Weaponized Psychology: The Psych Evals of Father MacRae

Writer Damien Fisher cited psychological reports to bolster the condemnation of a priest in the court of public opinion, but some omitted facts expose a cover-up.

October 12, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The following is Part Two of a series of posts by multiple writers presenting facts in the case of a wrongly imprisoned priest that some in the media have ignored or distorted. Part One, posted here one week ago, was: “A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae.”

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Part One in this series, linked above, explores a tendency of some in modern day news media to simply mimic material gleaned from prosecutorial officials. In news coverage, this practice has increasingly come to replace the hard work of investigative journalism and the natural skepticism every journalist should have.

One of the factors that irked me and other writers in Damien Fisher’s recent coverage of the MacRae story was his blind acceptance of an old and inadequate psychological evaluation of the accused priest that was debunked a decade ago. In 2012, a Catholic magazine published a letter to the editor from a reader of Father MacRae’s blog who defended him. In response, a member of SNAP, the activist Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, wrote a rebuttal which was also published citing psychological evaluations of MacRae as evidence of his presumed guilt.

I wrote a more up-to-date and factual response, but it was a testament to the one-sided jaundice of even Catholic media on this topic that the lurid claims against the priest were published while my factual response was not. Given that Damien Fisher’s recent article cited here a week ago referenced the same biased and one-sided reports, I now present anew what I first uncovered in 2012.

Like all accused Catholic priests, Fr. Gordon MacRae was required by Church officials to undergo a psychological evaluation. It was one of the many travesties of justice in this case that elements of two of those reports inexplicably ended up in public view while a far more extensive and professional report did not.

Mr. Fisher gleaned his information from a 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester that referenced an inadequate and one-sided evaluation from an M.A. level clinician with a state contract to evaluate those accused of sexual offenses. The Grand Jury Report omitted a much broader and more professional assessment from a team of licensed psychologists and psychiatric experts that negates the validity of the evaluation cited in the Grand Jury Report and repeated by Damien Fisher.

It is indeed correct that MacRae was labeled a “fixated sexual offender” in a 1989 report by a masters-level clinician at the Strafford Guidance Center, a New Hampshire outpatient center with a state contract to evaluate those accused of sexual offenses. This evaluation was the result of a misdemeanor solicitation charge that was debunked extensively in my article, “A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae.”

A second evaluation was conducted over a four-day period at the now-closed House of Affirmation, a treatment center for clergy in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. It was entirely prosecutorial in nature, and in many ways it violated the priest’s basic civil rights. It weaponized the psychological process, reporting, for example, a finding that “Father MacRae exhibits extremely high abstract intellectual ability.” That result, from a single evaluation tool called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, was later used to unjustly label the accused priest as a potential sociopathic manipulator. The report and its conclusions were criminally unprofessional.

EEG recorded during scanning session.

A Forensic Search for Truth

Another, far more extensive evaluation was conducted by a team of three doctoral-level forensic clinical psychologists and two staff psychiatrists with decades of experience in the assessment of offenders. This in-depth assessment was conducted over a period of months at an inpatient facility, the Villa Louis Martin Center in New Mexico. What follows are excerpts of that report introduced by licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Peter Lechner, Ph.D.:

“Of the reports mentioned earlier, one from House of Affirmation where Fr. MacRae spent four days and the other from the Strafford Guidance Clinic where he was evaluated, according to their report, for a two-hour period, they arrived at far-reaching, all embracing and definitive conclusions in regard to Fr. MacRae. The staff at VLM believes that such time periods would be inadequate to properly understand complex problems.

“The conclusions we arrived at came after many months.... It became clear that [Fr. MacRae] did not fit the description of the Strafford Guidance Clinic. He had a depth of conscientiousness and sensitivity to others, and a very high degree of ethical concern that did not fit with what their report said of him. Fr. MacRae does NOT fit the description of a fixated sexual offender. The reports are inaccurate.”

— 1990 Evaluation Report of the staff at Villa Louis Martin

Dr. Lechner went on to describe that the Strafford Guidance Center evaluation was conducted by an unlicensed masters-level clinician. It consisted of a single psychological test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which was dismissed by the evaluator as “unrevealing and within normal range.” The sweeping negative conclusions of the rest of the report, according to the file, were arrived at based on three 45-minute interviews over the course of six weeks.

The clinician began his assessment with clear bias. The mere fact that MacRae is a Catholic priest with a commitment to practice celibacy, like all priests, was itself treated as sexually aberrant by the evaluator. His process and conclusions were dismissed as invalid and unjust by staff at the Villa Louis Martin Center. They concluded that “Two hours of interviews by a masters-level clinician is simply not professionally adequate to brand a man in the court of public opinion for the remainder of his life.” The director of the VLM Center added another comment to his report:

“In my report to the NH Department of Probation, I mentioned the accusations that had been made in the above reports by way of background information regarding what had been said about [Fr. MacRae]. I indicated that he did not present as someone obsessed by sexual fantasies or driven to act out. I then went on to write about our assessment and the medical issues [MacRae] faced. I was later dismayed to find out that my reports were misquoted, and positive statements that were essential to the reports were left out. This I feel was a serious injustice.”

The far more comprehensive VLM report by Dr. Lechner and his staff directly refuted the impressions of the Stafford Guidance Center assessment arrived at after three 45-minute interviews. However, the prosecutorial files released by the Diocese of Manchester after its bishop signed over the rights of the priests involved, and published online by the Attorney General in 2003 omitted the more professional report opting to publish only the impressions of the negatively biased one.

In the far more extensive report, the director of the VLM facility explained that MacRae remained at the Center for one year in 1989, an unusual length of time for inpatient treatment, but it was not because he was diagnosed as a sexual offender. That was discounted earlier. MacRae remained at the center for a year because a neurological evaluation that included an EEG and MRI revealed a diagnosis of epilepsy.

