New Hampshire Dark Justice Is Illuminated Down Under

In early 2024, several Civil Rights venues hosted new, hopeful developments in a 30-year-old lingering injustice: the once hopeless 1994 trial of a Catholic priest.

February 7, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 and sentenced to 67 years in a New Hampshire prison. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration. ... We enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe Australia would blackball the discussion of a case such as Fr MacRae’s.”

— Cardinal George Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p.58

+ + +

It’s hard to know when to give up on justice. It’s even harder to know when to give up on hope. I have been at the brink of both several times over the last three decades, but I have not yet taken the plunge. I am not sure what that would feel like. Prison is bad enough without adding hopelessness to the mix. Other prisoners watch me for signs of hopelessness. If I descend into it, it will only justify their caving into it as well.

As my 30th year of unjust imprisonment began on September 23, 2023, my friend Pornchai Moontri wrote a post for this blog from Thailand. It is emotionally staggering to read, but it is also filled with hope — the sort of hope for which “the bigger picture” provides much-needed context. Only someone who has suffered and survived a great deal in life, as Pornchai has, could give both suffering and hope equal measure. l was not able to see his post, but our editor read it to me while preparing it for publication. She paused four times to cry.

Not all tears are tears of sorrow. Pornchai’s article deserves an award, but there isn’t one that measures what he and I, and Maximilian Kolbe, and Padre Pio have all been through together and triumphantly. Let that last word sink in. None of us appears on the surface to be triumphant in anything by any measure of this world, but in the Kingdom of Heaven, our enduring hope is radiant.

Its triumph is not just in our endurance, or in any obvious outcome. It is in the grace-filled ability to suffer with faith, hope, and love intact — the greatest of gifts as defined by Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 13:13). If you missed Pornchai’s post, you shouldn’t, but bring a tissue. Bring four of them. Nothing in my experience of the last thirty years makes any sense without the context provided by Pornchai’s heart rending message from our New Evangelization. His post is, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.” We will add a link to it at the end of this post.

In the early dawn of this 30th year in prison, there are some recent developments that I now need to write about, but first I must ask for your forgiveness. During the months between September 2023 and now, several of our readers extended kindness and generosity to me and this humble blog by helping with a number of expenses. I have been unable to respond with gratitude in a timely manner. I am sorry. My excuse is just more suffering. Like many in this overcrowded place I came down with a respiratory virus that lasted two months. A weekly post was all the writing that I could handle.

By December, the virus morphed into vertigo so even walking upright from point A to point B became a challenge. Then it became a month-long migraine with chronic double vision. It may even have been a minor stroke. I hope my posts of the last few months did not mirror the struggle I was in to write them. I now await an “outside” consult with an ophthalmologist.

I have begun to feel a little better but the vision problem remains a challenge, though with more recent minor improvements. So besides my BTSW posts, I have managed only a few letters in the last few months. Forgive me, please. We need your help but I am sorrowful to accept it in silence. A family member who had for the last 30 years been managing a small expense account for me with power of attorney has also had some health issues and I have had to relieve him of that burden. Please note at both our “Contact and Support” and “Special Events” pages, that we now have a new address for assistance to me and this blog. The address is: “Fr. Gordon MacRae, P.O. Box 81, Fayetteville, NY 13066-0081.”

You are raised up in thanksgiving before the Lord at every Sunday Mass in my prison cell. If you ever decide to help again in the wake of my only silent gratitude, it would help further if you always include an email address so I may properly acknowledge your assistance.

The Bill of Rights Obliterated

I owe a debt of gratitude to Ryan A. MacDonald, an accomplished columnist who has taken up my cause repeatedly over these many years. His latest articles appeared here over the last few weeks. In “Detective James McLaughlin and the Police Misconduct List” Ryan accomplished something that no other writer has taken on. He exposed concrete examples of how judicial secrecy in New Hampshire has further eroded the rights of citizens to seek justice.

Former Keene, New Hampshire Detective James McLaughlin is now retired, but at this writing he continues in retirement to investigate cases for the local Cheshire County (NH) prosecutor. As many readers now know, he has been exposed for a pattern of corruption and misconduct in his investigations when his name appeared on a once-secret list of officers with credibility issues. He also choreographed a fraudulent case against me that rode the waves to capitalize on Catholic scandal over the last thirty years.

Detective McLaughlin’s name appeared on that secret list for an unspecific 1985 incident of “Falsification of Records.” In some reports it has been described as “Falsification of Evidence,” something that I have accused him of since my own charges first arose over 30 years ago. Getting to the bottom of this is a test of endurance in a legal system that shelters police misconduct through secret and anonymous hearings.

Under a U.S. Supreme Court precedent (“Brady v. Maryland”), prosecutors are required to inform defendants and their defense counsel when an investigating detective is on the list for misconduct. In my case and many others, they did not do so. This discovery constitutes new evidence that can reopen a case. Famed civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate addressed this in a 2022 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.”

As pointed out in these pages in recent weeks, however, judges hearing former Detective McLaughlin’s petition to remove his name from that list have allowed these hearings to be presented in secret proceedings that are rendered anonymous through the use of “John Doe” in place of an offending officer’s name. Citizens are prevented from offering any further evidence because of this judicial secrecy. On January 24, Ryan MacDonald published another bombshell: “In New Hampshire Courts, Police Corruption Is Judged in Secret.”

His article lays out additional evidence under New Hampshire law for a multitude of other alleged incidents of official misconduct on the part of this officer. They include perjury, witness tampering, attempted bribery, tampering with evidence, and additional incidents of falsification of records. All of this has been shielded under color of law by the practice of sealing police personnel files and hearing challenges to the police misconduct list in secret. Ryan has also cited articles published at InDepthNH.org:

“The records obtained by InDepthNH.org indicate there are more internal affairs reports dealing with McLaughlin which the city has not so far provided. The city has also not provided an explanation for the omission of the other reports.”

The reporter cites a 1988 letter in McLaughlin’s file from then Keene, NH Police Chief Thomas Powers:

“I reviewed your personnel file and several internal affairs investigations. While you have accumulated a number of praises in your career, a disproportionate number of serious accusations and violations have significantly detracted from your record, including a one-week suspension.”

First in the Nation

By coincidence (or probably not) I am writing this post on January 23, 2024, the day that the State of New Hampshire hosts its much-celebrated, but now endangered, First-in-the-Nation presidential primary election. In anticipation of this event, Kentucky attorney Frank Friday penned a superb and provocative article for American Thinker entitled “Our Corrupt FBI : New Hampshire Edition.” It begins ...

“This Tuesday, New Hampshire will hold its quadrennial first-in-the-nation primary. I am sorry to say, I have come to know something of the seamier side of this small state, writing these past years about a great legal injustice that has occurred up there. This is something most Granite Staters don’t like to think about: the Fr. Gordon MacRae frame-up.

“Thanks to the state’s tiny, inbred legal and law enforcement community, the matter was kept quiet for years. But the truth is inevitably coming out especially regarding the ‘hero-detective’ who doesn’t look so good now.

“One of my New Hampshire friends who writes about this has even found a small army of New Hampshire lawyers, police and politicos making a nice living off spurious sex abuse allegations. The local FBI office, no surprise, may even be connected. It’s worth reading the whole thing. You will be appalled.”

— “Our Corrupt FBI : New Hampshire Edition,” AmericanThinker, January 20, 2024

To my great admiration, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights emailed the above article to its entire global network of members. It links in the final paragraph to a previous post here at Beyond These Stone Walls by Los Angeles documentary researcher Claire Best. Mr. Friday is right. You will be appalled! The link goes to, “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

And because of the American Thinker article, and the decision of the Catholic League to promote it, that link above surpassed almost all other posts in traffic so far this year. It is just the sort of thing that needs to happen. History has shown that nothing stifles Civil Rights more than a silent Coverup.

Wrongful Convictions Report — Down Under

While all the above was going on in recent weeks, I wrote a painfully difficult article about new developments in the case of the late Cardinal George Pell for whom I also have great respect and admiration. I do not think there has been a Church figure in modern times so unjustly maligned. My December 10, 2023 post was, “The Trial of Cardinal Becciu, the Betrayal of Cardinal Pell.”

An unintended effect was that it caught the attention of a site in Australia that I did not even know existed. Within a week of posting the above link, the site editor, Australian writer Andrew L. Urban, did a deep dive into my own situation and published two outstanding articles there:

“Sexual Abuse or Justice Abused?”

“False allegations, a corrupt detective, flawed judicial decisions ... no wonder Father Gordon MacRae’s life has been ruined, sentenced to a 67-year jail term, after refusing a one-year plea deal wishing to maintain his innocence.”

And...

“The Back Alley of Justice: Fr Gordon MacRae’s Wrongful Conviction”

“Malevolent shenanigans behind the scenes in the Fr Gordon MacRae case, from withholding evidence to witness tampering ... It seems justice took a holiday — and hasn’t returned. Fr Gordon, now 70, has been in prison for men in Concord, USA since he was 41.”

The above two articles are the result of exceptional investigative reporting by Andrew Urban who also published an extended excerpt from one of my own recent posts on Australia’s own Cardinal Pell marking the first anniversary of his death on January 10. Andrew Urban entitled it, the “Week of Pell’s Resurrection.”

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post which casts some needed light on a story otherwise kept in darkness. You will demonstrate to the above writers the importance of this story by sharing it. You may also like these related posts cited herein:

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

Our Corrupt FBI : New Hampshire Edition by Frank Friday, Esq.

New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case by Claire Best

Detective James McLaughlin and the Police Misconduct List by Ryan A. MacDonald

In New Hampshire Courts, Police Corruption Is Judged in Secret by Ryan A. MacDonald

Former Judge Arthur Brennan arrested at a Washington, DC protest in 2011.

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.”

Christmas in the Land of Nod, East of Eden

In the Book of Genesis, Cain was banished to wander for his crime in the Land of Nod, East of Eden. The Star of Bethlehem was the only way back to a State of Grace.

Christmas by Fr. Gordon MacRae

At Thanksgiving this year, we recommended a post entitled “The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope.” It was more of a history lesson than a typical blog post, but it got a lot of notice. It is said that history is written by the victors, not the vanquished, so my take on Thanksgiving was unusual. It was told from the point of view of Squanto, the man I credit with the survival of the Puritan Pilgrims who — for better or worse — were the spiritual and cultural beginning of the first colonies in the New World.

Please indulge me in another brief foray into history — this time, Biblical history. I just can’t help myself. We can’t understand where we are until we discover where we’ve been. In the Genesis account of the fall of man, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden as both a punishment and a deterrent. They disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. So God cast them out of Eden “lest [Adam] put out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever.”

They were cast out of Eden to the east (Genesis 3:24). God then placed a Cherubim with a flaming sword to the east of Eden to bar Man’s return, and to guard the way to the Tree of Life. Whether this is history, metaphor, myth, or allegory matters not. The inspired Word of God in the Genesis account tells us something essential about ourselves in relationship with God.

A generation later, after the murder of his brother Abel, Cain too “went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16). The “land of Nod” has no other reference in Scripture. It represents no known geographical name or place. The name seems to derive from the Hebrew, “nad,” which means “to wander.” Cain himself described his fate in just that way: “from thy face I shall be hidden; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14).

The Aggadah — a collection of Rabbinic commentary, legend, and anecdotes accumulated over a thousand years — expanded on the Biblical account. The “mark of Cain” imposed by God was a pair of horns. According to the Aggadah legend, Cain’s great-grandson, Lamech, had poor eyesight and shot Cain with an arrow believing him to be a beast. There was a sense of “what goes around comes around” in the Aggadah version.

In Genesis, Cain’s descendant, Lamech, became sort of a counter-cultural anti-hero seen as the epitome of the moral degradation of blood revenge. Lamech killed a man for wounding him. “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Genesis 4:24). Cain’s murder of his brother, and his banishment East of Eden, set in motion a ripple effect of epic proportion.

I have long wondered if the banishment of Adam and Cain “east of Eden” is a divinely inspired metaphor for man’s fall from grace, a state of being, more than a place. Jumping ahead way ahead — the Magi of Matthew’s Gospel came to Christ from the east (Matthew 2:1). They “saw his star in the east” and followed it out of the east — out of what is now likely modern day Iran, a story I told in “Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear.”

I envision the Star of Bethlehem to be a sort of beacon leading the way out of the darkness of the east, the darkness of man’s past, out of the spiritual wanderlust set into motion by Adam and Cain. In the Tanakh translation of the Jewish Scripture — our “Old” Testament — Psalm 113:3 is translated, “From the east to the west the Name of the Lord will be praised.”

Family Values and Woke Politics

Some of the prisoners I see each day are aware that I write weekly for Beyond These Stone Walls. Those who had a recipe published in “Looking for Lunch in All the Wrong Places” invited their families to read that post. Several others asked to read a printed copy of “The True Story of Thanksgiving” and it’s been circulating here a bit. Just a few days ago, a prisoner I do not know asked me if the “Squanto story” is true. Squanto’s plight in my Thanksgiving account caused an interesting reaction, and seemed to inspire discussion about how to best cope with shattered dreams and hopes, with loss and the fall from grace, with life in the land of Nod. The prevailing thought has been that Squanto responded to his bitterness and loss with sacrifice. The irony of what Squanto did is not lost on prisoners.

Captured by a British ship and nearly sold into slavery — his life in ruins and everyone he loved destroyed — Squanto chose to come to the aid of the only people worse off than Squanto himself: the hapless pilgrims who stepped off the Mayflower in winter, 1620. Some prisoners conclude that they need to be more like Squanto. Many of the men around me have lives that spun out of control through drug addiction, poverty, selfishness, rage, or greed. A lot of people imagine that prisoners are just evil, brutal men incapable of considering anyone but themselves. The media’s portrayal of prisoners as brutal, manipulative and self-involved accurately describes only a very small minority.

Evil men do exist, and prisons everywhere contain them, but they are not typical of men in prison. Most men and women in prison simply got caught up in something, made mistakes — some very grave — but are no more evil than your friends and neighbors. Some would give anything to atone for their crimes, to take back the wrongs they have done. Some were victims before they were victimizers. Most are guilty of crimes, but some are not.

Many of the younger prisoners are just lost. There’s a clear correlation between their presence here and the systemic breakdown of family — especially fatherhood — in our culture. There is an alarming number of young prisoners here who have had either abusive fathers or none at all. There is a direct and demonstrable correlation between the breakdown of family and the marked increase in prisoners in our society. For the evidence for this, see the most-read post ever at Beyond These Stone Walls, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

Puritans and Empty Pews

Recently, the Pew Research Center published the results of a study that identified the most and least religious areas of the United States. The study based its conclusions on surveys with parameters such as professed belief in God, participation in worship, the importance of religion in daily lives, and the practice of personal prayer. Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas were the most religious states with mostly Southern states rounding out the top ten. In contrast, the six New England states were at the very bottom of the fifty states in religious identity and practice. It’s ironic that the Puritans settled New England in 1620 desiring to build a religiously based society free from Catholic influence. The Puritans wanted religion, but not a church. They wanted religion free of Sacraments and symbols, free of any magisterial teaching authority, a religion of the elect. Over 400 years later, the community they established has now been identified as the least religiously influenced region of the country.

In the Pew study, New Hampshire placed at the very bottom — 50th out of 50 states — with a population professing any sort of religious belief, practice, or a religiously informed value system. In inverse proportion to the influence of religion on its population, New Hampshire now leads the nation in the growth of its prison population in ratio to its citizen population. Almost predictably, it also currently leads the nation in drug overdose deaths among people ages 16 to 54.

In 1980, New Hampshire had 326 prisoners. By 2005, the prison population swelled to 2,500. Between 1980 and 2005, the New Hampshire state population grew 34 percent while its prison population grew nearly 600 percent in the same period, and without any commensurate increase in crime rate. Anyone who is not alarmed by this statistic doesn’t understand the relationship between religious values, family life, crime, and the abandonment of young people to wander east of Eden. Among young men now in the New Hampshire prison system, the recidivism rate is a staggering 57 percent.

There’s a compelling argument here for the preservation of family and the restoration of religion in the American public square. There are far better ways for our society to invest the billions of dollars it now sinks into new prisons. The population in the land of Nod east of Eden is growing fast.

Christmas Gifts

It’s not all gloom and doom. In New Hampshire, at least, there is an emphasis on programs and rehabilitation that present an avenue toward redemption. In the journey out of the east, there are some prisoners who stand out, and their journey is most clearly expressed in their art.

On the eastern end of the Concord prison complex is a workshop known as HobbyCraft. There, prisoner-volunteers make some 1,000 toys per year for the U.S. Marine Corp’s “Toys-for-Tots” program. Several prisoners gifted in woodworking take part in the Toys-for-Tots project each Christmas. They donate their time, their talent and their own materials to create high quality toys and other wood creations for this project.

Among the prisoner-artisans is Mike, a 55-year-old man who has been in prison for over thirty years. Mike has donated his prodigious skill in woodworking for the Toys-for-Tots program. Here are two of his most popular creations:

If there has ever been anyone in your life for whom you have lost hope for redemption, then take some time to read the story of Pornchai Moontri told in “Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.” Pornchai’s story is a great example of the connection between conversion to a life of faith and rehabilitation.

Before Pornchai left prison for Thailand in late 2020, he spent his time studying theology through a scholarship program at Catholic Distance University. His creations in the HobbyCraft center have become legendary. Pornchai has mastered the art of model shipbuilding, and was designated a Master Craftsman in basic woodworking. Here are some of his most popular creations:

Two of the magnificent ships he designed and built last year were donated after being featured at the annual Newport Arts Festival. One of Pornchai’s creations was a replica of the U.S.S. Constitution. He carved and fitted each of its over 600 parts, and spent some 2,000 hours on the design, construction and rigging.

One of the first edicts in the Puritan’s Charter for their settlement in New England was to prohibit any observance of Christmas. As these and other prisoners have demonstrated on their journey out of the east of Eden, Christmas became very real after their Advent of the heart.

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. December 8, the Solemnity of the Assumption honors the Immaculate Conception, and four days later on December 12 is a most important Feast Day for the Church of the Americas. Honor our Mother by reading and sharing,

A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe

You may also like these related posts linked in the post above:

The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope

Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear

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

The Toll of Decades in Prison on a Mind, Heart, and Soul

Pornchai Moontri was released after almost three decades in prison. A new development could also release Fr. Gordon MacRae, but what does freedom look like for them?

June 8, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Someone who is an old friend to both Pornchai Moontri and me posted a Facebook rant in 2021 that was printed and sent to me by an angry reader who saw it. Our friend was reacting to a cut in Covid pandemic relief services. Clearly, the last two years have posed challenges for many people. Our friend’s rant protested the budget cut while bemoaning all the “free services” that he believes had been afforded to prisoners: “Free food, free housing, clothing, health care, legal representation, and free education!” I understood his argument. It is one held by many people, but none of it is true.

