Optimism: When Hope Springs Eternal

A decade after the priesthood scandal broke the hearts of many Catholics and the optimism of many priests, Fr. James Valladares reminded us all of the gift of Hope.

July 29, 2026 by Father Michael P. Orsi with an Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae

Introduction

As most of the readers of this blog know, I was sent to prison with a life sentence in 1994 after refusing multiple plea deal offers to plead guilty in exchange for a one-to-two-year prison sentence. I would have been released from prison over 30 years ago had I actually been guilty, or at least willing to pretend so. It is the way more than 90 percent of trials in the United States are resolved in court. Those who gain their sense of Law and Order from the popular TV show of the same name are oblivious to the reality of this. I used to also be oblivious to what is today called “The Trial Penalty,” the implied threat that if you do not plead guilty you will spend the rest of your life in prison.

The first decade of my life in prison was the most painful, but not the only one that was painful. All hope had gone out of my world. The Church had gone out of my world, and took the priesthood with it. By some unknown mercy, I was spared the loss of my priesthood. I was never dismissed from the clerical state, a factor that I clung to as I grasped for any semblance of hope. Toward the end of that first decade, around 2003-2004, it got even worse. What had been a crisis in Boston and New Hampshire exploded onto the national stage and became a cause célèbre for contingency lawyers by the hundreds and scam artists by the thousands to bilk the Church out of more than $4 billion dollars in settlement of claims that never even saw the inside of a court room or heard the gavel of a judge. I wrote of this trend most recently in “Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism.”

As the news footage and newsprint dominated the scandal, I heard from some brother priests of my Diocese, but what I heard was merely condemnation. My Bishop’s office spokesperson, a monsignor who years later would serve his own prison sentence for financial crimes, filled in all the blanks in the public narrative with content about me and the case against me, which was entirely contrived and untrue, and for which he thought with surety that I would never actually see. Further down that deep well of hopelessness, I was alone in my grief.

Around 2000 or so, a celebrated Pulitzer Prize-wining journalist stepped on to the national media stage after quietly performing a forensic analysis of the case against me and its motives and aftermath. Suddenly there was an explosion of hope within me that no matter the outcome, the truth would finally be told on the most potent national stage, The Wall Street Journal.

But then, on September 11, 2001 — in the least of the tragedies of that day — came news that the offices of The Wall Street Journal were destroyed as the Twin Towers in the World Trade Center fell in New York City. Any optimism I had left fell along with them. All the research and content, electronic and otherwise, that had been amassed by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, was demolished. In January of 2002 came word that we would have to start over. I was not certain that I could.

What was supposed to have been written around 2001 became postponed indefinitely. The corrupt monsignor in my Diocese, who wore a second hat as the head of an organization representing insurance companies that moderated settlements, continued his campaign of misinformation, inflating the file of record with falsehood. Then, finally, in 2005 the hammer fell. The Wall Street Journal published its first of several articles under the broad heading, “The Trials of Father MacRae.” Other publications, such as The Media Report, picked up that story and ran with it. Our “Monsignor” fell into silence. A few years later Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus, along with the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, urged me to write giving birth to Beyond These Stone Walls. My stifled optimism was undergoing a breakout appearance in my heart and soul.

Then the unthinkable happened. A priest and psychologist, a celebrated author in Australia, also took up this story in a magnificent book, Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast. Father James Valladares, PhD is one of the most courageous and honorable priests I know.

While I was busy writing in prison for a blog the audience of which I could not see, Father Valladares was in Australia reading every word. When his book was published in 2012, I learned with a shock that he had been taking copious notes about my sacrificial priesthood, and he filled a significant number of his pages and chapters with the thoughts of my heart which he revealed. I was stunned, and I knew instantly that all those years of hopelessness were dedicated to the exposition of truth that will long outlive both Father Valladares and me. He gave his book a most hopeful title:

Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This book is very special. It was not a gift to me, but to the priesthood. I recently wrote to Father Valladares about the status of his research and his book. He very generously gave me the entire book in electronic format so that we could publish his chapters one by one as an occasional post at Beyond These Stone Walls. And so we begin this week with the Foreword to Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast. The Foreword is brilliant. It was written by Father Michael P. Orsi, then of Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida. It contains the most hope I have seen or heard in a very long time.

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Foreword by Reverend Michael P. Orsi, Ave Maria School of Law

The clergy abuse scandal has posed the greatest threat to the traditional understanding of the Catholic priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. Now, as then, the deadliest attacks are coming from within the Church. In an attempt to ameliorate a system that allowed a small minority of the clergy to violate children and the gross negligence of some bishops who recycled these predators, the American bishops instituted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. It is, unfortunately, doing the Church more harm than good.

By adhering to the Charter’s provisions, the American hierarchy has unwittingly undermined the Church’s sacramental theology regarding Holy Orders and her ecclesiology, which depends on a priest’s relationship with his bishop. This breakdown has encouraged present-day Modernists, who believe the truth is culturally conditioned and that the Faith is based merely on sentimentality, to try to remake the Church according to their own lights. Intra-ecclesial groups like Future Church, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have subsequently formed, challenging the hierarchical nature of the Church, her infallible teaching on the male-only priesthood, and the Western tradition of priestly celibacy.

A major factor responsible for a large number of the sex abuse cases, according to the 2011 John Jay College of Criminology Report to the bishops, is attributed to the sexual confusion which reigned in society and the Church in the 1960s and 1970s. The teaching of moral relativism and the acceptance of popular psychological theories over traditional theological principles led to the excess of bad behavior during this period. No doubt bad thinking led to bad actions. The lesson is that orthodoxy is necessary for orthopraxis.

The Dallas Charter was a response to the deep regret felt by the bishops for the perverse crimes that had occurred against minors and a recognition that strong safeguards must be in place to protect them. But the remedies that they enacted were influenced by the secular solutions of lawyers and public relations experts, which compromised the Gospel. They do not reflect justice, charity, and forgiveness toward priests. Dangerous procedural measures, such as administrative leave, zero tolerance, and one-size-fits-all policy for accused priests and for punishing malefactors have lent themselves to violations of canonical due process and a mockery of time-tested principles of jurisprudence. This is especially evident when dioceses publish the names of defenseless deceased priests as sex abusers on their websites. But most egregious is the forced laicization imposed on those deemed to be guilty. This action clouds in the popular mind the permanency of the indelible character of Holy Orders conferred at ordination.

The present state of affairs has caused mistrust and fear in priest-bishop relationship. The collaboration of a priest with his bishop is vital since he participates in the bishop’s priesthood. Bishops, who are supposed to be fathers, brothers, and friends to their priests, have instead become mere managers with institutional damage control as their top priority. Many priests have dubbed this the Caiaphas Principle. A recent survey in an unpublished dissertation found that most priests do not believe that they can count on the support of their fellow priests in the event of a false accusation, presumably out of fear of retribution from their bishop or from victims’ advocacy groups. This too is extremely dangerous because priests of the diocese form a presbyterate in union with their bishop. It has devastating pastoral consequences.

“Credible evidence,” the nebulous standard used by diocesan review boards, has effectively made priests guilty until proven innocent. This has forced priests to shy away from human interactions, especially expressions of pastoral warmth and concern, which were the hallmarks of Jesus’s public ministry. Now a fatherly touch may be interpreted as a sexual advance or an act of kindness toward a young person misconstrued as “grooming.” As one priest so poignantly stated, “If I meet a woman, I’m having an affair; if I meet a man, I’m gay; and, God forbid, if I’m with a child, I’m an abuser.” In the current climate, any human action of a priest is suspect. Naturally, this has had a devastating toll on the effectiveness of the ordained ministry.

In Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, Fr. James Valladares shows how justice and charity have been violated by some bishops in dealing with accused priests. He examines the pertinent canons that guide the Church’s justice system and finds that these are often ignored or wrongly applied. He provides true cases that highlight the injustice of the process and the agony of priests who have been subjected to the Charter’s draconian mandates.

The Church has incurred tremendous financial losses because of settlements rising from both legitimate and false claims. Her image has been marred by the secular media, which has taken advantage of the crisis. However, we often fail to understand how trivial these are in comparison to the damage done to the priesthood by the enactment of the Charter’s policies. This is the pressing issue that the bishops need to address.

The present scenario reported by Fr. Valladares is dark. Yet, he has surprisingly chosen a title for his book that speaks of hope. For sure, it is a hope based on Jesus’ words to his disciples, “I will be with you always.” Therefore, far from being pessimistic, Fr. Valladares presents the facts with confidence that “the truth will set us free.”

For his hard work, born out of a love for the priesthood and his brother-priests, Fr. James Valladares is to be commended.

Reverend Michael P. Orsi
Ave Maria School of Law
Naples, Florida
Fall 2011

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Related Links

Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound by Rev. Michael P. Orsi for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism Years

Due Process for Accused Priests by Father Gordon MacRae for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

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

A Modern Orthodox Jew on Preserving Hebrew and the Latin Mass

A conversation between Father Gordon MacRae and his friend, a Modern Orthodox Jewish scholar, has something to add to the debate about preserving Latin in the Mass.

July 22, 2026 by Seth Bader, J.D. with an Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae

Introduction

In the image above this post, Melchizedek, the Priest-King of Genesis 14, blesses Abraham with a sacrificial offering of bread and wine (The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek painted by Juan Antonio de Frias y Escalante in 1668, housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain).

The affairs of Rome have not been the only source of heat throughout the world in recent weeks. The winds of war have reached hurricane force, and the rule of law and authority in both Church and State clashes against public sentiment. And the weather has not cooperated at all. It is about 105 degrees inside this place on the day I write. None of this has been comfortable.

Back in 2021, I wrote a post entitled, “A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass.” This appears to be at or near the center of the SSPX revolt in the Church. You may have seen news recently that Pope Leo XIV is reported to have excommunicated the Society of Saint Pius X, a conservative sect of Catholicism. Adherents to the sect have also reportedly been excommunicated.

Most importantly, I have just been corrected in my perception of this by a well-known and prominent canonist who read my post with some alarm. The situation is not at all what is commonly understood. Pope Leo did not excommunicate the SSPX. Please read carefully these words from my canonist friend:

“Six men, the four new bishops and the two conservators, were excommunicated by the law itself, and the penalty was later “declared” by the Prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF).  A note issued by the DDF stated that the clergy of the SSPX were excommunicated because their adherence to the Society was an act of schism for which there is a latae sententiae excommunication.  That excommunication has NOT been declared, which means it is a matter of conscience for those affected. It has not entered the external forum and may be lifted through a confessor or directly through the Apostolic Penitentiary. The declared excommunication of the bishops is now public fact and is in the external forum.  As for the laity, they are excommunicated only if they adhere to the schismatic mentality.  It, too, is only in the internal forum. Mere attendance at the SSPX’s valid, but illicit, masses does not excommunicate them.”

The trigger for this action was that SSPX had elevated four bishops ordained without the approval of the Pope and outside the Laws of the Church.

I wrote a post a while back during the papacy of Pope Francis entitled, “Will Pope Francis Stand Against Catholic Schism?” Many of us are now left to wonder whether the nuclear option, excommunication, was the only step left. It raises many questions on both sides of the Liberal-Traditional divide in the Church. Now, here we are.

The title of a related post, “My Father’s House Has Many Rooms,” comes from the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, verse 2. It is seen by scholars as a reference to the Jerusalem Temple, hinting of its heavenly sanctuary, the dwelling place of angels and saints who worship in eternal liturgy. The Letter to the Hebrews describes it:

“You have come to Mount Zion, to the City of the Living God in the heavenly Jerusalem, to choirs of angels in festal gathering and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus, mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.”

— Hebrews 12:22-24

After I wrote that post, I asked a friend here to read it. He is an attorney, a prisoner, and a scholarly Modern Orthodox Jew. He responded by telling me that the Catholic controversy over Latin Mass is very similar to a controversy over the use of Hebrew in liturgy and prayers. I asked if he would develop a comment about that, and it turned into this post. What follows is from Seth Bader, J.D.

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In September of 2025, I happened to read an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal about the late Pope Francis and his effort to stamp out the Traditional Latin Mass, and the sadness and bitterness thereby engendered amongst Roman Catholics of conservative inclinations. That opinion piece got me to thinking about the over-a-century-old, and now largely forgotten, disputes within the Jewish community about the liturgical and conversational use of Hebrew.

By way of introduction, I am a lawyer and an amateur historian now in my middle sixties and incarcerated. I was raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew; my observance thereof as an adult leaves something to be desired. But I am working on it.

To start with, brief descriptions of Latin and Hebrew are in order. They are both ancient languages. Latin ceased to be a national language in the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 400’s AD. Its offsprings, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, are all national languages to this day. The Latin alphabet is used in all western European languages. Latin is known today to scholars and to Roman Catholic priests, but I was shocked to learn that in seminaries it is barely taught at all today, but there are signs that this is changing. A recent resurgence of interest in the Traditional Latin Mass has had the effect of reviving interest in liturgical Latin among faithful Catholics and Tradition-minded priests.

Hebrew is a descendant of an extinct language, Phoenician, and is related to two other extinct languages, Aramaic and Syriac. It has some resemblance to Arabic. Its alphabet is unique. Hebrew ceased to be a national language after Israel lost its independence and became part of the Roman Empire. Hebrew remained in use among observant Jews for prayer and for reading the Scriptures.

In the middle to late 1800s, first in Europe and then in the United States, a movement known as the “Haskalah,” or Jewish Enlightenment, arose. That movement consisted of efforts by Jews to better fit into the surrounding non-Jewish communities while retaining core Jewish beliefs and customs. Such efforts included abandoning distinctively Jewish clothing, attending college, and conducting synagogue services in a modern language such as English, rather than Hebrew, among other things.

Three Jews who were products of the Haskalah changed the world, for better or for worse. They were Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. The Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed branches of Judaism all have their roots in the Haskalah. (Incidentally, Hasidic, or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, originated in Eastern Europe only about a century and a half before the Haskalah.)

The use of modern languages rather than Hebrew in Reform synagogues scandalized Modern Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox Jews to some extent, but never came close to causing a schism — to borrow a nonJewish expression — and is now generally tolerated on both sides of the linguistic divide. In part, that is because Judaism has no central authority comparable to the Papacy. And in part, that is because rabbinic teaching has long held that, while Hebrew is preferred for prayer and study of the Scriptures, any language may be used for those purposes by a Jew who knows no Hebrew (and many Reform Jews do not know Hebrew.) That said, it is utterly unthinkable that any authority in Judaism would bar the use of Hebrew in liturgy, prayer or study.

A second Hebrew-versus-modern language dispute arose in the early 20th century and has never quite died out. But has also never posed much of a threat to Jewish unity. That dispute arose from the Zionist movement, which sought — with eventual success — to reestablish a sovereign Jewish nation in the historical territory of the Land of Israel. The early Zionists, more than a century ago, sought to create a modern form of Hebrew, suitable for daily conversational use outside of synagogues. The Zionists succeeded in doing so, and millions of Israeli citizens now speak modern Hebrew as their primary language.

I rather like Father MacRae’s treatise, “My Father’s House Has Many Rooms” and his explanation therein of the “Sensus Fidelium,” the sense of the faithful in practice and belief over many generations of the past. They constitute the vast majority, not in place of papal authority but in support of it. Such inclusion of the generations of the past is very similar to the beliefs and practice of Orthodox Judaism.

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Seth Bader earned undergraduate degrees in physics and history at the City University of New York, and his Juris Doctor degree from Hofstra University School of Law.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I thank my friend Seth Bader for this learned contribution to our discussion about the role of Latin in the Mass. There is much more to learn about the links between modern and ancient times in Salvation History. You may like these related posts:

A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass

My Father’s House Has Many Rooms. Is There a Room for Latin Mass?

Iran, by Another Name, Was Once the Savior of Israel

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse
This post will be added to our feature presentation of “The Bible Speaks.”

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.”

Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism

‘Spotlight’ was a heavily biased film about The Boston Globe coverage of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. The problem with a spotlight is its narrowly focused beam.

July 15, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“prostituted — to use something valuable in a way that is not appropriate or respectable and especially in the pursuit of money.”

— From Merriam Webster’s Dictionary

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The Boston Globe’s pursuit of this story needed a floodlight and not a spotlight. I had a strange experience with the Globe’s coverage in this regard. In 2003 it carried a brief story about a Springfield, Massachusetts couple, Dominic and Briana Martin, who were arrested for a scam attempt involving an elderly local priest. The Martins engaged him in a series of emails about allegations of abuse and then threatened to make the allegations public unless the priest left a sum of money in a brown paper bag in the newspaper kiosk of a local restaurant. The frightened priest, who never had any kind of allegation against him, complied. Then came a second demand, but this time the police set up a sting of their own. They arrested the Martins and charged them with felony extortion.

The Globe seemed to be keeping this story buried and off the Front Page lest it turned some heads relative to the Globe’s ongoing coverage of alleged sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It was just a matter of time before the Globe and other media dropped the word “alleged” from the coverage.

As I read about the Martins extortion racket, I learned only in the last few sentences that Dominic Martin had acquired a new name in the later 1980s. The Globe reported that he was previously known as Todd F.X. Biltcliff, a name I immediately recognized as a person who had accused a priest in my diocese, then received a financial settlement. This was likely not the Martins first attempt at such extortion, but my letter to the Globe reporter and editor went unanswered. No one at the Globe had any interest in exploring this thread any further.

The Boston Globe’s own cashflow problems desperately needed a sordid story to exploit. In 1993, The New Times purchased The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in cash and stock. It was the most expensive newspaper acquisition in U.S. history. By 2013 the Times had launched a search for a buyer for the Globe, which turned out to be a massively losing proposition. The Times finally unloaded the Globe for $70 million. It was a loss of $1.03 billion from its initial investment or, more bluntly, the Globe was sold for less than 10 cents on the dollar from what the Times initially paid for it. The newspaper industry tends not to flout its own foibles, so few people were aware of the massive loss incurred by The New York Times.

In the few years after The Boston Globe’s one-sided exposé of the Archdiocese of Boston, the newspaper’s decline became more evident. In 2016 while the Globe was covering the story of its Spotlight team, and the Best Picture Academy Award the film, “Spotlight” had won, the subscriber list was 115,000 for the daily editions and 205,000 for The Sunday Globe alone. The Alliance for Audited Media today reports a dismal drop in readership down 52 percent since 2019 to a low of 45,000 daily readers of the Globe.

The notion that the Globe was bringing Roman Catholicism to its knees was highly exaggerated. Currently, 24 percent of Greater Boston’s adult population self-reports as Roman Catholic. This is higher than the national average of 19 percent. Combining all other Christian denominations under one umbrella, the Globe claims a 45 percent readership, while 41 percent report no affiliation with any religion at all. Though the Globe’s coverage of Catholic scandal and the scandal itself did indeed cause damage, only a small minority cite the story today as a cause for leaving the Church.

The Globe’s one-sided pursuit of this story drove Cardinal Bernard Law out of Boston and into retirement, but this was greatly exaggerated as being “to evade prosecution.” He was accused of poor judgment, but not of breaking any law. There was a good deal of injustice in the coverage of this story, and I wrote about it once in “Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights.”

My Spotlight Oscar Hangover

This prison in which I am a guest of the State of New Hampshire has a weekend movie program that broadcasts DVD films (mostly donated) each week from Friday through Sunday. I was initially dismayed to see on the posted movie list that ‘Spotlight’ was slated for four prime time showings here. The details of how I came to be in this prison were told by a far greater news outlet and a far less biased news reporter, who was also awarded a Pulitzer for her series of articles. This one was titled, “The Trials of Father MacRae” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (WSJ, May 13, 2013). There were other articles as well in coverage of this story by The Wall Street Journal, but I do not want to make this about my plight.

‘Spotlight,’ you recall, is a film about The Boston Globe’s Spotlight exposé of the priesthood scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. For political as opposed to journalistic reasons, it won “Best Picture” at the 2016 Academy Awards.

I watched “Spotlight” twice because I wanted to be fair and just, and if I were wrong in my judgments of the film and the motivations behind it, I wanted to revisit them. Having sat through the film twice in a single weekend, however, I won’t be retracting anything. To be honest, I actually liked the film. Having grown up in Boston, the landscape and politics of it were more than familiar. What was not familiar, and highly distorted, was the film’s presentation of the Catholic Church and the scandal that took place against the background of the sexual revolution in America, a scandal that had invaded every institution while media coverage was highly selective. Maybe it was just that I knew the subject matter from another perspective, and knew all the players, at least by reputation, from multiple angles, so the film was a very fast two hours for me.

But the film also contained some very troubling distortions. It glorified the journalists involved while casting doubt upon the integrity of just about everyone else. Some of its charges were accurate. For example, the film early on criticized the contingency lawyers who became millionaires by “turning sexual abuse into a cottage industry.” However, the Globe dropped the ball on this and let all the lawyers off the hook. That aspect of the story would go no further in media coverage. Today the Catholic Church in America, and only the Catholic Church, would be singled out for settlements to the tune of (so far) over $4 billion. The lawyers the Globe criticized became multimillionaires and the feeding frenzy at that trough continues unabated to this very day.

Early in the Globe’s coverage of the scandal, Church officials defended themselves by stating that the “non-disclosure” terms so criticized by the reporters were actually demanded by the contingency lawyers and accusers themselves. This was in large part true. In fact, in 2005 when The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote “A Priest’s Story” about my own case (WSJ, April 27, 2005), she got an urgent call from a lawyer for my diocese. His near panic was not over the fact that I, and perhaps some other priests, had been falsely accused, but that The Wall Street Journal had named names of accusers after the lawyers agreed to the non-disclosure demands. It was I who provided those names. I was never a party to any such agreement, and I would never publicly disclose the name of an actual victim of sexual abuse.

But the bigger scandal is that the Globe and it’s Spotlight Team did nothing to follow up on the role lawyers continued to play. That is one of the real coverups in this story and it continues. The film had clear allusions that Boston lawyer Eric MacLeish, for example, became wealthy representing claimants, filing demands, and keeping it all out of the news media before the Spotlight Team got hold of the story.