It has been professionally suggested that a diagnosis of untreated epilepsy and complex partial seizure disorder that was difficult to manage raised further questions about the legitimacy of the priest’s 1988 misdemeanor plea entered into without legal counsel after hours of intense badgering by a police detective with an agenda other than truth. This was disclosed in my article one week ago.

The VLM report of the evaluation of Fr. MacRae indicated that MacRae succumbed to coercion under duress in 1988 while talked into waiving his Constitutional right to legal counsel because Detective McLaughlin conned him into believing that he would be sparing the Church from adverse publicity if he took the plea. If MacRae is to be faulted for anything in this picture, the report concluded, “it is for placing his own well-being second.”

That 1988 misdemeanor charge was brought forward and propagated by the same detective who would five years later charge MacRae with more serious, but just as dubious offenses that now date back forty years. This is the same detective who now appears on a previously secret list accused of falsifying records, and has now also been accused of lying, erasing tapes, and tampering with evidence.

Four years after writing the Strafford Guidance Center report on MacRae, its author applied for employment at the Villa Louis Martin Center citing its thorough assessment of the priest as the reason for his desire to work there.

When Detective James McLaughlin’s new allegations emerged with new demands for settlement money in 1993, Fr. MacRae voluntarily submitted to two polygraph examinations with an expert. He passed both conclusively. No one who accused MacRae would agree to take a polygraph.

The Most Expert Evaluation

Perhaps the most important assessment, however, is one uncovered by Fr. George David Byers revealed in his article “Omertà in a Catholic Chancery: Affidavits Expanded.” Over 28 years in the New Hampshire State Prison, Fr. MacRae has never been even suspected of any form of predation. The prison system’s own evaluation labeled him at the lowest level of risk for any form of aberrant sexual interest or behavior. For 15 of those years MacRae was housed in a 60-square-foot cell with Pornchai Moontri, an adult survivor of sexual abuse. There is perhaps no better expert on the character of Fr. MacRae.

In Fr. Byers’ article linked above, he conveys a true story revealed to him by Pornchai:

“Pornchai has helped me to understand a truth that is nearly universal among those who have in fact been victims of sexual assault. The only thing that is as obnoxious to them as having been raped is to see their own sufferings capitalized upon by false accusers for money, and by clericalists who make themselves into heroes by paying out settlements with no evidence or due process of law. Priests are too often considered guilty just for being accused.

“Prison, by nature, is often a violent place. As a child of 12 brought to the State of Maine from a foreign country, Pornchai became a victim of violent sexual abuse. When Pornchai went to prison at age 18, he dealt with prison violence in the only way he could. He vowed that he would never again be someone’s victim. So he understandably met violence with violence of his own. It landed him in repeated long years in solitary confinement.

“After 14 years, Pornchai was transferred to the New Hampshire prison. He ended up in a cell with a man accused and convicted of the very thing that destroyed his life. It did not take him long — with his innate alertness to victimization — to discover that Father G had been falsely accused. Pornchai once told me this story that I held off writing until he was out of the prison system:

‘One day, I got a notice from the prison mental health department that a new 2O-week program was beginning called ‘Interpersonal Violence.’ My friend Father G thought it might be an opportunity for me so I said I would go if he goes with me. So we both signed up for it. Prison is filled with needy young men who have really broken lives. Some of them look for safe, comfortable older prisoners who might buy them things and take care of them. The result is a sort of mutual exploitation and prisons are filled with this. One young kid, about 19, who was attending the program quickly tried to latch on to Father G without knowing anything about him. I was going to speak with the kid, but decided to wait.

‘Over the next few sessions as I sat next to Father G, I was aware of how this kid was skillfully trying to gain his interest and maneuver his way into his life, but Father G was oblivious to it. Later that night I told him what I observed, but he had no idea what I was talking about. At the next session, Father G and I simply agreed to switch seats. In all his years in prison, Father G has been surrounded by people like this, many of them young drug addicts who would sell their soul for a few bucks for drugs. In all those years, Father G was never observed or even suspected of having any interest in them at all except to show those receptive to it a way out of their prison within a prison.’ ”

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IMPORTANT EDITOR’S NOTE:

During the 15 years that Fr. MacRae and Pornchai Moontri lived in the same prison cell, MacRae investigated Pornchai’s life and wrote about it in an explosive account that brought his abuser to justice. Richard Alan Bailey was convicted in 2018 on 40 felony counts of child sexual abuse. This most important story is told in

“Getting Away With Murder on the Island of Guam.”

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BREAKING NEWS — NEW IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

Nationally prominent criminal-defense and civil-rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate has just published an op-ed on developments in the Fr. MacRae case in the WSJ. This is the fourth major article in the WSJ on this story. We have reprinted the op-ed so it may be viewed by our readers:

Justice Delayed for Father MacRae by Harvey A. Silverglate

The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

Catholic priests and politicians who are silent about abortion often cite racism as a higher moral priority. Are they blind to the racist oppression of Roe v. Wade?

July 6, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Shortly after a U.S. Supreme Court draft was mysteriously leaked with an impression that the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned, this reactionary nation descended once again into chaos. At the time, I wrote a post making a case for why overturning a precedent like Roe v. Wade was not the legal earthquake some in the partisan news media described it to be. Catholic League President Bill Donohue sent an email to the civil rights group’s thousands of members asking them to read my post entitled, “After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul.”

It became our most-read post for the month of May, 2022, but I had long before been marked as a “prolife priest.” I had never even imagined that there are Catholic priests out there who might not champion the cause for life. I have since learned from lots of readers that they rarely if ever hear support for prolife causes in their parishes. So I set out in this post to make an argument for why Catholics — including priests — can and should be challenged to take up a well-informed defense of life.

I was a late arrival on the side of life. When I was a newly ordained priest forty0-two years ago in 1982, I learned that my one and only niece (two others arrived later) longed for a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. They were all the rage then, but my sister in the Boston area told me that the demand was so great it was simply impossible to find one. So I went on a mission and implored the help of a friend who managed a large department store just over the border in New Hampshire. She laughed saying that I should have listened to my sister, but I was an uncle determined not to disappoint my only niece.

A few days later, the friend called me and said that one of the chain’s stores had one that remained unclaimed so I quickly asked her to hold it for me. She wanted me to come late at night when the store was closing because she feared I might be mugged by desperate parents while carrying the semi-precious doll from the store. I felt like a thief in the night as I arrived to discover that the remaining doll was modeled after an African American infant. A flood of implications raced through my mind, but I dismissed them all and purchased the doll.

It was two weeks before Christmas, 1982. Back at my parish, I carefully opened the box, intrigued by the enormous social pressure on parents to find and buy this pseudo-human infant for their young daughters that Christmas. Inside the box, I was surprised to see what looked like an official birth certificate with the doll’s name and date of “birth” printed in nice calligraphy.

So the following Sunday at Mass, I brought the doll with me, box and all. It was the Fourth Sunday of Advent. During my homily, I opened the box and produced both the doll and the birth certificate. The parish was instantly riveted, not by the point I was making but by the fact that I had somehow actually obtained a Cabbage Patch doll. My homily called out the irony that the creators of this doll went to such great lengths to fabricate authenticity — including a birth certificate — and promote such enormous demand that mothers and fathers could not find one. Meanwhile, real human babies are quietly aborted by the millions every year across the land. The reaction to my homily was both strained and strange.

Project Rachel

As I held up the birth certificate, there were audible gasps. Some looked alarmed and uncomfortable, others mesmerized, some quite pleased, and others downright hostile. No priest likes hostility, and I was no exception. At the door after Mass, some people thanked me for bringing up a subject never before heard in their parish. Others whisked by me without eye contact. A few looked really ticked and muttered something about “politics from the pulpit.” One man who clearly did not get the point said, “a hundred bucks for the doll, Father.”

One week later at Christmas, my niece was overjoyed at her new “little sister.” Within a few years she would have two real ones, and would learn that little sisters are a mixed blessing when you are accustomed to being the only one at center stage. Today, they remain very close and each is now also a mother.

It was because of this experience — the simple act of buying a doll for my niece at Christmas — that I thought Roe v. Wade all the way through and knew that I could not be silent about what I had learned. My first lesson was how easy it was to dupe myself into comfortable moral complicity by not thinking it through. I know this is an uncomfortable subject for some, but it is not possible to fully profess the Gospel without discomfort.

Two years later, I became one of four priests in my diocese to join Project Rachel, a Catholic ministry approved by the U.S. bishops to assist women who have had an abortion with the process of repentance and reconciled Communion with their faith. It is one of the most important ministries in the Catholic community, second only to the cause of life itself.

Our culture has romanticized the Christmas story, but in the Gospel of St. Matthew it concludes with terrible tragedy. Enraged at being tricked by the Magi, Herod ordered the slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem. The story ends with a prophecy of Jeremiah which is the source for Project Rachel’s name:

“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they are no more.”

— Jeremiah 31:15 and Matthew 2:16-18

A reader of Beyond These Stone Walls recently told me of a discussion with her parish priest about abortion and Roe v. Wade, and the fact that the priest had never addressed either in a homily. She is a retired obstetrics nurse who obviously had a lifetime of thinking this through. I have heard the same critique of many priests in many states. Some respond that other social justice issues such as racism and inequality are higher moral priorities for them. They miss the crux of the matter.

There have been bold exceptions, priests who have inspired me and others in the cause of life. Among them are Father Frank Pavone, founder of Priests for Life, and Father Stephen Imbarrato, also known as the “Protest Priest.” He is the moderator of Catholic Prolife and a leader in Red Rose Rescue.

When San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone recently imposed a canonical discipline barring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Communion, Mrs. Pelosi accused him of hypocrisy. She stated that she is in fact prolife, but her prolife activism centers on limiting the death penalty. It is spiritual blindness, and a common progressive position. But it is also one that I have shared. I was dubbed “the priest who kicked the hornets nest” when I wrote of this a decade ago. To protest the death penalty while promoting abortion is to become comfortable with spiritual blindness.

Catholic politicians like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden have compartmentalized and dulled their Catholic consciences. Like many progressive politicians, they have not thought this all the way through. The arenas of both the death penalty and abortion rights are mired in racism.

The Real Social Injustice of Racial Inequality

The list of racial disparities in America is extensive. African Americans represent only 12.5 percent of the U.S. population but 40 percent of the U.S. prison population. Many studies have shown that African American defendants often received longer prison sentences than White defendants for the same offense. They have been more likely than White defendants to be sentenced to death for capital crimes, and have been many times more likely to actually be executed in states that retain a death penalty.

This is of grave concern, but all of our concern is moot if we cannot even get the subjects of our concern born in the first place. At his shocking and eye-opening site, Blackgenocide.org, Rev. Clenard H. Childress, Jr. reveals that “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” When it comes to racial disparities in abortion the political left and too many of our priests and bishops remain silent in a state of ignorant bliss. There is no more racist agenda than the one behind the abortion industry in America.

In 1992, President Bill Clinton presented what was then the accepted liberal Democratic view: that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Since then, the overall abortion rate has declined to about half of what it was in the 1980s — except among African Americans. According to Justice Clarence Thomas, Black women are today eight times more likely than White women to seek an abortion. Abortion’s impact on the size of the African American population is critical, but conveniently overlooked by the news media and the progressive political left.

I had no idea when I gave my three-year-old niece that African American-looking Cabbage Patch doll in 1982 that infants who look like that particular doll are especially in peril. In a 2019 abortion case, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas observed that in New York City that year, for the first time in history, more African American infants were aborted than born.

It is also true that Planned Parenthood of America places its origin in the work of Margaret Sanger, an activist American nurse who worked tirelessly to provide access to abortion. From her own writings, one of her motivations was an interest in eugenics, the science of selective breeding. By controlling the growth of the African American population, Margaret Sanger and others believed that the purity of American genetic heritage could be maintained.

Jason L. Riley, an African American writer and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal authored a recent op-ed entitled “Why Won’t the Left Talk About Racial Disparities in Abortion?” (WSJ, May 11, 2022). He wrote that the political left in America is quick to set off alarms anywhere racial disparities are known to exist — except for this one.

Race-based differences in SAT test scores, for example, brought calls to eliminate the SAT as a college admission test. A racial gap in arrest and incarceration rates has long vexed this nation, resulting on the left with socially destructive reactions like the “defund police” movement. In terms of sheer numbers and their impact on the African American population, abortion far exceeds other social justice concerns. The number of babies aborted by Black women each year in America far exceeds the combined numbers of Black youths who drop out of school, are sent to prison, and who are murdered on the streets of our cities.

The WSJ’s Jason Reilly cited a Pennsylvania case study about death rates. Examining premature deaths from all causes in 2018, it was discovered that abortions constituted 23.9 percent of premature deaths among the White population and 62.7 percent among the Black population. Abortion rights activists often cite these facts as a function of poverty, but even among other groups with higher poverty levels, Black women still have abortions at much higher rates than any other demographic.

The notion that not growing up at all is better than growing up in poverty is a notion only of the elite. Think of the arrogance behind such statements. If activists believe that lower incomes impact Black abortions, then the social justice issue and goal should be equality in income not controlling the population Planned-Parenthood-style through abortion.

Black lives matter. Indeed they do. Black infant lives matter too. There is no more racist agenda in America than the one keeping an entire people down through abortion.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post.

You may also like these related posts:

After Roe v. Wade: Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life

A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass

In Traditionis Custodes restricting the Traditional Latin Mass, Pope Francis insists that his goal is ecclesial communion. Then he dropped a bombshell of division.

In the above composite photo Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis offer Mass Ad Orientem in the Sistine Chapel.

August 11, 2021

The Year of Our Lord 2003 seemed a lot more like a year of Our Lord’s Calvary. It was a most painful year for me personally and for many Catholics. Starting in Boston with a rapid ripple effect across the land, diocese after diocese faced relentless Catholic scandal over the horror of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse. A spotlight was cast upon the Catholic Church to the delight of the news media, but the subject needed a flood light. There was little justice in the moral panic to follow. This is a story I wrote about in a recent post, “A Sex Abuse Cover-Up in Boston Haunts the White House.”

Just beyond the glare of The Boston Globe spotlight, there was another event that had an even more profound impact on another church community in 2003. It took place just north of Boston in New Hampshire and from there it, too, rippled across the land, and many lands. Its most distinctive feature was its contrast to the Catholic story. While Catholic priests were judged and condemned in the media, one Episcopal clergyman in New Hampshire became a celebrity of pop culture.

In 2003, The Reverend V. Gene Robinson became the first openly gay Episcopalian priest to be nominated to become a bishop. The announcement had the immediate effect of alienating conservative members of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. Born Vicky Gene Robinson in 1947, the nominee had been married, raised a family, divorced, and was in a conjugal same-sex relationship at the time of his nomination. For many, this seemed more of a politically correct statement than a serious nomination. If The Reverend Robinson had been divorced and living with another woman who was not his wife, this nomination would have gone nowhere.

Bishop Robinson’s nomination was confirmed by the Episcopal church of New Hampshire to equal parts applause and dismay. Then the cascade of damage was set in motion. With the support of the Nigerian Anglican church, many American conservative Episcopalians broke from the Worldwide Anglican Communion to form the Anglican Church in North America. The Anglican bishops of Uganda announced that they too broke from communion with the Episcopal church. This spread among conservative Anglican bishops across Africa and other parts of the world.

Having torn the Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder, Bishop Robinson announced his retirement seven years later in 2010. At some point he checked into drug rehab, and then used his voice as a retired bishop to promote same-sex marriage before the New Hampshire Legislature. He and his partner were among the first to “marry” under the new law he helped to pass. Then he announced his divorce to a news media that kept it very low key.

Among the protests came a multitude of petitions to Pope Benedict XVI who, in 2009, promulgated the Motu Proprio, Anglianorum Coetibus accepting into the Roman Rite entire Anglican parishes desiring to “cross the Tiber” to join the Roman Church. The first was a parish that became part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston-Houston, Texas in 2009.

We Are on a Road to Calvary Not Schism

The reactions that resulted in a breakup of the Worldwide Anglican Communion could not happen in the Catholic Church. Canon Law does not allow for the decisions to leave promoted by the Anglican bishops of Africa and other conservative communities. Only the Holy See can declare that a schism exists in a region or diocese. Popes have gone to great lengths to avoid schism. Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of Bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) to heal a longstanding rift with traditionalists. In 2007, Pope Benedict further mended that rift with his Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, which removed obstacles to the Traditional Latin Mass.

Now Pope Francis has reopened those wounds anew with Traditionis Custodes, his Motu Proprio: announced on July 16, 2021 which contradicts and revokes the permissions granted by Pope Benedict. I wrote of this last week in these pages in “Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful.”

I used that title because in many ways my experience of the vast majority of those who seek out the Latin Mass are among the most faithful. In a published Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal on July 30, 2021, writer Ray Martin of Ridgefield, Connecticut described what has become a lax and often disrespectful atmosphere in too many parishes. This is an impression that I hear about frequently from readers:

“I do not regularly attend a Latin Mass but I do remember it from childhood ... Nowadays, fewer Catholics attend Mass regularly, they tend to come late and leave early, and it is not unusual to see T-shirts, short-shorts and flip flops. Everyone presents at the altar for Communion. One study found that around one in three Catholics believes in the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. I would guess that more than 90-percent of Latin Mass attendees do.”

