Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe, Patron Saints behind Fr Gordon MacRae’s blog, have an obscure thread of connection that magnifies witness, sacrifice, and fatherhood.

September 23, 2020 — Updated September 23, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

The months of August through October have always produced some special content for Beyond These Stone Walls. That three-month period in the Catholic calendar contains the feast days of all the prominent saints at work here. These include Saint Maximilian Kolbe (August 14), Saint Padre Pio (September 23), Saint Michael the Archangel (September 29), Saint Therese of Lisieux (October 1), and the Guardian Angels (October 2). Interspersed among them, seemingly framing them, are several observances of Marian feasts giving her a strong presence in their lives and our lives here at this blog.

Padre Pio and I share an important, but ominous date. He passed from this life on September 23, 1968. I passed from my life in freedom on September 23, 1994. The day this is posted, I mark 32 years of imprisonment after refusing a plea deal lie to serve only one year.

I have written twelve posts about Saint Padre Pio over the life of this blog, which began in 2009. There came a point at which there was simply nothing more to write about this great saint except for the impact he has had on our lives, which has been immense. My friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, developed a powerful devotion to Saint Maximilian Kolbe, an identity even, because of me. In turn, I developed a powerful devotion to Saint Padre Pio, an identity even, because of Pornchai and the mystery of how his Godfather met and was blessed by Padre Pio. That story is told herein.

When I first wrote this post in 2020, it was just days after Pornchai was taken away for ICE detention to await deportation to Thailand. I was grasping for hope from Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio, and they both came through for us, but not in any way we might have expected. That story began on September 8, 2020, at 5 AM.

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There was an eerie sense about us as Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I walked around the concrete prison yard at 0500 on September 8, 2020, the Feast of the Nativity of Mary. There was not yet any sign of the dawn, nor was there any moon in the sky. If there were stars, we were blinded to them by the blazing prison lights reflected from the high walls that surrounded us. I asked Pornchai to take a long last look at these walls, for he was about to enter the final stretch of his long road to freedom.

Just then, a sliver of bright light emerged above the building where we had lived in a 60-square-foot cell for the last three of our many years in prison — 28 then for Pornchai and 26 for me at that time, and counting. We stood still to watch as the bright half-moon emerged above the walls. I told Pornchai that he will gaze upon the same moon in Thailand that I will see from this very spot. There was a long silence as he considered this, and then it was followed by tears. I had been putting a brave face on things up to this point, but I could no longer contain it.

It is difficult for men to talk and sob at the same time. I do not suggest that women cry more than men. Perhaps men do not cry enough. It is just that there was so much to say, and so I choked back the tears until another time. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, then you understand the gravity of what was transpiring that morning. It was expressed best by Pornchai himself in a guest post he wrote just after his arrival in Thailand: “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.” We will link to it again at the end of this post.

Soon after, we had to end that walk. After fifteen years sharing and building faith, conversion, and redemption in a tiny prison cell, Pornchai was taken away, and we will never see each other again in this life.

Backing up a little, it was Pornchai who brought up the most urgent and necessary part of our conversation that morning. It goes back to one of the first conversations we ever had about Pornchai’s faith experience. It was back in 2006 just before we were moved into the same cell. He described this in his post. He walked into my cell, saw an image of St. Maximilian Kolbe on the mirror, and asked, “Is this you?” He described that as one of the most important questions of his life.

Fifteen years later, as we walked in the pre-dawn light of a half moon, he said through tears, “Now I have the answer. You have saved me, but no one is saving you.” We talked a lot about our patron saints, of the mystery of how they came into our lives, and of what their witness means for us. Maximilian went to prison because he was writing the truth. I went to prison on trumped up charges, and have been writing the truth ever since. Padre Pio bore the wounds of the Crucified Christ for fifty years, while also suffering under the assaults on his reputation and good name and priesthood. Much of his suffering came from within the Church. I told Pornchai that he is a very important and powerful witness to the truth we have lived and written about. I said that no matter what happens to me now, “you are a living witness to the truth that no past is lived at the expense of the present, that no wounds can prevent a soul in search of God from emerging above prison walls.”

The Wounds of Padre Pio

I had been aware of Padre Pio for most of my life. As a young Capuchin, the Order that also formed Padre Pio, I earned a degree in psychology in the 1970s.  I am ashamed to write today that I once denounced Padre Pio’s wounds as psychosomatic. I hope he forgives me for my ignorance back when I knew everything. I knew a lot about Padre Pio back then, but I did not know Padre Pio. I know him now. Pornchai knows him as well. He came to us from Beyond These Stone Walls  in a personal and powerful way.

I had already been in prison on false witness for four years back in 1998. I had, for all of those years, been living in a horrible situation with eight men in each prison cell designed for only four. To “honor” the reverence of Catholics for Padre Pio then — six years before he was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 2002 — The New York Times ran an article alleging that Padre Pio was the subject of twelve Vatican investigations in his lifetime. The unjust and inflammatory article alleged that “Padre Pio had sex with female penitents twice a week.” Even for The New York Times, it was an egregious lie for which the “Paper of Record” broke the record. The lie originated from another priest who after his damage was wrought, admitted to the lie and to the envy that caused it.

This was the first inkling I ever had that Padre Pio suffered more than the visible wounds of Christ. He also suffered wounds upon his name, his integrity, his priesthood. Here we were, thirty years to the day since his death, and the “Scandal Sheet of Record” was still repeating an unfounded story for the sole purpose of deflating the faith of Catholics who reverenced him. It resonated with me in a most personal way.

Seven years passed. In April 2005, a newspaper of integrity, The Wall Street Journal, published a two-part account of false witness, wrongful prosecution, and public hysteria entitled “A Priest’s Story” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz. It was her first of several articles about the case against me. These articles were read all over the world. As a result of them, Bill Donohue at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights asked me to submit an article about my own awareness of false witness. My article was published in the November 2005 issue of Catalyst under the title “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud.”

I was surprised to see then that I shared the cover of that issue of Catalyst with a story about how Padre Pio was similarly defamed throughout his life and even after his death. None of it was ever substantiated nor was it supported by evidence in any form. On the contrary, many witnesses had testified in Vatican investigations that the detractors were themselves discredited beyond any doubt. That did not stop The New York Times  from slander.

The Echoes of a Special Blessing

Among the readers of the WSJ  series on my trial’s perversion of justice was Pierre Matthews, a Belgian with dual American citizenship who at the time was living in Chicago. The articles were his first realization — as they were for many — that the whole truth about the nature of Catholic scandal had not been told by the mainstream media. Pierre wrote to me months later. On a return trip from Belgium, he diverted his itinerary for a stop in Boston from where he drove up to Concord, NH to visit me in prison.

Later in 2005, Pornchai Moontri — who had spent the previous seven years in solitary confinement in Maine — was transferred to the Concord, NH prison where we met. In 2006 we became friends. In 2007 we became roommates. In 2010, on Divine Mercy Sunday, Pornchai renounced his troubled past to become Catholic. Later, in September 2010, I wrote “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata: Sanctity on Trial.”

That post told an amazing story. In an earlier visit with Pierre Matthews, I told him about Pornchai, about how our long and winding roads converged, and about Pornchai’s decision to renounce his past and become Catholic. Pierre told me a remarkable story. He said that when he was growing up in Belgium, his father sent him to a boarding school. In the 1950s, at just about the time I was born, Pierre’s school sponsored a trip to Italy. Pierre’s father wrote to him saying that his trip would take him near a place called San Giovanni Rotondo where there was a very famous priest and mystic who bears the wounds of Christ.

Pierre’s father instructed his skeptical 16-year-old son to take a train to San Giovanni Rotondo and ask to see Padre Pio. Being 16, Pierre did not want to go. But his father was insistent, so Pierre read his father’s account of Padre Pio’s mystical fame, which was at the time being suppressed by the Church, but was rising up globally from the sensus fidelium — the sense of the faithful across the world.

When Pierre Matthews learned that Pornchai was to become Catholic, he sent me a registered letter asking — no, insisting — that he be permitted to become Pornchai’s Godfather. Pierre asked me to submit a special request to the prison warden asking approval for Pierre to fly over from Belgium to visit both of us. In all the years that I had been here, such a thing was never allowed. No visitor can visit two prisoners at the same time. So I submitted the request with the intent of sending the denial back to Pierre. To my shock and awe, the request came back with a single word: “approved.”

During the special visit, Pierre told us that he indeed took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo at age 16 some 55 years earlier. He said he rang the monastery doorbell and asked a friar if he could see Padre Pio. “Impossible” came the curt reply. Pierre explained that his father had sent him from Belgium, so the friar invited him inside to be given a prayer card to show his father that he had been there. When Pierre stepped inside to be given the card, a strange man in a Capuchin habit, with hands heavily bandaged, was just then walking down a flight of stairs into the foyer. His eyes were fixed upon Pierre. Padre Pio approached Pierre, placed his bandaged hands upon his head, and blessed him.

Visiting us 55 years later, Pierre said he now knew this blessing was meant for us. He spoke of the long, winding journey from faith that led to his learning about me, then about Pornchai, and then, when Beyond These Stone Walls  began in 2009, it was what drew Pierre back to faith. It was then, in 2010, that I added Saint Padre Pio as one of the Patron Saints of this blog.  Through Pornchai’s Godfather, Padre Pio shared his wounds with us and became a witness for the defense against our own wounds. It was Pierre who first noted that I was condemned to prison on September 23, 1994, the feast day of Saint Padre Pio and the date he died in 1968.

Among the many letters of Padre Pio to the thousands of pilgrims and penitents who wrote to him was one dated in the year before he died on September 23, 1968. In that letter, Padre Pio advised a suffering soul to enroll in the Knights at the Foot of the Cross, a spiritual mission founded by Father Maximilian Kolbe for the offering of life’s wounds as a share in the suffering of Christ. I was amazed to read that Padre Pio had such an awareness of our other patron saint two decades before Saint Maximilian was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. Pornchai and I are both members of the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

Our beloved friend Pierre, Pornchai’s Godfather, passed from this life in Belgium on July 7, 2020. Pornchai and I were blessed to be able to talk with him by telephone in the weeks before his death. He never took redemption for granted, but I know with the certainty of faith that he and Padre Pio have since renewed their bond. In the picture atop this section of my post, Pierre returned to San Giovanni Rotondo in the last year of his life to present at the tomb of Saint Padre Pio his prayers for intercession and Blessing for us.

So Pornchai, my son, if you are reading this in Thailand then you must know that there is much more to our life’s wounds than the prison walls that surrounded us and surround me still. To be free of them is not just a matter of the body, but of the heart and soul. So be free! Be free enough to convey to others the great gifts imparted to us by these patron saints. You will no longer have a guest post at Beyond These Stone Walls. You will now be my partner in mission, writing from Divine Mercy Thailand about how God is inspiring hearts and souls through the transfiguration of your wounds.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you, dear readers, for sharing in this painful but remarkable faith journey. Please, pray for us as we do for you. You will learn a lot about the life of Padre Pio in these concluding posts that I have selected from the twelve I have written over the years (with one written by Pierre’s Godson, Pornchai):

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial

“I Am a Mystery to Myself.” The Last Days of Padre Pio

Pray, Hope and Don’t Worry: This Is Padre Pio’s Key to God’s Heart

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HOW TO HELP US: For nearly 20 years I have been committed to assisting Pornchai Moontri in navigating the trials and losses of his life, none of which were of his own making. I have done all in my power to promote an honest and thorough investigation into the unresolved, “cold-case” homicide of Pornchai’s mother, Wannee.

For six years since his arrival in Thailand, Max has been struggling in a nation in economic and political chaos. Promising developments are currently underway. Max will now be living in the house his mother set out to build 26 years ago. It is the house that cost her her life. Pornchai has the skills and will soon have the tools to finish it. He also has a solid plan to start a new agricultural business in Northern Thailand so he will not be dependent on the state of the local economy. This will be dependent upon my support, and I hope that can transition into “our” support.

Our BTSW Editor, Dilia E. Rodriguez, has established an account for my expenses in the support of this blog at Navy Federal Credit Union. Dilia also has the ability for direct funds transfers to assist both Pornchai Moontri in his new endeavor and Father John Hung Le, SVD, and his Refugee Assistance Project, which aids hundreds of Vietnamese refugee families in Thailand with basic food support.

If you wish to assist me, and you do so by check, make it out to Dilia E. Rodriguez and send it with your instructions to

Beyond These Stone Walls
PO Box 81
Fayetteville, NY 13066-0081

A few weeks ago, I received a hopeful message from Father John, who is awaiting a missionary visa to return to Thailand. It will take three to four months. The cost of the visa will be 15,000 Thai Baht, which translates to $500 USD. I have already provided it with the help from some readers.

I am deeply grateful for the goodness and generosity of our readers who have already responded to this plea. May the Lord Bless you a thousand-fold.

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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.”