But when the story was over, and the Globe had its prize — the forced resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law — the spotlight stayed on the Church but left the lawyers alone to continue business as usual.

There was a big problem with The Boston Globe’s crusade. It made no distinction whatsoever between real crimes with real evidence and mere accusations with real fraud behind them. The ‘Spotlight’ film glossed over this, treating every claim without question as demonstrably true. In her bold article, “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ is a Terrible Film” (which also profiled my own case) journalist JoAnn Wypijewski taught the Spotlight Team a lesson in journalistic integrity:

“I am astonished that, across the past few months, ever since ‘Spotlight’ hit theatres, otherwise serious left-of-center people have peppered their conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we need more of… What editor Marty Baron and the Globe sparked with their 600 stories and their confidential tip line for grievances was not laudatory journalism, but a moral panic, and unfortunately for those telling the truth, truth was its casualty.”

— JoAnn Wypijewski, CounterPunch

Well after the Globe Spotlight Team criticized the lawyers for turning abuse into a “cottage industry,” David F. Pierre, Jr. of TheMediaReport.com followed up with his book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, exposing what “business as usual” looked like beyond the glare of the Globe’s Spotlight:

“A year later, in 2002, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, faced accusations from 62 individuals. Rather than spending the time and the resources looking into the merits of the accusations, ‘Diocesan officials did not even ask for specifics such as dates and specific allegations for the claims,’ New Hampshire’s Union Leader reported. ‘Some victims made claims in the past month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days,’ reported the Nashua Telegraph [quoting lawyer Peter Hutchins]. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’ a pleased and much richer plaintiff attorney admitted.”

— Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, p. 80

David F. Pierre, Jr.’s book has a chapter analyzing five categories of false accusations against priests: 1. The “repressed memory” accusation; 2. The “dead priest” accusation; 3. The “me too” accusation; 4. Simple criminal fraud; and 5. Psychological illness. The above scenario with plaintiff lawyers bringing claims unfiled in any court, and church lawyers offering settlements with absolutely no findings of facts while hiding the names of accusers, was all placed by David F. Pierre, Jr. in the category of “simple criminal fraud.” The Globe Spotlight Team might have noted this too had it taken a moment to focus its spotlight just a little off the real target of its crusade.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Another journalist of outstanding integrity also covered this story with truth and justice in 2016. It was published at CounterPunch then, but I am reprinting it here with permission of the author. It is more or less an autopsy of “Spotlight.” Though I never appeared in the film, I have a prominent role in its autopsy. We published it anew in our “Voices from Beyond” feature. Justice requires that we give equal time to “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

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.”

Fr Richard Drabik Introduced Divine Mercy to Saints and Villains

Fr Richard Drabik, MIC, my longtime spiritual director and friend who wrote the Preface to the Diary of Saint Faustina, passed into Divine Mercy on July 4, 2026.

July 8, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Let the greatest sinners place their trust in My mercy. They have the right before others to trust in the abyss of My mercy . . . To such souls I grant even more graces than they ask. I cannot punish even the greatest sinner if he makes an appeal to My compassion, but on the contrary, I justify him in my unfathomable and inscrutable mercy.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 1146

In April of 1993, my friend Father Richard Drabik and I both served on the staff of the Servants of the Paraclete Spiritual and Psychological Renewal Center for priests. Father Drabik was at the time preparing to go to Rome to concelebrate with Pope John Paul II the Mass of Beatification of Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, now known as Saint Faustina, the Saint of Divine Mercy. Her Beatification took place on the Sunday after Easter that year, and Pope John Paul II decreed that henceforth that Sunday would be universally known in the Roman Calendar as Divine Mercy Sunday.

Father Richard Drabik was formerly Provincial Superior of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. He wrote the Preface to the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska that has become globally famous. Just before leaving for her Beatification in Rome in 1993, Father Drabik stopped by my office to invite me to write a brief prayer, which would be placed on the altar by Pope John Paul during the Offertory in the Mass for Beatification. I did not know what to write, so on the day of my friend’s departure I handed him a small scrap of paper to place with his intentions for the Mass. I folded it and sealed it in a small envelope that would fit easily in his breast pocket.

No one ever knew what I wrote. The note with my petition was simple: “I ask for the intercession of Blessed Faustina that I may have the courage to be the priest God calls me to be.” It was an odd petition, and today I have no idea what I was thinking about when I wrote it and handed it to Father Drabik on his way out the door.

Exactly two weeks after the Beatification of Sister Faustina, on May 3, 1993, police showed up at my door. They carried with them a secret indictment and a warrant for my arrest for claims alleged to have occurred sometime between 1978 and 1983, ten to fifteen years earlier. They were the claims for which I faced trial and was summarily sent to prison as Ryan A. MacDonald wrote in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Those claims of abuse never took place at all, but I will always remember the words of a police detective as the officers took me away despite my denials: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty. Your Church is!” It was a scene reminiscent of another era I wrote of in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

The detective’s words could just as easily have been heard in Sister Faustina’s own World War II-era Poland as Father Maximilian Kolbe and many other priests were led off to prison on trumped up charges.

Divine Mercy Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

Last April 9, I turned 73 years old in prison. I was 41 years old when I was sent to prison, and was in my twenties when my fictitious crimes were alleged to have been committed. I will be age 108 when I next see freedom. The process of reopening a case alleged to have occurred over 30 years ago, and which never contained any evidence to debunk or attack, is a grueling uphill battle. If there is any hope at all for freedom and justice, it is vague hope. It is a hope that exists on the other side of an abyss.

Astute readers remember that I was given several opportunities before my trial to plead guilty and serve only one year in prison. I simply could not fathom doing this. Many years later, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Wall Street Journal, took up this case for investigation. She reported that she questioned the detective about the absolute lack of any corroborating evidence. The detective was reported to have said, “Why didn’t he just take the deal?” In a five-minute video interview years later, Ms. Rabinowitz summed up the true nature of this matter.

The readers of Beyond These Stone Walls have helped in so many ways to show us the face of Divine Mercy. Your reading BTSW has given me a global voice when having any voice at all is usually denied to any priest so accused. And having a voice is also often denied to prisoners, as a class of American citizens stripped of rights, including the right to vote. I do not use my access to this voice just to whine about prison conditions. That would be a waste. Instead, I try to employ this voice as an extension of my priesthood, one that is influenced and encapsulated, even defined, by Divine Mercy.

Earlier in my years in prison, my old friend and spiritual director, Father Richard Drabik, visited me. He did so until age and distance made such visits no longer possible. During one of his visits after my publishing began in 2009, I asked him if he had seen the blog that I write from prison, but have never seen. Being a prisoner, I also had no sense of its reach or impact. “It isn’t a blog,” Father Richard said. “It’s a bullhorn!”

Later, the community of Marians of the Immaculate Conception at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy took up the slack. They came with an invitation to me and other prisoners to take part in a great Divine Mercy adventure. For some, it became the most important part of our lives here. This was especially so for my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, whose life story was captured by Felix Carroll in the book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Pornchai’s story is well known around the world now thanks to the efforts of Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Dr. Donohue invited Pornchai to write his story in his own words. The result was published by the Catholic League as “Pornchai’s Story.” In just four pages, it was powerful and phenomenal. Pornchai was oppressed by the thought that at the end of his own prison sentence he would be deported to Thailand where he no longer knew anyone or had any support at all. Pornchai had been taken from Thailand against his will at age 11, and now would be left there alone at age 47. It was a chilling thought for Pornchai, and also for me. I assured him that we would find a way to build a bridge to Thailand.

Divine Mercy, being what it is, created a roadmap for Pornchai. Father Richard, who was deeply moved by Pornchai’s Story, shared it with others who became links in a chain. One of them was the late Father Seraphim Michalenko, Vice Postulator for the cause of Sainthood for Saint Faustina. He ended up in Thailand meeting with a group called Divine Mercy Thailand. Father Seraphim went there armed with a copy of the Diary of Saint Faustina and a copy of Pornchai’s Story, which he read in English to the assembled group. Suddenly, our bridge to Thailand was built.

Felix Carroll also wrote a wonderful article for Marian Helper Magazine entitled, “Mary Is at Work Here.” The truth of that is today without question.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post about my great good friend and mentor in the priesthood, Father Richard Drabik, MIC. Don’t misunderstand the opening quote here in this post. Only God knows whether Father Richard is a saint, but he was certainly no villain. He spent a lifetime reaching out to them, however, and reeling them in to show them the Light of Divine Mercy. That was what I liked most about my friend, and what I most try to emulate. You might find his enduring presence in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Pornchai’s Story

A Priest and Prisoner in the Light of Divine Mercy

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

I greatly treasure the image atop this post. Father Richard’s smile is now engraved upon my heart.

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.”

America Turns 250, but This Is Not the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

The United States of America was born on the Fourth of July in 1776. There is no greater tribute to this Land of the Free than the words of its National Anthem.

July 1, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I have been pondering what to write as the nation in which I write marks 250 years in existence on the world stage. All thoughts kept bringing me back to our National Anthem and a reflection on it that I wrote in 2023. This nation and the entire free world were finally emerging then from the global Covid pandemic. Perhaps I needed more time to write of this then because our very freedom had been on the chopping block in both Church and State. We had surrendered far too much. So in this post I want to further examine the National Anthem, all four stanzas of it, three of which most of us do not even know. And then finally I want to add a reflection by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who gave us some very candid and pointed thoughts about the nature of freedom and what we stand to lose if we allow it to be set aside.

Readers in the United States may recognize the second part of my title this week as a line from the Star-Spangled Banner, our National Anthem: “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.” It was composed during a battle in the War of 1812. Thirty-six years after the American Revolution in 1776, the War of 1812 was called by some the Second War for American Independence.

In 1814, two years into the war, a British warship bombarded Fort McHenry in the Port of Baltimore. The part of the text of the famous poem that became our National Anthem was composed on the spot by American lawyer and poet, Francis Scott Key. He was aboard a British frigate under a flag of truce to negotiate the release of a prisoner. While aboard, a fierce battle broke out between British and American warships.

As the smoke of battle cleared at dawn, Francis Scott Key was so inspired by the sight of an American flag still intact aboard a battered U.S. ship that he wrote down what he saw. His “Star-Spangled Banner” appeared in a Baltimore newspaper. Then its first stanza was set to music to the tune of a popular pub drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” It became the National Anthem of the United States by an act of Congress only on March 3, 1931.

Few people seem to know that the famous poem that inspired the U.S. National Anthem had four stanzas. Only the first was set to music. Nonetheless, at age eight I was one of four fourth grade students required by our teacher, Miss McNeil, to each memorize a stanza for an Independence Day school assembly. I was fortunate enough to draw the first stanza which was the most familiar and easiest to memorize. I remember imagining at the time that Miss McNeil might actually have been present when Francis Scott Key composed the text in 1814:

“Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there .
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

“On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposed,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half concealed, half disclosed?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
’Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“Oh! Thus be it ever, when free men shall stand
Between their beloved home and war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

— Francis Scott Key, 1814

Independence Day and the State of Our Freedom

Not to abruptly change the subject, but for this 250th Anniversary of Independence Day, I want to examine what the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has done with our cherished freedoms. When I first wrote of this in 2023, we were still frozen in place, despite it being summer, over the politics of a pandemic. Freedom was never free, so justice requires that we honor it.

In observance of our Nation’s 250th Anniversary, Catholic League President Bill Donohue published a brief but brilliant essay, “Religious Roots of American Freedoms.” It was a stark reminder of what we stood to lose, or lose sight of, during the dark days of the Covid pandemic. We went awry over those years when the threat was not so tangible a thing as bombs dropping, but rather the tiniest of things: a virus that emerged in China.

Lest someone take umbrage with that last thought, the evidence now seems much clearer that Covid originated from a laboratory, though likely by accident, in Wuhan, China. That said, I must remind myself and all of us that China is the Peoples’ Republic, but Covid was not the peoples’ pandemic. The good people of China live under the hammer of an oppressive communist regime. The people of China had nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic nor with their government’s response to it. I wrote of that response in “Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media.”

What I find so ironic, however, is not what China did with it, but with what America did, and by that I mean all of America. Perhaps the best commentary on the state of our post-pandemic freedom as we emerged from three-plus years of government Covid policy is a statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. It was published on May 18, 2023 in a Supreme Court Order halting a lawsuit filed to continue Title 42. If you have not heard or read this before, it is because the free press suppressed it. The statement is a bold assessment of post-pandemic truth:

“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of the United States. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.

“They threatened violators not just with civil penalties, but with criminal sanctions as well. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

“Federal executive officials entered the act too, and not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace safety agency to issue a vaccine mandate for working Americans. They threatened to fire non-compliant employees and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

“At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another.”

— Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, May 18, 2023

Churches, Casinos and Liquor Stores

At a time of intense public anxiety, churches were deemed “non-essential” by government officials in many states. Justice Gorsuch pointed out above that state government officials “closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.” In New Hampshire, where I am a guest of the State, churches were forced to remain closed even while all the liquor stores remained open — even on Sunday. No one pointed out that in New Hampshire, the State owns all the liquor stores.

But the saddest oppression came later. When constitutional civil rights lawsuits in various states succeeded through the courts in reopening churches with reasonable safeguards, some of our own Catholic bishops instantly replicated the heavy hand of government to keep them closed and inaccessible. On June 10, 2020, I posted “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.” My own Bishop issued a chilling decree.

“As Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester understanding my responsibility to issue liturgical norms by which all are bound (Canon 838:3), I hereby decree the public celebration of Mass remains suspended ... until such time as I deem it prudent to modify [this] decree.”

In a state that led the nation in opioid overdose deaths among young people (and still does) deaths by overdose substantially outpaced deaths by Covid ten to one. The closure of churches never took into consideration the hopelessness to which it contributed. The year of the Bishop’s decree saw 250 deaths statewide from Covid. All but 65 of its victims succumbed in nursing homes where government failed to protect the elderly. In contrast, the same period saw 2,500 fatal overdoses from street drugs.

In some areas, Masses were relocated to online only and the reception of Communion became impossible. When court challenges opened up churches, some state governments — and later even some bishops — required Catholics who chose to attend Mass to register their name, address, and signature at the church door. This was not the Nazi occupation of Poland. This was the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Some priests were removed from ministry for openly defying these edicts. One priest friend famously challenged his bishop’s edict to “Just do it in the Parking Lot,” by responding “No. And … Hell no.”

In a Wall Street Journal / NORC poll published in April, 2023, 39-percent of Americans reported that religion was “very important” to them. This was down from 48-percent just four years earlier in 2019 before the pandemic. In 1998, this figure was 62-percent. Covid had the effect of accelerating a pre-pandemic trend in which Christians, and especially Catholics were slowly becoming disenfranchised from the practice of their faith. Even after Covid this trend continued as the Catholic hierarchy barred Catholics from the observance of Latin Mass, and even from kneeling to receive the Eucharist.

In March, 2023, the Pew Research Center released a study reporting that the percentage of U.S. adult Christians who participated in worship at least once per month was 43-percent. This was down from a pre-pandemic report of 49% in 2019. However, 22-percent of the respondents in 2023 reported that their “participation” was either online or on television. Of interest, Catholic parishes that kept congregations engaged throughout the pandemic using social media and streaming parish services to their own parishioners have retained more of their communicants than Catholic parishes that just rode the wave and remained closed.

The great downside to streaming Catholic Masses online is that it habituated the practice of many faithful to take part in worship without reception of the Eucharist which is central to the Mass and to the identity of Catholics.

An interesting story developed out of China while American Christians wrangled with our post-pandemic commitment to faith. All 63 members of an Evangelical Chinese Christian congregation escaped communist China, the first parish ever to do so en masse. In response to increasing oppression by the Chinese communist government, the entire parish community fled China, first to South Korea, then to Thailand, and then to the United States.

Aided by Freedom Seekers International, a Texas nonprofit that helps people flee religious persecution, the group submitted applications to the United Nations Refugee Agency in Bangkok. Having overstayed their Thai travel visas by one year, the group had to be deported, but Thai police worked with the U.S. State Department to deport them not back to China, but to Tyler, Texas.

The Chinese communist government viewed the church as illegal and threatened to shut it and its religious school down. Rather than risk the loss of their faith community, the 63 members of this small congregation decided unanimously to preserve their faith and flee their country. Here in America, we have never faced the forced choice between God and country.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts about freedom:

Religious Roots of American Freedoms by William A. Donohue, PhD

The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media

Latin Mass and Altar Rails Are Under Siege in North Carolina

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.”

An AI Analysis of Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

The April 18, 2000 murder of Pornchai Moontri’s mother, Wannee, on the Island of Guam still cries to Heaven for justice. This new AI forensic review provides hope.

June 24, 2026 by xAI Grok

Writing for The Wall Street Journal on November 7, 2025, Mike Cherney penned an insightful essay entitled, “A Campaign to Make Guam the 51st State Is Gaining Traction.” To help make the case, the author cites the geopolitical strategic importance of Guam:

“As US competition with China intensifies, the Pentagon is building up Guam as a hub for its security strategy in the Pacific. It is upgrading bases, moving more troops to the island and building a multibillion-dollar missile defense system to guard against a possible Chinese attack.”

I have long had a personal interest in the affairs of Guam as recent articles published on this site reveal. Hovering in the dim distance in the background of this important story about the political status of Guam is another story that impacts the public image of Guam and its people. From my standpoint, any ambition for statehood or major changes in the US administration of Guam must first address a lurking problem in the administration of justice. That problem was laid out in a November 7, 2021, Guam Daily Post report on the extraordinary number of Guam’s unsolved ‘cold-case’ homicides.

At the time of that writing, there were 103 unsolved murders on Guam’s list. One of them should be a great concern to our readers. Number 70 on that list is the as-yet-unsolved murder of Pornchai Moontri’s mother, Wannee, who was beaten to death in Guam at age 47. All the elements of that shocking crime were exposed by me in a 2022 article at this site entitled, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

My article circled the globe moving many hearts about this tragic story. What it failed to move was the administration of justice in Guam, which touts a new cold-case task force to investigate or reinvestigate the cases on this list.

In the four years since I wrote, “Getting Away with Murder,” many Guam residents have read and shared that account, but to no apparent avail.

Most recently, a reader submitted that article for a forensic review from the advanced AI model xAI Grok. The result was staggering, and I have decided to publish it here, in its raw form without any editing, as our weekly post. I am very open to suggestions about what we now do about this lingering grave injustice.

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xAI Grok Forensic Review of a Guam Cold-Case Homicide

xAI GROK:

Synopsis

The article, titled “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam” and written by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae (published September 14, 2022 on beyondthesestonewalls.com), examines the unsolved 2000 homicide of Wannee Laporn Bailey in Talofofo, Guam (Guam Police Department Cold Case #70). It frames the crime within the broader story of severe sexual and physical abuse inflicted on Wannee’s sons, Pornchai Moontri and Priwan Moontri, by their stepfather, Richard Alan Bailey. The piece argues that Bailey murdered Wannee shortly after their divorce was finalized, when she was pressing for the enforcement of court orders on alimony, asset division, and restitution. Wannee (age 47) was beaten to death; the autopsy showed broken ribs causing internal damage and a broken wrist (defensive wound). Bailey reportedly notified police that she was missing, then claimed to have found her body himself. The article contends that Guam authorities conducted an inadequate investigation at the time and that Bailey evaded accountability despite a clear motive tied to silencing Wannee and avoiding exposure of his abuse. Bailey was later convicted in Maine (2018) on 40 felony counts of gross sexual assault against the sons but received only probation and sex-offender registration — no prison time. The post calls for the case to be reopened with “new eyes,” highlighting systemic failures in Guam’s handling of cold cases (103 unsolved homicides noted in 2021 reporting).

Key Details Relevant to Investigation

• Victim: Wannee Laporn Bailey (née Laporn), Thai national, age 47 at death on April 18, 2000.

• Suspect Identified: Richard Alan Bailey (former Vietnam-era helicopter pilot, later FAA controller in Guam; resided in Westlake, Oregon as of the warrant period ~2017).

• Motive: Financial obligations from the divorce decree; preventing Wannee from exposing years of documented child sexual/physical abuse.

• Opportunity/Timeline: Bailey was in Guam; Wannee made a frantic call to her niece on the day of the murder with Bailey shouting in the background (recalled in a 2016 interview). The niece later reported Wannee saying words to the effect of “If I am found dead, Richard did it.” Bailey quickly sold property and left Guam after the death.

• Prior Conduct: Extensive 1989–1990 Maine records (Youth Center, DHS) document the sons’ abuse allegations; sheriff interviews with Bailey were superficial and did not include victim or witness statements. Bailey also sent a letter to the judge in Pornchai’s 1993 trial and allegedly had Wannee deliver threats to Pornchai in jail.

• Other Notes: Pornchai Moontri (the author’s friend and fellow prisoner at the time) was a victim of the abuse and later convicted in Maine of a separate 1993 homicide (influenced by trauma). No physical description of an unknown assailant is provided; the article focuses exclusively on Bailey as the perpetrator.

Assessment: Sufficient Information for Identifying a Person of Interest Under Current Professional Investigatory Standards?
Yes—decisively so.

Modern US law-enforcement standards (including those applicable in Guam as a US territory) for designating a person of interest in a cold-case homicide rely on reasonable suspicion supported by specific, articulable facts — not proof beyond a reasonable doubt or even probable cause for arrest. Factors typically weighed include motive, opportunity, means, prior similar conduct, witness statements, timeline alignment, and behavioral indicators. The article supplies all of these in detail and with verifiable documentary anchors (divorce decree, Maine abuse records from 1989–1990, autopsy findings, 2016 niece interview, Bailey’s 2018 Maine conviction). It explicitly names Richard Alan Bailey, provides his biographical identifiers, last known residence (Westlake, Oregon), and a clear circumstantial chain that would allow any competent investigator to:

1. Locate him (or confirm current status).

2. Obtain his criminal and civil records.

3. Re-interview living witnesses (niece, Pornchai, Priwan, Bailey’s sister).

4. Review preserved evidence (autopsy, original case file, divorce records).

This meets or exceeds the threshold used by agencies such as the FBI’s ViCAP or cold-case units for opening or prioritizing an investigation. Notably, the article itself cites a 2017 arrest warrant issued in Oregon based on the sons’ interviews — further evidence that law enforcement has already treated the information as actionable. The piece does not claim to be a formal police report; it is advocacy journalism. Professional investigators would still independently corroborate statements, seek any remaining physical/forensic evidence (DNA, if preserved), and rule out alternatives. However, nothing in the article is vague or anonymous; it supplies a fully identifiable suspect with a coherent investigative theory.

Additional Comments

The writing is clear, heavily sourced, and emotionally powerful, effectively linking Wannee’s death to decades of documented family trauma and institutional oversights (Maine authorities in the 1989–1990 period and Guam police in 2000). It raises legitimate questions about investigative diligence, especially given Guam’s high number of unsolved homicides and the fact that Bailey left the island quickly after the crime. As of 2026, public sources continue to list the case as unsolved, with no reported breakthroughs.

That said, the article is written from an advocate’s perspective (MacRae has long championed Pornchai Moontri’s cause). It relies heavily on accounts from the victims’ family, which, while credible and partially corroborated by official records, would require fresh, independent validation in a formal re-investigation. No new forensic breakthroughs or direct eyewitness testimony to the murder itself are presented — only strong circumstantial evidence.

Overall, this is a well-constructed public call to revisit a cold case that, on the facts presented, appears to have had a viable suspect from the outset. It would give any current Guam Police Department cold-case detective or federal partner (e.g., FBI Violent Crimes Against Children or cold-case task force) an immediate, named starting point for renewed inquiry. If the goal is justice for Wannee Laporn Bailey, the information here is more than sufficient to justify official action.

The House That Wannee Built

In the year 2000, after Wannee found the courage to divorce Richard Bailey on the Island of Guam and return to Thailand, she began building a small house on her family property where Pornchai was born. The partially built house in the photo above was the result of her dream to recover her sons and restore what had been taken from her. She had to stop work on the house in 2000 to return to Guam to seek the Court’s enforcement of its divorce rulings regarding restitution to Wannee and her family, Court rulings that Bailey simply ignored. She wanted the funds so she could complete the house for Pornchai to live in at some unforeseen future. She did not know she was going to her death.

Pornchai and Father John Le visited this house when Pornchai first arrived in Thailand after his deportation in 2020. He was only age two when he was abandoned in Thailand by his mother, who was unable to support him. Nine years later his mother returned, though he had no memory of her. She took him to live in Bangor, Maine, where his nightmare of physical and sexual trauma ensued. Wannee was determined to make up for that, but then her life was taken from her.

Pornchai is just now in the process of reclaiming his mother’s house. He is moving into it, in the village of Phu Wiang, where he was born. The house is not yet completely built and has been left dormant for 26 years. Pornchai hopes to complete his mother’s dream and bring it to fulfillment. There is much left to do. If any of our readers would like to assist him in this effort, please consult our “How to Help” page.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about restorative justice. Pornchai Maximilian Moontri now enters into a life of true freedom from the nightmares of the past.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

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

The Truth About Israel and the Truth About Hamas

A recent Wall Street Journal weekly ‘Review and Outlook’ editorial was “The Truth About Hamas.” It kept me awake, and our news media must no longer cover it up.

May 27, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

About the above image: “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” is an 1866 etching by Gustave Doré. It depicts a scene from the Book of Genesis (32:24-30). The Angel contends with Jacob’s strength, but the Angel is unmovable. In the end, the Angel gives Jacob a new name: “Isra-El,” a name which means “One who wrestles with God.”

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Sometime ago at Beyond These Stone Walls, we introduced the practice of publishing an occasional post from a voice other than my own. We created a platform for those posts called “Voices from Beyond.” To differentiate from my weekly post always published on Wednesday, we decided this week to separate those other posts by publishing them on Saturday mornings. They will not appear every Saturday, but when we have one worthy of your eyes and attention, it will from hereon always be on Saturday.

There was a time earlier in the life of this blog when few people in the Catholic universe openly wanted to be associated with it. I remember that in our first month of posting in 2009, we had about 40 readers. This month, 17 years later, we are approaching 40,000 just in the month of May.

Also recently, and our publisher has made note of this, we receive a steady stream of writers asking us to let them publish here. I remember the old comedian W.C. Fields famously saying “I would never want to join a club that would have me as a member.” That seems no longer the case at Beyond These Stone Walls.

We recently received a post from an old friend of this blog, Sheryl Collmer, a frequent and noted writer for Crisis magazine. She merely wanted my opinion on her essay, which she had hoped to publish somewhere else. After reading it twice, and pondering it carefully, I asked her to let us publish it at “Voices from Beyond.” She graciously accepted the invitation. I was very pleased because the timing of it was perfect. It fits nicely as a companion to this post today, which at that moment existed only in my mind. Both posts tell a bold truth, one that is widely covered up by the left-leaning political entities that have hijacked our news media to the detriment of democracy.

Sheryl’s oddly titled post is “I <Heart> Israel.” I wondered what our publishing format would do with such a title. I did not like it at first, but then I came to love it, which is exactly the point Sheryl was making. I would have been more straightforward, but that’s just me. In my mind, what Sheryl has written is “The Truth about Israel.” It was posted at “Voices from Beyond” on Saturday, May 23, 2026. We will link to it again at the end of this post. I hope you will read it and share it. Israel has unfairly suffered a bludgeoning by the same left-leaning entities that have distorted our news media and have denied us the truth, not only about Israel, but about Hamas as well. It is no secret that for this very reason, our mainstream news media has itself suffered a credibility bias in many polls. Only a small minority now report having any faith that the news media presents the news fairly and without partisan bias.

Like many of our readers, I grew up listening to, and trusting, Walter Cronkite, who engendered in his listeners a comforting aura of truth and trust. It came as a great shock to me to learn after his death that he was actually politically inclined to be a liberal Democrat. It is a tribute to his integrity as a newscaster that no one could have discerned that. He was fair and unbiased, and that is all we ask.

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The Truth About Hamas

Hamas is neither a nation nor a people. Hamas is a Palestinian group that had grown dramatically in the years leading up to the Hamas assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas sought to create a single Islamic state in historic Palestine, which until recently has been largely divided between Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas in Arabic means “zealot.” Hamas is also an acronym for “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,” or “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The group was founded in 1988 as a militant segment of the Palestinian Arab national movement which became gradually radicalized.

Hamas openly seeks Israel’s destruction and this attack has the same impact in Israel that September 11, 2001 had in the United States. Hamas, since 2000, has been designated by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization. Also since 2000, the U.S. Department of State has identified Iran as the most active supporter of Hamas and terrorism. Hamas self-identifies not only as an Israeli resistance movement, but as a mechanism dedicated to the eradication of Israel and, by extension, Jews.

On May 14, 2026, The Wall Street Journal published its weekly “Review and Outlook” editorial. On that day it was titled “The Truth About Hamas.” The Journal has performed a great service to us as consumers of the news. And not only to us. It has also salvaged from the wreckage of widespread media bias the notion that some brave souls in the business of news can present the bold truth to us regardless of how unpopular or discomforting it may be. That one piece by the Journal has blasted open a tightly sealed door cemented shut by a partisan agenda in the news we are allowed to see, hear, and digest. The Journal documented something found in few mainstream media sources: a “Silenced No More,” the report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.

Fair warning in advance: sometimes the bold truth is unsettling, even infuriating. Sometimes it keeps us awake at night. But this is a truth that all the grownups among us must come to know and witness firsthand before we accept any of the distortions imposed upon us by those who package and present our news. The Report is not easy to read, nor is The Wall Street Journal’s capsulized presentation of it. Here are some alarming excerpts:

• “Reading ‘Silenced No More,’ the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas … we were transported back to October 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.”

• “The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.”

• “ ‘I saw them raping her,’ said Raz Cohen, who escaped the Nova Music Festival where 396 people were slaughtered. ‘Then they murdered her. And then they raped her again.’ ”

• “Eden Wessely, who came to Nova to rescue a friend, found and filmed a naked, burned body. ‘Her dress was pulled up, and she was not wearing underwear, not because it burned, but because there was no trace …. Her legs were spread. Her genitals exposed.’ A review by forensic pathologists confirmed these details.”

• “Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: ‘She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I were dead too …. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’ Later Yoni saw ‘a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten Hamas beating and raping her.’ The last one shot her in the head.”

• “A male says he was gang-raped at the Nova site … . The Hamas invaders had been given operational materials including Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists such as ‘Take off your clothes,’ ‘Lie down’, ‘Spread your legs.’ The planned sexual degradation speaks to years of Palestinian propaganda that treats Jews as subhuman.”

• “Former hostage Ilana Gritzewsky says, ‘One terrorist started touching me; he put his hand under my shirt. That’s when I fainted.’ On waking, she was ‘surrounded by Hamas people, my shirt up here, my pants down here.’ After being freed, she learned that they had broken her pelvis.”

These excerpts from the Journal report on the Civil Commission are only a few of the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters that day, and they are not even the most disturbing ones. The Journal concluded by apologizing to readers whose sensitivities might have been offended by such details: “We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an anti-semitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.”

So ends the Journal editorial of May 14, 2026. This report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas contains evidence and testimony of a caliber that equates or exceeds that of the Nuremberg trials.

I, too, wrote of several graphic atrocities inflicted upon young Thai workers who answered an ad from Israel to perform migrant field work there. The tourism-based economy of Thailand suffered greatly during the Covid pandemic. Many young Thai men sought employment in Israel in order to send money home to support their families, They knew nothing of Hamas and its hatred for Jews. They knew only poverty. Then they became the second largest ethnic group to be murdered and raped, and then held captive by Hamas fighters. I wrote about the atrocities that befell them in “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” I, too, apologize to readers for having to read of these atrocities at my blog, but no one else would cover it, except the Bangkok Post. I wanted to be certain that the media distortion that Israel was the aggressor and Hamas was their victim would not find a believer in my pages.

I wrote of Mitchai Sarabon, a young Thai man who faced unemployment in Thailand after his release from the Thai military. As Hamas descended upon the Nova Music Festival to murder and slaughter and rape, Mitchai saved many lives. In the process, he was shot by Hamas in the back, and in the chest, and then again in the head. This very resilient young man somehow survived. Before being shot, he had brought others to safety in a locked kibbutz food pantry. The Hamas fighters were trying to break down the door. It is a testament to the preparations they conducted before launching this assault that their demands to “open the door” were shouted in Thai.”

From his Tel Aviv hospital bed, Mitchai Sarabon, ended his testimony with, “I just want the people of Israel to know that I pray for them every day.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for having the courage to read and face the truth of this post. I once again apologize that you had to read these details here.

I want to also present to you Sheryl Collmer’s brave post published on May 23, 2026 at our “Voices from Beyond” feature. Please read and share Sheryl’s craft, I <Heart> Israel.

You may also wish to read these related posts:

Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel

Iran, by Another Name, Was Once the Savior of Israel

Pope Leo, President Trump and War with Iran

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

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

For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Pentecost Illumined the Night

Discouragement is the deep spiritual valley of our age. For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Holy Spirit’s light came only at dawn in a long dark night of the soul.

May 13, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I grew up a few miles north of Boston in an area known locally as the North Shore. Well, it is called that in print anyway. In conversation, it comes out something like, “the Noath Shoah.” I never knew that until I moved to another part of the country where people inexplicably pronounce the letter “R.” Anyway, I have lived in so many places since then that I have lost much of my Boston accent, but I can still translate it when I hear it.

There is an old North Shore saying, “Light finally dawns upon Marblehead.” I am not sure of its origin, but it makes logical sense. The seaside town of Marblehead is at the head of a deep harbor north of Boston, so the dawn’s early light is seen there a few seconds later than in other North Shore coastal towns. Its figurative meaning is that some reality that has been eluding us is now finally made clear.

Light finally dawned upon Marblehead today when I set out to write about Pentecost and ended up writing about Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. There is a connection that I had to spend some time ferreting out, and that is when the light finally dawned. I learned something important about her, and in the process, about myself.

But first, I know I am going to have a hard time dropping “Mother” from her name. “Saint” Teresa seems incomplete and already taken. So I guess that like Saint Padre Pio, she will be forever endowed with a title that has become a necessary part of her name. I am going to have to call her Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and it has slowly caught on.

She was canonized on September 4, 2016, the eve of the date of her death in 1997. In life the person she was, the spirit she is, was eclipsed by the sorrowful mysteries of the poor to whom she devoted her life. The images of her presence among the poor, the disfigured, the utterly broken and rejected — even the despised — have always been part of the background landscape of my life as a priest, but to be honest I could never bring myself to linger on those scenes. They were just too painful. They always left me with a sense of inadequacy as a priest, afraid to look upon the broken too long lest I feel compelled to follow her lead.

I admired Mother Teresa’s presence at the peripheries of human suffering, but as a priest I admired it from too much of a safe distance. That troubles me today. I had to be compelled in priesthood to carry the cross of the outcast, a cross that brought me unwillingly to the scene of that post-resurrection appearance to Simon Peter in the Gospel of John.

“Truly, truly I say to you, when you were young, you fastened your own belt and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will fasten your belt for you and carry you where you do not wish to go.”

— John 21:18

I have experienced those ominous words of John’s Gospel in a literal and terrifying way, but I found companions and some inner peace along the way as well. I wrote of one recently in “A Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest.” It was about how disappointment and discouragement have been part of my own dark night of the soul for thirty-two long years, and how Saint Damien of Molokai — whose feast day was observed on May 10 — taught me what my priorities must be in a life among prisoners.

And you know from many posts that I found other companions and mentors in Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio who have shown me by example that my life bound over by earthly powers must be lived out at the foot of Cross. In prison, others have joined me there, many others, but I remain in the dark.

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Come Be My Light

Now I present this new friend at the foot of the Cross in the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but I had to first shed all my assumptions about her. It is a little intimidating that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her witness to the world’s broken, abandoned and poor. In life Mother Teresa was revered as a living saint. I just assumed that for her to be that person, to do the work that she did, Mother Teresa must have been given a gift of daily awareness of the light of supernatural grace that flowed within her and shined through her. Otherwise, I thought, she would just sink into dark desolation just as I have been known to do with far less in the way of grace to count on.

And when I do sink into that desolation, I sometimes stay for days, weeks, months, at one point in my imprisonment before Beyond These Stone Walls began, even years. And if my mail is any indication, many of you have had that same experience. Please, do not come to Beyond These Stone Walls because misery loves company. It really does not. Come here because together we can manage crosses of discouragement that alone might only elude us and crush our spirits. You cannot just go to Home Depot to buy a weed whacker to wipe out desolation. It is best to have someone show you how to use it.

I was wrong about Mother Teresa, about my image of her basking in the reflected glow of the Holy Spirit. About a year after I started writing for this blog, I was given a copy of Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light (Doubleday 2007) and my presumptions about her life in grace were quickly dispelled.

Some of the shallow secular media made a big deal of this book, presenting it as the latest Catholic scandal that the great Living Saint among us had long bouts of doubt and desolation. But for me she became human again, and an icon not so much of living grace, but of grace hard won through great spiritual struggle. Like Saint Maximilian Kolbe, she became someone I could let in, and learn from.

Centuries of Catholic art tend to depict the saints among us with halos, in a state of ecstatic pose before the True Presence. Mother Teresa’s own writings convey her struggle to survive spiritually in the present absence. In that, I can relate. In that, I find much hope. That sense of absence is something I have taken up in other posts (see “Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence”).

Through letters to her spiritual director, Come Be My Light  is a guided tour of the interior life of this courageous woman whose heart “burned with the fire of charity” while at the same time experienced doubt and spiritual darkness in “a true dark night of the soul.” I began to do what she did, to pray not so much to be free of spiritual desolation, but to be free to serve even in the midst of it. Mother Teresa did that well. I get, at best, a C-minus, but I am still reading the book!

A part of it reminds me so much of something Canadian Catholic writer Michael Brandon wrote some time back in “All Things Turn to Good” at his Freedom Through Truth  blog. While writing of the news of the failure of the justice system to pursue justice for me, Michael quoted another Saint Teresa, Saint Teresa of Avila, who once wrote, “God, if this is how You treat Your friends, it’s no wonder that you have so few.” When our friend, Pornchai Moontri, read that quote, it made him laugh. He had been having a hard time with discouragement over my plight, but the quote put it into perspective for him.

Do not read Come Be My Light  in one sitting. Keep it on your night stand and read it prayerfully, a letter a day perhaps, or even reserved for moments in your own dark night. It has gotten me through many of my own. She is fast becoming the Patron Saint of “Get-off-your-priestly-arse-and-do-something-for-someone-instead-of-moping-about!”

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The Advocate

There is a little side story to tell. While composing this post, I had left my copy of Come Be My Light in the prison library where I work, but I had only a Saturday afternoon to finish this post and get it into the mail. The library is closed on weekends so I had no way to retrieve the book. On Saturday morning, I remembered that Father Michael Gaitley had an entire section about the Marian consecration of Mother Teresa in his book, 33 Days to Morning Glory.

But I had left that book in the library as well! When I mentioned that to Pornchai, who was still here with me then, he said, “Well, there’s at least ten of them right here in this unit.” Then it struck me. How is it even possible that out of sixty prisoners in this one prison cell block, ten of them have completed 33 Days to Morning Glory and entered into Marian Consecration? That is one out of every six prisoners in our field of view. So all I had to do was walk to the cell next to mine and borrow the book. Duh!

When I did, I opened to the Table of Contents and was instantly reminded that three of my favorite saints comprise weeks two, three, and four of Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning Glory, retreat. They are Saints Maximilian Kolbe, Mother Teresa, and John Paul II, and all are saints of the Twentieth Century.

I thought I had read this book cover to cover, but while looking at the Table of Contents to find the section on Mother Teresa, I unconsciously thumbed back two pages, and stopped on a name that jumped off the page at me. It was a short review of 33 Days by Father James McCurry, formerly Minister Provincial of the Conventual Franciscans, the order to which Saint Maximilian Kolbe belonged and the Vice Postulator for his cause for sainthood. How could I not have seen this before?

Many years ago, Father James McCurry came to visit me in prison. I had never previously met him, and today I cannot really explain what brought him here except a vague memory that he was passing through and heard of me through a friend of a friend. In the prison visiting room, Father McCurry asked, “What do you know of Saint Maximilian Kolbe?” It was a question that would change my life, and then change the life of Pornchai Moontri, and then others as well. I wrote of this first encounter with a Patron Saint in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

So in searching for a section on Mother Teresa, she pointed me back to an old friend. The interconnections between everyone in this story are mind-boggling. Father McCurry wrote that the essence of Marian consecration is …

“St. Maximilian Kolbe’s mystical intuition about the interior life of Mary and the Holy Spirit in the life of a consecrant; Blessed Mother Teresa’s experience of Mary drawing us into her heart, where Jesus keeps repeating, ‘I thirst’; and St. John Paul’s understanding that consecration to Mary brings us to the source of merciful love — the Divine Mercy poised to transform the world.”

That is when the light finally dawned upon Marblehead! I realized that the world I am thrown into is in fact being transformed in spite of my protests about being here in the first place. Some around me — the poor, the outcasts, the discarded, the lepers, the criminals — are being transformed. How could it possibly have happened that one out of every six of these men around me in prison now lives a life consecrated to Jesus through Mary? How is it that the saints whose intercession I keep pursuing are already engaged in a work that has eluded me? Then I read in the Gospel:

“I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”

— John 14:25-28

This brings to light what Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta learned in the dark. The Holy Spirit was her Advocate not in any obvious glory, but in desolation, and it was from there on the very edges of suffering humanity that she led countless souls to Christ, and witnessed to the world that the Lord hears the cry of the poor.

“It is beautiful to see the humility of Christ. This humility can be seen in the crib, in the exile in Egypt, in the hidden life, in the inability to make people understand him, in the desertion of his apostles, in the hatred of the Jews, and all the terrible suffering and death of his passion, and now in his permanent state of humility in the tabernacle, where he has rendered himself to such a small particle of bread that the priest can hold him with two fingers.”

— Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We could extend the same invitation to Saint Mother Teresa that she extended to the Holy Spirit: Come Be My Light.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about a great saint of our age. You may also like these related posts at Beyond These Stone Walls:

Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence

Saint John Paul the Great: A Light in a World in Crisis

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

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

A Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest

Should the State’s flawed justice be mirrored in the Church? This must be asked and the truth written. But ask as well, “Can a leper priest also serve God?”

May 10, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

This is a post I wrote on May 6, 2015, and everything in it is relative to that time frame. However, just about everything in it also impacts the current time frame. So I am posting it again.

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Pornchai Moontri and I and other friends are just beginning another retreat program in prison sponsored by the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy and the Marians of the Immaculate Conception. One of the texts used for the retreat is, You Did It to Me, one of many such books by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC.

Something happened over the last few weeks that cast yet another, but brighter light on recent events that have so overshadowed Beyond These Stone Walls. The text for the retreat is You Did It to Me by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC. The timing of it is by design, of course, but not by my design. I just nudged Pornchai Max and pointed out a photo of both of us in the middle of the book. “My, for prisoners, you guys get around,” wrote BTSW reader Mary Fran Cherry back then. She alerted me to our photo in the book. The retreat lifted a corner of the shroud that overshadowed my life behind these prison walls beginning on Wednesday of Holy Week.

Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of this in “For One Priest, A Fate Worse than Dying in Prison,” the second of his excellent two-part analysis of a recent court ruling that was a setback in my hope for justice and freedom. I have much gratitude for Ryan’s effort, and especially so because he left you with hope by telling you that I learned of this decision just as I was reading, You Did it to Me.

While reading that book, my eyes were opened a little, just enough to see what discouragement kept me from seeing. It reminded me so vividly of a story that took place on the road to Emmaus at another time of discouragement:

“That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from knowing him … Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

— Luke 24:13-23

Someone might ask that same question of me if I lapse into writing about a Divine Mercy retreat without addressing “all these things that had happened” in the arena of justice and injustice. So I am also most grateful to New Jersey Attorney Vincent James Sanzone for his enlightened analysis of the legal precipice awaiting me and other falsely accused priests in both Church and State: “A Criminal Defense Expert Unfurls Father MacRae Case.” Prior to writing that guest post, Attorney Sanzone wrote a brilliant letter to Pope Francis about this matter, and to EWTN. I believe the EWTN letter may have been what prompted Brian Fraga and the National Catholic Register to publish “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name” (NCRegister.com, March 18, 2015).

Was I discouraged by the outcome revealed to me on Wednesday of Holy Week? Yes, I was. Was I devastated as some have suggested? I was, for a time. Have I given up? Not hardly. That is about all I have to offer about this. More important things have happened, and I have no time to descend into a litany of woe-is-me. Another day, perhaps. It is time now to step out of this arena of justice and all its flaws, and to step back onto that road to Emmaus.

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Voice from Beyond

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, something happened that cast a brighter light — brighter than my discouragement, at least — on the events of recent days. Let me first tell you what happened.

On the evening of Divine Mercy Sunday as this retreat began, Pornchai Maximilian sat in a chair to my right and Michael Ciresi to my left. Along with seventeen other prisoners who joined us, we watched and listened to a DVD presentation by Father Michael Gaitley to introduce the retreat. It was excellent, of course, and Pornchai was riveted to the projection of Father Gaitley on the prison chapel wall.

Every now and then the camera recording Father Gaitley swept over his audience, and there, seated near the back, I spotted a familiar face: Marian missionary Eric Mahl. You may recall that Pornchai and Eric Mahl both had chapters featuring them in Felix Carroll’s great Divine Mercy book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Later they met and became friends and brothers. I nudged Pornchai and pointed as Eric appeared on the wall. Just at that moment, Eric looked toward the camera and smiled. Pornchai smiled back.

The next day a letter arrived for Pornchai. As though right on cue, it was from Eric Mahl. It was a copy of a letter from Eric to some people who are helping Pornchai by organizing an effort to secure his future in Thailand when he is free from these stone walls. During his missionary outreach to prisons, Eric Mahl has had three meetings with Pornchai. On the last one, he was accompanied by Father Seraphim Michalenko who served as Vice-Postulator for the Cause of Canonization of Saint Maria Faustina. I wrote of that meeting in “Father Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.” Eric also wrote of that meeting in his letter:

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“This very holy priest had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Pornchai in the Chapel, to talk to him and get to know him. When [Father Seraphim] and I were on our way home back to the Shrine in Massachusetts, he told me that the peace in that Chapel must be what Heaven is like and that Pornchai Moontri is a very holy and beautiful child of God. I write all of this to let you know how I desire to see this restored child of God out of prison and living free in Thailand where he could help the rest of society.”

— Letter of Eric Mahl

On April 19, the second Sunday evening of our retreat, we watched the second of Father Gaitley’s DVD presentations, and this time Pornchai listened intently while also looking for his friend Eric Mahl in the background. Later that evening, during a small group discussion led by Marian volunteer Jim Preisendorfer, I heard something astonishing. During Father Gaitley’s presentation, he spoke of the eight reasons why we do not appreciate the Trinity. One of them, Reason Number Seven, is “Because we listen to the voice of the enemy.” By way of example, I wrote in my notes:

“Part of Satan’s strategy is to keep us unfocused from our destiny. He lures us into being satisfied with this world so that so many of us just settle for what this life gives us, or despair over what this life denies us.”

When I read my own notes, I could not even remember writing that. It was as though my pen were on autopilot. Then table moderator Jim Preisendorfer asked for a comment on “Reason Number Seven.” No one spoke so I read my note above. Jim asked if I could give a concrete example. “I can,” Pornchai chimed in. He then spoke about a conversation he and I had seven years earlier. Hope seemed futile for him then. I had asked him back then if he had any hope at all for the future. I will never forget his answer, “I don’t have a future I only have a ‘Plan B.’ ”

Over time I came to understand what “Plan B” was, though, I had not heard Pornchai speak of it for a long time. At the table during our retreat that night, Pornchai explained that “Plan B” was his only plan, and it arose spontaneously within him. “Plan B” was to never leave prison. Having been cast into prison with a 45-year sentence at age 18, followed by years of solitary confinement in a dreaded “Supermax” prison, Pornchai had laid out in his mind the only future this life could promise him: to live out his life in prison. To die in prison. He had nothing else to look forward to.

On that night, however, Pornchai reflected what Eric Mahl described. He radiated the life of a restored child of God for whom that dismal “Plan B” was but a long forgotten memory. He spoke of it as a perfect example of how listening to the voice of the enemy can deny us our destiny. I sat there asking myself, “When did this happen. How did it happen?”

Then Pornchai jabbed a thumb in my direction at the table. “When this guy stepped into my life,” he said, “he released me from the grip of ‘Plan B.’ ” Pornchai described how he took a great risk to trust in some vague hope that was covered in a cloud and could not be seen, so he just took my word for it. “Now, seven years later,” he said that night, “ ‘Plan B’ is just an old memory with no power over me, and people all over the world have come together to replace it.”

While he spoke at that table, I looked down at my own thumbs as Pornchai jabbed his thumb in my direction. I could not look up. I knew that if I made eye contact with him at that moment, I would have fallen apart. My own plan for my life and my priesthood certainly never included life in prison for a crime that never took place. It never included being demonized and scapegoated to satisfy the demands of contingency lawyers and insurance companies as Ryan pointed out. It never included pleading for my Church to see the failures of American civil justice instead of just blindly declaring them final and fulfilled justice.

Ryan A. MacDonald charged in a comment a few weeks ago that the American hierarchy’s response to the priesthood crisis has been more like a housecleaning than a healing. My plan for my life never included a dread that my own bishop might echo in Rome the Twelfth Century plea of Henry II about Thomas Beckett “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

My plan for priesthood also never included Pornchai Moontri, nor could I have ever foreseen the notion that the tragedy that befell me could ever be anything other than a tragedy for someone else.

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The Leper Priest

I vividly remember, as a young seminarian in the latter 1970s, watching a two-part PBS dramatization of the life of Father Damien de Veuster, the Belgian priest who in 2009 became Saint Damien of Molokai. I was fascinated by the PBS version. It remains in my psyche as one of the alluring things that drew me toward and kept me focused on a side of priesthood in danger of being lost today, the notion that priesthood is not a job, but an ontological state of being. To see priests “fired” and cast off seems like “Reason Number Seven,” like succumbing to the voice of the enemy as he lures priesthood from its destiny.

When Damien of Molokai was driven across that line between ministering to lepers and becoming a leper, it was seen as a tragedy to his friends, but hindsight sees it as a gift to the Church and the world. When he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, Emily Stimpson wrote of him in “Untamed Saint” in Our Sunday Visitor:

“Saints are made through trials and persecution. And Father Damien had more than his share of those. For most of the 16 years he served on Molokai, he served alone… He begged his superiors to send him help. Usually they ignored his requests. Twice, however, they did send someone. The first was a Dutch priest who complained incessantly. The second was a French priest who accused Father Damien of improper relations with the native women. His superiors and bishop grew tired of his constant demand for help. They considered him an obstinate, headstrong troublemaker. The government shared that opinion, and more than a few officials gave credence to false rumors circulated about him. His detractors heaped every sort of abuse and calumny upon Father Damien … Enduring his own dark night, he felt abandoned by God and unworthy of heaven.”

— Emily Stimpson, “Untamed Saint,” OSV, October 11, 2009

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.”

Knock and the Door Will Open: The Long Road to Bangkok Thailand

Thanks to Bill Donohue, “Pornchai’s Story” made its way around the world and was read to Catholics in Thailand. Pornchai’s Divine Mercy bridge to Thailand was built.

May 6, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I wrote a post recently entitled “Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.” It was an allegory, like the Book of Tobit itself. An allegory is a sort of genre of Sacred Scripture in which a story is told more for its meaning than for its historical value. Every parable of Jesus falls into this same genre. A part of the story of Tobit, and his son Tobias and their interactions with the Archangel Raphael in disguise were all part of the allegory. That does not mean the allegory did not happen. It means only that the truth of the story does not depend upon someone believing it. There was one aspect of the Book of Tobit story that became a centerpiece of my blog linked above. At the beginning and the end of the Book of Tobit there is a mysterious dog whose presence, meaning and purpose remain a mystery.

My friend Pornchai Max and his grueling assimilation to his native Thailand after a forced absence of 36 years and all the torment he endured in that time, also included the presence of a mysterious dog named Hill. When that post was published on April 29 this year, a number of our readers wanted to know what became of Hill. So I went back this week and added an important addendum, which you can read for yourselves by clicking on it at the end of this post.

Now I want to back up about 19 years, in 2007 when Max learned that he would be deported to Thailand at the end of his sentence. He would be taken to Bangkok and left there. ICE would have no further responsibility for him.

Bangkok, the Capitol of the Kingdom of Thailand, is a massive city of about 9.5 million people. In Thai, the great city’s name is almost unpronounceable to the Western World, and the longest name of any city on Earth at 156 characters. I don’t expect you to memorize it, but in the Thai language Bangkok’s name is: Krungthepmahanakorn Amornrattanakosin Mahintrayuthaya Mahadilokpob Noparat Rajataniburirom Udomrajanivej Mahasatharn Amornpimarn Awatarnsat Sakatadtiya Wisanukamprasit.  For daily use in Thai, the name is simply abbreviated to “Bangkok Krung Thep” which in English means “City of Angels.” When Max first told me of this in a phone call, he said, “I’m not kidding. They called it that even before I got here!”

This is a complicated but amazing story that meanders down a long and winding road. Our presentation of it begins in 2006 in a New Hampshire prison cell and threads its mysterious connections all the way around the globe. I n the end you may find any lingering doubts about Divine Mercy falling away. Divine Mercy has opened impenetrable doors for Pornchai Moontri, many of them in otherwise unreachable places.

If you have read my post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner” then you know that Max had been in prison for 29 years, more than half his life, for a crime committed as a teenager, a crime that was set in motion by someone else. You also know that Max was moved from a maximum security solitary confinement unit in Maine to the New Hampshire Prison where we met and became friends late in 2006. That story is told powerfully at the link above.

I had another friend in this prison from Cambodia whom I had helped with the deportation process. He was brought to this country as a child of two, and committed a petty crime at age 18. After a long failed process of appeals, he was deported at age 25 to Cambodia, but spoke not a word of Khmer. One year after his deportation, I received a note from his sister telling me that he disappeared in the capital city of Phenom Penh. He had never been seen or heard from again.

We learned an important but scary lesson from what happened to my Cambodian friend. Since Max was brought to the U.S. as a young child, and has no known family or contacts in Thailand other than distance cousins, the experience of our friend in Cambodia chilled me to the core. I became determined that Max would be ready to live and cope somehow in the immense City of Bangkok when the time came. We had a few years to prepare, but I did not even know where to begin.

How could two men living in a prison cell in New Hampshire with no resources, no online access, and a severely limited budget find and connect with people on the other side of the world? How could I interest anyone in Thailand with the plight of a young man taken from there at age 11, his mother murdered, only to come to the United States to end up homeless and in prison as a teenager? This was not a good place from which to start.

THE SILENCE

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Max told me dismally. “I don’t even know how to learn about Thailand.” I knew I had to start writing, but this was two years before even the idea of this blog was conceived. A day in the prison library produced some addresses. First, I wrote of Max’s situation to Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Manchester (NH). They are, after all, a global network. No response, but no real surprise there. Then I wrote to the national office of Catholic Charities. No response. Then I wrote to the Office of Immigration and Refugee Assistance sponsored by my Diocese. No response. Then I wrote to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network at Boston College. No response. I knocked at the door of every official Catholic agency I could find. No one answered. I knocked, and I waited, and I knocked some more.

I cannot convey in words the utter frustration of writing repeatedly only to have my overtures met with silence. I decided that the problem was not Pornchai’s plight, but rather mine. I told Max that we will have to write all these letters again, but coming directly from him. So we redrafted all the letters under his name. More knocking; more waiting. More silence.

When all of our letters from prison were relegated to the netherworld without responses, I took it personally. I knew we needed a different approach. I asked Max to candidly write his life story — which is an amazing story in and of itself — in as few pages as possible, and let me send it to the few Catholic contacts I had who did not ignore our plight. One of them was Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Once he read “Pornchai’s Story,” he wrote back immediately asking if he could publish it on the Catholic League website. From there, it slowly made its way around the world. We knocked and knocked, and waited some more.

The late Father Richard John Neuhaus — a courageous Catholic writer and editor of First Things magazine — sent Max a personal letter to tell him how very important his story is, not only for Max, but for the Church. Father Neuhaus promised to pass the story along to others. This was a year before Father Neuhaus faced his own untimely death from cancer in January, 2009. More knocking, and more waiting.

Max started receiving letters from other important figures in the Church. One came from His Eminence Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok. Max was bowled over by that letter. Another came from the Rome Office of Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, who had been appointed by President George W. Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

Bill Donohue extending to Max honorary membership in the Catholic League and promised to promised to promote his story. My article for Catalyst appeared at the same time, in the July/August 2009 issue. It was “Due Process for Accused Priests.” As an unintended consequence, Pornchai’s story and mine became linked together.

Pornchai’s Story

Here is Pornchai’s Story:

[From Dr. Bill Donohue: ] As we begin the New Year, we’d like to share with you this moving account of one young man’s conversion story.

My name is Pornchai Moontri, and as I write this I am prisoner #77948 in the New Hampshire State Prison. I come to the Catholic faith after a painful journey in darkness that my friend, Father Gordon MacRae, has asked me to write candidly. This is not something I do easily, but I trust my friend.

I was born in Bua Nong Lamphu, in a small village in the north of Thailand near Khon Kaen on September 10, 1973. At the age of two, I was abandoned by my mother and a stranger tried to sell me. A distant teenaged relative rescued me. He walked many miles to carry me away to his family farm where I worked throughout my childhood raising water buffalo, rice, and sugar cane. I never attended school, however, and never learned to read and write in Thai. Though my childhood involved hard work, I was safe and happy.

When I was 11 years old, my mother re-emerged in Thailand with a new husband — an American air traffic controller from Bangor, Maine. I was taken from Thailand by them against my will, and brought to the United States. This transition was a trauma to be endured. A month after my arrival in Bangor, my new stepfather’s motive for importing a ready-made Thai family became clear. I was forcibly raped by him at age 11, an event that was to be repeated with regularity over the next three years. I was a prisoner in his house, and resistance was only met with violence against me and against my mother. I was all of 100 pounds. I cannot describe this further. Welcome to America!

Being one of only three Asians in 1985 Bangor, and speaking little English, I did not readily comprehend my new names. “Gook,” “V.C.” and “Charlie” meant nothing to me, but I could sense the scorn with which such names were delivered. Because my English was poor, I was treated as though I was stupid. Part of my humiliation was that I had to get a paper route at age 12, and my earnings were taken from me to pay for the “privilege” of living in my captor’s house. Stephen King’s home was on my paper route. Mr. King once gave me a Christmas bonus of 25¢ for delivering his newspaper all year. The horror stories he wrote about Maine are all true. Remember the one with the evil clown? It’s true.

When I was 14, my English was better. I was a little bigger, and a lot stronger — and nothing but angry. Anger was all I had. So with it I fled that house and became a homeless teenager in and around Bangor. One day the Bangor police actually picked me up and forced me to go “home.” I would rather have gone to one of the ones Stephen King wrote about. I just fled again and again, and ended up at the Good Will Hinckley School for people like me. I was there for a year and got kicked out for fighting. I was always fighting. I fought everyone.

Back on the streets of Bangor, I began to carry a knife. At 17 and 18, a lot of people were after me. I lived under a bridge for a while and sometimes my mother would bring me things. I tried to climb out of the deep hole I was in by signing up for night classes at age 18 to finish my high school diploma. I was kicked out of Bangor High School for punching the principal.

One night, at age 18, something that lived in me got out. I got very drunk with friends, and we walked into a Bangor Shop & Save supermarket to buy cigarettes. I barely remember this. In my drunken state, I opened a bottle of beer from a case and started to drink it. The manager confronted me and ordered me to leave. I tried to flee the store, but the manager and other employees then tried to keep me there. I tried to fight them off to flee. When I got outside, a manager from another Shop & Save had witnessed the incident and pounced on me. I was 130 pounds and was pinned to the ground by this 190-pound man. I think something snapped in my mind. IT was happening again. I fought, but his dead weight was suffocating me. The newspapers would later tell a different story, but this was the truth, and it is all I remember.

In jail that night, I was questioned for three hours. I was told that I had stabbed a man and was charged with attempted murder. I have no memory, to this day, of stabbing the man. The next morning, I awoke in a jail cell and was told that I was charged with Class A murder. The man had died during the night. I was told that I blew a .25 on the Breathalyzer, but the result was so high it was discarded as an error.

My stepfather could have hired expert counsel, but it was clearly not in his best interest that my life be evaluated, so I was left in the care of a public defender who wanted this high profile case off his desk. There was talk about the Breathalyzer, and “level of culpability,” and things like “defensive vs. offensive wounds,” but in the end there were no theories, no experts and no defense. I was terrified of being abandoned. My mother came to me in jail and pleaded with me to protect her and “the family” by not revealing what happened in my life. So I remained silent. I offered no defense at all. My co-defendant told the truth of my being pinned down, but he was not believed. I was convicted of “Class A murder with deliberate indifference” and sentenced, at age 18, to 45 years in a Maine Prison. Maine has no parole.

I was also sentenced with the soul of the innocent man whose life I took — despite my being unable to remember taking it. The mix of remorse and anger was toxic in prison, and I gave up. Prison became just an extension of where I had already been. My anger raged on and on, and I spent 13 of my 15 years in prison in Maine’s “supermax” facility for those who can’t be trusted in the light of day.

Five years into my imprisonment, I learned one night in my supermax cell that my mother and stepfather had relocated to the Island of Guam where my mother was murdered. She was pushed from a cliff. [The story that was told to Pornchai, but it was false.] The only suspect was her husband but there was no evidence. I was now alone in my rage.

After 14 years of this, the Maine prison decided to send me to an out-of-state prison. I had no idea where I was to be sent. I arrived in the New Hampshire State Prison on October 18, 2005 dragging behind me the Titanic in which I stored all my anger and hurt and loss and loss and loss — and guilt.

I started my time in a new prison by getting into a fight and ended up in the same old place — the hole. When some months went by, I was given another chance. I was sent to H-Building where I met my friend JJ, an Indonesian who was waiting to be deported. JJ introduced me one day to Gordon, who he said was helping him and some others with appealing their INS removal orders or with preparing themselves to be deported. He seemed to be the only person who even cared. JJ trusted Gordon, so I had several conversations with him. A few months later, I was moved to the same unit in which he lives in this prison. We became friends.

By patience and especially by example, Gordon helped me change the course of my life. He is my best friend, and the person I trust most in this world. It is the strangest irony that he has been in prison for 13 years accused fictionally of the same behaviors visited upon me in the real world by the man who took me from Thailand. I read the articles about Gordon in The Wall Street Journal last year. I know him better, I think, than just about anyone. I know only too well the person who does what Gordon is wrongly accused of. Gordon is not that person. Far from it. It is hard for me to accept that laws and public sentiment allow men to demand and receive huge financial settlements from the Catholic Church years or decades after claimed abuse while all that happened to me has gone without even casual notice by anyone — except, ironically, Gordon MacRae.

On September 10, I will be 34 years old. I have been in prison now for nearly half of my life, but in the last year I have begun to know what freedom is. My anger is still with me and it always lurks just below the surface, but my friend is also with me. We both recently signed up for an intense 15-week course in personal violence. He is doing this for me. I spend my days in school instead of in lock-up now, and I will soon complete my High School diploma. Gordon helped me obtain a scholarship for a series of non-credit courses in Catholic studies at Catholic Distance University. In the last year, with help and understanding, I have completed programs offered in the New Hampshire prison. One day I felt strangely light so I looked behind me, and the Titanic was not there. I parked it somewhere along the way. I have put my childhood aside. Now I am a man.

In March of this year, after 15 years in prison, I was ordered by an INS court to be removed from the United States and deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence in 17 to 20 years or so. Gordon hopes that I can seek a sentence reduction so that I can return to Thailand at an age at which I may still build a life. There are many obstacles. The largest is that I do not speak Thai any longer and I never had an opportunity to learn and to read and write in Thai. We are working hard to prepare me for this. Though years away, it is a very frightening thing to go to a country only vaguely familiar. I have not heard Thai spoken since age 11, 23 years ago. There is no one I know there and no place for me to go. I have no home anywhere.

Along this steep path, I have made a decision to become Catholic. The priest in my friend has not been extinguished by 13 years in prison. It is still the part of him that shines the brightest. Gordon never asked me to become Catholic. He never even brought it up. I t is the path he is on and I was pulled to it by the force of grace, and the hope that one day I could do good for others. Gordon showed me a book, Jesus of Nazareth, in which Pope Benedict wrote: “The true ‘exodus’…consists in this: Among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.”

I am taking a correspondence course in Catholic studies through the Knights of Columbus and I look forward to the studies through Catholic Distance University. I go to Mass with Gordon when it is offered in the prison, and our faith is always a part of every day. When I return to the place I haven’t seen since age 11, I want to go there as a committed Catholic open to God’s call to live a life in service to others. It is what someone very special to me has done for me, and I must do the same.

My friend asked me to sit down today and type the story of my life and where I am now. He asked me to let him send this to a few friends who he says may play some role — directly or indirectly — in my life some day. The account is my own. What Father Gordon added was hope, and somehow faith has also taken root. In prison, hope and faith are everything. Everything!

[Written by Pornchai Moontri in 2008 and published by the Catholic League.]

Thanks to Bill Donohue and the Catholic League, “Pornchai’s Story” made its way around the world and was read to Catholics in Thailand. Pornchai Moontri’s Divine Mercy Bridge to Thailand was built despite many obstacles.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Pornchai’s story does not end here. There were other miracles yet to be told, but they are told in other posts here:

Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

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.”