Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis by Bill Donohue is a tour de force about our culture in decline and what we need to stem the encroaching tide.

August 21, 2024 by Bill Donohue, Catholic League President

Introduction by Fr Gordon MacRae:

Speaking at the “Essence Festival of Culture” in 2023, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris described what culture means to her:

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment and our time. Right? And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment. That is a reflection of joy. Because, you know … it comes in the morning. We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way, too.”

That quote from the current Vice President at a symposium on culture, was followed by her signature outburst of raucous laughter. I found it cited (without the laughter) in the June, 2024 edition of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in “Kamala Wins Race to the Bottom.”

Fortunately for America, Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a more nuanced view of culture, what it means for a society to survive, and the price we pay if it fades away. I believe the United States would face even greater cultural decline if not for the brakes applied by honest and vocal prophetic witnesses like Bill Donohue. Among the many accolades of his newest book, Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis (Sophia Institute Press, 2024) Catholic Encyclopedia editor Russell Shaw wrote, “Like the prophets, Donohue skewers bad guys — doers of evil and sowers of confusion — with consistent vigor and style.”

Cultural Meltdown (the book) is riveting, and in equal parts alarming, hopeful, and culturally uplifting. Donohue holds nothing back. His discussion of the roots and fallout of “Transgenderism” spans 58 pages, an education unto itself. It is a deeply troubling exposition of where we are and how we got here. The sheer madness of gender transition treatment for children is distressing. I recall hearing President Joe Biden casually say that “If an eight-year-old boy decides he wants to be a girl, his parents should have no say in it.” Pope Francis, no staunch defender of cultural traditions, called transgender ideology “demonic.”

In June, 2024, the Pew Research Center released results of a nationwide cultural survey. Sixty percent of respondents on the political left reported that being a man or a woman is merely a matter of personal preference and choice. Only nine percent of those on the conservative political right believe that. The lines of demarcation have permeated our politics. A recent Wall Street Journal news report analyzed the evidence of an ideological shift toward the right in young men under the age of thirty. The experience of one man, age 22, is an eye-opener:

“Harrison Wells said Trump’s 2016 campaign initiated his shift to the political right. He recalled being confused by the apoplectic reaction from teachers and students to Trump’s [2016] victory. His high school canceled classes and held listening sessions with students. ‘People were crying, upset,’ he said. ‘Everyone was hysterical.’ The experience crystallized growing skepticism of his private Catholic high school outside Menlo Park CA which organized lectures about the importance of access to contraceptives and abortion and celebrating transgender visibility.”

— “ElectionTriggers Battle of the Sexes, “ WSJ, July 30, 2024

No one involved with the article raised a question about how or why a California Catholic high school sponsored lectures on “the importance of access to abortion and contraceptives and celebrating transgender visibility.”

In the July/August 2024 issue of the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, Bill Donohue wrote a brief essay entitled, “We Are Badly Divided.” As evidence for his title he wrote, “Those who love Biden hate Trump, and vice versa. The hatred of Trump, often called Trump Derangement Syndrome, is so bad that 86 percent of Democrats reported in a recent survey that the Justice Department should have authorized ‘the use of deadly force’ in its retrieval of documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.”

This comes from the same people on the left who have gone on record, as Vice President Kamala Harris has, to advocate for defunding police. Such attitudes lured a hapless 20-year-old at a recent rally in Pennsylvania to the destruction of his own life while trying to end the life of Donald Trump. There is a way out of this cultural madness, and the prophetic Bill Donohue charts its course. What follows is Bill Donohue’s own explanation of why he wrote Cultural Meltdown. I could not improve upon it, so with his permission I am reproducing some of it here:

From Bill Donohue: “Why America Is in Trouble”

“The principal reason I wrote my new book is to address why America is in trouble. We live in a topsy-turvy world and most people, especially older adults, can’t seem to make sense of it. It is my hope that after reading Cultural Meltdown the reader will have a better handle on how this happened. We are a country torn between two conflicting visions of man and society. There are those who accept the religious vision and there are those who accept the secular vision. These perspectives are not only different, they are irreconcilable.

“Right now everything is in flux. As someone who favors the religious vision, I see signs of optimism, but not always. At some point, one side will win. We can’t go on indefinitely living as if we are living in two different worlds. The religious vision acknowledges belief in God, truth, human nature, the natural law, moral absolutes and Original Sin. It recognizes the limitations of the human condition. While it believes in progress it manifestly rejects the idea of human perfectibility.

“The secular vision promotes exactly the opposite view: God does not exist; truth is a mirage; human nature can be changed; there is no such thing as natural law; there are no moral absolutes; and the idea of Original Sin is fanciful. Furthermore, as the secular vision considers the human condition to be infinitely malleable, it champions the idea of the perfectibility of man.

“Left-wing intellectuals epitomize the secular vision. They are the ones who have had the greatest influence on the young, liberals, Democrats, and the well educated. As survey research shows, these are the most secular people in our society.

“The Catholic Church epitomizes the religious vision. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Men and women are biologically different, but possess equal dignity. We are expected to conform our behavior according to the tenets of the natural law. The faculty of reason is important, but it should complement faith, not oppose it.

“Those who ascribe to the religious vision reject the moral relativism that secularists promote. Moral relativism holds that what is moral is a matter of opinion and that there is no such thing as an act which is inherently immoral. Intellectuals very much believe this to be true. So did Hitler.

“I mention Hitler because he rode the waves of moral relativism right into office. There were political and economic reasons why he succeeded, but it was the moral collapse of German culture during the Weimar Republic (between the two world wars) that left the masses without a clear understanding of right and wrong. He capitalized on this cultural meltdown.

“Secularists are fond of saying that as long as two people agree on what constitutes proper moral behavior, that’s all that matters. It all boils down to consent. Those who believe in the religious vision know this to be false. It could justify incest. Without an understanding that God has given us Commandments to live by — and the moral absolutes they entail — all kinds of monstrosities are possible. History has shown exactly that.

“If there is one intellectual strain that is creating mass confusion it is postmodernism. For this we can thank French intellectuals in the 1960s. It is the most extreme expression of the secular vision. At bottom, it regards truth to be a fiction. Once this idea takes hold, look out. Here’s how postmodernism plays out in real life:

“David Detmer is a philosopher who knows how absurd postmodernism is. He interviewed one of its practitioners, fellow philosopher Laurie Calhoun. He asked her a simple question, one that any preschool child could answer: ‘Are giraffes taller than ants?’ ‘No,’ she replied. It is ‘an article of religious faith in our culture.’ In an earlier time, we would house people like her in an asylum. Today they are working in the academy.

“There is a chapter in the book on libertinism, or sexual license. Normal people regard people with perversions as sick and in need of help. Many left-wing intellectuals — who do not want to be regarded as normal, and who indeed reject the idea of normalcy — not only disagree that perverts are abnormal, they want to celebrate them.

“In 2022, Indiana University erected a large bronze sculpture of Alfred Kinsey, the zoologist-turned-sexologist. School officials celebrated his years of work there. There is also a Kinsey Institute on campus. They are proud of his writings and research on sexuality. They shouldn’t be. As I point out [in Cultural Meltdown, p.107] Kinsey was ‘a scientific fraud, a pervert, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a gay-bar-hopping homosexual (even though he was married) and a child abuser. Oh yes, he also had sex with animals.’ Guess which institution he hated? The Catholic Church.”

More from Bill Donohue: Christianity and Transgenderism

“The secular vision, especially postmodernism, explains the existence of Transgenderism, or gender ideology. If truth does not exist, then it is entirely possible for boys to think they are girls and vice versa. It does not matter what our chromosomes are. All that matters is what we feel is real.

“The tenets of Christianity and Transgenderism are polar opposites and cannot be reconciled. Pope Francis understands this as well as anyone. He calls gender ideology ‘one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations’ of our time. ‘Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs the differences and the value of men and women.’ So upset was [Pope Francis] with this ideological madness that he once called it ‘demonic.’

“Anti-science transgender activists are among the most intolerant people in our society. They believe there are more than two sexes (which they falsely call genders) and anyone who disagrees with them — which is to say most normal people — is dismissed as a bigot.

“The damage being done to young people — 80-percent of those who ‘transition’ to the opposite sex are girls who want to be boys — is incalculable. The long-term physical and psychological problems that they will experience have yet to be determined. We already know that puberty blockers, chemical castration, and genital mutilation have created enormous suffering. Indeed, this is the greatest child abuse issue of our day.

“The last two chapters [of Cultural Meltdown] explain why we are so divided as a nation. To take one example, we are treating racial and ethnic groups as if they were different tribes, pitting one against the other. Robin DiAngelo, the author of the best-selling book, White Fragility likes it that way: ‘People of color need to get away from white people and have some community with each other.’ They teach this racism — in the name of combating it — in many colleges and corporations. No doubt the Klan would agree with her. So does Harvard. That is why it designated ‘an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members’ when an adaptation of MacBeth was performed in 2021.

“Welcome to the world of the new apartheid. That much-condemned South African practice of separating the races is now very much in vogue in the United States. We have separate dorms on college campuses based on race, as well as separate graduation ceremonies. Part of the problem is the tendency of left-wing intellectuals to compare the tenets of the American Creed — the belief in freedom, equality and rule of law — to existing conditions. Inevitably, we come up short. But the Creed is the ideal; it is not reality. It gives us something to shoot for — holding out the potential that some day we will make good on this promise. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this. Why can’t intellectuals?”

Back to Father MacRae:

I came of age as a young adult in the middle of the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was deeply affected by it, and in some ways the roots of my vocation to priesthood were inspired by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. We have come a long way since then. It is doubly tragic for those who gave their lives to promote racial equality to see the deterioration of their work today. It is deeply sad that some in the Democratic Party of today choose to foment racial and ethnic divisiveness instead of promoting unity. For me, it feels like a giant step backwards in our culture. Bill Donohue concludes his book with a caveat:

“The Catholic Church — along with evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and Muslims — must hold the line and not bow to secular opinion. Secularism is the heart of our moral crisis; it is responsible for our cultural meltdown. We need to proclaim and defend eternal truths about man and society and the moral imperatives that make for the best of all possible worlds on Earth. We don’t need to re-create anything. We need to repair to our religious moorings.”

We are at a crossroads. As we face another presidential election in 2024, we stand at midnight in the garden of good and evil. Even some facets within our Church have quietly ventured over to one side of that garden — the “woke” side. Cultural Meltdown is our wake-up call.

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Bill Donohue is President of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and served for twenty years on the Board of the National Association of Scholars. The author of ten previous books, he has appeared on thousands of news, television and radio programs including EWTN, Fox News, CNN, NEWSMAX and other national media.

Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis by Bill Donohue is published in 2024 by Sophia Institute Press. His most recent guest post for Beyond These Stone Walls was, “The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae.” He was also instrumental in our recent, highly acclaimed post, “A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free.”

Digital billboard just outside the United Center in Chicago, the venue of the Democratic National Convention.

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 United Nations High Commissioner of Hypocrisy

In 2014 a United Nations Commission accused the Vatican under Benedict XVI of a past sex abuse cover-up. Then the U.N. was exposed for a present sex abuse cover-up.

July 12, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I sometimes come across an older post I have written about events in the news, and am struck by how much what I wrote ends up coming true. I just re-read a post I wrote on July 7, 2010. I read it anew with far more invested in the topic today than when I originally wrote it. That post is “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”

It raised an important point about an issue that has simmered in the background of this blog since its inception in 2009. That issue is the Catholic clergy sex abuse story, and how much the story has itself been abused in the news media to further certain agendas. On Easter Sunday 2010, for example, The Boston Globe hyped this story about a popular Massachusetts senior priest, Father Dominic Menna, who under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ “Dallas Charter,” was removed from ministry due to a claim of sexual abuse.

In reporting the story, the Globe neglected to mention that the uncorroborated single claim that destroyed this priest’s life was alleged to have occurred over a half century ago in 1971. And it was no accident that the story was reserved for the Globe’s Easter Sunday edition.

What the Globe omitted from the Easter Sunday 2010 story was the fact that the adult bringing that claim — a man in his late fifties — stood to gain a substantial financial settlement just for making the claim while proving nothing.

The contingency lawyers and their enablers in the media are counting on you to have no frame of reference to put any of the claims of priestly abuse into context. I do have a frame of reference, and I can tell you that the distortion created by lawyers and the news media is deeply unjust — not only to Catholics and their priests, but to millions of adult victims of abuse whose suffering has been trivialized and cheapened by the distortion that only victims of Catholic priests are worth hearing and compensating.

Since I wrote the above post, The Boston Globe was sold by its parent company, The New York Times, for less than ten cents on the dollar, compared to what the Times paid to purchase it. Some like to think that in the end the Globe pretty much reaped what it had sown at the expense of truth and justice.

The eventual result of the symphony created by contingency lawyers and biased news media was an arena in which the Church would become dislodged as a global source of moral truth. I wrote of some of the fallout for other innocent victims in my post, “Benedict Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.”

The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church

In 2014, an explosive 16-page report issued by the United Nations High Commissioner on the Rights of the Child indicted and convicted the Catholic Church without investigation, without evidence, without a formal defense, and without any trial of the facts. I know the feeling!

This public shaming of the Holy See came as a result of the emergence into public view of hundreds of claims of sexual abuse by priests dating back thirty, forty, fifty years or more. These were claims often brought forward by contingency lawyers who — once the mass settlement process had been established as status quo — flooded Church institutions with demands for “out-of-court” settlements with no effort at corroboration. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said N.H. contingency lawyer, Peter Hutchins when handed a $5.2 million check from the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire.

The various bishops and dioceses caved in to these demands, and then a hapless U.N. committee took that to be proof enough that the claims were all true. In a courageous article in First Things, “Rolling Stone, Alan Dershowitz, and Catholic Priests” (May 21, 2015) Father Thomas Guarino described the cost of this abandonment of rights for the priests accused when bishops got the monkey off their backs by throwing money at it:

“This Episcopal peace comes at a heavy price…. The problem is that, in many cases, no contrary evidence can come forward because an accusation is decades old. What convincing evidence could possibly be adduced to clear a man’s name? Even if a charge could be true, is lifetime suspension a proportionate penalty for a mere possibility? Should bishops be held hostage by forces dividing them from their own priests?”

— Fr Thomas Guarino, First Things

The United Nations had no such interest in basic civil rights like the presumption of innocence. Claudia Rosett, who led the Investigative Reporting Project for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, also reacted to the U.N. Commission report on the Vatican with a similarly titled column in The Wall Street Journal (“The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church,” WSJ, February 10, 2014). Ms. Rosett described the report:

“A Report on the Holy See — released by a U.N. Committee last week to much media fanfare — alleged that tens of thousands of children have been abused by Catholic clerics and that the Vatican has helped cover it up.”

Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, described that U.N. report as “one of the most ambitious power grab efforts ever undertaken by a U.N. committee.” The report was, of course, a lie, simply repeating a media mantra. But in the process of describing this in The Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett exposed another big lie, one belonging to the United Nations itself.

Now Hiring: A U.N. High Commissioner of Hypocrisy

Between 2007 and 2013, United Nations peacekeeper forces have been repeatedly implicated in the sexual abuse of children they were tasked to protect, and the U.N. has now been implicated in a cover-up of that fact. But the most disturbing part of this story is the extent to which it has been ignored — another form of cover-up — by the American news media. In fact, Ms. Rosett’s above column in the WSJ was likely the first hint of the scandal at the U.N. that appeared in mainstream U.S. news.

Since then, other media outlets have taken this up, but few of them in the United States. Sandra Laville, in The Guardian (U.K.) covered a report leaked to her newspaper alleging that the U.N.’s own investigation revealed “the rape and sodomy of starving and homeless boys” by French U.N. peacekeeper forces operating in the Central African Republic.

As sickening as that charge is, it gets much worse. French president Francois Hollande promised that France would prosecute those soldiers. The story came to light only because of a whistleblower. According to Matheiu Delahouse in the French paper, Le Nouvel Observateur, the U.N. marked its report on this matter “secret” and filed it away.

This is a story worth telling. The French government was not even informed of the claims against its soldiers until a man named Anders Kompass, a Swedish citizen working for the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees, “broke protocol and gave a copy of the report to the French government,” according to The Week:

“Naturally, the French investigators asked if they could speak to the U.N. investigator who wrote the report, but the U.N…refused to allow that. Meanwhile, Kompass, the whistleblower, has been punished and may lose his job. Saying he leaked a confidential document, the self-interested bureaucrats at the U.N. have suspended this 30-year veteran of humanitarian work for intervening on behalf of children.”

