“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Woe to You, Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites!
Pharisees and Sadducees appear in the Bible only in the period between the Old and New Testaments. Their only common ground was opposition to Jesus and each other.
Pharisees and Sadducees appear in the Bible only in the period between the Old and New Testaments. Their only common ground was opposition to Jesus and each other.
October 14, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
In Catholic liturgy, Scripture Readings follow a three-year cycle. Having a long-running blog means encountering the same Gospel passages every three years. The Gospel from Saint Matthew (22:15-21) for the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time describes one of the many encounters between Jesus and the Pharisees who “plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech.” The question they posed to entrap him was “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?”
Both the trap and the question turn out to be most important. I explored why this is so the last time this passage arose in our liturgy three years ago. It is a prelude to this post that has since been ensconced in our collection of Scripture posts called “The Bible Speaks.” We will link to the specific post again at the end of this one. For Salvation History to be fulfilled in our lives, we must answer the Pharisaic question for ourselves: “What Belongs to Caesar and What Belongs to God”
In Sacred Scripture, the arrival of the New Covenant in Christ signaled the end of Israel’s separation from the Gentiles and the beginning of a global family of God. We still struggle with our differences, and the Pharisees of the Gospel personify that struggle.
I have learned something about myself from them. In the United States, at least, we are in the midst of an election cycle in which our political differences take center stage. The divisions in the television ads are already getting on my nerves. Nonetheless, I find loathsome the political positions of one of those parties — the one I do not identify with, but did at one time in my life. I am learning, with a degree of humility, to loath the positions but not the persons within that party who promote them.
If I were to do so, I would cross the line between what I believe is righteous and what in effect becomes self-righteous. The Pharisees in the Gospel could not bring themselves to see through that distinction. So they faded from view in the Word of God.
In almost every instance, the Pharisees’ presence in the Gospel is beneath a dark cloud of suspicion and controversy. In the Gospel account of their question posed to Jesus about taxes and Caesar, for example, their motive was not to answer the question, but rather to expose Jesus as a false Messiah.
The Pharisees did not exist in the Old Testament. Their rise came with the Roman occupation of Palestine. In their determination to be rid of this foreign power, their agenda at every turn was at odds with the Gospel message of Jesus. Their goal was for Israel to separate itself from all gentile impurity and defilement. The very name, “Pharisee,” means “separated one.” Only in separation from all gentile influence, they believed, could God rescue his Chosen People from the political clutches of Roman occupation.
It was a tall order that the Pharisees took upon themselves, deciding in this or any outcome not with God but for God. If God had other plans, they were not immediately known to the Pharisees. The Crucifixion of Christ did not bring about the expulsion of Rome, but rather, ultimately, the conversion of Rome.
The Rise of the Sadducees
The next Sunday Gospel, for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Matthew 22:34-40), begins with a statement, “When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking, ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’” The Sadducees accepted only the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, called the Books of Moses, as authentic Scripture and the sum total of the biblical narrative. As usual the Pharisees did not ask this question to be instructed by Jesus but rather to trip him up and discredit him before the Sadducees. Jesus responded by strategically citing one of the books of Moses (Exodus 3:6),
“I am the God of your Fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look upon the face of God.”
The lawyer-Pharisee would discredit Jesus before the Sadducees if he cited any other Scripture.
This particular quote from Jesus is significant for both Sadducees and Pharisees. The Pharisees knew well that the Sadducees did not accept any Scripture beyond the five books of Moses. They also did not accept the Jewish belief in the immortality of the soul or life after death. What Jesus here proposed — that God is the God of the living, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob — is theological evidence that though they were long gone from this world, they still lived in some form in another. This is a truth I wrote of in “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.”
For the Pharisees, the 613 commands of the Mosaic Law are distilled into two prescriptions: Love God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and your neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). These citations would have satisfied the Sadducees if the Pharisees had, as was typical, conveyed the response of Jesus to the Sadducees. They were all about promoting division, even within the Scriptures. And so Jesus answered the question of “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” with
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
The presence of the Sadducees in the Gospel is much more brief than that of the Pharisees. But, like the Pharisees, the Sadducees were also cast in a negative light, and not only by the Gospel narrative but by the Pharisees themselves. The two sects were in bitter opposition about the goals and agendas of an occupied Israel. The Sadducees emerged as a political and religious interest movement around the Second Century BC. Their name is derived from the High Priest, Zadok, who served under King Solomon (1 Kings 2:35). The Prophet Ezekiel (40:46) reports that their descendants were bestowed with exclusive rights to exercise ministry in Jerusalem. The Sadducees were closely associated with the Temple priesthood (Act 4:1, 5:17). They held official positions representing Old Covenant Judaism, and were charged with maintaining relations between Israel and the Roman occupation.
Most of the Sadducees were wealthy aristocrats. Unlike the majority of Jews, the Sadducees rejected many of the beliefs of Israel. They were notoriously opposed to the Pharisees, who were commonly respected by the masses. In addition to rejecting all Scripture except the Pentateuch, the Sadducees rejected belief in an afterlife, resurrection, angels, and the immortality of the human soul.
The Gospels reveal but a single direct dispute between the Sadducees and Pharisees, though there were likely many others. They were like a tag team, taking turns attempting to discredit Jesus while also discrediting each other. All three Synoptic Gospels report one dispute between the two factions (Matthew 22:23-33, Mark 12:18-27, Luke 20: 27-38). While Jesus was teaching in the Temple, the Sadducees posed what they contrived as a theological puzzle believing that it would implode his teaching. They presented the case of a woman who had several husbands during her life. “If all her husbands are raised, whose wife will she be in the afterlife? Knowing what they do not believe, Jesus deliberately cited the Pentateuch example of Exodus 3:6 demonstrating that souls live beyond death. This was the dispute that silenced the Sadducees and began this section of our post. The Sadducees then fade from view in the New Testament.
Scribes and the Woes of Being a Pharisee
In the Old Covenant Testament, a scribe was an officer of the King’s Court. It was a strictly political position in which the scribe would act as a secretary and ambassador of the king. The Prophet Ezra was a scribe of the Persian court before coming to Jerusalem. (See Esther 3:12.) But Ezra was also a scribe in the religious sense, becoming an expert in interpreting and applying the Laws of Moses in all the circumstances of Jewish life.
Over time these religious dimensions became the dominant identity and purpose of each scribe. By the time of the New Testament, a Jewish scribe was not a political figure at all. But the scribes became caught up in the religious dominance of Israeli life. They began to serve at the pleasure of the Pharisees.
Parallel to this development, the Pharisees’ own disciples began to reflect their masters’ dismay over the presence of Roman occupation in the lives of the Jews. Their disciples also went to extreme measures to eliminate the influence of Jesus.
And so both the Pharisees and their disciples became the objects of scorn within the Gospel narrative, which in nearly every instance presents them in a negative light.
The Hebrew word, “Hoy” is translated as “Woe” in English. It is an interjection of anguish or lament offered by those who are mourning the dead (1 Kings 13:30), or an interjection of fear of a future prospect. When a person in the Bible utters a “Woe” for himself, he despairs for his life. Prophets uttered “Woe” as a warning of God’s judgement on sinful cities or nations. (Isaiah 10:5) Uttering “Woe” serves as a denunciation of evil, an oracle that one is on a path that leads to death or destruction. The Gospel of Saint Matthew, (Chapter 23) contains a litany of Woes against the scribes and Pharisees:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You shut the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in.”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”
“Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred.”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin while neglecting the weightier matters of the law, such as justice and mercy and faith. … You blind guides strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and the plate but inside are full of extortion and rapacity (avarice).”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful but within are full of death and uncleanness. You, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves, but you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify and scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zachariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all this will come upon this generation.”
— Matthew 23:13-36
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Writing this post has caused me to undergo a good deal of self-reflection. Few of us in the priesthood can escape every facet of this stinging rebuke against the Pharisees. I do not indemnify myself, but I understand it as a summons to ongoing conversion that we must all undertake before we need the services of an undertaker. Life here is short and eternity is pressing upon us all with hope for a better future.
Please share this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
What Belongs to Caesar and What Belongs to God
Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God
The Resurrection of Christ: Further Along the Road to Emmaus
The Law and the Prophets and the Transfiguration of Christ
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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 Wall Street Journal Tells the Truth About Hamas
A recent Wall Street Journal ‘Review and Outlook’ editorial told “The Truth About Hamas.” The WSJ also told the truth about me as well and so it has my attention.
A recent Wall Street Journal ‘Review and Outlook’ editorial told “The Truth About Hamas.” The WSJ also told the truth about me as well and so it has my attention.
October 7, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
“Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” is an 1866 etching by Gustave Doré. It depicts a scene from the Book of Genesis (32:24-30). An Angel of God contends with Jacob’s strength, but the Angel is immovable. In the end, the Angel gives Jacob a new name: “Isra-El,” a name which in Hebrew means “One who has contended with God.”
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Toward the end of September as it gave way to October this year, we have featured posts about angels. Their presence in our Scriptures has come to mean a lot to me about truth and justice and the notion that we are not alone. Fake UFO sightings just do not fill the void for me or for us. I have little confidence that our news media always presents truth and justice in this present, troubled age. The word angel in Scripture means messenger, especially a messenger from God.
The image atop this post is an etching by Gustave Dore (“Jacob Wrestles with the Angel,” 1866) depicts the biblical Jacob as he wrestles with the messenger of God as described in Genesis:
“Jacob was left alone; and a man [who was really and angel] wrestled with him until the break of day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, ‘Let me go for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ And the man said to him, ‘What is your name?’ and he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with man and you have prevailed.”
— Genesis 32:24-30
In the end, the Angel gives Jacob a new name: “Isra-El,” a name which means “One who wrestles with God.”
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 surprise 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 of our news reporting, and especially so in news from Heaven.
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 the October 7 attack had the same impact on Israel that September 11, 2001 Islamic assault had on 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 the nation of 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: “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 but potent 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 and The Wall Street Journal. 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. May you also have the courage to share it. 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
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.”
Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle
On September 29, the Church honors the three named angels of Sacred Scripture, the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and on October 2, the Guardian Angels.
September 29, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
“He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.”
— Psalm 91:11
The September 29 Feast Day of the Archangels of Sacred Scripture has been an important event in the life of this blog and in my life as a priest and prisoner excluded from justice among earthly powers. To honor that sacred day we are posting a day early this week. Our post extends from this date until October 2, a date reserved in 1670 by Pope Clement X to honor our Guardian Angels in close proximity to Michaelmas.
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The Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo, was a Catholic convert best known for his acclaimed novel, Silence, which I read in my early years in prison. It had an enormous impact on me. It is a small book, about 200 pages, first published in Japanese in 1969. The focus of much of Endo’s writing reflected his struggles, as one translator described it, “with the anguish of faith and the mercy of God.”
I read it at a time when I, too, was struggling with both. It is sometimes less of a struggle, and therefore a temptation, to simply not believe. There is a scene in this powerful book that left me spellbound. The story is about a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, who entered Japan in the 16th Century at the height of Christian persecution at the hands of the Shogun. That is the Japanese name for the military dictatorship that ruled Japan over seven centuries from 1192 to 1867. The name “Shogun” is a contraction of the Japanese “seii tai shogun” (barbarian-hunting warriors).
Father Rodrigues was among the “barbarians” hunted by the Shogun military, the samurai, under a constant threat of public torture and death. The scene that made me shudder most was a description of how Father Rodrigues entered Japan. Foreign ships were barred from its ports so the ship that bore him secretly approached a remote part of the 16th Century Japanese coast in the dark of night. The priest jumped ship and swam to shore in the pitch blackness with nothing but the clothes on his back and no idea of where, or to whom, he would go. The fear of the dark unknown and the courage it took to overcome it was vivid and staggering.
Darkness is itself a character in this highly symbolic novel. Father Rodrigues spent a good deal of time in a brutal Shogun prison in a constant state of darkness and near starvation. At one point, in an intense scene of fear and despair, he asked — and it is from this that the book takes its title — “Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent?”
I have asked that same question many times in the dark of prison. For the character of Father Rodrigues, however, the silence of God was finally broken. He was tortured by the Shogun in order to force him into publicly trampling on the “fumie,” the Japanese term for a sacred icon. It was a crucifix. Despite the torture, Father Rodrigues refused and endured. Then he was forced to watch while 30 Christian converts were lined up one by one to take his place for torture unless he trampled on the crucifix. An inner voice came to him:
“Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know the pain of your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross!”
— Silence, p.171
Father Rodrigues trampled upon the crucifix.
Spiritual Battle
Upon first reading, that excerpt may seem a betrayal. However, digging a little deeper into the words that came to the priest unveils a profound soteriology, the theology of salvation. The priest bore his own suffering, but by his actions he redirected the suffering destined for his converts onto Christ. “It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
I was surprised to learn that Shusaku Endo left this life leaving behind the life of his fictional tormented priest, Sebastian Rodrigues — on the Feast of Michaelmas. That was the old English name for the feast day of what was once called Saint Michael and All Angels on September 29. In the Catholic calendar it is now the Feast Day of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, the only angels in the biblical record whose personal names are revealed.