Prisoners where I have been forced to live against my will for 28 years are required to hold a prison job. However most prisons have become so overcrowded that more than 50-percent of prisoners are in the category of “no job available.” Prison jobs here pay a base rate of $1.15 per day for four hours of daily work. Both Pornchai Moontri and I held relatively privileged positions in specialized jobs that required some skill. These full time positions required working a full day, five days per week. Pornchai was the Safety Trainer for the prison woodworking shop managed by the Recreation Department. I am the sole legal clerk in the prison law library, a position that every prison is required to have by law. Both jobs were salaried positions with a rate of pay at $43 per month.

Prisons are required to provide the most basic level of sustenance including food, housing, clothing, etc. Beyond that, most prisons — this one included — sell food, hygiene items, and clothing items to prisoners either directly or through a prison-approved vendor who manages these sales with a healthy kickback to the prison’s recreation fund budget. A pair of shoes costs about six weeks’ pay.

Because the prison food budget affords lots of carbohydrates but far less protein, most prisoners strive to supplement food intake through purchases from a commissary. Those who cannot afford food, or who do not have families to help them, contrive all sorts of means to assure that they have adequate food. There is a lot of exploitation. Some prisoners will purchase food, and then sell it at inflated rates to the hungry who then rack up debts that they sometimes cannot pay.

The main meal of the day here is between 3:30 and 4:00 PM. By policy, prisoners are allowed 10 minutes to eat. It seldom ever takes that long. Neither Pornchai nor I were ever well off here, but we could not turn away prisoners who asked for a package of ramen noodles to fend off hunger at night. We both bought and stored them just so those around us would not have to owe someone who wanted to exact a profit — or worse.

The same is true with coffee and postage stamps, neither of which are provided to prisoners. A four-ounce bag of generic instant coffee is $5.00. A four-ounce packet of chicken is $3.25. A book of ten postage stamps is more than three days’ pay. Over the years, Pornchai and I have loaned enough coffee — seldom if ever repaid — to keep Juan Valdez on his burro for decades to come because those earning one dollar per day cannot afford coffee.

Many other items are required, but acquired only through purchase at the commissary. This includes soap, shampoo, toothpaste and toothbrushes, deodorant, cough syrup, Tylenol, bandages, toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, and, during the pandemic, face masks. Those who can afford to do so also purchase multivitamins, Omega-3, Vitamin D3, and other essential supplements. There are over 260 food and hygiene items sold to prisoners in the commissary here and in most other prisons.

Some enterprising prisoners develop little side ventures such as a laundry service. The more artistic ones create and sell greeting cards. Several have a sneaker cleaning service. The costs do not end with food, clothing and postage. A visit to daily Sick Call at Health Services has a co-pay that for some is the equivalent of three days’ pay. Telephone calls must be prepaid and are charged by the minute.

Money Laundering

Union Supply Direct, a company that markets only to prisoners, has cornered the commissary market here and also has a mail order business for prisoner clothing, electronics, and other needs. The catalog sells just about all clothing items except the actual New Hampshire prisoner uniform which consists of dark green slacks and a matching long sleeve buttoned shirt. Prisoners here may request three sets every two years. However, what we receive is used clothing. Ironed-on patches have the prisoners’s name and number. Prisoners often turn the replacements back in if they are in worse shape than the ones we already had. The last set I received had four prior ironed-on labels under the one with my name. The last set of new clothing I received was in 1998. The last used replacement set that was in good enough condition to keep was in 2012.

Purchased clothing is at risk of being stolen and then resold to other prisoners. This has never happened to me or to Pornchai, but it has happened to some of the people around us. My current roommate does not want to lose the new towels and clothing he purchased so he never puts them in the prison laundry. Instead, he washes them himself in the bucket that I use for Mass. In our small cell, he hangs them on a removable shoestring clothes line and aims a fan at them. Some enterprising prisoners have set up a sideline for private laundry services. They will pick up newer clothing, wash and dry it, and return it folded, all for a bag of coffee or food. Union Supply sells a gray fleece jacket for $42.95, and just about everyone will pay the fee to have it washed because it is a hot item for theft and resale.

The Union Supply Catalog sells about 200 items including clothing, sheets, towels, hygiene items, electronics, televisions, etc. at seemingly inflated prices. A small flat screen Clear Tunes TV is $275. In the latest catalog, a 4-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste is $12.95. A poor quality Swintec typewriter doubled in price this year and is now $375.95.

This could go on and on. Every category that our friend’s Facebook rant described as free for prisoners was falsely stated. When you consider the ratio between a prisoner’s expenses and what he or she can earn, prisoners are typically the most impoverished citizens on the planet. I know that the common argument for seeing this as “okay” is that “prisoners put themselves in prison.” That is indeed true for some, perhaps even most, but I hope that readers know by now that it is by no means true for all.

The Seeds We Sow in Prison

Surely the most advanced society on Earth can come up with a better model for the management of criminality than the current prison system, which has a recidivism rate of 50-percent. As a culture, we cave to our worst instincts for instant vengeance by the establishment of laws that make an adequate criminal defense virtually impossible. I am not guilty of the crimes attributed to me and I am by no means the only one now saying that.

When I heard Judge Arthur Brennan intone the jury instructions at my trial, I knew then that I was doomed. This was a case without evidence. None whatsoever. Judge Brennan first instructed the jury to “disregard inconsistencies” in accuser Thomas Grover’s claims. Then he told them that under New Hampshire law, (RSA 632a-6) “no evidence or corroboration is necessary for a conviction” under this category of offense.

After dutifully disregarding all the inconsistencies, the jury convicted me in less that ninety minutes. You already know that after refusing three efforts to convince me to take a plea deal to serve a minimum of one year in prison, Judge Brennan sentenced me to a term of 67 years. Attorney James Higgins, speaking for my bishop and diocese at the time, wrote to me in prison: “To the extent that you are without funds for an appeal, contact the Public Defender’s Office.” I was sent to prison at age 41 in 1994. I will be 70 on my next birthday. I will be 108 when my sentence is completed. I was 29 when the fictitious crimes were claimed to have occurred.

My peers in priesthood and in life are preparing for retirement. In contrast, I have spent the last nearly three decades of my life earning and trying to live on $43 dollars per month. Some readers have helped over time, and both Pornchai and I have survived almost solely because of that. We have profound gratitude. This blog could not exist without such help. One of the tragedies of prison is that people here for decades leave with nothing — with no life built up and no buffer or support system upon which to build one.

For a priest in prison, whether guilty or innocent, survival after would depend on the willingness of his bishop to observe Canon Law and provide some basic infrastructure such as housing, health insurance, etc. In the neighboring Archdiocese of Boston, a 75-year-old priest coming out of prison was told to go find a homeless shelter. Over time in the abuse scandal, fear reigned and the observance of Canon Law has diminished. Some bishops simply discard priests deemed inconvenient, again whether guilty or innocent. My bishop has given no indication whatsoever that he would assist me in any way. He visited me briefly ten years ago, but he would not let me speak of any of this.

Back in January, 2022, a surprising development surfaced. A New Hampshire court ordered the Attorney General to make public a previously secret list of police officers whose investigations or testimony have been tainted and discredited by misconduct. It turns out that former NH Detective James McLaughlin is on that list as revealed in “Predator Po1ice: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell.”

He is on the list for a 1985 incident of “Falsification of Records and/or Evidence” which is exactly what I have claimed of him for three decades. I am now expected to hire legal counsel for a new appeal based on this newly discovered evidence. I have been frozen in place ever since then. Only time will tell whether and how this develops. Saint Paul wrote that three gifts abide, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love (1 Corinthians 13:13). But Hope is the most fragile.

A part of me does not dare to hope or to even move on this. The last such hope in 2013 met a dead end with a prosecutorial judge who refused to review new evidence or hear new witnesses. Justice from men is not always even or just. At almost 70, I feel closer to meeting God’s justice than that of anyone in New Hampshire. Shall I try or shall I simply wait? Stay tuned!

+ + +

Important Notes from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please do not understand this post as a plea for help, for many of you have already done just that. I offer profound thanks for your support, encouragement, and prayers for both me and Pornchai Moontri whom God has entrusted to my care.

An important sequel to this post will appear here next week. My heart was broken, as were many, by recent events in Uvalde, Texas. Twice in two weeks, a lost and deeply troubled and broken 18-year-old committed grave acts of terror in Buffalo, New York and then in Uvalde, Texas. My friend, Pornchai, was also 18 and broken when his offense was committed. Something essential has been lost in our culture and must be faced with bold courage. Pornchai and I both have some thoughts of hope about this that will be a part of our post next week. Meanwhile: please share this post, and please consider reading more through these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae by Catholic League President Bill Donohue

Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

The Measure By Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past

The New Hampshire State Prison exit gate.

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood

Pope Francis issued 2019 guidelines for preserving a right of defense for accused priests and limits on publishing their names. Many U.S. bishops just ignored them.

Editor’s Note: The following guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald is an important sequel to his previous post, In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.

+ + +

In the above-captioned article at These Stone Walls, I wrote about a decision of The Most Rev. Peter Libasci, Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, to publish a list of the names of priests “credibly” accused in that state over the past fifty years. At the time the list was published in August 2019, the Bishop and Diocese issued a press release citing ‘transparency” as the reason for publishing it.

The list contained the names of 73 accused priests. More than half are deceased. Only five of the 73 ever had a case for prosecution before any New Hampshire court. None of the claims were current. Most alleged misconduct from three to five decades ago. Virtually all were brought with a financial demand that resulted in a monetary settlement from the diocese.

