“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD 9/4/24 Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD 9/4/24

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor

Having pondered the project questions from a student at Arizona State University, the Editor of Beyond These Stone Walls tells the story of this prison journal.

Having pondered the project questions from a student at Arizona State University, the Editor of Beyond These Stone Walls tells the story of this prison journal.

September 4, 2024 by Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD, Editor

Prelude from the Student:

“Truth in its simplicity, revealed by suffering, carries a quality in writing. I believe this is what has drawn me to Beyond These Stone Walls and retained my readership over the years when there is not a single other blog or newspaper that I read consistently. I believe it is also a mercy of God that I have been able to read authentic Catholic voices here regarding the tumultuous current events in our world because it has helped keep my Faith alive despite much darkness. I chose this topic because I love God and wish to glorify him.”

— an Arizona State University student

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How did you discover Beyond These Stone Walls, and how did you become the Editor?

I had never heard of Father Gordon MacRae or this blog. On the Feast of Saint Joseph in 2019, I searched “Pope Benedict XVI on St. Joseph,” and the fourth or fifth result was one of Father MacRae’s articles. I read several others, and I read his story at the About Page. Deeply saddened, I wanted to help with my prayers and in any other way I could. On the Feast of the Annunciation, I sent him a letter introducing myself and offering to be a Simon of Cyrene to him.

A priest friend of Father MacRae in North Carolina had been volunteering as acting editor for the previous few years while also having been given additional parish assignments. I was close to the end of my career as a civilian scientist for the United States Air Force. I had been pondering retirement for some time and this volunteer work for Beyond These Stone Walls seemed a perfect fit for me as I now manage all the nuts and bolts of a widely-read popular Catholic blog written under the most unusual conditions.

What is the process for you to receive posts from Father MacRae, post them, and then send the comments to him?

From inside a small prison cell, Father MacRae types each post on his old typewriter and mails it to me. I scan it using optical character recognition software. With the typewritten post he includes a description of the suggested images he would like to include above each section of the post, as well as at the top. Beyond These Stone Walls was built using Squarespace, which also hosts it. Using its services I compose text, images and links to create the post on the blog. We publish every Wednesday morning, and send out an email alert to our 2,000 or so direct subscribers. But the readership of this blog is much larger. Many people go directly to the posts without subscribing. We also publish the posts on some social media such as Gloria.TV where Father MacRae has been given a page. His Christmas post about shepherds had about 50 thousand readers, many in some of the poorest parts of the world such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Father Gordon has never actually seen his published posts. As a prisoner he has no access to the online world and has never seen any social media where his posts are published.

Prisoners cannot receive calls. So when Father Gordon calls me I read him the comments that have been posted on BTSW and some of the ones that have been posted on social media.

Do you believe your Faith life has changed since taking on this position? Why or Why not?

Beyond These Stone Walls shines a light on how Father Gordon MacRae is sharing in the Cross of Jesus. It nourishes me with his example and meditations. It reports on what is happening in society and in the Church, which corporate media and many Catholic media do not. Without Beyond These Stone Walls and the witness of Father MacRae I would miss much of what is going on in the world and in the Church, in which Jesus wants me to be His instrument. I pray that I may hear His voice and do whatever He tells me.

Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” In my youth I had an agnostic period in which I agonized in search of Truth. Jesus, Truth, attracted me to Him. Father Gordon MacRae has most beautifully and faithfully answered Jesus’ ardent prayer to the Father, “Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.” (John 17:17) When the corrupt and perverse “justice” system wanted him to lie about having committed crimes that never happened, he did not lie. As punishment Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced him to life in prison. Almost everyone abandoned him. But he clung to Truth, to Jesus. He is a model and a challenge to me and many, a light in the darkness.

This is a time in which astoundingly many are “those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). I ask myself what does Jesus want me to do. He says, “Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.” (Mt 10: 16)

In the midst of so much evil in our time, the Catholic sexual abuse scandal is most significant. Many outside and within the Church seek to confuse what is evil and what is good concerning this scandal. There are two wrongs: the abuse of young people by priests, and the false accusations of abuse of young people by priests. The latter wrong remains hidden from most, deceptively presented as the first wrong by an industry of lawyers, “victims’ advocates,” attorneys general, and anti-Catholic bigots; and very sadly and scandalously, by a bishops’ policy that encourages and promotes this evil industry. Father MacRae wrote of how this has evolved in his own diocese in To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.”

Had I not crossed paths with Beyond These Stone Walls and Father Gordon MacRae, I would not know about the false-accusation industry. I have come to believe that as ugly and depraved as the secular world has become, and as the Church is beset by multiple problems, it is the explosion of false accusations of priests that is the worst ever attack on the Church, the most diabolical attack on the Body of Christ, and therefore the world.

The immediate victims are the falsely accused priests. Their reputations are destroyed. The search for the truth of the accusation is nonexistent. The reputation of all priests is tarnished. The laity are also victims of this attack on the Church. Billions of dollars have been handed out to those who claimed to have been abused. No billionaire donated these funds. Dioceses have been bankrupted. Parish life has been affected.

And incredibly the worst members of this false-accusation industry are (most of) the bishops. In 2002, the Dallas Charter was adopted over the objections of Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father Richard John Neuhaus and a few others. The bishops adopted the “credible” standard, a fig-leaf term to convey a sense that accusations are investigated. They are not. I remember a couple of readers commenting that in their dioceses their bishops investigated the accusations, proved they were false, and the false accusations ceased.

Knowing that it is Jesus Who calls a man to be a priest, it is unimaginable that a bishop would discard a priest without a most thorough investigation. But it is a policy that has been enforced for over two decades. It masquerades as compassionate. It is an evil being called a good. The cruelty and the attack on priesthood it represents is astounding.

Shamelessly, quite a few years after the Dallas Charter was adopted, when there was talk of extending the “credible” standard to accusations against bishops, the USCCB got lawyers to begin defining the term [The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests]. This year the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire dropped altogether the fig-leaf term. Any priest accused of sexual abuse of a young person will be added to the list that publicly shames, and discards priests. The “credible” standard, as weak as it is, has been discarded. The accuser will be monetarily rewarded. Apparently, it should cross no one’s mind that handing out large sums of money would ever entice false accusations. Again, evil gets presented as good. Twenty-two years after the Dallas Charter was adopted a new generation of bishops upholds it.

How can this be anything but a diabolical, concerted effort to destroy priesthood, to destroy the Church?

How does this affect my Faith? This is not a superficial, little problem that for the most part I can forget while I go on with my life. With “fear and trembling” I ask, “What do You want me to do? Open my ears that I may hear. Without You I can do nothing,”

Certainly, it is a privilege for me to use my time and talent to help project the voice of Father Gordon MacRae outside that prison in New Hampshire as he tries to open minds and hearts to the truth of what is happening in the world and in the Church, to Truth Himself.

As to my treasure, I micromanage my donations. I have stopped donating to the lukewarm and to those who wittingly or unwittingly collaborate with the Father of Lies in trying to destroy priesthood, and I support some of the courageous people and entities that unceasingly defend and proclaim truth.

I pray that my righteousness may surpass that of the scribes and the Pharisees. I am sickened when I hear priests, bishops or the Pope consider every accusation of a priest to be true, as well as the media and lay people. May Jesus teach me to love them as He loves them.

What are your favorite things about editing BTSW? What are your least favorite?

It is a privilege and a joy to work with Father Gordon and watch his creativity as he directs me to edit an article on the fly. I want what we post to be beautiful and enjoy creating images to make it so. I want as beautiful images as I can get, and that usually takes me quite a bit of time. What I like least is not finding good images, or finding them but not being able to use them because they are copyrighted.

One of my other least favorite things, though it has come to some good, is the ocassional post that gets lost or delayed in the U.S. mail. Our choices in those weeks are to either skip a post entirely or for Father MacRae to slowly dictate a 2,000-word article to me by telephone.

What articles do you remember most? Why?

It is amazing the breadth of topics that Father MacRae tackles, from Scripture to history, to science, to current events. And he writes about his life. Pure evil placed him where he is, and he is sharing in the Cross of Jesus, but he shows how in magnificent ways God is ever present to him.

His Scripture articles are full of facts and striking insights. The collection of Holy Week posts is a gift. Another example is, “Casting the First Stone: What Did Jesus Write On the Ground?” Father MacRae brings out in fascinating detail the interplay between the law of Moses and the Roman law, and how Jesus’ response is a trap of the Pharisees. It seems to me that this and other Scripture articles need a second or third reading to fully grasp and appreciate the depth of what he is presenting.

Father Gordon loves science, especially cosmology. Many think or accuse the Church of being anti-science, but that has never been true. Not only have there been scientists in the Church, but some of the most significant advances in science were introduced by priests. For example, the father of modern genetics was a monk, Gregor Mendel. And a hero of Father Gordon discovered the Big Bang, Father Georges Lemaitre. He had known about Lemaitre for years, and was most flattered when in response to a letter he sent to Carl Sagan about his novel Contact, Sagan replied to Father MacRae, “You write in the spirit of Georges Lemaitre!” But God was not pleased to leave it just at that, He decided to make the most extraordinary connections between Father MacRae and Father Lemaitre.

Though Father Gordon has written several times about Father Lemaitre, maybe the most significant post on this subject is “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” It is an article about the great scientist Father Georges Lemaitre, co-written with noted physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, a research scientist at the University of Oxford. The article had two postscripts by Father Gordon MacRae. In the article Father Pinsent writes, “Among Catholics with some kind of popular outreach, Fr Gordon MacRae through his widely-read blog has done more than almost anyone I know in recent years to draw attention to Fr Lemaître.” For his part, Father Gordon recounts that after reading one of his posts on Belgian priest-scientist Lemaitre, Belgian BTSW reader Pierre Matthews, who is Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather, wrote to tell him that Fr. Lemaitre was his Godfather.

What makes the breadth of articles so surprising is that in prison, Father MacRae has no online access at all and no resources for research.

Initially, I was struck by how many posts are about or mention Pornchai Moontri. After a while I came to think that their profound bond was like that of friends who endure the horrors of war together and survive. Now I think that it is much more profound than that.

God has inspired many truth seekers to investigate the case of Father MacRae: Dorothy Rabinowitz, Harvey A. Silverglate, Ryan A. MacDonald, Dr. William Donohue, David F. Pierre, Jr., Father James Valladares, former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott, and investigative reporter Claire Best. Any fair-minded person who studies their work is convinced that a corrupt system put him in prison and Father Gordon MacRae is innocent.

But God wanted to reveal this with more than facts. He would reveal it with the powerful transformation of lives and souls. Pornchai had been viciously sexually and physically abused for years by a man who trafficked him from Thailand at the age of 11 and murdered his mother. Pornchai escaped and lived on the streets for all of his teen years. Then at age 18 he killed a man who tackled him and pinned him to the ground. After years of enduring violent sexual abuse this sent Pornchai into a rage. He spent the next 13 years in solitary confinement. He was then sent to the prison that houses Father Gordon. Having learned that he had been convicted of sexual abuse, Pornchai should have wanted to stay as far away as possible from Father Gordon. Yet, they became friends and then Pornchai asked Father Gordon if he could be his cellmate.

On the other hand, the corrupt and evil people who railroaded Father Gordon derailed his priesthood, took his freedom and viciously defamed him. It should be noted here that to their great credit, Vatican officials have not dismissed Father MacRae from the clerical state.

Most in the Church who should have stood by him instead abandoned him, or even worse denounced him. If this is how people in the Church treated Father Gordon, how much more understandable it would have been had Pornchai looked at him with suspicion and distrust. Yet, Pornchai has said that Father Gordon is the person in the whole world whom he most trusts. That must be a precious balm that heals Father Gordon’s heart. Many posts describe this most extraordinary friendship. Most important among them is Pornchai’s own words in, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Though the suffering of Father Gordon MacRae’s cross has not abated in 30 years, God has not abandoned him. He has sent Father Gordon two special friends who let him know that he is not alone: the prisoner-priest Saint Maximilian Kolbe; and the stigmatist and mystic, who was accused of sexual abuse and attacked from within the Church, Saint (Padre) Pio of Pietrelcina. Two of my favorite posts describing their presence in Father Gordon’s life are “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror,” his first encounter with Saint Maximilian Kolbe; and “Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial,” a very interesting post, which among other things describes a most special blessing that connected Father Gordon, Pornchai Moontri and Saint Padre Pio through time and space.

Have any comments left an impression on you? Why?

One of the early comments on BTSW was that of Deacon David Jones:

“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

I think Father Gordon deserves such a testimonial.

In 2010 Father MacRae’s blog was selected by readers of Our Sunday Visitor as The Best of the Catholic Web in the area of Catholic spirituality. About.com selected it as the second-place finalist for the Best Catholic Blog Award. Readers at the Fishers Net Award selected it as The Best Catholic Social Justice Site.

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Beyond These Stone Walls is a prison journal. Evil people did much to destroy the lives of Father Gordon J. MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri. But as this blog documents, their story is one of priesthood, sacrifice and conversion writ large. They met in the New Hampshire Prison for Men in Concord, New Hampshire, but as we have seen in some posts God had much earlier connected their lives in some intriguing ways. Into these lives weighed by deep suffering Divine Mercy entered at first in hidden ways, and then it overwhelmed them.

Shortly before the nightmare of arrest, trial and wrongful imprisonment, Father MacRae was invited to write an intention to be placed on the altar for the Mass of Beatification of Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska. He wrote:

“I ask Blessed Faustina’s intercession that I may have the strength and courage to be the priest God wants me to be.”

His strength and courage would be sorely tested. After six long years in prison he celebrated his first Mass on April 30, 2000, which unbeknownst to him was the day Pope John Paul II canonized Saint Faustina and the first official Divine Mercy Sunday.

Six years later at a most dark period in Father MacRae’s life and priesthood, Franciscan Father James McCurry, who had been a vice-postulator for the cause of sainthood of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, visited him and asked him, “What do you know about Saint Maximilian Kolbe?” Thereupon began a most special friendship between these prisoner-priests.

At just this time Pornchai Moontri was transferred from solitary confinement in Maine to the New Hampshire prison. When he first entered Father MacRae’s cell and saw Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s image on a card, half in the garb of a prisoner and half in the garb of a priest, he asked, “Is this you?” Father MacRae writes, “From that moment on, we were caught up in the light of Divine Mercy.” Pornchai’s conversion was set in motion by Father Gordon’s example and writings. Pornchai Maximilian Moontri was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010.

When they both learned that at the end of Pornchai’s prison term he would be deported to Thailand, the prospect seemed dismal. He had been taken from there decades earlier, he did not speak the language, and no one would be waiting for him. But Father Gordon said, “We will just have to build a bridge to Thailand.” And so it happened. Today Pornchai Maximilian Moontri lives in Pak Chong, Thailand and continues to be active in this blog.

Pornchai has recently been selected to represent Father Gordon MacRae and the group, Divine Mercy Thailand, at the Fifth Asian Conference on Divine Mercy in the Philippines this year. For Father Gordon, this is the best evidence that Mary is still at work here.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We are simultaneously publishing the article by the Arizona State University student at the Voices from Beyond page:

A Voice for the Voiceless: Beyond These Stone Walls

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. Gordon J. MacRae 7/24/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/24/24

God, Grant Me Serenity. I’ll be Waiting

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is much more than a few verses on the walls of a Twelve Step program. It’s a vital petition to recover from spiritual wounds.

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is much more than a few verses on the walls of a Twelve Step program. It’s a vital petition to recover from spiritual wounds.

“Forgiveness is to give up all hope for a better past.”

For the last several years where I live, greeting cards of any sort have been banned. It was somehow determined that some people on the “outside” found a way to separate the card stock on which greeting cards are made, and then insert narcotics between the layers of the card. I hear that there were machines that could detect all this, but the cheaper and more expedient way of dealing with it was to simply ban all cards from friends and families of prisoners. This was a morale bombshell especially around Christmas which is already sanitized to be virtually unrecognizable in prison. The draconian measure has been resolved a bit, but not for the better. We now get no mail at all. We receive only a photocopy of any mail that you send while the original is shredded. Bah, humbug!

The word “draconian” is an interesting word. Some people spell it with a capital “D” because it’s one of those words that came into English from the name of an actual historical person. Though technically the capital isn’t necessary, the word refers to the application of harsh laws such as those codified by Draco, a legislator in the city-state of Athens, Greece in the Seventh Century, B.C. Draco was notorious for imposing the death penalty for both serious and trivial crimes, thus giving rise to “draconian,” a rather uncomplimentary word named after him. When I explained all this some years ago to my friend, Pornchai-Max, he said, “maybe in a thousand years, going off on long, boring explanations about history will be called ‘gordonian.’” HMMPH! He lives in Thailand now and out of my reach, except by telephone.

Anyway, back to mail call. Of course, every prisoner loves mail, but when it comes to replying to it all, I get a D+ at best. A part of my excuse is that I can purchase only six Smith Corona typewriter ribbons per year, so that means having to handwrite most mail. So I find myself writing much of the same things over and over. It’s especially difficult to respond to overseas mail because the prison commissary sells only U.S. First Class 73¢ stamps, and has a purchase limit of twenty per week. Writing overseas takes three of them which costs much more than a day’s pay here. So some of my mail tends to pile up until I am able to respond.

I am so very sorry for this, but prison is one reality I wish I could change, but can’t. I hope it doesn’t discourage you from writing. Sometimes I try to incorporate responses to letters in some of my posts, and hope that readers can detect some of their letters between the lines. As an example, this excerpt is from a letter received just before Christmas last year from an Ohio reader (but still in a pile in my cell):

“Dear Fr MacRae: I first learned about you when I read the book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions [by Felix Carroll]. I am always so inspired by other people’s conversions! When I read the chapter about Pornchai Moontri I was very touched by his story and remarkable conversion and, frankly, I was shocked by your story. I became very concerned when I looked you up online and found your blog and read some of your articles… It did not take me long to have your blogs come right to my inbox and I gobble up everything you write. You inspire me to want to be a better follower of Christ and to accept the things I cannot change in my life.”

The writer added, in a paragraph later, “You are doing so much good despite what was done to you. Your light is still shining.” On the same day, I received another letter from a reader in the U.K. in which he wrote that my posts remind him of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous Letters and Papers from Prison. Talk about pressure! This resulted in a post by me on my birthday, “Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

I had long been aware of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous Lutheran pastor condemned to prison in Hitler’s Germany because of his writing. Both of the letters described above made me think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer although the first one never mentioned him. He never knew in life the profound impact that his writings from prison would have on others for generations to come.

I once read a superb interview with Eric Metaxas by Kate Bachelder in The Wall Street Journal entitled “The Death of God Is Greatly Exaggerated”. In it, Eric Metaxas

“recalls how in 1939 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting safely in New York at Union Theological Seminary. He elected to return to Germany, what Mr. Metaxas calls ‘the great decision.’ What would animate someone to leave comfort and security for the depraved Nazi Germany, where he would surely be arrested for supporting the Jews?”

The Serenity Prayer

There is an answer to that question, but first let’s get back to the pre-Christmas letter cited above from an Ohio reader. She mentioned that my posts inspire her “to want to be a better follower of Christ and to accept the things I cannot change in my life.” You might instantly recognize the latter half of that sentence as a reference to what is now commonly known as “The Serenity Prayer.”

It’s one of the most iconic prayers in common use in Western culture, and a portion of it adorns the walls and literature, of every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the world, as well as most other self-help endeavors based on the Twelve Steps of A.A. The prayer was written in 1926 by Lutheran pastor and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, but most people know it only by the few verses adopted by A.A. Here is its original form:

God, grant me
Serenity to accept the things
I cannot change;
Courage to change the things
I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enduring one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship
as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
and not as I would have it.

Trusting that You
will make all things right
if I but surrender to Your will;
That I may be
reasonably happy in this life, and
supremely happy with You in the next.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, 1926

Courage to Change the Things I Can

The famous prayer begins with a request for the grace of serenity, but in my current location, as it was in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison, there is little of it to be found on the outside. I received a letter from a reader recently who told me of the imprisonment of his wife of some fifty years. It is not a physical prison, but it is no less of a prison than the one I am in. Having lost and buried their own son from cancer, she finds herself in a prison of distrust and resentment over the losses of the past. It’s the sort of prison that has so many of us under lock and key.

“Forgiveness is to give up all hope for a better past.” I began this post with that quote, but I do not know its origin. A fellow prisoner whose mother died while he was in prison, stood in my doorway one morning to tell me that someone sent him that quote. It made me realize how much serenity requires the grace of surrender for the events of the past. It’s a real challenge where I am, but it’s a real challenge wherever any of you are too. Dare we hope? Dare we believe? Both take serenity, courage, and wisdom in the present moment. Our crosses of the present cannot be an excuse for retreating into the past.

The prisoner whose mother died spoke with me at length about the death of his mother, and about the painful letting go that it required of him with no opportunity for goodbye other than from within his own heart. I gave him a copy of “A Corner of the Veil,” about the death of my own mother during my imprisonment. But it’s really about more than that. It’s about my own letting go of the things I cannot change. The prisoner kept that post and read it several times. He said that he was profoundly affected by my challenge not to reduce the present to a litany of losses in the past.

Through this discernment, he made a decision to reconsider one part of his past: his Catholic faith that he long ago had abandoned. Through the loss of his mother, he opened himself to the one thing he has left to share with her, a faith that spans a bridge between his life and hers. He later attended Father Michael Gaitley’s “33 Days to Morning Glory” retreat when it was offered in this prison.

The wounds of the past surface in times of loss. Like the wife of the reader mentioned above, the struggles and wounds of life accumulate into a litany of loss until it is life itself that we now distrust. Sometimes it is life itself that requires our forgiveness. To do so, then, is to surrender all hope for a better past because such a hope is futile. No matter how you spin it in your heart and mind, no matter who you blame for it, no matter how long you have lived with it, you will never have a different past. Eric Metaxas alluded to this in his WSJ interview:

“One of my favorite Bible verses is Philippians 4:6” ‘Be anxious about nothing.’ Nothing. Now what does that mean, ‘nothing’? It means ‘NOTHING.’ [So] ‘Rejoice in the Lord always.’ That’s a command.”

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Both Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in prison. And yet the entire world today is shaken up by the wisdom that emanated from their prison writing.

Over the decades here in my own imprisonment, I have been tempted by the prospect of simply giving up on the present and retreating into the past. On the night before writing this post I had a long talk by telephone with my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in Thailand. He also spent 30 years in prison for a crime set in motion by someone else. When I told him about this post he reminded me of something said in a homily by the late Father Bernie Campbell, a Capuchin priest who offered Sunday Mass in this prison for decades. Pornchai told me that Father Bernie once said in a homily that “life is like toilet paper. It goes by a lot faster toward the end of the roll.” We both laughed at the truth of that.

I was so very struck by the reader at the beginning of this post who wrote that this blog reminds him of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. The letter caused me to return to Bonhoeffer’s writings. Reinhold Niebuhr, who composed “The Serenity Prayer” was on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York where he had a profound influence on Bonhoeffer at the time he arrived at “the great decision” that Eric Metaxas described. The great decision was to return to Germany because “He who believes does not flee,” no matter the cost.

Both men also had a very great influence on my late friend and mentor, Father Richard John Neuhaus. Along with Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father Neuhaus urged me to write and was instrumental in my starting this blog in 2009. His own great decision to pave a path from Lutheranism to Rome by becoming a Catholic and a priest — took great courage and wisdom.

You do not have to read very far into Bonhoeffer’s words and actions to see Reinhold Niebuhr’s “the courage to change the things that I can” reflected there. I think serenity itself was more of a challenge. Bonhoeffer freely chose to return to Nazi Germany from the comfort of Reinhold Niebuhr’s New York seminary knowing — very much like Father Maximilian Kolbe — that his own moral compass would not permit him to cease writing the truth.

And like Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Bonhoeffer wrote knowing, and fearing, that the truth would land him in a Nazi prison, but he wrote that truth anyway. Finding serenity along such a path is an immense spiritual challenge, and its only source is grace — and the conditions in which such grace is found are often surprising.

True courage does not mean the absence of fear. It means to do the right thing, to act morally, in spite of fear. There are some things which have terrified me — decades in prison being one of them— but terror alone was not sufficient cause to take up an easier cross. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and for Maximilian Kolbe, prison was no obstacle to grace.

The powerfully riveting book by Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2011) presents Bonhoeffer’s very life as a profile in courage. His writings and actions led inexorably to the sacrifice of his life on April 9, 1945, eight years to the day before I was born. Just imagine then the irony of my own introduction to prison. Standing in court facing prison on September 23, 1994, I was forced to be silent while prosecutor Bruce Elliot Reynolds asked Judge Arthur Brennan and my jury to disregard any good I have ever done, because “for some people, even Hitler was a nice guy.”

Over the years between his imprisonment and his execution by hanging upon the orders of Hitler himself, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his Letters and Papers from Prison. When what he wrote was posthumously published, those who knew him found some of it shocking. One of his most pointed criticisms of his own church during those years in prison was its tendency to limit faith and the requirements of faith to the “otherworldly,” focusing on the next life at the expense of this one. Though that is a part of all faith — certainly Catholic faith — we are now in this life, “taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, and not as I would have it.”

It was in the unjust imprisonment imposed upon him through the corruption of others that Dietrich Bonhoeffer found the core of his Christology. It could be summed up in three words: “life for others.” And it was in that same circumstance that Maximilian Kolbe discerned that “Love alone creates,” the center of his life in Christ that drew him toward surrendering his life that another may live.

In both men, in the struggles between courage and wisdom, in the midst of great suffering, trial, and loss can be found inspiration for the greatest challenge and adventure of our lives, that most essential part of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer: “God, grant me Serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post as an example of “the courage to change the things that I can.” You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Eternal Life Matters: Spiritual Survival in Trying Times

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Ryan A. MacDonald 6/26/24 Ryan A. MacDonald 6/26/24

Bombshells and Black Ops Defeated Justice in New Hampshire

Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F McLaughlin is retired but his legacy of bombshells and black ops left a lingering trail of deceit, injustice and ruined lives.

Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F McLaughlin is retired but his legacy of bombshells and black ops left a lingering trail of deceit, injustice and ruined lives.

June 26, 2024 by Ryan A. MacDonald

(Editor’s Note: The photo above depicts the Keene, NH Central Square gazebo. Photo: “Keene NH 26” by Alexius Horatius, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 / cropped)

On the day this article is published, a Catholic priest in America will awaken in a prison cell at age 71 in his thirtieth year of wrongful incarceration for fictitious crimes, sans evidence alleged to have occurred in 1983.

Every time I write about this story, my Inbox fills with messages from readers stunned and appalled by the facts of the 1994 trial of Fr Gordon MacRae. A small minority pose questions such as “How do you know he is innocent?” to which I usually reply, “What makes you think he may not be?” Then the tirades begin, but they never answer my question. Those who labor to suppress this case of false accusation preface their answers with statements like, “Priests did terrible things and bishops covered it up!” “We all know these priests are guilty,” and (from a SNAP activist) “The Catholic Church is a child raping institution!”. The prevailing logic here is that the details of this specific case do not matter. Father MacRae went to prison in 1994 for the sins of the Church, the sins of the bishops, and the sins of the priesthood. For too many silent Catholics who just want to move on from The Scandal, that is okay. It is not okay.

Then there are those who trumpet the fact that after Fr MacRae’s trial he pled guilty to other things. It is a favorite chant of the prosecutorial voices in all this which, sadly, include some officials of MacRae’s diocese. But it is true only if one is jaded enough to view the truth in its narrowest sense, disconnected from its factual history. It is not the whole truth. I explored that phenomenon in depth in “The Post Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae,” a previous chapter in this series.

In the trial of Father MacRae, the sole evidence was the word of Thomas Grover, a 27-year-old, 200 pound former high school football player who fell on bad times. Grover had a criminal rap sheet for assault, theft, forgery, and narcotics charges — all kept from the jury by Judge Arthur Brennan. He had a long history of drug abuse, and gained nearly $200,000 for “telling a lie and sticking to it,” as his ex-wife later described his testimony. She also says, today, that he punched her and broke her nose when she questioned his perjury.

And yet throughout this case, with all these factors in plain sight of everyone but the jury, not one person questioned whether this man might be lying for money. Not the zealot Detective James F. McLaughlin who today reportedly responded to the question of injustice with one of his own: “Why didn’t MacRae just take the plea deal?” Not the two prosecutors, one of whom was fired after this trial while the other later committed suicide. Not Judge Arthur Brennan who sent this priest to prison for the rest of his life while citing evidence that no one has ever seen or heard, evidence that never existed. Evidence that Grover was lying for money would have been in plain sight in a legitimate investigation. It emerged only years later in the Statement of Charles Glenn.

Nor was the possibility of lying for money ever openly considered by anyone in the Diocese of Manchester as they wrote six-figure checks to pay Grover and his brothers off. By the time it was all over, Thomas Grover, Jonathan Grover, David Grover and Jay Grover — all adults “remembering” their claims in the same week over a decade later — emerged from the case with combined settlements in excess of $650,000. Father MacRae boldly addressed the nature of such settlements, which continue to this day, in “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.”

MacRae took, and passed, two pre-trial polygraph (lie detector) tests in this case. Thomas Grover and his brothers never assented to take a polygraph.

In “The Ordeal of Father MacRae,” President Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights charged that Fr MacRae, “has been treated unjustly by the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil.” Bill Donohue is not the first Church figure of note to suggest this. The late writer and editor, Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote that this case “reflects a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.” The late Cardinal Avery Dulles expressed a similar analysis of the case. I do not imagine any of them would blithely suggest that some Church officials — by commission or, more likely, omission — abetted a process in which a priest was wrongly imprisoned less than twenty miles from the Chancery Office of his diocese while denied proper legal assistance and due process for three decades.

Celebrating a Witch Hunt

The truth is worse than you know. During these same three decades , Fr MacRae — and he is still “Father” MacRae — has been forced to divide his less than meager resources to also fight off a simultaneous attempt by his Bishop to have him dismissed from the clerical state based on the fact that he is convicted and in prison. In a commentary for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, I referred to such forced laicization as “a sort of ecclesiastical equivalent of lethal injection.” To date, that one-sided effort has not yet been successful in the MacRae case, but the effort was initiated by the same bishop who was the subject of this letter from a former official at PBS television:

“I contacted the Manchester Diocese from WGBH… A few weeks later, when I met with Bishop [John] McCormack, the very first words he said to me were, ‘This must never leave this office. I believe Fr MacRae is innocent and his accusers likely lied.’.”

— Letter to Judge Brennan, Oct. 24, 2013

This whole story began with an explosive, slanderous lie. But the question remains, “Whose lie was it?” Bill Donohue wrote that MacRae’s troubles began in 1983 with a vague claim that was investigated, but nothing came of it. In 1985 the same claim surfaced again, was investigated by state officials, and was formally dismissed as “Unfounded.” This story should have ended there, but it was only just beginning.

In September of 1988, Ms. Sylvia Gale with the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) sent a letter to Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F. McLaughlin. The letter claimed that she had developed information that before coming to New Hampshire, Father Gordon MacRae was a priest in Florida where “he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” She identified MacRae as the primary suspect in that case, and claimed in the letter that the case remained unsolved when MacRae was sent by Church officials to “Berlen (sic) NH” to avoid that investigation. The Sylvia Gale letter was at best, a bombshell.

The explosive letter went on to claim that this information was passed on to Sylvia Gale by a former employee of Catholic Social Services who claimed to have been told this account by her supervisor, Monsignor John Quinn of the Diocese of Manchester. Ms. Gale’s letter alleged that Msgr Quinn threatened to fire his employee if she divulged this story further. This unnamed Catholic social services worker appears to have also been the therapist who began the MacRae case with the repeated but unfounded claims in 1983 and 1985.

Until 1994, when he received it as part of pre-trial discovery, Fr MacRae was entirely unaware of the libelous letter from Sylvia Gale implicating him in molestation and murder. But in New Hampshire, state social workers, prosecutors, and judges are immune from lawsuits. Nor was MacRae even aware of Detective McLaughlin’s investigation that ensued as a result of the Sylvia Gale letter. He had no idea that Detective McLaughlin, armed with this letter, proceeded to track down every family whose adolescent sons knew Father MacRae at any time during the 1980s. His report describes questioning twenty-six Keene, NH adolescents and their parents while generating little more than gossip and innuendo for most, and the first thoughts of lucrative opportunities for some.

Among those approached by Detective McLaughlin armed with the Florida molestation and murder story in 1988 was Patricia Grover, the mother of accusers yet to come and herself a state social worker in the same child protection agency that employed Sylvia Gale. It appears from the reports that the two had already collaborated about the Florida letter, and Ms. Grover vowed that she would begin speaking with her sons who knew Father MacRae.

One of them, Jonathan Grover, was soon to be discharged from the U.S. Navy for refusing its alcohol intervention program after a drunk driving arrest. Jonathan years later died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 48 in Phoenix, Arizona. Another, Thomas, then age 21, had been terminated from his third or fourth stint in residential treatment for drug addiction after he was caught smuggling drugs into the treatment facility. In 1988, these approaches to the Grover brothers yielded no accusations. Five years later, as the prospect of money loomed, they changed their minds.

In regard to the slanderous Florida, claim, Father MacRae had never been a priest in Florida, had never even visited Florida, and had never been assigned in Berlin, NH, as Sylvia Gale’s letter alleged. A simple check with the records of the Diocese of Manchester would have revealed that he was ordained for that diocese in 1982. He spent the previous four years at St Mary Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland and the four years before that at St Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Detective McLaughlin ran with the Sylvia Gale letter without ever bothering to check the facts. This is consistent with a reading of all of his reports in the MacRae case and with new witness statements. It appears that McLaughlin skillfully avoided asking questions or pursuing leads that might yield any information contrary to his bias.

I read up to page fifty of Detective McLaughlin’s voluminous, outrageous witch hunt that was his 1988 report before the Florida story emerged again. He learned from unnamed Florida police that the story was bogus and never happened, that there was never a molestation and murder case involving a Catholic priest, and that they had never before even heard the name of Father Gordon MacRae.

However McLaughlin’s report also claimed that another Florida sheriff, a “Sgt. Smith,” revealed that some other priest molested two boys there and was moved by the Church to New Hampshire. “But the names don’t match and your suspect is too young to be that suspect,” McLaughlin quoted the Florida sheriff. His report gives the impression that McLaughlin did not even think to ask for the name of that priest. Officials of the Diocese of Manchester later wrote that no priest ever came to the Diocese of Manchester under those circumstances.

It is of interest in these reports that Fr MacRae was somehow transformed from a “subject” to a “suspect,” but of what? This was never a case in which individuals went to the police with a complaint about this priest. From all the witness statements I have seen, it was McLaughlin who went to them, and it was McLaughlin who suggested that “a large sum of money” could be had by accusing MacRae. In another report McLaughlin wrote, “I asked him where he stood on a civil lawsuit.”

Meanwhile, written questions to Monsignor John Quinn about his reportedly being the source of the Florida story were answered minimally, with one-word denials but no light. Others in the Diocese of Manchester cooperated in similar fashion and often only after prompting by the suggestion of a subpoena.

The door and window of Father MacRae’s office at Saint Bernard rectory in Keene, New Hampshire in 1983. It overlooks Main Street and the busiest part of downtown Keene, NH.

“Going for a Sex Abuse Victim World Record”

A year before the above investigation ensued, Thomas Grover was a patient at Derby Lodge, a drug treatment center in Berlin, NH, and his third or fourth attempt at such treatment. While there, according to his counselor, he was repeatedly confronted for his distortions, dishonesty, and manipulation. He reportedly told his counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett , that he had been sexually abused by his adoptive father who by this point had been divorced from Patricia Grover.

According to Ms. Collett’s statements, Grover also claimed to have been sexually abused by so many people in the past that it appeared that he was “going for some sort of sexual abuse victim world record.” Also according to her statements, he never accused Fr Gordon MacRae. Ms. Collett went on to reveal an alleged series of coercive harassment and overt threats from Detective McLaughlin to get her to alter her account before testifying at MacRae’s 1994 trial.

Four and a half years after the Florida letter and Detective McLaughlin’s investigation swept through Keene, NH, Thomas Grover and two of his brothers — and later a third brother, Jay Grover, who once told Detective McLaughlin that MacRae had never done anything wrong — all now accused the priest. Two of them also accused another priest, Father Stephen Scruton, providing highly detailed accounts of rape and molestations by Scruton. Fr Scruton was also named as someone who witnessed MacRae’s abuse of Jonathan Grover, and in two of his claims, the two priests abused him simultaneously at age 12. Then it was changed to age 14.

However, Fr Scruton was not present in that parish with MacRae until Jonathan Grover was over sixteen years old. When that fact became apparent, it never raised a doubt in McLaughlin’s mind. He just excised Scruton’s name from future reports as though never mentioned, and MacRae became the sole priest accused. The entire file contains no evidence that Detective McLaughlin ever questioned Rev. Stephen Scruton about Jonathan Grover’s claims despite having already investigated and charged Scruton with an entirely unrelated claim brought by Todd Biltcliff who was a high school classmate of Jonathan Groven. That claim resulted in a financial settlement by the Diocese of Manchester.

McLaughlin wrote in one of his reports that he gave the Grovers a copy of MacRae’s resume “to help them with their dates.” At the end of this three-ring circus, Father MacRae ended up in a trial of the facts where there were no facts, in a courtroom where credibility was the sole measurement of guilt or innocence. But there was also no credibility. Hype and a stellar performance by a practiced con artist had to suffice, and it did.

Witness Tampering

Late in 2013, a man who was present at that 1994 trial wrote a letter about it to retired Judge Arthur Brennan who presided over the MacRae trial. What follows are some excerpts of that letter postmarked November 24, 2013:

“My wife and I were present in the courtroom throughout most of the trial of Fr Gordon MacRae in 1994. I have had many questions about this trial and much that I’ve wanted to clarify for my own peace of mind… We saw something in your courtroom during the MacRae trial that I don’t think you ever saw. My wife nudged me and pointed to a woman, Ms. Pauline Goupil, who was engaged in what appeared to be clear witness tampering. During questions by the defense attorney, Thomas Grover seemed to feel trapped a few times. On some of those occasions, we witnessed Pauline Goupil make a distinct sad expression with a down-turned mouth and gesturing her index finger from the corner of her eye down her cheek at which point Mr. Grover would begin to cry and sob on the stand. The questions were never answered.

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

One of the challenges for the prosecution of this trial was to get Thomas Grover to look like a victim. It was not easy. At 27 years old at trial, Grover was a 5’ 11”, 200-pound ex-high school football player with a history of alcoholism and a police record including domestic violence, assault, forgery, narcotics, and theft charges — all suppressed in this trial by Judge Arthur Brennan. The sobbing Thomas Grover on the witness stand could not mask his real persona for long. Consider this next excerpt from the above letter to Judge Brennan from a witness at trial:

“Secondly, I was struck by the difference in Thomas Grover’s demeanor on the witness stand in your court and his demeanor just moments before and after outside the courtroom. On the stand, he wept and appeared to be a vulnerable victim. Moments later, during court recess, in the parking lot he was loud, boisterous and aggressive. One time he even confronted me in a threatening attempt to alter my own testimony during sentencing.”

The presence of Ms. Pauline Goupil in this story is highly problematic, and, to a layman’s eyes, most suspicious. A masters level psychotherapist, she was retained pre-trial by Grover at the behest of his contingency lawyer “because it would look better for the jury,” according to Grover’s ex-wife, Trina Ghedoni, whose later Statement cast some previously unseen light on this trial.

At one point in the trial, Ms. Goupil, once exposed, was forced under a court order to turn over her treatment file. It contained but a few pages, and not a single therapeutic record pertaining to any claims of abuse of Thomas Grover by Father MacRae. However, Ms. Goupil’s file did contain this letter purportedly written by her to Thomas Grover who apparently had not been showing up for his pre-trial coaching sessions with her:

“Jim tells me MacRae is being offered a deal his lawyers will want him to take so there won’t be a trial. We can just move on to the settlement phase.”

I discussed this letter previously in “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud,” my first installment in this series. The letter was part of a file of perhaps six pages that Pauline Goupil turned over upon orders of the court. A year later, during evidentiary proceedings from lawsuits brought by Thomas Grover and two of his brothers — a hearing in which everyone but the imprisoned priest had lawyers representing them — Ms. Goupil testified at length about her pre-trial sessions with Thomas Grover and her work in aiding the reconstruction of his memories of abuse at age 15. For excerpts of that testimony see my article, “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”

None of Ms. Goupil’s role in this case ever became known by the Fr MacRae trial jury. Like everyone else involved in the prosecution of this case, she has since declined to be interviewed or to answer any questions.

“Jim” in Ms. Goupil’s above letter to Thomas Grover refers to Detective James McLaughlin, a now retired sex crimes investigator for the Keene, NH Police Department. In 2018, his name was briefly added to a secret list of police officers with a history of official misconduct. McLaughlin sued in a secret “John Doe” lawsuit heard with no public accountability. In May 2024, he was allowed to have his name removed from that public list. The prevailing belief among court observers in New Hampshire was that McLaughlin was afforded this level of anonymity and the judicial outcome because leaving his name on that list could have reopened hundreds of other cases like MacRae’s.

At some point in his investigation of Thomas Grover’s claims against Gordon MacRae, the detective appears to have taken up some sideline work on behalf of Grover’s contingency lawyer. In 1993 before Fr MacRae was charged or even aware of the claims against him, McLaughlin obtained a warrant for a “one-party intercept,” a sting attempt to record a telephone call from Thomas Grover to the priest who at that time was involved in in New Mexico. Little, if any, of the resultant call made its way into the 1994 trial, however. The recorded claims from Grover elicited nothing more than the bewildered voice of Father MacRae apparently wondering what on Earth the caller was talking about. However, this attempt at a telephone sting revealed something far more interesting.

Detective McLaughlin had apparently learned of a toll-free “800” number for contacting Fr MacRae. His police report detailed his attempts to call that number from his office at the Keene Police station. However, phone records which coincided with McLaughlin’s reports about executing the warrant indicate that the calls were not placed from his office at Keene Police headquarters, but from the office of Grover’s contingency lawyer 50 miles away. This has never been explained. Also never explained are statements from Grover’s family members who today reveal that the contingency lawyer gave Grover repeated cash advances before MacRae’s criminal trial, a practice that, if true, was a violation of the New Hampshire Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers. It is but another example of the pervasive lure of money in this story from start to finish.

An immediate problem for anyone trying to get to the bottom of all this is the absence of recorded interviews. It seemed to be Detective McLaughlin’s standard procedure to record interviews with accusers — referred to as “victims” in every one of his reports that I have read.

Another new witness statement from Steven Wollschlager alleges that McLaughlin knowingly elicited false accusations against Fr MacRae in exchange for cash and an implication that “life could go easier with a lot of money.” Wollschlager was subpoenaed to testify before a Grand Jury to process a new indictment against Fr MacRae just before the Grover trial, but decided at the last minute that he could not pursue this lie. Wollschlager added that McLaughlin’s reports contain statements that he never said, and distortions of what he did say.

The one recording McLaughlin did appear to make was that of his interview with Thomas Grover’s counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett. Today, she reports that he badgered her, threatened her, and allegedly bullied her into restating her account into something he wanted to hear, and he did all of this on tape. That recording was never turned over to the defense and has never seen the light of day.

Detective McLaughlin did not seem to record his interviews with any of the Grover brothers accusing Gordon MacRae. This was a startling departure from his own longstanding methods and protocols. The choice not to record anything in this one case seems calculated, and it has never been explained. The fact that today, multiple witnesses claim to have been bribed, coerced, badgered, and otherwise manipulated by this detective could lead a rational observer to question what has gone on here, and to doubt the credibility of the claims against this priest.

It is true that there has been a cover-up in the Catholic clergy sex abuse story, but it is not the one everyone thinks it is. It took place twenty years ago in beautiful downtown Keene, New Hampshire.

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Editor’s Note: The above article continued a series by Ryan A. MacDonald. Other titles in this series include “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud,” “The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence,” and “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.”

Judge Arthur Brennan, who sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to life in prison, being arrested in the Congressional Chambers in Washington, DC as part of the “Occupy Movement.”

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 6/5/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 6/5/24

The Power and the Glory If the Heart of a Priest Grows Cold

After 42 years of priesthood, 30 unjustly in prison, ‘The Whisky Priest,’ the central figure of Graham Greene’s best known novel, comes to my mind in darker times.

After 42 years of priesthood, 30 unjustly in prison, ‘The Whisky Priest,’ the central figure of Graham Greene’s best known novel, comes to my mind in darker times.

June 5, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“You are sure to find another cross if you flee the one you bear.”

— Anonymous Mexican Proverb

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I was ordained to the priesthood on June 5, 1982, the sole candidate for priesthood in the entire State of New Hampshire that year. On the next day, June 6, 1982, I was nervously standing in a corner in the Sacristy as I prepared to offer my First Mass in Saint John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. The church was packed with friends, family, and strangers from near and far. I was standing in a corner because the Sacristy was filled with my brother priests all vesting to join me for the occasion. I imagined they were watching me for signs that I might flee.

I peered through the open sacristy door at the huge, anticipating crowd and my anxiety level was off the scales. I wished for a way to calm my nerves. Just then, a young lady came into the sacristy and handed me a written note. The driver of a Buick out in the parish parking lot had left the lights on and a thoughtful person jotted down the license plate number. So I totally broke protocol. I walked out of the sacristy into the sanctuary, approached the lectern microphone, and announced that someone had parked a car with its lights still on.

It worked! All the attention was suddenly off me as everyone looked around to see who would get up and embarrassedly walk outside. Then, still at the microphone, I announced, “I don’t know what the rest of you are expecting because I don’t have a clue how to say Mass!” The church erupted in laughter and spontaneous applause, and my anxiety went up in smoke. Back in the sacristy, the others did not understand what I had said. “What are you up to?” They asked.

In the years to follow, as you know, priesthood took me down some dark side roads. In many ways, and at many times over those years, I have felt as though I had been an utter failure as a priest. I should not be in this prison-place from where I write yet another epitaph on yet another year of priesthood offered up like incense to drift out beyond these stone walls. Yet here I am, and in the midst of sorrow and tears, I am powerless to change any of it.

I know today that I had been caught up in a dense web of corruption that resists unraveling despite some concerted efforts. I did not see any of this corruption as it arose around me. Priests tend not to be attuned to such things, but others have written about it. Among them is Claire Best, a most tenacious investigator, researcher, independent writer, and Hollywood talent agent who wrote, “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

On the Day of Padre Pio

Back in 2009 as my 27th anniversary of priesthood loomed, this blog was just beginning to take shape. I did not foresee that coming either. I did not even know what a blog was. It was proposed to me by a writer in Australia. This is a familiar story to most readers, but I recently came upon a different perspective on this blog’s beginning. It’s a sort of parallax view, a telling of the same story but from a different angle. From his newfound cradle of freedom in Thailand, Pornchai-Max Moontri wrote about this with some help from our editor. We will link to it again at the end of this post, but if you plan to read it, bring a tissue. It is, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

On the very day I was ordained in 1982, my friend, Pornchai Moontri was eight years old, living in abject poverty, but happy, on a farm in northeast Thailand. He was three years away from being taken, trafficked to America, his mother brutally murdered, and his life consumed in the wreckage of real abuse by a real predatory monster while all the “officials” looked the other way. Our lives, his and mine, were on a collision course.

When this blog had its debut in July, 2009, a small number of self-described “faithful” Catholics, and some faithfully anti-Catholic activists, took umbrage with the notion that an accused and imprisoned priest might have such a voice in the Catholic public square. Some of them sought out anything and everything they could unearth and throw at me to discourage my writing. It was effective. Discouragement comes easily to a prisoner.

The strangest of the insults came from a man who felt obliged to tell me that he refuses to read anything written by “another Whisky Priest.” That was a bit of a mystery until months later when I read Graham Greene’s masterful 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory. Its main character is a priest without a name. He is the “Whisky Priest” known mostly for the prison of addiction.

That particular insult seemed entirely misplaced. Google did not always pay attention to punctuation back then. It turned out that the letter writer had Googled “Father Gordon MacRae” and stumbled upon a reference to an interview with actress Meredith MacRae in which she revealed, “My father Gordon MacRae was an alcoholic.” Gordon MacRae the film and Broadway star went on to win a multitude of awards for starring roles in Carousel and Oklahoma, among others. But, alas, I am not he, and nor am I the “Whisky Priest.” I have not consumed alcohol in any form other than at Mass since 1983.

But “Whisky Priest” did not quite have the force of insult the letter writer intended. Graham Greene’s “Whisky Priest” was sadly all too human, but his priesthood towered over his flawed humanity. The Power and the Glory is set in early 20th Century Mexico when an emerging totalitarian regime there outlawed the practice of Catholicism in a nation that was almost 100 percent Catholic. This is the story of the Cristeros, Catholics who rose up in civil war against a Marxist regime that tried to banish their faith. Priests were hunted; many were martyred; and those who remained, and stayed alive, were forced to abandon their priesthood, enter into marriage, and denounce the Church or face prison and eventual execution.

Many who were not martyred did as required, but not the Whisky Priest. In the most unique of literary twists, a police lieutenant made it his life’s mission to hunt down and trap the Whisky Priest. He knew of the priest’s alcoholism so he enticed him by leaving a trail of bottles of wine. The story conveys the priest’s spiritual battle within himself as he consumed the wine to silence his addiction while through grace and sheer force of will always forced himself to leave enough to offer Mass all throughout the country for Catholics who remained steadfast in their faith at a time when there was no other priest.

The Whisky Priest is the most unlikely of spiritual heroes. Priesthood was his greatest cross because it placed his life, and the lives of those who sought his sacraments, in grave danger. It was also his liberation. When he was finally arrested, the Police Lieutenant asked him why he stayed only to be captured and likely martyred:

“If I left, it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. But it doesn’t matter so much my being a coward and all the rest. I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same — and I can give him God’s pardon. It wouldn’t make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.”

A Voice in the Wilderness

But also among the din of objections to my writing came far louder and more voluminous words of encouragement from other sources. Among them, as most readers know, was Cardinal Avery Dulles who famously wrote,

“Someday your sufferings will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Someone may want to add a new chapter to the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison. In the spirit of St Paul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fr Walter Ciszek, and Fr Alfred Delp, your writing, which is clear, eloquent and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.”

I was stunned to receive the support of this nation’s most prolific Catholic writer and prelate. But I was not sure that I believed him. Then, 15 years later as yet another ordination anniversary loomed, I learned from others just a week ago about a brief article at the blog, Les Femmes — The Truth. The writer, Mary Ann Krietzer, had written a letter to me about a year earlier.

I get many letters, a few of them hate mail but most of them strong gestures of support. However I fail, though not by choice, to answer most. I can purchase only six typewriter ribbons per year so I must preserve them for BTSW posts. I had carpal tunnel surgery on both hands so writing a large volume by hand is most difficult. I came upon a letter kindly sent to me from Mary Ann Krietzer that I somehow had misplaced. Six months later, near Pentecost, I discovered it in a pile of paper and wrote a brief reply. That prompted her to write a post on her widely-read blog entitled, “Fr Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

In many ways I was shocked by it. The author gave clear voice to all that Cardinal Dulles had predicted, without even knowing that he had predicted it. Mary Ann Kreitzer’s article included this passage published earlier by a recently ordained deacon that was given a magnified voice at Les Femmes — The Truth:

“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

For people who base their core purpose upon a lie, the truth is an especially threatening thing. I had no idea that my voice in the wilderness was no longer in the wilderness. I hope you will read Ms. Krietzer’s post linked again below. She provided articulate balance to the loud din of those who pursued me across the land just to disparage and demean. For my part, after reading Mary Ann Krietzer’s post, I just wanted to go hide under my bunk. But in truth, as I mark 42 years of priesthood in the deep peripheries to which Pope Francis once summoned the gaze of the whole Church, I remain a man in prison, and a priest in full.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I want to thank you for your support and prayers. I also want to ask for your prayers for a young man who encountered this blog along with his mother and father and family, back in its infancy in 2009. They have been devoted readers ever since. On May 29 this year Ben Feuerborn became Father Ben Feuerborn when he was ordained a priest in Lincoln, Nebraska. His first Mass went without a hitch — perhaps because no one had left their car lights on. His second Mass was offered at a Benedictine abbey near Kansas City, Missouri. While Father Ben was in the sacristy vesting for Mass, his mother spotted a plaque under the title “Ad Altare Dei” (To the altar of God). She took out her phone and snapped this photo, which I received this week. It is a bit of a mystery, one among many.

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We also recommend these related posts:

Fr. Gordon MacRae at Beyond These Stone Walls
by Mary Ann Krietzer @Les Femmes — The Truth

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized
by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

A Mirror Image in the Devil’s Masterpiece
by Dilia E. Rodríguez, Ph.D.

Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD 4/10/24 Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD 4/10/24

A Mirror Image in the Devil’s Masterpiece

Inspired by Bishop Robert Barron’s acclaimed Letter to a Suffering Church, the Editor of Beyond These Stone Walls was moved to write and publish this inspired reply.

Inspired by Bishop Robert Barron’s acclaimed Letter to a Suffering Church, the Editor of Beyond These Stone Walls was moved to write and publish this inspired reply.

April 10, 2024 by Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD with an Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae

Introduction

I will always owe a debt of gratitude to Suzanne Sadler of Australia. After following the sordid story that entangled many Catholic priests in false witness, Suzanne came upon an article I was invited to write for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The article, which appeared in the July, 2009 issue of Catalyst, was “Due Process for Accused Priests.”

Immediately upon reading it, Suzanne wrote to me from Australia with a suggestion that I permit her to establish a blog that would feature my writing. I was highly dubious, believing that I had nothing of interest or value that anyone would want to read. It was Pornchai Max Moontri, my friend and roommate of many years in prison who encouraged me to try. He reminded me of a letter from Cardinal Avery Dulles urging me to add a new chapter to the literature of Christians wrongly imprisoned. It was also Max who suggested this blog’s first title, “These Stone Walls.” Then Pornchai’s Godmother, Charlene C. Duline, a retired U.S. State Department official jumped aboard with an offer to help with logistics. I ran out of excuses, and in August of 2009 These Stone Walls was born with my first of hundreds of posts “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.”

Over the course of the next nine years, These Stone Walls published some 500 original posts written mostly by me but some by far more distinguished guest writers. Then, in 2019, Covid struck and grew into a global pandemic affecting every tenet of our lives, including our lives of faith. Much that we had come to cherish began to desintegrate before our eyes. In the course of a single week in 2020, my voice in this wilderness of prison and false witness was silenced. These Stone Walls had collapsed.

Then, seemingly from out of the blue came a letter from Dilia E. Rodríguez in New York. She wrote that she was so enamored by a post she stumbled upon about Pope Benedict XVI and Saint Joseph that she felt compelled to read more. Just before my blog was taken offline she downloaded its entire contents onto her own computer.

So the end that I thought was upon us turned out not to be an end at all, but a new beginning. It was in September 2020 that this news came to me. It was just as my longtime friend Pornchai Max Moontri was departing for deportation to Thailand. Just as I was immersed in loss and sadness, Dilia was quietly in the background resurrecting this blog with new life and a new name, “Beyond These Stone Walls.” Dilia has now been our Editor for going on four years.

As we faced the terminal illness of Claire Dion, the subject of my Divine Mercy post last week, Dilia accepted the necessity of stepping out of the shadows and into the light to also take over all that Claire had managed.

Dilia E. Rodriguez, PhD retired in 2022 from a career in U.S. Government service as a civilian scientist for the United States Air Force. Holding advanced degrees in both Physics and Computer Science, Dilia is also a daily communicant and a strong supporter and participant in Eucharistic Adoration. In recent weeks she has also stepped up to take on the logistics of support services for me and this blog as described at our Contact and Support Page.

To mark this occasion and further introduce Dilia, I want to restore and repost something she had written on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in December 2019. Her post is a brilliant response to a small book by Bishop Robert Barron entitled, “Letter to a Suffering Church.”

Here is Dilia E. Rodriguez with

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A Mirror Image in the Devil’s Masterpiece

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and to me it offers symbols for the crisis in the Church.

First, let me say that, as so many others, I am moved by the impassioned efforts of Bishop Robert Barron to stop Catholics from leaving the Church. His heart and soul are on fire with the love of Jesus, of His Church and of His People.

I never thought of leaving, and it is not just “to whom shall we go?” It is that God is LOVE, and as one saint, whose name I cannot recall, said, “LOVE is not loved.” I see the current scandal as stark evidence that LOVE is not loved. So my reaction is that I want to love God, I want to love Jesus with my whole being, as I have never loved Him before.

I want to consider (… think aloud … pray aloud …) three points: the devil’s masterpiece, evangelization at this time, and the call for saints.

Bishop Barron convincingly describes the sexual abuse scandal as exquisitely designed by the devil. He shows the horror that attends the sexual abuse of young people by priests, and the cover-up of these abuses by bishops. Whether or not it is seen as the devil’s masterpiece, this is what is described almost universally as the entirety of the sexual abuse scandal, by the mainstream media, by the Catholic media, by attorneys general and others.

But there is more to the devil’s masterpiece. There is a mirror image that remains invisible to most. The Father of Lies surely can use lies in this masterpiece of masterpieces. In this mirror image the accused priests are innocent, and the ones who claim to have been abused are the abusers. In this mirror image bishops abuse innocent priests by publishing their names in lists of “credibly” accused. This requires no corroboration or evidence of the accusation. It replaces “innocent until proven guilty” with “guilty until proven innocent” or even “guilty even if proven innocent.” This “credible” accusation standard is neither a legal nor a biblical standard.

So two abuses coexist: the visible one, the sexual abuse of young people by priests; and the invisible one, the abuse of innocent priests by those who falsely claim to have been abused and profit from it.

In the accused innocent priests Jesus is living His Passion. Pilate said, “I find no guilt in him.” There is no evidence against many of the accused priests. Jesus stood wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak. The chief priests and the guards cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him.” Pilate tried to release him, but the crowd insisted, “Crucify him!” Bishops may want to do the right thing, but they cave in to the pressure and they crucify innocent priests; they remove them from the ministry to which God called them. Bishops cave in to the pressure of those who ask cynically “What is truth?”, and do not listen to the One Who is TRUTH.

Holy Innocents: Double Symbol for the Crisis

The massacre of the holy innocents captures in symbol the two coexisting abuses. Herod’s killing of the innocent children represents the killing of innocent faith of the young who have been abused by priests. The way of Herod — to kill the many to ensure killing the One — is the way that has been adopted to assuage the anger and fears of the crowd and the media. So Herod’s killing of the innocent children also represents the destruction of the lives of innocent priests without having to prove any claim against them. Both are very grievous abuses.

A mirror adds much light where there is light. The mirror-image abuse deceptively intensifies the dark evil of the abusive priests.

What can I do, … we do, … the bishops do, in response to the devil’s masterpiece of masterpieces? Absolutely nothing. Jesus said it, “Without Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) But He said, “Whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit.” Only Jesus can respond to the devil’s masterpiece of masterpieces.

This time of great scandal is the Olympics of Evangelization. The Gospel is not just for intellectual discussions or for run-of-the-mill problems. It is only the full power of the Gospel that can cope with the immensity of this scandal.

The response of Jesus cannot be implemented by the weekend Catholic “athletes.” After a recent EWTN / Real Clear poll, Professor Robert George of Princeton University noted: “So even if you take the most devout Catholics — those who believe all of what the Church teaches or most of what the Church teaches — only 66% of those believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.” Clearly, an overwhelming majority of the laity can in no way be part of the response of Jesus. They are way out of shape.

The response of Jesus is the response of His Olympic team, the living saints, whom Bishop Barron and Benedict XVI point out as the great evangelizers; those who remain in Him, and He in them.

God is LOVE. Jesus said, “I am the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE.” In the mystery of Jesus, LOVE, TRUTH, and LIFE are synonyms. There can be no love without truth. There can be no life without love. Only Jesus can love both the abused and the abuser. Only Jesus can restore their lives. Only Jesus, the WAY, can reject the way of Herod. Only Jesus … through those who remain in Him and He in them.

Bishop Barron wrote (p. 97): “Above all, we need saints, marked by holiness of course, but also by intelligence, an understanding of the culture, and the willingness to try something new.”

Under “intelligence” and “understanding of the culture” should come a realization that the moral relativism of this age, the pervasive misinformation in the news (e.g. huge pro-life marches become invisible), the readiness to attack the Church, etc., do not foster an accurate portrayal of the scandal in the Church.

Conditioned by the Media

If in trying to solve a problem, or to understand a phenomenon, we ignore whole classes of facts and observations, we have no possibility of success: we will not solve the problem or understand the phenomenon.

Even though way back I realized that the real abuses of minors by priests could be exploited by others against the Church, I was still conditioned by the media. When the Pennsylvania Attorney General report came out, my knee-jerk reaction was “Here we go again.” But there was almost nothing new in it, and truth and fairness may not necessarily be its hallmark.

Jesus said: “Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.” (Matthew 10:16). Saints marked by intelligence and understanding of the culture eagerly and persistently seek the truth in this age that so fiercely rejects it. Their messages and their lives are a bright light in this very dark period. Consider the following examples: “A Weapon of Mass Destruction: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused”; Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast; Men of Melchizedek; A Ram in the Thicket; The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights ; Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories.

I began to see the magnitude of the mirror-image scandal when I accidentally discovered the blog “These Stone Walls.” It is the blog, published with the help of some friends, of Father Gordon J. MacRae, a falsely accused priest who has been in prison for 30 years. When the “hour had come,” Jesus prayed to the Father for those the Father had given to Him, “Consecrate them in the truth.” With a plea deal, Father MacRae could have been out of prison after one year. But he is consecrated to the Truth, and did not lie. For that, he got a life sentence.

Of his case Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote: “You may want to pray for Father MacRae, and for a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

The scandal of the Church is a colossal problem. The Dallas Charter of 2002 got some things right, but it also helped create the mirror-image scandal. Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote in 2004:

“The church must protect the community from harm, but it must also protect the human rights of each individual who may face an accusation. The supposed good of the totality must not override the rights of individual persons. Some of the measures adopted [at Dallas] went far beyond the protection of children from abuse … [By their actions, the bishops] undermined the morale of their priests and inflicted a serious blow to the credibility of the church as a mirror of justice.”

He also added:

“having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgment in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid having to make any judgments in these cases.”

If the priesthood is to be renewed, Jesus must be the foundation of this renewal. It must be His Way, His Love, and His Truth that renews the priesthood. The Church cannot be divided. It cannot call for saintly priests, while at the same time depriving some saintly priests of their civil and canonical rights when falsely accused.

Jesus, train me in Your ways. May I not utter empty words, and cry out “Lord, Lord.” May I love all the abused, all the abusers, and as Bishop Barron says, all fellow sinners. You have redeemed me through a Very Great Sacrifice. May I constantly beg You to make me Totally Yours.

Amen.

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Encoded Message from God

I got the idea that I wanted to find in the awful number the prison assigned to Father Gordon a comforting message from God. Maybe somehow the numbers could be mapped to some verse in the Bible. My starting point was to associate with each of the digits in 67546 the letters that phones assign to digits:

6 -> m n o; 7 -> p q r s; 5 -> j k l; 4 -> g h i; 6 -> m n o.

It really didn’t make much sense. I wanted to find some verse whose first word started with m or n or o, and whose second word started with p or r or q or s, and so on. I wasn’t finding such a five-word verse. I have as my desktop background the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. So I asked her for help. After a while I considered my favorite Bible verse:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

— John 15:5

There was no direct connection, but it was possible to see a loose one.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever REMAINs IN ME and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

At first I thought that it would have been better if “Jesus” had been the second word. But then I realized that Jesus being in the middle, at the heart of the prayer, was perfect.

With the help of Our Blessed Mother we can see that in the number the prison system uses to demean Father Gordon, God encoded the prayer he is living, and attests that he is bearing much fruit.

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: I am deeply grateful to Dilia for the ways she has saved my voice in the wilderness from being drowned out in the scandals of this age. I believe the Lord has in fact sent her just in the nick of time.

You may also like these other posts about our quest for Jesus and for justice:

Casting the First Stone: What Did Jesus Write On the Ground?

A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ

St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Our Salvation

Maximilian Kolbe: The Other Prisoner Priest in My Cell

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