The September 29 date was established in the Sixth Century when on that same date the Church of Saint Michael and All Angels was dedicated on the Salarian Way in Rome. The feast day was called “Michaelmas,” meaning “the Mass of St. Michael.” In British custom, it was one of the “quarter days,” traditionally marked by the election of magistrates and the beginning of the legal and university terms. This may have been because — or the cause of — the designation of Saint Michael as the Patron of Justice.
It was on another date — the Feast Day of the Guardian Angels on October 2 — that I discovered in prison that the silence of God is but an illusion. God has spoken volumes throughout all of human history, and His megaphones are Scripture, Tradition, and the ongoing revelation of grace in our lives. Justice is also not just an elusive and singular event, but a cosmic guarantee, and Saint Michael is its manifestation.
This is a difficult concept that I will try to convey to whatever extent I understand it myself. Scripture suggests to us that the conflicts we face and the struggles we endure in our lives on Earth have an unseen spiritual dimension. The Catholic Biblical scholar, Scott Hahn, also a convert, expressed this in his terrific little book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God’s Holy Ones (Image Books, 2014):
“St. Michael is mighty among the angels. The Book of Revelation (12:7ff) depicts him as the commander of the heavenly host of angels as they battle Satan and the rebellious spirits .... We know how the battle ends, and we know Michael is victorious (12:10). Still, the war will rage on until the final consummation of history.”
— Angels and Saints, p. 84
From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have invoked Michael as a guardian, patron, and leader in spiritual warfare. Our troubles and struggles in this world are not always simple anxieties over material discomforts, painful relationships, or the tragedies that occur in our lives. They are also manifestations of spiritual battle, and should be seen and resisted as such. People of deep faith recognize the spiritual battles within themselves and their environments, and they rely on faith and spiritual allies to defend against them.
I have suggested previously that priests especially are targets of spiritual warfare, inundated by constant temptation in a culture locked in spiritual combat between Heaven and hell. I have cited a Holy Week post of mine that exemplifies the most active goal of Satan: to prevent our reception of the Eucharist and undermine its truth. Every time I write about this, it is followed by days or weeks of spiritual struggle and painful events all around me. This is clearly a story “someone” does not want exposed. The post in which I first exposed this is “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.”
The Art of War Requires Allies
For 23 years, I had been living in the Hancock Building in this prison complex. For the first six, though I had done nothing to warrant it, I was forced to live in a place with eight men per cell. Words cannot express the assault on the psyche and spirit that life in such a constant environment produced. Just about everyone living there was given an opportunity to move to better housing within a year. I was there for six years.
In that same six years, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, was in the neighboring state of Maine living in the spiritual madness of endless solitary confinement. We lived with polar opposite prison anxieties, and each was in its own way devastating mentally and spiritually.
In 2000, I was finally moved to a saner place with two prisoners per cell. In 2006, Pornchai Moontri arrived. For the next 11 years we lived in the same cell. Then, in 2016, both of us, along with 94 others, were forced in a mass migration back into the place with eight prisoners to a cell. It was because of a development in the prison that had nothing to do with us. We were promised a return to a better housing situation in a matter of weeks. One year later, we were both still there.
In mid-July, 2017, I was summoned from my job as the legal clerk in the prison law library and handed a few trash bags. After 23 years in the dreaded Hancock Building, I was given one hour to unravel from it and move to another unit on the opposite end of this prison complex. I was told that Pornchai would be joining me there on the next day. After my arrival in the new unit, another officer told me that Pornchai was supposed to come with me, but some unseen and nefarious hand changed that order and Pornchai was to be sent somewhere else.
The next day, from a top floor stairwell outside the prison law library where I work, I saw Pornchai in the distance looking forlorn as he wheeled a cart in the opposite direction from where I now lived. I thought I would never see him again. It was a crushing blow for us both. I knew he would be facing deportation in a few years and now would face it alone. I cannot make sense of what happened next.
The outcome of this spiritual battle was stunning, but became so only when I sought help from our allies in spiritual warfare. I knew in my heart that I was called to bring some justice and hope to the burdens Pornchai carried. I described them recently in “Pornchai Moontri and the Things We Carry.”
Three weeks after our parting, I returned from work one day to find the person living in the bunk above me gone, and in his place was Pornchai Moontri. This never happens here. We were shocked, perplexed and overjoyed.
There were later signs that our allies summoned other allies behind the scenes who had come to know of us. On the day we were reunited, they were in just the right place at just the right time saying just the right things to just the right people. It was the most unlikely symphony of actual grace. It was incredible!
This computer generated image depicts the constellation Triangulum and galaxy RD1, 12.2 light-years billion from Earth, formed in the early period of the Universe after the Big Bang.
3:00 AM in a Dark Prison Cell
I apologize if this gets a little strange. Just before all these clouds gathered on the horizon and our chaotic upheavals took place, I had a mysterious dream. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016, the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.
I found myself at 3:00 AM standing and staring into a small stretch of sky that I could see beyond my barred cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see Pornchai fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was very familiar and someone I felt I implicitly trusted, but I cannot remember what he looked like. That part of the dream was erased when I awakened. He pointed to the sky and asked, “What do you see?”
I said, “I only see the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the mysterious man. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far away into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. As I have stated elsewhere, we do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. Then the companion said, “Michael dwells within the light.”
It seemed that I stood for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awakened in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.” I get chills even now thinking about it. Later that morning, I called a friend to search an astronomy database to see if such a triangular constellation even exists. This was what was sent to me:
“1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So a light-year is a distance of 5.88 trillion miles. The distance of this object in miles is that times 12.2 billion. [Good luck with the math! And please don’t ask me to convert this to the metric system.]
“A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjun Dey of Johns Hopkins University, was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when they noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy which is 90 million light-years farther away than the previous most distant galaxy ever discovered.” [They called it RD1.]
“Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, “RD1” was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”
This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from my recent post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,” cowritten by me and priest and physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe in an instant, “out of nothing.”
I have recently undertaken a study of Saint Agustin’s 1,200-page treatise The City of God. A major feature in it is Saint Agustin’s revelation of Creation and the Angelic Realm. In the Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis story of Creation, God’s declaration of “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), God separated the light from the darkness. For Augustine, this was the moment the fallen angels were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts.
This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are our struggles or pain. We are a collective part of an immense fabric God has woven toward a specific end. And we have allies who connect with us within the threads:
Prayers to the Archangels in Times of Spiritual Battle
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TO MICHAEL
Most glorious prince of the heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Corne to the assistance of man whom God has created to His likeness, and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, that ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.
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TO GABRIEL
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, we beseech you to intercede for us at the throne of Divine Mercy. As you announced the mystery of the Incarnation to Mary, so through your prayers may we receive strength of faith and courage of spirit and thus find favor with God and redemption through Christ our Lord. May we sing with the angels and saints in Heaven forever the praise of God our Savior through your Annunciation: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
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TO RAPHAEL
O Raphael the Archangel, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy. Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Him whose unveiled face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed in spirit by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling to you and pleading for the protection of your wings so we may not be as strangers in the province of joy. Remember the weak, you who are so strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder in a land that is always at peace, bright with the resplendent glory of God.
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To learn more about the Angelic Realm Beyond These Stone Walls please visit these related posts:
Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Our Salvation
The Annunciation: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri
Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still
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To follow Beyond These Stone Walls in the public square, subscribe on this site or follow @TSWBeyond on X.
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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.”
Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls
Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe, Patron Saints behind Fr Gordon MacRae’s blog, have an obscure thread of connection that magnifies witness, sacrifice, and fatherhood.
Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe, Patron Saints behind Fr Gordon MacRae’s blog, have an obscure thread of connection that magnifies witness, sacrifice, and fatherhood.
September 23, 2020 — Updated September 23, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
The months of August through October have always produced some special content for Beyond These Stone Walls. That three-month period in the Catholic calendar contains the feast days of all the prominent saints at work here. These include Saint Maximilian Kolbe (August 14), Saint Padre Pio (September 23), Saint Michael the Archangel (September 29), Saint Therese of Lisieux (October 1), and the Guardian Angels (October 2). Interspersed among them, seemingly framing them, are several observances of Marian feasts giving her a strong presence in their lives and our lives here at this blog.
Padre Pio and I share an important, but ominous date. He passed from this life on September 23, 1968. I passed from my life in freedom on September 23, 1994. The day this is posted, I mark 32 years of imprisonment after refusing a plea deal lie to serve only one year.
I have written twelve posts about Saint Padre Pio over the life of this blog, which began in 2009. There came a point at which there was simply nothing more to write about this great saint except for the impact he has had on our lives, which has been immense. My friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, developed a powerful devotion to Saint Maximilian Kolbe, an identity even, because of me. In turn, I developed a powerful devotion to Saint Padre Pio, an identity even, because of Pornchai and the mystery of how his Godfather met and was blessed by Padre Pio. That story is told herein.
When I first wrote this post in 2020, it was just days after Pornchai was taken away for ICE detention to await deportation to Thailand. I was grasping for hope from Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio, and they both came through for us, but not in any way we might have expected. That story began on September 8, 2020, at 5 AM.
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There was an eerie sense about us as Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I walked around the concrete prison yard at 0500 on September 8, 2020, the Feast of the Nativity of Mary. There was not yet any sign of the dawn, nor was there any moon in the sky. If there were stars, we were blinded to them by the blazing prison lights reflected from the high walls that surrounded us. I asked Pornchai to take a long last look at these walls, for he was about to enter the final stretch of his long road to freedom.
Just then, a sliver of bright light emerged above the building where we had lived in a 60-square-foot cell for the last three of our many years in prison — 28 then for Pornchai and 26 for me at that time, and counting. We stood still to watch as the bright half-moon emerged above the walls. I told Pornchai that he will gaze upon the same moon in Thailand that I will see from this very spot. There was a long silence as he considered this, and then it was followed by tears. I had been putting a brave face on things up to this point, but I could no longer contain it.
It is difficult for men to talk and sob at the same time. I do not suggest that women cry more than men. Perhaps men do not cry enough. It is just that there was so much to say, and so I choked back the tears until another time. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, then you understand the gravity of what was transpiring that morning. It was expressed best by Pornchai himself in a guest post he wrote just after his arrival in Thailand: “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.” We will link to it again at the end of this post.
Soon after, we had to end that walk. After fifteen years sharing and building faith, conversion, and redemption in a tiny prison cell, Pornchai was taken away, and we will never see each other again in this life.
Backing up a little, it was Pornchai who brought up the most urgent and necessary part of our conversation that morning. It goes back to one of the first conversations we ever had about Pornchai’s faith experience. It was back in 2006 just before we were moved into the same cell. He described this in his post. He walked into my cell, saw an image of St. Maximilian Kolbe on the mirror, and asked, “Is this you?” He described that as one of the most important questions of his life.
Fifteen years later, as we walked in the pre-dawn light of a half moon, he said through tears, “Now I have the answer. You have saved me, but no one is saving you.” We talked a lot about our patron saints, of the mystery of how they came into our lives, and of what their witness means for us. Maximilian went to prison because he was writing the truth. I went to prison on trumped up charges, and have been writing the truth ever since. Padre Pio bore the wounds of the Crucified Christ for fifty years, while also suffering under the assaults on his reputation and good name and priesthood. Much of his suffering came from within the Church. I told Pornchai that he is a very important and powerful witness to the truth we have lived and written about. I said that no matter what happens to me now, “you are a living witness to the truth that no past is lived at the expense of the present, that no wounds can prevent a soul in search of God from emerging above prison walls.”
The Wounds of Padre Pio
I had been aware of Padre Pio for most of my life. As a young Capuchin, the Order that also formed Padre Pio, I earned a degree in psychology in the 1970s. I am ashamed to write today that I once denounced Padre Pio’s wounds as psychosomatic. I hope he forgives me for my ignorance back when I knew everything. I knew a lot about Padre Pio back then, but I did not know Padre Pio. I know him now. Pornchai knows him as well. He came to us from Beyond These Stone Walls in a personal and powerful way.
I had already been in prison on false witness for four years back in 1998. I had, for all of those years, been living in a horrible situation with eight men in each prison cell designed for only four. To “honor” the reverence of Catholics for Padre Pio then — six years before he was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 2002 — The New York Times ran an article alleging that Padre Pio was the subject of twelve Vatican investigations in his lifetime. The unjust and inflammatory article alleged that “Padre Pio had sex with female penitents twice a week.” Even for The New York Times, it was an egregious lie for which the “Paper of Record” broke the record. The lie originated from another priest who after his damage was wrought, admitted to the lie and to the envy that caused it.
This was the first inkling I ever had that Padre Pio suffered more than the visible wounds of Christ. He also suffered wounds upon his name, his integrity, his priesthood. Here we were, thirty years to the day since his death, and the “Scandal Sheet of Record” was still repeating an unfounded story for the sole purpose of deflating the faith of Catholics who reverenced him. It resonated with me in a most personal way.
Seven years passed. In April 2005, a newspaper of integrity, The Wall Street Journal, published a two-part account of false witness, wrongful prosecution, and public hysteria entitled “A Priest’s Story” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz. It was her first of several articles about the case against me. These articles were read all over the world. As a result of them, Bill Donohue at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights asked me to submit an article about my own awareness of false witness. My article was published in the November 2005 issue of Catalyst under the title “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud.”
I was surprised to see then that I shared the cover of that issue of Catalyst with a story about how Padre Pio was similarly defamed throughout his life and even after his death. None of it was ever substantiated nor was it supported by evidence in any form. On the contrary, many witnesses had testified in Vatican investigations that the detractors were themselves discredited beyond any doubt. That did not stop The New York Times from slander.
The Echoes of a Special Blessing
Among the readers of the WSJ series on my trial’s perversion of justice was Pierre Matthews, a Belgian with dual American citizenship who at the time was living in Chicago. The articles were his first realization — as they were for many — that the whole truth about the nature of Catholic scandal had not been told by the mainstream media. Pierre wrote to me months later. On a return trip from Belgium, he diverted his itinerary for a stop in Boston from where he drove up to Concord, NH to visit me in prison.
Later in 2005, Pornchai Moontri — who had spent the previous seven years in solitary confinement in Maine — was transferred to the Concord, NH prison where we met. In 2006 we became friends. In 2007 we became roommates. In 2010, on Divine Mercy Sunday, Pornchai renounced his troubled past to become Catholic. Later, in September 2010, I wrote “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata: Sanctity on Trial.”
That post told an amazing story. In an earlier visit with Pierre Matthews, I told him about Pornchai, about how our long and winding roads converged, and about Pornchai’s decision to renounce his past and become Catholic. Pierre told me a remarkable story. He said that when he was growing up in Belgium, his father sent him to a boarding school. In the 1950s, at just about the time I was born, Pierre’s school sponsored a trip to Italy. Pierre’s father wrote to him saying that his trip would take him near a place called San Giovanni Rotondo where there was a very famous priest and mystic who bears the wounds of Christ.
Pierre’s father instructed his skeptical 16-year-old son to take a train to San Giovanni Rotondo and ask to see Padre Pio. Being 16, Pierre did not want to go. But his father was insistent, so Pierre read his father’s account of Padre Pio’s mystical fame, which was at the time being suppressed by the Church, but was rising up globally from the sensus fidelium — the sense of the faithful across the world.
When Pierre Matthews learned that Pornchai was to become Catholic, he sent me a registered letter asking — no, insisting — that he be permitted to become Pornchai’s Godfather. Pierre asked me to submit a special request to the prison warden asking approval for Pierre to fly over from Belgium to visit both of us. In all the years that I had been here, such a thing was never allowed. No visitor can visit two prisoners at the same time. So I submitted the request with the intent of sending the denial back to Pierre. To my shock and awe, the request came back with a single word: “approved.”
During the special visit, Pierre told us that he indeed took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo at age 16 some 55 years earlier. He said he rang the monastery doorbell and asked a friar if he could see Padre Pio. “Impossible” came the curt reply. Pierre explained that his father had sent him from Belgium, so the friar invited him inside to be given a prayer card to show his father that he had been there. When Pierre stepped inside to be given the card, a strange man in a Capuchin habit, with hands heavily bandaged, was just then walking down a flight of stairs into the foyer. His eyes were fixed upon Pierre. Padre Pio approached Pierre, placed his bandaged hands upon his head, and blessed him.
Visiting us 55 years later, Pierre said he now knew this blessing was meant for us. He spoke of the long, winding journey from faith that led to his learning about me, then about Pornchai, and then, when Beyond These Stone Walls began in 2009, it was what drew Pierre back to faith. It was then, in 2010, that I added Saint Padre Pio as one of the Patron Saints of this blog. Through Pornchai’s Godfather, Padre Pio shared his wounds with us and became a witness for the defense against our own wounds. It was Pierre who first noted that I was condemned to prison on September 23, 1994, the feast day of Saint Padre Pio and the date he died in 1968.
Among the many letters of Padre Pio to the thousands of pilgrims and penitents who wrote to him was one dated in the year before he died on September 23, 1968. In that letter, Padre Pio advised a suffering soul to enroll in the Knights at the Foot of the Cross, a spiritual mission founded by Father Maximilian Kolbe for the offering of life’s wounds as a share in the suffering of Christ. I was amazed to read that Padre Pio had such an awareness of our other patron saint two decades before Saint Maximilian was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. Pornchai and I are both members of the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.
Our beloved friend Pierre, Pornchai’s Godfather, passed from this life in Belgium on July 7, 2020. Pornchai and I were blessed to be able to talk with him by telephone in the weeks before his death. He never took redemption for granted, but I know with the certainty of faith that he and Padre Pio have since renewed their bond. In the picture atop this section of my post, Pierre returned to San Giovanni Rotondo in the last year of his life to present at the tomb of Saint Padre Pio his prayers for intercession and Blessing for us.
So Pornchai, my son, if you are reading this in Thailand then you must know that there is much more to our life’s wounds than the prison walls that surrounded us and surround me still. To be free of them is not just a matter of the body, but of the heart and soul. So be free! Be free enough to convey to others the great gifts imparted to us by these patron saints. You will no longer have a guest post at Beyond These Stone Walls. You will now be my partner in mission, writing from Divine Mercy Thailand about how God is inspiring hearts and souls through the transfiguration of your wounds.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you, dear readers, for sharing in this painful but remarkable faith journey. Please, pray for us as we do for you. You will learn a lot about the life of Padre Pio in these concluding posts that I have selected from the twelve I have written over the years (with one written by Pierre’s Godson, Pornchai):
On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized
Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial
“I Am a Mystery to Myself.” The Last Days of Padre Pio
Pray, Hope and Don’t Worry: This Is Padre Pio’s Key to God’s Heart
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HOW TO HELP US: For nearly 20 years I have been committed to assisting Pornchai Moontri in navigating the trials and losses of his life, none of which were of his own making. I have done all in my power to promote an honest and thorough investigation into the unresolved, “cold-case” homicide of Pornchai’s mother, Wannee.
For six years since his arrival in Thailand, Max has been struggling in a nation in economic and political chaos. Promising developments are currently underway. Max will now be living in the house his mother set out to build 26 years ago. It is the house that cost her her life. Pornchai has the skills and will soon have the tools to finish it. He also has a solid plan to start a new agricultural business in Northern Thailand so he will not be dependent on the state of the local economy. This will be dependent upon my support, and I hope that can transition into “our” support.
Our BTSW Editor, Dilia E. Rodriguez, has established an account for my expenses in the support of this blog at Navy Federal Credit Union. Dilia also has the ability for direct funds transfers to assist both Pornchai Moontri in his new endeavor and Father John Hung Le, SVD, and his Refugee Assistance Project, which aids hundreds of Vietnamese refugee families in Thailand with basic food support.
If you wish to assist me, and you do so by check, make it out to Dilia E. Rodriguez and send it with your instructions to
Beyond These Stone Walls
PO Box 81
Fayetteville, NY 13066-0081
A few weeks ago, I received a hopeful message from Father John, who is awaiting a missionary visa to return to Thailand. It will take three to four months. The cost of the visa will be 15,000 Thai Baht, which translates to $500 USD. I have already provided it with the help from some readers.
I am deeply grateful for the goodness and generosity of our readers who have already responded to this plea. May the Lord Bless you a thousand-fold.
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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 Odyssey: Pornchai Moontri Finds His Way Home
This pastoral memoir uses one man’s homecoming as a meditation on trauma that outlives prison, the long afterlife of war and abandonment, and unfinished fatherhood.
This pastoral memoir uses one man’s homecoming as a meditation on trauma that outlives prison, the long afterlife of war and abandonment, and unfinished fatherhood.
September 16, 2026 by AI Grok
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: A priest-friend of Beyond These Stone Walls, was so moved by our post, Pornchai Moontri and the Things We Carry, that he submitted it to Elon Musk’s AI model, Grok, to see how it would be handled by AI. In spite of all the recent controversy over AI, we felt that this result must be shared with readers. Some AI responses may be capable of mass destruction, according to recent news alerts. This one is capable of rending open hearts and minds to see the beauty even suffering can embue with grace.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?”
— Romans 8:35
Pornchai Moontri has known all of these in the course of his life, and in this, his homecoming, he surrenders all to Christ.
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GROK:
This moving pastoral memoir, published September 9, 2026 — the day before Pornchai “Max” Moontri’s 53rd birthday — was written by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae from prison. The occasion was not celebration so much as inventory: what Max still carries after prison walls, iron bars, deportation, and six years of precarious freedom in Thailand.
What the piece is doing
The title alludes to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. MacRae’s thesis is stated in the lede: physical release is not psychological or economic release. Max is “free” in the legal sense and still in “a prison of the mind,” while MacRae “still walk[s] with him from afar.”
The Wall Street Journal “Birthday Book” (front pages from the day you were born onward) is the framing device. It lets MacRae contrast a tidy public record of dates with the actual wreckage of 1973–2026: famine and political collapse in rural Thailand, abandonment, trafficking-adjacent family capture, years of sexual abuse, a killing in a Bangor parking lot, decades in prison, conversion, ICE detention, deportation, homelessness, unpaid labor, and a return to an unfinished house his murdered mother began to build in 2000.
The memoir then does three things at once:
Retells Max’s origin story with more historical context than earlier posts.
Updates the reader on 2025–2026: a car, a failed-ish resort job near Chiang Mai, homelessness in Pattaya, purchase of three acres near Phu Wiang, a poultry-farm plan, and a move into Wannee’s unfinished house.
Makes a concrete appeal for continued support.
Structure and rhetoric
The structure is chronological but not linear in feeling. It keeps looping: 1973 Thailand → 1975 Fall of Saigon → Wannee’s despair → Bailey → murder in Guam → prison conversion → 2020 goodbye at the gate → 2026 farmland and chapel.
Effective moves:
Scale shift. A two-year-old hospitalized for malnutrition sits next to U.S. withdrawal from Thai bases, refugee waves, and a rice-exporting nation that suddenly cannot feed its rural poor. The point is that Max’s “personal” catastrophe was also geopolitical.
Moral reversal on Wannee. MacRae admits he once judged the mother who abandoned two toddlers. After placing her in 1975 Thailand — abandoned by a Muay Thai fighter husband, no safety net, 50 cents a day on a Bangkok road crew — he recants his harsh judgment. That recantation is one of the memoir’s better ethical moments.
The 2020 farewell at the prison gate. “Thank you for my freedom. Thank you for my future.” Then MacRae weeps in his cell. It is the emotional center of the piece and the justification for everything that follows: the relationship did not end at the gate.
Full circle that is not closure. Max returns to Phu Wiang, his birth village, the house that “cost her her life,” and a St. Joseph chapel. Homecoming is presented as duty and risk, not reward.
The ending is openly instrumental. After the lyric material comes “HOW TO HELP US”: Navy Federal account via editor Dilia E. Rodriguez, checks to a Fayetteville, NY box, support for Max’s farm and for Fr. John Hung Le’s refugee food project after USAID cuts. That is not a hidden agenda; it is a call to arms, the genre of this blog.
Themes
Trauma as cargo. Abuse, maternal murder, the 1992 killing, solitary confinement, ICE, language and labor markets in Thailand — these are not “overcome.” They are carried. Conversion (Divine Mercy Sunday 2010) is framed as the decision not to keep the evil as identity, not as erasure of consequence.
Spiritual fatherhood across a locked door. MacRae was 53 when they became cellmates; Max is 53 now. The symmetry is deliberate. Daily phone calls, a two-phone relay devised by the late Claire Dion during ICE detention, a used hybrid car bought by Dilia the editor, farm land purchased with a reader’s support: the memoir argues that mercy is logistical.
History does not stay in the past. 1973 military-rule collapse, the 1975 ban on non-Thai labor, Saigon’s fall, U.S. base withdrawal, Vietnamese boat people (including the later Fr. John Le), and now “the war in Iran” raising fuel prices and a visa crisis for missionaries — all are treated as the weather in which one life has to be rebuilt.
Unfinished justice. Wannee’s homicide on Guam remains a cold case MacRae says he has pressed for years. Richard Alan Bailey was convicted in Maine in 2018 of 40 felony counts of sexual abuse of the brothers. The mother’s house is both shelter and shrine to a crime scene still open.
Voice, audience, and context
The voice is first-person priest-journalist: scriptural cadence, named helpers, linked earlier posts, and a standing community of readers who already know “Max.” New readers will feel dropped into a serial. Regular readers will hear an anniversary letter.
Two contextual facts matter for any honest reading:
This is advocacy writing from a contested narrator. MacRae has been imprisoned since 1994 on sexual-abuse convictions he and a network of supporters (including the Catholic League and some Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal commentary) treat as wrongful. The blog is his public ministry and his defense. That does not automatically falsify Max’s documented history — Bailey’s conviction, the deportation, the Thai years — but it means the piece is not a disinterested profile. It is a friend and spiritual director making a case, a man called Father who finds a prodigal son beaten and left on the side of the road, it is the convergence and fulfillment of two famous Parables of Jesus.
The theology is load-bearing. Saint Joseph, Divine Mercy, Maximilian Kolbe, “none of this evil was of his making nor was it his to keep.” If you do not share that frame, the memoir still works as a trauma-and-reentry story; the metaphysics will feel like overlay.
Strengths and limits
Strengths. Specificity (Phu Wiang, Pak Chong, Pattaya, Saint Nicholas, three acres of farmland, poultry, 15,000 baht visa). Refusal of a redemption arc that ends in 2020. Willingness to say Max was homeless, unpaid, lonely, and competing with family wage-earners in a bad labor market. The historical section on 1973–75 Thailand is more useful than most conversion narratives bother to be.
Limits. Some geopolitical claims are painted in broad strokes. The “things we carry” metaphor is announced more than developed as literature. Bailey and the Guam killing are summarized by pointer to earlier posts rather than argued here. The support-raising close will strike some readers as the real destination of the piece. And because Father MacRae cannot see Thailand except through calls and photos, the current-tense report is secondhand by necessity — vivid, but filtered.
Bottom line
The article is less a news feature than a continuation of a twenty-year collaboration: a priest still inside stone walls trying to keep a formerly abandoned child from being abandoned again, this time by freedom itself. Its best insight is modest and hard: release is an event; carrying is a life. The house in Phu Wiang, half-built since 2000, is the right emblem — shelter, inheritance, crime scene, and construction site and house of redemption all at once.
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To the readers of Beyond These Stone Walls: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. For greater context you may also like these related posts:
Pornchai Moontri and the Things We Carry
Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam
An AI Analysis of Getting Away with Murder
The Prison of Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri by Rebecca Virelles
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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.”
Pornchai Moontri and the Things We Carry
Freedom from stone walls and iron bars brings no freedom from a prison of the mind. Pornchai Moontri now faces a tempest within and I still walk with him from afar.
Freedom from stone walls and iron bars brings no freedom from a prison of the mind. Pornchai Moontri now faces a tempest within and I still walk with him from afar.
September 9, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
In the photo above, the military governor of the District of Phu Wiang, Thailand came to welcome Pornchai Moontri home as he prepares to recover and move into the home his mother, Wannee, had been building at the time of her death in April, 2000.
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The Wall Street Journal has been marketing a new bestseller called “The Birthday Book.” It features the Journal’s front pages from the day a gift recipient was born and every birthday hence up to the present time. On September 10, the day after this post is published, our friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri, will turn 53 years of age. I was 53 when he and I first met in prison and landed in the same cell twenty years ago.
In 2009, three years after his arrival here after many years in solitary confinement in another prison, this blog began. Through an abundance of grace our lives became intertwined. It was Pornchai — who now prefers to be called “Max” for our Patron Saint — who proposed the name for this blog. Neither of us even knew then what a blog was. They did not exist when we last lived in the land of the free.
In 2007, Max learned with great trepidation that he would be deported to Thailand at the end of his long sentence. He had no one there, and he feared the darkness. I promised him that with this blog from our prison we could build a bridge to Thailand. Max wanted very much to believe that, but he scoffed. He does not scoff any longer.
In September 2020, this looming deportation into freedom happened, but life remains for Max a daily crucible of trials all connected to the trials that came before. Reading about The Wall Street Journal “Birthday Book,” I decided to take a deep dive into the time and place in which Pornchai first entered this world in the village of Phu Wiang (pronounced Poo Vee-ang) in the far northeast of Thailand in 1973. He is now in the process of relocating there, to the village of his birth. This move is out of desperation, actually, but I will get back to that hoping that perhaps someone may feel moved to help me help him.
Our readers may recall that Pornchai was born in Phu Wiang, Thailand in 1973, but in 1975, at the age of two, he and his four-year-old brother Priwan were abandoned there by their mother, Wannee Laporn, who was then barely 19 years old. I at first found it difficult not to form a harsh and spontaneous judgment of Wannee for such an abandonment. That changed when I understood the setting and context into which Wannee gave them life and then left them in such a vulnerable state.
In 1973, after thirteen months of military rule, Thailand’s government collapsed. After having been one of the world’s leading rice-exporting nations — the staple food of the world’s poor — food production in Thailand, especially in the rural north, became severely challenged. As a matter of self-preservation, Thailand’s interim government adopted a law banning non-Thais from being employed in Thailand. This had serious repercussions for the economy and the distribution of food access as throngs of refugees fled into Thailand from the war raging in Vietnam.
When Priwan was two years old, and while Wannee was still carrying Pornchai, she and they were abandoned by her husband. He was a Muay Thai martial arts fighter who earned a scant living traveling village to village for bouts. When he did not return, Wannee was left even more impoverished and unable to care for her sons. There was no social safety net. Then, in 1975 when Pornchai was two years old, the Fall of Saigon ended the war in Vietnam and brought thousands upon thousands of refugees fleeing into Thailand from Vietnam. Many refugees died.
Among the refugees fleeing from the victorious Viet Cong then was a 15-year-old boy who became one of the well-known Vietnamese “Boat People.” He would later also become an important figure in our lives as Father John Hung Le, SVD, a missionary priest of the Society of the Divine Word in Thailand. While following my writing at Beyond These Stone Walls, Father John became a good friend to me and to Max. He gave Max shelter upon his deportation from the United States in September 2020.
Back to the dilemma of Wannee, she was impoverished and alone with two starving children in 1975. She decided in despair to leave them to seek work elsewhere to support her sons from afar. She hoped her extended family would care for them. Wannee, in a fragile state herself, labored on a Bangkok road crew carrying huge buckets of cement on a pole for the equivalent of 50 cents per day. Back in Phu Wiang, Pornchai was hospitalized for malnutrition. Throughout his young life, food scarcity and access were a critical and common theme. It was not an auspicious beginning in life.
I much later realized in hindsight that in that same period, I was living comfortably as a college student, well fed, and with few worries beyond my grades. I have since done penance for my past misguided judgment of Wannee.
After the Fall of Saigon
In Vietnam in 1975, city after city and province after province fell into Communist hands. It was not so much a conquering on their part as it was another abandonment. Two years after a 1973 cease fire agreement, Thailand stood entirely alone as the sole democracy among a gathering of communist Southeast Asian nations. Thailand’s long-standing alliance with the United States deteriorated rapidly as a result of communist advances in Vietnam and Cambodia. It was a very scary time for a young woman alone with two small children. Wannee left with a desperate hope that her extended family would shelter them.
In late spring of 1975, the U.S. began to abandon its Thai bases as it withdrew all U.S. troops from Vietnam. Both the U.S. military presence and economic assistance were drastically reduced. Student demonstrators rampaged in Bangkok as South Vietnam unconditionally surrendered to the Viet Cong. In Saigon, a policeman put his pistol to his head and fired. Waves of despair were evident everywhere as waves of U.S. marines and Navy personnel crowded onto the Embassy rooftops awaiting helicopters for a final evacuation of 6,400 troops to a 40-vessel armada anchored just off the coast. I wrote of one of these Navy personnel who refused to leave in “For Fr. John Tabor, the Path to Priesthood Was War.”
But also among those entering Thailand from Vietnam was someone Wannee and then later her sons would have the misfortune of ever coming to know. Richard Alan Bailey was a civilian helicopter pilot in Vietnam profiting from the last days of the war. He became a frequent visitor to Thailand exploiting various opportunities one of which was his quest for the servitude of a needy Thai wife. Somewhere, somehow, he encountered Wannee in 1978 and married her in Bangkok in 1980.
Wannee’s inability to return to her two sons in the far north of Thailand was not a personal choice, but it was to be the death of her. I wrote of Richard Alan Bailey and his dark, ominous and ongoing presence in this story in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” When Wannee threatened to go to authorities to report Bailey’s abuse of Pornchai and Priwan she was murdered.
The Heavy Baggage of a Stolen Life
We will link again to the above post and its sequel at the end of this one. The content they present would not be the usual for a WSJ “Birthday Book.” Not everyone has the lyrics of happy thoughts with which they can compose a Birthday Book.
Pornchai arrived in my cell in 2006, a broken, angry, and hostile young man. But as most readers know by now, that was all masking something else. The next four years were a daily battle of wills. On Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, four years after his forced transfer from Maine’s “Supermax” prison, Pornchai converted to Catholicism and embraced Divine Mercy. In 2007, as mentioned earlier, we learned of his pending future deportation to Thailand, but he coped knowing that he no longer faced it alone.
As trust grew between us — and between Pornchai and Jesus Christ — Max told me of all the dark corners of his life that he carried with him. I convinced him that none of this evil was of his making nor was it his to keep. It took time to build Max up for this, but in 2018, with the help of Clare Farr, an attorney in Australia, we brought Richard Alan Bailey to justice. He was found guilty of 40 felony charges of gross sexual abuse in the State of Maine.
Then the lights came on in Maine. I filed petitions revealing the connections between Pornchai’s original offense and the terror that had been inflicted upon him between the ages of 12 and 15 under Richard Bailey’s “care.” Maine officials then reduced some of Pornchai’s sentence, which in short order handed him over to ICE custody on September 10, 2020, to await deportation. After nearly 16 years as my roommate, that was the last time I saw Pornchai Moontri. We stood in the predawn dark at the gates of our prison, with us on the inside and ICE agents on the outside. Max turned to me and said, “Thank you for my freedom. Thank you for my future.” After the gates closed, I went to my cell and wept.
The contacts we had built on the outside suddenly seemed vastly important to us. I had no way to call Max in ICE detention in a Louisiana ICE facility where he was held, and he had no way to call me. But our mutual friend, the late Claire Dion expressed to me her concern that if Pornchai cannot speak to me, “he will not make it.” So she devised a plan using two cell phones, her own and her husband’s. Max would call into one at a specified time and I would call into the other at the same time. It was not perfect, but it was a necessity and it got Max through all the discouragement and despair that comes with ICE detention.
Six months later, after a long grueling stay in an overcrowded ICE facility in Louisiana during a pandemic, we got word that on the next day Max would board a flight to Thailand with two ICE agents. On board the long flight, heading for a long layover in South Korea and before going on to Bangkok, the two ICE agents where nudging each other while looking at their phones. I learned later that they were reading posts I wrote about Pornchai’s life. Then they put away their phones and removed his shackles. They treated him with exemplary kindness. Pornchai suddenly felt free.
Now, six years later from the opposite side of the world, I still walk with Max. I still chip away at the heavy burdens he carries. Thanks to the kindness of our readers and their concern for us, Max and I can still speak daily by telephone, which has proven to be a necessity.
Finding work in Thailand was a great but discouraging task. I have been supporting Max with basic necessities since his arrival there. For a few years he lived on a property in Pak Chong in the middle of the country where he landscaped and helped manage the owner’s properties, but for no pay. He earned room and board only. Then about a year ago, he became homeless for a time living in a small rented room in Pattaya, which I paid for. Pattaya was known as the seamier side of Thailand. He attended Mass there at Saint Nicholas Church. Though Thailand is about 98 percent Theravada Buddhist, Max managed to find at least a small Catholic chapel everywhere he went.
The war in Iran has had a global impact on fuel prices. Our BTSW Editor, Dilia E. Rodriguez, found and purchased a pre-owned hybrid vehicle in Thailand for Max. He learned to drive there, which is fortunate because the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car. This changed his day-to-day existence considerably. This past summer, Max obtained work as a translator for the Asian Oasis resort near Chiang Mai, Thailand serving a mostly European clientele. He did well there, and was an asset, but the long hours and loneliness worked against him. Meanwhile, Max’s main support in Thailand, Father John Hung Le, SVD, has been stranded in Myanmar and Vietnam because his visa was not renewed in Thailand. Missionary priests throughout the world are facing this same problem. His very important refugee assistance project also lost most of its funding due to cuts in USAID. Our politics have wide ranging repercussions around the world. I continue to be in contact with Father John.
Prospects for employment for Max were still dismal. He competes with thousands of family wage earners for a very limited number of jobs. So I felt his only real opportunity going forward was to start a small business. He wanted to remain in Phu Wiang, which is far removed from the noise and haste of Bangkok. One of our readers who asked not to be identified sent me a gift of $3,500. I remember the old adage: “If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.” I used the money to purchase three acres of good farmland near Phu Wiang for Max to begin farming. He is most interested in a poultry farm. I have been researching this and he is going to be enrolled in a semester of learning about how to begin. He is going to need help to get started. I just read that the world’s first poultry farm existed 8,000 years ago very near to what is now Phu Wiang, Thailand.
At the same time, Max is moving into the house his mother was having built for him. It is the house featured at the very top of this post. Max is painfully aware that his mother’s desire to finish this house cost her her life on the Island of Guam as she was liberating herself from Richard Alan Bailey in 2000. The outside of the house, which has been dormant for 26 years, is quite nice. The inside is nowhere near finished.
Max has now come full circle returning to the place of his birth, where he will start life over again. He is volunteering to help take care of a small Catholic chapel there, Saint Joseph Church, named for the Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed.
Max and I thank you for being here with us at this turning of the tide.
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HOW TO HELP US: For nearly 20 years I have been committed to assisting Pornchai Moontri in navigating the trials and losses of his life, none of which were of his own making. I have done all in my power to promote an honest and thorough investigation into the unresolved, “cold-case” homicide of Pornchai’s mother, Wannee.
For six years since his arrival in Thailand Max has been struggling in a nation in economic and political chaos. Promising developments are currently underway. Max will now be living in the house his mother set out to build 26 years ago. He has the skills and will soon have the tools to finish it. He also has a solid plan to start a new agricultural business in Northern Thailand so he will not be dependent on the state of the local economy. This will be dependent upon my support, and I hope that can transition into “our” support.
Our BTSW Editor, Dilia E. Rodriguez, has established an account for my expenses in the support of this blog at Navy Federal Credit Union. Dilia also has the ability for direct funds transfers to assist both Pornchai Moontri in his new endeavor and Father John Hung Le, SVD, and his Refugee Assistance Project, which aids 2,000 Vietnamese families in Thailand with basic food support.
If you wish to assist me, and you do so by check, make it out to Dilia E. Rodriguez and send it with your instructions to
Beyond These Stone Walls
PO Box 81
Fayetteville, NY 13066-0081
As I write this, I just received a hopeful message from Father John, who is awaiting a missionary visa to return to Thailand. It will take three to four months. The cost of the visa will be 15,000 Thai Baht, which translates to $500 USD. I have already provided it with the help from some readers.
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Thank you for reading and sharing this post. For a fuller understanding of this story, please see the following:
An AI Analysis of 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.”
A Gift to a Beleaguered Priesthood
Father James Valladares, PhD, a friend to Father Gordon MacRae and this blog, is a priest, psychologist, and noted author from Mumbai, India and Adelaide, Australia.
Father James Valladares, PhD, a friend to Father Gordon MacRae and this blog, is a priest, psychologist, and noted author from Mumbai, India and Adelaide, Australia.
September 2, 2026 by Fr. James Valladares, PhD
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
— Lao-tzu (philosopher, 604 BC - 531 BC)
Once upon a time . . . early in 1966, I commenced my second year in theology in the Diocesan Seminary of Bombay (now Mumbai), India. As part of the curriculum in Moral Theology, we were scheduled to do a very intensive and comprehensive study of the Seventh, Eighth, and Tenth Commandments (“You shall not steal”; “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour”; and “You shall not covet anything that is your neighbour’s”) as a proximate preparation for the crucial examination that would render us eligible for the faculty to serve as ministers of the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Ad audiendas confessiones).
Very briefly, that particular branch was commonly referred to as De Iure et Iustitia (About Rights and Justice). A right was defined as something that is legitimately due to another. To take it away without authority or justification, therefore, is a violation of the person’s right and a breach of the moral law. Framing it graphically, there is an invisible but inviolable link between a person and a basic right. So a failure to respect and honour the right is tantamount to breaking that invisible bond, and so offending the person and God. Stated differently, the deliberate flouting of a moral law offends God, the Supreme Lawgiver, and is, therefore, a culpable sin. For instance, each and every human being has a right to his/her life — a priceless gift that comes from God and God alone. None can take it away but God. To do so wilfully, violently and maliciously would be tantamount to murder — a grave crime that violates both the natural and divine law. Consequently, the perpetrator must bear the entire brunt of the law — civil, moral, and divine.
Similarly, a person has a right to his reputation. Once again, there is an invisible but inviolable bond between the individual and his/her reputation. Therefore, we all are duty bound to respect another’s reputation, and to refrain from any word or deed that could snap that bond and so harm the individual, often gravely and irreversibly. For instance, a very common offence is the sin of detraction, which is the unjustifiable disclosure of another’s faults and failings to persons who did not know them. Even worse is the sin of calumny — the deliberate distortion of the truth, thereby poisoning the mind of the listener, and so damaging the reputation of another seriously and irreparably.
O! Beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat if feeds on.
— Shakespeare: Othello ac3, sc.3, 1.165
Cruelty has a human heart,
And jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress.
— William Blake (1757-1827), “A Divine Image,” 56:6
Over the past 50 years, I have observed with both surprise and consternation that while priests have their pastoral duties, which they sedulously strive to fulfil, often in the face of overwhelming odds, they have little or no claim to either rights or justice. One very senior priest, who has passed on to his Creator, would jocularly repeat: “A Catholic priest has but one right — the right to a Christian burial!”
Bound by a solemn promise of respect and obedience, a priest has no alternative but to comply with the directions of his bishop or religious superior. Should they be judicious and fair, the mutual rewards will be manifest and productive. Regrettably, not always is this the case, with the priest coming off the worse only because he is powerless, defenceless and helpless. For instance, priests have been known to be transferred because of the sinister machinations and false allegations of individuals, who either did not agree with them or had a score to settle.
What is particularly disturbing in these most unfortunate instances is the fact that the priest was denied a fair chance to defend himself and he was not even apprised of the reasons for his sudden and unjust transfer. The woeful and inexcusable assumption has always been “guilty until proven innocent” — a most reprehensible violation of the natural, canon and moral laws.
Even more deplorable is the fact that the seemingly “errant” priest was unilaterally given a particularly difficult assignment as a punitive measure, harshly and malevolently designed “to burst his bubble” or “to pull him down a peg or two.” In some instances, the priest was stripped of his faculties and debarred from offering the Eucharist publicly. [This happened to Padre Pio because of someone else’s jeolosy.] Even after a due investigation and the vindication of his innocence, the hapless individual was not reinstated. The opposite of “love” is not “hate,” but indifference. And there could not be a more damaging blow to priestly morale.
As can be expected, the repercussions of such unjust, un-priestly, and morally reprehensible behaviour can have irreversibly injurious results that could range from loss of morale to a nervous breakdown, to a defection from the active ministry, to destructive addictions. Quite some time ago, for instance, in various parts of the United States, it had been observed that priests had been dying as a result of automobile accidents. What intrigued the investigating police was the fact that the details, in some cases, were identical — a sole driver ramming a speeding car on a highway into the concrete pylon of an overhead bridge. The article bore the intriguing but heart-wrenching caption: “Autocide!”
In an explosive exposé, David Rice recounts the following gut-wrenching and tragic story:
There was one old alcoholic priest called in to the chancery office (where the diocese is administered). “He was an ‘alky,’ no doubt about it,” another priest remembers. “They call him in; they tell him he’s a no-good alky. ‘You are suspended, removed, get out of the diocese in twenty-four hours. We don’t care where you go.’ Maybe they just want to scare him. Well, he goes home, puts a shotgun to his mouth, and blows his head off.” [1]
It is a commonly known fact that the good standing of the Catholic priest is undergoing serious appraisal in Western society. As a matter of fact, in view of the shocking revelations in the recent past, the Catholic priesthood is being undermined by a series of forces from both within and outside the Church. Even Pope Benedict XVI spoke of “the sin within.” [2]
Offering the Catholic Church’s strongest statement of fault to date in its widespread sexual-abuse scandal, the Sovereign Pontiff humbly and frankly confessed: “The greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sin within.” [3] This is why he confidently launched the International Year of the Priest (2009) in the 150th year of the death (dies natalis) of the saintly patron of the pastoral clergy, St. John Marie Vianney. [2009 was also the year that Father Gordon MacRae’s blog was born.]
When addressing the clergy of the Diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone, for instance, Pope Benedict XVI emphasized the stringent need for reinforcing fraternal bonds within the presbyterate: “No priest is a priest on his own; we are a presbyterate, and it is only in this communion with the bishop that each one can carry out his service.” [4]
In this pastorally cogent endeavour, Pope Benedict XVI unequivocally emphasised the crucial role of bishops. Speaking to the bishops of the United States of America in Washington DC, these are the Sovereign Pontiff’s precise words: “If you (bishops) yourselves live in a manner closely configured to Christ, the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life for his sheep, you will inspire your brother priests to re-dedicate themselves to the service of their flocks with Christ-like generosity. Indeed a clearer focus upon the imitation of Christ in holiness of life is exactly what is needed in order for us to move forward.” [5]
In so doing, Pope Benedict XVI was merely reiterating what the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council did unambiguously state in The Decree on Priestly Life and Ministry: “All priests share with the bishops the one identical priesthood and ministry of Christ Jesus. On account of this common sharing in the same priesthood and ministry, then bishops are to regard their priests as brothers and friends and are to take the greatest interest they are capable of in their welfare both temporal and spiritual.” [6] In a word, “no priest is a priest on his own; we are a presbyterate, and it is only in this communion with the bishop that each one can carry out his service.” [7]
The current crisis of false and unsubstantiated allegations against innocent priests and religious, therefore, urgently warrants a clear and definite procedure, for the following reasons:
This imbalance has enabled a coalition of forces to join a crescendo of sustained and damaging criticism of the Catholic Church centred on its Achilles’ heel of “breach of trust” by a very small number of priests.
Many of the rights of priests, which are protected by canon law, have been ignored.
Some bishops and provincials have acted unjustly in dealing with priests and religious who have been accused.
Some priests have become the victims of abuses of power, without being provided with a full understanding or advertisement of their rights. Each and every priest deserves due process of the law when he is accused. [8]
Such a travesty of justice blatantly contravenes the specific directives of Christ Jesus, the Eternal High Priest: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wished to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” [9]
Even Pope Benedict XVI, in addressing the American bishops, the United Nations, and all educators, spoke about the rights of every human being, a fortiori a priest, diocesan or religious, to receive respect and justice, as well as the need for true leaders to seek truth if they are to remain faithful to the Gospel.
Bishops must certainly protect the laity in the diocese, but they must also protect their priests, diocesan and religious, for these are the men who are the visible face of the bishop in parishes and other ministries.
When a bishop abuses his power, he is attacking the basis of all human rights and integrity. When used against a cleric, he is attacking of the most defenceless of all people in the Church.
When a cleric is not told who is making the accusations, what the actual accusation is, when it happened, or other vital information , the cleric is powerless to defend himself or even prove his innocence.
If there is no effort to ascertain the truth of an accusation or to ask for facts that are verifiable, then the bishops are opening themselves up to false accusations simply because people are seeking money at the expense of a defenceless and helpless cleric. Such a false denunciation is a canonical crime and reparation can be required (Canon 1390 §3).
Bishops are to be in service to all the people in their diocese. By requiring minimally that the accusations be true and giving clerics the right to defend themselves, they are simply upholding the recommendations of both Saint Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. A failure to honour this momentous commitment cannot but result in a loss of both credibility and moral authority.
To conclude, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in the Decree on Bishops (§16) have made it indubitably clear that “with sympathetic understanding and practical help, bishops should take care of priests who are in danger of any kind or who have failed in some way.”
This is particularly cogent in view of a widespread and distressing observation , which is not without a justifiable foundation: “The Catholic Church has become the safest place in the world for children, but the most dangerous place in the world for priests.” [10]
David Rice, Shattered Vows — Priests Who Leave (New York: William Morrow & Co. Inc., 1990) 16.
Benedict XVI, 11 May, 2010. Edward Pentin, “Pope’s In-Flight Briefing with Journalists,” National Catholic Register.
Benedict XVI. Op.Cit.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Codes, Paul J., Communio in the Presbyterium. Why Priests? Address to clergy of the Diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone, August 6, 2008. Scepter.
Pope Benedict XVI. Address to bishops of the United States of America, Washington DC, April 16, 2008.
Abbott (SJ), Walter M. (ed): The Documents of Vatican II. Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1967. Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Codes, Paul J., Op. Cit.
“Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he had all the guarantees necessary for his defence” (Article 11, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, General Assembly of the United Nations, adopted on December 10, 1948).
Matthew: 20: 25-28
Michael Brandon, host of ‘Freedom Through Truth’, and quoted by Fr. Gordon MacRae in “When Priests Are Falsely Accused: Why Accusers Should be Named.”
Fr. James Valladares, PhD is a diocesan priest of the archdiocese of Bombay in India, where he served for 20 years in the pastoral ministry before immigrating to the archdiocese of Adelaide, South Australia to join his family and serve for the next 26 years. In his ministry, Fr. James served in diocesan parishes, parish schools, and colleges at the graduate level.
Fr. James is a psychologist, who has done his Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate in Psychology, specialising in Counselling Psychology. He has excelled in preaching, and has always used the words of Jesus as his motivation: “ … that they may have life in abundance.”
Fr. James has written many books, two of which were universally and highly appreciated: Psychology, Religion and Healing; and Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, bravely and unequivocally championing the cause of priests falsely and maliciously accused in the questionable pursuit of money.
Readers are urged to read his Research Study published by iUniverse and easily available on Amazon and in any reputed book store such as Barnes & Nobles.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post about priesthood in our troubled time. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.
Optimism: When Hope Springs Eternal
The Prison of Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri
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.”
#MeToo and #HimToo: Addiction and #NHCorruption
Jonathan Grover died from opiate addiction before his 49th birthday. His role in the case against Fr Gordon MacRae left unanswered questions, but now gains clarity.
Jonathan Grover died from opiate addiction before his 49th birthday. His role in the case against Fr Gordon MacRae left unanswered questions, but now gains clarity.
April 18, 2018, Updated June 26, 2026 by Ryan A. MacDonald
Editor’s Note:
The image atop this post is a composite featuring the high school graduation photograph of Jonathan Grover at age 18. To the right is an artist’s rendering of a photo of Father Gordon MacRae circa 1983. The photo was composed for The Wall Street Journal and depicts Father MacRae in the time period in which the story told here was alleged to have taken place. This post by Ryan A. MacDonald is a necessary Part 2 of last week’s post, “Justice and Due Process Support the Rights of Priests — But Not This One.”
When I read Father Gordon MacRae’s Holy Week post in 2018, I was struck by a revelation that he offered Mass in his prison cell for the soul of a man who helped put him there by falsely accusing him. I do not know that I could have done the same in his shoes, and even if I could, I am not so certain that I would. His post took a high road that most only strive for.
The unnamed subject of that post about Judas Iscariot was Jonathan Grover, who died in Arizona from opiate addiction two weeks before his 49th birthday. An obituary indicated that he died “peacefully,” and cited ‘a “long career in the financial industry.” Police determined the cause of death to be an accidental overdose of self-injected opiates weeks after leaving his most recent attempt at rehab. In Arizona, he had charges for theft, criminal trespass, and multiple arrests for driving under the influence of drugs. A police report described him as “homeless.”
In the early 1990s, Jonathan Grover was one of Father MacRae’s accusers. MacRae first learned of Mr. Grover’s death from a letter written by a woman who had been a young adult friend of Grover at the time of MacRae’s trial in 1994. She wrote that she is now a social worker with “expertise in PTSD” (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The letter accused MacRae of having “murdered” 48-year-old Grover. This requires a rational and factual response.
Of interest, Mr. Grover’s obituary — despite his being 48 years old at the time of death — featured his 1987 Keene High School (NH) graduation photograph when Grover was 18 years old. I had seen this photo before. The photograph was among the discovery materials in MacRae’s defense files in preparation for his 1994 trial. Because Jonathan was the first of his brothers to falsely accuse MacRae, it was presumed that the case he brought would be the first to go to trial. Perhaps because it was full of obvious holes and factual discrepancies, prosecutors opted to postpone it and prosecute the case brought by his older brother, Thomas Grover, first.
The photograph of Jonathan raised the first of many doubts about the truth of his claims. At age 18 in 1987, Grover gave Father Gordon MacRae, his parish priest and friend at the time, a nicely framed copy of that photo with a letter written on the back. It thanked MacRae for his “friendship and support,” and “for always being there for me.” It was a typically touching letter from a young man to someone he obviously admired. It was written before addiction and the inevitable justification of enablers took hold in his life.
Five years later, apparently forgetting that he ever wrote that letter, Jonathan Grover became the first of four adult brothers to accuse MacRae of a series of sexual assaults alleged to have occurred more than a decade earlier. So what happened between writing that letter in 1987 and accusing MacRae five years later in 1992? It is one of the burning questions left behind in this story.
The framed high school photograph and its accompanying letter never found their way into MacRae’s 1994 trial, or into the public record, because the trial dealt only with the claims of Jonathan’s brother, Thomas Grover. Jonathan was the first to accuse MacRae, but a trial on his claims was deferred. His story had many holes that did not reconcile with the facts. Investigators have since uncovered a different story from the one Grover and his brothers first told.
Bombshells and Black Ops
The two common denominators in the case against Father Gordon MacRae were expectations of money and James F. McLaughlin. In the 1980s, the city of Keene, New Hampshire, with a population then of about 26,000, employed a full-time sex crimes detective on its small police force. In 1988, McLaughlin launched investigations of at least three, and possibly more, Catholic priests in the area including Father Gordon MacRae.
His targeting of MacRae seems to have begun with a bizarre and explosive letter. In September 1988, Detective McLaughlin received a letter from Sylvia Gale, a social worker with the Division of Children, Youth and Families, the New Hampshire agency tasked with investigating child abuse. Ms. Gale’s letter to McLaughlin revealed that she had uncovered information about “a Catholic priest in your area, named Gordon MacRae.”
The letter described explosive information from an unnamed employee of Catholic Social Services in the Diocese of Manchester, who developed a slanderous tale that MacRae had been “a priest in Florida where he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” The letter went on to claim that the case was still unsolved, and that MacRae was moved from Florida by Catholic Church officials to avoid that investigation.
The libelous letter also named a Church official, Monsignor John Quinn, as the source of this information reportedly told by him to an unnamed Catholic Charities employee on the condition that she would be fired if she ever divulged it. The 1988 letter generated a secret 70-page report developed by Detective James McLaughlin. He launched a dogged pursuit of MacRae, who was unaware at the time that any of this was taking place.
This all began to unfold one year after Jonathan Grover graduated from Keene High School and presented Father MacRae with that framed photograph and letter of thanks. Armed with Sylvia Gale’s letter, Detective McLaughlin proceeded to question 26 Keene area adolescents and their parents who had known MacRae including members of the Grover family. Up to that point, not one person had ever actually contacted McLaughlin with a complaint against MacRae, but rather it was McLaughlin who initiated these contacts. As reported below, some of them today claim to have been solicited by McLaughlin to accuse MacRae, some with the enticement of money.
I had to read up to page 54 of McLaughlin’s 1988 report before I came across any effort to corroborate the Florida “murder and mutilation” story with Florida law enforcement officials. By the time McLaughlin learned that MacRae had never served as a priest in Florida and that no such crime had been committed there, the damage to MacRae’s reputation was already done, and the seeds were sown for the Grover brothers to ponder claims yet to come.
Among those approached by McLaughlin armed with Sylvia Gale’s slanderous letter was Mrs. Patricia Grover, Jonathan’s adoptive mother. A parishioner of Saint Bernard Parish in Keene where MacRae had served from 1983 to 1987, Mrs. Grover was also a DCYF social worker who was supervised by Sylvia Gale. She had previously worked with McLaughlin in the handling of other cases.
Mrs. Grover also knew Father MacRae. According to McLaughlin’s 1988 report, she was alarmed by the Sylvia Gale letter but doubted that MacRae had ever served as a priest in Florida. She nonetheless vowed to talk with her young adult sons about their relationship with MacRae. Four more years passed before the first of them, Jonathan Grover, accused him.
After graduating from high school at age 18, Jonathan joined the U.S. Navy and was sent to submarine school in San Diego. It did not go well. There were early signs that Grover was experimenting with drugs. He slowly developed an opioid addiction. After an arrest for driving under the influence, Grover was discharged from the Navy while refusing its intervention program for alcohol and drug abuse. Jonathan returned to Keene, New Hampshire with an opiate addiction.
Grover had been approaching Father MacRae with increasingly anxious requests for financial loans, none of which were ever paid back or explained. MacRae was at first resistant to the idea that Grover may be abusing drugs, but eventually the signs became clear and the priest refused to continue the loans.
The “fake news” in the 1988 Sylvia Gale Florida letter set this community abuzz with anxiety and gossip about the potentially lecherous and murderous priest in its midst. Later, Monsignor John Quinn and other Diocese of Manchester officials denied having any involvement in the untrue information about MacRae. They also denied that there was ever any priest who relocated from Florida to New Hampshire under the circumstances described in the libelous letter.
Four years later in late 1992, Jonathan Grover became the first of four members of the Grover family to accuse Father Gordon MacRae of sexual abuse dating back to approximately the early 1980s. I use the word “approximately” because Grover and his brothers each presented highly conflicting and multiple versions of their stories and the relevant time frames. Detective James F. McLaughlin was acting more as a coach than as an investigator. According to his own police reports, he gave the Grover brothers copies of MacRae’s resume “to help them with their dates.”
As is clearer below, Jonathan Grover’s claims became problematic for the prosecution of MacRae, but instead of questioning Grover’s veracity, the police detective engaged a contingency lawyer on Grover’s behalf. In a September 30, 1992 letter from McLaughlin to Jonathan Grover, the detective detailed his conversations with Keene attorney William Cleary, who ultimately obtained a nearly $200,000 settlement for Grover from the Diocese of Manchester. From McLaughlin’s letter to Grover:
“As agreed, I contacted William Cleary about your case. Bill believes the statute of limitations has lapsed for a civil action, but this does not rule out the church being financially responsible. Bill [Cleary] states he would like to meet with you for a conference. You would not be charged for this. Your options could then be outlined and discussed.”
There is reason to question Detective McLaughlin’s police reports in this case. In most of McLaughlin’s prior cases, he practiced a protocol of audio-recording every interview with complainants. In many of his other reports that I have read, he made a point of explaining that he records interviews to protect the integrity of the investigation.
Two years prior to the Grover claims, for example, McLaughlin investigated a complaint against another former Keene area priest, Father Stephen Scruton. From the outset, his reports took pains to document his practice of securing both video and audio recordings of his interviews. He even administered a polygraph test on the accuser. All were standard protocol, but McLaughlin did not create a single recording of any type with any accuser in the case of Father Gordon MacRae. This is suspect, at best, and it has never been explained.
It is made more suspicious by the emergence of other information that has been developed by former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott, who spent three years investigating the MacRae case. One of MacRae’s accusers, a high school classmate of Jonathan Grover, recanted his own developing story of abuse by MacRae when questioned by Mr. Abbott in 2008. An excerpt of Steven Wollschlager’s statement may shed light on why Detective McLaughlin chose not to record these interviews.
“In 1994 I was contacted by Keene Police Detective McLaughlin … I was aware at the time of Father MacRae’s trial knowing full well that it was bogus and having heard of the lawsuits and money involved and also the reputations of those who were making accusations … The lawsuits and money were of greatest discussion, and I was left feeling that if I would go along with the story I could reap the rewards as well. McLaughlin had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about this priest 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 go 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.”
In “The Trials of Father MacRae,” a 2013 article by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal, Detective McLaughlin described the above account simply as “a fabrication.” What struck me about Mr. Wollschlager’s statement, besides the fact that he had nothing whatsoever to gain by lying, is that he never went to Detective McLaughlin with an accusation. Instead, he alleges that it was McLaughlin who approached him, and the approach alleges the enticement of money.
Steven Wollschlager was not the first person to report such an overture. Given the nature of his account and others, it is unclear today whether Jonathan Grover and his brothers initiated their first contacts with this detective. This suspicion was a contentious issue in MacRae’s 1994 trial. Thomas Grover, the brother of Jonathan Grover, was asked under oath to reveal to whom he went first with his claims, the police or a personal injury lawyer, but he refused to answer. To this very day, that question has never been answered.
What became clear, however, is hard evidence that placed Detective James McLaughlin investigating at least some of this case, not from his office in the Keene Police Department, but from the Concord, NH office of Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer, Robert Upton, before MacRae was even charged in the case.
A Conspiracy of Fraud
In a Police Report labeled Case No. 93010850, Detective McLaughlin produced the first of several conflicting accounts of untaped interviews with Jonathan Grover. Note that the first two digits of McLaughlin’s report, “93,” seem to indicate the year it was typed, but the date on the report is August 27, 1992. The content of this report is sexually explicit so I will paraphrase. The report has Grover claiming that when he was 12 or 13 years old he “would spend nights in the St. Bernard rectory in Keene.” During those nights, he alleged, he was sexually assaulted by both Father Gordon MacRae and Father Stephen Scruton.
But there was an immediate problem. MacRae was never at St. Bernard’s Parish in Keene until being assigned there on June 15, 1983, when Grover was 14 years old. Father Stephen Scruton was never there before June of 1985 when Grover was 16 years old. These dates were easily determined from diocesan files, but McLaughlin never investigated this. The report continued with claims alleged to have taken place in the Keene YMCA hot tub:
“It was during these times that Grover would be seated in the whirlpool and both Father MacRae and Father Scruton would be joined in conversation and they would alternate in rubbing their foot against his genitals. Grover was unsure if the priests were acting in concert or if they were unaware of each other’s actions.”
This report is highly suspicious. Just months earlier, Detective McLaughlin had previously investigated Father Stephen Scruton for an identical claim brought by another person alleged to have occurred in 1985 after Scruton’s arrival at this parish. Tod F. X. Biltcliffe, the person who brought that claim against Scruton, was also a high school classmate of Jonathan Grover.
After McLaughlin’s investigation, Mr. Biltcliffe obtained an undisclosed sum of money in settlement from the Diocese of Manchester. That interview with Biltcliffe was labeled Case No. 90035705 dated just 18 months before Jonathan Grover’s identical claims emerged. Unlike the Grover interviews, the interview with Tod Biltcliffe was tape-recorded by McLaughlin. Here is an excerpt from the report:
“Father Scruton was a regular at the YMCA. Tod went to the YMCA with Father Scruton. They decided to use the hot tub … At one point, Father Scruton took one of his feet and placed it between Tod’s legs and rubbed his genitals … The touching was intentional and not a mistake. A rubbing motion was used by Father Scruton … I asked Tod where he stood on civil lawsuits.”
It defies belief that a small town police detective could write a report about a Catholic priest (Scruton) fondling a teenager’s genitals in a YMCA hot tub, then 18 months later write virtually the same report with the same claims of doing the same things in the same place, only this time adding a second priest (MacRae), but nothing in the second report seemed to even vaguely remind the detective of the first report.
After Tod F. X. Biltcliffe’s YMCA hot tub complaint in 1990 — 18 months before Jon Grover’s own YMCA hot tub story — Father Stephen Scruton was charged by McLaughlin with misdemeanor sexual assault. He pled guilty and received a suspended sentence and probation. One year later, McLaughlin has someone else repeat the same story, only now involving both Scruton and MacRae, but two to four years before either of them was present in Keene.