— The Week, “United Nations: Riding sexual abuse by peacekeepers,” May 15, 2015

Rosa Freedman, writing at TheConversation.com from Australia, charged that the U.N. has “a long and sordid history of covering up sexual abuse by peacekeepers.” Simon Allison, writing from South Africa for The Daily Maverick observed about the U.N., “Who can trust an institution that covers up the sexual abuse of minors?”

The very fact that such a question is now asked of the United Nations itself after it dragged the Catholic Church through a round of public mudslinging is symptomatic of an institution in crisis. The situation is more hypocritical than it appears.

I have also written of the hubris and hypocrisy of the U.N.’s finger pointing on this issue. I have described evidence that even while the U.N. was pointing fingers at the Vatican for decades-old and unproven claims of abuse, the U.N. was itself being sued. In 2014, the United Nations employed any and every legal means to fight off a lawsuit from the beleaguered people of Haiti after its unscreened peacekeeper forces caused the deaths of innumerable children by bringing a cholera outbreak to their earthquake stricken country. One of its defenses was to blame the people of Haiti for the cholera, a plague that killed hundreds of Haitian children.

The saddest part of this story is that the Holy See sent emissaries to the U.N. Commission on the Rights of the Child to assure the U.N. that many hundreds of priests have been cast out after being accused in these decades-old claims of abuse. In “The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church,” (WSJ, February 10, 2014), Claudia Rosett proposed a more fitting response from the Church to the U.N.:

“Pope Francis might want to consider that it is precisely to avoid gross intrusion by U.N. ‘experts’ that the United States signed, but never ratified, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty has less to do with children than with political power plays, and a fitting reform of the Vatican would be to walk away from it.”

Would that such advice was followed before hundreds of accused priests were thrown under the bus and out of the priesthood. Would that such advice was followed before the extent of United Nations hypocrisy was bared for all to see. Is reform of the U.N. on the horizon? The evidence does not indicate that it is. The United Nations now needs a High Commissioner of Hypocrisy.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: You would serve the cause of justice and truth by sharing this post. You may also like these related posts:

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition

Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic

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 the image for live access 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 James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

James Webb Space Telescope illustration courtesy of ESA/Hubble (Northrup Grumman).

As the James Webb Space Telescope entered orbit in a neutral gravity zone one million miles from Earth, the waning days of Hubble revealed an astronomical surprise.

June 22, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or lose the chords of Orion?”

— Job 38:4,31

“Astronomy, Cosmology, Physics, Theology, History! Reading this blog is like enrolling in a graduate program at NYU.” That message was sent to me in a letter several years ago from a friend, an official of the Archdiocese of New York. I have written a good deal about the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, but only about a dozen posts over the 13-year lifespan of this blog.

In a recent telephone call from exile to my friend, Father George David Byers, STD, SSL, he chided me that I am way overdue for a science post. I cite his academic credentials here — a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University Angelicum in Rome and a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and Jerusalem — to reflect that his suggestion of a mere “science” post might contain just a hint of academic hubris. If so, I can only respond with a quote from the great English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.”

I actually did write a science post even before Father Byers brought it up. Please don't yawn or click me away just yet. For me, this is a very big deal and it has a “WOW” factor. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched into Earth orbit in 1990, has been operating for 32 years and has far exceeded its intended operational limit. In the waning days of Hubble, it surprised Earthbound scientists with an amazing discovery. I will get to it below, but first ...

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The next generation of space exploration was born with the December 25, 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It has recently arrived at its designated orbit in what is called a “Lagrange point.” Named for the 18th Century French mathematician and physicist, Joseph Louis Lagrange, a “Lagrange point” is a zone of neutral gravity between the Earth and the Sun about one million miles from Earth. That point is now host to the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope.

Thousands of scientists and engineers took part in this project on the cutting edge of astronomical science. The Space Telescope Science Institute will operate and monitor it from Baltimore. Webb successfully separated from its launch vehicle and unfolded a giant solar array to power the telescope. Armed with huge primary and secondary mirrors and a suite of cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments, the Webb Telescope is the size of a large truck. It is capable of producing spectral images of 100 galaxies at a time. As one scientist described it:

“[Webb] will crack open the treasure chest of the magnificent infrared sky invisible to the human eye. If a bumblebee hovered in space at the distance from Earth to the Moon, Webb will be able to see both the sunlight it reflects and the heat it emits.”

One of the burning questions of both science and faith that Webb may lend itself to solving is the existence of life elsewhere in the Universe. All the latest media craze about evidence of UFOs points only to Earth-bound technology. Distances between stars are like impenetrable barriers. If sentient life exists, we will detect each other long before we ever encounter each other. So far, after decades of searching, no such evidence yet exists.

A general consensus among astronomers is that life does exist “out there,” but complex life is much more rare, and sentient complex life like us, if it exists elsewhere at all, is extremely rare. I once wrote a post laying out a case for our uniqueness in the Cosmos. It was, “Star Trek and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

That post introduced readers to a remarkable contributor to the science that made the Webb Space Telescope possible. Astronomer Vera Rubin defied all the stereotypes of her time to become one of the great icons of cosmology. She discovered that the visible Universe that we see in the night sky is only about 10 to 15 percent of what is actually there. She wrote of this in “Dark Matter in the Universe” (Scientific American, 1998):

“As we have done for centuries, we gaze into the night sky from our planetary platform and wonder where we are in this cavernous cosmos. Flecks of light provide clues about great objects in space. And what we do discern about their motions and apparent shadows tells us that there is much more that we cannot yet see.

“From every photon we collect from the universe’s farthest reaches, we struggle to extract information. Astronomy is the study of light that reaches Earth from the heavens. Our task is not only to collect as much light as possible — from ground and space-based telescopes — but also to use what we can see in the heavens to understand better what we cannot see and yet know must be there.

“Based on 50 years of accumulated observations of the motions of galaxies and the expansion of the universe, most astronomers believe that as much as 90 percent of the stuff constituting the universe may be objects or particles that cannot be seen. In other words, most of the universe’s matter does not radiate. It provides no glow that we can detect in the electromagnetic spectrum. … We call this missing mass ‘dark matter,’ for it is the light, not the matter, that is missing.”

— Vera Rubin, 1998

In coming months, the first images to come from the James Webb Space Telescope now hovering one million miles between Earth and the Sun may provide humanity’s first illumination of dark matter, that 90-percent of the Universe that we have never before seen. The Webb Telescope enormous primary mirror has unfolded perfectly. In coming months Webb’s first images of the ancient cosmos will arrive on Earth. Be prepared to be amazed!

A Pre-retirement Surprise from Hubble

My favorite post of the past year is one that was only half written by me. The other (and far better) half was written by Fr. Andrew Pinsent, a noted particle physicist and Research Director at the Ian Ramsay Center for Science and Religion at Oxford University in the U.K. I was way out of my element in this joint venture, but it was this humble blog’s best foot forward. The jointly written post was, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.”

It was among our most popular and enduring posts of the last year. Perhaps it was just a nice break from this world’s seemingly never-ending preoccupations with war, pestilence, scandal, and other obsessions of our time.

In that post, I quoted an excerpt from the book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 2005), a wondrous book by a brilliant mathematician, Robyn Arianrhod:

“In 1931, [Georges] Lemaitre formally sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory when he suggested the universe had started as an explosion of a ‘primeval atom,’ and that it had continued expanding from that explosive beginning.... Einstein’s equation predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional space-time .... Before this point, about thirteen billion years ago, there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter, nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” ( p. 187)

“The Universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” And it all happened in an instant 13 billion years ago on “A day without yesterday.” This conclusion of modern cosmology was the work of a brilliant priest, mathematician and physicist, Fr. Georges Lemaitre. If you wonder about the relevance of faith in the scientific world, you may be surprised to learn that science and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are on the same page in describing the origin of a created universe:

“God created the universe out of nothing.” (CCC 290)

“We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create. God created freely out of nothing.” (CCC 296)

“God said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:4). Scripture bears witness to faith in creation ‘out of nothing’ as a truth filled with promise and hope.” (CCC 297)

“Since God created everything out of nothing, He can also, through the Holy Spirit, give spiritual life to sinners by creating a pure heart in them, and bodily life to the dead through the Resurrection.” (CCC 298)

The Hubble Space Telescope is destined to soon retire, but not before it gave us some amazing images of the visible Cosmos. Its latest surprise is a photograph of the most distant star ever seen by human eyes or instruments, a star now called “Earendel.” It is 28 billion light years from Earth. A light year is a measure of distance and not of time. It is the distance light travels in a single year at the constant rate of 186,000 miles per second. A light year works out to be 5.6 trillion miles. Multiply that by 28 billion and that is the distance from Earth to Earendel. Please don’t ask me to convert this to kilometers.

The light Hubble captured from Earendel emanated from the star 12.9 billion years ago in the very infancy of creation as calculated by Fr. Georges Lemaitre. The only reason Hubble could spot this star is because of a rare cosmic alignment. A galaxy cluster beyond the Milky Way — our galaxy — was positioned in such a way that its gravity bent light creating a sort of cosmic magnifying lens.

If you did the math, you might have noticed that Earendel is twice the distance of the age of the Universe which is possible only because the Universe has continually expanded over those 13 billion years. This expansion, and the now proven fact that galaxies are defeating gravity by speeding away from one another, was also a discovery of the physics of Fr. Georges Lemaitre which in the end were applauded and embraced by Albert Einstein.

Who says priests are boring?

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Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please visit our “Special Events” page and these related links:

Star Trek and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered The Big Bang

“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang

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Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing

Facing the truth about the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas will require courage. Something has gone terribly wrong in our culture and Pornchai Moontri knows it firsthand.

June 15, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Moontri

Note to readers: Fr. Gordon MacRae interviewed Pornchai Moontri in Thailand for this post. Pornchai’s most recent post was “A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.”

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A dense, dark cloud has been hanging over America since the recent inexplicable and shocking murders of 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers by 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos in Uvalde, Texas. The close knit community will feel the effects of this trauma for decades to come. A lot of soul searching has gone on about what could have triggered such an event, about how it developed, how it might have been prevented, and what could have been done differently by responding police.

The tragedy at Uvalde was devastating, and was preceded just a week earlier by the racially charged rampage of another 18-year-old shooter brandishing the same sort of weapon. He killed 12 people — ten of them targeted for being African American — at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

After the shocking but unrelated stories unfolded, half the nation went immediately for the guns and political talking points. President Biden’s loudest and most immediate response was, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? Where in God’s name is our backbone?” They were not exactly the words of consolation the nation and the people of Uvalde needed in the moment. The politics should have waited.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott explained rationally that 18-year-olds in Texas have been able to own long guns (not hand guns) since frontier days while only in recent years have these mass shootings occurred in schools. That is true, but it is also true, as Governor Abbott added, that there are currently many reports of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people that did not exist a hundred years ago. Why does it exist now?

After both stories dominated the news media, I reached out to our friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. I knew that when he learned of these accounts, he might relate them to his own offense at age 18 at a supermarket in Bangor, Maine 30 years ago. During a parking lot struggle with a much larger man, 18-year-old Pornchai killed him. It happened on March 21, 1992. Pornchai never saw freedom again until almost 30 years later.

The major difference between that incident and the two young assailants in Buffalo and Uvalde is that Pornchai never set out to harm anyone that day or on any day. He carried a knife for self-protection. Having been torn from a rural village in Thailand at age 11, Pornchai was abused and tormented in Bangor, Maine until he escaped into homelessness on the streets of a foreign country. As the only Asian in town, he was often the subject of racial hatred, hunted by a Bangor street gang.

Most people who read this blog know Pornchai’s story. It is told in multiple places, but the best source is a widely read article at Linkedin. If you read it, you may wonder, as many already have, how one young man could endure so much and ever trust life again. The article is “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.”

In the Absence of Fathers

When I asked Pornchai for his thoughts about what might have driven 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos to this end, he put his response in the first person:

“I didn’t care about anyone; and then someone cared about me. If I did not find God, and you, and acceptance, and Divine Mercy, I might have stayed on a road to destruction. It was all I knew or expected. Hatred left me when something came along to replace it. Do you remember your Elephants post? It makes total sense. The one thing missing from my life and the lives of those two kids in America was a father. Without one, a decent one, a kid is at the mercy of dark forces and his mind just breaks.”

The “Elephants post” that Pornchai referred to was a Fathers Day post I wrote in this same week in 2012. It was a huge eye-opener for many people and began a serious discussion about the crisis of father absence in our time and the retreat of good men from engagement in the public square. The post was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

It is interesting that, ten years after writing it, that post began appearing in search engines all over the United States just hours after news struck about the horror in Uvalde, Texas. I had also made the same connection and decided that I would share that post anew on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. When our editor looked at traffic reports that day, even before we shared it, the post was showing up everywhere.

Despite the story and research covered in that post being suppressed in our agenda-driven mainstream ne ws media, people instinctively know the truth of it. There are two factors, both speaking loudly and clearly, about the burgeoning mental health crisis among the young that is now clearly evident in our culture. Those two factors are the growing and spreading of fathers from the lives of struggling young men and the diminishment of faith and hope as our culture separates itself from God. Along with this, incidents of violence and other criminal behavior among young men have increased 1,000 fold in two decades, and deaths by suicide and accidental opioid overdose are now the number one killers of young men ages 15 to 30.

I live with many who live without hope. For year after year, this prison sees a steady stream of lost, fatherless young men trapped in adolescence and unable to developmentally move on. They are 35 going on 12 emotionally, they suffer from panic attacks and other critical anxiety states, and they are subject to fits of overwhelming emotion. Over ninety percent of them grew up in the care of single mothers with absent fathers. The steady stream of social weapons aimed at men in recent decades — such as the #MeToo movement — has further diminished manhood and, by extension, fatherhood.

In the Name of the Father

Once God and Fatherhood are cast aside, only the feminine remains. That may sound great for the causes of radical feminism, but in the psyches of young men it wreaks havoc and chaos when coupled with the diminishment of fatherhood. The results are all around us: a marked increase in transgender ideology and great political pressure to embrace it, chronic gender confusion, identity confusion, self-medicating drug abuse, and the breakdown of identity and self-awareness. The great psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson predicted that adolescence cannot end until the crisis of identity is resolved. Our culture has extended that crisis to engulf a lifetime.

Before the election of 2020, then nominee Joe Biden said in a news conference “if an eight-year-old boy wakes up one morning and wants to be a girl, he should be given all the tools and medical support necessary and parents should have no say in it.”

That is not verbatim, but it is the context and content of what was said. Media heads were bobbing as they took notes.

Dr. Paul McHugh, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and a widely recognized expert in this field, has stated that most transgender people suffer from a mental disorder and the idea of sex reassignment is simply mistaken — and leaves much psychological damage in its wake. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is now finalizing plans to require transgender treatment under healthcare plans. Catholic League President Bill Donohue recently addressed this in “Transgender Mania Grips the White House.”

These developments have all come about as a natural result of removing God from the public square. One of the last bastions of faithful witness has been the Catholic Church, but the sexual abuse crisis, though in too many ways real, was also hyped and manipulated to remove a Catholic voice from public discourse on moral issues. Gone also are the Boys Scouts of America. It is actually a hopeful sign that pro-abortion groups are attacking Catholic churches right now. It’s a sign that the Church is still perceived as being on the front line in the defense of life. Still, the eradication of God has made inroads that deeply affect young people and their ability to hope through hard times.

In a fine commentary by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, she added the obvious, that it is one thing for an 18-year-old to have a gun to shoot rattlers in the 18th Century. It is quite another to allow an 18-year-old to buy a military grade assault rifle in the middle of a mental health crisis. Some common sense and compromise are likely to eventually prevail, even in an election year. Ms. Noonan went on, however, to point to a far deeper crisis and contributing factor to such tragedy in a recent column, “Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb,” (WSJ, May 28, 2022):

“I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it ... I tell the young, I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby — it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing ... Consolation is not why you believe, but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it.”

I share with Peggy Noonan the consolation that the good people of Uvalde, Texas at least have that. This is part of our collective crisis. Too many have been robbed of the consolation of faith because of the relentless progressive assault on faith over the last few decades.

And she is also right about the crisis of mental health among the young. Signs of it are reported everywhere, and it is much exacerbated by the government enforced Covid lockdowns of the last two years.

I admire Peggy Noonan also for her unapologetic faith the absence of which is also a crisis among the young. It is the most common prayer request I receive from parents — a hope that their teen and young adult children will return to faith. As mentioned a week ago in these pages, Saint Paul famously wrote that only three gifts have lasting value, Faith, Hope, and Love. To impart Love without also imparting Faith and Hope diminishes love as a shallow and empty affair.

Among the Refugees of Thailand

What happened in Uvalde deeply impacted me. It made me double down on my own commitment as a father to Pornchai Moontri — even as he now lives many thousands of miles from me. When I asked him if he could explain Salvatore Ramos, he said, “I didn't care about anyone either; then someone cared about me.” He talked at length about my post, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.” Pornchai never knew his biological father, and then ended up in the hands of a sadistic abuser who did great harm to him mentally, spiritually and physically.

He vowed that he would never again be anyone’s victim and would never trust anyone again. When he finally took that chance, life fell back into place. Divine Providence steered the circumstances of our lives until they were on a collision course, and Pornchai courageously let me in.

Some readers have asked me what Pornchai is doing for work to support himself in Thailand. We are simply not there yet. American money goes a long way in Thailand so I manage to support Pornchai for just a small amount of money each month. A few good friends who understand that effort help me with it. I believe it is a necessity and I have dissuaded him from finding a menial job just to support himself right now. This is because I have a fully informed sense of what Pornchai has been through in life, of what others took from him.

So I have asked him to spend his time restoring his life by facing openly the traumas of his past without having to worry about where his next meal is coming from. He spends his days in learning, and when the need arises he spends whatever time is left assisting Father John Hung Le in caring for the Vietnamese refugees in Thailand.

This is of great importance. By caring for others, Pornchai is caring for himself just as the Father in his life taught him. That is why the photo below is so very special to me. In his last sixteen years here with me, at my urging, Pornchai sought the help of a therapist in the prison system to work through a lifetime of trauma and grief and loss. When the therapist saw the photo below, she said, “No one could have accomplished this but Gordon. No one else!”

I had little to do with it. It is God who directed this path. It required only sacrifice from me, and men need to be reminded that sacrifice is at the very heart of fatherhood.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading this post with an open mind and heart, and for sharing it. It can only accomplish some good if others see it.

Please visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page and these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

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Stones for Pope Benedict and the Rusty Wheels of Justice

Following revelations about possible deliverance after 28 years of wrongful imprisonment, hope is hard to come by, but it was not so for Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

February 9, 2022

“This prisoner of the State remains, against all probability, staunch in spirit, strong in the faith that the wheels of justice turn, however slowly.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, “The Trials of Father MacRae,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013

When this blog was but a year old back in 2010, my friend and prison roommate, Pornchai Moontri, was received into the Catholic faith. He was 36 years old and it was his 18th year in prison. Everyone who knew him, except me, thought his conversion seemed quite impossible. Pornchai does not have an evil bone in his body, but his traumatic life had a profound effect on his outlook on life and his capacity for hope. There is simply no point in embracing faith without cultivating hope. The two go hand in hand. We cannot have one without the other.

To sow the seeds of hope in Pornchai, I had to first reawaken hope from its long dormant state in my own life as a prisoner. I am not entirely sure that I have completed that task. It seems a work in progress, but Pornchai’s last words to me as he walked through the prison gates toward freedom on September 8, 2020 were, “Thank you for giving me hope.” I wrote of that day in “Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

A decade earlier, back in April of 2010, Pornchai entered into Communion with the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday. On the night before, he asked me a haunting question. It was what I call one of his “upside down” questions. As he pondered what was to come, his head popped down from his upper bunk so he appeared upside down as he asked it. “Is it okay for us to hope for a happy ending when Saint Maximilian didn’t have one?” Pornchai had a knack for knocking me off the rails with questions like that.

Before responding, I had to do some pondering of my own. Our Patron Saint lost his earthly life at age 41 in a Nazi concentration camp starvation bunker. His death was followed by his rapid incineration. All that Maximilian Kolbe was in his earthly existence went up in smoke and ash to drift in the skies above Auschwitz, the most hopeless place in modern human history.

Retroactive Guilt and Shame

What I am about to write may seem horribly unpopular with those harboring an agenda against Catholic priests, but popularity has never been an important goal for me. In recent weeks, the news media has trumpeted a charge launched by a commission empowered by some Catholic officials in Germany. The commission’s much-hyped conclusion was that Pope Benedict was negligent when he did not remove four priests quickly enough after suspicions of abuse forty-one years ago in 1981. Some of my friends have cautioned me to stay out of this. Perhaps I should listen.

But I won’t. At what point do we cease judging men of the past for not living up to the ideals and politically correct sensitivities of the present? Merely asking that question puts me in the crosshairs of our victim culture, but it also forces me to ask another. Go back just another forty-one years and you will find yourself amid the hopelessness of 1941 as the children of Yahweh suffered unspeakable crimes in Germany and Poland. Where do we draw the line of historic condemnation? Should the German Church stop with Joseph Ratzinger in 1981?

The condemnation of Pope Benedict called for by some media and German officials today should be seen through the lens of history. It is a part of our hope as Catholics and as human beings that neither Pope Benedict nor the German people would act today as they did — or allowed to be done — forty or eighty years ago. The real target of such pointless inquiry and blame was not Pope Benedict, but rather hope itself.

I think we have to be clear in our response which should include something about the splinters in our eyes and the planks in the eyes of those pointing misplaced fingers of blame. Perhaps the moral authority that chastises Pope Benedict today in Germany doth protesteth too much. A new book by historian Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 marshals a plethora of facts and critical skills of historical writing to portray the postwar “country’s stubborn inclination toward willful delusion.”

Thank you for indulging my brief tirade. Catholic League President Bill Donohue also came to the defense of Pope Benedict by shedding some light of historical context on the matter.

Hope Is Its Own Fulfillment

But back to Father Maximilian Kolbe. On the day of Pornchai’s Baptism, I responded to his question. I told him, “YOU are Maximilian’s happy ending!” Eighty-one years after his martyrdom at Auschwitz, the world honors him while the names of those who destroyed him have simply faded into oblivion. No one honors them. No one remembers them. God remembers. Their footprint on the Earth left only sorrow.

St. Maximilian Kolbe is the reason why I was compelled to set aside my own quest for freedom — which seemed utterly hopeless the last time I looked — in order to do what Maximilian did: to save another.

In all the anguish of the last two years as deliverance and freedom slowly came to Pornchai Moontri, the clouds of the past that overshadowed him began to lift. My prayer had been constant, and of a consistently singular nature: “I ask for freedom for Pornchai; I ask for nothing for myself.”

I am no saint, but that is what St. Maximilian did, and it seemed to be my only path. But since then that 2013 quote atop this post from The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz has once again become my reality. As you know if you have been reading these pages in recent weeks, a frenzy of action and high anxiety has surrounded the recent release of the New Hampshire ‘Laurie List,’ known more formally as the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. If you somehow missed the earthquake that struck from Beyond These Stone Walls in January, I wrote about it in Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell. 

I am most grateful to readers for making the extra effort to share that post. It was emailed by Dr. Bill Donohue to the entire membership of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It indeed came as a bombshell to me and to many. Just as the frenzy began to subside, Ryan MacDonald stirred it up again in his brilliant analysis with a very pointed title: “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

I am not entirely sure that “destroys” is the right term to use, but I understand where he is coming from. To survive twenty-eight years of wrongful imprisonment means relegating a lot of one’s sense of self to the ash heap of someone else’s oppression. Many of those who spend decades in prison for crimes they did not commit lose their minds. Many also lose their faith, and along with it, all hope.

I have to remind myself multiple times a day that nothing is a sure thing anymore — neither prison nor freedom. I keep asking myself how much I dare to trust hope again. To quote the late Baseball Hall of Famer, Yogi Berra, this all feels “like deja vu all over again.”

Deja vu is a French term which literally means “to have seen before.” It is the strange sensation of having been somewhere before, or having previously experienced a current situation even though you know you have not. It is a phenomenon of neuropsychology that I have experienced all my life. About 15 percent of the population has that experience on occasion.

A possible explanation of deja vu is that aspects of the current situation act as retrieval cues in the psyche that unconsciously evoke an earlier experience long since receded from conscious memory, but resulting in an eerie sense of the familiar. It feels more strange than troublesome. I have a lifelong condition called Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) which makes me prone to the experience of deja vu, but no one knows exactly why.

When Disappointments of the Past Haunt the Present

This time, my deja vu is connected to real events of the past, and the origin of my caution about current hope is found there. If you have read an important post of mine entitled “Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester,” then you may recall this story. In 2003 and 2004, the New Hampshire Attorney General conducted an intense one-sided investigation of my diocese, the Diocese of Manchester. When it was over, the former Bishop of Manchester signed a blanket release disposing of the privacy rights of priests of his diocese.

In 2021, when I wrote the above post, New Hampshire Judge Richard B. McNamara ruled that the 2003 public release of one-sided documents should have been barred under New Hampshire law because it was an abuse of the grand jury system and it denied basic rights of due process to those involved.

At the time this all happened in 2003, a Tennessee lawyer and law firm cited in a press statement that what happened in this diocese was unconstitutional. I contacted the lawyer who subsequently took a strong interest in my own case. He flew to New Hampshire twice to visit me in prison. I sent him a vast amount of documentation which he found most compelling. After many months of cultivated hope, he sent me a letter indicating that he would soon send a Memorandum of Understanding that I was to sign laying out the parameters under which he would represent me pro bono because I have not had an income for decades.

I waited. I waited a long time, but the Memorandum never came. Without explanation or communication of any kind, the lawyer and the hope he brought simply faded away. Letter after letter remained unanswered. It was inexplicable. It was at this same time that Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal published a two-part exposé, A Priest’s Story, on the perversion of justice that became apparent in their independent review of this matter. Those articles were actually published a few years after they were first planned. This was because the reams of supporting documents requested and collected by the newspaper were destroyed in the collateral damage of the terrorist attacks in New York of September 11, 2001.

Then in 2012, new lawyers filed an extensive case for Habeas Corpus review of my trial and imprisonment. It is still available at the National Center for Reason and Justice which mercifully still advocates for justice for me. However that effort failed when both State and Federal judges declined to allow any hearing that would give new witnesses a chance to testify under oath.

Now, in 2022 in light of this new ray of hope, some of the people involved in Beyond These Stone Walls have expressed frustration with my caution and apparent pessimism. I have not been as enthused as they have been over the hope arising from the current situation. Hope for me has been like investing in the stock market. Having lost everything twice, I am hesitant to wade too far into the waters of hope again.

I know only too well, however, that hope at times such as these is like that which both Pornchai Moontri and I once found in our Patron Saint. I wrote about it in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

So in spite of myself, I am now aboard this new train of hope and must go where it takes me. That, for now, is the best that I can do. My prayer has not changed. I ask for nothing for myself, but I will take whatever comes.

I thank you, as I have in the past, for your support and prayers and for being here with me again at this turning of the tide. I will keep you posted, but it won’t be quick. Real hope never is.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please visit our newest addition to the BTSW menu: The Wall Street Journal. You may also wish to visit these relevant posts cited herein:

Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance