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.

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.”

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and the Gift of Life

There was once a Little Flower who became a spiritual giant. The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux inspired many souls. This is the story of just a few.

Back in September, 2013, I happened upon a FOX News interview of Megan Kelly with Miriam Ibrahim. You may remember her as the young Sudanese woman who was cast into a Sudan prison with a death sentence. Miriam’s “crime” was two-fold. She married a Catholic, and then refused to renounce her Christian faith and convert to Islam. In chilling words, she spoke of having to give birth to her second child with her ankles chained in that prison cell. Her story received worldwide attention.

The courage of Miriam Ibrahim is inspiring. Her being a Christian and marrying a Catholic were both crimes punishable by death in her Islamic country, and she was given three days to recant. The world responded, and many intervened, including Pope Francis. Miriam Ibrahim is an extraordinary woman of immense courage and faith. My heart leapt at this exchange:

Megan Kelly: “But why not just say what they wanted to hear to save your life?”

Miriam: “If I did that it would mean I gave up. It’s not possible because it’s not true. I have committed no crime.”

I wonder today about the story that will be told to her child whose life began with a death sentence in that Sudanese prison. The story makes me wonder about the gift of life, about how Miriam’s Islamic captors would so casually extinguish it in the name of Sharia law and justice. It makes me wonder about what Western Culture could learn from such courage rooted in the sanctity of life and freedom. It makes me wonder about the raw courage of Miriam’s “fiat” to suffer not for its own sake, but for the sake of a message to the world.

I did have an ironic laugh, however, at the conclusion of the interview. Miriam Ibrahim now lives about twenty miles away from the prison in which I write. Megan Kelly asked her what her life is like now living in New Hampshire. Miriam paused thoughtfully and said, “Well, it’s better than a Sudanese prison!”

On that note, I sometimes wonder what draws so many people to visit me in prison from beyond these stone walls week after week. I have never once dropped a completed post in the prison mailbox and walked away thinking it might inspire anyone. I don’t think it’s a result of false humility, or the power of prisons everywhere to stifle any evidence of self-respect. I just don’t think that what I write is particularly noteworthy. I guess a part of that comes from reading a lot. I read so much from writers I admire that I never feel that anything I write could ever measure up to them.

All of which makes me wonder why it is that so many others write about what I write. Father James Valladares, PhD in Australia wrote a book a decade ago entitled Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, about a third of the book references my writing at Beyond These Stone Walls. Then Dr. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League did the same in “Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae” at the same time. Both of them generated lots of responses from around the globe.

One of the memorable responses appeared at Freedom Through Truth, the blog of Michael Brandon writing from Canada. His post “From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love” is a reflection on Bill Donohue’s guest post that rivals anything I write in depth and understanding. Then a few days later Mr. Brandon posted “The Parable of the Prisoner,” a post about Pornchai Maximilian and me. I had to wait for that one to arrive by mail because the person who tried to read it to me by telephone sobbed all the way through it.

I was so inspired by what Michael Brandon wrote that I forgot it was about me! I am always struck by the number of people, like the talented Catholic writer behind Freedom Through Truth who read Beyond These Stone Walls and tell me they felt as though I were writing directly to them. I am also struck by the many letters, comments, and posts by other writers all expressing the thought that, had I not been in such straits in prison, they would not have been drawn to what I write.

Thorns Before a Rose

As I try to wrap my mind around that, don’t think for a moment that I actually know what I’m doing when I write. I do not. I just plod along casting outposts like messages in a bottle cast into the sea. I am not gifted with the insight into the meaning of suffering that God has given to those I admire, those whose writings I write about, such as Saint Padre Pio, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and this week, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

In “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor”, Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD described the nuts and bolts of this blog (Pornchai Max might say “more nuts than bolts”) and how she became its editor. When this blog first began in 2009, my first posts were brief, and handwritten because at the time I had nothing more in this prison cell to write with than a Bic pen and some lined paper. There are few posts from back then that are still read today. But one that is, and that remains one of my most read and most shared posts today, is about an ordinary encounter with an extraordinary young woman. That post is “A Shower of Roses,” and since this post appears on BTSW on the day after the Feast Day of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, I want to mention it again.

Readers may recall that back in 2013 my friend Pornchai Moontri and I took part in an “in-house” retreat based on the book 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Father Michael Gaitley. We recently featured an article about this from Felix Carroll in Marian Helper magazine, “‘Mary Is at Work Here’.” One evening during that retreat, our esteemed coordinator, Nate Chapman, mentioned that he had been awaiting a wonderful new book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God’s Holy Ones, by Scott Hahn (Image Books, 2014). I didn’t tell Nate that I had ordered that same book and it arrived just days before. One of its chapters is about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and Scott Hahn approached writing of her with the same trepidation I experienced:

“Her prodigy was her littleness – and, paradoxically, her littleness is so large that it can be frightening. For no other chapter in this book have I been so intimidated. For no other chapter have I stared so long at a blank page”

— Saints and Angels, p. 155

I know the feeling, Dr. Hahn! When I set out to write of Saint Thérèse, I was thoroughly intimidated as though my soul were but a tabula rasa — a blank slate — in the presence of pages that spoke volumes, Story of a Soul, in the Presence of God. I could not write of Saint Thérèse. I had no frame of reference with which to relate to someone whose footprint in this world was so small, yet one whose spiritual impact was so immense that Saint John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, one of the 33 spiritual giants of Church history.

I could not really write about Saint Thérèse at all. I could only write about a chance encounter between us, a moment in my own life that somehow intersected with Saint Thérèse. It’s a snapshot in my life as a priest that changed the way I view faith, hope, and suffering, the way I live life toward dying.

“A Shower of Roses” is the story of Michelle, a suffering and dying teenage girl. With fear and trembling as a young priest, I took the hand of this girl as she surrendered her life. As I look back across 42 years of a priesthood mired in suffering, I keep going back to that moment, for it is filled with meaning and with mysteries yet to be unraveled.

There was a moment in which Saint Thérèse took that girl’s hand from mine, and in doing so, left an impression of how her suffering was a conduit between the soul and God. Consider these words of Saint Thérèse in Story of a Soul, the diary of a young woman leaving this life:

“My heart was fired with an ardent desire of suffering… Suffering became my attraction; in it I found charms that entranced me —Suffering has held out its arms to me from my very entrance to Carmel, and lovingly have I embraced it… For one pain endured with joy… we shall love the good God more forever — Suffering united to love is the only thing that appears to me desirable in this Vale of Tears.”

Unlike Saint Thérèse, but like most of the rest of us, I have spent a lot of time and effort struggling against suffering in many forms. I am daunted and intimidated by this little saint and her Story of a Soul, the story of her simple acquiescence to God’s will that turns every moment of suffering into an instrument of grace. It is the story of extraordinary grace reaching into souls through ordinary things, and it still shakes the earth beneath my feet.

Sometime in this month that opens with the Feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, read anew and share with someone else “A Shower of Roses.”

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A Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Don’t stop here, Dear Readers. With all the is going on in the world, and going wrong with the world, it is not easy to keep a focus on all that really matters. So sometime today, this week, or this month come back here and read or reread a few gems, three of which were written by others, about the transformation of sacrificial suffering into glory:

A Shower of Roses by Fr Gordon MacRae

From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love by Michael Brandon

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor by Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD

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.”

Stones for Pope Benedict and the Rusty Wheels of Justice

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

February 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retroactive Guilt and Shame

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

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

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

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

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

Hope Is Its Own Fulfillment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Disappointments of the Past Haunt the Present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

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

Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance