“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
Oprah, Geraldo, and a Psycho-Therapist: A Perfect Storm
Popular 1980s daytime television hosts like Oprah, Geraldo and others injected repressed memory into pop psychology bringing unjust harm to a multitude of innocents.
Popular 1980s daytime television hosts like Oprah, Geraldo and others injected repressed memory into pop psychology bringing unjust harm to a multitude of innocents.
December 3, 2025 by Fr. Gordon MacRae and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation
Just as I was preparing to type this post, an alert reader informed me that my name is mentioned in a brief but brilliant article by William A. Donohue, PhD, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The article, “What Happens When Truth Doesn’t Matter” appears in the November 2025 issue of the Catholic League Journal Catalyst. It tells a fascinating but disturbing story about a wealthy woman who had developed a best-selling memoir recounting her newly emerged memories of being raped by a middle school teacher 37 years earlier when she was 12. The story emerged with the help of a psychotherapist and the influence of a psychedelic drug called MDMA. The story propelled her memoir, promoted by Oprah Winfrey and other daytime TV luminaries. But it destroyed the life and career of the now elderly teacher, who had a spotless record and who vehemently denies the claims for which there is no other evidence beyond the memoir itself.
One well-known advocate of the use of the drug MDMA in therapy has gone on record to state that “whether or not repressed memories actually happened — from a therapeutic perspective — does not matter. People develop stories that help them make sense of their life … whether it is true or not, it has value because the emotion is real.” So is the irreparable harm done to an innocent man.
One of our readers sent this story to me because of a curious incident during my 1994 trial. As I sat before Judge Arthur Brennan, twelve jurors and a gaggle of prosecutors and news media in Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire, the Court was listening intently to some wild testimony from 27-year-old Thomas Grover. He was describing how, a dozen years earlier at age 15, he came to me for five counseling sessions for his drug addiction while claiming to have been forcibly raped at the end of each session. When asked the obvious question of why, after that first horrific encounter he returned again and again, he stated simply, “I don’t know how I got there. I repressed it.”
With pre-trial coaching from Detective James F. McLaughlin and psychotherapist Pauline Goupil, MA (now Pauline Goupil Vachon) — to whom Grover was referred by Robert Upton, his contingency lawyer — the details of a series of fictitious sexual assaults emerged from a dozen years earlier in the summer months of 1983. In earlier interviews between Grover and McLaughlin, the assaults were alleged to have occured in 1978 when Grover was 11, and then changed to 1980 when Grover was 13. Police reports indicate that Detective McLaughlin gave him a copy of my résumé “to help him with his dates.” The allegations were then updated to 1983, one year after my ordination to the Catholic priesthood, but the trial came twelve years later.
In the media-fueled background leading up to that trial was a lot of dishonest hype and consternation for which my Bishop and the Diocese of Manchester felt obliged to respond. Months before the trial began my Bishop issued a press release with the following pre-trial statement:
“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”
The die was cast. The verdict came first, and then the trial. From my perspective, this was never a story of so-called repressed and recovered memory, but rather a massive con perpetrated by a professional con man latching on to the rhetoric of the day for a quick-and-easy monetary settlement. He was given $200,000 by the Diocese of Manchester.
Alarmed at some point that Thomas Grover failed to show up for Ms. Goupil’s pre-trial coaching sessions, she sent him a letter which found its way into my trial, but not for the eyes and ears of the jury: “I have news,” Ms. Goupil wrote to Thomas Grover. “Jim” [Detective James F. McLaughlin] “told me that MacRae is being offered a plea deal his lawyers will want him to take so there likely won’t be a trial. We can just move on with the settlement.”
Unaware of that letter, and of the existence of Pauline Goupil and her pre-trial coaching of Grover, I was informed by my attorney that Prosecutor Bruce Elliott Reynolds presented a pre-trial deal to serve no more than one to three years in prison — later reduced to one to two — if I plead guilty. Because the alleged crimes never took place, I simply could not fathom doing this. I was repeatedly told, even by my own lawyer, that innocent defendants often have to take such deals to control a sentence if convicted. My lawyer reminded me that under New Hampshire law, no evidence beyond the accusation itself is required for a guilty verdict.
I was told that it all comes down to the credibility of a witness over the credibility of a defendant. Then I was reminded that I am a Catholic priest accused amid a barrage of accusations brought against other Catholic priests in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, all awaiting a lucrative payday. As our title suggests, it was a perfect storm.
Drug-Induced Courtroom Drama
There were some moments of high drama in this trial. A woman seated in the courtroom gallery with line of site to the witness stand was observed to influence Thomas Grover’s testimony. During cross examination from my attorney, Grover protested to Judge Arthur Brennan that he cannot answer the attorney’s questions if he insists on standing near the defendant. So the judge instructed my lawyer to walk to the other side of the court to ask his questions. The question at hand was, “Who did you go to first with your claims, the police or a lawyer?” Instead of answering, Thomas Grover began to cry.
During a break in the trial, two persons who were present approached my attorney to report what they had just observed. The real issue was that while standing next to the defense table to pose his questions, my attorney was blocking the line of sight between Grover and that woman. The two court observers also reported to my attorney that the woman in question was giving Grover hand signals to influence and direct his testimony. This information was then reported to Judge Arthur Brennan, who apparently ignored it. Many years later one of these observers, Leo Demers, a PBS broadcasting official, wrote a letter to Judge Brennan, who again did not address the specific allegation:
“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 questioning by the defense attorney, Thomas Grover seemed to feel trapped a few times. On some of those ocassions, we witnessed Pauline Goupil make a distinct sad expression with a downturned mouth and gesturing with her finger from the corner of her eye down her cheek at which point Mr. Grover would begin to cry on the stand. I have been troubled about this for all these years. I know what I saw, and what I saw was a clear attempt to dupe the Court and the jury.”
In his brief response, retired Judge Brennan did not address any of the specific allegation of Leo Demers. Despite a pre-trial court order to turn over to the defense all records of Grover’s psychotherapy and counseling, the above incident was the first time my defense learned of therapist Pauline Goupil and her pre-trial coaching of Thomas Grover.
In a post-trial statement of Trina Ghedoni, who was Thomas Grover’s wife at the time of this trial, she reported that all information before and during trial passed through Pauline Goupil to Detective McLaughlin. Trina Ghedoni also reported that Pauline Goupil arranged for Mr. Grover to be drugged during the trial.
In “Repressed Memory Therapy: Lies of the Mind,” a foundational 1993 article in Time Magazine, author Leon Jaroff attributed the sensational emergence of repressed memory not to expert opinion, but to trends in popular culture “featured prominently on Geraldo, Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael and other daytime TV talk shows.” The notion of repressed and recovered memory has never appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Lies of the Mind or a Pathological Liar?
The famous Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, once penned an amazing account of false memory from his childhood. From early childhood on into adolescence, Piaget had a firm memory of an incident involving his nurse with himself as the potential victim of a kidnapping attempt. He had a clear memory of his nanny pushing him in a carriage when a man came up and tried to take him. He remembered in vivid detail the location of the event, the villain, the struggle, and the outcome. He recalled deep scratches on his nanny’s arms as she boldly fended off the attacker, and he remembered the police officer who came to their rescue.
However, when Piaget was 15 years old, his nanny decided to atone for her own past offenses. She publically admitted that she made up the entire kidnapping story including scratching her own arms to make it look as though an attacker had done it. Piaget was shocked to learn at age 15 that this story that haunted his early childhood, a story for which he had formed and retained vivid memories, never actually took place. In adulthood, Piaget concluded that his memories of the event arose and took shape solely from the nanny’s retelling of the false story in his childhood. Eventually the scene became rooted in Piaget’s memory as an actual event.
Another troubling story of memory reconstruction as evidence was reported by The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz in her myth-shattering book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times. The terror this time was inflicted in Boston courts upon 61-year-old grandparents, Ray and Shirley Souza. No one could tell this with more succinctly existential terror than Dorothy Rabinowitz:
“Ray and Shirley Souza’s 24-year-old daughter had a dream one night. In the dream, her parents raped her. It was now the 1990s, the era of the repressed memory syndrome. Ray and Shirley’s grandchildren were taken to see therapists and interrogated. In court they testified that their grandparents tied them in a cage in the basement and raped them with elbows and feet and a big machine. Judge [Elizabeth] Dolan ruled [with no further evidence] that the children’s stories were credible and sentenced the Souza’s to a term of fifteen years in prison.”
— No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 90
Thus began the era of “Believe the Children” and the shame shrouded upon anyone who dared question a child’s account of abuse — even if the account emerged without evidence in the office of an agenda-driven therapist. It was also the era in which the case against me emerged.
And it was the era that gave birth to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and its efforts to breathe sanity and reason into what can only be described as the emotional takeover of psychology and the justice system. The FMSF was established in 1992 and continued until 2019 to amass a database of false-memory claims and expertise in psychology and the legal system that refuted them. In 2008 the False Memory Syndrome Foundation published the following report on my 1994 trial and conviction:
From the quarterly journal of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — Fall 2008, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 8
FATHER MACRAE
A Reminder That There Are Still Many People in Prison Based Only on Accusations of Recovered Memories
Although there is no doubt of the Catholic Church’s irresponsible handling of thousands of reports of clergy abuse, there are also a growing number of cases in which priests appear to have been wrongly convicted. The case of Rev. Gordon MacRae, which was detailed by Dorothy Rabinowitz in 2005 in The Wall Street Journal, appears to be one of them.
In May 1993, Rev. Gordon MacRae was arrested for sexually assaulting three New Hampshire boys [all three came forward as adults at the same time, with the same claim of repressed memory, but only the claims of Thomas Grover went to trial], when he had been a priest there a decade earlier. The early 1990s were heydays for accusations of sexual abuse based on new-found memories and just about everything that could go wrong for the defense did go wrong.
Among the problems was a letter from Florida informing local police that MacRae was a suspect in a murder/sex crime there. This was the final bit of tinder for a hyper-zealous detective who then repeatedly interviewed many young people who knew MacRae and even attempted a series of “stings.” By the time that the Florida case was declared bogus, there was no stopping the effort to convict MacRae.
Prosecutors offered various plea arrangements to MacRae, who is serving a life term, but he refused them all, declaring his innocence. Indeed, Fr. MacRae would have been released after one to three years if he had taken a plea or would have been released on parole if he confessed. The “Catch-22” of prison is that those who do not admit guilt will not receive parole.
At the criminal trial, witness Thomas Grover’s testimony verged on the bizarre. He had accused MacRae of abusing him during counseling sessions. When asked why he continued to go to the sessions, Grover explained that he had ‘out of body’ experiences and completely forgot between sessions that he had ever been sodomized.
Even the judge’s rulings appeared biased. According to Rabinowitz:
“Throughout his testimony, [accuser] Thomas Grover repeatedly railed at the priest for forcing him to endure the torments of a trial. He would not have much to fear, in the end, in these proceedings, whose presiding judge, Arthur D. Brennan, refused to allow into evidence Thomas Grover’s long juvenile history of theft, assault, forgery and drug offenses. In New Hampshire, where juries need only find the accuser credible in sex abuse cases, with no proofs required, this was no insignificant restriction. The judge also took it upon himself to instruct jurors to “disregard inconsistencies in Mr. Grover’s testimony,” and said that they should not think him dishonest because of his failure to answer questions. The jury had much to disregard.”
To read more about this case: Beyond These Stone Walls/About
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Editor’s Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this troubling story, which should have had equal time in the influential daytime talk shows that contributed to it. You may also wish to read and share the following published statements of persons with first-hand knowledge of this case who have never been permitted by any New Hampshire judge to offer their testimony under oath.
Statement of Leo Demers, PBS Television executive
Statement of Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Wall Street Journal
Statement of Debra Collett, Thomas Grover’s former therapist
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.”
South Park’s Bill Donohue Disgrace Was This Convert’s Amazing Grace
If ever there is an award for a Catholic who heroically goes above and beyond for others, Pornchai Moontri’s Nominee would be Catholic League President Bill Donohue.
If ever there is an award for a Catholic who heroically goes above and beyond for others, Pornchai Moontri’s Nominee would be Catholic League President Bill Donohue.
April 30, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri
Earlier in April 2025, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York City sent out the following Media Alert to all Catholic League members:
“April 10, 2025
South Park's "Fantastic Easter Special," featuring the animated character of Bill Donohue, will air Friday morning, April 11, on Comedy Central at 4:00 a.m. ET. It can also be streamed on HBO's streaming service for those who have a subscription.”
I had the Alert sent by email to our friend Max Moontri in Pak Chong, Thailand. For those who are newer readers to this blog, Pornchai Max Moontri was my roommate for almost 16 years. His story, amazing in its own righ, was told in these pages just a week ago on Relevant Radio in an interview with The Drew Mariani Show.
Upon receipt of Bill Donohue’s Media Alert about South Park, Max wrote to me immediately to tell me that the date of the Catholic League Media Alert was also the anniversary of Max being received into the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. It is difficult to hear this entire story and still cling to any doubt about the truth and power of Divine Mercy. Pornchai Max filled in a lot of blanks so I will now turn this story over to him.
“I was a teenager when I went to prison [in 1992]. Over the next 13 years, I was sent to solitary confinement over and over, for up to three-and-a-half years at a time, because I was so hostile. The longer I was there each time, the more inhuman I felt and became. Living for years on end in solitary confinement joined with the guilt I felt for the life I took during a struggle when I was 18 years old.
“So I just gave up on myself as a human being. I sank to the very bottom of the prison I was in, and stayed there. Then, in the spring of 2005, after almost fourteen years in and out of solitary confinement in Maine’s Supermax Prison, I was told that I was to be shipped to another prison in another state. I sat for months alone in my cell wondering about whatever hell was coming next. Then one day, guards in riot gear came and chained me up….”
[Editor: You can see the solitary confinement unit that held Pornchai in PBS FRONTLINE “Solitary Nation.” If you have not seen this, you cannot begin to know what Pornchai has been through.]
While I was writing the above, I had already lived in a prison cell with Father Gordon MacRae (“Father G”) for almost five years. I shudder when I think of my life before then. It is hard to put together this series of events that seem to be disconnected from each other. It only seems that way. Going from years in brutal solitary confinement to life in a cell with a Catholic priest is something I never imagined.
When I look back, and see all the small steps in which our Blessed Mother inserted herself into my life leading me to Jesus, it seems miraculous to me. If someone else told me this story twenty years ago, I would not believe it. But there is a lot more to my story.
Most people I knew in my earlier prison were afraid of me. Most expected me to erupt in violence any minute. I liked having that reputation then. I could not see it at the time, but it protected me from ever again feeling the terror I felt from the time I was taken from Thailand at age 11 to the time I ended up a homeless teenager living alone on the streets of Bangor, Maine at age 14.
A Black Hole from Which No Light Could Escape
What happened in those three years upon my arrival in America was like a black hole from which no light could escape without Divine assistance. I kept it bottled up within me for many years in a seething rage of trauma and hurt. It became my prison within a prison. But it served a purpose. It kept everyone else away, everyone except Father G.
I have read a little about exorcism since I became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. I understand it to be the spiritual casting out of evil. My exorcism at the hands of Jesus through His priest took a long time. It had to begin with my long, slow awakening to the fact that the evil within me was not planted there by me and it was not mine to keep. It was placed in my heart and soul by someone else.
On September 12, 2018, the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary, Richard Alan Bailey, the man who violently raped and tortured me more than forty times when I was taken to America, was brought to justice. It was Father G and Beyond These Stone Walls that ultimately accomplished this. Father G wrote some articles about what happened to me. They circled the globe and eventually they found the right persons who would be instrumental in my redemption. One of those persons was Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights of which I am now a member.
Backing up a little, in Fall, 2005, I was shackled, chained, thrown into a prison van, and driven from solitary confinement in Maine to Concord, New Hampshire. I was handled like a dangerous animal, and thrown into a familiar place: another stint in solitary confinement. But it was brief. It was also in 2005 that The Wall Street Journal wrote its first articles about the injustices that happened to Father G. Not long after I first met him by “chance” one day, I read those articles.
Later in 2006, Father G and I landed in the same place. Our cells were two doors apart. I remember the first time I walked into his cell. I saw a photo on a card attached to a battered mirror on the cell wall, and the man on the card looked sort of like Father G. So I said, “Is this you?” This turned out to be the most important question of my life. Father G then told me about St. Maximilian Kolbe, about what he did in prison at Auschwitz, and about how this card came to be on his mirror. Father G wrote this story in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”
Then one day came dreaded news. A U.S. Immigration Court ruled that I would be deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence. I never wanted to leave Thailand as a child. I was forcibly brought to America, and all I really knew in America was its prisons. In the meantime, my Mother — my only connection to Thailand — was murdered on the Island of Guam after she was brought there by Richard Alan Bailey. Her death remains classified there as a “cold case unsolved homicide.” It is not “unsolved” in the minds of either me or Father G.
When news of my eventual deportation came, I sank into deep depression. I knew that I had no future in Thailand. I had no future anywhere. Father G helped me appeal the deportation order, but like most such appeals, it was denied. So I just gave up again, and settled in my mind on my own “Plan B,” my eventual self-destruction. Father G confronted this setback with his own optimism that provided no hope or comfort at all. He said, “We are just going to have to build a bridge from here to Thailand.”
Who could take him seriously? I sure didn’t. We were in a prison cell thousands of miles away! All the things Father G tried to instill in me about hope and trust and surrender just felt empty again. But I had nothing else to hang onto. No hope at all. So I hung onto his.
Catholic League President Bill Donohue [l] and Pornchai Moontri at age 12 [r] just as he arrived in America and before the troubling events in this story took place.
Pornchai’s Story
Soon after this rejection from the Immigration Court, Father G came into our cell one day and told me that we have to get a summary of my life story on paper… So we talked for a long time. He asked me lots of questions and took notes. Then he helped me put it together in a four-page document. I could not see the point of it. I tried to type it on his typewriter, but my heart was not in it at all. Father G became impatient with my one-word-per-minute typing speed. So Father G took over and he typed it while I waited. He was not patient with my typing speed, but he was patient with me and my attitude of hopelessness and defeat.
After the story was typed, Father G said that he wanted my permission to send the short life story we typed to a few contacts in the outside world. He said that these were all people who had connections, and that he believed one of them would find connections for me in Thailand.
I thought this was hopeless, of course. No one is going to be interested in me. But I hate arguing so I just told him to go ahead. I believed it would come to nothing.
Dr Bill Donohue on South Park
I wrote that story with Father G’s help in 2007. When Father G said he wanted to send it out to others, I answered with a sarcastic “Whatever!” It was that word for which every parent of every adolescent wants to smack him for saying it. Father G sent my story to several people and he told me that it will come to good. Then I said it again, “Whatever!”
In coming weeks — to my shock and awe — I started receiving letters of support and encouragement. One was from Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok, Thailand. I nearly fell over when I saw the envelope with his return address and Thai stamps. Another came from Honorable Mary Ann Glendon, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. Another was from Father Richard John Neuhaus, Editor of First Things magazine. They encouraged me to cling to hope even when I saw none. And then finally one came from Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Dr. Donohue shocked me. He asked my permission for the Catholic League to publish my story.
At first, I was excited. Then the inevitable gloom within me crept back in. I did not dare to hope. Hope is not for the beaten down. It is just too painful. I told Father G I did not want others to know that I was victimized in America. I also was consumed with shame. I told Father G that I did not want to publish the story. But this gets really strange from here on.
I used to sometimes come across a horrible cartoon called South Park on the Comedy Central TV channel. South Park spared no one. They would often take famous people and create a cartoon satire to ridicule them. On April 5, 2007, I was watching an episode of South Park. It was their Easter Special. Suddenly, there on my screen was a cartoon version of Dr. Bill Donohue.
I stuck my head down from my top bunk and told Father G to turn it on. The cartoon was very disrespectful, but my first reaction was to shout, “WOW! DR DONOHUE IS REALLY FAMOUS!”
I thought he must be really good because only good people are ridiculed on South Park. Dr. Donohue was ridiculed along with Jesus and Pope Benedict in the same episode. At one point, Jesus punched Dr. Donohue. I was horrified! But this is also what changed my mind. I thought that if Dr. Donohue is brave enough to endure this ridicule, I can be too. So I asked Father G to help me write to Dr. Donohue with permission for the Catholic League to publish my story. It was because of South Park!
Two years later, in 2009, Beyond These Stone Walls began our long adventure in what Father G calls “The Great Tapestry of God.” He told me that in this life, we live only in the back of the tapestry, unable to see what all our tangled threads are producing.
Over the next decade, we together confronted evil. It was not all at once. It was in slow steps because at points along the way whenever I felt overwhelmed, I would retreat and then give up and quit. But Father G never quit. He stayed the course, patiently waiting for a better day to pull me back onto what he called “our road to Emmaus.” And staying the course meant writing about me. What he wrote started to become noticed.
Strange things began to happen. Just weeks after I was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, I read that South Park editors cancelled an episode that ridiculed Mohammed after freely ridiculing Jesus, Pope Benedict and Dr. Bill Donohue. I never watched South Park again.
But there are stranger things still. Because of what was being written about me, Clare and Malcolm Farr — husband and wife attorneys in Southwest Australia — offered to assist me pro bono. They are today among my dearest friends, but we have never actually even met in person. They performed miracles with contacts in Thailand, with an attempt to reopen the case of the murder of my Mother in Guam, and with helping Father G to bring my abuser to justice.
Then Father G received a letter from a group called Divine Mercy Thailand. The letter revealed that Marian Father Seraphim Michalenko had been in Thailand and he carried with him a copy of “Pornchai’s Story,” which he read from the Catholic League’s site to the Divine Mercy Thailand group. I learned only later from Father G that Father Seraphim Michalenko was the Vatican’s vicepostulator for the cause of sainthood of Maria Faustina Kowalska. It was Father Seraphim who smuggled Saint Faustina’s diary out of Communist Poland and assisted in its English translation. Father G wrote about this when Father Seraphim came to this prison to interview both of us. Father G’s post was “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare.”
Father Seraphim’s interest, triggered by Dr. Bill Donohue, then inspired Felix Carroll, who was then Editor of Marian Helper magazine, to contact Father G. Felix Carroll said that he posted my story from the Catholic League’s site and “it lit up our website like never before.” Felix asked that we allow him to include a chapter about me in his book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.
The miracles continued. I was visited in prison by a representative of the Royal Thai Consulate in New York who offered help in restoring my Thai citizenship and preparing me for repatriation. Then one day I was called to the prison library. The library had received a donated set of Thai language CDs which were set up on a computer for me to study. Then Divine Mercy Thailand wrote again and offered me a home. The bridge to Thailand Father G had once promised was built and I was utterly amazed. Then, in 2020, just before the pandemic took hold, Father G filed a petition on my behalf revealing all that had happened that never made its way into my trial in 1992. I was to be set free within the coming months.
I will never say “Whatever!” to Father G again. He and Bill Donohue, and even the disgraceful South Park, became the keys to the locks that held me bound. If there is ever a book called Divine Mercy Miracles, I expect to find this story in it. I am free!
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Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your Dearly Beloved Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: If you are not a member of the Catholic League, please consider lending your voice to this nation’s largest endeavor in protection of Religious Liberty: Catholic League Membership Subscription. Your membership fee also includes a one-year subscription to the Catholic League Journal Catalyst.
We also recommend these related posts:
Pornchai’s Story: The Catholic League Conversion Story for 2008
Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare
A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free
The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner
Thailand’s Once-Lost Son Was Flag Bearer for the Asian Apostolic Congress
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.”
Vatican Bans Publishing Lists of ‘Credibly’ Accused Priests
The Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts, two other Vatican Dicasteries, and Pope Francis himself have banned publishing lists of priests ‘credibly’ accused.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts, two other Vatican Dicasteries, and Pope Francis himself have banned publishing lists of priests ‘credibly’ accused.
April 2, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae and William A. Donohue, PhD
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This post may not move hearts, but it should move minds and consciences. It is of utmost importance to me, to the priesthood and to the whole Church. So we should not be silent in the face of injustice. So please share this post.
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On February 22, 2025, the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, the Vatican office responsible for issuing authoritative legal interpretations and directives for the universal Church, published online a long awaited guidance to bishops impacting the due process rights of “credibly accused” Catholic priests.
The announcement underscores the Dicastery’s decision that bishops considering publication of lists of priests deemed credibly accused of sexual abuse are prohibited under Canon Law from doing so. This guidance is for a multitude of reasons connected to long established civil and canonical rights of due process. I will describe below some examples of how these rights have been impacted.
From the point of view of official Church positions, the problem is, and has always been, the bishops’ collective interpretation and use of the term “credible” in their response to the crisis. It is a standard applied nowhere else in the world of civil or criminal jurisprudence. It means only that a claim of abuse cannot be immediately dismissed on its face. If a claimant alleges abuse in a specific community 30 or 40 years ago, for example, and the named priest had once been assigned there, the claim is “credible” unless and until it is disproven.
There is no court in America that admits such a standard of evidence but it is routinely applied now to accused Catholic priests. Courts have long recognized that older memories are highly malleable, and misidentification of the accused is a frequent risk.
Before delving further into this, I want to present a reaction to the Vatican news from William A. Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who has consistently defended the due process rights of priests.
From Catholic League President Bill Donohue
Vatican Finally Does Right by Accused Priests
Six years after Pope Francis rejected the practice of publishing the names of accused priests, the Vatican has finally codified his plea. Henceforth, dioceses are discouraged from publishing such a list. Among the reasons cited was the inability of deceased accused priests to defend themselves.
This should never have been an issue in the first place. But in the panic that ensued following the 2002 series in The Boston Globe detailing clergy sexual abuse, the bishops convened in Dallas in 2004 to adopt a charter that listed comprehensive reforms, some of which substantially weakened the rights of the accused.
At the time, I was highly critical of the way some bishops allowed a gay subculture to flourish, one that resulted in a massive cover-up of the sexual abuse of minors (homosexual priests — not pedophiles — were responsible for 8 in 10 cases of abuse). But I also said of the Dallas reforms, “There is a problem regarding the rights of the accused. It appears that the charter may short-circuit some due process rights.”
One of the problems was the desire to publish the names of accused priests. Egging the bishops on was Judge Anne Burke, the first person to head the National Review Board commissioned by the bishops to deal with the problem.
She made it clear that priests — and only priests — should be denied their constitutionally prescribed right to due process. “We understand that it is a violation of the priest’s due process rights — you’re innocent until proven guilty — but we’re talking about the most vulnerable people in our society and those are children,” she said. Such thinking allowed the bishops to make public the names of accused priests.
In an interview I had in my office with a female reporter from CNN, she became quite critical of the Church for not posting the names of accused priests on its diocesan websites. I picked up the phone and, holding it in my hand, asked her for the name and phone number of her boss. When she asked why, I said I was going to accuse her of sexual harassment. I added that I wanted to see if CNN would post her name on its website. She said, “I get it.” I put the phone down. (For more on this see my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse).
No organization in the United States, religious or secular, publishes the names of accused employees. That there should be an exception for priests is obscene.
The rights of accused priests need to be safeguarded, and the penalties for those found guilty need to be severe. The Church failed on the latter, which is why the scandal took place, and it failed on the former, which is why Pope Francis, and now the entire Church, had to act.
The sexual abuse of minors in the Church in America has long been checked — almost all the cases in the media are about old cases, and most of the bad guys are dead or out of ministry. Now that the rights of the accused have been given a much needed shot in the arm, we can say with confidence that the problem has been ameliorated.
Now back to Father MacRae............
But My Diocese Employs “Trauma-Informed” Consultants
On July 31, 2019, Bishop Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire proactively published a list of the names and assignment histories of 73 priests in his diocese who had been “credibly” accused of sexual abuse of minors and removed from ministry. Most of the claims deemed “credible” are decades old. The majority of the priests on Bishop Libasci’s list are long deceased. In most cases, the sole condition making the claims “credible” was the fact that money — lots of it — changed hands.
Bishop Libasci’s stated goal for publishing his list was “transparency.” In 2024, long after Pope Francis discouraged bishops from doing so, Bishop Libasci republished the list with the names of additional accused but deceased priests.
Weeks after Bishop Libasci’s original list was publicized in 2019, Ryan A. MacDonald penned and published a contentious objection: “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.” It was contentious because it represented well my disagreement with this action of the bishop of my diocese, something I otherwise hoped to avoid. Plaintiff attorneys and activist groups like SNAP pressured bishops to publish such lists for the purpose of “assuring victims they are not alone and that they are heard.”
The real reason for pushing for published lists, however, was to provide a forum and online database for false “copycat” claims, a lucrative business for contingency lawyers and claimants alike with little or no court oversight. In May 2024, Ryan A. MacDonald published a report on how and why this happens in “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.” Here is an excerpt from an official statement of my Diocese:
“The Diocese of Manchester provides financial assistance to those who have been harmed, regardless of when abuse occurred, through a process utilizing independent trauma-informed consultants.”
A basic problem with handling the matter of due process for the accused and outcomes for the Diocese by abdicating judgment to “trauma-informed consultants” is that the term is widely noted and critiqued by professionals as highly biased. It has a documented negative impact on judicial fairness and due process of law in claims of sexual abuse and assault.
The Center for Prosecutor Integrity (CPI ) is an organization that seeks to strengthen prosecutorial ethics, promote due process, and end wrongful convictions. Victim-centered investigations, also known in the sex abuse contingency lawyer industry as “trauma-informed,” presume the guilt of all accused and lead to wrongful convictions.
According to the Center’s website, “The most destructive types of victim-centered investigations are known as “Start by Believing,” and “Trauma-Informed.” The Center exhibits a professional bibliography documenting the “junk science” behind such investigations creating an epidemic of false witness and police and prosecutorial misconduct. Given the well-founded caution about false claims and financial scammers, it was alarming to read the following in a recent news article, “Diocese of Manchester Settles Sexual Abuse Claims from the 1970s.” Here’s an excerpt:
“No lawsuit was filed because the alleged abuse happened outside the statute of limitations, but the attorney representing the ‘John Doe’ who was involved said it’s important for survivors to come forward as part of the healing process, … thus announcing a six-figure settlement outside the Diocese of Manchester office.”
Has it never dawned on anyone in Church leadership that there are those in our midst who would find a “six-figure settlement” an enticement for false accusations? This is especially so when there is no court oversight for such claims. The process has been made very simple. A lawyer writes a letter and a bishop writes a check.
In addition to these trauma-informed consultants retained by the Diocese of Manchester and other dioceses,”it seems that civil lawyers and risk managers, not bishops, are often running the show.” So wrote prominent canon lawyer, Michael Mazza, JD, JCD, in a recent First Things article (February 24, 2025): “Who’s Really Calling the Shots at U.S. Diocesan Chanceries?” Mazza concludes:
“ln the wake of the clerical abuse crisis, church leaders may have surrendered too much authority to risk managers focused on eliminating every threat. Seasoned entrepreneurs understand that the moment lawyers run the show, adopting a zero-risk strategy as the business model, the company grinds to a halt. While the surest way for a car company to avoid getting sued is to stop making cars, that strategy is not an option for an institution that has received a divine call to preach the Gospel to all nations. Bishops must recognize this truth and seize the helm with the resolve their office demands.”
The Perspective of a Not-So-Credibly Convicted Priest
My name was on Bishop Libasci’s published list under the unique category, “convicted,” but that was not at all my point of contention with his list. Unlike most of the priests named on that ongoing list, I at least had public charges in a public forum — a 1994 criminal trial — no matter how jaded and unjust it was. The details of those charges and that trial have emerged over time and are also now in public view. They have raised awareness about the absence of truth and the aura of injustice in the forum in which I was condemned and sentenced.
As Ryan A. MacDonald’s article, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List” points out, Bishop Libasci’s predecessor, the late Bishop John B. McCormack, went on record in an unpublished media interview in the aftermath of my trial stating his informed belief that I was falsely accused, wrongly convicted, and should not be in prison. He insisted, however, that this information should never leave his office. These details were exposed in a 2021 post, “Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded.”
Going back even further in this history of neglected due process, Bishop McCormack’s predecessor, the late Bishop Leo O’Neil, chose not to wait for the outcome of a trial. Before my trial commenced, he published an official diocesan press release declaring that I victimized not only my accusers but the entire Catholic Church. After that, a trial seemed just a formality.
The most visible post-trial analysis of due process in the case, however, was that of Dorothy Rabinowitz, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her courageous exposure of “accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our time.” Her series of articles in The Wall Street Journal culminated in “The Trials of Father MacRae” in 2013, six years before Bishop Libasci published his list.
In a compelling five-minute video interview produced by The Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz saw through all the smoke and mirrors and got to the heart of the matter. It is a brief but bold exposé of unassailable truth that ties the two-decade outbreak of clergy abuse claims to the very unquestioned settlements money promised by my Diocese in its statements above.
I give the last word to “A Video Interview with Dorothy Rabinowitz.”
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Note from Father Gordon Mac Rae: I thank Catholic League President Bill Donohue for his contribution to this post. His outstanding book on this subject is The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse (2021) published by Ignatius Press.
I also thank Michael J. Mazza, JD, JCD for letting us reprint a segment of an article that I highly recommend: Who’s Really Calling the Shots at U.S. Diocesan Chanceries? First Things, February 24, 2025.
During Lent this year I created a list of our Scriptural posts and published them together under the title “From Ashes to Easter.” We shared the list on several Facebook Catholic groups. In response, Facebook dismissed it as “SPAM,” and then froze our account. (Again!) So we cannot share this post on Facebook, but you can. Thank you for doing so.
You may also like these related and eye-opening posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List
To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
After Eight Years in Exile Fr William Graham Is Credibly Innocent
Fr William Graham of the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota was falsely accused and cast out in 2016 after his bishop deemed a nearly 40-year-old claim to be “credible.”
Fr William Graham of the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota was falsely accused and cast out in 2016 after his bishop deemed a nearly 40-year-old claim to be “credible.”
May 1, 2024 by Fr William Graham with an Introduction by Fr Gordon MacRae.
“Now have salvation and power come … for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accused them day and night before God. They have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”
— Revelation 12:10-11
From Fr Gordon MacRae: Some of our readers might have passed over my recent post, “Pop Stars and Priests: Michael Jackson and the Credible Standard.” Much more than the strange story of Michael Jackson, that post was really about the much stranger story of Catholic priests falsely accused. Commenter James Anderson wrote of it, “This article is the best ever on your false conviction.” The matter of falsely accused Catholic priests has received some increased attention of late, but not nearly enough to counter the vast media bias that grew and festered through news of the scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood since the moral panic of 2002.
In my post linked above, I wrote of a development in my diocese, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. A press release from the diocese has indicated that more names of long deceased priests have been added to a published list of the merely accused. The previous standard of “credibly accused” has now evolved to include everyone accused with no apparent investigation whatsoever. We published about the grave injustice posed by this practice in another post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”
Also in recent years, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has published a good deal about the rights of priests and why those rights must be defended within the Church. Another excellent source of commentary built upon justice is The Media Report hosted by writer David F. Pierre, Jr. Back in 2019, he sent a title and link into our Inbox: Two Falsely Accused Priests Fight Back and Win! In the matter of one priest in the Diocese of Duluth, MN, Dave Pierre summarized a development that caught my attention back then:
We are pleased to report that a Minnesota appeals court recently upheld a $13,500 jury award to Rev. William C. Graham after the jury found that an accuser had falsely accused him.
As we reported last year, the accuser was represented by the notorious law firm of Jeff Anderson, and Anderson's sleazy lawyer, Mike Finnegan, lied to the media that there was somehow a "split verdict" in the jury's decision.
But a woman on the jury wrote a letter blasting Finnegan's characterization of the verdict and added that there was "no proof" that any abuse occurred. Good for her.
Hopefully, this is the beginning of a new trend. When folks lie to courts claiming they were abused by priests, the priests should countersue, naming names. Justice demands it.
The slowly evolving matter of justice for Father William Graham finally came to a conclusion just days ago when Father Graham’s removal from ministry was overturned by the Vatican for lack of any credible evidence. Father Graham has been restored as pastor to the very parish from which he was removed unjustly eight years ago, and exiled from any priestly ministry, barred from even identifying himself as a priest. It comes as a great and triumphant irony that Father William Graham is now restored as pastor of Saint Michael the Archangel Parish, a parish named to honor the Patron Saint of Justice. Here is Father Graham’s first homily upon his return sent to me just days ago.
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Father William Graham on the Road to Emmaus
Well, as I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted ... Thank you. I’ve been working on that line for the last 95 months.
The old gospel hymn describes what I see here today: “When all God’s children get together, what a time, what a time, what a time!” And what a wonderful sight this is to me: all of us together again around book and table, thanking God for the gift of Christ, remembering and celebrating that the Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church. Vatican II teaches us that: “the Church has never failed to come together to celebrate the Paschal Mystery: reading those things ‘which were in all the scriptures concerning Him’ (Luke 24:27), celebrating the Eucharist in which ‘the victory and triumph of His death are again made present,’ and at the same time giving thanks ‘to God for His unspeakable gift’ (2 Cor. 9:15) in Christ Jesus, ‘in praise of His glory’ (Eph. 1:12), through the power of the Holy Spirit. To accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations.’
We are much like those disciples who, on the road to Emmaus, met Jesus. He was made known to them as He is made known to us: in the telling of the stories and in the breaking of the bread. Those disciples shared the agony of the passion and death of Jesus. We, too, have suffered as the Body of Christ, broken, but called to new life and renewed hope.
You and I have been through a terrible, traumatizing experience. I was falsely accused and denied both justice and mercy by our local Church. A number of folks have asked why I didn’t just quit and go away. That is not how justice is accomplished; it is not how we seek the Truth, who is Christ, and who will set us free. Doing the right thing is a demanding task. You know that. I have found the path to justice exhausting and worrisome and, let me say, very, very, very expensive. All that we have is our human dignity, and it is our obligation to assert and defend that dignity as we seek the face of God. Pope St. Leo the Great told us of that duty of ours when he said in the fifth century, “Christian: remember your dignity!”
I am deeply sorry that the pursuit of justice was so long and difficult for you here, and for me, and for all who were involved. Those who stood for justice will enjoy what the psalmist promises, that the Lord does wonders for his faithful ones, and hears us when we call upon him. Further, the light of the Lord will shine on us, and he will put gladness into our hearts (Psalm 4).
The Vatican official who made the last determination of my case spoke out on March 25. He is Archbishop Charles Scicluna, adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. He told Vatican Media that “The pope very often repeats this phrase: ‘When one of us suffers, we all suffer.’” Scicluna added, “If there is this attitude of solidarity, if there is the thirst for justice of which Jesus speaks, but also the will to do good, then the law becomes a living instrument, otherwise, like all laws, it could remain a dead letter.”
I am grateful for the Church’s laws and courts. I received no justice, no comfort and no word of mercy from the Diocese of Duluth during my long ordeal, and often told the bishop, and the previous bishop, that Psalm 31 speaks to my pain: “I am like a dead man, forgotten, like a thing thrown away.”
Pope Paul VI told us that if we want peace, we must work for justice. We who seek Christ among us must understand that justice is the first virtue of both Church and civilization. Without justice, we have no future or no hope. I am grateful to the Vatican, my legal team, my family and friends, and many of the members of this parish, and many former members, who insisted that justice be done. We cannot walk away from injustice and hope that the universe will fix it. Our mission is to build the Reign of God among us; we cannot do so if we ignore the demands of justice. Justice is first and obligatory; we are bound to seek justice; we are called to do charity. Jesus Himself tells us in today’s Gospel passage why we pursue justice, no matter the cost. Remember that the two disciples who had encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus were telling the others about their experience. “While they were still speaking about this, [Jesus] stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” They were terrified, thinking He was a ghost. When they recognized Jesus, He ate with them, and said:
“Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer
and rise from the dead on the third day
and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,
would be preached in his name to all the nations,
beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things.”
Christ “claims dominion over all creation,
that He may present to [the] almighty Father,
an eternal and universal kingdom:
a kingdom of truth and life,
a kingdom of holiness and grace,
a kingdom of justice, love, and peace.”
— Preface of Christ the King
We, you and I, are called to be men and women of peace, in imitation of Jesus, with whom we are on the road, and whose Spirit gathers us to Himself. Here at St. Michael’s, our immediate task will be to pray together and listen to each other with the ears of our hearts. After that, we will ask each other, Where do we go from here? We can’t have a plan or an agenda yet, but we will move to healing and peace, reconciliation, cooperation with grace, “Proclaiming the Gospel in Word, Sacrament, and Service” (Parish Mission Statement 2015).
I have heard that some say that this is a time for mourning, or grief or grieving. I do not say that. I say that this is the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it.
May The One who began this good work in us bring it to completion in the day of Our Lord Jesus Christ!
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this landmark post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed
Casting the First Stone: What Did Jesus Write on the Ground?
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
A 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
Please consult our “Contact and Support” Page for new information on how to support this blog and our cause for justice.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
For the Soul of a Nation: In Defense of Religious Liberty
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the present U.S. Supreme Court are all that stand in the way of the gradual annihilation of religious liberty.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the present U.S. Supreme Court are all that stand in the way of the gradual annihilation of religious liberty.
April 19, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Early in 2023, a global Internet tracking service reported that there are more than two billion active websites, 600 million of which are blogs publishing over 2.5 billion posts per year — including this one. Back in 2010 when this blog was in its infancy with a much smaller readership, a site called The Crescat reviewed a variety of blogs it categorized as Catholic blogs.
A moderator divided them into further categories and asked for reader input to sort them out. Somehow, this blog showed up on The Crescat’s radar, but it defied easy description. I wrote about everything. So in the end we were given the dubious distinction of “Best Under-Appreciated Catholic Blog.”
I do not look for recognition in writing, but that may not seem evident when publishing a single weekly post that competes for readers with about 50 million other weekly posts. I also never called this blog a “Catholic blog.” It has no Imprimatur, no Nihil Obstat, and no official recognition from any official Catholic institution, but neither do any other Catholic blogs.
As a writer, I have to earn Catholic “street cred” the hard way. “Street cred” is a term I hear a lot in my present environment. It refers to “street credibility.” In prison it is considered a standard of personal integrity, a sort of consistency of being. Having pulled oneself up from the school of hard knocks translates into a badge of honor for some and a cause for disdain for others. The Catholic Writers Guild invited this blog’s participation while the Catholic Media Association rather bluntly refused it.
“The School of Hard Knocks” is a literary term defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as, “the practical experiences of life, including hardships and disappointments that temper and educate a person.” It isn’t easy for a priest — even one in prison — to claim such a thing, but in recent years some priests could be considered for this distinction. For a Catholic priest, being falsely accused and unjustly in prison is like the postgraduate level of the school of hard knocks.
This blog has always struggled against tidal forces to survive. So you might understand my surprise a few years back when readers of Our Sunday Visitor cited Beyond These Stone Walls as “The Best of the Catholic Web” in the area of Spirituality. Then Catholic Culture gave it highest marks for content, excellence, and fidelity. Then About.com awarded it second place in the category of Best Catholic Blogs. Being where I am, I did not even know about some of this. Do they not know from whence I write?
But for me, the “street cred” with the most impact has come from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the largest, most influential, and most visible organization dedicated to the defense and preservation of religious liberty. Catholic League President Bill Donohue has repeatedly recognized this blog as a source of credible Catholic witness in dark times. And Bill Donohue himself has recently been cited by the Catholic Herald in the U.K. as one of the top religious leaders in the U.S.
On a dozen occasions recently, Bill Donohue and the Catholic League have cited and promoted posts from Beyond These Stone Walls sending tens of thousands of readers to this site. Each cited post covered some aspect of religious liberty or controversial currents in the Church that impact religious freedom. These posts are now collected on the page, “Cited by the Catholic League.”
Image Credit: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
A Growing Culture of Hostility to Religion
On July 21,2022, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke at the University of Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit in Rome. This excerpt of his address, published in The Wall Street Journal (August 4, 2022) exemplifies the dire importance of our attention to the state of religious freedom. From Justice Samuel Alito:
“I am reminded of an experience I had in a museum in Berlin. One of the exhibits was a rustic wooden cross. A woman and young boy were looking at this exhibit. The young boy turned to the woman, presumably his mother, and said, ‘Who is that man?’ The memory has stuck in my mind as a harbinger of what may lie ahead for our culture. The problem that looms is not just indifference to religion; it is not just ignorance about religion. There is also growing hostility to religion.
“A dominant view among legal academics is that religion does not merit special protection. A liberal society, they say, should be value-neutral, and therefore it should treat religion just like any other passionate personal attachment — like rooting for a favorite sports team, pursuing a hobby, or following a popular artist or group. Now I think we would all agree that in a free society, people should be free to pursue those avocations. But do they really merit the same protection as the exercise of religion?”
— Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, July 21, 2022
In a different recent address, Vice President Kamala Harris cited the Declaration of Independence. She emphasized that the document “guarantees all Americans the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But there was an intentional glaring omission. The Vice President conspicuously left out the most fundamental of inalienable rights, the Right to Life. It is a right rooted in religious liberty, recognizing both life and religious freedom as rights given by God and not simply by the whim of government.
I have strong reason to now believe that the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the current United States Supreme Court are all that stand in the way of the annihilation of the Right to Life and Religious Liberty in America. A Catholic League annual membership fee is a small price to pay for lending your name in defense of the most basic of our unalienable rights, the right to practice and profess your faith even in a secular world.
I admit to having a vested interest in this. More than any other voice, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has treated me with open-minded justice and fairness. The Catholic League has also advocated for my friend, Pornchai Moontri as he languished in ICE detention for five grueling months during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. To great effect, Bill Donohue and the Catholic League petitioned the White House to move Pornchai’s case forward from the bureaucracy in which it was stalled.
A Movement Defending Parental Rights
The Catholic League has also recently distinguished itself as a staunch defender of parental rights. One of my posts cited and recommended this year was “Disney’s Disenchanted Kingdom versus Parental Rights.” That post was about the production of a documentary sponsored by the Catholic League entitled, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” which has received wide acclaim.
In a recent news release, Catholic League President Bill Donohue described some of its accolades. The film was just one entry among films from 22 nations in the L.A. International Short Film Festival. “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” was nominated for six categories and won in four of them awarding it Best Documentary, Best Editing, Best Sound Design, and an Honorable Mention for Best Trailer. The latter three awards were in a broader field than just the documentaries alone. They were judged the best of all films presented to the International Film Festival. “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” is now also nominated for Best Documentary and Best Poster Design at The Prisma Film Festival in Rome, Italy.
Some on the political left have remained stubbornly tone deaf to the assault on parental rights that the Disney franchise has recently embraced. Parental demands to be heard have upended the political spectrum in Virginia and Florida and are now spreading across the playing field of U.S. politics. To suggest that religion does not belong in that arena may be a fair assessment, but Religious Liberty as an unalienable right certainly does belong in the political sphere, and so does parental rights.
More recent examples of the tone deaf politics arising out of the debate over Parental Rights in Education have come from two prominent New York House Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) characterized the Parental Rights in Education bill in Congress thusly: “Extreme MAGA Republicans don’t want your child to learn about the LGBTQ+ experience.” He deserves our thanks for making our point so succinctly. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) described the Parental Bill of Rights as “fascism,” adding, “Our children need urgent and aggressive educational solutions. When we talk about progressive values, I can say what my progressive value is: It is freedom over fascism.”
There is not much left to say after that. They have made our point for us. Please consider lending your voice to the Catholic League efforts to preserve and protect our freedoms. You may become a member or subscribe for free email news releases at: www.catholicleague.org.
Bill Donohue’s new book, War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class Is Killing the American Dream, was published yesterday and is available on Amazon and Sophia Institute Press.
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A Message to Our Readers from Fr. Gordon MacRae
In recent months, a number of readers have suggested that I compile some of our past posts into a series of published books. I think the popularity of the Prison Journal by George Cardinal Pell raised this idea among some of our readers. I have been moved beyond words that I had a substantial presence in the late Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal Volume Two.
I am also moved by the Journal itself and the many similarities in our respective prison experiences. The late Cardinal Pell and I responded to prison in much the same way, boldly facing the absence of anything that supports our faith or our priesthood. It is amazing how important something becomes when you can no longer have it. Cardinal Pell's Prison Journal is a legacy for the whole Church. So is his final message which was one of our posts recommended by the Catholic League: “The Vatican Today: Cardinal Pell’s Last Gift to the Church.”
The exoneration of Cardinal Pell was the answer to a prayer. At the time of his exoneration by Australia’s highest court, he had spent just over 400 days in unjust imprisonment. At the time I was storming Heaven for his freedom, I marked 10,000 days and nights in prison. Australia’s justice system is not the same as in the United States. A release based on wrongful conviction here is very hard won. An effort to review my case and restore my freedom is still underway. My faith and my priesthood are also still intact, and they inform and empower my survival.
Compiling past posts into my own version of a Prison Journal like Cardinal Pell’s is not possible, however. I have no access at all to the online world or to income, and that has been so for a much longer period of time. I cannot even see and have never seen this blog. I have no access to almost 14 years of writing published at this site. With severe restrictions on space, I have no access to printed copies of past writings. I have only a list of titles and I reference them only on memory.
But perhaps we have done the next best thing. When These Stone Walls, the prior version of this blog, evolved into Beyond These Stone Walls in 2020, we added the BTSW Public Library with multiple categories. We have slowly been restoring past posts to add them to the respective categories. Some of our categories have considerably more posts than others. This is because I pay more attention to some category subjects than others. Because I have abiding interest in Sacred Scripture, for example, I have written many posts about it.
The BTSW Public Library is set up like an ordinary library’s card catalog except that it is digital. Each category has a title and top image. Once you tap or click on either one, you will enter that category to scroll through a list of images and titles for each post. When you find a post that interests you, just tap or click on the image. When you close it, you will remain in the same category to peruse it further if you wish.
Abuse of the Abuse Crisis
The newest Category in our Library is “Abuse of the Abuse Crisis.” This is an important Category for me because it contains posts about how others have magnified and exploited the abuse crisis in the priesthood for their own ends and agendas. There has been no shortage of people who — out of vindictiveness or greed or just anti-Catholic bias — have used our crisis to tear down the priesthood and your faith. The posts in Abuse of the Abuse Crisis tell a riveting story about the costs of such abuse not only to the Church’s financial future, but to our lives as priests and your lives as Catholics. Real abuse has made us all ashamed, but the amount of fraud and bias is an outrage.
My interest in developing this special Library Category came from an experience with watching CNN a few years ago. A CNN commentator told the world that During a protest at the Vatican, 100,000 victims of sex abuse by priests were refused an audience with the Pope.” I was alerted to this story from several readers so, to the extent I was able, I looked more closely under the hood.
It turned out that SNAP, the Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests, did in fact stage a “victims’ protest” near the Vatican. The number of people present was about 40 — of which more than half were media people invited in advance to the photo op. The actual protesters were very few, and actual victims fewer still. By the time the story reached CNN, 40 became 100,000. I sent this story to Bill Donohue at the Catholic League and he followed it with a protest of his own. CNN apologized and promised to be more vigilant with its facts.
We must not accept such distortions blindly just because they appear in the news media. A post at this new category, second from the top, also addressed this same story. The SNAP-sponsored trip to Rome later became part of an employee lawsuit against SNAP in which the organization was exposed for fraud, a lawyer kickback scheme, and misused donor funds — some of which paid for a high end junket at first class hotels for this protest in Rome. I expect 100,000 people will now visit my Abuse of the Abuse Crisis page. Well ... maybe it will be closer to 40, but you might understand how such numbers are easily confused.
There are other important additions. You may have noticed the “Documents” feature in the menu at Beyond These Stone Walls. You will find there some important documents in the case against me and also a section with documents on the Pornchai Moontri story. Both sets of documents have been equally visited and l consider both to be of great importance to the cause of justice. Over 16 years of listening to the constant tap-tap-tap of my typewriter, Pornchai more than earned an honored place at this blog.
We have recently added a new item atop the documents section in my own case. It was recently prepared for a legal review through a new set of eyes. The document is entitled “Synopsis of the Case.”
Finally, for those who want to help me personally, and/or contribute to maintaining this blog or aiding me in support of Pornchai Moontri and Fr. John Hung Le, we have added access to a Zelle Account in addition to our existing PayPal Account. Zelle is easier and less expensive to use, but presently only available in the United States. Please visit our “Contact and Support” page or “Special Events” for further information.
Thank you for coming here. May the Lord Bless you and keep you.
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.”