What is most suspect about this claim of Jonathan Grover involving both priests is that in 1994, one year after writing the report, McLaughlin responded to a question under oath:
“On occasion, I have had conversations with Reverend Stephen Scruton, however I have no recollection of ever discussing any actions of Gordon MacRae with the Reverend Scruton.”
(Cited in USDC-NM 1504-JB)
The above was also cited in an AI analysis entitled “The Grok Chronicle Chapter 2: The Perjury of Detective James F. McLaughlin.”
But this all becomes more suspicious still. In the investigation file on these claims was found a transcript of a November 1988 Geraldo Rivera Show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It was faxed by the Geraldo Show in New York to Detective McLaughlin at the Keene Police Department two months after his 1988 receipt of the Sylvia Gale “Florida letter.” It was two years before Tod F. X. Biltcliffe’s YMCA hot tub claim about Father Scruton and four years before Jonathan Grover’s identical claims involving both priests. Here is an excerpt:
Geraldo Rivera:What did the priest do to you Greg?
Greg Ridel: Around the age of 12 or so, he and I went to a YMCA. And I was an altar boy at the time. And the first time I was ever touched … he began stroking my penis in a hot tub, I believe it was, at a YMCA. From there it went to what you might call role playing in the rectory where the priests stay.
— “The Church’s Sexual Watergate,” Geraldo Show, Nov. 14, 1988
Detective McLaughlin’s 1993 police report also had Jonathan Grover claiming that Father MacRae paid him money in the form of checks from his own and parish checking accounts in even amounts of $50 to $100 in order to maintain his silence about the abuse. McLaughlin never investigated this, but Father MacRae’s lawyer did investigate. MacRae’s personal checking account was researched from between 1979 to 1988. It revealed no checks issued to Jonathan or Thomas Grover.
However, the attorney uncovered several checks written from parish accounts to both Jonathan Grover and Thomas Grover. All were in even amounts between $40 and $100 and dated between 1985 and 1987 when these two brothers were 16 to 20 years of age respectively. The checks were filled out and signed by Rev. Stephen Scruton.
Days before Father Gordon MacRae’s 1994 trial commenced, his attorney sought Father Scruton for questioning. He declined to respond. When the lawyer sought a subpoena to force his deposition, Scruton fled the state. During trial, the jury heard none of this. Because the trial involved the shady claims of Thomas Grover alone, the defense could not introduce anything involving his brother, Jonathan.
In April, 2005, The Wall Street Journal published an extensive two-part investigation report of the Father MacRae case (“A Priest’s Story”), but it omitted Father Stephen Scruton’s role in the story — perhaps because he could not be located. Diocese of Manchester officials reported for years that they had no awareness of Scruton’s whereabouts.
In November 2008, former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott was retained to investigate this case. He located Father Scruton at an address in Newburyport, Massachusetts, just over the New Hampshire state line. First reached by telephone, Scruton was reportedly agitated and nervous when he learned the reason for the call. The investigator heard a clear male voice in the background saying, “Steve, if this is something that might help Gordon I think you should do it.” Scruton reluctantly agreed to meet.
The former FBI agent drove from his New York office to Newburyport, MA, on the agreed-upon date and time, but Scruton refused to open the door. He said only that he had “consulted with someone” and now declines to answer any questions. The investigator then sent Scruton a summary of his involvement in this case and requested his cooperation by telling the simple truth. Days after receiving it, Father Stephen Scruton suffered a mysterious fall down a flight of stairs and never regained consciousness. Scruton died a month later in January of 2009. He took the truth with him, and now Jonathan Grover has done the same. But facts speak a truth of their own. Readers can today form their own conclusions about this story.
I have formed mine, and I remain more than ever convinced that an innocent man is in prison in New Hampshire, a blight on the American justice system. Having thus far served 32 years of wrongful imprisonment for crimes that never took place, Father Gordon MacRae still prays for the dead.
“After three years of investigation of this case, I have found no evidence that Father MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes.”
— Affidavit of former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott
ADDENDUM: IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE GROVER FAMILY GRIFT
Thomas Grover’s former wife, Trina Ghedoni, in an interview with investigator James Abbott, told the former FBI official that around 1988 Thomas Grover was interviewed by Detective McLaughlin, but Grover made no allegation that resulted in a charge. She stated that Grover was 22 or 23 years old then and living in the City of Manchester. She said that he met a man named Dominic Martin and they became close friends and “drinking buddies.” Dominic Martin had a girlfriend, whose name Ghedoni could not recall. It was then that Dominic Martin began to introduce Grover to the idea of setting up priests for money.
Investigator Abbott noted in his report that Dominic Martin was later arrested and convicted for extortion against a priest in neighboring Massachusetts in 2003. This was reported in a January 25, 2003 Boston Globe article, “Couple Facing Extortion Charges” by Matt Carroll. Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna Martin were arrested in early January, 2003. They were charged and convicted of extortion after they falsified claims of sexual misconduct and then demanded $1,500 from an elderly Lowell, Massachusetts, priest who never had a prior accusation against him.
Using a threat of publicity, the Martins convinced the priest that he would be ruined if Martin’s claimed information ever became public. Compounding his poor judgment, the elderly priest borrowed $1,500 and paid a courier to deliver it to a newspaper kiosk at a local restaurant. Father MacRae first wrote of this account in “Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism.”
Predictably, with the $1,500 in hand, Dominic Martin then made a second demand after which the frightened priest called the police, who set up a sting of their own. They staked out the restaurant and arrested the Martins as they drove away. Oddly, the Globe article reported that Dominic Martin is a self-described bishop in The Traditional Western Rite Archdiocese, an “independent” Christian denomination.
A final bombshell for our purposes exploded in the last line of the Globe article reporting, that Dominic Martin had legally changed his name about two years earlier in 2000 or 2001. He identified his birth name as Tod F. X. Biltcliffe, the same person who previously sued the Diocese of Manchester alleging that Father Stephen Scruton molested him in a hot tub at the Keene YMCA. His financial settlement was obtained at about the same time Jonathan Grover, his former high school classmate, concocted an identical account. I previously wrote of this story in “Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest.”
COUPLE FACING EXTORTION CHARGES
By Matt Carroll, Globe Staff, 1/25/2003
Dominic Martin is listed on a website of independent churches as a bishop in the Traditional Western Rite Archdiocese, an independent Christian denomination, and pastor of Holy Family Old Catholic Mission in Springfield. He also lists his birth name as Tod F.X. Biltcliffe, but legally changed it about two years ago, said his attorney, Lynda Dantas.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: For the second week in a row, I am indebted to Ryan A. MacDonald for his clear writing and equally clear sense of justice. You may also like these related links from Beyond These Stone Walls:
Justice and Due Process Support the Rights of Priests — But Not This One
Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism
Oprah, Geraldo, and a Psycho-Therapist: A Perfect Storm
Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest
Justice and Due Process Support the Rights of Priests — But Not This One
A right of defense for accused priests is supported on paper in the Diocese of Manchester, but in this case it has been suppressed and obstructed at every turn.
A right of defense for accused priests is supported on paper in the Diocese of Manchester, but in this case it has been suppressed and obstructed at every turn.
October 21, 2013 by Ryan A. MacDonald [updated August 19, 2026]
I became quite familiar with the scene above during a short trip one summer. A nice 4-hour drive from New York took me along Interstate 91 and the Connecticut River. From Brattleboro, Vermont (locals call it “Brat”) I drove east on Route 9 for 18 miles to the picturesque City of Keene, New Hampshire and its much admired downtown Main Street.
Keene is a small city with a population of about 23,500 — not counting the 5,000 students enrolled in Keene State College. The social and economic hub of southwest New Hampshire, Keene boasts the widest Main Street in the United States. Its bustling downtown collection of quaint and busy shops, restaurants, a theatre, offices, and concerts on the Keene Commons is the envy of many cities its size. Keene’s downtown begins at the doors of St. Bernard Church, today part of a three-parish community known as the Parish of the Holy Spirit.
Saint Bernard Church and Rectory are depicted above. The building in the background is Saint Joseph Regional Catholic School (grades K to 8). The entire complex is bordered on the left by the bustling campus of Keene State College, and on the right by busy downtown Keene. Directly across the wide, heavily traveled Main Street from the rectory is the region’s largest and busiest U.S. Post Office, a pizza take-out, and a convenience store conducting a brisk college town business 24/7.
THE ROOM WHERE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
Just above is a closer view of the Main Street driveway between Saint Bernard Church and Rectory. It’s a scene I wanted to see for myself, and was the reason for my summer drive to Keene. Note the flat roofed adjunct just to the left of the building. It was added on at some point to the large old mansion that became St. Bernard Rectory.
The rounded doorway on the building’s left side was in 1983 the rectory’s main business entrance. Just to its left is a large window. In 1980, a closed circuit television camera was installed just above that door because the rectory had been the scene of a number of urban burglaries and an armed robbery or two. In the late 1970s, two priests and the pastor’s elderly mother were tied up in the rectory basement while the house was ransacked and robbed in the middle of the night.
On the other side of that door, when Father Gordon MacRae was assigned there in 1983, was the desk of a receptionist and secretary staffed in two shifts from 9:00 AM until 9:00 PM. There was also a waiting area for parishioners wanting to see one of the four priests assigned there in the early 1980s, and for daily clients of the region’s busy St. Vincent DePaul Society seeking assistance with food, clothing, and emergency shelter.
On the right of the church building just across the narrow driveway from the rectory was the most heavily used entrance and exit for parish activities. These doorways to the church and rectory were the busiest places in or around that parish church. The photos above and below was taken early in the morning. At virtually any other time, this scene was a hubbub of activity.
Note the large window just to the left of the rectory’s main entrance with its monitoring TV camera. It was just behind this highly visible office window — in full view of the daily hustle and bustle of Main Street traffic and the steady stream of visitors into and out of this busy rectory and church — that 27-year-old Thomas Grover claimed that he was four times sexually assaulted by Father Gordon MacRae at age 15 between April and November of 1983.
It was here behind this highly visible window where Grover claimed that in the months just prior to his 16th birthday he sought MacRae out for counseling for his drug addiction, but instead was threatened, berated, made to cry, and then raped. It was here that 200-pound Thomas Grover claimed to have returned four times from week to week unable to remember the sexual assaults he claimed to have occurred during previous visits.
Like so many who have looked at this case, I was aghast when I first became familiar with the details of the trial of Father MacRae. I wrote of this trial in an article entitled “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.” As The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in “The Trials of Father MacRae” (May 13, 2013):
"Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents."
Once I became aware of the facts of this case, I had to see for myself exactly where this was all claimed to have taken place. What I saw in the scenes depicted above is a compelling visual to accompany something Attorney Robert Rosenthal included in his failed appeal briefs to the New Hampshire courts:
“In what the petitioner asserts has been revealed as a scam to obtain a cash settlement from the Catholic church, Tom Grover, a drug addict alcoholic and criminal, accused Father Gordon MacRae of molesting him years before. Grover’s civil suit — featuring MacRae’s conviction — earned him nearly $200,000. No witnesses to the alleged acts could be found, despite that they were to have occurred in busy places. Grover’s claims were contradicted by objective facts (e.g. inoperable locks that he claimed worked, acts in an office to which MacRae did not have access, claims about a chess set that had not [yet] been purchased).”
Thomas Grover claimed that these assaults occurred in this office commencing in April 1983 and ending just as he turned 16 years old in mid-November 1983. Father Gordon MacRae did not arrive at St. Bernard Church until mid-June 1983, and did not have access to this particular office because it was occupied by another priest until the end of July 1983. Upon learning this pre-trial, Grover then vaguely moved one of his claimed assaults to an adjacent busy office to which MacRae also had no access that summer.
In the summer of 1983, St. Bernard Rectory employed a full and part-time staff of twelve, including the four priests who lived in this house, and a total staff of 25 parish and school employees all coming and going throughout the day and evening. And yet, the prosecution produced not a single witness to these acts. No one ever testified to seeing Thomas Grover there. No one ever opened the door to admit him, or saw him leave. No one ever claimed to have heard anything.
A lock Grover claimed that MacRae used to secure the office door had been dismantled and painted over years before the priest arrived. An ornate marble chess set Grover claimed was inside that office during the assaults was not purchased by the priest until three years later in 1986. Today, Grover’s former wife, Trina Ghedoni says that Grover admitted to her that he perjured himself throughout the MacRae trial, and said he offered perjured testimony about the chess set because “it was what he was told to say.”
The one person who could have helped to inform this appellate defense — Father Robert Biron, a prominent pastor in the Diocese of Manchester — refused to help. The above scene was his office several years before MacRae arrived, and again for several more years after MacRae left St. Bernard’s. Father Biron might have spoken to the improbability of much of what had been claimed. He might have described the painted over office door lock that didn’t work, the shade on the office window that wasn’t there in 1983, the absence of air conditioning requiring that this office window remain wide open to the scene overlooking the main entrance and busy Main Street throughout summer months.
Father Robert Biron might have attested to the traffic; to the noise of people coming and going, noise that easily penetrated that office door in both directions. He might have attested to the waiting area just outside that office door, and its steady stream of people. But he refused. In his answer to Father MacRae’s plea as the investigation for this appeal began, Father Biron wrote on his official Our Lady of Fatima Parish stationery,
“I can’t be of any help to you, and don’t see the necessity of entertaining any further correspondence from you.”
