Are You Suffering a Great Deal?

As this blog by a priest unjustly in prison began in 2009, Fr Gordon MacRae had to write 12 brief posts to send to an editor. Here are three of these early gems.

July 19, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

A lot has been going on here this summer. Even in this place where time often seems to stand still, finding blocks of time to write has suddenly become a challenge. Nonetheless, I am enthused by a new development. Gloria.tv is an international Catholic video and news sharing venue launched in Switzerland in 2005. It is known for its high degree of fidelity. I cannot see it, of course, but on rare occasions over the years it has reported on one of my posts.

After reviewing and then reposting “Convicted for Cash,” the 44-minute video documentary about my trial by Frank X. Panico, Gloria.tv invited me to establish a page and submit selected past posts on the site. The result has been a huge increase in visits to this blog from around the world. Please visit our presence there at Gloria.tv/FrGordonJMacrae.

A flood of activity this July, along with some technical difficulties where I live, has temporarily slowed my ability to write. So this week, and again two weeks from now, we are returning to July, 2009 and the first days of this blog. As it was beginning, I was asked to quickly write and submit 12 short posts to launch it. I am told today that a few of them are “gems,” so I want to share them with you anew.

Our first entry today is “Are You Suffering a Great Deal?” It’s from a laminated card that fell into my lap from a book in 2009 just as I was beginning to write. At the time, I was in fact suffering a great deal.

Pornchai Moontri was here with me then and was very much a part of this beginning. It was Pornchai who named this blog, “These Stone Walls,” then in 2020 I renamed it “Beyond These Stone Walls” as he was returning to Thailand. Pornchai has contributed many posts to this site, some more popular than my own, but please don’t tell him I said that. So the second of our three short selections is “Bunkies: Pornchai’s Story.” Next week in these pages, we will have some exciting news about developments in Pornchai’s new life in Thailand.

My last entry this week is “Contentious Convicts.” I will let that one speak for itself. You might think it seems a little fishy.

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Are You Suffering a Great Deal?

Are you suffering a great deal? No, the question isn’t from Oprah or Dr. Phil. It is on a bookmark kept in my breviary. It was asked by Our Lady of Fatima on June 13, 1917:

“Are you suffering a great deal? Don’t lose heart. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge, and the way that will lead you to God.”

There is immense power in that promise, and for someone who has lost everything, it is like a lifeboat at sea. There is sometimes nothing else to cling to. Even when I feel that my faith dangles from a thread — which is often, in prison — I cling to that promise.

I don’t know where the bookmark came from. Like most of the things I cling to for spiritual support, it just sort of showed up one day. I like to think it was handed down to me — in the way important things are handed down by brothers — by Maximilian Kolbe whose reverence for the Immaculate Heart of Mary guided him through life, and death, at Auschwitz.

Even when my faith is so diminished and darkened by the prison around me that I believe in little, I believe that promise. Sometimes I can only believe that Maximilian believed — with the very fabric of his life.

It’s often hard to pray in prison. It’s not just the noise, the harshness, the lack of privacy, the relentless obstacles. It’s just hard to raise my mind and heart beyond these stone walls at times. In that, at least, I am not alone.

The Vietnamese Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan wrote that there were long periods during his years in a Communist prison when he was unable to pray. I guess any Catholic who ever looks inward has a dark night of the soul. If not, why would the Blessed Mother ever ask such a question in her appearance at Fatima? It’s not the usual question a mother would ask when she comes a long way for a brief visit.

Are you suffering a great deal? When Saint Maximilian’s life was finally snuffed out after days of starvation chained to the corpses of those who could not endure, he was heard gasping a hymn of praise. I wish I had his heart! I don’t, but I wish I did. I have to learn how to suffer, and I am a slow learner.

In Spe Salvi, his Encyclical on Christian Hope, our Holy Father Pope Benedict wrote the most masterful prose on suffering that I have ever read. I cling to it like I do my bookmark with Our Lady of Fatima’s Promise:

“Christ descended into ‘Hell,’ and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and well-nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen — the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering — without ceasing to be suffering — becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.”

Spe Salvi, ¶37

Brilliant! Simply brilliant! There’s something hopeful in that, and I should listen.

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Bunkies: Pornchai’s Story

In prisons all over the world, the most crucial issue for prisoners is where one has to live, and with whom. Confined to a 60 square foot cell with another human being can be a nightmare. Most of us have no say in the choice of “Bunkies,” as cell mates are called here. If a bunky is moved — even after two or three years with the same person — sometimes a total stranger is living in the cell within minutes.

Having a good roommate seems to be everyone’s goal, but I tried another approach years ago. Being a good roommate is a goal I have more control over. The result has been that in 10 years since being moved from the torturous 8-man cells in which I spent my first seven years in prison, I have never had a roommate (we prefer to call our cells “rooms”) request a move.

The downside of that is that I have had some very dysfunctional roommates who have no wish to move elsewhere. My assigned roommates here have ranged in age from 19 to 67 or so, and have included men convicted of murder, rape, armed robbery, various drug crimes, and gang-related crimes. Everyone here knows all the details of why everyone else is here. Rumor and gossip fill in what the facts leave out.

My roommate of the last two years was also a good friend for several more. It was the first time I have been assigned to live with someone I know well, so it feels more like living with a family member than a felon.

Pornchai (his name is Thai, and the “r” is silent, as in “Paunch-eye”) is 35 years old and has been in prison since the age of 18.

He is about to convert to the Catholic faith and currently he is a scholarship student in theology in the Catholic Distance University’s excellent Distance Learning Program for prisoners.

Pornchai caused a minor sensation last year when he wrote a very brief autobiographical sketch that ended up being published as “The Conversion Story of 2008” by The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I hope you will take a moment to read it.

A year after publication, Pornchai still receives occasional mail about his life story. The most recent being a personal letter from Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok, Thailand, and a note from Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Oh, and there was also a letter from the late Father Richard John Neuhaus.

Pornchai takes his new notoriety in stride, though one letter had a profound impact. It was from a young man who wrote that he turned his life around, dropped out of his gang, swore off drugs, and returned to faith after reading “Pornchai’s Story” online.

Pornchai mistakenly credits me with some small role in his extraordinary life of late. He has fallen under the power of grace and cannot escape it now even if he tried. Now, he creates. Here is a photo of one of his creations, “The Olde Baldy” (named after me) which he carved piece by piece (over 600 of them) from scratch.

Pornchai Moontri — Master Craftsman

Pornchai was designated a master craftsman in wood and model shipbuilding. One of his first ships was a circa 1800 British warship from the Napoleonic era which he named after Father MacRae. He dubbed it “The Olde Baldy,” which is now docked in the home of our friend, Bill Wendell in Stow, Ohio.

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Contentious Convicts

There was little I could do to stop the fighting. Convicts are so territorial; they do not hesitate to take on intruders twice their size. They just can’t be reasoned with. It’s even worse when the convicts are mating. What drama!

No, no, no! I’m not talking about bizarre behavior among my fellow prisoners — though they do have their moments. I’m referring to Herichthys (Archocentrus) Nigrofasciatus, a fish of the cichlidae family native to the tropical river basins of Central America. They are popularly known as convict cichlids, or just convicts because of their characteristic black stripes.

Oh, go ahead and yawn! Whenever I would recite the scientific nomenclature for the fish in my aquarium, my friends would always yawn! Aquarium buffs are used to it! The more serious among us always felt duty-bound to learn the scientific names of the residents of our aquatic neighborhoods. Hey, we don’t talk that way by choice, you know!

My 100 gallon cichlid aquarium was my spare-time-consuming hobby for most of my life as a priest until I was sent to prison at age 41. It was an oasis of life, light, and aquatic drama that kept me mesmerized for hours at the end of each day. Only one other priest in my diocese had an aquarium, and we had an instant bond of shared knowledge and interest.

I had a breeding pair of convict cichlids who shared their home — perhaps “shared” is too strong a word — with a pair of Astronotus Ocellatus, or red oscars native to the Amazon Basin. I also had a single Herichthys (Archocentrus) Octofasciatus known otherwise as a “Jack Dempsey,” and for good reason. He ended up in a smaller aquarium of his own. Couldn’t play well with others.

Convicts typically excavate a cave when preparing to breed, so an old clay flower-pot in the corner sufficed. I named my convicts Bonnie and Clyde (at the time, I had limited knowledge of suitable convict names. Today I’d go with Bubba and Bella.) The other denizens, the Oscars, were named Oscar Madison and Oscar Wilde. (I’m glad I only had two!)

The Oscars gave their testy neighbors a wide berth once eggs were laid in the cave. Oscar Madison, twice the size of the convicts, sometimes paid a price for lumbering over to eat the convicts’ food. He had the nips in his fins to remember them by.

I once tried to use a mirrored barrier to keep everyone happy, but Clyde kept launching himself furiously at his own reflection. In time, everyone learned to respect some boundaries. My current convict friends could learn a lot from that. “The Aquarium is Gone.” That’s actually a line from a poem by Robert Spence Lowell (“For the Union Dead.” 1964)

Its absence from my world is still deeply felt. It is one of the three recurring dreams I have in prison. (I’ll write of the other two later.) It haunts me a bit. I often dream that my aquarium is on the concrete shelf of my cell, and Oscar Wilde is staring at me with his bulging eyes willing me to bring food.

I miss them. There is nothing with water and life here.

“And the fish of the sea will declare to you. In His hand is the life of every living thing.”

— Job 12:8,10

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.”

Divine Mercy Reunites Pornchai Moontri and His Brother

Midway on life’s arduous path, Divine Mercy entered the lives of Pornchai Moontri and Fr. Gordon MacRae. When the road led to Thailand, Divine Mercy was there too.

April 12 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pornchai Moontri entered the Catholic faith on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. To some who knew him, it was a most unlikely conversion story but it was a transformation in his very core. This story is my story as well. The Lord asked me to be an instrument in restoring life and hope to this prisoner even while in prison myself. Though Pornchai now lives on the far side of the world from me, he is still very much a part of my life and the life of this blog. His most recent post for these pages was the very moving “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

As most readers of this blog know, Pornchai (which in Thai means “Blessing”) was my roommate for 16 years in the draconian confines of this prison. Out of both necessity and deprivation, we became each other’s family. Pornchai was not just a transient along the twists and turns of my life. I learned over time that our paths crossed for a divinely inspired reason.

With new information, I won a reprieve for Pornchai who was released after 29 years in prison. I did my best to accompany and support him through a gruesome five-month ordeal in ICE detention at the height of a global pandemic. He finally emerged free in Bangkok, Thailand on February 24, 2021 with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. The life he vaguely remembered before he was taken as a child of eleven was gone. Because of the posts I wrote about us, a small group of devout Catholics who formed Divine Mercy Thailand recruited Father John Hung Le and Khun Chalathip, a benefactor of Father John’s refugee work, to give Pornchai shelter. Mary herself chose them for this task just as she chose me.

That is not an exaggeration. It might seem strange to someone not versed in Catholic spiritual life, but at some point I became aware that through the intercession of Saint Maximilian Kolbe in both our lives, The Immaculata involved herself in a special way in Pornchai’s life and well being. Then she involved me through intricately woven threads of actual grace over time.

In 2022, in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare,” I wrote of the compelling signs of Mary’s interventions in our lives. After Pornchai’s conversion to the Catholic faith, we took part in the “33 Days to Morning Glory” retreat written by Marian Fr. Michael Gaitley who would become a friend to us. Depicted atop this post, our Consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary took place in 2013 on the Solemnity of Christ the King.

I once mistakenly believed that this path was all about me and my priesthood in exile, but the truth was confirmed for me when Marian Helper magazine published “Mary Is at Work Here” in 2014. The article by Felix Carroll includes these startling paragraphs:

“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group to be the first [invited to Marian Consecration]. The reason eventually was revealed. It turned out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. (See the Chapter entitled “Pornchai Moontri”) .

“Pornchai experienced a dramatic conversion in no small part due to a friendship formed with fellow inmate and cellmate Fr. Gordon MacRae who chronicles their lives in his celebrated website, Beyond These Stone Walls. Fr. Gordon joined Pornchai in the Consecration and called it 'a great spiritual gift.' It opened a door to the rebirth of trust during a dark time for both men. Great suffering requires great trust.”

— Marian Helper, Spring 2014

From Dante’s Inferno to Purgatorio

Many readers already know the most painful parts of this story. Pornchai and his brother, Priwan, were two and four years old respectively when they were abandoned in rural Thailand by a young mother desperate to find work to provide for them. She traveled to Bangkok where she fell under the control of an evil man. She was but a teenager. Nine years later, when her sons were ages 11 and 13 with no memory of her, they were taken from Thailand to the United States where they both became victims of sexual and physical violence.

Pornchai and Priwan became homeless adolescents fending for themselves in a foreign land in the mid-1980s, and they became separated. I and others investigated this story, wrote about it, and ultimately, with God’s grace, brought their abuser to justice. In September 2018, thirty years after his ruinous offenses, Richard Alan Bailey was convicted in Maine of 40 felony counts of child rape.

I discovered that at some point their mother learned the truth, but when she vowed to seek justice for her sons, she was murdered. This account is told in an article that may shake your faith in the justice system but strengthen your faith in Divine Providence. It is, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

In the sixteen years in which Pornchai lived in a bunk just above me in the Concord, New Hampshire prison, the first few years were a bit rough. Looking back, Pornchai today says that the rough part was all him. He never set out to harm anyone, but in a Maine prison at age 18, facing a dark future alone, Pornchai vowed to never again become someone’s victim. He kept people away with a constant state of anger. As a result, he spent the next seven years alone with his raging thoughts in the cruel madness of solitary confinement.

When Pornchai could be held in solitary no longer, the State of Maine decided to just get rid of him. He was chained up in a van and taken to another prison in another state. He could have been taken anywhere, and he had no idea where he was going, but he landed just one state away in New Hampshire. He ended up in a familiar place solitary confinement.

When he emerged months later, Pornchai could have been sent to any of three New Hampshire prisons each with multiple housing units reflecting varying levels of security. By some mysterious grace, he was moved in with me. It was providential that just before his arrival in New Hampshire,The Wall Street Journal published its first articles about my plight. Somehow, Pornchai read them.

The context for this story is essential. Understandably, Pornchai trusted no one. Just imagine his inner struggle when he learned that he was now to live in a prison cell with a Catholic priest convicted of sexual abuse. Others told me to sleep with one eye open, but it did not take long for Pornchai to learn that I was not at all like the man who destroyed his life.

When I offered Mass in my cell late at night, it was Pornchai who was sleeping with one eye open. He watched me, and later he questioned me. When I told him about the Mass he asked if he could stay awake for it. I taught him to read the Mass readings and I explained the Eucharist along with a restriction that he cannot receive the Body of Christ unless he came to believe. Did he dare to believe in anything good in this world?

Pornchai and I lived in the same cell for two years before I began writing from prison. When we spoke about an invitation I received to write for this blog, I told Pornchai that it might somehow find its way around the world to Thailand. I did not actually believe that myself, but that is exactly what happened.

Here is Pornchai’s perspective on the first year of this blog given to me in a recent phone call to Thailand:

“When I was living in the bunk above Father G he would sometimes hand some typed pages up to me. Sometimes I thought they were interesting. Sometimes they kept me awake, and sometimes they just put me to sleep. But one time — I don’t remember the post — Father G included some paragraphs from the book, Dante’s Inferno. [It’s the first part of a three-part book, The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri in 1307]. When I read the passage, I thought, “This is the story of my life!” Father G found it and here it is:

“Midway on my life’s journey, I went astray from the straight path and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was? I never saw so drear, so rank, so horrible a wilderness! Its very memory gives shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter. But since it came somehow to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God’s grace. How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered from the True Way. But at the far end of that valley of evil, whose maze had sapped my heart with fear, I found myself upon a little hill, and there I lifted up my eyes...”

— Dante, The DivineComedy: Inferno, 1307

“Living with Father G., I thought I had finally left hell and now I was in Purgatory with him. I came to trust him. He was the only person in my life who always looked out for my best interest and never put his own first. So now I turn this story back over to Father G.”

From Dante’s Purgatorio to Paradiso

Learning from this blog about what we both faced in this prison without support or family, some readers came to our aid. Thanks to their modest gifts of support, we were suddenly eating a little better and were able to purchase things that made life here a little easier. The slow and tedious passage of time in prison sped up. I made a promise to Pornchai that he would never again be abandoned and stranded in life. I can only say that I am filled with gratitude, not only to our readers, but to God and our Mother Mary, the Immaculata, under whose mantle Saint Maximilian Kolbe led us both. He ratified a covenant with us when Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. There was now meaning in all the injustice I had endured.

I began to write posts that would reach around the world to navigate a path home for Pornchai. There were small miracles of connection, one after another, and the lights of Divine Mercy began to illuminate both of our exiled souls. This story was not without setbacks and challenges, however.

In 2017, Pornchai and I became separated. It came at a most stressful time just as we learned that Pornchai must be deported to Thailand immediately upon leaving prison. I knew that the few years we had left together were crucial for his well being. What happened next was a miracle. There is no other explanation for it.

On July 17, 2017, I was summoned from my work in the prison law library. I was handed a few plastic bags and was told that I have one hour to unravel my life from the 23 years I had spent in that punitive and confining building and move to another place. I asked that Pornchai also be called from his work to help me. I was shaken, and did not want him to return that day just to find me inexplicably gone. As Pornchai helped me pack, our despondence was like a dark cloud. Prison has no knowledge of Divine Mercy and places no value on human relationships.

An hour later, we wheeled a small cart out of that building, across the long walled prison yard, up a series of ramps, and then in between some other buildings to a housing unit called Medium South. I knew about it, but I had never before seen it. A gate in the high wall opened up, and in we went.

I felt like Dorothy Gale having just crashed in the Land of Oz after a tornado uprooted our lives. After 23 years locked in with no outside at all — 13 of them with Pornchai — this new place was built around a park-like setting with outside access nearly around the clock. And there were flowers! People I knew came running down to carry my things. I was led to the top floor from where I could see over the walls into forests and hills beyond.

Then came this wonderful scene’s collision with a broken heart. From there, I watched as Pornchai passed all alone back through that gate down below, possibly never to be seen again by me again. Friendship means nothing in prison bureaucracies. We were powerless to change this and I was powerless to decline this move. On the next day after a sleepless night, I learned that Pornchai was also moved — but somewhere else. Our faith was shaken and it began to crumble.

Pornchai was moved to another unit. We both knew that no one ever returns from there. Not ever! Over the next two weeks I prayed daily asking Saint Maximilian, our Patron Saint ,to bring this before the Heart of Mary for a word to her Son. Surely, she could undo this knot. After all, it was upon her word that He changed water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana (John 2:1-10).

On the following Sunday, Pornchai was able to attend a Catholic Mass in the prison chapel. We had only a minute to speak after Mass. I asked him to trust, and to hand this over to our Mother. Pornchai just nodded in silence. Then I picked up a Missalette and saw a prayer, the Memorare. I asked Pornchai to pray with me:

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, we fly unto you, O Virgin of Virgins, our Mother. To you do we come, before you we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petition, but in your mercy, hear and answer us. Amen.”

Each day to follow was under a dark cloud. Three days later, on a Wednesday afternoon, I returned from my work in the prison law library. As the gate to Medium South slid open, another prisoner was waiting for me. I usually sit on a bench there for a few minutes before climbing up the 52 stairs to my cell, but the person standing there told me I was needed up there right away.

I arrived to find Pornchai unpacking and moving into the bunk above me where, just a few hours earlier, some other prisoner lived. The smile on Pornchai’s face told the story. “How did this happen?” I asked. Pornchai said, “I think you already know.” He had no explanation. He said he was suddenly called to an office and told to pack and move to Medium South, Pod 3-Bravo, Cell 4. He had no idea the address was mine until he got there and saw my possessions in the 60-square-foot cell.

We were able to spend the next three years becoming ready, and we were ready. Pornchai remained my roommate until September 8, 2020 when he was handed over to ICE for deportation to Thailand. There was another miracle yet to come, and I wrote of it in “For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand.”

Epilogue : A Prodigal Son and His Older Brother

It has long been my mission in life to restore the life of another person stranded in the twists and turns of this story. After an absence of 38 years, Pornchai’s brother, Priwan has been saving and hoping to travel to Thailand. For the first time since they were taken away in 1985, he will be reunited with Pornchai in Thailand. Priwan’s flight departs Boston on Divine Mercy Sunday arriving in Bangkok on the day after.

Priwan cannot remain there, but he wants to restore his Thai citizenship and the identity that was taken from him as Pornchai had already begun to do. Priwan will spend a month with Pornchai, the first time they have been together since the tragedy of their lives separated them 38 years earlier. I have promised to help, and that is my other prayer.

Mary is still at work here, and I am still in her service.

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Left: Pornchai greets his brother Priwan in the company of Khun Chalathip, his Thai tutor, upon arrival at the Bangkok International Airport. Right: Having arrived with clothing from the state of Maine, Priwan needed to find something more suitable to Thai weather. It was 113℉ that day. (Photos by Father John Hung Le, SVD)

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this Divine Mercy story. To help me in this Corporal Work of Mercy, or to support Beyond These Stone Walls, please see our “Contact and Support” page. You may also wish to read these related posts:

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Loved, Lost, Found: The Chapter on “Pornchai Moontri”

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

And you must not miss...

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

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And available until Pentecost:

A Personal Holy Week Retreat from Beyond These Stone Walls

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.”

The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine

The world is changing, and not for the better. The Annunciation proclaims an eternal truth: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)

Forty years ago, at my priesthood ordination on June 5, 1982, I received a number of gifts from a multitude of friends who had entered my life at various points along its path. Not a single one of them is a part of my life today. Many have left this life, almost all in God’s friendship but some also at various stages of doubt. It is not easy to keep the company of a friend you constantly doubt, but in the case of God we should just be thankful that it was never mutual.

One of the gifts I received on that day was from one of the greatest of my lifelong friends, Fr. Tony Nuccio, CSS. A priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata, he served Holy Family Parish in Lynn, Massachusetts, a rather rugged industrial city on the North Shore of Boston. I was a 17-year-old lost, faithless, fatherless teen, a condition which had not yet become so common, when Father Tony arrived to rescue me from the path of the Prodigal Son.

Father Tony filled in some very empty space in my life. He was present fourteen years later for my priesthood ordination. Tony died a year later from complications after a heart transplant. I have missed him ever since, but thanks to him that empty space in my life remained filled. I thank him, and thank God for him, at every Mass I have offered ever since.

The ordination gift that Father Tony gave me was very special. It was a wood panel reproduction of The Annunciation, a famous painting by the 15th Century Italian artist and Dominican friar, Fra Angelico. Father Tony brought it back from Rome and it was one of my great treasures, gracing the wall of every place I have lived since — except the place where I live now.

The scene depicted in the Annunciation, which is honored by the Church on March 25, is that of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that the Messiah is about to enter our world through a union between her and the Holy Spirit. I wrote of that scene with all its meaning in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

The Archangel Gabriel appears in only two places in Sacred Scripture: in the scene above and in the Book of Daniel (8:16 and 9:21). The two appearances are like bookends. In Daniel, Gabriel is an interpreting angel who explains to Daniel events that will accompany the Messiah to come (9:21-27). This places the Archangel at both ends of Biblical prophecy. Having foretold the Messiah’s coming in the Old Testament, he now heralds in the New the arrival of Jesus and John the Baptist, his forerunner.

I have pondered Father Tony’s gift for most of the years of my priesthood. There is no doubt in me that the scene of the Annunciation took place on Earth, but, like the painting itself, it seems to have been made in Heaven. In the landscape, you can see Adam and Eve in a side panel that depicts their exile from Eden, an exile mended by the Birth and Cross of Christ.

Then one day, through the betrayal of false witness, the bottom fell out of my world. I never saw Father Tony’s gift again. For a long time, I had no idea what happened to it, and to all the other signs and symbols of my priesthood. When this miraculous blog took shape from behind these prison walls, I wrote of that loss and many other losses in “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.”

That post was read by many around the world, including some who had become misplaced from my life by the cruel waves of time and circumstance. I learned that Father Tony’s gift had a chain of custody, ending up in the home of another priest and dear friend who took it into his heart without fully knowing from whence it came or what it meant to its owner.

Saving a World in Crisis

I was overjoyed to learn all these years later that Father Tony’s gift awaits my return to the land of the free just as Father Tony himself awaits my life in his company in a place where justice reigns and loss is unknown. Father Tony knew that his Redeemer lives, and he passed the surety of that knowledge onto me just as a real father should. And for those who doubt whether there is any real plan in place here, it was because of what Father Tony passed onto me that I passed onto Pornchai Moontri that same surety of faith. You can read about it, if you haven’t already, in “To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

In the few decades just before the Birth of Christ, the Roman Empire adopted a calendar introduced under the authority of Julius Caesar. It was the first calendar to observe a solar year, the 365-day passage of one revolution of the Earth around the sun. The Julian Calendar also included a leap year, an additional day observed every four years on February 29 to compensate for the six extra hours of Earth’s yearly revolution. The Julian Calendar was observed throughout most of Europe until it was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory VIII in 1562.

The “New Style” Gregorian Calendar observed the New Year as beginning on January 1, but in the “Old Style” Julian calendar, March 25 was New Year’s Day. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, New Year’s Day came to be called “Annunciation Day,” a tribute to the centrality of its meaning and message.

The world is once again in a time of great political and social upheaval. After writing a week ago here of the latest grim manifestation of evil in our midst, I wanted to follow it with something that may give hope. This is not the first time the world has been under the dark cloud of a regime spreading war like a plague.

In 2017, marking the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to three peasant children, I received a letter from Craig Turner. An accomplished journalist and historian, Mr. Turner had been working on a CD presentation for Lighthouse Catholic Media that placed the Fatima appearances and all that followed into a context against the backdrop of history.

The result was fascinating. Having read some of my posts, Craig offered his CD presentation to me for a guest posting at Beyond These Stone Walls. He placed it into a narrative format that on its face may seem a little daunting. It turned out to be the most read and shared post of that year and one of the most read in the five years since.

After I wrote my recent post, “Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us,” many readers asked why Pope Francis has not consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as was once requested in her appearance at Fatima. At one time, I joined some of the rest of the world in not taking this very seriously. It is serious now. So I posed the question to my friend Father George David Byers. He in turn posed the same question to a close contact in Rome. On March 16, Father George received a response which he passed on to me.

His friend confirmed that the Holy Father, Pope Francis, intends to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at 5:00 PM Rome time on the Feast of the Annunciation, Friday, 25 March, 2022. The Holy Father had said he was going to be doing this in union with Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the Papal Almoner sent to Fatima for this purpose. Father George asked his friend to request from Pope Francis that this consecration be made in union with all the other bishops in the world. Having made this request with the Holy Father about 12:00 Noon Rome time, 17 March, 2022, Pope Francis affirmed that all the bishops — “every bishop around the world” — will be joining him for the consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Five minutes later, at 7:05 AM EST, on 17 March, Father George received this email from his friend:

“Dear George, I have just asked the Holy Father about the Consecration with all the Bishops of the world. He confirmed that that is the way it is going to be: He will do it with every bishop around the world. Let us pray to Our Blessed Mother to stop the devil’s work …; and I also pray to her to stop the ongoing cultural revolution. God bless you!”

Much later that day, seemingly in response to what was set in motion here, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States sent this message to Archbishop José Gomez, President of the U.S. Conference of Bishops:

“In the context of the tragic events unfolding in Ukraine, the Holy Father, Pope Francis, will lead an Act of Consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25 next. The Holy Father intends to invite each bishop, together with all priests, to join in this Act of Consecration at an hour corresponding to 5:00 PM Rome time.”

Mary is at work here, not in the human sin that lies beneath Vladimir Putin’s horrific assault on the people of Ukraine, but in the spiritual warfare that all human beings face. In the end, the Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph. On the 100th anniversary of Mary’s apparition at Fatima, I was immersed in a time of spiritual warfare of my own as chaos descended all around me. I was unable to write. It was at that time that I was contacted by Craig Turner and made a decision to host his guest post which opened my eyes and the eyes of many to our need to submit to the Immaculate Heart of Mary the knots of a screwed up world. Please do not miss:

“How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis.”

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You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

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To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe are both set during Advent. They are harbingers of the greatest story ever told.

December 8, 2021

For most of my life as a priest, I treated the visions at Lourdes, Fatima and other elements of our collective beliefs about Mary and the saints with entrenched skepticism. I considered myself to be a sort of scientist-priest. All knowledge had to be sifted by the scientific method using concepts such as objective scientific study with experiments that can be replicated in a laboratory.

Armed with studies of cosmology and astrophysics, and degrees in behavioral science, my inner world was both predictable and provable. I scoffed inwardly at the pious notion that the Mother of God has appeared in visions to some of the poorest people in some of the most unlikely places on this planet. I also, to my shame today, dismissed openly the notion that the wounds borne by Padre Pio were anything but psychosomatic evidence of an intense psychological focus on Christology.

Then came my Great Comeuppance. It was 1992 and I was living in New Mexico where I was Director of Admissions at a facility for spiritually and psychologically troubled priests. During those years I made regular pilgrimages to the Very Large Array, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the high desert of Socorro.

In 1992, I was visited by two priest friends, one from Maine and one from New York. I wanted to bring them to the desert observatory but they wanted to visit a Catholic shrine in the opposite direction north of Santa Fe where some sort of Marian miracle had once supposedly taken place there. I was not the one driving which really irked me all by itself — so their votes prevailed.

Sitting in the back seat of the car as we approached the shrine, I scoffed in silence and arrogantly dismissed their interest as spiritually immature fluff. What happened next I have never really been able to articulate with any clarity. I was stricken with a momentary inward vision of how small I am next to the immense power of grace that God has bestowed upon Mary.

It lasted only a moment. I could not see her with my eyes, but she became a momentary presence in the deep recesses of my mind. I could not have withstood more than a moment. And like an intense light, it left me with an echo of itself that has never left me. It cast me then into a state of inexplicable interior collapse. It was not fear, but rather overwhelming awe. It lingers nearly three decades later.

There was nothing about that experience that gave me any sense that I am anyone special, for I am not. Instead, it forced me to reinventory the tools necessary to see and encounter life as it is, and not as I would have it. I was wrong to think that the required tools of life are all intellectual, and I was wrong to think that I had them. Up until that day, I was missing the most essential of receivers and didn’t even know it.

Radio waves fill the atmosphere, but without a receiver, they remain silent. A spiritual life is our receiver. We ignore it, or just go through the motions, to our spiritual peril.

There have been other instances when I felt that I had been spoken to. I described two of those instances in two special posts that left me feeling that it just makes more sense to believe than not. Newer readers may not have seen those posts. They were: “A Shower of Roses” and “A Corner of the Veil.”

Inmates Pornchai Moontri (left) and Fr. Gordon MacRae (right) make their consecration to Jesus through Mary on Nov. 24, 2013, the Solemnity of Christ the King, in New Hampshire State Prison for Men. They pray to become instruments in Mary’s “immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God.”

An Encounter with Christ the King

In a post some months ago, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote of the years I spent in empty exile in prison before anything like a spiritual life began to manifest itself. For twelve years, from 1994 to 2006, I did little more than survive here with no sense of a purpose for the heavy cross I carried. As that post linked above reveals, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, spent those same twelve years in prison in the torment of solitary confinement in the neighboring state of Maine. In 2006, our lives converged.

From there, looking back with hindsight, it seems as though our parallel lives were meant to cross. Today, I am certain of that. As our lives converged, we were set — apparently by “accident” on a path that led Pornchai to a Divine Mercy conversion and led both of us to a relationship with a persistent Patron Saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe entered our lives in prison in mysterious ways, and then led us on a path to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I would have scoffed at and dismissed such a story thirty years ago, but now I cannot because it has captured me in far greater ways than any unjust prison sentence. Over the course of our long walk along the path of Divine Mercy, other events began to unfold in our lives leading me to believe that everything that happened to me — though evil in and of itself — was somehow hijacked by Divine Mercy to bring about a great and wondrous good.

About sixty miles from this prison, Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC, had been working on a book called “33 Days to Morning Glory.” It’s a self-directed retreat program that Father Gaitley used to develop a superb DVD presentation for a course in Divine Mercy which culminates in consecration of the self to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The very language of this would likely have turned me away as a younger priest. My theology was far beyond such pious nonsense. That was all before my Comeuppance, however.

I did not know Father Gaitley then. Had never even heard of him. But because I had been writing about our story and Pornchai’s conversion, someone at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts took notice. As Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning G1ory began to sweep the country with profound popularity, someone at the Shrine suggested that this retreat should be offered in a prison. Then they chose this prison, and invited me and Pornchai Moontri.

You likely know elements of this story from past posts about it, but there is a point that I must stress. Pornchai and I had, at the time, been through a series of grave disappointments and discouragement. It seemed at the time that prison was winning the battle for our souls and we felt powerless to interrupt it. We declined the invitation. In the days to follow, St. Maximilian Kolbe intervened, and we reluctantly agreed, but with my usual skepticism. There was, however, a nagging inner sense that we were being led to something of great importance.

It was the fall of 2013. The “33 Days” retreat ended with Mass in the prison chapel on the Solemnity of Christ the King on November 24 that year. It ended with our consecration to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a consecration I have renewed ever since on the Solemnity of Christ the King. Here is Fr. Michael Gaitley’s Consecration Prayer that we used:

“I,_____, a repentant sinner, renew and ratify today in your hands, O Immaculate Mother, the vows of my Baptism. I renounce Satan and resolve to follow Jesus Christ even more closely than before. Mary, I give you my heart. Please set it on fire with love for Jesus. Make it always attentive to His burning thirst for love and for souls. Keep my heart in your most pure Heart that I may love Jesus and the members of His body with your own perfect love. Mary, I entrust myself to you: my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions. Please make of me, of all that I am and have, whatever most pleases you. Let me be a fit instrument in your immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God. If I fall, please lead me back to Jesus. Wash me in the blood and water that flow from His pierced side, and help me never to lose my trust in this fountain of love and mercy. With you, O Immaculate Mother, you who always do the will of God, I unite myself to the perfect consecration of Jesus as he offers Himself in the Spirit to the Father for the life of the world. Amen.”

The Immaculate Conception

Why should anyone enter into such a personal consecration of the self? I have renewed this consecration on the Solemnity of Christ the King every year since 2013. Each time, I was carried back to that strange day at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 when Mary Herself knocked on the door of my soul. I have no other way to put it. Like Mary, I have since pondered these things in my heart (Luke 2:13), and they took over my heart.

The answer to why we should make such a consecration rests in the very identity of the Immaculate Conception. It is not a mere coincidence that at Mass for the Immaculate Conception, the Church chooses as the proclamation of the Gospel St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38). I wrote of the same passage in “St. Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

In that exchange between the Angel of the Annunciation and Mary, Gabriel, one of the Angels who stands in the Presence of God, refers to Mary with a term never before used in all of Sacred Scripture. Never before had an angel referred to a human being with a title and not a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). When translating the New Testament Greek into Latin, St. Jerome interpreted the Greek title used by Gabriel as “gratia plena” which, in English is rendered “full of grace.” No English words can fully capture the meaning of the original Greek.

The term in St. Luke’s original Greek is “kecharitōmenē,” a title unique in Sacred Scripture. It refers to a vessel that is, and always has been, filled with divine life. St. Maximilian Kolbe developed a fascinating identification of the Holy Spirit as the “Uncreated Immaculate Conception” and of Mary as the “Created Immaculate Conception,” living in an interior union, from the first moment of her existence, a “union of essence” with the Holy Spirit.

Some Catholics (I was once one of them) and some fundamentalist Protestant Christians rebel against such an interpretation as assigning a state of divinity to Mary. That is not the case. Another Greek phrase used of Mary by the Church Fathers is “Theotokos,” the “bearer of God,” a term that identifies Mary as the New Ark of the Covenant. It makes complete sense that God, from the moment of Mary’s bodily existence, created within her a union with the Holy Spirit. The same Protestant Christians also stress vehemently the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture. There is simply no other way to interpret what the Archangel Gabriel says to Mary — and says to us about Mary — in Luke Chapter One: “Kecharitōmenē” — one who lives in a union of essence with the Holy Spirit. Among all human beings, Mary lives a unique existence in the Presence of God.

At the beatification Mass for Maximilian Kolbe on October 17, 1971, Saint Pope Paul VI addressed this: “A mysterious communion unites Mary to Christ, a communion that is documented convincingly in the New Testament ... The Church is faithful to honor Mary, her most exceptional daughter and her spiritual Mother.”

Our Patron and friend on this path, St. Maximilian Kolbe, gave Mary another name: The Immaculata. He honored her with his life, and he handed over that life in the horror of Auschwitz to free another prisoner. While writing this post, I spoke by telephone with Pornchai Moontri in Thailand who also has been pondering.

He told me that he knows he would not be free today — in every sense of that word — if not for me. And it troubles him greatly, he said, that I remain unjustly in prison. He is wrong about this. If Pornchai is free, so am I. I know without a doubt today that the powerful grace instilled in my heart was for this singular purpose. I know this for two reasons. On the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013, when Pornchai and I first entered into Marian consecration, Marian Helper magazine editor Felix Carroll wrote of it in “Mary Is at Work Here”:

“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press Title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.”

However, the strongest hint came as I pondered all of this in my heart. It came as somewhat of a bombshell. I did a deep dive into the events I describe here and realized with astonishment that the inexplicable event I experienced at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 is what set this story in motion. It was during Holy Week in 1992. Just days before, some 2,000 miles away in Bangor, Maine, a desperate teenager fleeing a horror inflicted on him committed the act of despair that would send him to prison. Fourteen years later, our paths merged, and set us upon a road to Divine Mercy.

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A Note to readers from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please share this post, and please visit our “Special Events” page to assist with an important Advent project and mission of Divine Mercy. This was the subject of my important Advent post, “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.”

Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll invited me to write for the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016. That article, “The Doors That Have Unlocked,” is the featured post this week at “Voices from Beyond.”

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“O Come, Thou Key of David, come,

And open wide our heavenly home,

Make safe the path that sets us free,

And leads us on the road to liberty.

Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel

To Thee shall come Emmanuel”

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Photo by Dennis Jarvis

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

A Parable of Divine Mercy: Pornchai Moontri had a first birthday in freedom on September 10. One third of his life passed in a prison cell with a Catholic priest.

September 8, 2021

Jesus taught in parables, a word which comes from the Greek, paraballein, which means to “draw a comparison.” Jesus turned His most essential truths into simple but profound parables that could be easily pondered, remembered, and retold. The genre was not unique to Jesus. There are several parables that appear in our Old Testament. I wrote of one some time ago — though now I cannot recall which post it was — about the Prophet Jonah.

The Book of Jonah is one of a collection of twelve prophetic books known in the Hebrew Scriptures as the Minor Prophets. The Book of Jonah tells of events — some historical and some in parable form — in the life of an 8th-century BC prophet named Jonah. At the heart of the story, Jonah was commanded by God to go to Nineveh to convert the city from its wickedness. Nineveh was an ancient city on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq near the modern city of Mosul. It was the capital of the Assyrian Empire from 705-612 BC.

Jonah rebelled against the command of God and went in the opposite direction, boarding a ship to continue his flight from “the Presence of the Lord.” When a storm arose and the ship was imperiled, the mariners blamed Jonah and cast him into a raging sea. He was swallowed by “a great fish” (1:17), spent three days and nights in its belly, and then the Lord spoke to the fish and Jonah “was spewed out upon dry land” ( 2: 10) . ( I could add, as a possible aside, that the great fish might later have been sold at market, but there was no longer any prophet in it!)

Then God, undaunted by his rebellion, again commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh. Jonah finally went, did his best, the people repented, and God saved them from destruction. Many biblical scholars regard this part of the Book of Jonah as a parable. Jesus Himself referred to the Jonah story as a presage, a type of parable account pointing to His own death and Resurrection:

“Some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.' But he answered them, 'An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days in the belly of the giant fish so for three days and three nights, the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”

— Matthew 12:38-40

What I take away from the parable part of the story of Jonah is that there is no point fleeing from “the Presence of the Lord.” God is not a puppeteer dangling and directing us from strings. Rather, the threads of our lives are intertwined with the threads of other lives in ways mysterious and profound. I have written several times of what I call “The Great Tapestry of God.” Within that tapestry — which in this life we see only from our place among its tangled threads — God connects people in salvific ways, and asks for our cooperation with these threads of connection.

The Parable of the Priest

I was slow to awaken to this. For too many days and nights in wrongful imprisonment, I pled my case to the Lord and asked Him to send someone to deliver me from this present darkness. It took a long time for me to see that perhaps I have been looking at this unjust imprisonment from the wrong perspective. I have railed against the fact that I am powerless to change it. I can only change myself. I know the meaning of the Cross of Christ, but I was spiritually blind to my own. Ironically, in popular writing, prison is sometimes referred to as “the belly of the beast.”

After a dozen years of railing against God in prison, I slowly came to the possible realization that no one was sent to help me because maybe I am the one being sent. My first nudge in this direction came upon reading one of the most mysterious passages in all of Sacred Scripture. It arose when I pondered what exactly happened to Jesus between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the three days He refers to in the Sign of Jonah parable in the Gospel of Matthew above. A cryptic hint is found in the First Letter of Peter:

“For it is better to suffer for good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which he also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in former times did not obey.”

— 1 Peter 3:17-20

The second and much stronger hint also came to me in 2006, twelve years after my imprisonment commenced. This may be a familiar story to long time readers, but it is essential to this parable. I was visited in prison by a priest who learned of me from a California priest and canon lawyer whom I had never even met. The visiting priest was Father James McCurry, a Conventual Franciscan who, unknown to me at the time, had been a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Maximilian Kolbe whom I barely knew of.

Our visit was brief, but pivotal. Father McCurry asked me what I knew about Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I knew very little. A few days later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry with a holy card (we could receive cards then, but not now). The card depicted Saint Maximilian in his Franciscan habit over which he partially wore the tattered jacket of an Auschwitz prisoner with the number, 16670. I was strangely captivated by the image and taped it to the battered mirror in my cell.

Later that same day, I realized with profound sadness that on the next day — December 23, 2006 — I would be a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. At the edge of despair, I had the strangest sense that the man in the mirror, St. Maximilian, was there in that cell with me. I learned that he was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. I spent a lot of time pondering what was in his heart and mind as he spontaneously stepped forward from a line of prisoners and asked permission to take the place of a weeping young man condemned to death by starvation. I wrote of the cell where he spent his last days in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

On the very next day after pondering that man in the mirror on Christmas Eve, 2006 — a small but powerful book arrived for me. It was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl, a Jewish medical doctor and psychiatrist who was the sole member of his family to survive the horror of the concentration camps. I devoured the little book several times. It was one of the most meaningful accounts of spiritual survival I had ever read. Its two basic premises were that we have one freedom that can never be taken from us: We have the freedom to choose the person we will be in any set of circumstances.

The other premise was that we will be broken by unending suffering unless we discover meaning in it. I was stunned to see at the end of this Jewish doctor’s book that he and many others attributed, in part, their survival of Auschwitz to Maximilian Kolbe “who selflessly deprived the camp commandant of his power over life and death.”

The Parable of a Prisoner

God did not will the evil through which Maximilian suffered and died, but he drew from it many threads of connection that wove their way into countless lives, and now I was among them. For Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor with an unusual familiarity with the Gospel, Maximilian epitomized the words of Jesus, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

I asked the Lord to show me the meaning of what I had suffered. It was at this very point that Pornchai Moontri showed up in the Concord prison. I have written of our first meeting before, but it bears repeating. I was, by “chance,” late in the prison dining hall one evening. It was very crowded with no seats available as I wandered around with a tray. I was beckoned from across the room by J.J., a young Indonesian man whom I had helped with his looming deportation. “Hey G! Sit here with us. This is my new friend, Ponch. He just got here.”

Pornchai sat in near silence as J.J. and I spoke. I was shifting in my seat as Pornchai’s dagger eyes, and his distrust and rage were aimed in my direction. J.J. told him that I can be trusted. Pornchai clearly had extreme doubts.

Over the next month, Pornchai was moved in and out of heightened security because he was marked as a potential danger to others. Then one day as 2006 gave way to 2007, I saw him dragging a trash bag with his few possessions onto the cell block where I lived. He paused at my cell door and looked in. He stepped toward the battered mirror and saw the image of St. Maximilian Kolbe in his Franciscan habit and Auschwitz jacket and he stared for a time. “Is this you?” he asked.

Within a few months, Pornchai’s roommate moved away and I was asked to move in with him. Less than four years later, to make this long and winding parable short, Pornchai was received into the Catholic faith on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. Two years after that, on the Solemnity of Christ the King, 2012, we both followed Saint Maximilian Kolbe into Consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Most readers likely know by now the depth of the wounds Pornchai experienced in life. He was abandoned as a child in Thailand, suffered severe malnutrition, and then, at age eleven, he fell into the hands of a monster. He was taken from his country and the only family he knew, and was brought to the U.S. where he suffered years of unspeakable abuse. He escaped to a life of homelessness, living on the streets as a teenager in what was to him a foreign land. At age 18, he accidentally killed a much larger man during a struggle, and was sent to prison.

Pornchai’s mother, the only other person who knew of the years of abuse he suffered, was murdered on the Island of Guam after being taken there by the man who abused him. In 2018, after I wrote this entire account, that man, Richard Alan Bailey, was brought to justice and convicted of forty felony counts of sexual abuse of Pornchai. After the murder of his mother at that man’s hands, Pornchai gave up on life and spent the next seven years in the torment of solitary confinement in a supermax prison in the State of Maine. From there, he was moved here with me.

Over the ensuing years, as I gradually became aware of the enormity of Pornchai’s suffering, I felt compelled to act in the only manner available to me. I followed Saint Maximilian Kolbe into the Gospel passage that characterized his life in service to his fellow prisoners: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

I asked the Lord, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to free Pornchai from his past and the seemingly impenetrable prisons that held him bound. I offered the Lord my life and freedom just as Maximilian did on that August day of 1941. Then I witnessed the doors of Divine Mercy open to us.

This blog began just then. In the time he spent with me, Pornchai graduated from high school with honors, earned two additional diplomas in guidance and psychology, enrolled in theology courses at Catholic Distance University, and became an effective mentor for younger prisoners in a Fast Track program. He tutored young prisoners in mathematics as they pursued high school equivalency, and, as I have written above, he had a celebrated conversion to the Catholic faith, a story captured by Felix Carroll in his famous book, Loved, Lost, Found.

Pornchai became a master craftsman in woodworking, and taught his skill to other prisoners. One of his model ships is on display in a maritime museum in Belgium. His conversion story spread across the globe. After taking part in a number of Catholic retreat programs sponsored by Father Michael Gaitley and the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, Pornchai was honored as a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. So was I, but only because I was standing next to him.

One of the most beautiful pieces of writing that has graced this blog was not written by me, nor was it written for me. It was written for you. It was a post by Canadian writer Michael Brandon, a man I have never met, a man who silently followed the path of this parable for all these years. His presentation is brief, but unforgettable, and I will leave you with it. It is, “The Parable of the Prisoner.”

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Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Book: Man’s Search for Meaning

Book: Loved, Lost, Found

The Parable of the Prisoner

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: On September 10, Pornchai will mark his 48th birthday. It is his first birthday in freedom. In 2020 on that date he was just beginning a grueling five months in ICE detention awaiting deportation. For the previous 29 years he was in prison. For the four years before that he was a homeless teenager having fled from a living nightmare.

I asked him what he would like for his birthday, and this was his response:

“I have never seen the ocean. I would like to go to the Gulf of Thailand and visit my cousin who was eight years old when I was eleven and last saw him. He is now an officer in the Thai Navy.”

Please visit our “SPECIAL EVENTS” page, and our BTSW Library category for posts about Pornchai.