Weapons of Mass Destruction

At the behest of paid, unnamed ‘trauma-informed consultants,’ my diocese provided a six-figure settlement for a claim far too old to be filed in any court of law.

May 22, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

And they keep on coming. A year before the 2002 wave of clergy sex abuse claims rippled out of Boston across the country, Sean Murphy, age 37, and his mother, Sylvia, demanded $850,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston. Sean claimed that three decades earlier, he and his brother were repeatedly molested by their parish priest. In support of the claim, Mrs. Murphy produced old school records placing her sons in a community where the priest was once assigned. No other corroboration was needed. Shortly thereafter, Byron Worth, age 41, recounted molestation by the same priest and demanded his own six-figure settlement. The men were following an established practice of “mediated settlements,” a precedent set in the early 1990s when a multitude of molestation claims from the 1960s and 1970s emerged against Father James Porter and a few other priests. In 1993, the Diocese of Fall River settled some 80 such claims in a single negotiated deal. Other Church institutions followed that lead on the advice of insurers and attorneys.

Before the Murphys’ $850,000 demand was paid, however, Sean, his mother, and Byron Worth were indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury for conspiracy, attempted larceny, and soliciting others to commit larceny. It turned out that Sean and Byron were once inmates together at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Shirley where they concocted their fraudulent plan to score a windfall from their beleaguered Church.

On November 16, 2001, Sean Murphy and Byron Worth pleaded guilty to fraud charges and were sentenced to less than two years in prison for the scam. The younger Murphy brother was never charged, and Mrs. Murphy died before facing court proceedings. Local newspapers relegated the Murphy scam to the far back pages while headlines screamed about the emerging multitude of decades-old claims of abuse by priests. When two other inmates at MCI-Shirley accused another priest in 2001, a Boston lawyer wrote that it is no coincidence these men shared the same prison. “They also shared the same contingency lawyer,” he wrote. “I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that this is a current and popular scam.”

It is not difficult to understand the roots of such fraud. Prison inmates, like others, read newspapers. Just months before the onslaught of claims against priests, the Archdiocese of Boston landed on the litigation radar screen with the notorious arrest of Mr. Christopher Reardon, a young, married, Catholic layman, model citizen, and youth counselor at a local YMCA who was also employed part-time at a small, remote parish outpost north of Boston. As Mr. Reardon’s extensive serial child molestation case came to light—with substantial and graphic DNA, videotape, and photographic evidence of assaults that occurred over previous months—the YMCA quickly entered into settlements consistent with the State’s charitable immunity laws.

In a search for deeper pockets, however, a local contingency lawyer pondered for the news media about whether the rural part-time parish worker’s activities were personally known—and covered up—by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. It was a ludicrous suggestion, but it was a springboard to announce in the Boston Globe (July 14, 2001) that “the hearsay and speculation” among lawyers and clients, is that “the Catholic Church settled their cases [of suspected abuse by priests] for an average of $500,000 each since the 1990s.”

It was a dangled lure that would soon have many takers, some of whom have been to the Church’s ATM more than once. In January of 2003, at the height of the clergy scandal, a 68-year-old Massachusetts priest had the poor judgment to be drawn into a series of suggestive Internet exchanges with a total stranger, a 32-year-old man named Dominic Martin. Using a threat of media exposure of the printed exchanges, Mr. Martin demanded that the priest leave an envelope containing $3,000 in a local restaurant lobby.

The frightened priest, who never had a prior accusation, compounded his poor judgment by paying the demand. Soon after, another cash demand was made, but the priest finally called the police who set up a sting of their own. On January 24, 2003, Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna, were arrested at the drop point, and charged with extortion.

The police report revealed that Mr. Martin had changed his name. His birth name was identified as Tod Biltcliffe, a man who, a decade earlier, obtained a settlement when he accused a New Hampshire priest of molesting him in the 1980s. At the time the priest protested that Mr. Biltcliffe was committing fraud and larceny. The Church settled anyway. Biltcliffe’s claim was that when he was 15 years old, the priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA. Curiously, the investigation file contained a transcript of a 1988 “Geraldo Rivera” show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” One of the cases profiled was that of a young man who claimed that a priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA.

The 1988 “Geraldo” transcript was a sensationalized account of clergy sex abuse cases from the 1970s and 1980s. The transcript is notable because it contains many of the same claims of exposing secret Church documents, archives, and episcopal cover-ups in 1988 that lawyers and reporters claim to have exposed for the first time in 2003.

Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country. Jason Berry, who excoriates the Church and priesthood at every turn, actually defended, in 1988, the existence of so-called “secret” Church archives: “Canon law says that you have to have a secret archive in every diocese…. That’s funny because I’ve been attacking the Church for three years on this… I want to express my own irony of [now] being in a position of defending the Church.”

Enter Shamont Lyle Sapp

When Shamont Lyle Sapp first detected the smell of money, he found it too enticing to pass up. Convicted for a series of bank robberies, Mr. Sapp, then age 51, was serving a lengthy sentence in the dark peripheries of the U.S. Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania when the scent first drifted by his cell in 2008. That was when Sapp filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. Detailing his tragic past, Sapp’s lawsuit claimed that he was a stranded teenage runaway from his Pennsylvania home en route to stay with relatives in Oregon. Then Archdiocese of Portland priest, Father Thomas Laughlin took advantage of his plight to repeatedly sexually abuse him.

Sapp claimed in his highly detailed lawsuit that the priest offered the young runaway a job cutting grass, then sexually abused him at a Portland Catholic church. Then Father Laughlin sodomized him during a five-day motel stay paid for by the priest who then funded the youth’s return trip to Pennsylvania. It was the latest horror story in the Catholic abuse narrative, and one that dismayed Catholics coast to coast.

Mr. Sapp’s story rang true, so it flew. Further inquiry was deemed unnecessary. The detailed claims were reported to civil legal authorities for whom the story also rang true, but Father Tom Laughlin had already been accused and convicted by others with similar tales. Mr. Sapp’s disturbing story added to the weight of a growing millstone around the priest’s neck.

In all public documents in the case, Mr. Sapp found refuge among an ever-expanding list of “John Does” accusing priests from the Archdiocese of Portland to cash in on its bankruptcy proceedings. Sapp’s story was accepted at face value resulting in a cash settlement of $70,000. Inmate Sapp accepted the offer while lawyers, the Archdiocese, and victim advocates all pontificated about how no amount of money could compensate him for the trauma he endured. As for Father Laughlin, the “credible” (aka “settled”) accusations drove another nail into the coffin containing the remains of his priesthood as the Archdiocese sought his dismissal.

There was only one problem with Shamont Lyle Sapp’s story: “It was entirely fabricated,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer who in 2014 prosecuted Sapp for mail fraud and other federal charges for this and three similar frauds carried out against Catholic priests and dioceses in four jurisdictions. While serving another sentence in a medium security state prison in Minersville, PA, Mr. Sapp filed a second lawsuit claiming that a priest of the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona sexually abused him.

Later still, Sapp was serving a sentence in a South Carolina prison from where he sought compensation for claimed sexual abuse by another priest. And before all the above, Sapp filed a 2006 lawsuit claiming that a Spokane, Washington priest had sexually abused him in a similar account.

In all these other claims, Sapp picked from diocesan records the names of senior priests who had never before been accused, destroying not only their good names, but their vocations. Each was removed from ministry under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter. They became “Priests in Limbo,” as the National Catholic Register’s Joan Frawley Desmond described priests living, sometimes for years, under a cloud of shame and suspicion for events that could not be disproven after the passage of time. In each of his claims, Shamont Lyle Sapp simply did a little research on publicly available bankruptcy proceedings entered into by each of the four beleaguered dioceses he sued. He then attached his name and claims to each case — one by one over several years — aided and abetted by an assurance of anonymity as “John Doe” at every level in the settlement process.

He was also “John Doe” in the news media, and in the fired-up rhetoric of the activists of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests who are ready to dismiss any hard questions as “revictimizing the victims.” It was ultimately his own greed that unfolded Mr. Sapp’s hand. In 2011, Sapp gained some notoriety when he filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages against comedians Jamie Fox and Tyler Perry, falsely claiming that they stole from him an idea for a film project called “Skank Robbers.” Finally, someone took a hard look at Shamont Lyle Sapp, and it was his undoing.

“Like the Anti-Communist Witch Hunt of the 1950s”

In a 2004 article in the Boston Phoenix, “Fleecing the Shepherds,” legal expert and author Harvey Silverglate cautioned against capitulating to significant numbers of questionable claims brought after the Church entered into huge blanket settlements. In some cases, such claims were deemed “credible” — the standard established for permanent removal of accused priests — with no other basis than their having been settled.

As accusations swept over the U.S. Church, few in the media dared write anything contrary to the tidal wave gaining indiscriminate momentum against the Church. A notable exception was the left-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal, which editorialized: “Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties… All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.”

With media coverage of the unprecedented $4 billion invested in mediated settlements, the trolling for claims and litigation continues unabated. In 2007, a Boston area high school history teacher and coach of twenty years, a husband and father with no prior record or accusation, was caught up in an Internet sting by New Hampshire Detective James F. McLaughlin posing on-line as a teenage boy cruising Internet chat rooms for sexual encounters. The practice has netted the detective some 600 arrests, including — by his own estimation — one Catholic priest, six police officers, and 18 public school teachers.

The Keene, New Hampshire police detective was also known to have fielded cases for local contingency lawyers. The ex-teacher, now prison inmate, related that as the handcuffs were set upon him, before he was even led out of the YMCA to which he had been lured and arrested, Detective James F. McLaughlin reportedly asked some enticing questions: “Are you a Catholic?” “Yes,” said the suspect. “Were you ever an altar boy?” Another “Yes.” “Were you ever molested by a priest?”

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: The mainstream media, and sometimes even the Catholic media as well, too often shrinks from reporting on the story of fraudulent claims of victimhood. So please share this post on social media and elsewhere. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

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.”

Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy

On February 28, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world as the first pope in over 700 years to resign. The time of Pope Francis has been a tempest of controversy.

What faithful Catholic could forget the events of February and March, 2013? The story first broke on February 11 that year. It was a Monday. Pope Benedict XVI had summoned a minor consistory of the cardinal-residents of Rome. The official reason was the announcement of three new saints.

The names of the three beati were read by Cardinal Angelo Amati. Then Pope Benedict, looking tired and worn, stunned the world as he spoke in Latin from a prepared text:

“Ingravescente aetate non iam aptas esse ad munus Petrinum aeque administrandum …”

“I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

I had just returned that afternoon from a meeting when a friend knocked on my door. “Can a pope quit?” he asked. “No,” came my tired reply. “Well,” he said, “I think this one just did.” I quickly turned on FOX News, and like so many of you, my heart was stabbed with sorrow. Even in exile, I pondered what could have brought Pope Benedict XVI to this point, and what it would mean for the Church.

If you spent any time at all with the rabid round-the-clock television news media back then, it seemed that the haters of the Catholic Church had won as Benedict collapsed under a relentless assault. If the gates of hell had not yet prevailed against the Church, they were certainly giving it their all.

In hindsight, there were foreshadows of Benedict’s thoughts, but only the most observant Vatican watchers might have noticed, and for the most part, they remained in silent denial. In 2010, Pope Benedict was extensively interviewed by journalist Peter Seewald for a book entitled Light of the World (Ignatius 2010). Readers of the book might have noted this statement of Benedict:

“If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances an obligation, to resign.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

The last pope to have done so was Pope Saint Celestine V in the year 1294. In 2009, a year before publication of Light of the World, Pope Benedict visited the Cathedral in L’Aquila, Italy. While there, he placed a white stole on Pope Celestine’s glass coffin, a gesture given new meaning four years later when Benedict followed Celestine to become only the second pope in over 700 years to resign.

When in Rome, Don’t Do as the Romans Do

The media coverage was an absolute circus. Over successive weeks I felt an obligation to use my small voice at Beyond These Stone Walls to address this story in saner terms. In the five weeks leading up to the Conclave of 2013 and the earliest days of the papacy of Pope Francis, I wrote many posts. The first of these was “Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”

Writing them with limited resources and no Internet access at all made them more like editorials than blow-by-blow accounts of what was happening in Rome. This was all unfolding during Lent in 2013, and we were facing a daily media onslaught of wild speculation and agenda-driven reporting.

I had no idea when I wrote the above post that so many readers would later thank me for bringing sanity and clarity to a dark, tumultuous time of uncertainty and doubt. Since then, I have written several posts about the almost hidden Pope Emeritus and the pontificate of Pope Francis. One of the most recent of these was “Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful.”

Some readers who vehemently disagree with some of the actions and positions of Francis have chided me for defending him. But I don’t think I have defended him. He doesn’t need my defense and wouldn’t even notice if I had one. Instead, I have defended the truth of what was actually happening in the Church at the time Benedict stepped down, and of how a reformer like Francis came to the Chair of Peter. That does not mean that I agree, or even see his reforms as reforms.

Some in the media speculated that a Wikileaks scandal was the ultimate cause of Benedict’s decision. It resulted when Pope Benedict’s butler stole and released confidential documents but, in the end, this had little to do with his resignation. It was, as I described it then, a result of “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”

The Winds of Change

In his eye-opening book, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (Henry Holt 2014) British religious affairs expert and journalist, Austen Ivereigh got to the heart of why Pope Benedict really stepped down. It was an event that occurred one year earlier in March of 2012, and my heart went out to Benedict when I read it:

“…at the end of a fleeting trip to Mexico and Cuba, [Benedict] realized that he could not go on. He had stumbled on the steps of the cathedral of Leon in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and that night he hit his head on the sink as he fumbled his way to the bathroom in his hotel in the city. The cut was not deep, and few knew because his skullcap covered it, but, as often happens to old people after such falls, it brought a sudden cognizance of his frailty.”

— The Great Reformer, p 344

And as Austen Ivereigh also points out, “the Vatican was at this time imploding.” Headlines were full of the “Vatileaks” scandal described above. The public airing of confidential documents pilfered from the elderly Pope’s private desk conveyed an image of “an ineffectual pope sitting powerlessly atop a Vatican riven by Borgia-style factionalism and rivalry” (Ivereigh, p 343).

The Vatican was under siege by factions within its ranks. The documents were stolen by Pope Benedict’s otherwise faithful butler, Paolo Gabriele, and leaked for the same stated reason for which he stole them — a desperate action moved ultimately by fidelity to the Church. A lot of people in Rome shared his frustration with the stifled need for reform blocked by endless powerful factions in Rome — especially in the financial scandals in the Vatican bank. Austen Ivereigh characterized the time:

“Looking back, it is hard not to see in [Benedict’s] decision an exhausted European Church standing back to allow the vigorous Church of Latin America to step forward.”

— The Great Reformer, p 344

I’m not so sure that I agree that the above quote was what Pope Benedict had in mind when he made what had to be the most momentous decision of his life. But I do know that the local sensus fidelium — the mind of the truly faithful in Rome — had some sympathy for the desperate act of the Pope’s butler. Who knows? Centuries from now, his actions may be seen as inspired by the Holy Spirit.

I know that sounds unlikely, but judging this point in Church history is impossible in a Church that sees its place in history in terms of millennia. A while back, I wrote a post entitled “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican.” Its point was that one of the most corrupt and tumultuous periods in the history of the Church — the Renaissance papacy of the 15th and 16th Centuries — was a time in the Church, says historian Barbara Tuchman, “when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter.”

From our vantage point in history, the corruption and scandal of that time also produced much of the art and architecture that we today treasure with reverence as the centerpieces of our expression of faith — including Saint Peter’s Basilica itself. Wherever you stand on the directions and decisions of Pope Francis, history supports the truth that the Holy Spirit has at times used our flawed human nature for the same ends in which He has used our gifts.

The Conclave of 2013 was carried out in an unprecedented intrusion of minute-by-minute media coverage and coverage by social media. The pressure for a reformer was great. Like many of you, I have misgivings and distrust about some of the direction in which this Pope seems to be taking the Church. I think most readers know that I share a deep respect for Tradition. Most readers would conclude, and rightly so, that I have felt thoroughly betrayed by liberal factions in both Church and State. My reasons for that sense of betrayal are many and complex. Both I and others have written about them.

But there has been a betrayal from the voices of Tradition as well. It’s a point that I know may alienate some readers, but it must be said. Among some conservative voices in the Church, there has been a huge controversy about the Pope’s pastoral exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. The concern is that its pastoral approach to reception of the Eucharist for some divorced and remarried Catholics undermines the Sacramental bond of Matrimony and the meaning of Communion. I share this concern for the integrity of the Sacraments and the integrity of the Church’s mandate to teach and personify the ideal — even when human nature doesn’t always live up to ideals. When has it ever?

The “Heresy” of Pope Francis

But for me, the Traditionalist voices may be choosing these battles selectively. They remained largely silent over the last twenty-one years since the grave public priesthood scandal of 2002. Using scandal as a means to an end, factional agendas in the Church have demanded broad changes in the way the Church perceives priests. These agendas have greatly undermined and reinterpreted the Sacrament of Holy Orders and all but destroyed the paternal bond between bishops and priests. Catholic writer Ryan A. MacDonald addressed this in his article, “Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood.”

Where were these voices of Sacramental concern when all due process for accused priests was thrown out the window to pacify lawyers and insurance companies and a corrupt, scandal-hungry news media? None of them are ever pacified. Where were the voices of Sacramental concern when it was the Sacrament of Holy Orders that was being discredited, undermined and cheapened? Where were the defenders of the Sacramental bond when priests were being described as self-employed contractors as some bishops did to fend off insurance liability in 2002?

Where have these defenders of Sacramentals bonds been while bishops dismissed priests from the clerical state with no corroboration, no defense, little due process, and no appeal, and often based on mere accusations that were sometimes 30, 40, 50 years old, and sometimes based on no accusation at all?

The Sacrament of Holy Orders suddenly became dispensable in response to the current orthodoxy of political correctness which demands that no one must ever question a claim of victimhood. I must tell you that this attitude toward accused priests has invaded every aspect of American Catholic life, and like all things American, it is spreading throughout the world.

Sometimes, even with the most practiced politicians, it is a spontaneous reaction rather than one filtered through handlers that most clearly reflects justice in the human heart. I believe I saw justice, wisdom, and courage in the heart of Pope Francis when he let loose a spontaneous reply to a question for which he was later dressed down by his own team. It happened during a visit to Chile amid the controversy of a bishop widely condemned for tolerating, even witnessing, acts of sexual abuse. When asked why he had not removed that bishop, Pope Francis spontaneously replied, “Show me some evidence.”

For the victim culture that fuels the #MeToo movement, the Pope had committed cultural heresy. The next day, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a close advisor to Pope Francis on the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, issued a rare public rebuke, clarifying that the Church must not question any claim of victimhood. Within a day, the Pope’s spontaneous words were filtered through the new orthodoxy of political correctness and Pope Francis then fell into line with its doctrinal infallibility.

Not long after, the Our Sunday Visitor newspaper published an article by Brian Fraga entitled, “Abuse Survivors and the Value of Belief” (OSV Feb. 25-Mar. 3, 2018). Both the article and the subject were seriously marred, however, by an agenda-driven quote from Mary Jane Doerr, Director of the Archdiocese of Chicago Office for the Protection of Children and Young People:

“Doerr said that, generally, less than four percent of allegations are not true. ‘Children lie to get out of trouble, not into trouble…’ She added an insight she once heard from a mental health professional: ‘Children lie every day about sexual abuse. They lie to protect the abuser.’”

Mary Jane Doerr, and, I hope, Brian Fraga, should know that this in no way characterizes the story of Catholic priests accused of abuse. More than seventy percent of the accusations have come, not from children, but from adults who stand to gain huge financial settlements for making such claims. That in itself should be cause for caution and investigation. Finding the truth does not re-victimize real victims, only the fraudulent ones.

My accuser is not a child. At the time of my trial, he was a 27-year-old man with a criminal history of fraud, forgery, assault, and drug charges. He and his three adult brothers all conjured their memories of abuse in the same week. They together amassed $650,000 in unquestioned settlements, and bragged to friends who have since gone on record that they “got one over on the Catholic Church!”

In my 2005 article for Catalyst, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud,” I quoted noted Boston Civil Rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate who wrote in 2004 that the Church should not capitulate to significant numbers of claims brought only after it became clear that the Church would settle financially, and with no corroboration. This characterizes more than seventy percent of the total number of such claims.

The initial, spontaneous reaction of Pope Francis to the matter of Bishop Barros in Chile was the only just one, and the only truly Catholic one. It is heresy, today, to even suggest the notion of due process and a presumption of innocence when a man stands accused of abuse. By no means do I want to compare Pope Francis with former President Donald Trump, but both committed the same spontaneous heresy against political correctness at roughly the same time.

After a media flurry about dismissing a White House staff member accused of domestic abuse, the former American President also had one of these lucid moments of spontaneous justice not yet filtered by handlers concerned for its political correctness. In one of his famous, sometimes too blunt tweets, President Donald Trump expressed a truth that I hope Pope Francis will keep in mind:

“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused. Life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as due process?”

— President Donald Trump, Feb. 10, 2018

This erosion of the priestly Sacramental bond in the Church now threatens the Church’s mandate to be a Mirror of Justice to the world. When asked just a few years ago about priests blessing same-sex unions, Pope Francis spontaneously responded, “The Church cannot bless sin.” Now in response to demands of the woke in the Synod on Synodality, he has dabbled in talk about leaving this up to the conscience of individual priesst instead of the conscience of the Church. That is heresy.

+ + +

Editor’s Note: Father Gordon MacRae is a priest of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire who has just begun his 30th year in prison for crimes that never took place. He is the subject of a multi-part analysis in The Wall Street Journal and a video documentary entitled, “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam.”

Truth Seekers Are the Prophets of Every Troubled Time

St. Dionysius the Areopagite | George E. Koronaios

In a time of darkness, lies and death cling to Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Do not let go. Let Him shine His Light within you and on the world through you.

By Dionysius the Areopagite

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Dionysius the Areopagite came to believe in the truth of the Resurrection (Acts 17:34) while others only mocked. The author of this post is recently retired from a distinguished career as a scientist in U.S. government service.

+ + +

In “The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence,” Ryan A. MacDonald recounts an exchange he had with a prominent Catholic author, whom he does not identify. He had asked the author to take a look at the trial and imprisonment of Father Gordon MacRae. The man told him: “I don’t share your belief in Father MacRae’s innocence. I just don’t believe a judge and jury would sentence a priest to life in prison with anything less than clear and compelling evidence.” This reminds me of the principle Adolf Hitler presented in Mein Kampf

“The great masses of the people ... more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one.”

— Adolf Hitler

This author might accept that the justice system sometimes gets it wrong in small ways, that there might be a little corruption. Had Father MacRae been sentenced to a few years in prison, he might have considered looking into the case. But we live in America, the greatest nation in the world, with the best justice system in the world, he surely thinks. There can be no big corruption in the justice system, no horrific corruption. He blindly trusts the system.

Father MacRae lost his freedom because the truth of the case was totally suppressed. Instead of truth there was the fabrication of Detective James F. McLaughlin. There was the testimony of the accuser, Thomas Grover. He testified that on five weekly counseling sessions Father MacRae violently sexually abused him. When asked why he kept going back he replied that he repressed the memory of it all while having a weekly “out-of-body experience.” The accuser cried under much of the cross examination, which the judge quickly deflected protecting the accuser whom he had predetermined was a victim. There was also the dismissal of inconsistencies in the accuser’s testimony. Judge Arthur Brennan told the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in Mr. Grover’s testimony.”

But there was no testimony of the accused, Fr. MacRae. Then there were two appeals, which were summarily dismissed. The last one precluded any further appeal. The publication of the “Laurie List,” a list of police officers with founded credibility problems, included Detective James F. McLaughlin due to “falsification of records” in a case prior to Fr. MacRae’s trial. The required disclosure of this to the defense never happened. At no time in the trial nor in the appeals was there any minimal attempt to search for the truth.

We know about the truth of this case because there were people who cared about the truth and investigated the case following the facts to wherever they led: Dorothy Rabinowitz, Harvey Silverglate, Ryan A. MacDonald, former FBI Special Agent James Abbott, journalist Joann Wypijewski, Catholic League President Bill Donohue, The Media Report’s David F. Pierre, Jr. and others. These Truth Seekers all concluded that the Fr. MacRae case was a gross miscarriage of justice.

I have sketched the case of Fr. MacRae to point out that it was total suppression of the truth, and complete fabrication of the case that led to the preposterous outcome of sentencing an innocent priest to life in prison. It is a big lie. And “the great masses of people more easily fall victim to a big lie” (in this case believing Fr. MacRae is a criminal) “than to a little one,” according to that great master liar of the 20th Century, Adolf Hitler. It is ironic, but no coincidence, that in his closing argument before the jury in the Fr. MacRae trial, prosecutor Bruce Elliot Reynolds compared Fr. MacRae to Adolf Hitler. This is what happens when a case is brought before a court with no supporting evidence. The void must be filled with outrageous rhetoric.

In the 29 years since then Truth Seekers have shined light on the truth and on how evil this case was. Our unnamed writer is among the great masses, not to be counted among the Truth Seekers. Any rational, fair person who reads all the evidence of wrongdoing in suppressing the truth is convinced of the innocence of Fr. MacRae. The unnamed writer’s blindness to the truth probably had no effect on his job, or his health, or his life. (God knows the effect on his soul.) Blindness to the truth in other matters has grave consequences to the blind one.

Christ Healing the Blind by El Greco | Metropolitan Museum of Art

I Want to See — Mark 10:51

Big lies perpetrate great evil. The last three years since Covid have been dreadful — loss of life, loss of health, loss of jobs, loss of freedom, confusion, pain, much suffering. We want it to stop. We see evil all around — and we see goodness. But is what we see real or fabricated?

In the case of Father MacRae the fabricated evil is that he is a criminal who deserves to lose his freedom for the rest of his life. Instead, Truth Seekers revealed the total disregard of the justice system for truth and justice. The system criminally railroaded Fr. MacRae, and attacked the freedom of every citizen, of the Church, of Priesthood. This was the real evil in this case. Should we question what we see? Or should we blindly trust some authorities?

Test everything; hold fast what is good.

— 1 Thessalonians 5:21

Before Covid many had chanted, “My body, my choice.” Then came the Covid mandates, and some were chanting, “My body, my choice.” But the earlier chanters did not approve. As Judge Arthur Brennan would say, Disregard the inconsistencies. After the horror of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Code set principles for the practice of human experimentation. Chief among them is that consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The so-called vaccines and boosters are experimental; they fall under the Nuremberg code. Yet the mandates completely obliterate this code. Has the door been opened to new atrocities?

When this global pandemic began the logical thing would have been to gather the very best physicians and scientists to work out how to proceed. Instead, they were cancelled. Sacrificing much they have worked feverishly to save lives, and they have seen how all the actions the government has taken contradict fundamental medical principles. They are Truth Seekers at a time when there is an overwhelming effort to suppress truth. [24, 11, 13, 16]

As the Covid pandemic has unfolded more people have realized that there is a real evil that is different from the uncensored, fabricated evil. Jews have often taken great offense when the word Holocaust is used to describe other atrocities. Holocaust survivors, who have faced great evil before, now recognize what is going on as a Holocaust. They are among the Truth Seekers of today. [31, 3, 22, 14]

I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.

— Psalm 34:4

The past three years have been awful. Fear has been used to lock down, to control, to censor, to divide. As we listen to the Truth Seekers we find that the real evil is much worse than we thought. We can become even more fearful. But like never before this is a time to cling to Jesus. “Fear is useless, what is needed is trust.” Luke 8:50

In the uncensored, fabricated evil, it seems that the worse is almost over. The lockdowns are gone. Most people are not wearing masks anymore. It seems that normalcy may be coming back. Could reality be different? In Nazi times many people were saved. They escaped before being taken to concentration camps. But most of those taken to camps died. Are there concentration camps now?

Violating the Nuremberg code and with much coercion people were injected, outside physical concentration camps. Most people did not die soon after. Some did. Now people are dying in unprecedented numbers — people of all ages, many young healthy people, healthy athletes, many suddenly. And many people are getting very sick. The official story, the corporate story, is that this has nothing to do with the injections. [8, 2, 1, 25, 16]

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.

— John 14:6

Does truth matter? Consider the case of Father MacRae again. It can be described by two contrasting views: the ‘criminal’ view of the justice system, and the ‘victim’ view of the Truth Seekers. Looking at these two views, the author with whom Ryan A. MacDonald tried to discuss Father MacRae’s case, did not seek the truth. He choose the ‘criminal’ view because he blindly trusts the system promoting this view. Other than his spiritual life, the choice did not affect him.

Does truth matter in this other case? Two views describe the time in which we live. The ‘protection with loss of freedom’ is the view that the authorities are protecting us during a pandemic that started three years ago, and this requires the loss of some freedoms. The contrasting view is the ‘genocide’ view; plans began much earlier than three years ago, and the loss of freedoms is a way of implementing a depopulation plan.

In this case, if after considering the evidence for both views, you decide that the real view is ‘protection with loss of freedom,’ you learn to live with less freedom accepting that it is the only way you can be protected at this time. If, however, you decide that the ‘genocide’ is the real view, you might not want to cooperate with a system that is trying to kill you. You are not a casual observer. Your life and your freedom depend on being able to see which is the real view. [20, 23, 25, 26, 13, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 3, 7, 9]

Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”

— Mark 10:51

Photo | Wilf’s Wine Press

Without Me You Can Do Nothing — John 15:5

Many of us see much evil around us. Evil is attacking so many things, at so many levels, at different scales. Does it make any difference which evil we confront first? Or is there a more global, more fundamental, more horrifically diabolical evil than the rest? One that if not stopped the others would not matter any more. The references below are a sampler of the work of Truth Seekers who are working tirelessly to save the world, to open the eyes of the rest of us.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness!

— Isaiah 5:20

Critically examine the evidence these Truth Seekers present. Ask Jesus to help you see what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil. The sacredness of life has been attacked for a long time. The combination of technology and loss of freedom gives rise to an unprecedented evil in which our resources, our bodies, even our consciousness will be controlled by others. What is at stake is our national sovereignty and our individual sovereignty. [21, 4, 14, 33]

In Nazi times people were saved before being taken to concentration camps. Once in a camp most did not survive. In these times, if we fail to resist this monstrous, evil attack we will all succumb to it. The time is late, but there is still something we can do. If we remain casual observers unwilling to discern the true evil that is encompassing us, we do not have a chance.

The Truth Seekers of our time suggest some actions we may take to protect ourselves, and resist the evil that is upon us.

• Treatments: The best doctors in America, in collaboration with others around the world, developed treatments to prevent and deal with the aftermath of Covid. If you have taken any injections, do not take any more. There are protocols for Covid (prevention, early treatment, long Covid, hospital treatment, post-vaccine recovery), and RSV and the flu. [12]

• Cash vs Digital Ids: There is a rush to implement Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). If this succeeds, each of us will have a digital identity, and we will be living in a digital concentration camp. To try to resist this, use cash as much as possible. [4]

• One World Totalitarian Government / WHO “Treaty:” The World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a global pandemic treaty. The Administration is committed to the accord. Though it would be a treaty Congress will not be consulted. Many have looked at the details and see the end of national and individual autonomy. [6, 5, 21, 19, 27, 28, 29, 33] James Roguski has emerged as the foremost expert on the two proposals being pushed by the WHO, which he discusses in [32]

We are in Lent, a time of prayer and fasting:

“Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke?”

— Isaiah 58:6

But how can we break any yoke if we do not see it? And how can we see it if we pray not constantly?

Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.

— John 15:5

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Three years ago, early in 2020, I wrote a post about the burgeoning pandemic of Covid 19. My post rejected the Chinese Communist Government’s explanation of its origin. The CCG claimed, and still claims, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by natural means through an animal sold at the Wuhan, China open market. I laid out a case for why this is likely not so, and why it is much more likely that the virus escaped from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research and other experimentation was being conducted since 2013. This week, a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress concluded, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a Wuhan laboratory.

If the Chinese Communist Government had been transparent from the beginning, the world may have had a better response to this pandemic. But please remember: China is by force the People’s Republic, but Covid is by no means the people’s pandemic. The good people of China had nothing to do with this.

Please revisit my post, which lays out in stark prose all the dangers described by our guest writer in this week’s post when a system of government adopts the protection of itself over the protection of its people. Please read “The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19.”

---

Bibliography

1. Balmakov, Roman, “ ‘Massive’ Blood Clots,”, 12/15/2022, Facts Matter with Roman Balmakov.

2. Berenson, Alex, “The funeral business is booming. And not because of Covid,” 11/22/2022, Unreported Truths.

3. Breggin, Peter R., Ginger Ross Breggin, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, Ithaca, NY, Lake Edge Press, 2021.

4. “#CashEveryDay,” 07/02/2021, The Solari Report.

5. Corbett, James, “The Global Pandemic Treaty: What You Need to Know,” 04/27/2022, The Corbett Report.

6. Corbett, James, “What is the WHO? — Questions for Corbett,” 08/21/2020, The Corbett Report.

7. Corona Investigative Committee.

8. Davison, Scott, “Insurance deaths up 40% people 18-64 Davison OneAmerica Indiana,” 01/23/2022.

9. Doctors for Covid Ethics.

10. Fitts, Catherine Austin, Carolyn Betts, “I Want to Stop CBDCs — What Can I Do?,” 02/01/2023, The Solari Report.

11. Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

12. FLCCC Alliance, “Treatment Protocols.”

13. Fleming, Richard, “Exclusive With Dr. Richard Fleming,” 05/14/2022, CHD.TV.

14. Fuellmich, Reiner, “PCR Tests, AIDS + More,” 05/09/2022, CHD.TV.

15. Iverson, Kim, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “How The Powerful Captured The Public During The Pandemic With RFK, Jr.,” 02/06/2023, The Kim Iverson Show, CHD.TV.

16. “Journalism in a Post-Truth World,” EWTN News and Franciscan University.

17. Kennedy, Jr., Robert F., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children's Health Defense), New York, NY, Skyhorse Publishing, 2021.

18. Kennedy, Jr., Robert F., Eric Clapton, “Stand and Deliver,” 11/02/2021, CHD.TV.

19. Knightly, Kit, “WHO moving forward on GLOBAL vaccine passport program,” 03/01/2022, Off Guardian

20. Latypova, Sasha, “Intent To Harm,” 12/22/2022, Doctors for Covid Ethics Symposium.

21. Lynn, Corey, “22 Ways to Stop Vaccine ID Passports in 2022 and Why We Must!,” 01/04/2022, The Solari Report.

22. Malhotra, Aseem, “Exclusive with Aseem Malhotra, M.D.,” 09/28/2022, CHD.TV.

23. McCullough, Peter, “Dr. McCullough on Real America: Failure of Masks and Vaccines, Epidemic of Sudden Death,” 02/26/2023.

24. McCullough, Peter, “Del Bigtree Hosts Dr. Peter McCullough: Pandemic Era Sudden Death and Crushing Physician Reprisal,” 11/16/2022.

25. McCullough, Peter, “Dr. McCullough US Senate Dec 7, 2022 More Pandemic Deaths after Vaccines Rolled Out,” 12/07/2022.

26. McCullough, Peter, “Bradford Hill Criteria for Causation Met: COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Death by Dr. McCullough,” 12/22.

27. Mercola, Joseph, “WHO Pandemic Treaty: What It Is, Why It matters and How to Stop It,” 05/10/2022, The Defender.

28. Nass, Meryl, James Corbett, “WHO Sneak Attack,” 01/15/2023, CHD.TV.

29. Nevradakis, Michael, “Exclusive: WHO Proposals Could Strip Nations of Their Sovereignty, Create Worldwide Totalitarian State, Expert Warns,” 01/13/2023, The Defender.

30. “Pfizer — Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History,” 09/02/2009, United States Department of Justice.

31. Sharav, Vera, “Never Again is Now Global,” 02/03/2023, CHD.TV.

32. “Urgent WHO Discussion w/ Special Guest James Roguski, hosted by Maze Love,” 11/11/23. [audio begins about two minutes into the recording]

33. Wood, Patrick M., “Exclusive with Patrick M. Wood,” 05/16/2022, CHD.TV.

34. Yeadon, Michael, “Former Pfizer VP Calls For Accountability From Ex-Big Pharma Colleagues,” 11/03/2022, CHD.TV.

35. Yeadon, Michael, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Former Pfizer Vice President Dr. Mike Yeadon Speaks Out,” 05/25/2021, CHD.TV

From the Editor: After reading this post, a reader sent us a link to a 10-minute video by Law Professor Francis Boyle related to the content of this post: Francis Boyle: The WHO’s Plan to Be a Global Dictator.

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.”

Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Paul Haring | CNS

In strange ways, injustices I have known as a prisoner and a priest intersected the lives of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell who died just ten days apart.

February 8 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pope Benedict XVI passed from this life at age 95 on the final day of 2022. Ten days later, Cardinal George Pell died of cardiac arrest at age 81 while recovering from routine surgery at a hospital in Rome. Both of these men were giants in the Church as the many tributes to them from around the world make clear. They were also targets for much vitriol and injustice. It was in this targeted injustice that my path crossed with that of both men.

In “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae,” a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by famed Boston criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, he cited a ground-breaking book by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board entitled, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness, and Other, Terrors of Our Time. Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of writings about unjust sex abuse prosecutions that generated a spate of wrongful convictions of innocent people in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of her subjects in the book and subsequent writings spent decades in prison. I am one of them.

One of the tragically misguided prosecutions cited in the book is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels, then a 24-year-old nursery school teacher in New Jersey. Charged with multiple counts of child molestation in a witch hunt atmosphere, Kelly was innocent of the heinous crimes, none of which actually took place. The charges were fantastical and false, but the child abuse terror of the time resulted in easy convictions with no valid evidence.

The nature of the evidence in Kelly’s case was chilling. The prosecution’s child psych expert — who had no real expertise at all — fashioned a theory that young children who say that no sexual abuse happened actually mean the opposite. A vigilante jury bought that theory and convicted Kelly Michaels. At age 24, she was sentenced to 47 years in prison.

After failed appeals having nothing whatsoever to do with truth or justice, Kelly’s fate seemed sealed in wrongful imprisonment until Dorothy Rabinowitz began writing about it. Then New York civil rights attorney Morton Stavis came out of retirement to take the case pro bono. In her book, Ms. Rabinowitz revealed that Mr. Stavis sought the aid of a New York-based left-leaning legal think tank, the Center for Constitutional Rights that he himself founded. The CCR wanted nothing to do with this case. As Ms. Rabinowitz explained:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the politically progressive views held by many at the center. In the 1980s, as today, there was a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse was to undermine the battle against child abuse. It was to betray children and other victims of sexual predators.”

No Crueler Tyrannies, 17-18

The charges against me stem from the same time period, filtered through the same progressive political opinions, and hyped by the same prosecutorial mindset that to be accused of such things is to be guilty. It is the cruelest of tyrannies that even our Catholic bishops have cowed in fear under that progressive steamroller as priests so accused are discarded without defense. This was articulated in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

The heroic attorney Morton Stavis was not defeated by the progressive disdain for his effort from his own tribe at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He did not live to see his victory in this case, but he had put together a small team of righteous defenders who eventually prevailed by exposing the truth and winning Kelly’s freedom. One of these defenders was Robert Rosenthal whose prior legal briefs on my behalf are still on display at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

Kelly Michaels went on in life to marry a judge. She eventually recovered — to the extent one can — from the tyranny of wrongful imprisonment. She has corresponded with me in freedom, imparting as much hope for justice as she can by urging me to never give up. I haven’t, but I will be 70 on my next birthday and like Job, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25).

Vincenzo Pinto | AFP

Benedict’s “Crimes against Humanity”

However, reading Dorothy’s book was unfortunately not my final encounter with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Clinging to the progressive view that to be accused of sexual abuse is to be guilty, the Center for Constitutional Rights allowed itself to be duped and used by SNAP, the activist group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. I wrote a post some time ago that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of this organization's campaign to destroy any due process for Catholic priests. The post was, “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

Prior to writing that post, David Clohessy and SNAP manipulated the Center for Constitutional Rights into bringing a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was a shameless publicity stunt that had no hope of success, but was filed only to shame Pope Benedict and bring attention to SNAP.

Though I was aware of the charge, it was only after the International Criminal Court dismissed it that I learned that I was an unwitting pawn in this debacle. Journalist Joann Wypijewski, a reporter of courage and high integrity, wrote of it in her blistering review of the movie “Spotlight,” a film about The Boston Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the sexual abuse scandal. The following is an excerpt of her bold article, “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“The film’s advertisement for SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, faithfully represents the Globe’s affiliation. It elides SNAP’s belief that wrongful prosecutions are a minor price to pay in pursuit of its larger mission, something [The Boston Globe] did not much concern itself with either as it collected its Pulitzer for service in the public interest; something even the Center for Constitutional Rights disregarded in 2011 when it joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

“Liberals who cheer this sort of thing ought to ponder whether they have any principles at all ... . The CCR brief failed ... but to CCR’s shame, Father MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief, with respect to allegations of videotape (that is, child porn), which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

I was frozen in place by grief upon first learning of this. I knew that the charge had no substance. I also knew that in her WSJ investigation, Dorothy Rabinowitz confronted NH Detective James McLaughlin who first contrived the charge. Cornered, he finally admitted, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

This did not stop SNAP and CCR from including it in a falsified brief before the International Criminal Court. There was no repercussion for the attempt at fraud upon the court. Even now, as recently as a few months ago, biased NH reporter Damien Fisher— whose wife Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher has ties to my diocese — repeated the pornography allegation without even mentioning that it had been widely discredited, including by the dishonest detective who first raised it.

All the claims that Pope Benedict XVI enabled accused priests and failed to protect victims are of a kind with the above story. In the end, it was never any of this that really made him a target. It was his orthodoxy, his fidelity, his clear-minded exposure of Catholic truths. None of this could ever successfully be assailed, so instead they smeared him with a weapon straight from hell: false witness. Let that sink in.

The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

In the same manner that Kelly Michaels reached out to me upon her exoneration, it was because I had been so falsely accused that I reached out to Cardinal George Pell during his 400 days of unjust imprisonment. Having come to recognize signposts of dishonesty in such a case, I was certain that Cardinal Pell had been falsely accused. But because of prison rules barring direct contact with other prisoners, I could not contact in prison directly.

A friend, Sheryl Collmer, a Tyler, Texas writer for Crisis Magazine and other venues, was my intermediary. I know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this case it was perhaps a bit less deadly. There have been few really proud moments during my imprisonment, but my ability to detect and expose the truth in support of Cardinal Pell was one of them.

As a result, I found this excerpt in his published Prison Journal Volume 2 (Ignatius Press 2021). It was written from his prison cell:

“Friday, 2 August 2019: By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl Collmer, a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, ‘Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?’

“Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australia media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday, your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windshuttle, editor of the quality journal Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ (See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell,’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019).

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama's White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men.

“As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in 2015] . Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from the BTSW About Page], ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice]’”

Addendum

You may see — from Cardinal Pell’s last citation above — where Dorothy Rabinowitz got the inspiration for the title of her book, No Crueler Tyrannies. Once free from his wrongful prison sentence, Cardinal Pell was restored to his rightful position in Rome. From there, he reached out to me again in ways that I only learned about posthumously. He wrote to a mutual friend that he plans to refer to my situation in talks he is slated to present in Rome and Australia. He never got to present them.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Cardinal George Pell Faced Down a Hostile World” (January 13, 2023), Fr Raymond de Souza wrote that “His faith even during wrongful detention, was the crown of an inspiring Catholic life.” Reading his Prison Journal, I have no doubt been so inspired.

It is my prayer, and perhaps not even a necessary one, that Pope Benedict and Cardinal Pell both now stand in the Presence of God where they behold the fruition of all the graces bestowed upon them, and hopefully now upon us through them. We have not heard the last of them.

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

+ + +

Francesco Sforza | Osservatore Romano | AFP

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

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

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

While some high-profile priests are maligned from both in and beyond the Church, The Catholic University of America published its National Study of Catholic Priests.

“You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?”

— Matthew 7:16

January 11, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In 2005, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was interviewed on the NBC Today show about accusations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests — some sadly true, but some also sadly false. Citing the case against me as an example, he said, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

Catholic priests in the United States have long been under assault from the news media, from activist groups, and at times even from within the Church. As most readers know, I have been the subject of many published articles, but not because I have been accused. It is because I strenuously refute the accusations as false. Much evidence has amassed in support of that. For some reason, this poses a threat to some nefarious agendas built around the sex abuse crisis in the Church.

When accused priests defend themselves in online media, seeding articles with vile comments using fake screen names had long been a tactic of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an organization that sought not so much to support legitimate victims, but to maximize monetary awards and media condemnation. Its representatives terrorized Church officials with media manipulation whenever any accused priest is defended in the court of public opinion.

Despite all that, some standout news media have bravely produced articles and commentary against the tide of public vitriol about accused priests. The Wall Street Journal recently published its fourth such article about the case against me. The most recent was by Boston Attorney Harvey Silverglate entitled “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.” This generated some excellent analysis by David F. Pierre, Jr. moderator of The Media Report. Those and other articles appear in our featured section, The Wall Street Journal.

I have much gratitude for Dorothy Rabinowitz, Harvey Silverglate, Ryan MacDonald, Bill Donohue, and David F. Pierre, Jr. for their valiant efforts to correct the public record. Without their truthful courage, I was at the mercy of nefarious means driven mostly by progressive political agendas and litigious greed. Most recently, however, even some bold Catholic writers have taken up the subject of Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.

The National Study of Catholic Priests

When I was first accused, my bishop and diocese published a press release declaring, without evidence, that I victimized not only my accusers, but the entire Catholic Church. That bishop’s successor later went on record to state his informed belief that I am innocent and should never have been in prison. Then his successor chose only to shun me, and to release my name on a public list of the “credibly” accused. He did this, he stated, for “transparency,” but that transparency has been highly selective.

My own experience leaves me with no trust at all that my bishop could, or would even try, to discern guilt from false witness in defense of me or any accused priest. Trust and distrust as the fallout from the scandal are now central issues in a recently published survey of 10,000 U.S. priests sponsored by The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. I highly recommend reviewing a report on the study results entitled, “The National Study of Catholic Priests: A Time of Crisis.” It was the largest study on the state of the priesthood in fifty years. Here is an overview of its parameters:

“Over the last two decades, the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has significantly eroded the trust between laity and clergy... Since the earliest days of the Dallas Charter there have been concerns that the bishops’ understandable eagerness to crack down on abusive priests was coming at the expense of due process protections for the accused: a de facto policy of ‘guilty until proven innocent.’ These concerns have been exacerbated by an expansion in the scope of the Church’s anti-abuse policies coupled with a perceived double standard in the way allegations against bishops have been handled in comparison to priests.”

Father Roger Landry, a columnist for the National Catholic Register, has an excellent analysis of The Catholic University of America study entitled, “Repairing the Relationship Between Priests and Bishops.”

The findings of the study are based on the responses of the thousands of U.S. priests who participated and submitted completed surveys. Given the difficult period of the last 20 years since the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter was enacted, some of these responses are surprising, and point to the depth of commitment, spiritual life, optimism and resiliency of most priests. Most priests reported a high level of satisfaction in their ministry. A stunning 77% of priests self-reported that they are flourishing in their vocation.

Among the results, however, are some big red flags: 82% of priests report living with a fear of being falsely accused and left with no defense; 45% of priests report that they experience at least one symptom of ministry burnout, while 9% described their level of burnout as severe, and characterized by high levels of stress and emotional and physical exhaustion. Reports of high stress came particularly from younger priests. (I will get back to this later) .

The biggest concern among priests is related to the toll and fallout of the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the sex abuse crisis in the Church. The sense of vulnerability among priests and their trust level for their bishops are the two most significant areas of negative fallout from the crisis.

In his NC Register column linked above, Father Roger Landry points to what I have called a disaster in the relationship between bishops and priests: the drafting and enactment of the 2002 “Dallas Charter” which imposed a draconian standard of “zero tolerance” and one-strike-and-you’re-out in response to any “credible” accusation against a priest. For an analysis of this standard of evidence, see my post, “The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests.”

Father Landry reports that the drafting of these policies in 2002 was done “hurriedly and under enormous pressure from the press, lawsuits and furious faithful.” Priests in the current study actually appreciated the efforts to respond to the crisis openly and with transparency. “But the priests surveyed gave stark testimony to the harms that have come from what the bishops in Dallas left out of balance.”

Guilty for Being Accused

The Vatican and Catholic hierarchy were unfairly maligned throughout publicity on “The Scandal.” At one point, SNAP partnered with the far-left, New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights to bring a crimes-against-humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Some of the false claims against me were employed to shame Pope Benedict on a global scale. The scheme was nothing more than a publicity stunt to embarrass the Church into maximizing financial settlements. Many of its claims, including those against me were exposed as a fraud. Journalist Joann Wypijewski exposed this story in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

Only in the Catholic Church is the highest echelon of governance blamed for the lowest level of misbehavior. Even in his later years, Benedict was demonized by German Catholics and others eager for any reason to blame him for the abuses of the past. Of interest, in the State of New Hampshire where I live more than 900 men between the ages of 20 and 50 have open lawsuits alleging systemic sexual abuse by State agents in the State’s juvenile detention facilities. Not one media outlet, not one victim group, not one of the victims themselves has blamed any of this on any present or former governor. This State carried out a witch-hunt in 2002 when the accused were Catholic priests. It is now confirmed that simultaneous to the witch-hunt was an active cover-up of the malfeasance of State agents.

As stated above, 82% of priests now report that they feel vulnerable to false accusations of sexual abuse that under existing policy will summarily end their ministry without due process. Compounding this fear, many report that they would be treated as guilty and left without support unless they could prove their innocence. Sixty-four percent said they would be left without support or resources to mount a defense, and almost half, 49%, think they would not be supported by their bishop. Father Landry added a sobering understanding of the reality:

“In most dioceses, when a priest is accused, he loses his home, his job, his good name — all within hours. He is removed immediately from his rectory and parish assignment, prevented from public ministry for the length of what is often an inexcusably glacial investigation, and required to dress like a layman. A press release is published in which the priest’s reputation is injured, if not ruined. He needs to exhaust his meager savings or beg and borrow money to hire a lawyer. Most excruciatingly, he has to linger for months or years under suspicion of being a sadistic pervert as well as a hypocrite to the faith for which he has given his life.”

Given the reality that most claims against priests are many years or decades old, establishing clear evidence is difficult if not impossible. So the bishops adopted what they called the “credible” standard. It means only that if a priest and an accuser lived in the same parish or community 20, 30, or 40 years ago, the accusation is “credible” on its face. No one in America but a Catholic priest could lose his livelihood, his reputation, sometimes even his freedom, under such a standard. I exposed one such case in “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”

I am most appreciative to Father Roger Landry and the National Catholic Register for their bold and transparent analysis of what actually happens to an accused priest. By taking all the steps a diocese or bishop imposes above, such a priest is effectually silenced and unable to defend himself at all.

Stress along the fault lines between bishops and priests that these policies have caused is also clear in the survey. There is a wide disparity between how bishops view themselves and how they are viewed by their priests. Seventy-three percent of bishops reported viewing priests as their brothers. Only 28% of priests reported that their bishops treat them that way.

The disconnect revealed itself in several other ways as well: 70% of bishops reported that they are spiritual fathers to their priests while only 28% of priests thought the same. Father Landry reported that the biggest disconnect relates to a priest who is struggling. Ninety-percent of bishops reported that they would be present to and supportive of a struggling priest while only 36% of priests thought that this is true.

The Double Standard

Also evident in both the survey and Father Landry’s analysis of it is the double standard created when bishops failed to hold themselves accountable to the same standards imposed on their priests. In 2002, as the Charter was being debated during the U.S. Bishops Conference at Dallas, Cardinal Avery Dulles published a landmark article in America magazine entitled “The Rights of Accused Priests.”

The article was cheered by priests but largely ignored by bishops. Cardinal Dulles cited a 2000 pastoral initiative of the U.S. bishops entitled “Responsibility and Rehabilitation.” It criticized the U.S. justice system for the establishment of one-size-fits-all norms such as “zero tolerance” and “one strike and you’re out.” Then the same bishops, in a media panic, imposed those same standards on their priests.

But none of it ever applied to accusations against bishops, a reality that Father Landry described as “a double standard that profoundly affected their relationship [with priests].” While deliberating adoption of the Dallas Charter, the bishops removed the word “cleric,” which could have included bishops, and replaced it with “priests and deacons.” Now 51% of priests report that they do not have confidence in their bishop while 70% report a lack of confidence in bishops in general.

In a 2019 apostolic letter, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis addressed some of the disparities with mixed results. Father Landry points out that investigations of bishops, even in allegations of past sexual abuse, “seldom involve the draconian measures experienced by priests.”

I have written of a glaring example in my own diocese. Citing a desire for “transparency,” and with no one pressuring him to do so, my bishop proactively published in 2019 a list of the names and status of 73 priests of this diocese who had been “credibly” accused over fifty years. Most are deceased. Weeks later, a New Hampshire Superior Court judge barred publication of information from a grand jury investigation which was the source for most of the Bishop’s list. Ryan MacDonald wrote of the reasons for that in “Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm On the Priesthood.”

Months after publishing his list, my bishop was himself accused in a civil lawsuit in the Diocese of Rockville Center, New York. He was unjustly caught up in the political fallout of former New york Governor Andrew Cuomo who generated the claims when he signed into law an exemption window in which old time-barred accusations can be brought forward after the statute of limitations had run. I defended my bishop in a widely read post, “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Conservative Priests Face Greater Scrutiny

I mentioned above that I would revisit one finding of this report — that younger priests experience more stress than older priests. A separate research report on Catholic priests by the Austin Institute has documented that younger priests tend to be more conservative and traditional than older priests. That bears out from observations of our readers who find this distinction to be a positive development. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Vatican Correspondent Francis X. Rocca reported on this in “Catholic Ideological Split Widens” (Dec.19, 2022):

“U.S. Catholic bishops elected conservative leaders last month, continuing to resist a push from Pope Francis to put issues such as climate change and poverty on par with the bishops’ declared priority of opposing abortion.”

The bishops appointed by Pope Francis tend to mirror his priorities. His recent elevation of San Diego Archbishop Robert McElroy, a leading liberal among U.S. bishops, to the College of Cardinals is an example. There is thus a growing disparity in liberal vs. conservative views as newly appointed bishops are more liberal while priests newly emerging from U.S. seminaries are more conservative and traditional.

Since the 1980s, successive annual ordinations have grown more conservative. Each successive 10-year grouping in the ordained priesthood supports Church teaching on moral and theological issues more strongly than the one before it. Those ordained after 2010, as a whole, are most conservative. When seminarians and younger priests do not have their views of the Church and Catholic practice affirmed, stress develops and increases. Younger U.S. priests represent a generation disillusioned with ideas of progress and religious pluralism, and the abandonment of the Church’s prolife charism in favor of topics like climate change.

This leaves a widening chasm between Pope Francis, his Episcopal appointments, and younger priests in the United States. The Catholic Project study also reveals that almost 80% of priests ordained before 1980 approve strongly of Pope Francis while only 20% of those ordained after 2010 share that view. Is their priestly interest in respect for tradition a plague upon the Church?

Or is it the whispering of the Holy Spirit?

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This brief essay from American Thinker by Attorney Franklin Friday is perhaps the best commentary on the future Church after the death of Pope Benedict XVI, and not only because I am in it. Please read and share this timely article: No Easy Road for Men of God.

You may also be interested in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm On the Priesthood

+ + +

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

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

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”