Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and the Gift of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thorns Before a Rose

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

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

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

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

— Saints and Angels, p. 155

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ + +

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

A Shower of Roses by Fr Gordon MacRae

From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love by Michael Brandon

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

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

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

On Good Authority, “Salvation Is from the Jews”

Anti-Israel protests and prejudice were as common as any other plague in Biblical history, and often inflamed, just as they are today, by agitators in a proxy war.

May 8, 2024 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In the image above, The Deliverance of Israel depicted in “The Crossing of the Red Sea” by Raphael Sanzio, 1519.

There is a lawyer here in this prison who, like me, has been here for too many years. He is a learned Jewish man who is one of the most well-read persons I know. He says I am the second most well-read, but I am not prepared to throw down with him over that. A few days before I began to write this post, he approached me in the prison law library where I serve as the legal clerk. I sometimes have to ask him a question or two about legal forms and procedure.

Seeming especially stressed and guarded that day, he nervously scanned the room before talking with me. He wanted to know if I understand the meaning of the word, “pogrom.” I associated it with the earliest days of the Holocaust, and he nodded silent agreement. It was crowded that day in the prison law library, and he seemed keenly aware that mine were not the only ears listening. Wary of the attention his question drew, he left, saying that we must have this discussion in a less public forum.

I knew what this was about. Across the U.S., the anxiety of Jews has heightened of late as universities campuses erupted in violent protest against the Nation of Israel. A “pogrom” is a Russian term that means “devastation.” It refers to a mob attack that is promoted, condoned, or even just conveniently overlooked, by civil authorities. The term was historically used to describe Nazi-era tactics to threaten and harass Jews while inflaming spontaneous mob uprisings and outright assaults against their property, or their persons, or both.

One such pogrom, known as Kristallnacht (German for “Night of Broken Glass”), took place in Germany on the night of November 9, 1938. In the minds of many Jews, including my lawyer-friend, Kristallnacht was the opening act in one of the most feared of all pogroms, the Holocaust. It was carried out in Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe from 1939 to 1945 and it systematically exterminated six million Jews — fully two thirds of the Jews of Europe.

For my friend, and for the Jews of New York City, which hosts the world’s largest population of Jews outside of Israel, recent events have been frightening reminders of the “Night of Broken Glass.” It left succeeding generations of Jews in a state of existential distrust if not terror.

For day after day in the United States and throughout the free world in recent weeks, we have been witnesses to a pogrom, an organized series of so-called “Pro-Palestinian” protests threatening to evolve into riots on major college campuses across America. At Columbia University in New York, the directive given to Jews from campus administration was to “Stay home for remote classes” because the University could not guarantee their safety.

The outrage of many Jews should now be keenly felt by all Americans. The news media called these noisy, escalating protests “Pro-Palestinian,” but in reality they are more accurately “Pro-Hamas.” Let that sink in, please. In the United States of America, should our national response to threats from an internationally recognized terrorist organization openly operating in U.S. territory be to tell its innocent victims to just “stay home?”

Free Palestinians from Hamas

Upon the advice of well meaning friends, I have wanted to avoid writing about this latest hornets’ nest of politics and power struggles in the Middle East, however, it seems inevitable that the forces at work there would eventually work to bring their pogrom here to be acted out before American news cameras. For weeks now, our democracy has been saturated in it, infected by it, and at risk of being further divided by it as it takes hold and festers here.

It would be foolish to think that these protests have spread spontaneously of their own accord to college campuses across the United States. Some in the less partisan and more incisive news media have uncovered evidence of financial manipulation with activist organizations on the deep political left offering $3,000 (student stipends) to infiltrate and inflame mobs for anti-Israel protests.

Many others among the chanting students have been misled and indoctrinated into a revisionist history leaving them tone-deaf to the actual meaning of rousing chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It calls for the annihilation of Israel, and by extension the eradication of Jews. That this chant has been propagated by some Democrat members of the United States Congress has spread fears of our darkest history repeating itself. In a lead editorial entitled, “America’s New Mob Rule” (May 1, 2024), The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote that the protesting students seem not to know or care that Hamas’ Charter calls for the annihilation of Jews.

What is now happening across America began in Israel on October 7, 2023. Thousands of young Israeli citizens and others were savagely slaughtered in the light of day by Hamas terrorists on an innocent Saturday afternoon. The victims were mostly young people the same ages as many of those now promoting and supporting their murderers. These campus protesters are utterly ignorant of the forces manipulating them. I wrote of the meaning and history of Hamas in “The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God.”

There was much more to the events of October 7, 2023 than the vicious assault on Jews along the Gaza border. In response to those events, I wrote a post that stunned many of our readers who had no idea of the extent of Hamas brutality and of how its violence had also targeted other innocent people. That post was “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.”

It clarified the extent of the pogrom, the devastation, inflicted on many innocent young people that day, including many whose only crime was poverty and a desire to work to support their families, something these hapless university protesters have never had to do. What follows is an excerpt cited in the above linked post from The Wall Street Journal of October 28, 2023 written by the usually restrained and moderate Editorial Board. If it does not send a shudder down any reader’s spine, then there is no spine left.

“Why did the Hamas men, upon confronting the dead body of a teenage girl start cheering? Why did they argue over who would get to decapitate a Thai guest worker they had shot, then proclaim ‘Allahu akbar,’ ‘God is most great’ with every swing at his neck? ‘Allahu akbar’ was on their lips over and over as they shot defenseless civilians, dragged corpses, and pumped round after round into the dead. There it was again on the terrorists’ return to Gaza, ‘Allahu akbar’ coming from crowds as a Hamas man pulled by the hair a battered hostage with pants bloodied around her groin … . During the music-festival massacre, a terrorist paused to put a bullet through each of the porta-potties lest a single girl escape.”

I regret that you had to read the above excerpt in these pages. The parts left out about the acts of Hamas were far more hideous and barbaric “Allahu akbar!” God is great but this was not God. This was the work of evil spinning up from the dark hearts of men who have, over eons of inherited hatred, let their politics take the place of God. Some in our nation are at risk of doing the same.

It is this that masses of American college students now support with misinformed, misguided, and inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric masked as concern for the Palestinian people — many of whom are not at all enamored of the Hamas terrorists in their midst using them as human shields. I am all for supporting Palestine. The free world must help them become free of Hamas. The good people of Palestine are as much held hostage by Hamas as the men, women and children chained up in Hamas tunnels to be used as political pawns.

Salvation and Freedom Are Both from The Jews

When I told a priest-friend about the title I was choosing for this post his knee-jerk reaction was, “Are you crazy? Don’t you think ‘they’ can get to you?” I wonder who ‘they’ are. The words of my title — “Salvation Is from the Jews” — were spoken by Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Saint John, Chapter 4, Verse 22.

The setting is a field in Samaria at a place that came to be known to Jews as “Jacob’s Well.” Tradition has it located at the foothills of Mount Gerazim, a sacred site of Samaritan worship. In New Testament times (First Century AD) the Samaritans were considered heretical and hostile to the Jews who returned that hostility with some of their own. The people of Samaria were separatist Jews who had lived in exile for centuries, a history that I described in “The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God.”

The disciples of Jesus were shocked (John Chapter 4) to discover him conversing with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans then were only semi-Jewish whose Scriptures were limited to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible known as the “Books of Moses.” The Samaritans knew nothing of the Prophets, the Psalms, the Wisdom literature, the struggles of Judaism, or the Davidic Kingdom and its promised Messianic return. The Jewish-Samaritan disdain for each other is evident in the irony highlighted by Jesus in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37). The Samaritan in the famous Parable aided a robbed and beaten Jewish traveler when a priest and Levite, honored members of the traveler’s own faith, were barred by ritual laws from doing so.

It was also evident in the dialogue between Jesus and the woman of Samaria set at Jacob’s Well near Mount Gerazim. Jesus instructed her: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” (John 4:22) This was so in God’s Covenants with Noah, Abraham, and Moses, but it was not to stay that way. Christianity arose with Jesus himself upon whom salvation now rests. That is a theological truth, but it does not change the historical truth that Jesus conveyed to the woman of Samaria.

“Salvation is from the Jews.” Saint John’s Gospel reports that “many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony... . So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them ... and many more believed because of his word.”

— John 4:39-42

Freedom also comes from the Jews. Freedom is more than a right that enables and tolerates hapless student protests against what they clearly do not understand. Freedom is the right to live unencumbered by any will beyond your own, and your legitimate government’s, and your Creator’s. The journey to freedom of every enslaved people since the Exodus from Egypt is rooted in the freedom from bondage won for the Jews by the Hand of God.

Higher education in the United States is nothing if not predictable in the current age. The age of tolerance now opts for a select body of lies that many more clear-headed people might describe as “woke,” the newest trendy measure of orthodoxy. Steven Stalinsky, Executive Director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, described the fallout in “Who’s Behind the Anti-Israel Protests” in The Wall Street Journal (April 23, 2024):

“At Columbia University, demonstrators chanted support for terrorist organizations [while] burning the American flag and waving Hezbollah’s. They called for Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades to attack again, and taunted Jewish students with ‘Never forget the 7th of October,’ and ‘That will happen 10,000 more times.’ Three men interrupted the Easter Vigil at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York unfurling a banner while shouting, ‘Free Palestine.’”

They also called for humanitarian aid, not for Palestine, but for the protesters themselves. They also demanded unquestioned passage of the Green New Deal, and free pizza.

The protesters at Columbia University in New York City, like those in many other protests, wore masks or face shields so they could remain anonymous. So much for the courage of their convictions. When Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan approached several of them for an interview, they each declined, one by one, saying “I’m not trained.”

Trained by whom?

+ + +

This young Thai guest worker was shot three times by Hamas terrorists while trying to save other Thai workers on October 7, 2023. Interviewed in his hospital bed in Tel Aviv, he said: “I want the people of Israel to know that they are in my thoughts and prayers all the time.”

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for bravely reading and boldly sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

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.”

If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!

There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.

February 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Back in the summer of 2011 in Massachusetts, Independence Day brought dismal news for devoted Catholics already bent under the millstone of scandal. On that morning I turned on New England Cable News to learn that a forty-two year old Massachusetts priest ordained only six years, had taken his own life. It was heartbreaking, and I know his family must have been devastated. However, I feared that far too many in his other family — the Catholic Church — had so steeled themselves against the relentless tide of painful news that such a tragedy was just part of another news day. That was an even greater tragedy. If you have never read my article, “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” about the suicide of a priest I knew, please do. I wish this priest, and his diocesan family had read it. It may have helped him to seek another way to deal with whatever immense pain brought him to this horrific act. I have been where he was in the final moments of his life. I wrote about surviving that painful day in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

I do not know the particular anguish of that young priest in 2011. He died sometime the previous Saturday night after celebrating Mass and then ministering to a family in a hospital emergency room where he was a chaplain.  When he did not show up for his Mass that Sunday morning, someone went in search of him. In between was the darkest night of his own priestly soul. Please, please pray for him. Though this was a major news story in 2011, I am sparing his family from reliving this again in 2024.

Some thirty American Catholic priests have taken their own lives since priests became a favorite target of the news media, of S.N.A.P., and of Satan himself. I have personally known eight of them, and three others who were murdered. A psychiatrist friend who has been conducting research on the priesthood told me that it is extraordinary that I have known 11 priests who were either murdered or died by their own hand. He said that I have been hanging out with the wrong crowd — or, if you read the Gospel, the right one.

I do know this: simply casting off the most wounded among our priests has been the sin of the Church, and it is a sin that would not happen in our own families. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote of this in one of his last letters to me before his death in December 2008:

“Thank you for keeping me informed about the great scandal of the failure of the Church to support her priests in their time of need.  Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform.  I am sure that in the plans of Divine Providence your ministry of suffering is part of your priestly vocation.”

No corporate bottom line would dictate whether we care for our fathers, our grandfathers, our brothers, or our sons, but lately in the Church in America, it does, and it has compounded The Scandal. Christ came into the world to call forth a community’s soul, not a corporate sole. One bishop I know wrote in a whining missive to Rome that if he helped one accused priest in his diocese he would fear an uproar. At least the bishop was honest. His response toward a brother left beaten on the side of the road was moved by fear.

The problem was strictly American back then. But it has since spread to other parts of the world where the same draconian and terminal measures have been imposed upon priests who are merely accused without due process leading to their being simply discarded — sometimes on the streets with no place to go. I fear sometimes that the Catholic Church in America is becoming far more American than Catholic. America is a disposable culture that does not abide problems, and the Church has come to reflect this ugly side of America. Not long ago, Pope Francis derided our “cancel culture,” then he proceeded to cancel the careers of many priests and bishops who did not fall immediately into his ideological plan. The stewards of our faith have capitulated to cancel culture.

For full article tap image.

Disposable Priests in a Disposable Culture

There are priests who, for various reasons, are not assigned to ministry. Under a tenet of Canon Law (Canon 1722) a bishop, with just cause, may forbid a priest from the exercise of public ministry for a period of time, but he remains a priest. For seven years before I was accused and faced trial in 1994, I was not assigned by my bishop and diocese.  For the first two years, I was director of a drug and alcoholism treatment center, and vice-president of the New Hampshire Association of Chemical Dependency Service Providers.  But I was still very much a priest living under obedience to the authority of my bishop.  I celebrated Mass and other sacraments. For the following five years I served in ministry to other priests as Director of Admissions in a residential psychological and spiritual renewal center for Catholic priests and religious.

Even now, in my 30th year in prison for a crime that I insist never took place, I witness to the Gospel and to the Mission of the Church every day in conditions that most priests cannot imagine.  That is not a boast.  Who would boast of such a thing?  I celebrate the sacraments, as you know, and I am still a priest.

A priest may also petition the Holy See for voluntary removal from the clerical state, known popularly as “laicization.” Some years ago this blog had a comment from a man who left ministry as a priest to marry. As far as the Church was concerned, he remained a priest and entered into a civil, but invalid marriage. He reported that he was only recently granted his petition for laicization so that he may now have his marriage blessed by the Church. For reasons that are both sound and prudent, the Church has never been in any hurry to return a priest to the lay state.