— Ray Martin, WSJ.com

My experience of the many Catholics I hear from who seek out the Latin Mass either weekly or even just on occasion is that they are our modern day Essenes. I wrote of the Essenes and their role in preserving the faith of both Israel and the early Jewish Christians in “Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse.” When Pope Benedict XVI opened the Church door to those requesting the Tridentine Latin Mass, many thought it would draw only senior citizens and some “far-right cranks,” as one writer put it back then. That has been far from true. Pope Francis expressed a concern that many who take part in the Latin Mass deny the validity of the Novus Ordo, the form of the Mass promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970. This also is far from true. I hear from many Latin Mass attendees who also take part in the Novus Ordo Mass. All they ask for is a sense of the sacred, and a communal acknowledgment that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. Their appreciation of the Novus Ordo has been strengthened by the Latin Mass.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp magazine, penned an eye-opening op-ed one week after Pope Francis announced new, severe and immediate restrictions on the Latin Mass. Entitled, “Pope, Francis, the Latin Mass, and My Family” (July 23, 2021), Mr. Lamb described the reaction of those in his Catholic community of faith:

“We are loyal children of the Church on the receiving end of a harsh punishment. Pope Francis ... seemed to suggest that things had gone too far and were threatening to undo the liturgical reforms of the 1960s. The gradual displacement of the new rite, which emerged after Vatican II, was in fact the half-articulated ambition of many traditionalists. Until recently many had looked forward to a future in which the ‘extraordinary form’ of the Mass, as Benedict referred to it, was set to become rather ordinary.”

— Matthew Walther

Perhaps that is the point. The solemnity, majesty, and sacredness of the sacrifice taking place is just that — extraordinary. I want to contrast that with an experience I had as a newly ordained priest in one New Hampshire parish whose pastor made a weekly show of rushing through Sunday Mass at warp speed. After his hasty final blessing he would look at his watch and declare, “Twenty-two minutes, and I didn’t miss a thing!”

Standing with Peter v. Standing Our Ground

In some ways, Pope Francis has been unpredictable for so-called progressive Catholics as well. After playing down the issue of homosexuality with oft-quoted remarks like, “Who am I to judge?”, he disappointed many in liberal Catholic enclaves like Germany when he refused to allow blessings of same-sex unions. He dismissed the proposition while shocking liberal German priests with the definitive statement, “God cannot bless sin.” In an open letter to German Catholics in 2019, he cautioned them against “multiplying and nurturing the evils the Church wants to overcome.” He also gave a definitive “no” on the topic of ordination of women.

With all the open, and often flagrant, dissent from Church teaching and discipline in Germany and other parts of Europe, why would Francis choose to label traditional Catholics who appreciate the Latin Mass as “divisive?” I do not have answers.

But I do have more questions and a few suspicions. As I pointed out in these pages a week ago, there is an immense and growing contrast between the state of the Catholic Church in Germany and other areas in Europe, and that of the Church in Africa. The former has been in a state of stagnation for decades, and is now deeply involved in the embrace of what has come to be called, “Cancel Culture.” In its Catholic manifestation, I can only describe this as the setting aside of the “sensus fidei,” the sense of the faith as it has been expressed across two millennia, in favor of populist social trends of just the first two decades of the 21st Century.

With that understanding, “Cancel Culture” has become a modern plague on humanity that is far more destructive than any viral pandemic. If we do not understand history, and learn from it, we are doomed to repeat its most destructive patterns. Joining this secularized culture by placing God on the shelf while morphing Roman Catholicism into a mirror image of the flailing American Episcopal church is perilous.

The rapid growth of the Traditional Latin Mass since Pope Benedict XVI re-opened that door may well be the work of the Holy Spirit. Pope Francis knows well that the entire Church — and not just the bishops with whom he consulted — comprises the “sensus fidelium,” the action of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds and souls of the faithful from the Sacrifice at Calvary to the present day. The faithful witness of those who embrace the Traditional Latin Mass may prove to be a gift to the Church.

But the faithful must not stand against Peter to achieve that end. We are a Church built upon the blood of martyrs, and faithful witness may now require paying the cost of discipleship. Sometimes in the Church’s story of faith, white martyrdom has not only been for the Church. Sometimes it has been from the Church. Padre Pio knew this. So did Cardinal George Pell. So do I.

I have been most struck by the two volumes of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal. He frequently repeated his longing for Mass and the Eucharist in a place where he was barred from them. I recall reading from Father Walter Ciszek’s book, With God In Russia, that he sat on the edge of his bunk in a Siberian labor camp and would mouth from memory the words of the Roman Canon of the Mass.

My experience of Mass as a prisoner is reduced to the contents of a small plastic box. On Sunday nights at 11:00 PM, after the last prisoner count of the day, I take that box from a shelf and place it at the foot of my prison bunk. It serves as both a container and an altar. It has a Corporal that I spread over its surface. I attach a small battery powered book light to the wall just above it, and begin my preparation for Mass. The Mass is always “Ad Orientem,” toward the East, not by any design of my own, but because the cell window faces in that direction.

I have no sacred vessels. I have a coffee cup purchased years ago but never used for any other purpose. I have a weekly supply of a host placed on a clean linen purificator, and a one-quarter ounce of unfermented wine with no additives approved for liturgical use by Catholic priests serving in a war zone. I have a small wooden crucifix on a stand on a shelf just above where my Mass is offered.

There was a time when I did not have even these. For many years in prison, I had no access at all to the Mass. So I look upon this present drama unfolding now in our Church, and see it as madness that is hopefully brief. If you have appreciated the Traditional Latin Mass, you must not leave. The Church needs you. We need you to remind us of a lesson that I have long since learned harshly, and can now never forget.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. And please visit our Special Events page. It contains a story that is dear to my heart.

You may also like these relevant posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse

The feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, our patron saint, is August 14. The above photo is his prison cell.

A Sex Abuse Cover-up in Boston Haunts the White House

When The Boston Globe Spotlight focused only on Catholic priests, sex abuse by a top Boston police union official was covered up all the way to the 2021 White House.

Our Canadian guest writer, Father Stuart MacDonald, posted a thoughtful comment on my recent post, “Cardinal Sins in the Summer of Media Madness.” He pointed out a sobering fact. Former police officer Derek Chauvin, who now stands convicted in the murder of George Floyd, was sentenced to exactly one-third of the sentence I am serving for crimes that never took place. Father Stuart’s insightful comment was followed by one from another frequent guest writer, Ryan A. MacDonald, no relation to Father Stuart.

Their comments are very much worth a return visit to that post. The tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of Derek Chauvin in sight of three other officers launched a movement across America to defunct police. It also led to all of the events described in the post cited above.

You might think that in my current location, a movement like #DefundPolice would find lots of sympathy and even some vocal support. The truth is just the opposite. No one understands the need for police in our society more than a prisoner. As one friend here, an African American, put it: “Knowing the truth about some of the guys around me, the last thing I want to see is them and my family living in the same place without police.”

I reflected that same sentiment, and others like it, in my own response to the #DefundPolice movement that was spawned by the death of George Floyd. It was a post written in the heat of that awful riotous summer of 2020. It was “Don’t Defund Police! Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption.”

As that post revealed, former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin had multiple excessive force complaints in his personnel file. Thanks to the so-called “Blue Wall” and the misguided advocacy of the local public sector police union, none of the prior complaints ever became public. Had they been known, George Floyd may be alive today and Derek Chauvin may not be facing prison.

Others among my friends have advised me not to overlook the fact that Mr. Floyd was alleged to have committed a crime that day — an attempt to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Even if true, this is not relevant. Americans do not face death over a fake $20 bill. The George Floyd story unmasked racial prejudice in the way policing is sometimes done on the streets of America. We will be a stronger and better people for the hard soul-searching and policy building needed to address this.

I write all of the above to stress that I am not in any way against police. Like my friend mentioned above, knowing some of the men with whom I now live deepens my appreciation for the many dedicated police officers who serve and protect our communities.

The account I am about to present should not be understood as just another “dirty cop” story. It is better seen as a cautionary tale of public corruption that extends beyond police to infiltrate and compromise many of the once-respected institutions on which our culture is built. The corruption you will read about here is as much that of partisan politics and the news media as it is about police. It is a Boston story. It took place in my own home town.

While the Spotlight Was on Catholic Scandal

This account is unrelated to the sordid stories of Catholic scandal in which we have been immersed for two decades, but it must begin there with a July, 2010 post, “The Exile of Fr. Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”

I highly recommend that post for the back story of what was happening to many Catholic priests as the age of cancel culture was just taking shape. The story might infuriate you. It should. In 2010, Father Dominic Menna was a much beloved 80-year-old Boston priest who was suddenly accused of molesting a minor 51 years earlier when he was 29 years old in 1959. Like every accused priest since The Scandal first gripped Boston and spread from there across the land, the elderly Father Menna was put out into the street.

You could not tell from reading The Boston Globe accounts of the case that none of this story took place in the present. The Globe had a subtle way of presenting every decades-old claim as though it happened in the here and now. Father Menna just disappeared into the night with no recourse to protect himself or his priesthood. There were no groups forming such as “Stand with Father James Parker” or “Stand with Canceled Priests” when the stench of injustice was in any way related to suspicions of sexual abuse.

Even some Catholic entities have thanked The Boston Globe and its pernicious Spotlight Team for doggedly pursuing the files of priests accused and for publishing every lurid detail, true or not. The Globe helped create a mantra that impacted the civil rights of all priests who, since the Bishops’ Dallas Charter of 2002, have been considered “guilty for being accused.” The trajectory lent itself in 2010 to “The Exile of Fr. Dominic Menna” with few questions asked. The details in that post are staggering for any Catholic who still cares about justice. One of the truths exposed in that post is about all that is left in darkness when a spotlight is used on a topic that requires a floodlight. It is about something that was happening off-the-radar in Boston while The Boston Globe and its Spotlight Team celebrated an Academy Award for Best Picture in the category of Public Service.

If not for the Globe’s hammering away at priests, the people of Boston might have been shocked in the summer of 2020 when Patrick Rose, a Boston police officer and former president of the Boston police union, was charged with 33 counts of molesting children. Bostonians might have been further shocked to learn that the behaviors which led to his arrest extended all the way back to 1995 and were known by officials in the Boston police, their public sector union, and others who helped to keep it all secret.

In 1995, just months after I was on trial in nearby New Hampshire, Patrick Rose was arrested and charged with child sexual abuse. He was placed on administrative leave by the Boston Police Department. The Boston Globe today reports that the charges were dropped in 1996 when the accuser recanted her account under pressure from Rose. Later in 1996, however, a Boston Police Internal Affairs investigation reported that the charge “was sustained” and relayed to supervisors.

Despite this, Patrick Rose remained on the police force. In 1997, an attorney for the police union wrote a letter to the police commissioner complaining that Rose had been kept on administrative duty for two years and demanding his full reinstatement. Rose was then reinstated. Prosecutors today allege that he went on to molest five additional child victims, including some after Rose himself became union president from 2014 to 2017.

White House Labor Secretary Marty Walsh

In the May 14, 2021 print edition of The Wall Street Journal, the Editorial Board published “A Police Union Coverup in Boston.” The WSJ reported that The Boston Globe filed requests for the Internal Affairs file on Patrick Rose. The administration of then Boston Mayor Marty Walsh denied the request citing that the record could not be released in a way that would satisfy privacy concerns.

Imagine the outcry if the late Cardinal Bernard Law said this when The Boston Globe demanded a file on any foreknowledge of sexual abuse by Father Dominic Menna. It turned out in that case that there was no such file because the 80-year-old priest had never previously been accused. The Boston Globe repeatedly dragged the Archdiocese of Boston into court in 2002 to demand public release of scores of files on Catholic priests and never rested until every detail — corroborated or not — ended up in newsprint.

It is hard to imagine today that The Globe would simply settle for the excuse Mayor Marty Walsh provided. It is hard to imagine that the “Blue Wall of Silence” was any real obstacle for The Boston Globe which, perhaps to cover for its own inaction, reported that it was “astonishing [the] lengths to which the [Boston Police] Department and the now departed Walsh administration went to keep those files under wraps.”

The file remained “under wraps” until after Senate confirmation hearings that vetted Mayor Walsh and confirmed him (68 to 29) for a Biden Administration cabinet position as Secretary of Labor in 2021. Walsh signed a contract with the Boston Police Union in 2017 while Patrick Rose was still union president. It remains unclear what Marty Walsh knew and when he knew it.

A Massachusetts state supervisor of public records refuted the Mayor’s reasoning for keeping the file secret. He called upon (then) Mayor Walsh to provide a better reason for denying the Internal Affairs file on Patrick Rose. Walsh ignored this for two months until his mayoral successor, Kim Janey, released a redacted version of the file after the Senate confirmation hearing approved Mr. Walsh as Secretary of Labor. The Wall Street Journal reported:

“Mr. Biden picked Mr. Walsh because he is a union man. He was president of a Laborers’ Union local, as well as head of the Boston Building Trades, until he ran for mayor in 2013. As mayor, he showered unions with taxpayer money, including a contract with Mr. Rose’s police union in 2017 that resulted in a pay increase of 16-percent over four years. City employees in unions donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign. The Rose Coverup is relevant to Mr. Walsh’s duties at the Labor department.”

— The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2021

An Epilogue

Just as I was preparing to print and mail this post, someone sent me the July 2021 copy of Newsmax magazine containing an article by journalist Merisa Herman on this same story entitled, "Police Union Cover-Up Haunts Top Biden Official." [I chose my title long before seeing this]. Ms. Herman concluded:

“Rose had been given a pass from the media for what could be construed as a cover-up ... Someone in Congress might ask Mr. Walsh why Americans should believe he’ll fight union corruption when his city may have helped protect a union chief with a history of alleged predation against children.”

It is difficult to measure this story against what happened in 2010 to 80-year-old Father Dominic Menna whose life and priesthood were utterly obliterated by The Boston Globe spotlight for a half century-old claim that could never be corroborated.

It is difficult to measure this story against what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis when a history of previous excessive force complaints in a police file were kept under wraps until someone paid with his life.

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Notes from Father Gordon MacRae:

1. Many thousands of readers have been circulating last week’s post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.” Thousands in Washington, Chicago, New York and Boston have read that post. If you wish to send a printed copy to your bishop or anyone else, we have created a five-page pdf version that is printable.

   We have also created a pdf with the name and address of every U.S. Catholic Bishop.

2. Learn more about The Boston Globe’ s Spotlight coverage of the Catholic Church and the Best Picture Academy Award for the film, Spotlight. You may never watch the Oscars again after reading “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” by a courageous journalist, Joann Wypijewski, former Editor of The Nation. (It also sheds some much needed media light on my own travesty of justice.)

“Cardinal Sins in the Summer of Media Madness”

“Don’t Defund Police: Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption”

“The Exile of Fr. Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe”

“Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” by Joann Wypijewski

Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — Edith Stein — are honored this week as martyrs of charity and sacrifice.

In a post some years ago I invited our readers to join my friend Pornchai Moontri and me in a personal Consecration to Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s dual movements: the Militia of the Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross. Our Consecration took place at Mass on the night of August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day after Saint Maximilian’s Feast Day. Visit the website of the Militia of the Immaculata for instructions for enrolling in the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

We’re very moved by the number of people who have pledged to join us in this Consecration. The invitation remains always open.

Consecration as members of Saint Maximilian’s M.I. or Knights at the Foot of the Cross does not mean I plan to take on any more suffering or that I will never again complain. It does not even mean that I accept with open arms whatever crosses I bear and embrace them.

A person who is unjustly imprisoned must do all in his power to reverse that plight just as a person with cancer must do everything possible to be restored to health. Consecration does not mean we will simply acquiesce to suffering and look for more. It means we embrace the suffering of Christ, and offer our own as a share in it. In the end, I know I cannot empty myself, as Christ did, but I can perhaps attain the attitude of “Simon of Cyrene: Compelled to Carry the Cross,” of which my own is but a splinter.

I have written in the past that history has a tendency to treat its events lightly. The centuries have made Saint Patrick, for example, a sort of whimsical figure. History has distorted the fact that he became the saint he is after great personal suffering. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, forced from his home and family, taken across the Irish Sea and forced into slavery.

The life and death of Saint Maximilian are still too recent to be subjected to the colored glasses through which we often view history and sainthood. As with nearly all the saints — and with some of us who simply struggle to believe — great suffering was imposed on Maximilian Kolbe and he responded in a way that revealed a Christ-centered rather than self-centered life. What happened to Father Maximilian Kolbe must not be removed from what the Germans would call his “sitz im leben,” the “setting in life” of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. As evil as they were, they were the forges in which Maximilian cast off self and took on the person of Christ.

Scene from the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust”

“And the Winner Is . . .”

Do you remember the television “mini-series” productions of the 1970s and 1980s? After the great success of bringing Alex Haley’s “Roots” to the screen, several other forays into history were aired in our living rooms. One of them was a superb and compelling series entitled “Holocaust” that debuted on NBC on April 16, 1978. It was a brilliant and powerful example of television’s potential.

“Holocaust” won several Emmy Awards for NBC in 1978 for outstanding Limited Series, Best Director (Marvin Chomsky), Best Screenplay (Gerald Green), Best Actor (Michael Moriarty), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and a number of Supporting Actor and other awards. As a historical narrative, however, “Holocaust” was deeply disturbing and shook an otherwise comfortable generation all too inclined to want to forget and move on. That was a complaint during the famous Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

Just two years after the Allied Invasion of Germany and Poland ended the war and exposed the Death Camps, writers complained that Americans had lost interest and were not reading about the Nuremberg Trials. The aftermath of war revealed the sheer evil of the Nazi Final Solution, and it was more than most of us could bear to look at — so many did not look.

As I wrote in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” there are some who would have you believe that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the 20th Century. Viewing “Holocaust” (the miniseries) would quickly shatter any such revisionist history. Its first episode was so graphic in its depiction of Nazi oppression, and caused me so much anguish, that I struggled with whether to watch the rest.

I was 25 years old when it first aired, and finishing senior year at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in New Hampshire. I was a double major in philosophy and psychology, and was in the middle of writing my psychology thesis on the relationship between trauma and depression when “Holocaust” kept me awake all night.

The morning after that first episode, I sought out a friend, an elderly Benedictine monk on campus who recommended the series to me. I thought he might tell me to turn my television off, but I was wrong. “This happened in my lifetime,” he said. “We cannot run from it. So don’t look away. Stare straight into its heart of darkness, and never forget what you see.”

He was right, and his words were eerily similar to those of biographer, George Weigel, who wrote of Pope John Paul II and his interest in Saint Maximilian Kolbe in Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999):

Maximilian Kolbe . . . was the ‘saint of the abyss’ — the man who looked into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.

— Witness to Hope, p. 447

That was what the Holocaust was: “the modern heart of darkness.” I have been a student of the Holocaust since, but I am no closer to understanding it than I was on that sleepless night in 1978. As I asked in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich”:

“How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?”

We have all been reading about the breakdown of faith in Europe, and about how decades-old scandals are now being used to justify the abandonment of Catholicism in European culture. This is not a new phenomenon. This madness engulfed Europe just eighty years ago, and before it was over, six million of our spiritual ancestors were deprived of liberty, and then life, for being Jews.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” exterminated fully two-thirds of the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe — and millions of others who either stood in his way or spoke the truth. Among those imprisoned and murdered were close to 12,000 Catholic priests and thousands more women religious and other Catholics. The determination to rid Europe of the Judeo-Christian faith did not begin with claims of sexual abuse, and this is not the first time such claims were used to further that agenda.

The Great Lie and Revealed Truth

This of all weeks keeps me riveted on the Holocaust.  It was in this week that two of my dearest spiritual friends were murdered a year apart at Auschwitz by that madman, Hitler, and his monstrous Third Reich.  Father Maximilian Kolbe traded his life for that of a fellow prisoner on August 14, 1941, and Edith Stein — who became Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — was dragged from a cattle train and murdered along with her sister, Rosa, immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

We must not forget this line from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Ch.10, 1925): “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In order for a lie to disseminate and prevail, the truth must be controlled. In 1933, the Third Reich imposed the “Editor’s Law” in Germany requiring that editors and publishers join the Third Reich’s Literary Chamber or cease publishing. In 1933 there were over 400 Catholic newspapers and magazines published in Germany. By 1935 there were none.

The Nazi law was imposed in each country invaded by the Reich. In Poland, Father Maximilian was one of many priests sent to prison for his continued writings, but time in prison did not teach him the lesson intended by the Nazis. He was imprisoned again, and he would not emerge alive from his second sentence at Auschwitz. He was not alone in this. Nearly 12,000 priests were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

“Come, Let Us Go For Our People.”

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family in Germany. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, l891. As a young woman, Edith broke her mother’s heart by abandoning her Jewish faith in adolescent rebellion. She was also brilliant, and it was difficult to win an argument with her using reason and logic. She was a master of both.

Edith received her doctorate in philosophy under the noted phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and taught at a German university when the Nazis came to power in 1933. During this time of upheaval, Edith converted to Catholicism after stumbling across the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. “This is the truth,” Edith declared after reading it through in one sleepless night. A few years after her conversion, Edith Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Germany taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Blessed by the Cross).

March 27, 1939 was Passion Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In response to a declaration of Adolf Hitler that the Jews would bring about their own extinction, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote a private note to her Carmelite superior. She offered herself in prayer as expiation against the Anti-Christ who had cast all of Europe into a spiritual stranglehold. In her letter to her superior, Sister Teresa offered herself as expiation for the Church, for the Jews, for her native Germany, and for world peace.

As the Nazi horror overtook Europe, Sister Teresa grew fearful that she was placing her entire convent at risk because of her Jewish roots. Edith was then assigned to a Carmelite Convent in Holland. Her sister, Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism, joined her there as a postulant.

Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.

A 2010 book by Paul Hamans — Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz — details the horror of that day. Hundreds of Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland in retaliation for the bishops’ open rebellion, and most were never seen again. This information stands in stark contrast to the often heard revisionist history that Pope Pius XII “collaborated” with the Nazis through his “silence.” He was credited by the chief rabbi of Rome, Eugenio Zolli, with having personally saved over 860,000 Jews and preventing untold numbers of deaths.

The last words heard from Sister Teresa as she was forced aboard a cattle car packed with victims were spoken to her sister, Rosa, “Come, let us go for our people.” On August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa emerged from the cramped human horror of that cattle train into the Auschwitz Death Camp to face The Sorting.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described The Sorting:

“How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukranian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And because I’m a writer and teacher, I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that.”

That August 9th, Edith Stein went no further into the depths of Auschwitz than The Sorting. Some SS officer glared at this brilliant 50-year-old nun in the tattered remains of her Carmelite habit, and declared that she was not fit for work. This woman who had worked every day of her life, who taught philosophy to Germany’s graduate students, who scrubbed convent floors each night, was determined to be “unfit for work” by a Nazi officer who knew it was a death sentence.

Edith and Rosa were taken directly to a cottage along with 113 others, packed in, the doors sealed, and they were gassed to death. Their remains, like those of Maximilian Kolbe a year earlier, went unceremoniously up in smoke to drift through the sky above Auschwitz. And Europe thinks it would be better off now without faith!

“Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simeon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib … The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness that is Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection.

“The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of everyone of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal.”

— Edith Stein/Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross