The Power and the Glory If the Heart of a Priest Grows Cold

After 42 years of priesthood, 30 unjustly in prison, ‘The Whisky Priest,’ the central figure of Graham Greene’s best known novel, comes to my mind in darker times.

June 5, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“You are sure to find another cross if you flee the one you bear.”

— Anonymous Mexican Proverb

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I was ordained to the priesthood on June 5, 1982, the sole candidate for priesthood in the entire State of New Hampshire that year. On the next day, June 6, 1982, I was nervously standing in a corner in the Sacristy as I prepared to offer my First Mass in Saint John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. The church was packed with friends, family, and strangers from near and far. I was standing in a corner because the Sacristy was filled with my brother priests all vesting to join me for the occasion. I imagined they were watching me for signs that I might flee.

I peered through the open sacristy door at the huge, anticipating crowd and my anxiety level was off the scales. I wished for a way to calm my nerves. Just then, a young lady came into the sacristy and handed me a written note. The driver of a Buick out in the parish parking lot had left the lights on and a thoughtful person jotted down the license plate number. So I totally broke protocol. I walked out of the sacristy into the sanctuary, approached the lectern microphone, and announced that someone had parked a car with its lights still on.

It worked! All the attention was suddenly off me as everyone looked around to see who would get up and embarrassedly walk outside. Then, still at the microphone, I announced, “I don’t know what the rest of you are expecting because I don’t have a clue how to say Mass!” The church erupted in laughter and spontaneous applause, and my anxiety went up in smoke. Back in the sacristy, the others did not understand what I had said. “What are you up to?” They asked.

In the years to follow, as you know, priesthood took me down some dark side roads. In many ways, and at many times over those years, I have felt as though I had been an utter failure as a priest. I should not be in this prison-place from where I write yet another epitaph on yet another year of priesthood offered up like incense to drift out beyond these stone walls. Yet here I am, and in the midst of sorrow and tears, I am powerless to change any of it.

I know today that I had been caught up in a dense web of corruption that resists unraveling despite some concerted efforts. I did not see any of this corruption as it arose around me. Priests tend not to be attuned to such things, but others have written about it. Among them is Claire Best, a most tenacious investigator, researcher, independent writer, and Hollywood talent agent who wrote, “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

On the Day of Padre Pio

Back in 2009 as my 27th anniversary of priesthood loomed, this blog was just beginning to take shape. I did not foresee that coming either. I did not even know what a blog was. It was proposed to me by a writer in Australia. This is a familiar story to most readers, but I recently came upon a different perspective on this blog’s beginning. It’s a sort of parallax view, a telling of the same story but from a different angle. From his newfound cradle of freedom in Thailand, Pornchai-Max Moontri wrote about this with some help from our editor. We will link to it again at the end of this post, but if you plan to read it, bring a tissue. It is, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

On the very day I was ordained in 1982, my friend, Pornchai Moontri was eight years old, living in abject poverty, but happy, on a farm in northeast Thailand. He was three years away from being taken, trafficked to America, his mother brutally murdered, and his life consumed in the wreckage of real abuse by a real predatory monster while all the “officials” looked the other way. Our lives, his and mine, were on a collision course.

When this blog had its debut in July, 2009, a small number of self-described “faithful” Catholics, and some faithfully anti-Catholic activists, took umbrage with the notion that an accused and imprisoned priest might have such a voice in the Catholic public square. Some of them sought out anything and everything they could unearth and throw at me to discourage my writing. It was effective. Discouragement comes easily to a prisoner.

The strangest of the insults came from a man who felt obliged to tell me that he refuses to read anything written by “another Whisky Priest.” That was a bit of a mystery until months later when I read Graham Greene’s masterful 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory. Its main character is a priest without a name. He is the “Whisky Priest” known mostly for the prison of addiction.

That particular insult seemed entirely misplaced. Google did not always pay attention to punctuation back then. It turned out that the letter writer had Googled “Father Gordon MacRae” and stumbled upon a reference to an interview with actress Meredith MacRae in which she revealed, “My father Gordon MacRae was an alcoholic.” Gordon MacRae the film and Broadway star went on to win a multitude of awards for starring roles in Carousel and Oklahoma, among others. But, alas, I am not he, and nor am I the “Whisky Priest.” I have not consumed alcohol in any form other than at Mass since 1983.

But “Whisky Priest” did not quite have the force of insult the letter writer intended. Graham Greene’s “Whisky Priest” was sadly all too human, but his priesthood towered over his flawed humanity. The Power and the Glory is set in early 20th Century Mexico when an emerging totalitarian regime there outlawed the practice of Catholicism in a nation that was almost 100 percent Catholic. This is the story of the Cristeros, Catholics who rose up in civil war against a Marxist regime that tried to banish their faith. Priests were hunted; many were martyred; and those who remained, and stayed alive, were forced to abandon their priesthood, enter into marriage, and denounce the Church or face prison and eventual execution.

Many who were not martyred did as required, but not the Whisky Priest. In the most unique of literary twists, a police lieutenant made it his life’s mission to hunt down and trap the Whisky Priest. He knew of the priest’s alcoholism so he enticed him by leaving a trail of bottles of wine. The story conveys the priest’s spiritual battle within himself as he consumed the wine to silence his addiction while through grace and sheer force of will always forced himself to leave enough to offer Mass all throughout the country for Catholics who remained steadfast in their faith at a time when there was no other priest.

The Whisky Priest is the most unlikely of spiritual heroes. Priesthood was his greatest cross because it placed his life, and the lives of those who sought his sacraments, in grave danger. It was also his liberation. When he was finally arrested, the Police Lieutenant asked him why he stayed only to be captured and likely martyred:

“If I left, it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. But it doesn’t matter so much my being a coward and all the rest. I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same — and I can give him God’s pardon. It wouldn’t make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.”

A Voice in the Wilderness

But also among the din of objections to my writing came far louder and more voluminous words of encouragement from other sources. Among them, as most readers know, was Cardinal Avery Dulles who famously wrote,

“Someday your sufferings will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Someone may want to add a new chapter to the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison. In the spirit of St Paul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fr Walter Ciszek, and Fr Alfred Delp, your writing, which is clear, eloquent and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.”

I was stunned to receive the support of this nation’s most prolific Catholic writer and prelate. But I was not sure that I believed him. Then, 15 years later as yet another ordination anniversary loomed, I learned from others just a week ago about a brief article at the blog, Les Femmes — The Truth. The writer, Mary Ann Krietzer, had written a letter to me about a year earlier.

I get many letters, a few of them hate mail but most of them strong gestures of support. However I fail, though not by choice, to answer most. I can purchase only six typewriter ribbons per year so I must preserve them for BTSW posts. I had carpal tunnel surgery on both hands so writing a large volume by hand is most difficult. I came upon a letter kindly sent to me from Mary Ann Krietzer that I somehow had misplaced. Six months later, near Pentecost, I discovered it in a pile of paper and wrote a brief reply. That prompted her to write a post on her widely-read blog entitled, “Fr Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

In many ways I was shocked by it. The author gave clear voice to all that Cardinal Dulles had predicted, without even knowing that he had predicted it. Mary Ann Kreitzer’s article included this passage published earlier by a recently ordained deacon that was given a magnified voice at Les Femmes — The Truth:

“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

For people who base their core purpose upon a lie, the truth is an especially threatening thing. I had no idea that my voice in the wilderness was no longer in the wilderness. I hope you will read Ms. Krietzer’s post linked again below. She provided articulate balance to the loud din of those who pursued me across the land just to disparage and demean. For my part, after reading Mary Ann Krietzer’s post, I just wanted to go hide under my bunk. But in truth, as I mark 42 years of priesthood in the deep peripheries to which Pope Francis once summoned the gaze of the whole Church, I remain a man in prison, and a priest in full.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I want to thank you for your support and prayers. I also want to ask for your prayers for a young man who encountered this blog along with his mother and father and family, back in its infancy in 2009. They have been devoted readers ever since. On May 29 this year Ben Feuerborn became Father Ben Feuerborn when he was ordained a priest in Lincoln, Nebraska. His first Mass went without a hitch — perhaps because no one had left their car lights on. His second Mass was offered at a Benedictine abbey near Kansas City, Missouri. While Father Ben was in the sacristy vesting for Mass, his mother spotted a plaque under the title “Ad Altare Dei” (To the altar of God). She took out her phone and snapped this photo, which I received this week. It is a bit of a mystery, one among many.

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We also recommend these related posts:

Fr. Gordon MacRae at Beyond These Stone Walls
by Mary Ann Krietzer @Les Femmes — The Truth

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized
by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

A Mirror Image in the Devil’s Masterpiece
by Dilia E. Rodríguez, Ph.D.

Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence

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.”

What do John Wayne and Pornchai Moontri Have In Common?

As Advent begins in the midst of some long-awaited changes and revisions in the Catholic Mass, I have been doing some thinking about the nature of change.

In “February Tales,” an early post at Beyond These Stone Walls, I described growing up on the Massachusetts North Shore — the stretch of seacoast just north of Boston. My family had a long tradition of being “Sacrament Catholics.”

I once heard my father joke that he would enter a church only twice in his lifetime, and would be carried both times. I was seven years old, squirming into a hand-me-down white suit for my First Communion when I first heard that excuse for staying home. I didn’t catch on right away that my father was referring to his Baptism and his funeral. I pictured him, a very large man, slung over my mother’s shoulder on his way into church for Sunday Mass, and I laughed.

We were the most nominal of Catholics. Prior to my First Communion at age seven, I was last in a Catholic church at age five for the priesthood ordination of my uncle, the late Father George W. MacRae, a Jesuit and renowned Scripture scholar. My father and “Uncle Winsor,” as we called him, were brothers — just two years apart in age but light years apart in their experience of faith. I was often bewildered, as a boy, at this vast difference between the two brothers.

But my father’s blustering about his abstention from faith eventually collapsed under the weight of his own cross. It was a cross that was partly borne by me as well, and carried in equal measure by every member of my family. By the time I was ten — at the very start of that decade of social upheaval, life in our home had disintegrated. My father’s alcoholism raged beyond control, nearly destroying him and the very bonds of our family. We became children of the city streets as home and family faded away.

I have no doubt that many readers can relate to the story of a home torn asunder by alcoholism, and some day soon I plan to write much more about this cross. But for now I want to write about conversion, so I’ll skip ahead.

The Long and Winding Road Home

As a young teenager, I had a friend whose family attended a small Methodist church. I stayed with them from time to time. They knew I was estranged from my Catholic faith and Church, so one Sunday morning they invited me to theirs. As I sat through the Methodist service, I just felt empty inside. There was something crucial missing. So a week later, I attended Catholic Mass — secretly and alone — with a sense that I was making up for some vague betrayal. At some point sitting in this Mass alone at age 15, I discovered that I was home.

My father wasn’t far behind me. Two years later, when just about everyone we knew had given up any hope for him, my father underwent a radical conversion that changed his very core. He admitted himself to a treatment program, climbed the steep and arduous mountain of recovery, and became our father again after a long, turbulent absence. A high school dropout and machine shop laborer, my father’s transformation was miraculous. He went back to school, completed a college degree, earned his masters degree in social work, and became instrumental in transforming the lives of many other broken men. He also embraced his Catholic faith with love and devotion, and it embraced him in return. That, of course, is all a much longer story for another day.

My father died suddenly at the age of 52 just a few months after my ordination to priesthood in 1982. I remember laying on the floor during the Litany of the Saints at my ordination as I described in “Going My Way,” a Lenten post last year. I was conscious that my father stood on the aisle just a few feet away, and I was struck by the nature of the man whose impact on my life had so miraculously changed. Underneath the millstones of addiction and despair that once plagued him was a singular power that trumped all. It was the sheer courage necessary to be open to the grace of conversion and radical change. The most formative years of my young adulthood and priesthood were spent as a witness to the immensity of that courage. In time, I grew far less scarred by my father’s road to perdition, and far more inspired by his arduous and dogged pursuit of the road back. I have seen other such miracles, and learned long ago to never give up hope for another human being.

The Conversion of the Duke

A year ago this very week, I wrote “Holidays in the Hoosegow: Thanksgiving With Some Not-So-Just Desserts.” In that post, I mentioned that John Wayne is one of my life-long movie heroes and a man I have long admired. But all that I really ever knew of him was through the roles he played in great westerns like “The Searchers,” “The Comancheros,” “Rio Bravo,” and my all-time favorite historical war epic, “The Longest Day.”

In his lifetime, John Wayne was awarded three Oscars and the Congressional Gold Medal. After his death from cancer in 1979, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But, for me, the most monumental and courageous of all of John Wayne’s achievements was his 1978 conversion to the Catholic faith.

Not many in Hollywood escape the life it promotes, and John Wayne was no exception. The best part of this story is that it was first told by Father Matthew Muñoz, a priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and John Wayne’s grandson.

Early in his film career in 1933, John Wayne married Josephine Saenz, a devout Catholic who had an enormous influence on his life. They gave birth to four children, the youngest of whom,  Melinda, was the mother of Father Matthew Muñoz. John Wayne and Josephine Saenz civilly divorced in 1945 as Hollywood absorbed more and more of the life and values of its denizens.

But Josephine never ceased to pray for John Wayne and his conversion, and she never married again until after his death. In 1978, a year before John Wayne died, her prayer was answered and he was received into the Catholic Church. His conversion came late in his life, but John Wayne stood before Hollywood and declared that the secular Hollywood portrayal of the Catholic Church and faith is a lie, and the truth is to be found in conversion.

That conversion had many repercussions. Not least among them was the depth to which it inspired John Wayne’s 14-year old grandson, Matthew, who today presents the story of his grandfather’s conversion as one of the proudest events of his life and the beginning of his vocation as a priest.

If John Wayne had lived to see what his conversion inspired, I imagine that he, too, would have stood on the aisle, a monument to the courage of conversion, as Matthew lay prostrate on the Cathedral floor praying the Litany of the Saints at priesthood ordination. The courage of conversion is John Wayne’s most enduring legacy.

Pornchai Moontri Takes a Road Less Traveled

The Japanese Catholic novelist, Shusaku Endo, wrote a novel entitled Silence (Monumenta Nipponica, 1969), a devastating historical account of the cost of discipleship. It’s a story of 17th Century Catholic priests who faced torture and torment for spreading the Gospel in Japan. The great Catholic writer, Graham Greene, wrote that Silence is “in my opinion, one of the finest novels of our time.”

Silence is the story of Father Sebastian Rodriguez, one of those priests, and the story is told through a series of his letters. Perhaps the most troubling part of the book was the courage of Father Rodriguez, a courage difficult to relate to in our world. Because of the fear of capture and torture, and the martyrdom of every priest who went before him, Father Rodriguez had to arrive in Japan for the first time by rowing a small boat alone in the pitch blackness of night from the comfort and safety of a Spanish ship to an isolated Japanese beach in 1638 — just 18 years after the Puritan Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Squanto’s Pawtuxet, half a world away as I describe in “The True Story of Thanksgiving.”

In Japan, however, Father Rodriguez was a pilgrim alone. Choosing to be left on a Japanese beach in the middle of the night, he had no idea where he was, where he would go, or how he would survive. He had only the clothes on his back, and a small traveler’s pouch containing food for a day. I cannot fathom such courage. I don’t know that I could match it if it came down to it.

But I witness it  every single day. Most of our readers are very familiar with “Pornchai’s Story,” and with his conversion to Catholicism on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. Most know the struggles and special challenges he has faced as I wrote in “Pornchai Moontri, Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

But the greatest challenge of Pornchai’s life is yet to come. In two years he will have served twenty-two years in prison — more than half his life, and half the original sentence of forty-five years imposed when he was 18 years old. In two years time, if many elements fall into place and he can find legal counsel, Pornchai will have an opportunity to seek some commutation of his remaining sentence based on rehabilitation and other factors.

It is a sort of Catch-22, however. Pornchai could then see freedom at the age of forty for the first time since he was a teen, but it will require entering a world entirely foreign to him. On the day Pornchai leaves prison — whether it is in two years or ten or twenty — he will be immediately taken into custody under the authority of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, flown to Bangkok, Thailand, and left there alone. It is a daunting, sometimes very frightening future, and I am a witness to the anxiety it evokes.

For every long term prisoner, there comes a point in which prison itself is the known world and freedom is a foreign land. Pornchai has spent more than half his life in prison.

Even I, after seventeen years here, sometimes find myself at the tipping point, that precipice in which a prisoner cannot readily define which feels more like the undiscovered country — remaining in prison or trying to be free. I had a dream one night in which I had won my freedom, but entered a hostile world and Church in which I was a pariah, living alone and homeless in a rented room in hiding, pursued by mobs of angry Catholics.  I know well the anxious fears of all the prisons of men.

Pornchai was brought to the United States against his will at the age of eleven. That story is told in deeply moving prose by Pornchai himself in “Pornchai’s Story.” I think we became friends because by the strangeness of grace I knew only too well the experience of having the very foundations of life and family and all security fall out from under me. Pornchai spoke a language that I understood clearly. The transformation of pain and sorrow into the experience of grace is the realm of God, and enduring it to one day lead another out of darkness is a great gift. In the end, who can ever say what is good and what is bad? It is not suffering that is our problem, but rather what we do with it when it finds us.

But what Pornchai faces in the future is daunting. With no opportunity for schooling as an abandoned child in Thailand, he never learned to read and write in Thai and hasn’t heard the Thai language spoken since he was eleven. He remembers little of Thai culture, has no prospects to support himself, no home there, no contacts, and no solace at all. Like Father Rodriguez in Silence, Pornchai will be dropped off in a foreign country, and left to fend for himself with no preparation at all beyond what he can scrape up from behind prison walls in another continent. Welcome to the new America!

Pornchai’s options are limited. He can try to bring about this trauma sooner by seeking commutation of his sentence at an age at which he may still somehow build a life in Thailand. Or he can remain quietly in prison another decade or more, postponing this transition until he is much older, with fewer chances for employment, but perhaps can find connections in Thailand.

These are not great choices. “Pornchai’s Story” got the attention of the Thai government and the Cardinal Archbishop of Bangkok two years ago, but the Thai government has been in chaos since, and the Archbishop has retired. All overtures to both since 2009 have been met by silence.

So in the midst of all this dismal foreboding, and in the face of a future entirely unknown, and perhaps even bleak, Pornchai Moontri became a Catholic. He embraced a faith practiced by less than one percent of the people who will one day be his countrymen again, and in so doing, he piled alienation upon alienation.

And yet this man who has no earthly reason to trust anything to fate, trusts faith itself. I have never met a man more determined to live the faith he has professed than Pornchai Moontri. In the darkness and aloneness of a prison cell night after night for the last two of his twenty years in prison, Pornchai stares down the anxiety of uncertainty, struggles for reasons to believe, and finds them.

I am at a loss for more concrete sources of hope for Pornchai. But like Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, whom I have quoted so often, I believe that “I am a link in a chain; a bond of connection between persons.”

Someone out there holds good news for Pornchai — something he can cling to in hope. I await it with as much patience as I can summon. Pornchai awaits it with a singular courage — the courage of conversion that seeks the spring of hope in the winter of despair.

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