One of the most destructive fallouts of the sex abuse scandal in the American Church has been the reality of involuntary laicization. When enacting the 2002 Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the US Bishops quoted a statement of Pope John Paul II in his address to American cardinals on April 23, 2002: “There is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.” Some American bishops have used that statement to seek forced laicization of accused priests under Canon 290, by judicial sentence or by a special act of the Pope. Prior to the Dallas Charter, such a permanent and unappealable removal from the priesthood was exceedingly rare. After the Charter, there was a wave of involuntary laicizations, and some believe they have done irreparable harm to the very Catholic theology of priesthood.

From a practical standpoint, forced laicization — popularly but erroneously called “defrocking” in the media — might satisfy some vindictive urges in certain victim groups, but it does nothing to prevent any possible victimization. It merely discards a priest with problems, or an innocent one falsely accused, upon the dung heap of Job with no support, no supervision, and no  accountability because of claims that are decades old and often unsubstantiated. Families do not discard their fathers, sons, or brothers, and the Church should not discard her priests.

A Puritan Response to Sin

The Bishops’ Charter failed to add a qualifying statement of Pope John Paul II to the American cardinals summoned to Rome in 2002:

“At the same time . . . we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depth of a person’s soul and can work extraordinary change.”

By omitting the most important part of the Pope’s statement, the U.S. Bishops adopted a punishment with no allowance for repentance. In an essay for Homiletic & Pastoral Review (“Sex Abuse and Anti-Catholicism“) Ryan A. MacDonald wrote:

“The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood now underway in Western Culture, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”

In a landmark article in America magazine, “The Rights of Accused Priests” (June 21, 2004), the late Cardinal Avery Dulles issued a stinging rebuke of the bishops. What follows are some excerpts:

“The United States bishops have taken positions at odds with [their own] high principles.”

“Under intense pressure from various survivors’ networks, they hastily adopted, after less than two days of debate, the so-called Dallas Charter . . . ”

“In their effort to . . . restore public confidence in the Church as an institution and to protect the Church from liability suits, the bishops opted for an extreme response.”

“The dominant principle of the Charter was ‘zero tolerance’ . . . Having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgement in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid having to make any judgements in these cases.”

Cardinal Dulles went on to address the often near impossibility of judging the truth of allegations against priests without investigation, and the inherent injustice of taking actions that brand a priest as guilty before such investigation. He then outlined the rights of priests under Canon Law, and how the Charter and current policies ignore or even destroy those rights. I urge every priest and every Catholic to read Cardinal Dulles’ article.

I am not a canon lawyer, and I have only limited training in Church Law. What I have learned has been from experience, and my own experience has been a crash course in fending off what I believe is a seriously flawed and unjust process faced by many accused priests who simply did not commit the crimes.

To highlight how flawed this process is, I would like to reproduce a letter I received in 2002 from a prominent priest, canon lawyer, and professor of Canon Law at a leading Catholic University. I am printing the entire letter, but without his name since I have not asked his permission to print his name. I will let his letter speak for itself:

“Dear Father MacRae:

Don’t ever discount the real spiritual good accomplished by your words at Beyond These Stone Walls. You make people like me, with consciences dulled by repetitious prevalence of procedural abuses, face our responsibilities to protest and to act. You make it personal and compelling.

I want to pass along some bad news. You may already be aware of it, since you seem very well informed, but, if not, at least it will give you occasion to reflect. It seems that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has turned to ‘penal dismissals from the clerical state’ as a routine solution to the cases being sent by American bishops after preliminary investigations. The decrees of dismissal are not subject to appeal or review.

The procedural injustice of this practice is obvious.

In the preliminary investigation process, the accused priest has no opportunity to defend himself. The cases are sent by bishops to CDF sometimes with an expectation that they will instruct the diocese to proceed with a canonical trial for dismissal or allow the accused priest to remain [in the priesthood] in a penitential state but removed from public ministry. Instead, the CDF seems to be taking this drastic and terminal action based solely on the information provided by a bishop in the preliminary investigation — often when the priest is accused of abuse alleged to have occurred thirty years ago or more.

I don’t want to discourage you or any petitions to the Holy See on your behalf. Quite the contrary, I would urge any and all possible interventions.

Think about the implications if this shameful result should fall on you. It is really an empty juridical gesture with no practical consequences. You remain a priest. No one can take that away. You can pray, and you can celebrate the Holy Eucharist validly, absolve or anoint in emergencies, and, I presume, you  could continue your very valuable ministry of consciousness raising. What I am trying to say is please do not be discouraged or lose hope if this awful expedient is aimed at you.”

Ganging Up on the Already Down

To date, at least, that final chapter of my nightmare has not taken place. But the Church must be made aware — you must be made aware — of the inherent injustice of “piling on” that occurs when most priests are accused.

When I faced trial in 1994, I was entirely on my own against an assault on three simultaneous fronts. First, I faced a criminal trial, a highly sensationalized and problematic one that Ryan A. MacDonald recently described in these pages in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Very few priests earn a salary or have access to funds that would assure a fair trial. I certainly did not, but my diocese issued a letter to my attorneys instructing them: “To the extent he is without funds, he should contact the public defenders’ office.” The cost of my defense would have been but a tiny fraction of the cost of mediated settlements.

Secondly, simultaneous to a criminal defense and preparing for trial, I also faced civil lawsuits naming both me and my diocese as defendants. The accusers were represented by their contingency lawyers, and both they and their lawyers had a clear financial stake in the outcome. My diocese was represented by a high profile law firm seeking, from day one, the quietest path to settlement that would generate the least publicity. With my meager assets dissolved in only partial funding of a criminal defense, I was not represented at all against the civil claims. When I protested the possibility of a settlement without substantiation, my accusers and their lawyers simply dropped me as a defendant so that I would no longer have any standing in the matter.

Lastly, from the moment I was accused, I faced a trial-by-media that set an impossible boundary between me and justice. The accusers had contingency lawyers who were relentless spokespersons for their feigned “victimization.” My diocese had a spokesperson who advocated for the distance the diocese was motivated to obtain from me. As I faced trial in 1994, knowing that I maintained my innocence, and knowing that I was not represented at all as settlement negotiations ensued in the background, my bishop and diocese issued a press release stating:

“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

— Press Release of the Diocese of Manchester, September 6, 1993

My attorneys protested this to deafened ears. With that public statement came the end of my civil rights to a presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Throughout the trial, the local news media cited that statement. The jurors in my trial read the statement. To pretend that this scenario represents justice requires far more skill in the art of pretense than I have ever been capable of.

And it’s even worse still, today.

The Bishop Accountability website publishes every sordid detail about every money-driven claim taking no responsibility whatsoever for whether their information is true or corroborated. The site administrators publish the names and lurid details claimed of every accused priest while removing the names of all accusers. In some instances, this amounts to aiding and abetting them in the commission of the crimes of fraud and larceny.

And now, as is clear from the canonist’s dismal letter above, if the accused priest cares anything at all about preserving his priesthood then he must also hire a canon lawyer to defend himself against yet another tier of simultaneous judicial processes: the possibility of canonical dismissal from the priesthood.

If night befalls your father, you don’t discard him! You just don’t!

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. Please consider these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood

When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked

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.”

In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo

Actor Robert De Niro has been cast as a Catholic priest in three films : True Confessions, The Mission, and Sleepers. The latter tells a spellbinding true story.

June 14, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I began this post in May, 2019, but a lot has happened since then that caused me to want to start over. This is an important story about a topic still front and center in the world of Catholic affairs: the Catholic sex abuse crisis. If you’re just plain sick of it, well, frankly, so am I. Both mainstream and Catholic media are still saturated with it. I last wrote of it in April, 2023 in “Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report.”

Fans of Robert De Niro the actor are not necessarily also fans of Robert De Niro the person. Whatever the reasons for that distinction, I want to write of his outstanding roles as a Catholic priest in three controversial films: True Confessions (1981), The Mission (1989) and Sleepers (1996). In each, his character became embroiled in an unforgettable moral quagmire.

The term, “quagmire” first appeared in British literature in 1570. It combines two older British terms, “quag,” with its origin in the word, “quake,” and “mire,” which means to find oneself bogged down in something. A quagmire was first used to refer to becoming trapped in a bog which looks solid enough to walk upon, but then entraps a person in the unseen muck. Today it is used to refer to a situation that seems innocent enough on its surface, but entraps a person in a moral dilemma.

In each of the films above, Robert De Niro portrayed a priest caught up in such a quagmire. I have written before of one of them. In True Confessions, based on a novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne, De Niro was cast in the role of Monsignor Desmond Spellacy. Groomed to become Archbishop of Los Angeles, Spellacy becomes marginally implicated in the murder of a prostitute, a crime being investigated by his L.A. homicide detective brother portrayed by Robert Duvall.

The moral quagmire of True Confessions is that the priest is entirely innocent of the crime, but is he innocent of any knowledge of it? If he knows, how does he know? The title of the film and book gives a hint to the nature of the moral quagmire, a nightmare scenario for many Catholic priests.

But the De Niro role that I want to focus on for this post is that of “Father Bobby” Carillo in Sleepers, a 1996 film based on a book of the same title by Lorenzo Carcaterra published in 1995 but written in 1994, the year of my imprisonment. The story reads like a novel, but it is actually a biographical account in which Carcaterra has changed the names of his characters to protect the innocent.

The book and film unfold in the Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan in 1966 when I was in high school. Hell’s Kitchen was then a poor bastion of mostly Irish Catholics in a tough neighborhood — a term used here with an emphasis more on “hood” than “neighbor.”

In Sleepers, Robert De Niro’s character, Father Bobby, is in stark contrast to much of the media portrayal of Catholic priests since then. He is a priest as tough as the neighborhood in which he lives. Father Bobby meets a group of adolescent boys who hang out in the neighborhood. All have absent fathers or abusive fathers, or both, and over time Father Bobby comes to fulfill a role that today would land him squarely in the crosshairs of societal and media suspicion.

Father Carillo’s Moral Quagmire

Father Bobby does not indoctrinate these street kids into faith. That is something he walks more than talks. I hope you catch the meaning of that because it is central to fatherhood. Father Bobby does not drag them into church. Instead, he protects them, cares for them, challenges them, and becomes a father to them and the sole person on Earth that any of them trust. His lack of Catholic indoctrination might not be the witness some of us might hope for, but it is clearly the witness that these boys most need. One of the saddest aspects of the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis of suspicion in the Church is that such a scenario could never happen again.

But even in 1966, as the story unfolds, Father Carillo is keenly aware of appearances and the necessity of professional distance. As an indirect result of keeping his emotional connection to these young men in check, he is one day not present to them when trouble finds them. Several of them commit a petty crime that escalates. A corrupt judge and court system sentences them to time in “juvey” a New York juvenile detention facility. While there, four of them “earn” a stint in solitary confinement. Sleepers is the slang term for juvenile delinquents serving more than six months in solitary confinement.

While there, they are demoralized and dehumanized beyond description. They are beaten by guards and several of them are repeatedly and brutally raped. To make the awful story shorter, they survive and are restored to freedom but could never be “free” again. They emerged from their nightmare destroyed as men, but they hide the truth. They make a pact to never reveal any of this to Father Bobby — first and foremost because they are ashamed.

Twenty years pass. The 14-year-old boys are now 34-year-old men. One became a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office. Most of the others became street thugs having dropped out of school and all engagement with the human race as a result of what they endured at the hands of the State. All of them occasionally still see Father Bobby, and to a man, they still trust and revere him.

I have to remind readers at this point that this is not some seedy fictional story. It is a true account. In the early 1990s when Lorenzo Carcaterra wrote it, the mainstream media had no interest in the story because the priest in the account is not the perpetrator of sexual abuse, but rather the savior of its victims. And lest you choose to believe that such abuse could not happen in a state run juvenile justice facility, I have firsthand knowledge to the contrary.

At the time Sleepers was written in 1994, my friend Pornchai Moontri was in the solitary confinement unit of the Maine State Prison for nearly seven years. The news venue, PBS Frontline produced a segment on that very same place filmed just months after Pornchai was transferred from there to the New Hampshire State Prison. If you have never viewed PBS Frontline’s Solitary Nation [part1, part2] , be brave and consider doing so. The abuse by guards is all masked because they were on camera and knew it, but the true nature of such a place remains clear.

The Reckoning

Back to Sleepers. One day, some twenty years after Father Bobby’s friends emerged from solitary confinement, two of them ventured into a dark neighborhood bar. Seated alone in a booth was “Nokes,” the most monstrous and sadistic of the guards who sexually assaulted and dehumanized them twenty years earlier. By the end of the day, his victims exacted the justice denied.

In the aftermath, Father Carillo learned the entire truth of what happened to these men in juvenile detention. He then had to wrestle with the deepest, most perplexing moral quagmire of his life as a man and as a priest. He was told by their lawyer that he alone could save them with an alibi defense. All of this painfully reminded me of another story told in my post, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

Most who have read that story agree that all the media hype about the supposed crimes of Catholic priests — some sadly true but many not at all — pale in comparison to the crimes committed against Pornchai and his mother. And yet, the survivor in that story, like the survivors in Sleepers, fled not from the Catholic Church but to it. Pornchai himself confirmed this in a post written upon his arrival in Thailand, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai and I had another friend, TJ, who was released from prison only to find himself back here at age 26 with a new petty offense. Just after Pornchai left in 2020, TJ was moved from solitary confinement to a crowded cellblock. He unpacked his few possessions and obtained a pass to come to see me in the prison Law Library. With his head bowed in silent shame for his failure to live uprightly in freedom, he told me only that life was hard and he “did something stupid.” I don’t know the details.

What I do know, and it is well documented, is that for much of his young life until he was old enough to escape, TJ was a victim of unspeakable sexual and physical violence. The pairing of sex and violence is especially psychologically destructive. Like the young men in Sleepers, TJ and Pornchai both carried in their hearts a devastating devaluation of their lives. With every day in “fight or flight” mode, freedom was stolen from them long before prison.

As an accused Catholic priest, one would think that I would be the last person TJ would want anything to do with, but Pornchai and I taught him that he need not be forever defined by the sins of others. We did not allow his past to excuse his present and neither should he, but we also placed his offenses into the totality of his life. We saw through his façade and challenged him too grieve his past without letting it rule his present.

So I, too, was in a quagmire here — with Pornchai and TJ and others. I was left with the irony of sheltering them not only from what happened to them, but also from what happened to me. When leaders of the Church built upon God’s Truth, God’s Justice and God’s Mercy reflected none of these, I covered for them in the presence of Pornchai and TJ. They looked to the Church for healing and hope, and I could never deprive them of that. Neither could Father Bobby Carillo.

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: This post ends in another glaring irony. At the time my diocese was besieged by a grand jury report from the State of New Hampshire in 2003, the State was itself hiding an enormous sexual abuse scandal brought by former residents of its Youth Detention Center. Over the last year, that story had come to light.

The Diocese of Manchester paid $30 million in unquestioned mediated settlements over the last 30 years, while state officials raked the Church over the coals. Now the State of New Hampshire has earmarked $100 million to settle in excess of 1,300 pending lawsuits against the state. One attorney described this as “the largest child abuse case in U.S. history.” Unlike its treatment of the Catholic Church, however, the State has not convened a grand jury to investigate and create a grand jury report as has happened to Catholic institutions across the land. Apparently, for the State some things are best left in the dark.

You may also be interested in these related links:

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

Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester

Judge Clears Way for Hundreds of YDC Child Abuse Lawsuits

Judge Questions AG’s Conflict at Heart of YDC Cases

Courtesy of NH Business Review

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

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Justice Clarence Thomas: When a News Story Becomes the News

Despite known threats against Supreme Court justices, an April CNN report revealed the home address of the elderly mother of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

May 10, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Hours after I began this post, I was forced to abandon it and start over. Just as I sat before my typewriter, popular FOX News host Tucker Carlson was fired from the network for reasons that I am certain will be clearer but no less controversial by the time this is posted. On the same day, CNN Morning News host Don Lemon was also fired, but entirely unrelated to the FOX News story. Both events shook the world of cable television news media.

Whatever the reasons behind them, however, they could not possibly rise to the clear and present danger posed from a violation of journalistic standards that stayed mostly off the rest of the media radar in recent weeks. The only reference I have seen to its seriousness was in an April 21, 2023 column by James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Justice Thomas and the Plague of Bad Reporting.”

James Taranto is the WSJ Editorial Features Editor. His column that day was a very good report about some very bad journalism. It took a complex development and systematically presented it in clear prose. If you cannot see it due to the WSJ pay wall, I want to present some of its highlights. Its subject was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a short list of supposed “ethics violations” touted in some news venues with lots of partisan spin. Mr. Taranto, especially critical of coverage in two Washington DC media venues, wrote: “The Washington Post and ProPublica commit comically incompetent journalism. But by stirring up animus, they increase the risk of a tragic ending.”

The “risk of a tragic ending” refers to some related coverage at CNN. Among the published claims from ProPublica was a charge that the 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas has been living rent free in a property formerly owned in part by Thomas but sold in 2016 to longtime friend, Harlan Crow. When Justice Thomas sold his one-third interest in the property, at a substantial loss, he was required to report the sale, but did not. It was an oversight. A source said that Thomas erroneously believed he did not have to report the sale because he sold it at a loss and none of the entities involved had a case before his Court.

Mr. Taranto went on to explain that the oversight is a rather common one. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Ketanji Brown Jackson had all committed the same oversight which in each case was corrected by simply filing an amendment to the respective year’s report. That same simple correction should have been afforded to Justice Thomas as well, but instead ProPublica pounced on the story in April, presenting it as a gross violation of judicial ethics. It was an oversight that could have been easily corrected within the rules, but that did not stop The Washington Post from also hyping the story for partisan reasons.

The story, as later reported by CNN, was that, as part of a negotiated $133,363 sale price of the home and property in 2016, then 85-year-old Leola Williams, the mother of Justice Thomas, was given an occupancy agreement by the buyer to be able to remain in her home rent free for the rest of her life. She remained responsible for property taxes and insurance. The occupancy agreement was with her and not with Justice Thomas who sold the modest home at a loss to a company owned by longtime friend, Harlan Crow. Ms. Williams is now 92 years of age.

Ethics and Common Sense at CNN

It is perhaps providential that Harlan Crow’s first name is not “Jim.” It did not take long for the political left to turn this story into a scandal, though with some difficulty. Something terribly nefarious was imagined lurking beneath the fact that a white billionaire might offer such a gesture of mercy to an elderly black woman. Former ProPublica president Richard Tofel wrote of this on Twitter: “Can’t imagine how any reasonable person could distinguish this from Crow giving Thomas cash every month.”

In publishing this story on Monday, April 17,2023, CNN followed this “incompetent reporting” by “increasing the risk of a tragic ending.” The potential tragic ending was this: The CNN report also published the home address of the now 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas. That was the only real scandal in this story. With help from a friend, I published the following comment on James Taranto’s Wall Street Journal column:

“In 2022, I was invited by the Pew Research Center to participate in its Survey of Journalists about the state of journalism and news reporting in America, both broadcast and print. One result was a widely expressed dismay by journalists that journalistic ethics are routinely compromised in favor of partisan politics. Apparently, the participating journalists have not done enough to counter this concern.

“The most disturbing part of Mr.Taranto’s column is a revelation that CNN reported the address of the elderly mother of Justice Clarence Thomas. There can be no acceptable explanation for this dangerous and irresponsible setting aside of journalistic ethics in favor of one-sided political gain. The news department at CNN is under new management. Viewers were assured that there would be changes in the way news is presented there. We were promised news with less opinionated partisan influence.

“Whoever at CNN published the address should be fired. Whoever provided oversight to allow this to happen should also be fired, especially in light of other attempted attacks and harassment at the homes of other Supreme Court justices. After this serious breach of ethics, I am deleting CNN from my television channel list until CNN can live up to its promise. This is the only way consumers of the news can speak truth to power. Actions like this at CNN tell me that power takes precedence over truth.”

— Gordon J. Mac Rae, The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2023

A Jarring 2020 Flashback

This was really all about Roe v. Wade and it could easily be interpreted as a reminder to those off the rails that reprisals are now called for. Addressing a crowd of angry pro-abortion supporters in March 2020, then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) leveled threats against two Supreme Court Justices:

“We know what’s at stake. Over the last three years, women’s reproductive rights have come under attack in a way we haven’t seen in modern history. Republican legislatures are waging a war on women, and they’re taking away fundamental rights. I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”

— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

We all saw the jeering protesters lobbing threats at the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices. Early in the morning of June 8, 2022, two weeks before the leaked decision on Roe v. Wade was formally published, U.S. marshals arrested an armed man trying to break into the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He told police that he had begun “thinking about how to give his life purpose” so he decided to kill Justice Kavanaugh after finding his address on the internet. All of this was known to CNN before publishing the address of the 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas.

I know that CNN is not the only news venue that packages news along partisan lines. According to media expert, Alex S. Jones in his 2010 book, Losing the News (Oxford Press). “CNN and MSNBC have shifted their focus from news to opinion in pursuit of FOX News’s highly successful mix of news and advocacy.” In the month before this breach of ethics at CNN, its ratings had soared 35-percent since the New York indictment of former president Donald Trump. Its audience base was already highly charged. And it goes without saying that if Donald Trump had said in public what Senator Chuck Schummer said on the steps of the Supreme Court, that story would have eclipsed all other news.

A March 26, 2023 You Gov poll of trust in broadcast news services asked respondents to address two questions: 1) which of the following TV networks do you watch to keep up with the news? And 2) Which TV networks do you most trust for news? The combined results were definitive: Fox News 41%; ABC News 24%; CNN 22%; CBS 22%; NBC 21%; MSNBC 18%.

Whether our readers agree with the partisan spin of any of these news networks is beside the point. There is clearly a ratings war going on, and networks that have trailed in ratings have also suffered a decline in advertising dollars, the networks’ sole source of income. Most viewers who consistently choose one network over another tend to do so not just because they want the news, but also because they want their own belief system to be affirmed. This was the number two complaint among journalists in the recent Pew Research Center Survey of Journalists in which I and this blog were invited to participate.

Taking part in that survey is not a bragging point. If anything, it made me realize how much I am also a slave to a news service and its fundamental frame of mind. The blending of news and opinion is a toxic but alluring mix. Once I became conscious of this, I have tried to view news networks with opposing views, but it hasn’t been easy. Two years after the election of 2020, one of these networks remains dedicated to 24-hour coverage of “get Trump at any cost.” Another seems wedded to the idea that we are all unrepentant racists. When I leave a news program feeling angry and riled, just imagine how an already fired-up mob is responding.

At least one cooler head has prevailed. After reading the above column and two recent sequels by The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, I am convinced that the ethics claims against Justice Clarence Thomas are entirely contrived and reported along partisan lines to support a strictly partisan bias.

Along those same lines, the Gallup Poll now reports that 70% of Democrats, 27% of Independents, and only 14% of Republicans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence in the current state of journalism.

Have an opinion? I would love to hear it, but please don’t shoot the messenger!

+ + +

Two final notes from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Forty-four years ago on May 11, 1979, my friend Father Joseph Sands was murdered in the rectory of St. Rose of Lima parish in the town of Littleton, New Hampshire. The years to follow revealed that this troubling story had many mysterious tentacles into the case that sent me to wrongful imprisonment. Ryan A. MacDonald untangled those tentacles in “The Story Buried Under the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

On a very different note, Sunday May 14 is Mothers Day in the United States. It is a day to honor our mothers, both living and deceased. I would like to think that after all these years of injustice, I managed to bring some poetic justice to my mother in “Mothers Day Promises to Keep, and Miles to Go Before I Sleep.”

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

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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