not listen because their minds were already made up. I never saw or heard from my friend again, and I never learned what was behind his pleading cry for help made through me. I also never learned what became of him.

I was 24 years old then. I am nearly 74 now, and I still carry this after all these years. I also had no idea then that such devastating false witness would be repeated in my life 15 years later as a diocesan priest.

In 1978, one year after the events described above, the Province gave a strong recommendation, under the direction of Father Groeschel, in support of my decision to transfer to studies toward diocesan priesthood. In the ensuing years, I completed a Master of Divinity degree and Pontifical degree in Sacred Theology at Saint Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore. As written above, I was ordained for the Diocese of Manchester on June 5, 1982. There was one other candidate for ordination that year, but he dropped out just weeks before being ordained.

The story about my friend from Guam stayed buried for the next 42 years. Then, in 2019, a previously unknown factor in the story was revealed to me. A Capuchin priest from my former Province came to this prison for Mass and asked to speak with me after. He told me that he remembered this incident and hoped that I did not. I told him that my life was radically altered as a result of it. He said that he felt partially responsible. He had been pursuing a sabbatical study in Sacred Scripture at Harvard Divinity School in 1977, the same year as the events above. My uncle, a Jesuit priest and renowned Scripture scholar was a faculty member at Harvard at that time, and they had a chance meeting.

I mentioned earlier that there were hints of the demonic in this story. It was in the form of events that were set up like dominoes intended to fall in just the right way and at just the right time to steer this story.

My uncle approached the Capuchin priest at Harvard and asked him if he and I were in the same province. The Capuchin said that we were, and my uncle inquired about how I was. The events written above had all taken place in just the two previous weeks in 1977, but my uncle knew nothing of what had transpired in those weeks. The Capuchin told my uncle about these events, but this was before the discovery that I was not the cause of them. Upon hearing this partial story, my uncle shared with the Capuchin that I had a difficult life growing up in a home and family destroyed by alcoholism. My uncle expressed to the Capuchin that he was glad to know that I had the support of a religious community.

Forty-two years later, the Capuchin priest told me that he shared my uncle remarks with the leaders of my Province in 1977. It was what my uncle innocently divulged that caused the Capuchin superior and Provincial staff to jump to a conclusion that I must have been the deranged person responsible for the threatened acts of violence against my friend from Guam.

Gauging my reaction upon learning of this 42 years later told me how much the wounds left by these incidents still festered. Everyone in this account — the Capuchin priest, my Jesuit uncle, even my accusing religious superiors — all believed they had acted in what they thought was my best interest balanced with that of my friend. The betrayal did not belong to any one person, but I was the only one in this scene who knew of its insanity and acted to save my friend. Forty-two years later, my feelings of anger and betrayal smoldered anew.

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Haunting Echoes from the Past

In 1994, as you know, I was falsely accused again and faced trial with no evidence or corroboration beyond the jaded suspicions of a police officer now known to have been corrupt. Journalist Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of this account in “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.” The demonic dominoes continued to fall.

After being so accused again, echoes of how helpless and oppressed I was during the first such encounter decades earlier were still with me. I became, perhaps understandably, despondent, and again I could reach out to no one. At the time, it was more than I could bear, and I fell. You can read about this in a post that has been in plain sight since I wrote it in 2017. It is, “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.” I could have added the words, “… for the Second Time.”

In September, 2022, I wrote an article in these pages that shocked readers around the world. It might have shocked them a lot more had they known of the crucible of memories I had to face and set aside in order to write it when no one else could. It is a centerpiece of my priesthood. Had I not gone through everything described in this post, I would not have been wounded enough, wise enough, or strong enough to become for another the saving grace that Father Groeschel had become for me.

It was a story long overdue, but justice required it. I meticulously researched it and then wrote it. It is about events in the life of my friend, Pornchai Moontri, and it has eerie echoes of the past. The article is “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

I mentioned earlier that this story has elements of the demonic. I wrote of the devil’s ominous stage presence here, a presence that tips over the dominoes to great effect at just the right time and in just the right way. The post I wrote about this is “Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still.” We will link to it again, and to other posts described here, at the end of this post. For now, Pornchai Moontri and I have both followed the advice of Saint Peter:

“Cast all your cares on the Lord for he cares for you. Stay sober and alert for your opponent the devil is prowling like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your brethren throughout the world.”

— 1 Peter 5:7-9

On June 5, 2026, I marked 44 years of priesthood out here in the Oort Cloud, that distant region of space where, among our Solar System’s detritus, I encounter others cast out among the unwanted debris. Most of those I encounter here have suffered far greater wounds than my own.

Bing Crosby notwithstanding, priesthood has never been going my way. But I have done what is recommended in another post I wrote, “The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost.” I have mourned what was lost. I have let it ascend. And I surrender to the life, and priesthood, that I am called to live now. As I mark 44 years of priesthood in pursuit of the True Presence, in spite of all, the Lord has done great things for me, and perhaps even a few great things through me.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this painful post, and these related posts:

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

And for those Blessed among us who thirst for justice …

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Prison of Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Marking 44 years of sacrificial priesthood, Father Gordon MacRae has been an instrument of Divine Mercy securing freedom for many wounded and imprisoned souls.

June 3, 2026 by Rebecca Virelles

From the Editor:

This Friday, June 5, 2026, marks the 44th anniversary of the ordination of Father Gordon MacRae. On this occasion, we have a guest author. Rebecca Virelles has been a regular reader for years. A while back, she interviewed me about BTSW, which resulted in my article, “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” She then wrote her insightful article, “A Voice for the Voiceless: Beyond These Stone Walls.”

Recently, she has been reflecting on the literature of those unjustly incarcerated. Her aim is to make their lives and writings more accessible to new audiences. She has considered various saints and moral icons from history, and also Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, whose lives are deeply intertwined. We have asked her to share with BTSW readers the part of her work concerning our two friends.

We think it is a fitting way to reflect on the priesthood of Father Gordon MacRae on his anniversary of ordination. We thank God for the gift this priesthood has been to the Church, and we ask Him to continue to bless him and be his strength.

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Dear Reader,

Before you read about the two men named above, please know they are real people, living at the time of this writing, who are dear to many on earth and in heaven. Though you may never meet them in this life, please extend mercy with your heart and read their stories carefully.

Historical Context

Father Gordon MacRae is an American priest who is currently serving up to 67 years in prison. He was wrongly convicted of sexual assault in 1994. At the time of this writing, he has spent 32 years in prison for crimes for which he is wholly innocent, crimes that never took place. Because Father MacRae maintains his innocence, he will never receive parole and thus will serve the full 67 years, a life sentence, unless some other intervention materializes.

The Evidence

In 2005 and 2013, Dorothy Rabinowitz, an award-winning journalist wrote multiple articles for The Wall Street Journal covering this egregious injustice: “Trials of Father MacRae” (2013), “A Priest’s Story” (2005). Dorothy Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the “Champion of Justice Award” from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In 2022, Boston criminal justice and civil rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate also wrote for The Wall Street Journal in “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.” His article revealed new information which came to light about the “falsification of records” of the lead detective behind Father MacRae’s case, James F. McLaughlin.

Additionally, a post-trial investigation by former F.B.I. Investigator James Abbott revealed that Detective McLaughlin threatened a defense witness, a therapist, with arrest if she did not change her testimony which would have helped to exonerate Father MacRae. The therapist had planned to testify that the accuser, Thomas Grover, had never accused MacRae of anything, though he accused several others of sexual abuse. This would have weakened McLaughlin’s case. She stated, “McLaughlin told me he would personally come to my home, drag me out of it bodily if necessary, and force me to appear in court and testify despite my information to him.” Her statement is here: Statement of Debra Collett.

Here is an excerpt of a letter dated October 24, 2013 by a media official for PBS to Judge Arthur Brennan, who sentenced Father MacRae to prison:

“My wife, Penny, and I were present in the courtroom throughout most of the trial of Fr. Gordon MacRae. For all these years, I have had many questions about this trial and much that I’ve wanted to clarify for my own peace of mind. I learned recently that both a superior court judge here in New Hampshire and the NH Supreme Court declined to hold a hearing on the evidence and merits of a habeas corpus petition in this case. Now that state courts seem no longer to be involved, I feel more inclined to approach you on what has been bothering me, as you were the presiding judge.

“We saw something in your courtroom during the MacRae trial that I don’t think you ever saw. My wife nudged me and pointed to a woman, Ms. Pauline Goupil [now Pauline Vachon], who was engaged in what appeared to be clear witness tampering. During questioning by the defense attorney, Thomas Grover seemed to feel trapped a few times. On some of those occasions, we witnessed Pauline Goupil make a distinct sad expression with a downturned mouth and gesturing with her finger from the corner of her eye down her cheek at which point Mr. Grover would begin to cry and sob on the stand. The lawyer’s questions were never answered.

“I have been troubled about this for all these years. I know what I saw, and what I saw was a clear attempt to dupe the court and the jury. If the sobbing and crying was not truthful, then I cannot help but wonder what else was not truthful on the part of Mr. Grover. If he was really a victim who wanted to tell the simple truth, why was it necessary for him and Ms. Goupil to have what clearly appeared to be a set of prearranged signals to alter his testimony? The jury was privy to none of this, to the best of my knowledge.

“Signed, Leo Demers”

His full statement is here: Statement of Leo Demers.

Here is an excerpt of a statement by Steven Wollschlager on October 27, 2008:

“McLaughlin asked me many times if Gordon ever tried to come onto me sexually or offered me money for any sexual favors. He had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about Gordon and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could be easier for us with a large amount of money [...] I was at the time using drugs and could have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money.

“A short time later after being subpoenaed to Court, I had a different feeling about the situation. I did not want to lie or make up stories. After speaking with the Clerk of Courts I was approached by another person. After telling this person that I did not want to be there and I stated Gordon had never done anything wrong towards me sexually or otherwise. I was told I could leave. This person seemed visibly upset that I had nothing to say.”

His full statement is linked: Statement of Steven Wollschlager.

The last to make a statement in support of Father MacRae’s innocence whom I will mention is Charles Glenn, Thomas Grover’s former stepson. An excerpt of his signed statement reads as follows:

“From 1993 to 1997 I was assigned to the Youth Development Center in Manchester, New Hampshire. During this period, my mother Trina Ghedoni was dating and later married to Thomas Grover. Almost every week my mother would visit me with Thomas Grover and on numerous weekends I would receive a furlough and be allowed to go to my home at 410 Prescott St. in Manchester where my mother and Thomas Grover lived.

“During these visits, and over a number of months and years, Thomas Grover discussed the sex abuse allegations against Gordon MacRae with me. Grover often stated to me that he was going to set MacRae and the church up to gain money for sexual abuse. Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church. On several occasions Thomas Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae.”

His full statement is here: Statement of Charles Glenn.

These statements are not the only evidence of wrongdoing, manipulation, and fraud in the case against Father Gordon MacRae, however for the sake of brevity I will conclude with linking Father MacRae’s own synopsis of the case against him: Synopsis of the Case.

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Where To From Here?

Now that we have covered this injustice, we can turn our attention to what Father MacRae has done with his time and talents within those stone walls. He has successfully encouraged many prisoners to seek and complete higher education, and he has helped multiple prisoners prepare for deportation to countries where they had few or no connections or means of assistance. Some of the best work Father Gordon MacRae has done is not material: he has cooperated with the Holy Spirit to bring people, in and outside of prison, to hope and to God despite what they have endured or what they have done. Pornchai Max Moontri, one of Father MacRae’s closest friends, and a free man now living in Thailand, says of him:

“Father Gordon MacRae freed me from the evil inflicted on me. He taught me that this evil is not mine to keep. What do I do with such a story? If Father G had not been here, what would have become of me? He freed my mind and soul from the horror inflicted by a real predator. It breaks my heart that the man responsible for my freedom will now be left behind in prison.”

— Statement of Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in a post written from Thailand: “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Sigmatized.”

Father MacRae has a blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, in which he posts weekly reflections about Faith, Science, current events, and updates on the lives of his friends. Two of my favorites of his posts are: Science and Faith Are Not Mutually Incompatible and In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.

Here is a link to a post written on September 26, 2018, about his friend Pornchai Max titled: Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.

My Analysis: Finding Light in the Dark

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

— Joseph to his brothers who sold him into slavery, Genesis 50:20

The purpose of this essay is to share the literature and lives of those who chose freedom of the soul over physical freedom. Other lives I have recounted and written about were courageous for facing death, but it is inspiring to see two people not give up after so much injustice and years of confinement. It is also wonderful to see how the effects of this hope have spread to others. At the end of Pornchai Max’s sentence in 2020, he faced five months in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention and deportation to a land he had not seen or spoken the language of for many years. This was due to Richard Bailey’s meaningful choice not to allow Pornchai Max’s mother (Wannee) to apply for U.S. citizenship, as he knew it helped him to keep a higher control of the mother and sons. It is likely Bailey threatened Wannee that if she did not do what he said that she would be deported to Thailand without means or assistance, as this was one of the reasons Wannee pleaded with Pornchai Max not to testify against his stepfather, Bailey.

However, what man intended for evil, God used for good. Thanks to Divine Providence, Beyond These Stone Walls readers, the “bridge” Father MacRae and Pornchai Max built, and the hard work and faithfulness of Pornchai Max in meeting these challenges, he was able to find housing and meaningful employment. He now lives in Thailand and volunteers to help those less fortunate. If Father Gordon MacRae had taken the lenient plea deals offered to him, he would not have met him and Pornchai Max would likely have never seen any measure of justice for what he endured.

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Pornchai Moontri was selected to be the flag bearer for Thailand at the Fifth Asian Apostolic Congress in the Philippines in 2024.

“ ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ ”

— Revelation 21:5

Pornchai Max’s triumph over the past is also evidenced by his accomplishments: earning his diploma and graduating as class Valedictorian in 2012, completing social work and psychology academic certificates at Stratford Career Institute “with highest honors”, and completing Theology courses at Catholic Distance University through a scholarship with all “A’s”. The late Clare Dion, who interviewed, visited, and befriended Pornchai Max during his imprisonment wrote, “What Pornchai has accomplished is nothing short of amazing given that he learned English in prison. He and ‘Father G’ encourage other prisoners to become educated, and Pornchai spent time mentoring and tutoring them, especially in mathematics in which he excels. He also spent his days in the woodworking and Hobby Craft shop where he taught safety training to other prisoners on the use of carpentry tools and machines.”

Testimony

A recent comment on the “Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri” reads:

“What a beautiful faith-filled story! What left me with goosebumps is the fact that I know that every word of it is true. I have known Father Gordon and Max for many years. I was a lost 17-year-old when I was sent to prison, and I spent many years in hopelessness before meeting these two incredible guys. Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, they were at my side bringing light to my very dark journey. I am a different person today because of them. I have wept over Max’s journey and the continued challenges he faced even in freedom. But Father G was there for him, even from a distance, and that is true of me as well. I also love dogs and this is the best dog story ever! I treasure you guys.
God bless you.
Bobby T”

A comment on a different post reads:

“WOW! I spent a couple of years in that prison. Because of overcrowding, there were no cells available for me. So I was stuck in an overflow bunk right outside cell #1 on Bravo Pod in Hancock Building. In time I came to see that I was the luckiest person in the world because the two prisoners living in cell #1 were Father G and Pornchai. When the gangs tried to recruit me, they weren’t having it. When a predator tried to extort me, they sent him packing. I felt so exposed going to prison at a very young age that these two guys made me feel perfectly safe. They weren’t taking any BS from me either. In exchange for looking after me, they made me go to school and I earned my high school diploma. That is a miracle because I have always been a dumbass. My worst enemy was Math, but Pornchai was a whiz at Math and got me through it. These two guys were seen by everyone as a team and I was fortunate enough to be their gatekeeper. I was popular by default. I have a lot of gratitude toward them both, and I thank them for their patience with me. I admire Pornchai so much more now to see that he is a man of deep faith. God bless them both.
With love from Ralph”

According to “Mercy Inside These Stone Walls,” a chapter in a book by Felix Carroll, fellow inmate, Donald Spinner, a Catholic convert, says his faith took root through Pornchai’s example. “Pornchai, especially, has influenced so many people here,” he says. “We all expect Father G. to be a good person, but Pornchai’s life of grace is inspiring to everyone. … The cost of discipleship for me has been the loss of my selfishness. No one can be selfish in such company.”

Conclusion

Evil and injustice are the hardest things to grapple with, especially as we witness our own struggles with light and dark. As others have written before, in our lives we cannot control the evil that happens to us, but we do always have the choice in how we respond. Even after meeting Father Gordon, Pornchai Maximilian could have chosen not to trust in him — he had every reason not to. Yet his courage and hope in setting aside the past propelled him forward, to freedom and to seeing some measure of justice served. Father Gordon could have chosen the easy way out, yet he would not have touched many lives, as several of the comments on his posts attest.

In an echo of one of his writings quoting St. Padre Pio: We often do not see how things are being woven together in God’s tapestry; we only see what looks like a tangled mess on the back. Yet, if we trust and do our part, even in the dark, even in pain, we will do what is right and one day understand it all. That is the essence of choosing the freedom of your soul over convenience, over your family, even over your life. True freedom comes from choosing to do the right thing, the will of God written on our hearts, and returning to it again when we stumble and fall. Our lives look different in the light of eternity.

In the photograph above, Pornchai Moontri is at the center of his graduating class, who obtained their high school diplomas in the most trying circumstances but with hard work and honor. They are smiling at Father Gordon MacRae, who took the picture in 2012.

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Appended by the Author:

Father MacRae has thus far assisted prisoners throughout their deportation process from the United States to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, and Brazil. Each country represents a person, a soul with few or no means or outside assistance, whom Father MacRae aided when most would have looked the other way.

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Rebecca Virelles is a Senior at Arizona State University’s Bachelor of Arts in English degree program online. She served on active duty for nine years and is now a stay-at-home wife and mother. When not studying, she enjoys reading, baking, and traveling with her family. She aspires to write children’s literature one day in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. 

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Editor’s Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this important article by Rebecca Virelles. You may also like these related articles from multiple other writers:

A Criminal Defense Expert Unfurls Father MacRae Case by Vincent James Sanzone, Jr., Esq.

Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

Could Fr. Gordon MacRae Finally Go Free? by Kathy Schiffer at TheCatholic World Report

Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest by David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Truth About Israel and the Truth About Hamas

A recent Wall Street Journal weekly ‘Review and Outlook’ editorial was “The Truth About Hamas.” It kept me awake, and our news media must no longer cover it up.

May 27, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

About the above image: “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” is an 1866 etching by Gustave Doré. It depicts a scene from the Book of Genesis (32:24-30). The Angel contends with Jacob’s strength, but the Angel is unmovable. In the end, the Angel gives Jacob a new name: “Isra-El,” a name which means “One who wrestles with God.”

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Sometime ago at Beyond These Stone Walls, we introduced the practice of publishing an occasional post from a voice other than my own. We created a platform for those posts called “Voices from Beyond.” To differentiate from my weekly post always published on Wednesday, we decided this week to separate those other posts by publishing them on Saturday mornings. They will not appear every Saturday, but when we have one worthy of your eyes and attention, it will from hereon always be on Saturday.

There was a time earlier in the life of this blog when few people in the Catholic universe openly wanted to be associated with it. I remember that in our first month of posting in 2009, we had about 40 readers. This month, 17 years later, we are approaching 40,000 just in the month of May.

Also recently, and our publisher has made note of this, we receive a steady stream of writers asking us to let them publish here. I remember the old comedian W.C. Fields famously saying “I would never want to join a club that would have me as a member.” That seems no longer the case at Beyond These Stone Walls.

We recently received a post from an old friend of this blog, Sheryl Collmer, a frequent and noted writer for Crisis magazine. She merely wanted my opinion on her essay, which she had hoped to publish somewhere else. After reading it twice, and pondering it carefully, I asked her to let us publish it at “Voices from Beyond.” She graciously accepted the invitation. I was very pleased because the timing of it was perfect. It fits nicely as a companion to this post today, which at that moment existed only in my mind. Both posts tell a bold truth, one that is widely covered up by the left-leaning political entities that have hijacked our news media to the detriment of democracy.

Sheryl’s oddly titled post is “I <Heart> Israel.” I wondered what our publishing format would do with such a title. I did not like it at first, but then I came to love it, which is exactly the point Sheryl was making. I would have been more straightforward, but that’s just me. In my mind, what Sheryl has written is “The Truth about Israel.” It was posted at “Voices from Beyond” on Saturday, May 23, 2026. We will link to it again at the end of this post. I hope you will read it and share it. Israel has unfairly suffered a bludgeoning by the same left-leaning entities that have distorted our news media and have denied us the truth, not only about Israel, but about Hamas as well. It is no secret that for this very reason, our mainstream news media has itself suffered a credibility bias in many polls. Only a small minority now report having any faith that the news media presents the news fairly and without partisan bias.

Like many of our readers, I grew up listening to, and trusting, Walter Cronkite, who engendered in his listeners a comforting aura of truth and trust. It came as a great shock to me to learn after his death that he was actually politically inclined to be a liberal Democrat. It is a tribute to his integrity as a newscaster that no one could have discerned that. He was fair and unbiased, and that is all we ask.

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The Truth About Hamas

Hamas is neither a nation nor a people. Hamas is a Palestinian group that had grown dramatically in the years leading up to the Hamas assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas sought to create a single Islamic state in historic Palestine, which until recently has been largely divided between Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas in Arabic means “zealot.” Hamas is also an acronym for “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,” or “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The group was founded in 1988 as a militant segment of the Palestinian Arab national movement which became gradually radicalized.

Hamas openly seeks Israel’s destruction and this attack has the same impact in Israel that September 11, 2001 had in the United States. Hamas, since 2000, has been designated by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization. Also since 2000, the U.S. Department of State has identified Iran as the most active supporter of Hamas and terrorism. Hamas self-identifies not only as an Israeli resistance movement, but as a mechanism dedicated to the eradication of Israel and, by extension, Jews.

On May 14, 2026, The Wall Street Journal published its weekly “Review and Outlook” editorial. On that day it was titled “The Truth About Hamas.” The Journal has performed a great service to us as consumers of the news. And not only to us. It has also salvaged from the wreckage of widespread media bias the notion that some brave souls in the business of news can present the bold truth to us regardless of how unpopular or discomforting it may be. That one piece by the Journal has blasted open a tightly sealed door cemented shut by a partisan agenda in the news we are allowed to see, hear, and digest. The Journal documented something found in few mainstream media sources: a “Silenced No More,” the report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.

Fair warning in advance: sometimes the bold truth is unsettling, even infuriating. Sometimes it keeps us awake at night. But this is a truth that all the grownups among us must come to know and witness firsthand before we accept any of the distortions imposed upon us by those who package and present our news. The Report is not easy to read, nor is The Wall Street Journal’s capsulized presentation of it. Here are some alarming excerpts:

• “Reading ‘Silenced No More,’ the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas … we were transported back to October 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.”

• “The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.”

• “ ‘I saw them raping her,’ said Raz Cohen, who escaped the Nova Music Festival where 396 people were slaughtered. ‘Then they murdered her. And then they raped her again.’ ”

• “Eden Wessely, who came to Nova to rescue a friend, found and filmed a naked, burned body. ‘Her dress was pulled up, and she was not wearing underwear, not because it burned, but because there was no trace …. Her legs were spread. Her genitals exposed.’ A review by forensic pathologists confirmed these details.”

• “Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: ‘She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I were dead too …. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’ Later Yoni saw ‘a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten Hamas beating and raping her.’ The last one shot her in the head.”

• “A male says he was gang-raped at the Nova site … . The Hamas invaders had been given operational materials including Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists such as ‘Take off your clothes,’ ‘Lie down’, ‘Spread your legs.’ The planned sexual degradation speaks to years of Palestinian propaganda that treats Jews as subhuman.”

• “Former hostage Ilana Gritzewsky says, ‘One terrorist started touching me; he put his hand under my shirt. That’s when I fainted.’ On waking, she was ‘surrounded by Hamas people, my shirt up here, my pants down here.’ After being freed, she learned that they had broken her pelvis.”

These excerpts from the Journal report on the Civil Commission are only a few of the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters that day, and they are not even the most disturbing ones. The Journal concluded by apologizing to readers whose sensitivities might have been offended by such details: “We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an anti-semitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.”

So ends the Journal editorial of May 14, 2026. This report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas contains evidence and testimony of a caliber that equates or exceeds that of the Nuremberg trials.

I, too, wrote of several graphic atrocities inflicted upon young Thai workers who answered an ad from Israel to perform migrant field work there. The tourism-based economy of Thailand suffered greatly during the Covid pandemic. Many young Thai men sought employment in Israel in order to send money home to support their families, They knew nothing of Hamas and its hatred for Jews. They knew only poverty. Then they became the second largest ethnic group to be murdered and raped, and then held captive by Hamas fighters. I wrote about the atrocities that befell them in “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” I, too, apologize to readers for having to read of these atrocities at my blog, but no one else would cover it, except the Bangkok Post. I wanted to be certain that the media distortion that Israel was the aggressor and Hamas was their victim would not find a believer in my pages.

I wrote of Mitchai Sarabon, a young Thai man who faced unemployment in Thailand after his release from the Thai military. As Hamas descended upon the Nova Music Festival to murder and slaughter and rape, Mitchai saved many lives. In the process, he was shot by Hamas in the back, and in the chest, and then again in the head. This very resilient young man somehow survived. Before being shot, he had brought others to safety in a locked kibbutz food pantry. The Hamas fighters were trying to break down the door. It is a testament to the preparations they conducted before launching this assault that their demands to “open the door” were shouted in Thai.”

From his Tel Aviv hospital bed, Mitchai Sarabon, ended his testimony with, “I just want the people of Israel to know that I pray for them every day.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for having the courage to read and face the truth of this post. I once again apologize that you had to read these details here.

I want to also present to you Sheryl Collmer’s brave post published on May 23, 2026 at our “Voices from Beyond” feature. Please read and share Sheryl’s craft, I <Heart> Israel.

You may also wish to read these related posts:

Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel

Iran, by Another Name, Was Once the Savior of Israel

Pope Leo, President Trump and War with Iran

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God

From Creation onward, Scripture often depicts the Holy Spirit as the wind or breath of God. When it swept through Jerusalem at Pentecost, all divisions ceased. 

May 20, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

For a hot summer post years ago, I wrote “Hot Town: Summer in the Slammer.” My title was a spoof of “Summer in the City,” the famous 1969 hit single by “The Lovin’ Spoonful.” I was sixteen years old when that song hit the charts, but my post about it decades later was sparked by more current heat in my life: the long, hot summer days in prison.

The sealed and barred window in my prison cell then faced due west, so on the hottest summer days there was a build-up of heat in a sort of greenhouse effect within these stone walls, and it could feel very oppresive at times. The windows let in heat, but no air. There are no curtains or shades in prison, and covering cell windows is forbidden. By late in a typical summer day, that cell could feel like a crucible from which there is no escape. There is no air conditioning in prison, but I bought a little nine-inch fan, which was great at circulating the heat.

Underneath each cell window was a small security grate, a five-inch high double-grated steel slot venting through the stone wall to the outside world. By summer each year, the grates are so clogged with dust that not even a hint of moving air passed through them. Prisoners were always trying to devise new ways to clean the small vent.

On one of the hottest days that summer, I watched with great hope out my cell window as towering thunderclouds built in the west late in a stifling afternoon. They grew denser and darker, and then the rarest of things happened. A blast of cool wind flowed out of the west, through the security grate, and filled this cell with cool air. Then came thunder and a torrential rain that released all the day’s heat built up in these stone walls. Blast after blast, the cool wind kept coming. It felt like the very Breath of God.

This post is about the wind, but first I owe thanks to playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee for my use of the title of their great 1955 American play, “Inherit the Wind.” The play was based on the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925 in which the famous defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow defended John Scopes in a Tennessee court. A high school biology teacher, John Scopes, was charged with violating state law by teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in science class. In 1925 Tennessee, this violated a state-sanctioned fundamentalist view of the biblical account of Creation. I wrote about our culture’s conflict between science and religion in “Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?”  Religion is not a topic for scientific inquiry, and science should not be refuted in the name of religion. Those are human conflicts, not God’s.

Most people do not know that “Inherit the Wind,” — both the play and the classic 1960 Spencer Tracy film — first borrowed the title from the Book of Proverbs: “He who troubles his household will inherit the wind, and the fool will be a servant to the wise.” (Proverbs 11:29). It is just possible that the Book of Proverbs itself borrowed the phrase from an even more ancient source: the followers of Pazuzu, the Assyrian god of wind and pestilence. In some ancient Mesopotamian religions, “an ill wind” carried the spirits of demons, and so to inherit the wind could mean generations of suffering for one person’s sin.

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On the Day of Pentecost

I borrowed the title, Inherit the Wind, with a very different connotation. There are 181 references to wind in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, and many of them are equated with a sacred wind or with the Breath of God. The Hebrew word for both “breath” and “wind” is “ruah,” and the Hebrew name for the Holy Spirit is “ruah ha-Qodesh,” simultaneously meaning the Spirit of God, the Wind of God, and the Breath of God.

The image of the Spirit of God rendered as a mightly wind is ancient. The very first time I picked up a Bible as a child, I was enthralled by a single image that begins the story of our existence in a created Universe with God. It was told in a few simple sentences that taught nothing about the science of cosmology except the most basic fact that I described in a science post, “A Day Without Yesterday.” It had to do with the fact of Creation, not the mechanics of it, and as a child it filled me with wonder:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

— Genesis 1:1-2 RSV

Some biblical translations render that phrase, “a mighty wind from God was moving over the surface of the waters.” The image this raises is striking. If you have ever seen a film depicting raging winds at sea, the result is chaos.

The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV Catholic Edition) translated this more literally: “A Wind of God swept over the face of the waters.” The only thing in existence in the Universe that God did not create is darkness. Darkness is the one reality that was already there at the moment of Creation. The darkness is not a description of something evil, but rather of something absent. The Wind of God moved above its unfathomable depth, and then, with a spoken word, “Let there be light,” there was light, and light overcame the darkness.

The Breath of God has stirred throughout human history ever since, and each time it does, we change dramatically. In the moment man became man, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7) in the image and likeness of God. That same image is reflected in the account of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus in the Gospel of John before Pentecost:

“He breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ ”

— John 20:22

I will forever think of that blast of cool wind through my cell as I read the story of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles:

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled the house where they were sitting. There appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each of them, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit.”

— Acts 2:2-4

Saint Luke was a great writer. In three matter-of-fact sentences, with no flourish whatsoever, he conveyed a meeting between God and humankind that would be told for thousands of years. Understanding its setting explains a lot about its meaning, and what happened next.

Some people mistakenly assume that the “Day of Pentecost” referred to is the coming of the Holy Spirit that Saint Luke goes on to describe, but it does not. The “Day of Pentecost” was the reason the Apostles were in Jerusalem in the first place, and “all together in one place,” and it is the reason why “devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) were there. They had all come because Shavuot required a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Shavuot is the second of three “pilgrimage festivals” in Jewish tradition. The other two are Passover itself, and “Sukkot,” the Feast of Booths (or “Tents”), which was the Jewish autumn festival marking the harvest of wheat. The Sukkot pilgrimage to Jerusalem was set down in the Book of Leviticus (23:42) and recalls the forty years of wandering and encampment in the desert after the Exodus (hence the “booths” or tents). Sukkot was the setting for the Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Jesus (eg., Mark 9:2-13). Each of the three pilgrimage festivals — as described in the Book of Deuteronomy (16:16) — required adult men of Israel to travel to Jerusalem to mark the feast.

The Shavuot festival, known in Greek as Pentecost (meaning “fifty days”), is also called the “Festival of Weeks” because it is celebrated on the day after the passage of seven full weeks from Passover. Shavuot originally marked the end of the barley season and the beginning of the wheat season. The pilgrimage required that the first fruits of wheat be brought to Jerusalem as an offering, as described in the Book of Leviticus (23:15-17). The feast fell on the Sixth day of the Hebrew month, Sivan. In Rabbinic legend, that was also the date marking the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai described in Exodus 8, and that became the main reason for the pilgrimage feast. At Shavuot, specially baked twin loaves made from newly cut wheat were presented in the Jerusalem Temple with great ceremony to commemorate the Tablets of the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. In our Gregorian calendar, the Sixth day of Sivan falls on our Feast of Pentecost.

This is the setting for Pentecost in the Book of Acts, Chapter Two. As that driving wind filled the room where the Apostles were gathered, “men of every race and tongue, of every people and nation” emptied into the street at the strange and powerful noise. The mighty wind and tongues of fire described by Saint Luke were reminiscent of the loud wind and fiery descent of the Spirit of God on Mount Sinai at the time of the Exodus:

“On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightning and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in a fire.”

— Exodus 19:16-19

The First Catholic Scandal!

Filled with the Holy Spirit, the Apostles began to address the bewildered crowd gathered in Acts Chapter Two. Each person heard them speaking in his own native tongue, an event that in effect reversed the “tragedy of Babel” described in the Book of Genesis (11:1-9), in which men became divided by foreign languages. In Acts, the Holy Spirit filled not only the Apostles, but many of the crowd as well, “and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” (Acts 2:41).

It was on that day that the Church was born, and before it was even ten minutes old, scandal broke out. Those in the crowd who did not “inherit the wind” immediately accused the Apostles of being drunk at 9:00 in the morning on a major holy day that required a morning fast. Their claims forced Saint Peter into the first Papal defense of the Church:

“Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day.”

— Acts 2:14-15

Saint Peter went on to preach the Church’s first homily, relying on the Prophet Joel (2:28-32) to explain that God poured out His Spirit because the Messianic Age had begun. The meaning of The Passion of the Christ was revealed, and the Apostolic Succession that first preached Christ continues even today in Salvation History as expressed in Catholic Tradition. There is no human institution on earth that has endured for so long in human history. For me, this is the real evidence that the Church inherits the wind. There is no human language, culture, or government that has existed in linear succession for so long. It is safe to say that no human conflict can put asunder what God Himself has joined. To suggest that a 21st Century tabloid sex scandal can destroy the Church is pure folly.

The point is brought home often in the news headlines, and a great example was in a May 10, 2011 column by Mary Kissel in The Wall Street Journal (“A Cardinal’s Warning on China“). Mary Kissel wrote of China’s Communist regime and its interference in the selection and ordination of Catholic bishops. She summed up the state of affairs quite well:

“The Holy See is thousands of years old; the Chinese Communist Party has ruled for little over six decades, and it faces all kinds of internal instability and challenges to its illegitimate rule. When the regime eventually falls, China will be the holy grail of Catholic missions.”

— WSJ Editorial Page, May 10, 2011

I have a particular challenge as I mark this 32nd Pentecost in prison. As I wrote in “The Last Full Measure of Devotion,” more than the loss of freedom itself, I mourn the passing of the world beyond these stone walls. Sometimes my faith strains under the weight of an unjust imprisonment, but when something as simple as a blast of cool wind through my cell on a blistering summer day can remind me of Pentecost, I have hope. We who have inherited the wind do not measure the weight of our crosses, but rather the strength of our conversion and our identity as True Believers.

In the last words of the Resurrected Christ to the Apostles as they gathered in fear of his Crucifixion and the torment of pursuit, Christ never promised them a rose garden instead, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ ” (John 20:22)

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Join us a three-minute meditation on the event of Pentecost as the Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos chant the Pentecostal hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus.”

This post will be added to our Sacred Scripture collection, The Bible Speaks. You may also like these related links from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost

For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Pentecost Illumined the Night

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

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Veni Creator Spiritus

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Pentecost Illumined the Night

Discouragement is the deep spiritual valley of our age. For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Holy Spirit’s light came only at dawn in a long dark night of the soul.

May 13, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I grew up a few miles north of Boston in an area known locally as the North Shore. Well, it is called that in print anyway. In conversation, it comes out something like, “the Noath Shoah.” I never knew that until I moved to another part of the country where people inexplicably pronounce the letter “R.” Anyway, I have lived in so many places since then that I have lost much of my Boston accent, but I can still translate it when I hear it.

There is an old North Shore saying, “Light finally dawns upon Marblehead.” I am not sure of its origin, but it makes logical sense. The seaside town of Marblehead is at the head of a deep harbor north of Boston, so the dawn’s early light is seen there a few seconds later than in other North Shore coastal towns. Its figurative meaning is that some reality that has been eluding us is now finally made clear.

Light finally dawned upon Marblehead today when I set out to write about Pentecost and ended up writing about Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. There is a connection that I had to spend some time ferreting out, and that is when the light finally dawned. I learned something important about her, and in the process, about myself.

But first, I know I am going to have a hard time dropping “Mother” from her name. “Saint” Teresa seems incomplete and already taken. So I guess that like Saint Padre Pio, she will be forever endowed with a title that has become a necessary part of her name. I am going to have to call her Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and it has slowly caught on.

She was canonized on September 4, 2016, the eve of the date of her death in 1997. In life the person she was, the spirit she is, was eclipsed by the sorrowful mysteries of the poor to whom she devoted her life. The images of her presence among the poor, the disfigured, the utterly broken and rejected — even the despised — have always been part of the background landscape of my life as a priest, but to be honest I could never bring myself to linger on those scenes. They were just too painful. They always left me with a sense of inadequacy as a priest, afraid to look upon the broken too long lest I feel compelled to follow her lead.

I admired Mother Teresa’s presence at the peripheries of human suffering, but as a priest I admired it from too much of a safe distance. That troubles me today. I had to be compelled in priesthood to carry the cross of the outcast, a cross that brought me unwillingly to the scene of that post-resurrection appearance to Simon Peter in the Gospel of John.

“Truly, truly I say to you, when you were young, you fastened your own belt and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will fasten your belt for you and carry you where you do not wish to go.”

— John 21:18

I have experienced those ominous words of John’s Gospel in a literal and terrifying way, but I found companions and some inner peace along the way as well. I wrote of one recently in “A Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest.” It was about how disappointment and discouragement have been part of my own dark night of the soul for thirty-two long years, and how Saint Damien of Molokai — whose feast day was observed on May 10 — taught me what my priorities must be in a life among prisoners.

And you know from many posts that I found other companions and mentors in Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio who have shown me by example that my life bound over by earthly powers must be lived out at the foot of Cross. In prison, others have joined me there, many others, but I remain in the dark.

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Come Be My Light

Now I present this new friend at the foot of the Cross in the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but I had to first shed all my assumptions about her. It is a little intimidating that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her witness to the world’s broken, abandoned and poor. In life Mother Teresa was revered as a living saint. I just assumed that for her to be that person, to do the work that she did, Mother Teresa must have been given a gift of daily awareness of the light of supernatural grace that flowed within her and shined through her. Otherwise, I thought, she would just sink into dark desolation just as I have been known to do with far less in the way of grace to count on.

And when I do sink into that desolation, I sometimes stay for days, weeks, months, at one point in my imprisonment before Beyond These Stone Walls began, even years. And if my mail is any indication, many of you have had that same experience. Please, do not come to Beyond These Stone Walls because misery loves company. It really does not. Come here because together we can manage crosses of discouragement that alone might only elude us and crush our spirits. You cannot just go to Home Depot to buy a weed whacker to wipe out desolation. It is best to have someone show you how to use it.

I was wrong about Mother Teresa, about my image of her basking in the reflected glow of the Holy Spirit. About a year after I started writing for this blog, I was given a copy of Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light (Doubleday 2007) and my presumptions about her life in grace were quickly dispelled.

Some of the shallow secular media made a big deal of this book, presenting it as the latest Catholic scandal that the great Living Saint among us had long bouts of doubt and desolation. But for me she became human again, and an icon not so much of living grace, but of grace hard won through great spiritual struggle. Like Saint Maximilian Kolbe, she became someone I could let in, and learn from.

Centuries of Catholic art tend to depict the saints among us with halos, in a state of ecstatic pose before the True Presence. Mother Teresa’s own writings convey her struggle to survive spiritually in the present absence. In that, I can relate. In that, I find much hope. That sense of absence is something I have taken up in other posts (see “Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence”).

Through letters to her spiritual director, Come Be My Light  is a guided tour of the interior life of this courageous woman whose heart “burned with the fire of charity” while at the same time experienced doubt and spiritual darkness in “a true dark night of the soul.” I began to do what she did, to pray not so much to be free of spiritual desolation, but to be free to serve even in the midst of it. Mother Teresa did that well. I get, at best, a C-minus, but I am still reading the book!

A part of it reminds me so much of something Canadian Catholic writer Michael Brandon wrote some time back in “All Things Turn to Good” at his Freedom Through Truth  blog. While writing of the news of the failure of the justice system to pursue justice for me, Michael quoted another Saint Teresa, Saint Teresa of Avila, who once wrote, “God, if this is how You treat Your friends, it’s no wonder that you have so few.” When our friend, Pornchai Moontri, read that quote, it made him laugh. He had been having a hard time with discouragement over my plight, but the quote put it into perspective for him.

Do not read Come Be My Light  in one sitting. Keep it on your night stand and read it prayerfully, a letter a day perhaps, or even reserved for moments in your own dark night. It has gotten me through many of my own. She is fast becoming the Patron Saint of “Get-off-your-priestly-arse-and-do-something-for-someone-instead-of-moping-about!”

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The Advocate

There is a little side story to tell. While composing this post, I had left my copy of Come Be My Light in the prison library where I work, but I had only a Saturday afternoon to finish this post and get it into the mail. The library is closed on weekends so I had no way to retrieve the book. On Saturday morning, I remembered that Father Michael Gaitley had an entire section about the Marian consecration of Mother Teresa in his book, 33 Days to Morning Glory.

But I had left that book in the library as well! When I mentioned that to Pornchai, who was still here with me then, he said, “Well, there’s at least ten of them right here in this unit.” Then it struck me. How is it even possible that out of sixty prisoners in this one prison cell block, ten of them have completed 33 Days to Morning Glory and entered into Marian Consecration? That is one out of every six prisoners in our field of view. So all I had to do was walk to the cell next to mine and borrow the book. Duh!

When I did, I opened to the Table of Contents and was instantly reminded that three of my favorite saints comprise weeks two, three, and four of Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning Glory, retreat. They are Saints Maximilian Kolbe, Mother Teresa, and John Paul II, and all are saints of the Twentieth Century.

I thought I had read this book cover to cover, but while looking at the Table of Contents to find the section on Mother Teresa, I unconsciously thumbed back two pages, and stopped on a name that jumped off the page at me. It was a short review of 33 Days by Father James McCurry, formerly Minister Provincial of the Conventual Franciscans, the order to which Saint Maximilian Kolbe belonged and the Vice Postulator for his cause for sainthood. How could I not have seen this before?

Many years ago, Father James McCurry came to visit me in prison. I had never previously met him, and today I cannot really explain what brought him here except a vague memory that he was passing through and heard of me through a friend of a friend. In the prison visiting room, Father McCurry asked, “What do you know of Saint Maximilian Kolbe?” It was a question that would change my life, and then change the life of Pornchai Moontri, and then others as well. I wrote of this first encounter with a Patron Saint in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

So in searching for a section on Mother Teresa, she pointed me back to an old friend. The interconnections between everyone in this story are mind-boggling. Father McCurry wrote that the essence of Marian consecration is …

“St. Maximilian Kolbe’s mystical intuition about the interior life of Mary and the Holy Spirit in the life of a consecrant; Blessed Mother Teresa’s experience of Mary drawing us into her heart, where Jesus keeps repeating, ‘I thirst’; and St. John Paul’s understanding that consecration to Mary brings us to the source of merciful love — the Divine Mercy poised to transform the world.”

That is when the light finally dawned upon Marblehead! I realized that the world I am thrown into is in fact being transformed in spite of my protests about being here in the first place. Some around me — the poor, the outcasts, the discarded, the lepers, the criminals — are being transformed. How could it possibly have happened that one out of every six of these men around me in prison now lives a life consecrated to Jesus through Mary? How is it that the saints whose intercession I keep pursuing are already engaged in a work that has eluded me? Then I read in the Gospel:

“I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”

— John 14:25-28

This brings to light what Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta learned in the dark. The Holy Spirit was her Advocate not in any obvious glory, but in desolation, and it was from there on the very edges of suffering humanity that she led countless souls to Christ, and witnessed to the world that the Lord hears the cry of the poor.

“It is beautiful to see the humility of Christ. This humility can be seen in the crib, in the exile in Egypt, in the hidden life, in the inability to make people understand him, in the desertion of his apostles, in the hatred of the Jews, and all the terrible suffering and death of his passion, and now in his permanent state of humility in the tabernacle, where he has rendered himself to such a small particle of bread that the priest can hold him with two fingers.”

— Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We could extend the same invitation to Saint Mother Teresa that she extended to the Holy Spirit: Come Be My Light.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about a great saint of our age. You may also like these related posts at Beyond These Stone Walls:

Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence

Saint John Paul the Great: A Light in a World in Crisis

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest

Should the State’s flawed justice be mirrored in the Church? This must be asked and the truth written. But ask as well, “Can a leper priest also serve God?”

May 10, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

This is a post I wrote on May 6, 2015, and everything in it is relative to that time frame. However, just about everything in it also impacts the current time frame. So I am posting it again.

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Pornchai Moontri and I and other friends are just beginning another retreat program in prison sponsored by the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy and the Marians of the Immaculate Conception. One of the texts used for the retreat is, You Did It to Me, one of many such books by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC.

Something happened over the last few weeks that cast yet another, but brighter light on recent events that have so overshadowed Beyond These Stone Walls. The text for the retreat is You Did It to Me by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC. The timing of it is by design, of course, but not by my design. I just nudged Pornchai Max and pointed out a photo of both of us in the middle of the book. “My, for prisoners, you guys get around,” wrote BTSW reader Mary Fran Cherry back then. She alerted me to our photo in the book. The retreat lifted a corner of the shroud that overshadowed my life behind these prison walls beginning on Wednesday of Holy Week.

Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of this in “For One Priest, A Fate Worse than Dying in Prison,” the second of his excellent two-part analysis of a recent court ruling that was a setback in my hope for justice and freedom. I have much gratitude for Ryan’s effort, and especially so because he left you with hope by telling you that I learned of this decision just as I was reading, You Did it to Me.

While reading that book, my eyes were opened a little, just enough to see what discouragement kept me from seeing. It reminded me so vividly of a story that took place on the road to Emmaus at another time of discouragement:

“That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from knowing him … Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

— Luke 24:13-23

Someone might ask that same question of me if I lapse into writing about a Divine Mercy retreat without addressing “all these things that had happened” in the arena of justice and injustice. So I am also most grateful to New Jersey Attorney Vincent James Sanzone for his enlightened analysis of the legal precipice awaiting me and other falsely accused priests in both Church and State: “A Criminal Defense Expert Unfurls Father MacRae Case.” Prior to writing that guest post, Attorney Sanzone wrote a brilliant letter to Pope Francis about this matter, and to EWTN. I believe the EWTN letter may have been what prompted Brian Fraga and the National Catholic Register to publish “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name” (NCRegister.com, March 18, 2015).

Was I discouraged by the outcome revealed to me on Wednesday of Holy Week? Yes, I was. Was I devastated as some have suggested? I was, for a time. Have I given up? Not hardly. That is about all I have to offer about this. More important things have happened, and I have no time to descend into a litany of woe-is-me. Another day, perhaps. It is time now to step out of this arena of justice and all its flaws, and to step back onto that road to Emmaus.

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Voice from Beyond

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, something happened that cast a brighter light — brighter than my discouragement, at least — on the events of recent days. Let me first tell you what happened.

On the evening of Divine Mercy Sunday as this retreat began, Pornchai Maximilian sat in a chair to my right and Michael Ciresi to my left. Along with seventeen other prisoners who joined us, we watched and listened to a DVD presentation by Father Michael Gaitley to introduce the retreat. It was excellent, of course, and Pornchai was riveted to the projection of Father Gaitley on the prison chapel wall.

Every now and then the camera recording Father Gaitley swept over his audience, and there, seated near the back, I spotted a familiar face: Marian missionary Eric Mahl. You may recall that Pornchai and Eric Mahl both had chapters featuring them in Felix Carroll’s great Divine Mercy book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Later they met and became friends and brothers. I nudged Pornchai and pointed as Eric appeared on the wall. Just at that moment, Eric looked toward the camera and smiled. Pornchai smiled back.

The next day a letter arrived for Pornchai. As though right on cue, it was from Eric Mahl. It was a copy of a letter from Eric to some people who are helping Pornchai by organizing an effort to secure his future in Thailand when he is free from these stone walls. During his missionary outreach to prisons, Eric Mahl has had three meetings with Pornchai. On the last one, he was accompanied by Father Seraphim Michalenko who served as Vice-Postulator for the Cause of Canonization of Saint Maria Faustina. I wrote of that meeting in “Father Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.” Eric also wrote of that meeting in his letter:

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“This very holy priest had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Pornchai in the Chapel, to talk to him and get to know him. When [Father Seraphim] and I were on our way home back to the Shrine in Massachusetts, he told me that the peace in that Chapel must be what Heaven is like and that Pornchai Moontri is a very holy and beautiful child of God. I write all of this to let you know how I desire to see this restored child of God out of prison and living free in Thailand where he could help the rest of society.”

— Letter of Eric Mahl

On April 19, the second Sunday evening of our retreat, we watched the second of Father Gaitley’s DVD presentations, and this time Pornchai listened intently while also looking for his friend Eric Mahl in the background. Later that evening, during a small group discussion led by Marian volunteer Jim Preisendorfer, I heard something astonishing. During Father Gaitley’s presentation, he spoke of the eight reasons why we do not appreciate the Trinity. One of them, Reason Number Seven, is “Because we listen to the voice of the enemy.” By way of example, I wrote in my notes:

“Part of Satan’s strategy is to keep us unfocused from our destiny. He lures us into being satisfied with this world so that so many of us just settle for what this life gives us, or despair over what this life denies us.”

When I read my own notes, I could not even remember writing that. It was as though my pen were on autopilot. Then table moderator Jim Preisendorfer asked for a comment on “Reason Number Seven.” No one spoke so I read my note above. Jim asked if I could give a concrete example. “I can,” Pornchai chimed in. He then spoke about a conversation he and I had seven years earlier. Hope seemed futile for him then. I had asked him back then if he had any hope at all for the future. I will never forget his answer, “I don’t have a future I only have a ‘Plan B.’ ”

Over time I came to understand what “Plan B” was, though, I had not heard Pornchai speak of it for a long time. At the table during our retreat that night, Pornchai explained that “Plan B” was his only plan, and it arose spontaneously within him. “Plan B” was to never leave prison. Having been cast into prison with a 45-year sentence at age 18, followed by years of solitary confinement in a dreaded “Supermax” prison, Pornchai had laid out in his mind the only future this life could promise him: to live out his life in prison. To die in prison. He had nothing else to look forward to.

On that night, however, Pornchai reflected what Eric Mahl described. He radiated the life of a restored child of God for whom that dismal “Plan B” was but a long forgotten memory. He spoke of it as a perfect example of how listening to the voice of the enemy can deny us our destiny. I sat there asking myself, “When did this happen. How did it happen?”

Then Pornchai jabbed a thumb in my direction at the table. “When this guy stepped into my life,” he said, “he released me from the grip of ‘Plan B.’ ” Pornchai described how he took a great risk to trust in some vague hope that was covered in a cloud and could not be seen, so he just took my word for it. “Now, seven years later,” he said that night, “ ‘Plan B’ is just an old memory with no power over me, and people all over the world have come together to replace it.”

While he spoke at that table, I looked down at my own thumbs as Pornchai jabbed his thumb in my direction. I could not look up. I knew that if I made eye contact with him at that moment, I would have fallen apart. My own plan for my life and my priesthood certainly never included life in prison for a crime that never took place. It never included being demonized and scapegoated to satisfy the demands of contingency lawyers and insurance companies as Ryan pointed out. It never included pleading for my Church to see the failures of American civil justice instead of just blindly declaring them final and fulfilled justice.

Ryan A. MacDonald charged in a comment a few weeks ago that the American hierarchy’s response to the priesthood crisis has been more like a housecleaning than a healing. My plan for my life never included a dread that my own bishop might echo in Rome the Twelfth Century plea of Henry II about Thomas Beckett “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

My plan for priesthood also never included Pornchai Moontri, nor could I have ever foreseen the notion that the tragedy that befell me could ever be anything other than a tragedy for someone else.

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The Leper Priest

I vividly remember, as a young seminarian in the latter 1970s, watching a two-part PBS dramatization of the life of Father Damien de Veuster, the Belgian priest who in 2009 became Saint Damien of Molokai. I was fascinated by the PBS version. It remains in my psyche as one of the alluring things that drew me toward and kept me focused on a side of priesthood in danger of being lost today, the notion that priesthood is not a job, but an ontological state of being. To see priests “fired” and cast off seems like “Reason Number Seven,” like succumbing to the voice of the enemy as he lures priesthood from its destiny.

When Damien of Molokai was driven across that line between ministering to lepers and becoming a leper, it was seen as a tragedy to his friends, but hindsight sees it as a gift to the Church and the world. When he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, Emily Stimpson wrote of him in “Untamed Saint” in Our Sunday Visitor:

“Saints are made through trials and persecution. And Father Damien had more than his share of those. For most of the 16 years he served on Molokai, he served alone… He begged his superiors to send him help. Usually they ignored his requests. Twice, however, they did send someone. The first was a Dutch priest who complained incessantly. The second was a French priest who accused Father Damien of improper relations with the native women. His superiors and bishop grew tired of his constant demand for help. They considered him an obstinate, headstrong troublemaker. The government shared that opinion, and more than a few officials gave credence to false rumors circulated about him. His detractors heaped every sort of abuse and calumny upon Father Damien … Enduring his own dark night, he felt abandoned by God and unworthy of heaven.”

— Emily Stimpson, “Untamed Saint,” OSV, October 11, 2009

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Knock and the Door Will Open: The Long Road to Bangkok Thailand

Thanks to Bill Donohue, “Pornchai’s Story” made its way around the world and was read to Catholics in Thailand. Pornchai’s Divine Mercy bridge to Thailand was built.

May 6, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I wrote a post recently entitled “Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.” It was an allegory, like the Book of Tobit itself. An allegory is a sort of genre of Sacred Scripture in which a story is told more for its meaning than for its historical value. Every parable of Jesus falls into this same genre. A part of the story of Tobit, and his son Tobias and their interactions with the Archangel Raphael in disguise were all part of the allegory. That does not mean the allegory did not happen. It means only that the truth of the story does not depend upon someone believing it. There was one aspect of the Book of Tobit story that became a centerpiece of my blog linked above. At the beginning and the end of the Book of Tobit there is a mysterious dog whose presence, meaning and purpose remain a mystery.

My friend Pornchai Max and his grueling assimilation to his native Thailand after a forced absence of 36 years and all the torment he endured in that time, also included the presence of a mysterious dog named Hill. When that post was published on April 29 this year, a number of our readers wanted to know what became of Hill. So I went back this week and added an important addendum, which you can read for yourselves by clicking on it at the end of this post.

Now I want to back up about 19 years, in 2007 when Max learned that he would be deported to Thailand at the end of his sentence. He would be taken to Bangkok and left there. ICE would have no further responsibility for him.

Bangkok, the Capitol of the Kingdom of Thailand, is a massive city of about 9.5 million people. In Thai, the great city’s name is almost unpronounceable to the Western World, and the longest name of any city on Earth at 156 characters. I don’t expect you to memorize it, but in the Thai language Bangkok’s name is: Krungthepmahanakorn Amornrattanakosin Mahintrayuthaya Mahadilokpob Noparat Rajataniburirom Udomrajanivej Mahasatharn Amornpimarn Awatarnsat Sakatadtiya Wisanukamprasit.  For daily use in Thai, the name is simply abbreviated to “Bangkok Krung Thep” which in English means “City of Angels.” When Max first told me of this in a phone call, he said, “I’m not kidding. They called it that even before I got here!”

This is a complicated but amazing story that meanders down a long and winding road. Our presentation of it begins in 2006 in a New Hampshire prison cell and threads its mysterious connections all the way around the globe. I n the end you may find any lingering doubts about Divine Mercy falling away. Divine Mercy has opened impenetrable doors for Pornchai Moontri, many of them in otherwise unreachable places.

If you have read my post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner” then you know that Max had been in prison for 29 years, more than half his life, for a crime committed as a teenager, a crime that was set in motion by someone else. You also know that Max was moved from a maximum security solitary confinement unit in Maine to the New Hampshire Prison where we met and became friends late in 2006. That story is told powerfully at the link above.

I had another friend in this prison from Cambodia whom I had helped with the deportation process. He was brought to this country as a child of two, and committed a petty crime at age 18. After a long failed process of appeals, he was deported at age 25 to Cambodia, but spoke not a word of Khmer. One year after his deportation, I received a note from his sister telling me that he disappeared in the capital city of Phenom Penh. He had never been seen or heard from again.

We learned an important but scary lesson from what happened to my Cambodian friend. Since Max was brought to the U.S. as a young child, and has no known family or contacts in Thailand other than distance cousins, the experience of our friend in Cambodia chilled me to the core. I became determined that Max would be ready to live and cope somehow in the immense City of Bangkok when the time came. We had a few years to prepare, but I did not even know where to begin.

How could two men living in a prison cell in New Hampshire with no resources, no online access, and a severely limited budget find and connect with people on the other side of the world? How could I interest anyone in Thailand with the plight of a young man taken from there at age 11, his mother murdered, only to come to the United States to end up homeless and in prison as a teenager? This was not a good place from which to start.

THE SILENCE

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Max told me dismally. “I don’t even know how to learn about Thailand.” I knew I had to start writing, but this was two years before even the idea of this blog was conceived. A day in the prison library produced some addresses. First, I wrote of Max’s situation to Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Manchester (NH). They are, after all, a global network. No response, but no real surprise there. Then I wrote to the national office of Catholic Charities. No response. Then I wrote to the Office of Immigration and Refugee Assistance sponsored by my Diocese. No response. Then I wrote to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network at Boston College. No response. I knocked at the door of every official Catholic agency I could find. No one answered. I knocked, and I waited, and I knocked some more.

I cannot convey in words the utter frustration of writing repeatedly only to have my overtures met with silence. I decided that the problem was not Pornchai’s plight, but rather mine. I told Max that we will have to write all these letters again, but coming directly from him. So we redrafted all the letters under his name. More knocking; more waiting. More silence.

When all of our letters from prison were relegated to the netherworld without responses, I took it personally. I knew we needed a different approach. I asked Max to candidly write his life story — which is an amazing story in and of itself — in as few pages as possible, and let me send it to the few Catholic contacts I had who did not ignore our plight. One of them was Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Once he read “Pornchai’s Story,” he wrote back immediately asking if he could publish it on the Catholic League website. From there, it slowly made its way around the world. We knocked and knocked, and waited some more.

The late Father Richard John Neuhaus — a courageous Catholic writer and editor of First Things magazine — sent Max a personal letter to tell him how very important his story is, not only for Max, but for the Church. Father Neuhaus promised to pass the story along to others. This was a year before Father Neuhaus faced his own untimely death from cancer in January, 2009. More knocking, and more waiting.

Max started receiving letters from other important figures in the Church. One came from His Eminence Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok. Max was bowled over by that letter. Another came from the Rome Office of Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, who had been appointed by President George W. Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

Bill Donohue extending to Max honorary membership in the Catholic League and promised to promised to promote his story. My article for Catalyst appeared at the same time, in the July/August 2009 issue. It was “Due Process for Accused Priests.” As an unintended consequence, Pornchai’s story and mine became linked together.

Pornchai’s Story

Here is Pornchai’s Story:

[From Dr. Bill Donohue: ] As we begin the New Year, we’d like to share with you this moving account of one young man’s conversion story.

My name is Pornchai Moontri, and as I write this I am prisoner #77948 in the New Hampshire State Prison. I come to the Catholic faith after a painful journey in darkness that my friend, Father Gordon MacRae, has asked me to write candidly. This is not something I do easily, but I trust my friend.

I was born in Bua Nong Lamphu, in a small village in the north of Thailand near Khon Kaen on September 10, 1973. At the age of two, I was abandoned by my mother and a stranger tried to sell me. A distant teenaged relative rescued me. He walked many miles to carry me away to his family farm where I worked throughout my childhood raising water buffalo, rice, and sugar cane. I never attended school, however, and never learned to read and write in Thai. Though my childhood involved hard work, I was safe and happy.

When I was 11 years old, my mother re-emerged in Thailand with a new husband — an American air traffic controller from Bangor, Maine. I was taken from Thailand by them against my will, and brought to the United States. This transition was a trauma to be endured. A month after my arrival in Bangor, my new stepfather’s motive for importing a ready-made Thai family became clear. I was forcibly raped by him at age 11, an event that was to be repeated with regularity over the next three years. I was a prisoner in his house, and resistance was only met with violence against me and against my mother. I was all of 100 pounds. I cannot describe this further. Welcome to America!

Being one of only three Asians in 1985 Bangor, and speaking little English, I did not readily comprehend my new names. “Gook,” “V.C.” and “Charlie” meant nothing to me, but I could sense the scorn with which such names were delivered. Because my English was poor, I was treated as though I was stupid. Part of my humiliation was that I had to get a paper route at age 12, and my earnings were taken from me to pay for the “privilege” of living in my captor’s house. Stephen King’s home was on my paper route. Mr. King once gave me a Christmas bonus of 25¢ for delivering his newspaper all year. The horror stories he wrote about Maine are all true. Remember the one with the evil clown? It’s true.

When I was 14, my English was better. I was a little bigger, and a lot stronger — and nothing but angry. Anger was all I had. So with it I fled that house and became a homeless teenager in and around Bangor. One day the Bangor police actually picked me up and forced me to go “home.” I would rather have gone to one of the ones Stephen King wrote about. I just fled again and again, and ended up at the Good Will Hinckley School for people like me. I was there for a year and got kicked out for fighting. I was always fighting. I fought everyone.

Back on the streets of Bangor, I began to carry a knife. At 17 and 18, a lot of people were after me. I lived under a bridge for a while and sometimes my mother would bring me things. I tried to climb out of the deep hole I was in by signing up for night classes at age 18 to finish my high school diploma. I was kicked out of Bangor High School for punching the principal.

One night, at age 18, something that lived in me got out. I got very drunk with friends, and we walked into a Bangor Shop & Save supermarket to buy cigarettes. I barely remember this. In my drunken state, I opened a bottle of beer from a case and started to drink it. The manager confronted me and ordered me to leave. I tried to flee the store, but the manager and other employees then tried to keep me there. I tried to fight them off to flee. When I got outside, a manager from another Shop & Save had witnessed the incident and pounced on me. I was 130 pounds and was pinned to the ground by this 190-pound man. I think something snapped in my mind. IT was happening again. I fought, but his dead weight was suffocating me. The newspapers would later tell a different story, but this was the truth, and it is all I remember.

In jail that night, I was questioned for three hours. I was told that I had stabbed a man and was charged with attempted murder. I have no memory, to this day, of stabbing the man. The next morning, I awoke in a jail cell and was told that I was charged with Class A murder. The man had died during the night. I was told that I blew a .25 on the Breathalyzer, but the result was so high it was discarded as an error.

My stepfather could have hired expert counsel, but it was clearly not in his best interest that my life be evaluated, so I was left in the care of a public defender who wanted this high profile case off his desk. There was talk about the Breathalyzer, and “level of culpability,” and things like “defensive vs. offensive wounds,” but in the end there were no theories, no experts and no defense. I was terrified of being abandoned. My mother came to me in jail and pleaded with me to protect her and “the family” by not revealing what happened in my life. So I remained silent. I offered no defense at all. My co-defendant told the truth of my being pinned down, but he was not believed. I was convicted of “Class A murder with deliberate indifference” and sentenced, at age 18, to 45 years in a Maine Prison. Maine has no parole.

I was also sentenced with the soul of the innocent man whose life I took — despite my being unable to remember taking it. The mix of remorse and anger was toxic in prison, and I gave up. Prison became just an extension of where I had already been. My anger raged on and on, and I spent 13 of my 15 years in prison in Maine’s “supermax” facility for those who can’t be trusted in the light of day.

Five years into my imprisonment, I learned one night in my supermax cell that my mother and stepfather had relocated to the Island of Guam where my mother was murdered. She was pushed from a cliff. [The story that was told to Pornchai, but it was false.] The only suspect was her husband but there was no evidence. I was now alone in my rage.

After 14 years of this, the Maine prison decided to send me to an out-of-state prison. I had no idea where I was to be sent. I arrived in the New Hampshire State Prison on October 18, 2005 dragging behind me the Titanic in which I stored all my anger and hurt and loss and loss and loss — and guilt.

I started my time in a new prison by getting into a fight and ended up in the same old place — the hole. When some months went by, I was given another chance. I was sent to H-Building where I met my friend JJ, an Indonesian who was waiting to be deported. JJ introduced me one day to Gordon, who he said was helping him and some others with appealing their INS removal orders or with preparing themselves to be deported. He seemed to be the only person who even cared. JJ trusted Gordon, so I had several conversations with him. A few months later, I was moved to the same unit in which he lives in this prison. We became friends.

By patience and especially by example, Gordon helped me change the course of my life. He is my best friend, and the person I trust most in this world. It is the strangest irony that he has been in prison for 13 years accused fictionally of the same behaviors visited upon me in the real world by the man who took me from Thailand. I read the articles about Gordon in The Wall Street Journal last year. I know him better, I think, than just about anyone. I know only too well the person who does what Gordon is wrongly accused of. Gordon is not that person. Far from it. It is hard for me to accept that laws and public sentiment allow men to demand and receive huge financial settlements from the Catholic Church years or decades after claimed abuse while all that happened to me has gone without even casual notice by anyone — except, ironically, Gordon MacRae.

On September 10, I will be 34 years old. I have been in prison now for nearly half of my life, but in the last year I have begun to know what freedom is. My anger is still with me and it always lurks just below the surface, but my friend is also with me. We both recently signed up for an intense 15-week course in personal violence. He is doing this for me. I spend my days in school instead of in lock-up now, and I will soon complete my High School diploma. Gordon helped me obtain a scholarship for a series of non-credit courses in Catholic studies at Catholic Distance University. In the last year, with help and understanding, I have completed programs offered in the New Hampshire prison. One day I felt strangely light so I looked behind me, and the Titanic was not there. I parked it somewhere along the way. I have put my childhood aside. Now I am a man.

In March of this year, after 15 years in prison, I was ordered by an INS court to be removed from the United States and deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence in 17 to 20 years or so. Gordon hopes that I can seek a sentence reduction so that I can return to Thailand at an age at which I may still build a life. There are many obstacles. The largest is that I do not speak Thai any longer and I never had an opportunity to learn and to read and write in Thai. We are working hard to prepare me for this. Though years away, it is a very frightening thing to go to a country only vaguely familiar. I have not heard Thai spoken since age 11, 23 years ago. There is no one I know there and no place for me to go. I have no home anywhere.

Along this steep path, I have made a decision to become Catholic. The priest in my friend has not been extinguished by 13 years in prison. It is still the part of him that shines the brightest. Gordon never asked me to become Catholic. He never even brought it up. I t is the path he is on and I was pulled to it by the force of grace, and the hope that one day I could do good for others. Gordon showed me a book, Jesus of Nazareth, in which Pope Benedict wrote: “The true ‘exodus’…consists in this: Among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.”

I am taking a correspondence course in Catholic studies through the Knights of Columbus and I look forward to the studies through Catholic Distance University. I go to Mass with Gordon when it is offered in the prison, and our faith is always a part of every day. When I return to the place I haven’t seen since age 11, I want to go there as a committed Catholic open to God’s call to live a life in service to others. It is what someone very special to me has done for me, and I must do the same.

My friend asked me to sit down today and type the story of my life and where I am now. He asked me to let him send this to a few friends who he says may play some role — directly or indirectly — in my life some day. The account is my own. What Father Gordon added was hope, and somehow faith has also taken root. In prison, hope and faith are everything. Everything!

[Written by Pornchai Moontri in 2008 and published by the Catholic League.]

Thanks to Bill Donohue and the Catholic League, “Pornchai’s Story” made its way around the world and was read to Catholics in Thailand. Pornchai Moontri’s Divine Mercy Bridge to Thailand was built despite many obstacles.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Pornchai’s story does not end here. There were other miracles yet to be told, but they are told in other posts here:

Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”