Bishop Peter Libasci’s published list was generated, not by any semblance of due process, but rather by a one-sided grand jury investigation of the diocese launched in 2002. That investigation treated all claims in civil lawsuits and other demands for settlement as demonstrably true with no standard of evidence whatsoever.

Bishop Libasci’s press release revealed that the claims against all 73 priests were determined to be “credible.” This is a standard that the United States bishops adopted at their Dallas meeting in 2002. “Credible,” as the bishops are applying it, means only “possible.” If it could have happened, it’s credible.

A 2003 grand jury investigation of the Diocese was the source for the recently published list. In that investigation, none of the accused — the few who were still living, anyway — were permitted to appear to offer any defense. That is the nature of a grand jury investigation. It is a strictly prosecutorial affair that is supposed to determine whether indictments and trials should follow. None of the subjects on Bishop Libasci’s list were indicted after the 2003 grand jury report became public.

My article cited above was followed by a related and stunning article by Fr. Gordon MacRae, one of the priests whose name appears on the bishop’s list. His category was unique on the list. It was simply, “convicted.” It was published without nuance by a diocese whose previous bishop told others in secret that he knows Father MacRae to be innocent and unjustly imprisoned. “Transparency,” however, has its limits.

Father MacRae’s article is “A Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester.” Amazingly, from reports I have seen generated by These Stone Walls, the article was heavily read around the world, most notably in Washington D.C., at the Holy See, and throughout Rome. In New Hampshire, it was the most-read article of the year at These Stone Walls.

My article, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List,” focused on injustices behind the scenes in a decision of the Bishop and Diocese to publish that list anew. Father MacRae’s remarkable sequel contrasts the 2003 grand jury investigation of his Diocese with a similar 2018 investigation of a nationally known Concord, New Hampshire academy, St. Paul’s School, with historic ties to the Episcopal church. Fr. MacRae brought to light a judicial ruling that publishing these grand jury reports — and by extension the Bishop’s list of names — is actually forbidden under New Hampshire law.

Grave Injustice in the ‘Live Free or Die’ State

Father MacRae’s article revealed a grave injustice in the Diocese of Manchester and multiple other U.S. dioceses. Fifteen years after the Diocese and Attorney General signed a deal in secret to publish a grand jury report in 2003, New Hampshire Superior Court Judge Richard McNamara ruled that the report, and one involving a 2018 St Paul’s School grand jury investigation, cannot legally be published.

New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald pressed to allow publication of the St. Paul’s School report. He cited the 2003 Diocese of Manchester precedent in which a report and files were published — the source for the names on Bishop Libasci’s list.

Father MacRae revealed that in 2003, the current N.H. Attorney General was part of a legal team representing the Diocese when release of the report was agreed upon in secret. It was the Attorney General’s citing the precedent that triggered Judge McNamara’s 23-page Order dated August 12, 2019, ten days after Bishop Libasci published his list.

Given the various one-sided grand jury investigations of Catholic dioceses across the U.S., Judge McNamara’s Court Order should give Catholics pause. The judicial findings summarized below cast doubt on the U.S. bishops’ collective decisions to publish lists of names arising from grand jury investigations:

• The OAG [Office of the Attorney General] argues that a common law precedent for such a report does in fact exist because the Hillsborough County [NH] Superior Court [in 2003] authorized an agreement between the OAG and the Diocese of Manchester to waive the secrecy of a grand jury investigation …

• The Hillsborough County Superior Court endorsed the Diocese-OAG Agreement without explanation and without any written Order. This Court respectfully disagrees with the decision to approve the Diocese-OAG Agreement [in 2003].

• The Diocese-OAG Agreement fulfilled none of the traditional purposes of the common law grand jury.

• The Court cannot find that the use of grand jury materials and the breach of grand jury secrecy in order to prepare a report is a practice authorized by New Hampshire common law.

• Rather than investigation of crime, the report is a post hoc summary of information the grand jury considered, but did not indict on. It did not protect the privacy interests of those witnesses and subjects that were never charged with a crime by the grand jury.

• The deficiency of the Diocese-OAG Agreement is cast in bold relief by [a] December 2018 decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Pennsylvania has a statute that specifically authorizes investigative grand juries and investigative reports. However, as in most states, the statute contains statutory procedures to provide individuals with due process protections for their reputational rights … the petitioners were entitled to have a report published with redactions of their names in order to protect their right to reputation. [emphasis added]

• A grand jury is not an adversary hearing in which guilt or innocence is established. Rather, it is an ex parte investigation to determine whether a crime has been committed and whether criminal proceedings should be instituted against any person.

• Grand jury testimony can involve all sorts of false, damaging, and one-sided information and New Hampshire has no historical or legal basis for releasing such information.

• An allegation of wrongdoing or impropriety, based on half-truths, illegally seized evidence, or rumor, innuendo or hearsay may blight a person’s life indefinitely.

• Mark Twain famously said that a lie is half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. In an internet age, he might have added that the lie will forever outrun the truth as search engines become more efficient.

• Accordingly, the Court DENIES the OAG Motion to Produce and Disclose. The OAG may not produce any report that contains any material characterized as a “Grand Jury Report.”

[Source Order of Judge Richard B. McNamara In Re: Grand Jury No. 217-2018-CV-00382, August 12, 2019.]

Now Comes the Pope

The Court Order should have applied to the Bishop of Manchester as well. He took it upon himself to do what the law forbids the State to do: to prosecute and convict in the public square those who were not indicted, were not tried or convicted, but were merely accused. I find it a disturbing coincidence that Bishop Peter Libasci’s decision to publish a list of the names of 73 accused priests — the vast majority of whom are merely accused — took place just days before the Order by Judge McNamara was issued.

This is ironic, at best, and at worst highly suspect. Had the Order preceded the release of names, the priests involved — those still living, anyway — may have had legal standing to challenge it. But this all pales next to published guidelines of another authority the bishops should be heeding.

On November 12, 2019, Archbishop Christoph Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, addressed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C. His address emphasized that “The pastoral thrust of this pontificate must reach the American people.” The bishops can fulfill this, he said, with “tangible signs of their communion with the Holy Father.”

Among the “pastoral thrusts” of the pontificate of Pope Francis that might require communion with his bishops was a February 21, 2019 issuance of a set of guidelines that bishops should follow on how allegations of sexual abuse by priests are to be handled. The list included 21 points that Pope Francis asked the bishops to observe. Point Number 14 is as follows:

“The right to defense: the principle of natural and canon law of a presumption of innocence must also be safeguarded until the guilt of the accused is proven. Therefore, it is necessary to prevent the lists of the accused being published, even by dioceses, before the preliminary investigation and a definitive condemnation.”

— Guidelines of Pope Francis, February 19, 2019

Rev. Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino, Professor of Systematic Theology and a prolific author, has published what I consider to be a landmark article entitled “The Dark Side of the Dallas Charter (First Things, October 2, 2019). Father Guarino characterized the 2002 Dallas Charter — the operable document under which accused priests are removed from all ministry:

“The harried bishops, with their Dallas Charter of 2002… passed Draconian norms that come close to venturing beyond Catholic teaching. The American bishops decreed ‘zero tolerance’ for priests accused of sexual abuse, a norm that, as Cardinal Avery Dulles acknowledged in 2002, violates equitable treatment for priests. Dulles added, ‘Having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgment in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid making any judgments in these cases’”

Father Guarino’s article points out that Pope Francis has been reluctant to invoke the term “zero-tolerance.”  The Wall Street Journal  reported that of the twenty countries in the world with the largest Catholic populations, only the Bishops of the United States have invoked a policy of “zero tolerance.”

In 2000, the U.S. bishops issued a pastoral document critical of the American criminal justice system. The bishops rejected terms such as “zero tolerance” and “three-strikes” in the application of punishments in the criminal justice system. They urged lawmakers to focus on rehabilitation and restorative justice while imposing sentences.

But two years later, at Dallas in 2002, under the harsh glare of the news media and victim advocates such as S.N.A.P. (who were directly invited by the bishops) the U.S. bishops inflicted the same panic-driven one-size-fits-all policy on their priests that they asked the justice system NOT to inflict on all other U.S. citizens. Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote in rebuttal in 2004:

“The Church must protect the community from harm, but it must also protect the human rights of each individual who may face an accusation… Some of the measures adopted [at Dallas] went far beyond the protection of children… [Bishops] undermined the morale of their priests and inflicted a serious blow to the credibility of the Church as a mirror of justice.”

— Avery Cardinal Dulles, “The Rights of Accused Priests,” America 2004

The Dark Side of the Dallas Charter

As Father Gordon MacRae exposed in “A Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester,” the late Father Richard John Neuhaus interviewed an American prelate who was one of the unnamed principal architects of the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter. Father Neuhaus quoted him in a First Things  article: “It may be necessary for some innocent priests to suffer for the good of the Church.” That prelate, according to Father MacRae, was Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

As Father Guarino points out in “The Dark Side of the Dallas Charter,” a significant problem with the Bishops’ policy is that most accused priests have not actually been found guilty of abuse. Of the 73 priests, both living and deceased, on Bishop Peter Libasci’s published list, only five ever had due process in any court of law. Three of those were by plea deals, and one, as Bishop Libasci’s predecessor has acknowledged in secret, is wrongfully convicted.

For all the other names on the Diocese of Manchester list — and for the vast majority of the hundreds of American priests who have been removed from ministry, the allegations against them were only considered “credible,” meaning only that it is possible that they happened. If any other American citizens from any walk of life were subjected to such a standard before being shamed in the public square, libel and slander lawsuits would flood the courts.

Perhaps the greatest insult to Catholics in the pews is the statement of Bishop Libasci — and other bishops who have published lists of names of the accused — that this is done for the purpose of “transparency.” I have personally attempted to review the required canonical investigations of Father MacRae that a previous official of the Diocese of Manchester insisted were carried out. I was told that these investigations are confidential.

I have requested to see the list of settlements meted out to the accusers in his case which have been called into question by The Wall Street Journal  and other interested parties. I was told that these settlements are confidential.

Father MacRae himself requested of a previous bishop, the Most Rev. John McCormack, that he be permitted to see the canonical investigation that the bishop claimed was forwarded to the Holy See. Father MacRae was reportedly told that this, too, is confidential. He was later told by another official of the Diocese that no required canonical investigation ever took place. This was before MacRae learned from a New Hampshire attorney and a PBS producer that Bishop McCormack revealed, after requesting secrecy, that “I firmly believe Father MacRae is innocent and should not be in prison.”

“Zero Tolerance” is an insult to Catholic theology and to our priests who are disenfranchised from their priesthood, and from their civil rights as citizens, on the whim of a bishop after being accused.

“Transparency,” however, is an insult to all the rest of us who have waited under shrouds of duplicity for our bishops to reflect the mirror of justice that this world needs the Church to be.

+ + +

Editor’s Note: Please share this important post with the priests and Catholic laity you know. You are also invited to Subscribe to These Stone Walls  and to Follow on Facebook some inspiring related graphic presentations of these posts.

You may learn more on the story of Catholic priests falsely accused from these relevant articles:

• In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald

• The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence by Ryan A. MacDonald

• Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction by Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL

• The Trials of Father MacRae by Dorothy Rabinowitz, The Wall Street Journal

President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform

Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump, he brought about a sweeping bipartisan reform for the most alienated citizens of the free world: America’s prisoners.

History sometimes repeats itself in subtle ways. In 587 BC, the Kingdom of Judah fell to Babylonian invaders who destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and carried off the people of Judah to exile in Babylon. It is one of the mysteries of Sacred Scripture that, two centuries earlier, the Prophet Isaiah wrote about this, and actually named the person — Cyrus — who would show up two centuries later to fix it:

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed: To Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”

— Isaiah 45:1

Two hundred years after that prophecy was set down by Isaiah, a man named Cyrus united the Medes and the Persians to form the great Persian Empire. In 539 BC, fifty years after Babylonians captured Jerusalem, deported the Jews into exile, and destroyed the Temple, Cyrus, and his armies conquered Babylon.

For the Jews in exile, however, Cyrus turned out to be more of a liberator than a conqueror. Though he practiced no faith the Jews could recognize and lived with values deplorable to them, Cyrus carried out exactly what Isaiah had prophesied. He restored the Kingdom of Israel, rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple, and returned the Jews to their promised land. King Cyrus then published a charter of freedom declaring an end to slavery and oppression and the restoration of religious freedom.

The Prophet Isaiah certainly never envisioned anyone like Donald Trump, but there is a curious sort of parallel in his presidency. He is notorious for having lived with a lifestyle and value system that would be anathema to Evangelical Christians, and yet they have come to see him as a Cyrus-like protector of religious liberty.

Devout Catholics might find some of his value system embarrassing, but he has also embraced the right to life and is transforming the federal courts with pro-life judicial nominees who respect religious liberty, the most fundamental freedom in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. American Jews traditionally identify as Democrats, but many might be thinking of King Cyrus right about now in the wake of a stream of anti-semitism from two new Democratic members of Congress who resist correction. Also like King Cyrus, President Trump restored the American Embassy to Jerusalem, Israel’s traditional capitol for three thousand years.

For my part, I don’t know quite what to make of this president. As I write this, a family member sent me an email declaring, “Right now I am committed to despising Donald Trump and waiting for the day he is charged with treason.” My family is still reeling from a photo of me portraying him in “Assassins’ Deed: My Stage Debut as President Donald Trump.” They were horrified

The President’s First Step Act

Most people have heard of the First Step Act initiated by the Trump White House and signed into law after receiving wide bipartisan support. it is the most significant prison reform initiative in decades, but most people do not know that its title is actually an acronym. First Step = the “Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed, Safely Transitioning Every Person.”

This is a bold and very broad initiative that encompasses far more than I could fit into a single TSW post, but as a prisoner, reading the act brought about my own “Cyrus-like” moment. This president, who has been droning on about walls for three years, has set into motion a policy statement for federal prisons that exposes prison walls to some much-needed daylight. Some TSW readers have asked me if this could have an effect on my own imprisonment and over time this is a hopeful notion. For the present, however, the initiative only affects the Federal Bureau of Prisons just as the President’s pardons and commutations power is limited only to federal prisoners.

But this First Step Act is just that, a first step. States often, though sometimes slowly and sometimes begrudgingly, follow what has been adopted by the federal government, however. We can only hope that this president’s bold course of action has a trickle-down effect.

For the moment, the First Step Act is being talked about and implemented in several states, but not yet in the Live Free or Die State where I am in my 25th year of imprisonment. I do not doubt, however, that time will erode that resistance so let’s have a look at what the First Step Act has taken on.

This President has ordered the removal of what prisoners everywhere call “the box” on federal employment applications. Let’s hope this catches on. Mr. Trump has asked that employers in the private sector follow his lead on this. “The Box” is a check-off box on federal job applications that must be checked if a job applicant has ever been convicted of a felony. Even in the best job markets, like the present one, checking “the Box” means a dead end for all but the most menial employment for ex-prisoners.

No matter how long ago an offense had been committed, no matter how much education and rehabilitation the former prisoner has been invested in, no matter that his or her debt to society has been paid in full, checking “the Box” has too often meant chronic unemployment for former prisoners — and even worse, exploitation. Not checking it subjects ex-prisoners to charges of falsifying applications. Its removal is a giant step toward helping former prisoners remain free.

President Trump’s rhetoric on this has also been bold, and against the tide for both Republicans and Democrats. In demanding removal of “the Box” he has stated forcefully that any former prisoner who applies for a job is able to do so because he or she has paid in full a debt to society and their imprisonment has ended.

The First Step Act also funds and implements evidence-based rehabilitation programs to enable prisoners to regain their freedom and to remain free once a sentence is completed. The prejudice in our culture against former prisoners is akin to that against the rights of slaves that I wrote about in “Senator Susan Collins Stokes the Embers of Civil War.” It took a federal edict — Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — to begin a cascade of events and attitudinal adjustments toward meaningful reforms. “Lock ‘em up and throw away the key” does not reflect a free and enlightened society.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here!

In the current prison system in some states, rehabilitation and restorative justice are dead-ended by laws like New Hampshire’s “Truth in Sentencing.” When that law passed in the early 1980s, it required that a New Hampshire prisoner must serve every single day of his or her imposed prison sentence and nothing a prisoner could do would mitigate that.

The politicians who pushed such a law onto its citizens later justified it by saying that they expected judges to temper their sentences in accord with the new law, but that never happened. Prison became like the “Hotel California.” No one ever leaves, and those who do are so institutionalized by long sentences, and so unprepared for a return to society that they are set up for failure. All incentives for rehabilitation were destroyed, and prisons became mere warehouses of nothing more redemptive than endless punishment.

As a direct result of such laws — and the draconian prison sentences resulting from the Clinton Crime Bill of the 1990s — America’s prison population grew far beyond the capacity of its prisons. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. This nation imprisons more of its citizens than all 28 countries of the European Union combined.

In the 25 years from 1980 to 2005 in New Hampshire, for example, the State population grew just 34% while its prison population grew almost 600% with no commensurate increase in crime rate. This is entirely because of Truth in Sentencing, and the fact that it overcrowded its prisons with long sentences and no avenue or incentive to mitigate them. Currently, only two states — New Hampshire and Iowa — cling to their Truth in Sentencing laws. They also happen to be the two states at the earliest epicenter of every presidential election.

To try to fix this, New Hampshire passed measures like NH-RSA 651:20 that, on paper at least, provides a forum for prisoners to demonstrate their rehabilitation to the court and earn up to a one-third reduction in sentence. Such reductions, however, are rarely if ever granted by the courts. Judges want legislators to fix this while legislators blame judges for not using discretion — or worse, for abusing discretion — that the law affords them.

In the late 1990s, then NH State Representative Maxwell Sargent wrote in a legislative newsletter of his dismay at the attitude of one judge, Judge Arthur Brennan (who also happened to be the judge who presided over my trial and sentencing). Representative Sargent had been encouraging one young prisoner to work doggedly toward his own rehabilitation and release. Over a decade in prison, the man earned both Bachelor and Masters degrees at his own expense and jumped through every possible hoop to redeem himself. In the end, Judge Brennan dismissed his petition with a blithe, “I’m not at all impressed,” and denied his request for a sentence reduction. The message sent was, “Why bother trying?”

The Injustice of Extreme Prison Sentences

Among the many signs of hope that have followed on the heels of President Trump’s First Step Act has been an increasing clamor of voices to revisit the length of the prison sentences imposed on first-time offenders. One such voice is Colorado Judge Morris Hoffman whose commentary in The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 9, 2019) was entitled, “The Injustice of Extreme Prison Sentences.”

Judge Hoffman wrote of how mandatory minimum sentences required him to impose a 146-year prison term on a teenaged armed robber in 1995. The only person injured in the incident was the teenage robber himself who was shot in the foot. Still, his earliest possible parole date is 2065 at the age of 90. Judge Hoffman reflected on this a bit:

“Since I imposed that sentence 23 years ago, that DA has retired, my children have grown up and had their own children, and my black hair is turning gray. The world saw the mapping of the human genome and the rise of the internet. My teenage robber saw the inside of a prison, and has 48 more years to go.”

Judge Hoffman wrote that many people have celebrated the First Step Act, but warned that it does little to address the American epidemic of overly long prison sentences. Some of his statistics are an eye-opener. According to the Justice Policy Institute, the average length for a first-time offender in Canada is four months; in Finland it is 10 months, in Germany it is 12 months; and in “rugged, individualistic Australia” it is 36 months. The United States leads the Western world with an average length of prison sentence for a first-time offender at 63 months.

I should point out here that when I appeared before Judge Arthur Brennan for sentencing on September 23, 1994, I too was a “first-time offender” though I to this day insist that the offense for which I was sentenced never actually occurred at all. I was sentenced to 804 months, nearly 13 times the national average. I was privileged, however, to publish a comment on Judge Hoffman’s article at WSJ.com with the help of a friend. Here it is:

“It is a good and just thing that Judge Hoffman reflects so candidly on the rampant imposition of extreme prison sentences. Other factors, besides those he mentioned, are the injustices of the plea bargain system, the fact that former prosecutors are over-represented on the judges’ bench, and a profession-wide bias against allowing convicted persons to have a voice. I am perhaps an exception to the latter. I was sentenced in 1994 in the Live Free or Die State to serve 67 years in prison after three times refusing a plea deal, proffered in writing, to serve one year. I am now 65-years old in my 25th year in prison for a crime alleged to have occurred when I was 29, but that never actually occurred at all. Why else would someone decline a single year in prison and risk sixty-seven?”

Judge Morris Hoffman makes a critical distinction about the sentencing of offenders in his court. “We have a duty to punish wrongdoers,” he wrote, “but that duty comes with the obligation not to punish them more than they deserve. Much of our criminal justice system has lost that moral grounding and our use of prisons has become extreme.”

I must add a qualifying principle to that. It is not just the offense that is being punished, but also the offender, and that requires evaluation for factors that may mitigate a sentence. Refusing a one-year plea deal offer may be seen as a defendant having no remorse. It may also be the result of actual innocence, something that too many judges simply never consider.

A far more egregious example is that of Pornchai Moontri who has served 27 years in prison for a crime that he did commit. But today every objective observer of that story agrees that his offense at age 18 was the direct result of extreme conditions that were never evaluated. That memorable story was told in “Pornchai Moontri, Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

Pornchai has vastly demonstrated that he is no longer the abused and homeless teenager who committed a desperate act on March 21, 1992. He is to be deported upon completion of his sentence in two more years. His only hope for some relief from that sentence – as is mine – was a political solution. Maine’s Republican Governor Paul LePage is leaving office and had the ability to commute those last two years. In various articles, he has spoken of his concern for the homeless and abused, and for victims of domestic violence. He had no political risk whatsoever in evaluating this story, but he reportedly refused to even look.

The First Step Act is a step in the right direction, but only a step. Justice requires taking it out of the hands of politicians and placing it where it belongs — before judges who are permitted the discretion to do what they are supposed to do: judge.

---

Editor’s Note: Please share this important post, but don’t stop here. Learn more about prisons and the potential for restorative justice with these related posts from These Stone Walls:

The Shawshank Redemption and Its Real-World Revision

Prisons for Profit and Other Perversions of Justice

At Play in the Field of the Lord

Cry Freedom: A Prisoner Unlocks Doors from the Inside

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

Are committed fathers an endangered species in our culture? Fr. Gordon MacRae draws a troubling corollary between absent fathers and burgeoning prisons.

Wade Horn, Ph.D., President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, had an intriguing article entitled “Of Elephants and Men” in a recent issue of Fatherhood Today magazine. I found Dr. Horn’s story about young elephants to be simply fascinating, and you will too. It was sent to me by a reader who wanted to know if there is any connection between the absence of fathers and the shocking growth of the American prison population.

Some years ago, officials at the Kruger National Park and game reserve in South Africa were faced with a growing elephant problem. The population of African elephants, once endangered, had grown larger than the park could sustain. So measures had to be taken to thin the ranks. A plan was devised to relocate some of the elephants to other African game reserves. Being enormous creatures, elephants are not easily transported. So a special harness was created to air-lift the elephants and fly them out of the park using helicopters.

The helicopters were up to the task, but, as it turned out, the harness wasn’t. It could handle the juvenile and adult female elephants, but not the huge African bull elephants. A quick solution had to be found, so a decision was made to leave the much larger bulls at Kruger and relocate only some of the female elephants and juvenile males.

The problem was solved. The herd was thinned out, and all was well at Kruger National Park. Sometime later, however, a strange problem surfaced at South Africa’s other game reserve, Pilanesburg National Park, the younger elephants’ new home.

Rangers at Pilanesburg began finding the dead bodies of endangered white rhinoceros. At first, poachers were suspected, but the huge rhinos had not died of gunshot wounds, and their precious horns were left intact. The rhinos appeared to be killed violently, with deep puncture wounds. Not much in the wild can kill a rhino, so rangers set up hidden cameras throughout the park.

The result was shocking. The culprits turned out to be marauding bands of aggressive juvenile male elephants, the very elephants relocated from Kruger National Park a few years earlier. The young males were caught on camera chasing down the rhinos, knocking them over, and stomping and goring them to death with their tusks. The juvenile elephants were terrorizing other animals in the park as well. Such behavior was very rare among elephants. Something had gone terribly wrong.

Some of the park rangers settled on a theory. What had been missing from the relocated herd was the presence of the large dominant bulls that remained at Kruger. In natural circumstances, the adult bulls provide modeling behaviors for younger elephants, keeping them in line.

Juvenile male elephants, Dr. Horn pointed out, experience “musth,” a state of frenzy triggered by mating season and increases in testosterone. Normally, dominant bulls manage and contain the testosterone-induced frenzy in the younger males. Left without elephant modeling, the rangers theorized, the younger elephants were missing the civilizing influence of their elders as nature and pachyderm protocol intended.

To test the theory, the rangers constructed a bigger and stronger harness, then flew in some of the older bulls left behind at Kruger. Within weeks, the bizarre and violent behavior of the juvenile elephants stopped completely. The older bulls let them know that their behaviors were not elephant-like at all. In a short time, the younger elephants were following the older and more dominant bulls around while learning how to be elephants.

Marauding in Central Park

In his terrific article, “Of Elephants and Men,” Dr. Wade Horn went on to write of a story very similar to that of the elephants, though it happened not in Africa, but in New York’s Central Park. The story involved young men, not young elephants, but the details were eerily close. Groups of young men were caught on camera sexually harassing and robbing women and victimizing others in the park. Their herd mentality created a sort of frenzy that was both brazen and contagious. In broad daylight, they seemed to compete with each other, even laughing and mugging for the cameras as they assaulted and robbed passersby. It was not, in any sense of the term, the behavior of civilized men.

Appalled by these assaults, citizens demanded a stronger and more aggressive police presence. Dr. Horn asked a more probing question. “Where have all the fathers gone?” Simply increasing the presence of police everywhere a crime is possible might assuage some political pressure, but it does little to identify and solve the real social problem behind the brazen Central Park assaults. It was the very same problem that victimized rhinos in that park in Africa. The majority of the young men hanging around committing those crimes in Central Park grew up in homes without fathers present.

That is not an excuse. It is a social problem that has a direct correlation with their criminal behavior. They were not acting like men because their only experience of modeling the behaviors of men had been taught by their peers and not by their fathers. Those who did have fathers had absent fathers, clearly preoccupied with something other than being role models for their sons. Wherever those fathers were, they were not in Central Park.

Dr. Horn pointed out that simply replacing fathers with more police isn’t a solution. No matter how many police are hired and trained, they will quickly be outnumbered if they assume the task of both investigating crime and preventing crime. They will quickly be outnumbered because presently in our culture, two out of every five young men are raised in fatherless homes, and that disparity is growing faster as traditional family systems break down throughout the Western world.

Real men protect the vulnerable. They do not assault them. Growing up having learned that most basic tenet of manhood is the job of fathers, not the police. Dr. Horn cited a quote from a young Daniel Patrick Moynihan written some forty years ago:

“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Eastern Seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations for the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

When Prisons Replace Parents

It’s easy in the politically correct standards of today to dismiss such a quote as chauvinistic. But while we’re arguing that point, our society’s young men are being tossed away by the thousands into prison systems that swallow them up. Once in prison, this system is very hard to leave behind. The New Hampshire prison system just released a dismal report two weeks ago. Of 1,095 prisoners released in 2007, over 500 were back in prison by 2010. Clearly, the loss of freedom does not compensate for the loss of fathers in managing the behavior of young men.

There is very little that happens in the punishment model of prison life that teaches a better way to a young man who has broken the law. The proof of that is all around us, but — especially in an election year — getting anyone to take a good hard look inside a prison seems impossible. We live in a disposable culture, and when our youth are a problem, we simply do what we do best. We dispose of them, sometimes forever. Anyone who believes that punishment, and nothing but punishment, is an effective deterrent of criminal behavior in the young is left to explain why our grotesquely expensive prisons have a 50 percent recidivism rate.

As I have written before, the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. The U.S. has more young men in prison today than all of the leading 35 European countries combined. The ratio of prisoners to citizens in the U.S. is four times what it is in Israel, six times what it is in Canada and China, and thirteen times what it is in Japan. The only governments with higher per capita rates of prisoners are in Third World countries, and even they are only slightly higher.

For a nation struggling with its racial inequities, the prison system is a racial disaster. Currently, young men of African-American and Latino descent comprise 30 percent of our population, but 60 percent of our prison population. But prison isn’t itself an issue that falls conveniently along racial divides.

New Hampshire, where I have spent the last twenty-six years in prison, is one of the whitest states in the United States, and yet it is first in the nation not only in its Presidential Primary election, but in prison growth relative to population growth. Between 1980 and 2005, New Hampshire’s state population grew by 34 percent. In that same period, its prison population grew by a staggering 600 percent with no commensurate increase in crime rate.

In an election year, politicizing prisons is just counter-productive and nothing will ever really change. Albert R. Hunt of Bloomberg News had a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times (“A Country of Inmates,” November 20, 2011) in which he decried the election year politics of prisons.

“This issue [of prison growth] almost never comes up with Republican presidential candidates; one of the few exceptions was a debate in September when audiences cheered the notion of executions in Texas.”

This may be so, but it’s the very sort of political blaming that undermines real serious and objective study of our national prison problem. I am not a Republican or a Democrat, but in fairness I should point out that the recent Democratic governor of New Hampshire had but one plan for this State’s overcrowded and ever growing prison system: build a bigger prison somewhere. And as far as executions are concerned, the overwhelmingly Republican state Legislature in New Hampshire voted overwhelmingly to overturn the state’s death penalty ten years ago. Governor Jeanne Shaheen (now U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen), a Democrat, vetoed the repeal saying that this State “needs a death penalty.” (In 2020, the death penalty was finally rescinded in New Hampshire.)

More dismal still, New Hampshire is also first in the nation in deaths of young men between the ages of 16 and 34. This is largely attributed to opiates addiction and all the hopelessness it entails. Young men growing up in fatherless homes are exponentially more likely than any others to fall prey to addiction.

Eighty percent of the young men I have met in prison grew up in homes without fathers. The problem seems clear. When prisons and police replace fathers, chaos reigns, and promising young lives are sacrificed.

Before we close the door on Father’s Day this year, let’s revisit whether we’re prepared for the chaos of a fatherless America. “Fathers” and “Fatherhood” are concepts with 1,932 direct references in the Old and New Testaments. Without a doubt, fatherhood has long been on the mind of God.

+ + +

Don’t miss these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Pornchai Moontri: Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing

Please share this post!

Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — Edith Stein — are honored this week as martyrs of charity and sacrifice.

In a post some years ago I invited our readers to join my friend Pornchai Moontri and me in a personal Consecration to Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s dual movements: the Militia of the Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross. Our Consecration took place at Mass on the night of August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day after Saint Maximilian’s Feast Day. Visit the website of the Militia of the Immaculata for instructions for enrolling in the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

We’re very moved by the number of people who have pledged to join us in this Consecration. The invitation remains always open.

Consecration as members of Saint Maximilian’s M.I. or Knights at the Foot of the Cross does not mean I plan to take on any more suffering or that I will never again complain. It does not even mean that I accept with open arms whatever crosses I bear and embrace them.

A person who is unjustly imprisoned must do all in his power to reverse that plight just as a person with cancer must do everything possible to be restored to health. Consecration does not mean we will simply acquiesce to suffering and look for more. It means we embrace the suffering of Christ, and offer our own as a share in it. In the end, I know I cannot empty myself, as Christ did, but I can perhaps attain the attitude of “Simon of Cyrene: Compelled to Carry the Cross,” of which my own is but a splinter.

I have written in the past that history has a tendency to treat its events lightly. The centuries have made Saint Patrick, for example, a sort of whimsical figure. History has distorted the fact that he became the saint he is after great personal suffering. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, forced from his home and family, taken across the Irish Sea and forced into slavery.

The life and death of Saint Maximilian are still too recent to be subjected to the colored glasses through which we often view history and sainthood. As with nearly all the saints — and with some of us who simply struggle to believe — great suffering was imposed on Maximilian Kolbe and he responded in a way that revealed a Christ-centered rather than self-centered life. What happened to Father Maximilian Kolbe must not be removed from what the Germans would call his “sitz im leben,” the “setting in life” of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. As evil as they were, they were the forges in which Maximilian cast off self and took on the person of Christ.

Scene from the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust”

“And the Winner Is . . .”

Do you remember the television “mini-series” productions of the 1970s and 1980s? After the great success of bringing Alex Haley’s “Roots” to the screen, several other forays into history were aired in our living rooms. One of them was a superb and compelling series entitled “Holocaust” that debuted on NBC on April 16, 1978. It was a brilliant and powerful example of television’s potential.

“Holocaust” won several Emmy Awards for NBC in 1978 for outstanding Limited Series, Best Director (Marvin Chomsky), Best Screenplay (Gerald Green), Best Actor (Michael Moriarty), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and a number of Supporting Actor and other awards. As a historical narrative, however, “Holocaust” was deeply disturbing and shook an otherwise comfortable generation all too inclined to want to forget and move on. That was a complaint during the famous Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

Just two years after the Allied Invasion of Germany and Poland ended the war and exposed the Death Camps, writers complained that Americans had lost interest and were not reading about the Nuremberg Trials. The aftermath of war revealed the sheer evil of the Nazi Final Solution, and it was more than most of us could bear to look at — so many did not look.

As I wrote in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” there are some who would have you believe that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the 20th Century. Viewing “Holocaust” (the miniseries) would quickly shatter any such revisionist history. Its first episode was so graphic in its depiction of Nazi oppression, and caused me so much anguish, that I struggled with whether to watch the rest.

I was 25 years old when it first aired, and finishing senior year at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in New Hampshire. I was a double major in philosophy and psychology, and was in the middle of writing my psychology thesis on the relationship between trauma and depression when “Holocaust” kept me awake all night.

The morning after that first episode, I sought out a friend, an elderly Benedictine monk on campus who recommended the series to me. I thought he might tell me to turn my television off, but I was wrong. “This happened in my lifetime,” he said. “We cannot run from it. So don’t look away. Stare straight into its heart of darkness, and never forget what you see.”

He was right, and his words were eerily similar to those of biographer, George Weigel, who wrote of Pope John Paul II and his interest in Saint Maximilian Kolbe in Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999):

Maximilian Kolbe . . . was the ‘saint of the abyss’ — the man who looked into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.

— Witness to Hope, p. 447

That was what the Holocaust was: “the modern heart of darkness.” I have been a student of the Holocaust since, but I am no closer to understanding it than I was on that sleepless night in 1978. As I asked in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich”:

“How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?”

We have all been reading about the breakdown of faith in Europe, and about how decades-old scandals are now being used to justify the abandonment of Catholicism in European culture. This is not a new phenomenon. This madness engulfed Europe just eighty years ago, and before it was over, six million of our spiritual ancestors were deprived of liberty, and then life, for being Jews.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” exterminated fully two-thirds of the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe — and millions of others who either stood in his way or spoke the truth. Among those imprisoned and murdered were close to 12,000 Catholic priests and thousands more women religious and other Catholics. The determination to rid Europe of the Judeo-Christian faith did not begin with claims of sexual abuse, and this is not the first time such claims were used to further that agenda.

The Great Lie and Revealed Truth

This of all weeks keeps me riveted on the Holocaust.  It was in this week that two of my dearest spiritual friends were murdered a year apart at Auschwitz by that madman, Hitler, and his monstrous Third Reich.  Father Maximilian Kolbe traded his life for that of a fellow prisoner on August 14, 1941, and Edith Stein — who became Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — was dragged from a cattle train and murdered along with her sister, Rosa, immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

We must not forget this line from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Ch.10, 1925): “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In order for a lie to disseminate and prevail, the truth must be controlled. In 1933, the Third Reich imposed the “Editor’s Law” in Germany requiring that editors and publishers join the Third Reich’s Literary Chamber or cease publishing. In 1933 there were over 400 Catholic newspapers and magazines published in Germany. By 1935 there were none.

The Nazi law was imposed in each country invaded by the Reich. In Poland, Father Maximilian was one of many priests sent to prison for his continued writings, but time in prison did not teach him the lesson intended by the Nazis. He was imprisoned again, and he would not emerge alive from his second sentence at Auschwitz. He was not alone in this. Nearly 12,000 priests were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

“Come, Let Us Go For Our People.”

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family in Germany. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, l891. As a young woman, Edith broke her mother’s heart by abandoning her Jewish faith in adolescent rebellion. She was also brilliant, and it was difficult to win an argument with her using reason and logic. She was a master of both.

Edith received her doctorate in philosophy under the noted phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and taught at a German university when the Nazis came to power in 1933. During this time of upheaval, Edith converted to Catholicism after stumbling across the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. “This is the truth,” Edith declared after reading it through in one sleepless night. A few years after her conversion, Edith Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Germany taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Blessed by the Cross).

March 27, 1939 was Passion Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In response to a declaration of Adolf Hitler that the Jews would bring about their own extinction, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote a private note to her Carmelite superior. She offered herself in prayer as expiation against the Anti-Christ who had cast all of Europe into a spiritual stranglehold. In her letter to her superior, Sister Teresa offered herself as expiation for the Church, for the Jews, for her native Germany, and for world peace.

As the Nazi horror overtook Europe, Sister Teresa grew fearful that she was placing her entire convent at risk because of her Jewish roots. Edith was then assigned to a Carmelite Convent in Holland. Her sister, Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism, joined her there as a postulant.

Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.

A 2010 book by Paul Hamans — Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz — details the horror of that day. Hundreds of Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland in retaliation for the bishops’ open rebellion, and most were never seen again. This information stands in stark contrast to the often heard revisionist history that Pope Pius XII “collaborated” with the Nazis through his “silence.” He was credited by the chief rabbi of Rome, Eugenio Zolli, with having personally saved over 860,000 Jews and preventing untold numbers of deaths.

The last words heard from Sister Teresa as she was forced aboard a cattle car packed with victims were spoken to her sister, Rosa, “Come, let us go for our people.” On August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa emerged from the cramped human horror of that cattle train into the Auschwitz Death Camp to face The Sorting.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described The Sorting:

“How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukranian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And because I’m a writer and teacher, I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that.”

That August 9th, Edith Stein went no further into the depths of Auschwitz than The Sorting. Some SS officer glared at this brilliant 50-year-old nun in the tattered remains of her Carmelite habit, and declared that she was not fit for work. This woman who had worked every day of her life, who taught philosophy to Germany’s graduate students, who scrubbed convent floors each night, was determined to be “unfit for work” by a Nazi officer who knew it was a death sentence.

Edith and Rosa were taken directly to a cottage along with 113 others, packed in, the doors sealed, and they were gassed to death. Their remains, like those of Maximilian Kolbe a year earlier, went unceremoniously up in smoke to drift through the sky above Auschwitz. And Europe thinks it would be better off now without faith!

“Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simeon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib … The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness that is Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection.

“The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of everyone of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal.”

— Edith Stein/Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

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

As Father Dominic Menna, a senior priest at Saint Mary’s in Quincy, MA, was sent into exile, The Boston Globe’s role in the story of Catholic Scandal grew more transparent.

“I’m a true Catholic, and I think what these priests are doing is disgusting!” One day a few weeks ago, that piece of wisdom repeated every thirty minutes or so on New England Cable News, an around-the-clock news channel broadcast from Boston. I wonder how many people the reporter approached in front of Saint Mary’s Church in Quincy, Massachusetts before someone provided just the right sound bite to lead the rabid spectacle that keeps 24-hour news channels afloat.

The priest this hapless “true Catholic” deemed so disgusting is Father F. Dominic Menna, an exemplary priest who has been devoting his senior years in service to the people of God at Saint Mary’s. At the age of 80, Father Menna has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

There is indeed something disgusting in this account, but it likely is not Father Menna himself. He has never been accused before. Some of the news stories have not even bothered to mention that the claim just surfacing now for the first time is alleged to have occurred in 1959. No, I did not transpose any numbers. The sole accusation that just destroyed this 80-year-old priest’s good name is that he abused someone fifty-one years ago when he was 29 years old.

Kelly Lynch, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston, announced that Father Menna was placed on administrative leave, barred from offering the Sacraments, and ordered to pack up and leave the rectory where he had been spending his senior years in the company of other priests. These steps, we are told, are designed to protect children lest this 80-year-old priest — if indeed guilty — suddenly decides to repeat his misconduct every half century or so.

Ms. Lynch declined to reveal any further details citing, “the privacy of those involved.” That assurance of privacy is for everyone except Father Menna, of course, whose now tainted name was blasted throughout the New England news media last month. Among the details Kelly Lynch declines to reveal is the amount of any settlement demand for the claim.

Some of the fair-minded people who see through stories like this one often compare them with the 1692 Salem witch trials which took place just across Massachusetts Bay from Father Menna’s Quincy parish. The comparison falls short, however. No one in 1692 Salem ever had to defend against a claim of having bewitched a child fifty-one years earlier.

Archdiocesan spokesperson Kelly Lynch cited “the integrity of the investigation” as a reason not to comment further to The Boston Globe. Does some magical means exist in Boston to fairly and definitively investigate a fifty-one year old claim of child abuse? Is there truly some means by which the Archdiocese could deem such a claim credible or not?

Ms. Lynch should have chosen a word other than “integrity” to describe the “investigation” of Father Menna. Integrity is the one thing no one will find anywhere in this account — except perhaps in Father Menna himself if, by some special grace, he has not utterly lost all trust in the people of God he has served for over fifty years. 

Transparency at The Boston Globe

The June 3rd edition of The Boston Globe  buried a story on page A12 about the results of an eight-year investigation into the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Eight years ago, it was front page news all over the U.S. that the Los Angeles Archdiocese was being investigated for a conspiracy to cover-up sexual abuse claims against priests.

After eight years of investigation at taxpayer expense, California prosecutors reluctantly announced last month that they have found insufficient evidence to support the charges. That news story was so obviously buried in the back pages of The Boston Globe  that the agenda could not be more transparent. The story of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is front page news only when it accommodates the newspaper’s editorial bias. That much, at least, is clear.

But all transparency ends right there. The Globe article attributed the lack of evidence of a conspiracy by Catholic bishops to the investigation being “stymied by reluctant victims.” Now, that’s an interesting piece of news!

The obvious question it raises is whether these claimants were reluctant to speak BEFORE obtaining financial settlements in their claims against the Archdiocese. If they are reluctant witnesses now, then, at best, it may be because the true goal of some has long since been realized and there is nothing in it for them to keep talking. At worst, the silence of claimants in the conspiracy investigation could be interpreted as an effort to fend off pointed questions about their claims. Perhaps prosecutors were investigating the wrong people.

I have seen this sort of thing play out before. Last year, a New Hampshire contingency lawyer brought forward his fifth round of mediated settlement demands against the Diocese of Manchester. During that lawyer’s first round of mediated settlements in 2002 — in which 28 priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused in claims dating from the 1950s to the 1980s — the news media announced a $5.5 million settlement. The claimants’ lawyer was astonished that $5.5 million was handed over with no real effort at proof or corroboration sought by Diocesan representatives before they paid up and deemed the claims “credible.” The lawyer was quoted in the news media:

“During settlement negotiations, diocesan officials did not press for details such as dates and allegations for every claim. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

— Mark Hayward, “NH Diocese will pay $5 million to 62 victims,” New Hampshire Union Leader, Nov. 27, 2002

“He and his clients did not encounter resistance from the Diocese of Manchester in their six months of negotiations. Some victims made claims in the last month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days.”

— Albert McKeon, “Settlement reached in abuse claims,” Nashua Telegraph, Nov. 27, 2002

That lawyer’s contingency fee for the first of many rounds of mediated settlements was estimated to be in excess of $1.8 million. When the mediation concluded, the news media reported that at the attorney’s and his clients’ request, the diocese agreed not to disclose the claimants’ names or any details of their claims or the amounts they received in settlement. “No confidentiality was sought by the Diocese,” the lawyer declared.

In contrast, the names of the accused priests — many of whom were deceased and none of whom faced criminal charges — were repeatedly released and publicized throughout the news media. This process served one purpose: to invite new claimants against those same priests with assurances that their names would remain private and no real corroborating details would ever be elicited. It was clear that non-disclosure clauses were demanded by the contingency lawyer and his clients, though the diocese and its lawyers were eager to oblige as part of the settlement.

It is fascinating that the news media now blames “reluctant victims” for stifling an investigation into cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That is a scandal worthy of the front page, but we won’t ever see it there. If the news media now has concerns about the very people whose cause it championed in 2002, we won’t be reading about it in the news media. Transparency in the news media, after all, is a murky affair.

Transparency and the U.S. Bishops

Writer Ryan A. MacDonald has a number of contributions published on These Stone Walls. His most recent is, “Should the Case Against Father Gordon MacRae Be Reviewed?” I am told that Mr. MacDonald has an essay published in the June/July, 2010 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review entitled, ”Anti-Catholicism and Sex Abuse.” In the essay, the writer also recommends These Stone Walls to H&PR readers. Though I subscribe to the well respected H&PR, I have not at this writing seen the current issue.

Ryan MacDonald also has a letter published in a recent issue of Our Sunday Visitor (“Raising the Alarm,” June 13, 2010). Ryan makes a point very similar to one I made last month in “As the Year of the Priest Ends, Are Civil Liberties for Priests Intact?” Here is an excerpt from Ryan’s OSV letter:

---

“A number of courageous bishops have argued in opposition to retroactive application of revised civil statutes of limitations. Such revised statutes typically expose the Catholic Church to special liability while exempting public institutions.

“But I must raise the alarm here. As a body, American bishops lobbied the Holy See for retroactive extension of the time limits of prescription, the period of time in which a delict (a crime) exists and can be prosecuted under Church law …

“… Many accused priests now face the possibility of forced laicization with no opportunity for defense or appeal because our bishops have embraced routine dispensation from the Church’s own statute of limitations. The bishops cannot argue this point from two directions. Some have defended this duplicity citing that the delicts involve criminal and not civil matters. This is so, but these men are also American citizens, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits retroactive application of criminal laws as unconstitutional.

“Statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.  Our bishops cannot have it both ways on this issue.”

---

Ryan MacDonald made this point far better than I ever could. The issue for me is not just the obvious double standard applied when the spirit of Church law is set aside. The issue is one of fundamental justice and fairness, and what Cardinal Dulles called “The great scandal of the Church’s failure to support Her priests in their time of need.” Pope John Paul II said that the Church must be a mirror of justice. Let’s hope our bishops can respond to the public scandal of sexual abuse without perpetrating a private scandal of their own.

There are people in groups like S.N.A.P. and Voice of the Faithful who clamor for the Church to ignore the rights of priests in favor of an open embrace of “survivors.” It is always easy to deny someone else’s rights and restrict someone else’s civil liberties, and that, historically, is how witch hunts begin.

+ + +