— Letter of Father Robert Biron, January 19, 2009
Father Biron’s cold letter was received by the imprisoned priest just after the Bishop of Manchester at the time, now deceased Bishop John McCormack, insisted to Vatican officials and others that he and the Diocese of Manchester fully support Father MacRae’s right of defense.
Earlier, Bishop McCormack offered Father MacRae $40,000 toward an appellate defense, but with conditions: he wanted the diocese to choose MacRae’s lawyers and wanted the priest to sever all contact with Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal. The Bishop also wanted MacRae to agree not to review the history and merits of this case, appealing only his sentence and not the convictions. Bishop McCormack then reneged on his offer in a grueling and cruel “stringing along” of this imprisoned priest that another prominent writer described in detail in “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits.”
When Father Gordon MacRae was on trial in 1994, and the prosecution finished presenting its case, which consisted of nothing more than Thomas Grover’s hysteria and evasiveness, Judge Arthur Brennan instructed Fr. MacRae not to take the stand in his own defense or else the judge would open the door for Thomas Grover’s brothers to testify to their own false claims brought in civil suits. Gordon MacRae was the only person never heard from in this trial.
When Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father MacRae to more than 30 times what had been offered in a plea deal, the judge never permitted the priest to speak. Now, today, both New Hampshire courts receiving this appeal have dismissed it without a hearing, without hearing from new witnesses, and without Fr. MacRae being allowed to utter a word. Even in the Diocese of Manchester, the Bishop presented Father MacRae’s case for dismissal to the Holy See without his ever even knowing what was put forward or having any opportunity to defend himself. This came after a sworn affidavit from a PBS official quoting Bishop McCormack as stating, “This must never leave this office, but I believe Father MacRae is not guilty and should not be in prison, but my hands are tied.”
Fortunately, to date, the Holy See has not seen fit to act solely on such unilateral information. The silence forced upon Father Gordon MacRae has been deeply unjust. This case must move forward and be fully heard.
What were they all afraid of?
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison
Bombshells and Black Ops Defeated Justice in New Hampshire
To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants
In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List
Saint Maximilian Kolbe is the Man in the Mirror
At the canonization of St Maximilian Kolbe, Pope John Paul II was gifted with a portrait of the new saint by Fr James McCurry, a friend of Beyond These Stone Walls.
At the canonization of St Maximilian Kolbe, Pope John Paul II was gifted with a portrait of the new saint by Fr James McCurry, a friend of Beyond These Stone Walls.
August 12, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
As many of our readers know, this blog began early in the month of August in 2009. It came into being as a result of a phone call to Australia. The person I called in Sydney had read an article I wrote for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It was her daunting suggestion that I write a blog that would be published weekly from prison. I had no idea then how that could happen. I had already been in prison for 15 years then, and Pornchai Moontri had already been my roommate for two years.
So after my phone call to Australia, I returned to our cell and told Pornchai what had been suggested to me. Neither of us knew what a blog was. They did not exist when we first went to prison. But I told Pornchai of what had been described to me: that this could be our voice to the world from behind these prison walls. Neither of us were taking this seriously, but I asked Pornchai that if I went ahead with this project, what should I call it? He immediately suggested “These Stone Walls.”
I wrote a weekly post from 2009 to 2020 when somehow this blog ran into a wall of resistance. It had to be taken down and started anew. Both Pornchai and I thought it was the end of our voice in the wilderness, but just weeks later in September 2020 it was restored with a new name: Beyond These Stone Walls. It also had a new editor, and in the same week that all of this happened, Pornchai was taken away on September 8, 2020, at 5 AM. He was taken for ICE detention (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) where he prepared for his deportation to Thailand after 36 years in the U.S., 30 of them in prison. I wrote at the time of all that we had been facing in a widely acclaimed post, “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”
Since then another six years have passed. Pornchai has been back in Thailand for six years at this writing, and I have now been writing these weekly posts for 17 years. At this time each year Pornchai and I both honor our patron saint, Maximilian Kolbe, who surrendered his life at Auschwitz to save the life of another prisoner.
What follows are the first three posts ever written for this blog. I think you will see why we combined them to publish anew here this month.
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St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror
First published August 2009.
For someone on the outside looking in, it must seem an odd place to begin. Virtually every prison cell has one: a small stainless steel sink with a matching toilet welded to its side. Bolted to the cinderblock wall just above it is a small stainless steel mirror, dinged, dented, and scraped so badly that the image it reflects is unrecognizable.
I began each day in prison at the break of dawn by shaving in front of that mirror. That morning ritual had been repeated 5,412 times [when I first wrote of it in 2009. At this writing, I have been here for 11,750 days, but I no longer shave in front of that mirror. Rules for shaving changed sometime back. I now keep a close-cropped white beard, somewhat like the one Sean Connery wore, but without his cool Scottish accent.] Back then, I seldom cut myself shaving — a minor miracle as I could see very little of my self in that mirror. I often think of St. Paul’s cryptic image in his first letter to the Church in Corinth (13:12): “For now I see dimly, as in a mirror, but then I shall see face to face.” It is a hopeful image.
I sometimes find that my mind calculates dates and their meanings on a sort of autopilot. There came a day when I stood at the mirror to shave and realized that on that day — it was December 23, 2006 — I had been a priest in prison for the exact amount of time that I was a priest “on the streets” as prisoners like to describe their lives before prison.
From that day until now, I wonder which I see more of in that flawed mirror. Do I see the man who is a priest of 27 years? [Now 44 years] Or do I see only Prisoner 67546, the identity imposed upon me behind prison walls?
A strange thing happened on the day after I first reflected — as best I could in that mirror — on who I see. It was Christmas Eve, December 24, 2006, the day that the equation changed. It was the day that I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else. That night at prison mail call, I had a few Christmas cards. One of them was from Father James McCurry, a Conventual Franciscan priest who once visited me in prison.
Inside Father McCurry’s Christmas card was a prayer card that is now one of my enduring treasures. It is taped to the stone wall just above the mirror in my cell and has been there ever since. In later years I was moved to other places, but the card always came with me. The holy card has an image of St. Maximilian Kolbe who offered himself for execution by starvation in place of another prisoner in Auschwitz in 1941. The card depicts Father Kolbe in his Conventual Franciscan habit. He has one sleeve in the striped jacket of his prison uniform with the number 16670 emblazoned across it. There is a scarlet “P” above the number indicating his Polish nationality. He was also a priest and a falsely accused prisoner. Does either designation extinguish the other? Father Kolbe is at once both, though only one identity was chosen by him.
The image is a haunting image for it captures fully that struggle I have so keenly felt. Father Maximilian appeared in my cell just a day after I asked the question of myself. Who am I? I thought at the time, that it was a rhetorical question, but it was a prayer. As such, it begged a reply — and got one.
Saint Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning
Not long after that card first arrived, so did my friend Pornchai Moontri. He had just spent 13 years in solitary confinement in the Maine State Prison since he was age 18. When they could no longer hold him in the cruelty of such a place, they sent him here where he ended up with me. On the day he arrived in my cell, he dropped his trash bag of belongings, stared at the image above the mirror and asked, “Is this you?” That, too, was not a rhetorical question.
How I came to be in this prison is a story told elsewhere, by me and by others. How I “met” Father Maximilian Kolbe 60 years after he surrendered his life at Auschwitz is a story about actual grace. In his Catholic Catechism, Jesuit Father John Hardon defined actual grace as God’s gift of “the special assistance we need to guide the mind and inspire the will” on our path to God. Sometimes, it is very special.
My first years in prison are a blur in my memory. There is no point trying to find words to express the sense of loss, of alienation, of being cast into a dark abyss that was not of my own making — a loss that could not be grounded in any reality of my own. Thousands of days and nights had passed in the abyss before what Father Hardon described as “special assistance” crossed my path.
Someone, somewhere — I don’t know who — sent the prison’s Catholic chaplain (a layman then) a book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, M.D. Somewhere in my studies, I heard of this book, but only a prisoner can read it in the same light in which it is written. The chaplain called me to his office. He wanted to know whether he should recommend this book, but didn’t have time to read it. He wanted my opinion.
It had been years since anyone had asked my opinion on anything. I didn’t read Dr. Frankl’s book so much as devour it. I read it through three times in seven days. As a priest, I often counseled others that grace is a process and not an event. It is not always so. I was meant to read Man’s Search for Meaning at the precise moment that it landed upon my path. A week earlier, I would not have been ready. A week later may have been too late.
I was drowning in a solitary sea of hopelessness. I was not going to make it across. My priesthood and my soul were dying. The Book, as I have come to call it, is Viktor Frankl’s vivid account of how he alone among his family survived imprisonment in Auschwitz. This was an imprisonment imposed on him for who he was: a Jew.
There is a central message in this small book. A profound message, so clear in meaning, that it has within it the hallmark of inspired truth. Like Saul thrown from his mount, I remember sinking to the floor when I read it.
“There is a freedom that no one can ever take from you: The freedom to choose the person you are going to be in any set of circumstances.”
This changed everything. Everything! You will see how later. At the very end of his book, Dr. Frankl revealed the name of his inspiration for surviving Auschwitz. He wrote of Sigmund Freud’s cynical view that man is self-serving. And a man’s instinctual need to survive will trump “quaint notions” such as grace and sacrifice every time. For Dr. Frankl, Auschwitz provided the proof that Freud was wrong.
That proof was Father Maximilian Kolbe.
The Sacrifice of Saint Maximilian
“Greater love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for another.”
— John 15:13
As a young priest in 1982, I was only vaguely familiar with the name Maximilian Kolbe. I remember reading of his canonization by Pope John Paul II, but Father Kolbe’s world was far removed from my modern suburban priesthood. I was far too busy to step into it.
I didn’t know that nearly two decades later, Father Kolbe’s life, death, and sainthood would be proclaimed triumphantly on the wall of my prison cell, and not only by me. I also didn’t know this would help define the person I choose to be in prison.
Being a Jew and not a Catholic, Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, said nothing about Maximilian’s sainthood or any miracles attributed to his intercession. Instead, Dr. Frankl was moved by the profound sacrifice of Maximilian, which defies the narcissism of our times.
For those unfamiliar with him, the story is simple.
The prisoners of Auschwitz were packed into bunkers like cattle. To encourage informants, the camp had a policy that if any prisoner escaped, 10 others would be randomly chosen for summary execution.
At the morning roll call one day, a prisoner from Maximilian’s bunker was missing. Guards chose 10 men to be executed. The 10th fell to the ground and cried for the wife and children he would never see again. Father Kolbe spontaneously stepped forward and said,
“I am a Catholic priest, and I would like to take the place of this man.”
Two weeks later, he alone was still alive among the 10 prisoners chained and condemned to starvation. Maximilian was injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, and his remains unceremoniously incinerated.
For the unbeliever, all that Maximilian was went up in smoke and ash in the bleak sky above Auschwitz. Viktor Frankl shared some other corner of that horrific prison. The story of the person Father Kolbe chose to be rippled through the camp. This story offered proof to Viktor Frankl that we can be as much inspired by grace as doomed by despair. We get to choose which will define us.
Within days of reading Man’s Search for Meaning and learning of Father Kolbe’s sacrifice, I received a letter from out of the blue. Conventual Franciscan Father James McCurry had been in an airport in Ireland when he heard an Irish priest nearby mention that he corresponds with a priest in a Concord, New Hampshire prison. Father McCurry said he was on his way to visit his order’s house in Granby, Massachusetts and would arrange to visit the Concord prison.
Weeks later, Father McCurry and I met in the prison visiting room. When I asked him what his “assignment” is, he said,
“Well I just finished a biography of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Have you heard of him?”
Father McCurry went on to say that he was involved in Father Maximilian’s Cause for Sainthood, and was officially appointed by the Vatican to be Vice-Postulator for Maximilian’s Cause. He had met the man whose life was saved by Father Kolbe.
A few years later, Father McCurry arranged a Father Maximilian Kolbe exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum. It was then that he sent me the card depicting Father Maximilian clothed in his Franciscan habit with one sleeve in his prison uniform. I keep the card above my mirror in my cell.
I can never embrace these stone walls. I can’t claim ownership of them. Passively acceding to injustice anywhere contributes to injustice everywhere. Father Maximilian never approved of Auschwitz.
One cannot understand how I now respond to these stone walls, however, without hearing of Father Maximilian’s presence here.
Above my mirror, he refocused my hope in the light of Christ. The darkness can never overcome it.
What hope and freedom there is in that fact! The darkness can never, ever, ever overcome it!
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I will be offering Mass late at night on August 14, the Feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, which is also the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, his Immaculata and ours. Regarding the letter from Father James McCurry at the end of this post, I only just now realized that it had not come to me from our editor; rather, Father McCurry sent it by U.S. mail to Pornchai Maximilian in Thailand, where it arrived after weeks with all its wrinkles still intact. Pornchai was so proud of it that he quickly took a photo and mailed it to me in prison.
You may also like these related posts in honor of our Patron Saint:
Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s Gift of Noble Defiance
The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe