Dr Anthony Fauci Took Refuge Under the Fifth Amendment 111 Times

WSJ: “Senator Rand Paul deserves credit for digging into the truth about the destructive Covid response and the effort by Dr Fauci to stifle dissent and hide the record.”

August 5, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

The above excerpt from The Wall Street Journal is from a July 30, 2026 lead editorial, “Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas.”

On May 6, 2020, I published a post at Beyond These Stone Walls entitled, “The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19.” I became interested in the subject matter because for the previous month I had been gravely ill in prison and self-isolated in an effort to halt the spread of a virus that had devastated my immune response. There was no treatment whatsoever beyond my resolve not to pass it on to others. My friend Pornchai Moontri was here with me then and he had Covid as well. So did most of the prisoners who shared the space in which we lived. I was in my later 60s then, and at one point I thought I may not survive it, but obviously I did.

What I wrote at the time about evidence for a source connection for the virus with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was widely dismissed in the U.S. as a conspiracy theory, but it was dismissed mostly for political reasons rather than scientific ones. The Wuhan wildlife market connection curiously proffered (and oddly preferred) by Democrats was also in lockstep with the level of surety professed by the Chinese Communist Government. The agreed-upon doctrine was that the virus was contracted and innocently spread by Chinese citizens, and/or tourists who purchased, and consumed wild animals at a Wuhan market. That assertion, without compelling scientific evidence, would have been widely dismissed by Democrats as racist if President Trump had asserted it.

Four months before I wrote the above-linked post — but unknown to me at the time — Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in a January 2020 diary entry that the Wuhan market was not the source of the viral spread, but rather an “amplifier” of it.

In 2026, a video played by Homeland Security Committee Chair, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) showed Dr. Fauci stating with dogmatic certainty in TV interviews that wild animals being sold in Asian ‘wet markets’ were the “likely” source of the virus. More recently, Dr. Fauci and his team of lawyers tried to suppress the journal evidence as “personal views” but a court ordered that they may be made public. Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told Fox News that his staff “dug the diaries” out of Health Department servers and gave them to the Homeland Security Committee.

The Left of the U.S. Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party Are Becoming Dangerously Aligned

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stated that there has been a cover-up of the true origin of Covid-19. If so, the cover-up has been the work of some of our highly partisan American news media as much as that of the Chinese Communist Party.

I survived, but the above-linked post I wrote did not fare quite as well. It addressed with much doubt the origin of Covid-19 that had been settled upon in the official account of the Chinese Communist Party. Since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has conducted its own investigation with conclusions that conveniently matched those of China’s communist regime and the U.S. Democratic Party, all without evidence.

However, the cooperation of the Chinese government was sorely lacking, and some WHO investigators were not satisfied that the whole truth had been uncovered and told to the world. I am certainly no wild conspiracy theorist, but the science part of me had doubts about the reigning dogma: that a Wuhan wildlife market was the source of the virus despite evidence that the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology had been handling that same virus since its initial quiet discovery in an abandoned mine in Southwest China in 2012.

It was discovered then when six Chinese citizens entered a mine in Yunnan Province to gather samples of bat droppings. All six became quite ill within days. Three of them died. Now new evidence has emerged from a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that in November 2019, a month before the world even heard of Covid-19, three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became critically ill and were hospitalized. The Biden administration, which had earlier shut down any inquiry into a possible laboratory source for the virus, had then and only reluctanly called for further review. There is a lot more to this story.

I have written that there was zero evidence to support the conspiracy theory that this is a weaponized virus intentionally unleashed on the world. Emails released at the time by Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that he was warned in early 2020 by immunology expert Kristian Andersen that “the virus had some unusual features hinting at manipulation in a lab setting.” Dr. Andersen stated that the virus was not compatible with evolutionary theory leading him to believe that it was manipulated in a lab. Four other experts in his team agreed with that assessment. Then suddenly it was withdrawn without explanation. From 2014 to 2019 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent $3.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology culminating with a note of thanks for sticking by the “natural origin" theory.

Evidence that something is amiss here continued to mount. In following weeks, Kristian Andersen deleted thousands of tweets with information related to his initial assessment of the virus. In early June of that year Dr. Andersen deleted his Twitter account and has since reportedly declined to respond to questions, as we have recently seen, so has Dr. Fauci himself.

According to a June 4, 2021 Wall Street Journal report, the NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, “and it is likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious.” In a February 2020 email, Dr. Fauci sent his deputy a paper about this gain-of-function research. The email instructed the deputy, “Read this paper. You will have tasks today that must be done.” His deputy replied that he would “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.” Dr. Fauci has said to date that his organization did not fund gain-of-function research, but “I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab.”

Dr. Steven Quay and physics professor Richard Muller published their findings in The Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2021) revealing that the gene sequence of a virus that has been subjected to gain-of-function adaptations is not typically naturally occurring. And yet it does appear in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. “The scientific evidence,” they say, “points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.” If true, the world is left to determine whether the leak was indeed an accident.

There have always been many reasons to question China’s official explanation — for which there is also zero evidence — that humans visiting a Wuhan market contracted the virus from an animal that had been bitten by a bat, and then it spread from Wuhan across the globe. Again, the science part of me concludes that there would be many other examples of a similar natural transmission of deadly viruses if this scenario were so. Given the stakes for humanity and for the future, the truth must be uncovered. However, in both China and the United States this inquiry has been suppressed for political bias having nothing to do with scientific truth.

After I and others wrote about the origin of Covid-19 in 2020, the concept of a possible laboratory leak as the source of the virus was widely and quickly dismissed. A New York Times reporter admitted that the Times dismissed the theory only because it was the Trump administration that first raised it. CNN dismissed it as an unhelpful conspiracy theory in 2020, but now reluctantly calls for further investigation. Also early in 2020, 27 leading scientists signed an open letter condemning conspiracy theories that suggest Covid-19 did not have a natural origin like the one officially proffered by the Chinese government. Now several of the signatories have withdrawn that position. That fiasco was on a par with the 51 intelligence operatives in the United States who lent their names to a document denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation.”

The People’s Republic but Not the People’s Pandemic

In early January 2020, international news media began reporting on a viral outbreak of unknown origin in Wuhan, China. On January 30, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton warned that “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately dismissed this suspicion of a laboratory involvement as “absolutely crazy.”

Much of the mainstream U.S. news media immediately took up representation of the CCP denouncement, not because Senator Cotton’s idea was not worthy of scientific inquiry, but because of an unspoken media mandate to disparage the people who proposed it: Senator Tom Cotton and President Donald Trump. The Washington Post declared, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was absolutely debunked.” The New York Times followed with the headline, “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origin.”

We should never again have a global pandemic during a U.S. presidential election year. The July 30 lead editorial cited above, “Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas,” concludes, “The conformist media idolatry of Dr. Fauci was a way of shutting off debate over Covid policy. It also became a way for the press to attack President Trump in an election year.” From that point on, anyone who published any evidence for why the possibility of a laboratory connection should be considered was labeled on CNN and MSNBC and most major news networks as “fringe” or “a conspiracy theorist.” I was hit with those same labels after my May 2020 post linked above.

On February 6, 2020, Botao Xiao, a molecular biologist and researcher at South China University of Technology, published a paper in which he concluded that the novel coronavirus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Under pressure from the CCP, he quickly withdrew that publication.

A year later, a group of 18 scientists from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities signed an open letter in the journal Science calling for a more serious consideration of the theory that the virus could have been of natural origin that, after discovery in a cave, was brought back to a laboratory intentionally or by accident and then escaped.

Now the CCP has obstructed any further investigation. The mine in Yunnan Province set up a checkpoint that bars journalists and investigators from entering.

The body of evidence gathered by the World Health Organization investigation is not at all compelling and is not supported by emerging evidence. It is important to get to the bottom of this to prevent an outbreak like Covid-19, or something worse, from ever occurring again.

But what is most important here is a point I have made before and must make again: The Chinese Communist Party and government are not a reflection of the will, minds, or hearts of the Chinese people. Anti-Asian bigotry was not an acceptable response to the pandemic. The good people of China exist under an oppressive Communist regime. China is called the People’s Republic, but Covid-19 was not the people’s pandemic.

On that note, and perhaps only loosely related, everything written in this post should raise the inner alarm of every thinking person about the newest, most dangerous development in our politics: the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America. What sane, thinking person would ever want to go down that road again? We need our news media and we need it to be free of Socialist control.

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Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these posts of related interest:

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

The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

From Dorothy Rabinowitz: ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’

Fifty Years after Watergate Came the January 6 Committee

The marriage of media and left-leaning politics has brought us Pandemonium.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s Gift of Noble Defiance

At the end of July, 85 years ago in 1941, Father Maximilian Kolbe stepped out of line at Auschwitz. His gift of noble defiance has spread throughout the known world.

July 30, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Auschwitz 1941:

After the so-called dinner, I was invited between Blocks 18 and 19 where some prisoners had gathered among whom were several priests … Our colleague, Kolbe, spoke of the Feast of Corpus Christi, of the great omnipresent God, and of our sufferings by which He was trying to make us ready for a better life.

— A priest at Auschwitz, from Depositions of Fellow Prisoners, 1970, p. 34

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Pornchai Moontri once looked at the death chamber of Maximilian Kolbe and saw devouring jaws of evil. I saw that evil too, but choking on a brave soul’s noble defiance.

The photograph in this post has deep meaning and significance for us.  BTSW  reader Lupe Gwiazdowski, on a tour of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, stood with her camera before the gaping maw of a prison window. She photographed the window of the death chamber that consumed the life of our Patron Saint but could not extinguish the light of his sacrificial priesthood.

When Lupe’s letter with the photograph arrived in early July, 2017, when Pornchai “Max” Moontri was still here with me, he and I were standing with 100 other prisoners for Mail Call. The mail handlers here reversed the pages before stuffing the letter back in its envelope so the page with this photo was on top when I unfolded the letter.

I did not know what the photo was, but right off Pornchai pointed to it. “It’s a face!” he said. “An evil face!” Study the photograph above for a moment. Once I saw what Pornchai saw, I could not look at the photo again without instantly seeing that same demonic face. You will see it too.

But what Pornchai saw as the gaping jaws of evil ready to devour, I saw those same jaws choking on whatever was inside. When I suggested this to Pornchai, he saw it too. Stare at the photo for another moment, and you may see what I mean.

Then I read the letter that accompanied Lupe’s photo, and realized with a jolt that it was behind these gaping jaws that our Patron Saint, Maximilian Kolbe, surrendered his life in defiance of the great evil that manifested itself at Auschwitz.

Over two weeks of forced starvation followed his choice to die in place of an innocent young man. When Father Kolbe did not die in a timely manner that suited his captors, his life was taken by lethal injection on August 14, 1941. After a lifetime of devotion to “The Immaculata,” death came on the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption. Lupe tells the story of the photo in her letter of June 29, 2017 that touched our hearts deeply:

“Hi Father G: I wanted to send you this photo and I hope you get it. I went to Poland this month, and I made a mental note to pray for you and Pornchai “Max” Moontri at the Auschwitz cell of St Maximilian Kolbe.

“As is often the case with my mental notes, when I got to the cell I was so overwhelmed that I forgot it. As soon as we exited the block of cells I remembered. I left the group and tried to push my way back to the cell, but Polish tour guides are not to be pushed against! I didn’t make it.

“I was downcast as I caught up with the group, and then realized that the guide was pointing to the bars of the Saint’s cell window from the outside. I didn’t even hear what she was saying as I looked upon this sacred spot. I thought of how this priest and his companion prisoners died giving such powerful witness through those same bars to so many whose hope was perishing. I lifted you and Pornchai up right there, and then snapped this photo for you. Father, I do not know what else to say.

“When I got back to a computer, I saw your post, “Thoughts Upon My 35th Anniversary of Priesthood Ordination,” and realized that your anniversary was on the same day I prayed for you and Pornchai-Max at Auschwitz. Father, thank you for your priesthood.”

In Noble Defiance of Evil

Today, virtually everyone knows the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. His Earthly remains were reduced to smoke and ash in the ovens of Hitler to drift in the skies above Auschwitz. But what he wrote and said and did, the glow of his soul, still moves mountains and the hearts of millions.

In Father Maximilian Kolbe, evil did not destroy what it set out to destroy. It imprisoned and killed the body of a man, but the priest lived on in noble sacrifice and love. The jaws of that window choked on the goodness of the soul contained therein.

Of all the thousands of accounts about the witness and strength of Father Maximilian Kolbe, for me the most powerful account comes from Herrmann Langbein, who was a prisoner at Dachau and then at Auschwitz. He is best known for his book, Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1938-1945. He singles out one man’s defiance that I have cited in other posts about our Patron Saint:

“The best-known act of resistance was that of Maximilian Rajmund Kolbe, who deprived the camp administration of the power to make arbitrary decisions about life and death.”

— People in Auschwitz, p. 241

Langbein went on to write powerfully of the witness, not only of Father Kolbe’s sacrifice by volunteering to take upon himself the death sentence of a fellow prisoner, but of his demeanor in prison:

“Kolbe and his companions in misfortune had to spend almost three weeks [in starvation] in an unlit cell. On August 14 (1941) a lethal injection ended the suffering of the man whose bearing elicited the respect of the supervising SS men to the very end.”

— People in Auschwitz, p. 241

I pray for the gift of this brave priest’s noble defiance of evil. It is easier to just succumb to it, enduring it for as long as we can until it starts to bring about subtle changes in our resolve. My favorite passage in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (Harper, 1942) is Letter 12. You have seen this passage before in these pages. The demonic “Uncle Screwtape” describes perfectly the slippery slope that suffering and sin conspire to spread the contagion of evil. Their cumulative effect …

“… is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing … . Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

— The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, Letter 12

In no place is a man or woman without defiance “edged away from the Light out into the Nothing” more than in prison. Like all prisons — whether they be prisons of iron, or fear, or trauma, or loneliness, or sickness, or pain — year upon year of it can set us upon the subtle turnings C. S. Lewis describes. For some, no doubt, resistance to the evils of our prisons seems futile.

Something happened recently — something profoundly humbling — that I thought about when I read the short passage at the top of this post from a priest-prisoner in Auschwitz with Maximilian Kolbe. The passage is from a published collection, Depositions of Fellow Prisoners, in the investigation of Maximilian Kolbe’s cause for sainthood.

More than 12,000 priests died in Auschwitz and the other camps of Germany and Poland, but the priest who wrote the passage atop this post survived. I wonder about those who perished there, those whose hope was siphoned off by the evil in their midst.

But for Maximilian Kolbe, resistance to evil was the one charism of a sacrificial priesthood available to him in a place where priesthood and sacrifice were deemed meaningless by worldly powers. Prison can quickly descend into “every man for himself,” but Maximilian lived and died on life’s road less traveled.

Priesthood Lost in Translation

Over the many years that I have been in this prison unjustly, there was another priest here. He was a priest of my Diocese, but I never knew him outside of prison. In fact, I barely knew him here. He was convicted of a sexual abuse charge in 1997, one alleged to have taken place long before then, and had been here ever since.

I know that in 2001, this priest acquiesced to a demand that he be voluntarily laicized (dismissed from the clerical state). Over the ensuing years, after 25 years of priesthood, he never again heard from our Bishop or Diocese. He was discarded. The prisoner-priest lost his faith. He became unable to be present at Mass for the next sixteen years. He was in a different prison unit than I, and I saw him only in rare passing.

However, when printed copies of some BTSW posts were mailed to me, the sender would often send two. So, with the clandestine help of friends here, I started to send the other copy to this priest. I did not send him every post, just the ones about priesthood. One post reached an untapped well of faith and hope.

It was “Saint Maximilian Kolbe: A Knight at My Own Armageddon.” It was the middle of an important three-part post, and was the only post for which the priest sent back — via the same circuitous prison channels — a request to see more. These posts were the limits of our contact.

The same week that Lupe’s letter and photo arrived, Pornchai Max and I were climbing the multiple tiers of stairs on a Sunday morning for Mass in the prison chapel. As we passed the second floor landing, the priest mentioned above was just then emerging from the prison medical unit. I greeted him and shook his hand (another act of resistance as shaking someone’s hand is forbidden here) and then something strange happened.

Pornchai did not even know who he was and I did not want to put the priest on the spot so we parted company and proceeded up the next flight of stairs. Then Pornchai turned and said, “Do you want to come with us?” The priest paused for a moment looking puzzled, and then quietly followed us up the stairs. Before we entered the chapel, I asked Pornchai to go find us some seats while the prisoner-priest told me that this was his first time at Mass in 16 years. He became reconciled, and we sat with him.

The next week — being an idiot sometimes — I took our usual seats and Pornchai stood glaring at me. “What are you doing?” he asked, and then pointed to that other priest still standing outside the door. “Go get him and bring him in to sit with us,” said Pornchai. God bless Pornchai!

In early July back in 2017, I spotted that prisoner-priest on the local news. He was appearing before the New Hampshire Parole Board with a request for medical parole because he was dying of cancer.

A physician who spoke at the hearing reported that he had no more than six months to live, and his care would be a burdensome expense for the state. After some callous remarks from a victim advocate on the State’s payroll about whether he “looks sick enough,” and whether twenty years in prison exacts sufficient reckoning, the Parole Board granted his medical parole.

On the Move

A week later, Max and I were suddenly moved — he to one place and I to another. Apart for the first time in over ten years, this had been a great hardship for us both. We were trying to reunite, but once anything like this is done here, it resists being undone. Max was trying to be moved to the same place I was in. We saw each other only once in the prison law library where I work. I invited Max to pray with me the Memorare:

“Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, we flee unto you, O Virgin of virgins, our Mother; to you do we come, before you we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer us. Amen.”

The place I was sent to is the unit the other priest had been living in for the previous twenty years. My first week there was his last week there, and we were able to walk each morning and talk. He was restored to faith and hope that our sufferings will make us ready for a better life.

I was with him early on the morning he left prison, and went home to his sister to die. I like to think that we managed to fill in some of the cold abyss in which our Church let him wander alone in exile for twenty years. I cannot imagine, even in my most vengeful thoughts, that such alienation and abandonment are what Christ summons forth from the Apostolic witness of His Church.

Most of all, I like to think we helped to prepare my brother-priest for something essential imparted to us by a Patron Saint who guides us on a right path through prison: the gift of a noble defiance of evil with the living witness of sacrificial priesthood.

On the day after that priest left prison, one week after Max and I prayed the Memorare, I returned from work to see him living once again in the bunk above me. He remained there until he entered ICE detention to prepare for his return to Thailand in 2020.

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.”

Optimism: When Hope Springs Eternal

A decade after the priesthood scandal broke the hearts of many Catholics and the optimism of many priests, Fr. James Valladares reminded us all of the gift of Hope.

July 29, 2026 by Father Michael P. Orsi with an Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae

Introduction

As most of the readers of this blog know, I was sent to prison with a life sentence in 1994 after refusing multiple plea deal offers to plead guilty in exchange for a one-to-two-year prison sentence. I would have been released from prison over 30 years ago had I actually been guilty, or at least willing to pretend so. It is the way more than 90 percent of trials in the United States are resolved in court. Those who gain their sense of Law and Order from the popular TV show of the same name are oblivious to the reality of this. I used to also be oblivious to what is today called “The Trial Penalty,” the implied threat that if you do not plead guilty you will spend the rest of your life in prison.

The first decade of my life in prison was the most painful, but not the only one that was painful. All hope had gone out of my world. The Church had gone out of my world, and took the priesthood with it. By some unknown mercy, I was spared the loss of my priesthood. I was never dismissed from the clerical state, a factor that I clung to as I grasped for any semblance of hope. Toward the end of that first decade, around 2003-2004, it got even worse. What had been a crisis in Boston and New Hampshire exploded onto the national stage and became a cause célèbre for contingency lawyers by the hundreds and scam artists by the thousands to bilk the Church out of more than $4 billion dollars in settlement of claims that never even saw the inside of a court room or heard the gavel of a judge. I wrote of this trend most recently in “Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism.”

As the news footage and newsprint dominated the scandal, I heard from some brother priests of my Diocese, but what I heard was merely condemnation. My Bishop’s office spokesperson, a monsignor who years later would serve his own prison sentence for financial crimes, filled in all the blanks in the public narrative with content about me and the case against me, which was entirely contrived and untrue, and for which he thought with surety that I would never actually see. Further down that deep well of hopelessness, I was alone in my grief.

Around 2000 or so, a celebrated Pulitzer Prize-wining journalist stepped on to the national media stage after quietly performing a forensic analysis of the case against me and its motives and aftermath. Suddenly there was an explosion of hope within me that no matter the outcome, the truth would finally be told on the most potent national stage, The Wall Street Journal.

But then, on September 11, 2001 — in the least of the tragedies of that day — came news that the offices of The Wall Street Journal were destroyed as the Twin Towers in the World Trade Center fell in New York City. Any optimism I had left fell along with them. All the research and content, electronic and otherwise, that had been amassed by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, was demolished. In January of 2002 came word that we would have to start over. I was not certain that I could.

What was supposed to have been written around 2001 became postponed indefinitely. The corrupt monsignor in my Diocese, who wore a second hat as the head of an organization representing insurance companies that moderated settlements, continued his campaign of misinformation, inflating the file of record with falsehood. Then, finally, in 2005 the hammer fell. The Wall Street Journal published its first of several articles under the broad heading, “The Trials of Father MacRae.” Other publications, such as The Media Report, picked up that story and ran with it. Our “Monsignor” fell into silence. A few years later Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus, along with the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, urged me to write giving birth to Beyond These Stone Walls. My stifled optimism was undergoing a breakout appearance in my heart and soul.

Then the unthinkable happened. A priest and psychologist, a celebrated author in Australia, also took up this story in a magnificent book, Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast. Father James Valladares, PhD is one of the most courageous and honorable priests I know.

While I was busy writing in prison for a blog the audience of which I could not see, Father Valladares was in Australia reading every word. When his book was published in 2012, I learned with a shock that he had been taking copious notes about my sacrificial priesthood, and he filled a significant number of his pages and chapters with the thoughts of my heart which he revealed. I was stunned, and I knew instantly that all those years of hopelessness were dedicated to the exposition of truth that will long outlive both Father Valladares and me. He gave his book a most hopeful title:

Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This book is very special. It was not a gift to me, but to the priesthood. I recently wrote to Father Valladares about the status of his research and his book. He very generously gave me the entire book in electronic format so that we could publish his chapters one by one as an occasional post at Beyond These Stone Walls. And so we begin this week with the Foreword to Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast. The Foreword is brilliant. It was written by Father Michael P. Orsi, then of Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida. It contains the most hope I have seen or heard in a very long time.

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Foreword by Reverend Michael P. Orsi, Ave Maria School of Law

The clergy abuse scandal has posed the greatest threat to the traditional understanding of the Catholic priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. Now, as then, the deadliest attacks are coming from within the Church. In an attempt to ameliorate a system that allowed a small minority of the clergy to violate children and the gross negligence of some bishops who recycled these predators, the American bishops instituted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. It is, unfortunately, doing the Church more harm than good.

By adhering to the Charter’s provisions, the American hierarchy has unwittingly undermined the Church’s sacramental theology regarding Holy Orders and her ecclesiology, which depends on a priest’s relationship with his bishop. This breakdown has encouraged present-day Modernists, who believe the truth is culturally conditioned and that the Faith is based merely on sentimentality, to try to remake the Church according to their own lights. Intra-ecclesial groups like Future Church, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have subsequently formed, challenging the hierarchical nature of the Church, her infallible teaching on the male-only priesthood, and the Western tradition of priestly celibacy.

A major factor responsible for a large number of the sex abuse cases, according to the 2011 John Jay College of Criminology Report to the bishops, is attributed to the sexual confusion which reigned in society and the Church in the 1960s and 1970s. The teaching of moral relativism and the acceptance of popular psychological theories over traditional theological principles led to the excess of bad behavior during this period. No doubt bad thinking led to bad actions. The lesson is that orthodoxy is necessary for orthopraxis.

The Dallas Charter was a response to the deep regret felt by the bishops for the perverse crimes that had occurred against minors and a recognition that strong safeguards must be in place to protect them. But the remedies that they enacted were influenced by the secular solutions of lawyers and public relations experts, which compromised the Gospel. They do not reflect justice, charity, and forgiveness toward priests. Dangerous procedural measures, such as administrative leave, zero tolerance, and one-size-fits-all policy for accused priests and for punishing malefactors have lent themselves to violations of canonical due process and a mockery of time-tested principles of jurisprudence. This is especially evident when dioceses publish the names of defenseless deceased priests as sex abusers on their websites. But most egregious is the forced laicization imposed on those deemed to be guilty. This action clouds in the popular mind the permanency of the indelible character of Holy Orders conferred at ordination.

The present state of affairs has caused mistrust and fear in priest-bishop relationship. The collaboration of a priest with his bishop is vital since he participates in the bishop’s priesthood. Bishops, who are supposed to be fathers, brothers, and friends to their priests, have instead become mere managers with institutional damage control as their top priority. Many priests have dubbed this the Caiaphas Principle. A recent survey in an unpublished dissertation found that most priests do not believe that they can count on the support of their fellow priests in the event of a false accusation, presumably out of fear of retribution from their bishop or from victims’ advocacy groups. This too is extremely dangerous because priests of the diocese form a presbyterate in union with their bishop. It has devastating pastoral consequences.

“Credible evidence,” the nebulous standard used by diocesan review boards, has effectively made priests guilty until proven innocent. This has forced priests to shy away from human interactions, especially expressions of pastoral warmth and concern, which were the hallmarks of Jesus’s public ministry. Now a fatherly touch may be interpreted as a sexual advance or an act of kindness toward a young person misconstrued as “grooming.” As one priest so poignantly stated, “If I meet a woman, I’m having an affair; if I meet a man, I’m gay; and, God forbid, if I’m with a child, I’m an abuser.” In the current climate, any human action of a priest is suspect. Naturally, this has had a devastating toll on the effectiveness of the ordained ministry.

In Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, Fr. James Valladares shows how justice and charity have been violated by some bishops in dealing with accused priests. He examines the pertinent canons that guide the Church’s justice system and finds that these are often ignored or wrongly applied. He provides true cases that highlight the injustice of the process and the agony of priests who have been subjected to the Charter’s draconian mandates.

The Church has incurred tremendous financial losses because of settlements rising from both legitimate and false claims. Her image has been marred by the secular media, which has taken advantage of the crisis. However, we often fail to understand how trivial these are in comparison to the damage done to the priesthood by the enactment of the Charter’s policies. This is the pressing issue that the bishops need to address.

The present scenario reported by Fr. Valladares is dark. Yet, he has surprisingly chosen a title for his book that speaks of hope. For sure, it is a hope based on Jesus’ words to his disciples, “I will be with you always.” Therefore, far from being pessimistic, Fr. Valladares presents the facts with confidence that “the truth will set us free.”

For his hard work, born out of a love for the priesthood and his brother-priests, Fr. James Valladares is to be commended.

Reverend Michael P. Orsi
Ave Maria School of Law
Naples, Florida
Fall 2011

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Related Links

Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound by Rev. Michael P. Orsi for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism Years

Due Process for Accused Priests by Father Gordon MacRae for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

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 Modern Orthodox Jew on Preserving Hebrew and the Latin Mass

A conversation between Father Gordon MacRae and his friend, a Modern Orthodox Jewish scholar, has something to add to the debate about preserving Latin in the Mass.

July 22, 2026 by Seth Bader, J.D. with an Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae

Introduction

In the image above this post, Melchizedek, the Priest-King of Genesis 14, blesses Abraham with a sacrificial offering of bread and wine (The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek painted by Juan Antonio de Frias y Escalante in 1668, housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain).

The affairs of Rome have not been the only source of heat throughout the world in recent weeks. The winds of war have reached hurricane force, and the rule of law and authority in both Church and State clashes against public sentiment. And the weather has not cooperated at all. It is about 105 degrees inside this place on the day I write. None of this has been comfortable.

Back in 2021, I wrote a post entitled, “A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass.” This appears to be at or near the center of the SSPX revolt in the Church. You may have seen news recently that Pope Leo XIV is reported to have excommunicated the Society of Saint Pius X, a conservative sect of Catholicism. Adherents to the sect have also reportedly been excommunicated.

Most importantly, I have just been corrected in my perception of this by a well-known and prominent canonist who read my post with some alarm. The situation is not at all what is commonly understood. Pope Leo did not excommunicate the SSPX. Please read carefully these words from my canonist friend:

“Six men, the four new bishops and the two conservators, were excommunicated by the law itself, and the penalty was later “declared” by the Prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF).  A note issued by the DDF stated that the clergy of the SSPX were excommunicated because their adherence to the Society was an act of schism for which there is a latae sententiae excommunication.  That excommunication has NOT been declared, which means it is a matter of conscience for those affected. It has not entered the external forum and may be lifted through a confessor or directly through the Apostolic Penitentiary. The declared excommunication of the bishops is now public fact and is in the external forum.  As for the laity, they are excommunicated only if they adhere to the schismatic mentality.  It, too, is only in the internal forum. Mere attendance at the SSPX’s valid, but illicit, masses does not excommunicate them.”

The trigger for this action was that SSPX had elevated four bishops ordained without the approval of the Pope and outside the Laws of the Church.

I wrote a post a while back during the papacy of Pope Francis entitled, “Will Pope Francis Stand Against Catholic Schism?” Many of us are now left to wonder whether the nuclear option, excommunication, was the only step left. It raises many questions on both sides of the Liberal-Traditional divide in the Church. Now, here we are.

The title of a related post, “My Father’s House Has Many Rooms,” comes from the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, verse 2. It is seen by scholars as a reference to the Jerusalem Temple, hinting of its heavenly sanctuary, the dwelling place of angels and saints who worship in eternal liturgy. The Letter to the Hebrews describes it:

“You have come to Mount Zion, to the City of the Living God in the heavenly Jerusalem, to choirs of angels in festal gathering and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus, mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.”

— Hebrews 12:22-24

After I wrote that post, I asked a friend here to read it. He is an attorney, a prisoner, and a scholarly Modern Orthodox Jew. He responded by telling me that the Catholic controversy over Latin Mass is very similar to a controversy over the use of Hebrew in liturgy and prayers. I asked if he would develop a comment about that, and it turned into this post. What follows is from Seth Bader, J.D.

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In September of 2025, I happened to read an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal about the late Pope Francis and his effort to stamp out the Traditional Latin Mass, and the sadness and bitterness thereby engendered amongst Roman Catholics of conservative inclinations. That opinion piece got me to thinking about the over-a-century-old, and now largely forgotten, disputes within the Jewish community about the liturgical and conversational use of Hebrew.

By way of introduction, I am a lawyer and an amateur historian now in my middle sixties and incarcerated. I was raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew; my observance thereof as an adult leaves something to be desired. But I am working on it.

To start with, brief descriptions of Latin and Hebrew are in order. They are both ancient languages. Latin ceased to be a national language in the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 400’s AD. Its offsprings, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, are all national languages to this day. The Latin alphabet is used in all western European languages. Latin is known today to scholars and to Roman Catholic priests, but I was shocked to learn that in seminaries it is barely taught at all today, but there are signs that this is changing. A recent resurgence of interest in the Traditional Latin Mass has had the effect of reviving interest in liturgical Latin among faithful Catholics and Tradition-minded priests.

Hebrew is a descendant of an extinct language, Phoenician, and is related to two other extinct languages, Aramaic and Syriac. It has some resemblance to Arabic. Its alphabet is unique. Hebrew ceased to be a national language after Israel lost its independence and became part of the Roman Empire. Hebrew remained in use among observant Jews for prayer and for reading the Scriptures.

In the middle to late 1800s, first in Europe and then in the United States, a movement known as the “Haskalah,” or Jewish Enlightenment, arose. That movement consisted of efforts by Jews to better fit into the surrounding non-Jewish communities while retaining core Jewish beliefs and customs. Such efforts included abandoning distinctively Jewish clothing, attending college, and conducting synagogue services in a modern language such as English, rather than Hebrew, among other things.

Three Jews who were products of the Haskalah changed the world, for better or for worse. They were Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. The Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed branches of Judaism all have their roots in the Haskalah. (Incidentally, Hasidic, or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, originated in Eastern Europe only about a century and a half before the Haskalah.)

The use of modern languages rather than Hebrew in Reform synagogues scandalized Modern Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox Jews to some extent, but never came close to causing a schism — to borrow a nonJewish expression — and is now generally tolerated on both sides of the linguistic divide. In part, that is because Judaism has no central authority comparable to the Papacy. And in part, that is because rabbinic teaching has long held that, while Hebrew is preferred for prayer and study of the Scriptures, any language may be used for those purposes by a Jew who knows no Hebrew (and many Reform Jews do not know Hebrew.) That said, it is utterly unthinkable that any authority in Judaism would bar the use of Hebrew in liturgy, prayer or study.

A second Hebrew-versus-modern language dispute arose in the early 20th century and has never quite died out. But has also never posed much of a threat to Jewish unity. That dispute arose from the Zionist movement, which sought — with eventual success — to reestablish a sovereign Jewish nation in the historical territory of the Land of Israel. The early Zionists, more than a century ago, sought to create a modern form of Hebrew, suitable for daily conversational use outside of synagogues. The Zionists succeeded in doing so, and millions of Israeli citizens now speak modern Hebrew as their primary language.

I rather like Father MacRae’s treatise, “My Father’s House Has Many Rooms” and his explanation therein of the “Sensus Fidelium,” the sense of the faithful in practice and belief over many generations of the past. They constitute the vast majority, not in place of papal authority but in support of it. Such inclusion of the generations of the past is very similar to the beliefs and practice of Orthodox Judaism.

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Seth Bader earned undergraduate degrees in physics and history at the City University of New York, and his Juris Doctor degree from Hofstra University School of Law.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I thank my friend Seth Bader for this learned contribution to our discussion about the role of Latin in the Mass. There is much more to learn about the links between modern and ancient times in Salvation History. You may like these related posts:

A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass

My Father’s House Has Many Rooms. Is There a Room for Latin Mass?

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

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse
This post will be added to our feature presentation of “The Bible Speaks.”

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.”

Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism

‘Spotlight’ was a heavily biased film about The Boston Globe coverage of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. The problem with a spotlight is its narrowly focused beam.

July 15, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“prostituted — to use something valuable in a way that is not appropriate or respectable and especially in the pursuit of money.”

— From Merriam Webster’s Dictionary

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The Boston Globe’s pursuit of this story needed a floodlight and not a spotlight. I had a strange experience with the Globe’s coverage in this regard. In 2003 it carried a brief story about a Springfield, Massachusetts couple, Dominic and Briana Martin, who were arrested for a scam attempt involving an elderly local priest. The Martins engaged him in a series of emails about allegations of abuse and then threatened to make the allegations public unless the priest left a sum of money in a brown paper bag in the newspaper kiosk of a local restaurant. The frightened priest, who never had any kind of allegation against him, complied. Then came a second demand, but this time the police set up a sting of their own. They arrested the Martins and charged them with felony extortion.

The Globe seemed to be keeping this story buried and off the Front Page lest it turned some heads relative to the Globe’s ongoing coverage of alleged sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It was just a matter of time before the Globe and other media dropped the word “alleged” from the coverage.

As I read about the Martins extortion racket, I learned only in the last few sentences that Dominic Martin had acquired a new name in the later 1980s. The Globe reported that he was previously known as Todd F.X. Biltcliff, a name I immediately recognized as a person who had accused a priest in my diocese, then received a financial settlement. This was likely not the Martins first attempt at such extortion, but my letter to the Globe reporter and editor went unanswered. No one at the Globe had any interest in exploring this thread any further.

The Boston Globe’s own cashflow problems desperately needed a sordid story to exploit. In 1993, The New Times purchased The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in cash and stock. It was the most expensive newspaper acquisition in U.S. history. By 2013 the Times had launched a search for a buyer for the Globe, which turned out to be a massively losing proposition. The Times finally unloaded the Globe for $70 million. It was a loss of $1.03 billion from its initial investment or, more bluntly, the Globe was sold for less than 10 cents on the dollar from what the Times initially paid for it. The newspaper industry tends not to flout its own foibles, so few people were aware of the massive loss incurred by The New York Times.

In the few years after The Boston Globe’s one-sided exposé of the Archdiocese of Boston, the newspaper’s decline became more evident. In 2016 while the Globe was covering the story of its Spotlight team, and the Best Picture Academy Award the film, “Spotlight” had won, the subscriber list was 115,000 for the daily editions and 205,000 for The Sunday Globe alone. The Alliance for Audited Media today reports a dismal drop in readership down 52 percent since 2019 to a low of 45,000 daily readers of the Globe.

The notion that the Globe was bringing Roman Catholicism to its knees was highly exaggerated. Currently, 24 percent of Greater Boston’s adult population self-reports as Roman Catholic. This is higher than the national average of 19 percent. Combining all other Christian denominations under one umbrella, the Globe claims a 45 percent readership, while 41 percent report no affiliation with any religion at all. Though the Globe’s coverage of Catholic scandal and the scandal itself did indeed cause damage, only a small minority cite the story today as a cause for leaving the Church.

The Globe’s one-sided pursuit of this story drove Cardinal Bernard Law out of Boston and into retirement, but this was greatly exaggerated as being “to evade prosecution.” He was accused of poor judgment, but not of breaking any law. There was a good deal of injustice in the coverage of this story, and I wrote about it once in “Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights.”

My Spotlight Oscar Hangover

This prison in which I am a guest of the State of New Hampshire has a weekend movie program that broadcasts DVD films (mostly donated) each week from Friday through Sunday. I was initially dismayed to see on the posted movie list that ‘Spotlight’ was slated for four prime time showings here. The details of how I came to be in this prison were told by a far greater news outlet and a far less biased news reporter, who was also awarded a Pulitzer for her series of articles. This one was titled, “The Trials of Father MacRae” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (WSJ, May 13, 2013). There were other articles as well in coverage of this story by The Wall Street Journal, but I do not want to make this about my plight.

‘Spotlight,’ you recall, is a film about The Boston Globe’s Spotlight exposé of the priesthood scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. For political as opposed to journalistic reasons, it won “Best Picture” at the 2016 Academy Awards.

I watched “Spotlight” twice because I wanted to be fair and just, and if I were wrong in my judgments of the film and the motivations behind it, I wanted to revisit them. Having sat through the film twice in a single weekend, however, I won’t be retracting anything. To be honest, I actually liked the film. Having grown up in Boston, the landscape and politics of it were more than familiar. What was not familiar, and highly distorted, was the film’s presentation of the Catholic Church and the scandal that took place against the background of the sexual revolution in America, a scandal that had invaded every institution while media coverage was highly selective. Maybe it was just that I knew the subject matter from another perspective, and knew all the players, at least by reputation, from multiple angles, so the film was a very fast two hours for me.

But the film also contained some very troubling distortions. It glorified the journalists involved while casting doubt upon the integrity of just about everyone else. Some of its charges were accurate. For example, the film early on criticized the contingency lawyers who became millionaires by “turning sexual abuse into a cottage industry.” However, the Globe dropped the ball on this and let all the lawyers off the hook. That aspect of the story would go no further in media coverage. Today the Catholic Church in America, and only the Catholic Church, would be singled out for settlements to the tune of (so far) over $4 billion. The lawyers the Globe criticized became multimillionaires and the feeding frenzy at that trough continues unabated to this very day.

Early in the Globe’s coverage of the scandal, Church officials defended themselves by stating that the “non-disclosure” terms so criticized by the reporters were actually demanded by the contingency lawyers and accusers themselves. This was in large part true. In fact, in 2005 when The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote “A Priest’s Story” about my own case (WSJ, April 27, 2005), she got an urgent call from a lawyer for my diocese. His near panic was not over the fact that I, and perhaps some other priests, had been falsely accused, but that The Wall Street Journal had named names of accusers after the lawyers agreed to the non-disclosure demands. It was I who provided those names. I was never a party to any such agreement, and I would never publicly disclose the name of an actual victim of sexual abuse.

But the bigger scandal is that the Globe and it’s Spotlight Team did nothing to follow up on the role lawyers continued to play. That is one of the real coverups in this story and it continues. The film had clear allusions that Boston lawyer Eric MacLeish, for example, became wealthy representing claimants, filing demands, and keeping it all out of the news media before the Spotlight Team got hold of the story.

But when the story was over, and the Globe had its prize — the forced resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law — the spotlight stayed on the Church but left the lawyers alone to continue business as usual.

There was a big problem with The Boston Globe’s crusade. It made no distinction whatsoever between real crimes with real evidence and mere accusations with real fraud behind them. The ‘Spotlight’ film glossed over this, treating every claim without question as demonstrably true. In her bold article, “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ is a Terrible Film” (which also profiled my own case) journalist JoAnn Wypijewski taught the Spotlight Team a lesson in journalistic integrity:

“I am astonished that, across the past few months, ever since ‘Spotlight’ hit theatres, otherwise serious left-of-center people have peppered their conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we need more of… What editor Marty Baron and the Globe sparked with their 600 stories and their confidential tip line for grievances was not laudatory journalism, but a moral panic, and unfortunately for those telling the truth, truth was its casualty.”

— JoAnn Wypijewski, CounterPunch

Well after the Globe Spotlight Team criticized the lawyers for turning abuse into a “cottage industry,” David F. Pierre, Jr. of TheMediaReport.com followed up with his book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, exposing what “business as usual” looked like beyond the glare of the Globe’s Spotlight:

“A year later, in 2002, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, faced accusations from 62 individuals. Rather than spending the time and the resources looking into the merits of the accusations, ‘Diocesan officials did not even ask for specifics such as dates and specific allegations for the claims,’ New Hampshire’s Union Leader reported. ‘Some victims made claims in the past month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days,’ reported the Nashua Telegraph [quoting lawyer Peter Hutchins]. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’ a pleased and much richer plaintiff attorney admitted.”

— Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, p. 80

David F. Pierre, Jr.’s book has a chapter analyzing five categories of false accusations against priests: 1. The “repressed memory” accusation; 2. The “dead priest” accusation; 3. The “me too” accusation; 4. Simple criminal fraud; and 5. Psychological illness. The above scenario with plaintiff lawyers bringing claims unfiled in any court, and church lawyers offering settlements with absolutely no findings of facts while hiding the names of accusers, was all placed by David F. Pierre, Jr. in the category of “simple criminal fraud.” The Globe Spotlight Team might have noted this too had it taken a moment to focus its spotlight just a little off the real target of its crusade.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Another journalist of outstanding integrity also covered this story with truth and justice in 2016. It was published at CounterPunch then, but I am reprinting it here with permission of the author. It is more or less an autopsy of “Spotlight.” Though I never appeared in the film, I have a prominent role in its autopsy. We published it anew in our “Voices from Beyond” feature. Justice requires that we give equal time to “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

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.”

Fr Richard Drabik Introduced Divine Mercy to Saints and Villains

Fr Richard Drabik, MIC, my longtime spiritual director and friend who wrote the Preface to the Diary of Saint Faustina, passed into Divine Mercy on July 4, 2026.

July 8, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Let the greatest sinners place their trust in My mercy. They have the right before others to trust in the abyss of My mercy . . . To such souls I grant even more graces than they ask. I cannot punish even the greatest sinner if he makes an appeal to My compassion, but on the contrary, I justify him in my unfathomable and inscrutable mercy.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 1146

In April of 1993, my friend Father Richard Drabik and I both served on the staff of the Servants of the Paraclete Spiritual and Psychological Renewal Center for priests. Father Drabik was at the time preparing to go to Rome to concelebrate with Pope John Paul II the Mass of Beatification of Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, now known as Saint Faustina, the Saint of Divine Mercy. Her Beatification took place on the Sunday after Easter that year, and Pope John Paul II decreed that henceforth that Sunday would be universally known in the Roman Calendar as Divine Mercy Sunday.

Father Richard Drabik was formerly Provincial Superior of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. He wrote the Preface to the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska that has become globally famous. Just before leaving for her Beatification in Rome in 1993, Father Drabik stopped by my office to invite me to write a brief prayer, which would be placed on the altar by Pope John Paul during the Offertory in the Mass for Beatification. I did not know what to write, so on the day of my friend’s departure I handed him a small scrap of paper to place with his intentions for the Mass. I folded it and sealed it in a small envelope that would fit easily in his breast pocket.

No one ever knew what I wrote. The note with my petition was simple: “I ask for the intercession of Blessed Faustina that I may have the courage to be the priest God calls me to be.” It was an odd petition, and today I have no idea what I was thinking about when I wrote it and handed it to Father Drabik on his way out the door.

Exactly two weeks after the Beatification of Sister Faustina, on May 3, 1993, police showed up at my door. They carried with them a secret indictment and a warrant for my arrest for claims alleged to have occurred sometime between 1978 and 1983, ten to fifteen years earlier. They were the claims for which I faced trial and was summarily sent to prison as Ryan A. MacDonald wrote in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Those claims of abuse never took place at all, but I will always remember the words of a police detective as the officers took me away despite my denials: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty. Your Church is!” It was a scene reminiscent of another era I wrote of in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

The detective’s words could just as easily have been heard in Sister Faustina’s own World War II-era Poland as Father Maximilian Kolbe and many other priests were led off to prison on trumped up charges.

Divine Mercy Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

Last April 9, I turned 73 years old in prison. I was 41 years old when I was sent to prison, and was in my twenties when my fictitious crimes were alleged to have been committed. I will be age 108 when I next see freedom. The process of reopening a case alleged to have occurred over 30 years ago, and which never contained any evidence to debunk or attack, is a grueling uphill battle. If there is any hope at all for freedom and justice, it is vague hope. It is a hope that exists on the other side of an abyss.

Astute readers remember that I was given several opportunities before my trial to plead guilty and serve only one year in prison. I simply could not fathom doing this. Many years later, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Wall Street Journal, took up this case for investigation. She reported that she questioned the detective about the absolute lack of any corroborating evidence. The detective was reported to have said, “Why didn’t he just take the deal?” In a five-minute video interview years later, Ms. Rabinowitz summed up the true nature of this matter.

The readers of Beyond These Stone Walls have helped in so many ways to show us the face of Divine Mercy. Your reading BTSW has given me a global voice when having any voice at all is usually denied to any priest so accused. And having a voice is also often denied to prisoners, as a class of American citizens stripped of rights, including the right to vote. I do not use my access to this voice just to whine about prison conditions. That would be a waste. Instead, I try to employ this voice as an extension of my priesthood, one that is influenced and encapsulated, even defined, by Divine Mercy.

Earlier in my years in prison, my old friend and spiritual director, Father Richard Drabik, visited me. He did so until age and distance made such visits no longer possible. During one of his visits after my publishing began in 2009, I asked him if he had seen the blog that I write from prison, but have never seen. Being a prisoner, I also had no sense of its reach or impact. “It isn’t a blog,” Father Richard said. “It’s a bullhorn!”

Later, the community of Marians of the Immaculate Conception at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy took up the slack. They came with an invitation to me and other prisoners to take part in a great Divine Mercy adventure. For some, it became the most important part of our lives here. This was especially so for my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, whose life story was captured by Felix Carroll in the book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Pornchai’s story is well known around the world now thanks to the efforts of Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Dr. Donohue invited Pornchai to write his story in his own words. The result was published by the Catholic League as “Pornchai’s Story.” In just four pages, it was powerful and phenomenal. Pornchai was oppressed by the thought that at the end of his own prison sentence he would be deported to Thailand where he no longer knew anyone or had any support at all. Pornchai had been taken from Thailand against his will at age 11, and now would be left there alone at age 47. It was a chilling thought for Pornchai, and also for me. I assured him that we would find a way to build a bridge to Thailand.

Divine Mercy, being what it is, created a roadmap for Pornchai. Father Richard, who was deeply moved by Pornchai’s Story, shared it with others who became links in a chain. One of them was the late Father Seraphim Michalenko, Vice Postulator for the cause of Sainthood for Saint Faustina. He ended up in Thailand meeting with a group called Divine Mercy Thailand. Father Seraphim went there armed with a copy of the Diary of Saint Faustina and a copy of Pornchai’s Story, which he read in English to the assembled group. Suddenly, our bridge to Thailand was built.

Felix Carroll also wrote a wonderful article for Marian Helper Magazine entitled, “Mary Is at Work Here.” The truth of that is today without question.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post about my great good friend and mentor in the priesthood, Father Richard Drabik, MIC. Don’t misunderstand the opening quote here in this post. Only God knows whether Father Richard is a saint, but he was certainly no villain. He spent a lifetime reaching out to them, however, and reeling them in to show them the Light of Divine Mercy. That was what I liked most about my friend, and what I most try to emulate. You might find his enduring presence in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Pornchai’s Story

A Priest and Prisoner in the Light of Divine Mercy

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

I greatly treasure the image atop this post. Father Richard’s smile is now engraved upon my heart.

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.”

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

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

July 1, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Francis Scott Key, 1814

Independence Day and the State of Our Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, May 18, 2023

Churches, Casinos and Liquor Stores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776

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

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

The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

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

Latin Mass and Altar Rails Are Under Siege in North Carolina

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

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

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

June 24, 2026 by xAI Grok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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xAI Grok Forensic Review of a Guam Cold-Case Homicide

xAI GROK:

Synopsis

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

Key Details Relevant to Investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Locate him (or confirm current status).

2. Obtain his criminal and civil records.

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

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

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

Additional Comments

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

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

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

The House That Wannee Built

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

Pornchai and Father John Le visited this house when Pornchai first arrived in Thailand after his deportation in 2020. He was only age two when he was abandoned in Thailand by his mother, who was unable to support him. Nine years later his mother returned, though he had no memory of her. She took him to live in Bangor, Maine, where his nightmare of physical and sexual trauma ensued. Wannee was determined to make up for that, but then her life was taken from her.

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

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

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

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

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

June 17, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Urgent Note from Father MacRae:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Catholic Scandal and the Rule of Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Facts, the Fraud, the Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eighth Commandment Is at the Heart of Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— The Genesis of Justice, p. 250

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

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

— Deuteronomy 19:15-21

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

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

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

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June 17, 2026: A Very Necessary Update

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

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

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QUERY:

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

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

xAI GROK:

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

What Happened on May 7, 2025

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

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

• One was a defamation case.

Key details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Broader Context Father MacRae Mentions

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

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

Weighing In

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

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— End of xAI Grok input

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

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

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

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

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

June 10, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Priesthood in the Coming Cancel Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Still in the Eye of the Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Haunting Echoes from the Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

— 1 Peter 5:7-9

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

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

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

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

And for those Blessed among us who thirst for justice …

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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