The Shawshank Redemption and Its Grace Rebounding

Readers are struck by the fascination with this fictional prison from the mind and pen of Stephen King, while the real thing seems to resist any public concern.

July 2, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

The Shawshank Redemption was released in theatres just as I was led off to prison in September, 1994.  Andy Dufresne and I went to prison in the same week, he at the fictional Shawshank State Prison set in Maine, and me one state over at the far more real New Hampshire State Prison in Concord.

In the years to follow its release, The Shawshank Redemption became one of American television’s great “Second Acts,” theatrical films that have endured far better on the small screen than they did in their first life at the cinema box office. The Shawshank Redemption is today one of the most replayed films in television history.

I’ve always been struck by the world’s fascination with this fictional prison that first emerged from the mind and pen of Stephen King. The real thing seems to resist most serious public concern.

Several years passed before I got to see The Shawshank Redemption.  When I finally did, I could never forget that scene as new arrival, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) stood naked in a shower, arms outstretched, to be unceremoniously doused with a delousing agent.  It seemed the moment that human dignity was officially checked at the prison door.

The scene triggered a not-so-fond memory of my own arrival in prison coinciding with that of Andy Dufresne in September 1994.  Andy Dufresne and I had a lot in common. We both came to that day of delousing with a life sentence, and no real hope of ever seeing freedom again.  Upon arrival we both endured jeers from in-house consumers of the local news.

For my part, the rebuke was for my very public refusal to accept one of several proffered “plea deals.” This is about prison, however, and not justice or its absence, but the two are so inseparable in my imprisoned psyche that I cannot write without a mention of this elephant in my cell.

I refused a “plea deal,” proffered in writing, to serve no more than one to three years in exchange for a plea of guilty.  Then I refused another, reduced to one-to-two years.  I would have been released by 1997 had I taken that deal, but for reasons of my own, I could not. Even today, I could cut my sentence substantially if I would just go along with the required narrative, but alas … .

Andy and I also shared in common a misplaced hope that justice always works out in the end, and a nagging, never-relenting sense that we don’t quite fit in at the place to which it has sent us.  This could never be home.  Andy got out eventually, though I should not dwell too much on how. After thirty years, I am still here.

I was in my twenties when my fictitious crimes were alleged to have been committed. I was 41 when tried and sent to prison.  For my audacity of hope for justice working, I was sentenced by the Honorable Arthur Brennan to consecutive terms more than 30 times the State’s proffered deal: a prison term with a total of 67 years for crimes that never actually took place.  I am 72 at this writing and will be 108 when I next see freedom, if there is no other avenue to justice.

Dostoyevsky in Prison

As overtly tough as the Shawshank Prison appeared to movie viewers, Andy had one luxury for which I have always envied him.  It was something unheard of in any New Hampshire prison.  He had his own cell, and a modicum of solitude.  Stephen King’s cinematic prison where Andy was a guest of the State of Maine was set in the 1950s and everyone within it had his own assigned cell. 

Prison had changed a lot since then, even prisons in quaint New England landscapes where most other change is measured in small increments. In the decade before my 1994 delousing, prison in New Hampshire underwent a radical change.  It was mostly due to the early 1980s passage of a knee-jerk New Hampshire law called “Truth in Sentencing.” Once passed, prisoners serving 66% of their sentence before being eligible for parole were now required to serve 100%. The new law was championed by a single New Hampshire legislator who then became chairperson of the state parole board.

Truth in Sentencing is another elephant roaming the New Hampshire cellblocks, and no snapshot of life in this prison can justly omit it. Truth in Sentencing changed the landscape of both time and space in prison. The wrongfully convicted, the thoroughly rehabilitated, the unrepentant sociopath all faced the same sentence structure: There is no way out.

In the years after its passage, medium security prison cells built for one prisoner were required to house two.  Then a new medium security building called the Hancock Unit was constructed on the Concord prison grounds with cells built to house four prisoners each.  A few years later, bunks were added and those four-man cells were now required to house six.

When I arrived in Hancock in early 1995, I carried my meager belongings up several flights of stairs, and then had to carry up my bunk as well.  The four-man cells, having increased to six, were now to house eight. The look of resentment on my new cellmates’ faces was disheartening as I dragged a heavy steel bunk into their already crowded space.

Over the years I was moved from one eight-man cell to another, in each place adjusting to life with seven other strangers in a space meant for four. Generally, this was considered “temporary housing” for those who would move on to better living conditions after a year or two. I was there for 23 years, the price for maintaining my innocence.

I remember reading once about the great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Reflecting on his time in a Siberian prison, Dostoyevsky lamented, though I’m paraphrasing from memory:

"Above all else, I was entirely unprepared for the reality, the utter spiritual devastation, of day after day, for year upon year, of never, ever, ever, not for a single moment, being alone with myself."

Viewers of The Shawshank Redemption always react to the prison brutality depicted in the film.  Some of that has always been present in the background of prison life, and there is no adjusting to it.

The most painful deprivation in any prison, however, is the absence of trust. That most basic foundation of human relating is crippled from the start in prison.  But the longer term emotional toll is more subtle.  The total absence of solitude and privacy is just as Dostoyevsky described it.

Imagine taking a long walk away from home, far beyond your comfort zone.  Invite the first seven people you meet to come home with you.  Now lock yourself in your bathroom with them, and come to terms with the fact that this is how you will be living for the unforeseen future.

In 2017, twenty-three years after my arrival in prison, I was finally able to move to a unit within the prison that housed two men per cell.  It felt strange at first.  Twenty-three years in the total absence of solitude had exacted a psychological toll.  Just sitting on my bunk without seven other men in my field of view required some internal adjustment to adapt.

Then dozens of bunks were added to the dayrooms and recreation areas. Then space used for rehabilitation programs was converted to dormitories for the ever-growing overflow of prisoners.  Confinement-sans-solitude crept like a virulent plague in the prodigious hills of New Hampshire.

Prison Dreams

There is, however, another perspective on this story about life in the absence of solitude.  Also, like Andy Dufresne, I found friendship in prison, one that was the mirror image of Andy’s friendship with Red, portrayed in the film version of Stephen King’s story by the great Morgan Freeman.  Friends and trust are both rare commodities in prison.  But like shoots growing from cracks in the urban concrete, the human need for companions defeats all obstacles.  Bonds of connection in this place happen on their own terms.

My friend, Pornchai Moontri had a very different prison experience from mine.  He went to prison at age 18, in the State of Maine, and the very prison in which Stephen King’s story was set. In the years in which I was deprived of solitude in a small space with seven other men, Pornchai was a prisoner in the neighboring state where he spent most of those years in the utter cruelty of solitary confinement in a “supermax” prison.

Pornchai was brought to the United States from Thailand at the age of eleven, a victim of human trafficking. He became homeless in Bangor, Maine at age thirteen, and at 18 he was sent to prison. Pornchai is now 52 years old and he resides in his native Thailand, having spent well over 60% of his life in prison.  This man once deemed unfit for the presence of other humans in Maine turned his life around with amazing results in New Hampshire.

Thrown together after my years in deprivation of solitude and Pornchai’s equal stint in solitary confinement, we lived with polar opposite prison anxieties.  As the years passed in the 60 square feet in which we then dwelled, Pornchai graduated from high school, completed two post-secondary diplomas with highest honors, pursued dozens of programs in restorative justice, violence prevention, and mediation, and had a radical and celebrated Catholic conversion chronicled in the book Loved, Lost, Found by Felix Carroll (Marian Press 2013).

Pornchai Moontri then served as a mentor and tutor for other prisoners, wielding immense influence while helping to mend broken lives and misplaced dreams.  The restoration of Pornchai has inspired others, and stands as a monument to the great tragedy of what is lost when strained budgets and overcrowding transform prison from a house of restorative justice into a warehouse of nothing more redemptive than mere punishment.

When Pornchai was twelve years old, a year before becoming a homeless teen in Bangor, Maine, he had a paper route.  It is an ironic twist of fate that at just about the time Andy Dufresne and Red, sprang from the mind and pen of Stephen King, Pornchai was delivering the Bangor Daily News to his home.

Reflecting back on the reconstruction of his life against daunting obstacles, Pornchai once told me, “I woke up one day with a future, when up to now all I ever had was a past.” In the years to follow Pornchai’s transformation, he finally emerged from prison after 30 years to face deportation to Thailand, the place from which he had been taken at age 11. I wrote about this transformation, both for him and for me, in “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.”

Pornchai emerged from a plane in Bangkok, unshackled after a 24-hour flight to begin a life that he was starting over in what for him was as a stranger in a strange land. He handed his future over to Divine Mercy and now, five years after his arrival in Thailand, he is home, and he is free in nearly every sense of those words.

In The Shawshank Redemption, the innocent prisoner Andy Dusfresne escaped from his cage decades after entering it. He had written to his friend Red about the hopes of one day joining him in freedom. Red had no way to conceive that as even possible.

Like Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, I revel in the very thought of my friend’s freedom, even into the dense fog of a future we cannot see. We both dream of my joining him there in freedom one day.  It’s only a dream, and by their very nature, dreams defy reality.

But I cannot help remembering those final words that Stephen King gave to Andy Dufresne’s friend, Red, as he finally emerged from Shawshank.  We cling to those words as we cling to the preservation of life itself, while otherwise adrift on a tumultuous and never-ending sea:

I am so excited I can hardly hold the pen in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Authors generally prefer their own writing to any screenplay that transforms it into a movie. In an interview, Stephen King said that the film version of The Shawshank Redemption had the opposite effect: “The story had heart. The movie has more.” I have always been grateful to Mr. King for writing that story for Pornchai Max and I were unwitting characters within it, and our own character was somehow shaped by it. There is more to this story in the following posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Parable of the Prisoner by Michael Brandon

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

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

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

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.”

The Prodigal Son: Alexander’s Long Lent Toward Easter Sunrise

This account of a young man’s conversion to the Catholic faith is the Parable of the Prodigal Son told in prose; a story of pain and loss, of grace and freedom.

March 26, 2025 by Alexander

My name is Alex. I am 38 years old. Fourteen years ago I was prisoner number 96829 in the New Hampshire State Prison. One day back then I was standing in the doorway of Cell Number One having a conversation with two friends. I think you might know the ones I mean. Anyway, I went there a lot to talk about a very big decision I made back then that changed the course of my life. I didn’t know when I went to visit Cell One that I would one day be telling you this story, but here I am. It took a long time for this to come into print, and in the meantime all of our lives have changed.

I have become a Catholic. That might seem no big deal to the casual observer. Just about everywhere at this time of year, people are getting ready to enter the Catholic Church. If you knew me then, however, you might see that this decision was most unlikely, but, like I said, here I am.

It’s hard to pin down the point where I first thought of this. It isn’t something that I pursued. It’s more like it pursued me. Of all the places for a person to find faith for the first time in his life, prison seems the most unlikely. At least that’s what I always thought. Before I went there with my life in ruins, I had lots of misconceptions about prison and prisoners.

My memory of my life as a child is that it was fairly normal for today’s standards. I had loving parents and an older brother. Until I was 11 years old, everything was ordinary for me. Then came the fall. My father left. He didn’t just leave. He left my Mom alone to raise two sons. He moved to Kansas in search of himself and a new family. I was yesterday’s child, and I was angry about it.

Those years were rough for my family. My Mom struggled to keep our home, but couldn’t. My older brother worked as much as he could to lift the burden from my Mom, but couldn’t. At 12 I started smoking dope and drinking, trying hard to escape feeling like a burden and discarded. My best friend was going through a similar breakdown in his family and we escaped together into drugs and alcohol. There was just no one there to stop us.

So in the eighth grade we began skipping school. First, a day here and there, then it slowly became our way of life. Up to then I was an honor student, but by ninth grade I was drinking every day and all honor left me. It was a crushing source of shame that I stole money from my already struggling Mom and from my friend’s Mom. I was feeding a growing addiction to oxycodone. Today I see its grip on my 14-year-old self as demonic.

I was barely living, fighting every day with my Mom who fought hard to save my life and my soul from self-destruction. It was a losing battle, but still, as with everything else, she struggled. Then another life-changing event happened. My Mom and I were in a terrible accident in the fall of my ninth grade. She was hospitalized for a year. My brother had to leave school and work full time to support us.

By the tenth grade I told my Mom that I wanted to drop out of school and work full time as a roofer. She reluctantly agreed, but got me to at least agree to work on obtaining my G.E.D. high school equivalency. I signed the papers and went to work, but I hated my life and the powers that had stolen my will. I was yearning for something, though then I thought it was just drugs.

Some of my “friends” would offer me drugs for free when I had no money just to keep me in my habit. That’s when I learned that I had no real friends. My older brother even told me that there was nothing wrong with doing drugs, or as he put it, “living life.” I didn’t see it then, but I see it today. He had no more guidance than I did, and neither of us knew what “living life” meant.

California Dreaming

I was 17 years old when I had enough of the way I was living and sought a geographical cure. I talked with a friend in California who told me I would have a place to sleep if I came out there. So off I went. I wasn’t counting on the fact that my Mom was still struggling to save me, so in her eyes I was now a 17-year-old runaway. Eventually, she came to tolerate my latest bad decision, but reminded me of my promise to at least complete a G.E.D.

In California, I landed a job within five days. My glorious new life of freedom from myself and the past lasted all the way up to my first paycheck which, true to form, was handed over to alcohol and drugs. In California, nothing changed but the direction of the tides. The tides of my life, meanwhile, still flooded over me.

I think it’s important to note that up until this point in my life I had no real exposure to religion or faith. I did not believe in anything, least of all myself. I remember as a small child asking my Dad what religion we were. He said, “Well, if you had to put a label on it, I’d say we are Protestant.” I had no idea what a Protestant was. As I grew older, I learned that my Mom was a Methodist as a child, and I discovered that I had been baptized whatever that meant.

But here in California I was more lost than ever before. I stayed until I was almost 20 until the next geographical cure brought me home to New Hampshire where my downward spiral with drugs and alcohol continued until I was 24.

On July 6, 2010, my first and only son was born. When I saw him open his eyes for the first time and stare into mine, I cried. It was as though someone had turned a light on for the first time in my life, and I saw how very limited I was. I knew things had to change, for my son and for myself. I was determined not to bestow upon my son the legacy of absent fatherhood, the abyss I spent so much of my life trying to fill.

Over the next six months, I stopped drinking and using drugs. I began to think more about the miracle of life before me and less about all the searching I left behind. There had to be something more to life. I had seen it in my son’s eyes.

So I began to read about religion. I read about Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. Then one day I was parked on a street waiting for a friend when I began to pray for the first time in my life. I asked God to show me the way. When I opened my eyes I saw two young men cross the road carrying a Bible and I started to laugh. I watched as the young men left, and thought I had missed my chance.

So I prayed again. I told God that if those young men ever again cross my path, I will get up the courage to talk with them. When I finished and looked up, they were standing, still holding their Bible, looking around and puzzled. They turned 180 degrees and started walking back toward my car. I jumped from the car, and I think I scared them. That day I received my first Bible and started reading.

The Debts of the Past

Then my life of wandering caught up with me. In 2014, I was sent to prison. I had never before been in jail or prison, and I was preparing for the worst. It’s not at all like what you see in the movies or on T.V. It was devastating and frightening. At the point at which I was just beginning to discover myself, I became prisoner 96829.

After three months of being classified, I was terrified. In the whole time I was there, all I heard were prisoner horror stories about this one unit called Hancock, or “H-Building” as it was called. Prisoners called it the “gladiator unit,” and I prayed to God that I wouldn’t be sent there. So when I was told to pack my things and move to H-Building, I was terrified.

When I arrived in Hancock, I was sent to Echo or “E-Pod” where there were eight prisoners per cell. I quickly began to learn the difference between T.V. prison and real prison. Day to day life was very difficult with fights breaking out all around me. It was always loud and dirty, and the arguments and fights were a daily occurrence. I tried to keep to myself, but the overcrowding made that impossible. I knew that sooner or later I would have to defend myself. It was filled with aimless young men all trying to prove themselves and not appear vulnerable.

I knew this place could destroy me so I started going to classes in the prison and to the prison chapel whenever I could. After all, I thought, it could be worse. I could be on Bravo or “B-Pod.” The rumor on the upper pods was that B-Pod had “lifers who will take what they want and kill you in a heartbeat.” I prayed to God not to let me be sent to B-Pod. Within days of that prayer, just after my birthday, I was told to pack my things because I was being moved. When I asked where, the dreaded words terrified me all over again. “You’re going to B-Pod.”

I was put on a top bunk on B-Pod out in the day room where the lights are kept on 24/7. I was at least glad to have a top bunk because I thought it would be harder for someone to jump me. I was terrified and knew everyone could see it. I also knew that prisoners would be true to form, and most would look to exploit my fear.

I unpacked my few things, most of which I expected to be stolen by morning, and climbed into my bunk to hide behind a book. It felt as though everyone was avoiding me, “the new guy,” like the plague. I was afraid to leave my bunk to go to the prison chow hall so I just stayed there behind my book. As the day moved on, prisoners started returning from work. This one bald guy with glasses walked past me and stopped. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

I recognized him as the guy who works behind the desk in the law library. He saw instantly that I was very intimidated by this place so he told me not to worry, that everything would be okay and no one would harm me. I only later learned that this man was Fr Gordon MacRae.

Then the next guy to come over to me was Donald Spinner. He asked me why I did not go to dinner, and I had no answer for him. So Donald came back and left some bread and peanut butter and jelly on my bunk and said “you’ll be hungry before the day is over.” I was starving!

Then the next guy to stop was an Asian man everyone called “Ponch.” He joked around and made me laugh, and then said he is G’s roommate, and to just come over if I need anything. Yeah right! I thought. I’m not going anywhere near these guys!

Later, a lot later, I would have the privilege of reading a post by Father G called “The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims and the Pope.” In it he wrote about a man named Squanto who was horribly lost in the odyssey of life. I thought this could have been my story. When I read it I thought back to that first day on that bunk out on the pod, and I realized that the discipleship that these guys believed in was very real. These guys didn’t just believe it. They lived it.

The Homecoming

One day I ventured over to the weight machine on the pod to look at it. Pornchai Moontri came over and asked me if I was interested in getting into shape. I thought it was a lost cause, but he encouraged me. For the next several months, Pornchai worked with me every day, teaching me weightlifting and how to get enough exercise to change the way I think and feel about myself.

Then he began to talk about faith and what I believe. I knew he had become Catholic. Another friend of Pornchai and Gordon, Michael Ciresi also worked out with us. One day I read Michael’s post that Father G invited him to write. It was “Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I left Behind” and it profoundly changed the way I see my past, my present, and my future. I could see these guys heading off to Mass every Sunday, but more importantly I could see the way they conducted themselves in a very difficult environment from Monday through Saturday. I could also see the way everyone else conducted themselves around them. It was best behavior all around! These guys were the real deal.

One day I was sitting on a bench near Donald Spinner’s cell. He asked if I was okay, and I asked him, “What do Catholics believe about Baptism?” I told him that I thought I needed to be baptized again, and he said that if I already am, it is for life. This led to many conversations about faith and about the Catholic Church’s place in history. I wasn’t being “won over” so much as “called home.” I began to see that I was changing not just physically, but spiritually.

When I began to go to Mass offered by Father Bernard Campbell — Father Bernie — I approached him and said that I needed to be forgiven. I asked if I could go to Confession, and Father Bernie didn’t even ask if I was Catholic. He smiled and said, “Of course,” and said he would meet me at the Chapel on the following Friday. I will never forget that day — the day of my first Confession when I walked away a new man.

That new man now has a new faith, and is on fire with it. I am clean, and sober, and free of the life long burdens of the past. I remember something that Father G showed me that Pornchai wrote:

“One day I woke up with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past.”

Today, miraculously born in the most unlikely place, I have an identity. I no longer wake up wondering who I am. I am a man! I am a father! I am strong! I am a Catholic! I am hopeful! I am free!

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these other stories of Redemption from behind these stone walls.

Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

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

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind by Michael Ciresi

We have added a new feature at this blog, a list of the Scriptural accounts of Salvation History, which I hope you will visit and share with others: From Ashes to Easter.

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.”

How Our Lady of Guadalupe Came to Us in Prison

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the setting for a profound story of how Mother Mary sought out two sons in darkness and led them to the light of Divine Mercy.

December 11, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri.”

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

This story describes a most unlikely series of events in a most unlikely place. Some of it has been told in these pages before, but putting theses threads together in one place creates an inspiring tapestry of Divine Mercy. I first began writing about this several years ago at the conclusion of a six-week retreat program in the New Hampshire State Prison.

Over the summer of 2019, Pornchai Moontri and I were asked to take part, for a second time, in the Divine Mercy retreat, 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Fr Michael Gaitley. It was offered here in the summer months amid lots of competing activities. The organizers needed 15 participants to host the retreat, but only 13 signed up. So Pornchai and I were to be “the filler.”

We ended up benefitting greatly from the ‘retreat,’ and I think we also contributed much to the other participants. At the end of it, one of the retreat facilitators, Andy Bashelor turned to Pornchai and said “I want you to know that I saw your conversion story. It is the most powerful story I have ever read.” I wrote of this in “Eric Mahl and Pornchai Moontri: A Lesson in Freedom.”

But before returning to that story, I want to revisit something that happened several months before it was posted. Late in the afternoon of December 11, 2018, I was at my desk in the prison Law Library where I use two computer systems side by side. Neither can be used for my own work. I still write posts on an old typewriter.

One computer at my work desk connects directly to Lexis Nexus, a legal database that all law libraries have. The other connects to the prison library system database. As I was shutting down the computers before leaving for the day, I decided to change the background screen on that second computer. For the previous several years it was a graphic image of our Galaxy with a little “You Are Here” arrow pointing to a tiny dot in the cosmos that depicted our solar system. It made me feel somewhat insignificant.

I had but moments left before rushing out the door at 3:00 PM. I called up a list of background screens which displayed only hundreds of numbered graphic files with no way to view them. So I decided to just pick a number — there were pages of them — and get what I get. Then I shut down the system without seeing it.

The next morning, December 12, I arrived at my desk and booted up the computer for work. The image that filled my screen is the one you see here. It’s a magnificent mural in Mexico City. I was not yet even conscious of the date. On the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, blindly chosen from a thousand random numbers, she appeared on my screen and has been there ever since.

I was not always conscious of any spiritual connection with Mary. Her sphere of influence in my life was first directed to Pornchai Moontri. The segment from Marian Helper magazine atop this post attests to that. I wrote of it in “Fr Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.”

A Mystery in Her Eyes

But back, for a moment, to Our Lady of Guadalupe which became my favorite among all the Marian images I have come to reverence. Its origin is fascinating. Nearly five centuries ago, on the morning of December 12, 1531, young Juan Diego, an early Aztec convert to Catholicism in the New World, was walking at the foot of Tepayac Hill outside Mexico City.

Days earlier in the same location, Juan Diego heard the beautiful voice of a lady, but saw no one. On this day, she appeared. She instructed Juan Diego to build a church on that spot. She then told him to gather up in his tilma — a shawl that was commonly worn at the time — a bunch of Castillian roses that appeared nearby. Castillian roses were never in bloom in December, but there they were. He was told to bring these to the local bishop.

When Juan Diego removed his tilma in the presence of the bishop and a group of people with him, he and they were surprised to see the roses. But they were stunned to also see imprinted in the tilma an amazing image of a beautiful young woman surrounded by the rays of the Sun with the crescent moon under her feet, surrounded by roses and with angels attending her. The woman had asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop that she is “Coatloxopeuh,” which in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, means “The One Who Crushes the Serpent.”

Juan Diego’s tilma, a garment of the poor, was made of coarse fiber completely unsuitable for painting. Since 1666, the tilma image has been studied by artists and scientists who have been unable to explain how the image became incorporated into the very fibers of the tilma. The shawl is the only one of its kind still in existence after nearly 500 years. It is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

Hundreds of years later, in 1929, a photographer revealed that when he enlarged photographs of the Lady’s face on the tilma, other images appeared to be in her eyes. In 1979, scientist and engineer, Dr. Jose Aste Tousman, studied the tilma using more sophisticated imaging equipment enlarging her eyes 2,500 times.

After filtering and processing the images using computers, it was discovered that the Lady’s two eyes contain another imprint — the image of the bishop and several other people staring at the tilma apparently at the moment Juan Diego presented it in 1531. It was a permanent imprint equally appearing upon the retinas of both eyes in stereoscopic vision. It appeared to be what Our Lady of Guadalupe saw when Juan Diego first presented his mysterious tilma to the bishop.

On January 26, 1979, Pope John Paul II offered Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe before an overflow crowd of 300,000. Years later, St. Juan Diego was canonized by him. Now, seemingly by random “accident,” that image is enshrined on the computer screen in the place where I work each day in prison. The mathematical odds against this happening are as astronomical as the odds against the image itself.

Her Summons to Pornchai Moontri

The icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now also on the wall of my cell. It has been widely accepted by many as a representation of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Moon Under Her Feet” as described in the Book of Revelation (12:1). In the Mystical City of God, Venerable Mary of Agreda discerned that evil greatly fears this image, and flees from it.

Both Sacred Scripture and Catholic Tradition are filled with accounts of good men and women who suffer terrible ordeals only to be transformed into great men and women. I told the devastating story of how Pornchai Moontri came into my life in 2005 and all that he endured before and after in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

Seemingly by some mysteriously Guiding Hand, the events of both our lives steered us toward the point of our being in the same place at the same time and meeting. After all that Pornchai had suffered in life, he would never have trusted me, an accused Catholic priest, if not for a series of articles that Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Pornchai read them and was moved that he has met a friend whose life had been unjustly shattered in almost equal measure to his own. It was then that he made a decision to do something he had never done before, to trust.

In 2007, the next catastrophe in his life took place. After fifteen years in prison, many of them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement, Pornchai was ordered by a U.S. Immigration Judge to be deported to his native Thailand upon completion of his sentence. Pornchai despaired about the prospect of one day being left alone in a country of only vague memories, a country from which he was taken against his will as a young abandoned child.

I told Pornchai in 2007 that we will have to build a bridge to Thailand. He scoffed at this, saying that it was impossible to do from a prison. Then the first sections of the bridge began to be laid out. This was two years before this blog began in 2009. First, Mrs. LaVern West, a retired librarian in Cincinnati, Ohio also read those WSJ articles and began corresponding with me.

In a return letter, I mentioned my friendship with Pornchai and the challenges we faced. LaVern began researching and printing rudimentary lessons of Thai language and culture and sending them to Pornchai who began to study them. One of the lessons mentioned a Thai language series produced by Paiboon Publishers, a Thai language bookseller in California. So I wrote to them. Pornchai had not heard Thai spoken since before he became a homeless 13 year old lost in America.

Paiboon Publishers donated a set of Thai language DVDs to the prison library for the exclusive use of Pornchai to study Thai several hours per week. He quickly became proficient in the spoken language of his early childhood. Reading and writing in Thai, however, were simply beyond his grasp. Mine too.

We both gave learning the Thai writing system a serious effort, but it seems just a complex series of squiggles beyond the capacity of most Western adult minds to assimilate. Pornchai reads and writes fluently in English, however, which in Thailand is an asset.

In 2008, the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights published “Pornchai’s Story” as the conversion story of 2008. In 2009, Beyond These Stone Walls began, and I also began a quest to make our presence known in Thailand. Dilia E. Rodriguez, PhD told the story of the development of this blog in “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It conveys how this blog impacted both my life and Pornchai’s in prison, and of how it reached a global readership including throughout Asia.

Also across the globe in Australia, attorney Clare Farr read of us and began an investigation into the life of Pornchai in both Thailand and the State of Maine.

My efforts to reach out to Thailand at first seemed to no avail. Everything written and mailed from prison bears a disclaimer stamped on our envelopes declaring that the contents were written and mailed from prison. With only a few exceptions, my letters to anyone I thought might help us were met with silence. Meanwhile, Pornchai was brought into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. This resulted in several articles and a chapter in the book, Loved, Lost, Found, by Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll. That chapter is reprinted here with permission entitled Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls.

The book was especially powerful, and it made its way to Bangkok where it was read by a prominent group of Catholics who founded a Divine Mercy mission and ministry there.

My Surrender to Her Fiat

I gradually became aware that what I once thought and hoped was a Great Tapestry of God designed to rescue me was really designed to rescue Pornchai Moontri, and I was but an instrument in a Divinely inspired Script. It became increasingly clear to me why Mary sent another of her spiritual sons, St Maximilian Kolbe, into our lives.

I came to understand in my heart and soul that I am to emulate what he did. I am to offer my life — or at least my freedom — for the salvation of another prisoner upon whom Mary has placed the safety of her mantle. I wrote of this recently in “The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe.” This is how we got to where we are.

Pornchai’s survival has taken on a life of its own as a result of our growing years of trust in Divine Mercy. The Divine Mercy Thailand group conveyed its readiness to help me prepare Pornchai for his eventual reassimilation to Thailand. They were on the other end of what seemed to us just a black hole up to that point. They embraced Pornchai and provided him with housing and support upon his arrival after a 36 year absence from Thailand. Our Lady lifted from us both an enormous burden of hopelessness.

Late on the night of November 22, 2019, I watched on EWTN as Pope Francis was greeted in Thailand in a beautiful ceremony as Thai Catholics in a predominantly Buddhist culture sang for him like an angelic choir. I realized I will be handing Pornchai over to them in a matter of months, and I could not contain my emotions any longer. As Pornchai was fast asleep late at night in the prison bunk above, as I watched Pope Francis being received in Thailand, I began to cry.

I do not know where our long road turns next, but what started as tears of loss and sorrow that night were also tears of triumph. They were the tears of St. Joseph, summoned to a Fatherhood he never envisioned but from which he would never retreat. Through grace, and the gifts of powerful advocates in Heaven and on Earth, we did all this from inside a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire. At every turn I heard Mary’s Fiat to Divine Providence: “Be it done to me according to Thy Word.”

The beautiful and miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was placed on our cell wall for Pornchai. Now it remains there still, for me.

O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Note: We posted a companion to this post at our Voices from Beyond Page on the day before this post is published: “Thomas Merton and Pornchai Moontri Meet in the City of Angels.”

For more on the mysterious presence of Mary in our lives, please visit “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

And for the future Mary promised: “Thailand’s Once-Lost Son was Flag Bearer at the Asian Apostolic Congress on Mercy.”

+ + +

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

July 31, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

This post has been a long time in the making. It’s the result of an epiphany, a sudden realization of truth that radically changed my perception of what had previously been to me just a painful memory. Then I stumbled upon something entirely new. To convey this thunderous awakening, I have to first ask you to return with me to a time not long ago that was painful and confusing for us all: the rise of the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021. The virus, the masks, the closures, the lies, the “mostly peaceful” protests that were actually riots, the burning cities each night on the news, it was all just awful.

Then there was Covid itself. I had it twice, the first time in the month after my friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri, was taken away in the custody of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after 36 years in America and 15 years as my roommate. Prisons are not known for having empathy about the human side of things. There was not a single concern about what happens to Pornchai or where I go from there. For over 15 years Max lived in the bunk above me where we were engaged in an epic spiritual battle to reconcile his past and secure a future. Then at 0700 on the morning of September 8, 2020, he was gone. By 0900, a stranger was living in his place.

And as I struggled to regain my sense of autonomy and balance, dark forces chose that very moment to bring down this blog. The only means I had to communicate with the outside world. I had to set all this aside to focus my meager resources and attention on the biggest crisis at hand: how to help Max cope with the hellish vortex of being lost in ICE detention with little hope and no means to communicate at all.

I seem to never learn to trust, however. I instinctively lean back on to my own resources and rely on no one else. That was certainly not working and it was not going to work. Then our late friend Claire Dion revealed an ingenious plan. Pornchai Max and I could not call each other, but we both could call Claire. She cared very much for us, and being a retired RN, she put her ingenuity to work. She devised a plan that I described not long after her death from cancer this year. That post was “Claire Dion Has Fallen into the Hands of the Living God.” Here is our treasured photo of how Claire put us back together.

The ICE Follies

As you know, Pornchai Moontri was taken from Thailand at age 11 in 1985 and brought to America. This forced him into a devastating and traumatic life from which there was but one escape. So he fled from it, again and again, the last time leaving him all alone in this world, a homeless teen at age 14 in a foreign country with a language and customs he could not comprehend.

Fleeing the trauma of exploitation, Pornchai fell into life on the streets where he trusted no one. He would steal food to survive, and sleep in doorways, shelters, and sometimes on the floor in the home of a friend. One day he stole a few cans of beer from a store. Fleeing across the store parking lot in 1992, Pornchai was tackled and pinned down by a much larger man. He could not be in that situation again. He could not be someone’s victim. He snapped, and that man died over a few cans of beer.

Ironically, just as I began typing this post I received a message from “Melissa.” Nearly 40 years ago at age 12 she had been a classmate of Pornchai in the seventh grade in middle school in Bangor, Maine when he first arrived in the United States. Melissa’s comment was both caring and brave, and it struck me that the trauma to which Pornchai was subjected has echoes all around him and across the years. Here is an excerpt of Melissa’s comment:

“I met Pornchai in seventh grade. I remember him as a sweet boy who was always smiling. However, a ‘foreigner’ he was not going to be accepted into the ‘in crowd’ though I don’t recall anyone that didn’t like him. How could they not? He had a great disposition … . I was upset to learn of Pornchai’s arrest back in 1992 because I knew the kid never stood a chance. We had all heard about the abusive home in Bangor. Over the years I would check to see if he had yet been released and was infuriated to learn that he had not. He had stolen beer, was chased into the parking lot by a grown man who confronted him. Pornchai reacted as the scared, cornered boy that he was. It was a tragedy for both. However, this boy, barely a legal adult, was locked up and forgotten. His American dream was a living nightmare. He became Bangor’s forgotten son. America, Bangor, Penobscot County Courts, DCF, teachers … . We all failed him.”

Years later, Pornchai emerged from over a decade in solitary confinement. Then our lives converged, clearly by design. I drew the entire story of his life out of Pornchai including all the madness that had been inflicted upon him.

What sparked me to write this post in 2024 was something that I did not know until very recently. I stumbled upon a plea from Catholic League President Bill Donohue addressed to the White House in 2021 in the final days of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Dr. Donohue published this petition in the January 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League, under title “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee”:

We took up a very serious case at Christmastime, hoping to bring relief to a man who has paid his dues and has been through enough. We asked Catholics to appeal to President Donald Trump to release Pornchai Moontri from the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He deserves to be repatriated to Thailand.

We were encouraged by news that the embassy in Thailand was contacted by ICE just days after we made our request; Pornchai’s case showed movement for the first time.  Right before Christmas we asked our email subscribers to redouble their efforts making one more push.

Bill Donohue has known of the plight of Pornchai for many years. It was Fr. Gordon J. MacRae — he is another victim of injustice — who brought Pornchai’s story to his attention. Pornchai rightly credits Fr. MacRae with mentoring him. More than that, MacRae brought him into the Catholic Church.

We explained why Pornchai deserves to be released.

Pornchai was born in Thailand in 1973 and was abandoned by his mother when he was two-years-old. She intended to sell him, but a young relative came to his rescue and brought him into his home. When he was 11-years-old his mother reemerged with a new husband; they took him to Bangor, Maine, against his will. His stepfather, Richard Bailey, immediately started raping him, and did so for three years. At age 14, Pornchai escaped (it was his second escape) and became homeless. When he was 18, he got into a fight with a much bigger man while he was intoxicated and took the man’s life during the struggle (he was so drunk he does not recall stabbing him).

While awaiting trial, Pornchai’s mother came to visit him in jail, warning him that if he disclosed to the authorities what his stepfather did to him, she would suffer the consequences. Fearing for his mother’s life, he prudently decided not to speak, even to the point of not defending himself in court. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Maine has no parole.

In 2000, his mother attempted to leave her husband; they were living in Guam. That is where she was beaten to death. The only suspect was her husband, but there was no evidence to convict him. Subsequently, many things changed.

In 2005, Pornchai was sent to a New Hampshire State Prison. That is where he met Fr. MacRae. Five years later, Pornchai became a Catholic; he soon became a fan of the Catholic League.

In 2018, after new evidence emerged — advocates for Pornchai pursued Bailey — and justice was finally done. Bailey was convicted on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai.

On September 11, 2020, Pornchai, after serving his full sentence, was released at age 47 to the custody of ICE for deportation to his native Thailand. He is still in custody, with no end in sight.

Pornchai has served his time and has suffered enough. He should now be set free.

— William Donohue, PhD, Catalyst, January 2021

A White House Intervention

When Bill Donohue published the above, and Catholic League members sent it to the White House, Pornchai had already been held by ICE in an ICE detention facility in Gena, Louisiana for five months. It was the peak of Covid contagion and he was living 70 to a room with no protection and lights blazing around the clock. Despite my daily assurances that we were working hard to get him out, he was showing signs of extreme stress and depression. While I was shielding Pornchai from false hopes and promises, I was unaware that others were also shielding me about their own efforts. I thought I was a lone ranger doing my best each day to reach out to anyone who would take a call from a prisoner — and they were few — to plea for relief from Pornchai’s plight. The Covid pandemic had the world locked tightly in its grip and the riots across America were evidence of how tightly wound our world had become. Pornchai believed that he would remain trapped in ICE until the Covid crisis was over and that could take years. So in the meantime, I asked Pornchai to try to reach out to others who were also trapped in ICE, but even less fortunate than himself. He did exactly that, and ended up saving 17-year-old Trepha, a Vietnamese teen who ended up in the same ICE facility as Pornchai, but surrounded mostly by young men from Latin America. Trepha had stowed away on a container ship departing Vietnam and then his unplanned world tour ended in Mexico.

Smugglers took what little money Trepha had saved and then led him across the Rio Grande and locked him in the trunk of an abandoned car. When Border Patrol agents found him, they made no distinction between migrants from Latin American countries and those who had come from abroad. Pornchai protected Trepha by keeping him away from the Central American gangs at Gena and then tasked me with reaching out to the Vietnamese Consulate to try to get Trepha returned home. I still hear from him on occasion. He is back in Vietnam with his grandmother and has promised me that he would not undertake any more world tours. In December 2020 we posted “An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump” asking for an intervention to move Pornchai’s relocation along despite the Covid pandemic and its international restrictions. What I did not know at the time I wrote that post was that Catholic League President Bill Donohue also reached out to the White House greatly magnifying our voice.

I learned of this only recently, three years later in 2024. I stumbled upon some fascinating paperwork from my friend Fr George David Byers in North Carolina who had been helping me then behind the scenes in this blog. Father George printed a few pages of a BTSW traffic report showing visitors to this site and what they were seeing in December 2020 and January 2021. I did not make much sense of it then, so I just put it aside out of sight and out of mind. Three years passed and I discovered it again just weeks ago. I could see that many of the site views were from ICE Headquarters in New Orleans and then in January 2021 from Homeland Security in Washington and then finally from the White House. This was the culmination of the interest of thousands of Catholic League members who intervened to assist Pornchai Moontri.

Then, upon discovering the above, I went to the prison law library where I work. I keep there a collection of the many issues of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I began to look through them, and then found one breathlessly in the January 2021 edition entitled “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee.”

It did not just move the needle, it moved a mountain. Just two weeks after its publication Pornchai was aboard a Korean Airlines flight bound for Seoul along two plainclothes ICE officers who accompanied him. From there they boarded a connecting flight to Bangkok. The flight was 23 hours.

It turned out that the ICE officers read a good deal about Pornchai and as a result treated him very well. In fact, they saved the day. Upon their arrival after midnight in the Customs area at Bangkok International Airport, an exhausted Pornchai found himself surrounded by Thai police who were waiting for him. They demanded to know why he was being deported from the United States. The two ICE officers quickly intervened telling Pornchai not to answer. The ICE officers said that Pornchai had done nothing wrong, that he was being repatriated to his native country in cooperation with the Thai government and was entirely a free man. The Thai police went silent. Pornchai had never seen anything like it. Much later Pornchai wrote of his arrival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai learned from me this week that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, and likely also then-President Donald Trump, were instrumental in a worldwide effort to restore him to freedom. He marveled at this, and so do I. “The Hand of God was on them both,” I told him, “and on you as well.”

“I could not see that then,” said Pornchai, “it took a priest and two presidents, but I see it now.”

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a riveting and timely new book that I hope to soon review in these pages. It is Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization defending individual Catholics and the Church against defamation. No one in the U.S. Catholic Church has done more to assist me and Pornchai Moontri than Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Join forces with us at www.CatholicLeague.org.

You may also like these related posts:

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison by Marie Meaney

Free at Last Thanks to God and You! by Pornchai Moontri

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

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.”

The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope

A prison concert by composer Eric Genuis and his outstanding musicians made Advent spirits soar for a prisoner priest and an old friend whom you have come to know.

December 13, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“Music is a language with the profound ability to stir the heart, inspire the mind, and awaken the soul .”

— Pianist and Composer Eric Genuis

Note from the Editor: The above image shows Eric Genuis and his ensemble performing his composition The Butterfly at a Concert of Hope in Ft. Collins, CO.

+ + +

I have, over time and of necessity, become somewhat attuned to signs and wonders here at Beyond These Stone Walls. As Advent loomed, there was no shortage of them and little time to ponder them. The wonders began in the weeks before Advent began. I was descending the multiple flights of stairs from the prison law library where I work as a clerk when, at the bottom, I heard someone call my name.

It was the Director of the prison’s Recreation Department who stopped me. He asked if I know a music composer named Eric Genuis. I said that I did not, but that I had heard of him. “Well, he has heard of you, too,” said the Director adding, “We are scheduling a music concert with him next month, and he emailed me to ask if you might be able to attend.” It was suggested that I keep an eye out for the notice and then sign up if I want to go. Weeks later, I saw a poster advertising the concert. There would be two performances in the prison gymnasium, one at 8:30 AM and the other at 1:00 PM. I signed up for the earlier one thinking that it might be less crowded.

When I arrived for the concert that day, all the front rows were filled with prisoners anticipating something very special. Like a good Catholic, I took a seat at the end of an empty row of seats at the rear. Then someone came over to me, pointing out Eric Genuis conversing with some of his musicians off to one side. I got up and walked over to them. Eric spun around and vigorously shook my hand. “This is Father MacRae, the priest and writer I told you about,” he said to the others. I wanted to sink back into my seat and disappear. Eric spoke of it being an honor to meet me and said that he is a reader of Beyond These Stone Walls. Others in the small group also shook my hand and commented that they appreciated my recent post “Pell Contra Mundum.”

Thirty years in prison have not exactly left me accustomed to recognition, or even basic human respect for that matter. Being where I am, I do not have a sense of the impact of anything I write or of who reads it. When we finished our greetings, Eric asked me for a blessing. Every eye in the huge room was riveted to this scene as I made my way back to the seat I had just vacated. I will get back to this in a moment.

The Memorare

By longstanding tradition at Beyond These Stone Walls, but with occasional exceptions, we publish one post per week on Wednesday mornings. The tradition was born out of the limits of prison writing. As described here recently, this blog has to contend with many obstacles to appear in print. With no computer and just an old fashioned standard Smith Corona typewriter, I count on postal mail — sometimes in vain — to get my completed post from New Hampshire to New York each week. However, one particular post did not cooperate. It was “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Some Older Songs.”

Fourteen days after mailing it, that post still had not arrived for scanning and editing. So we had to do the unthinkable. At the behest of our editor who does all the hard work, I had to dictate my new post word for word over the telephone while our editor typed it one character at a time. She was a paradigm of patience while I imagined little clouds filled with expletives hovering about my head like in the comic books while she typed.

Adding to the frustration, just about every phone call from prison is dropped multiple times and has to be reconnected. Writing like this leaves me feeling a bit like Saint Paul in the middle of his shipwreck (2 Corinthians 11:25). So here we are in the middle of the Second Week of Advent, and I struggle to decide what I will write about in this post. Advent is a most difficult time for a Catholic writer who can publish only once per week.

The reasons may not be so obvious. Just two days after my Wednesday post of last week, the Church honored the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a most important Marian Feast that I cannot let pass by without notice. She is central to Advent, and there is no Christian hope at all without her Fiat, her “Be it done to me according to Thy Word.” I wrote of her during a past Advent in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.” (We will link to it again at the end of this post.)

Then, just a few days later in Advent is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a very special Catholic observance for me because she appeared to me as well. Hmmm — I should modify that a little. She did not appear as she did to Saint Juan Diego on Tepayac Hill in Mexico in 1531. She came to me quite differently, and it could easily be dismissed as coincidence, but it wasn’t. You had to be there to see and feel the impact of it, but no one was there except me. Ten years ago, in 2013, I was leaving my job in the prison law library for the day late in an afternoon.

There is a computer at my desk there containing the Law Library database that I must use daily. As I was shutting everything down for the day, I had the sudden inkling to change the background image on the screen. I had never done so before, so when I went to the listings of thousands of background photos to choose from, I could see only identifying numbers but no text or titles or descriptions. I had but minutes left. So I randomly chose one of them only by number from among the thousands of numbers on the screen. I could not see it. Then I shut down the computer.

My next work day that year was December 12, but I was not even conscious of the date. I arrived at my desk at the usual time on that morning and booted up the computer. I opened drawers to pull out files I had to work on, and when I looked back at the screen, I gasped. There was no one I could tell because no one here would understand it and the few who might understand it also might not have believed it. So I told no one except my friends Father Michael Gaitley and Father George David Byers who both took it in agonizing stride.

On my screen that day was a brilliant painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe as she appeared to Juan Diego on Tepayac Hill. In the background is the modern day Basilica of Our Lady, all painted on a canvas in Mexico City. Then, as if tasered, I noted the date this happened. It was December 12, 2013 — ten years ago on the Feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. My friend Father George David Byers found a grainy copy of the same image which is posted above, but it does not do justice to what is on my screen.

Two other things happened in the months preceding this. Two persons who had been my friends in prison also became my family. It was mostly by default because none of the three of us had one. December 2013 was the most trying month of my entire, and entirely unjust, imprisonment. It was also the month that Pornchai Moontri and I, with profound reluctance at first, signed up for a six-week program that would end in our Consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. That story is told on the Marian Fathers own website in “Behold Your Son! Behold Your Mother!”

Then, in that same month, our other family-friend, Alberto Ramos, was suddenly transferred from New Hampshire to a Florida prison from where we would likely never see each other again. “Likely,” however, does not always get the last word.

Now back to 2023 and the Eric Genuis concert ... .

The Measure by Which You Measure

After Eric and his musical entourage asked for a blessing, I made my way back to my seat — only now there was someone else sitting in it. To my utter shock and surprise, it was Alberto Ramos who ten years earlier had been moved to another state to serve out his sentence. Discounting that anything positive can come from any association between prisoners, most states do not allow them to communicate with each other. So for ten years there was nothing but silence from or about Alberto who was sentenced to 30 years in prison at age 14. He is now 44, and has never known any other life.

I wrote of Alberto’s life, and his offense at age 14, in a post many years ago entitled, “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” In 2022, after ten years in distant silence, I wrote of him again in “The Measure by Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past.” Here is an excerpt from that post:

“Alberto was 14 years old when the knife in his hand severed the artery of an 18-year-old with whom he struggled. It was a vicious end to a late night drug deal gone very bad in a dark Manchester, New Hampshire alley. It happened in 1994, the same year that I was sent to this prison. It seemed a flip of a coin which combatant would die that night and which would survive only to wake up in prison. At age 14, Alberto had won the battle but lost himself. Sentenced to a prison term of 30 years to life, he spent his first few years in solitary confinement. The experience extracted from him, as it also did from Pornchai Moontri, any light in his heart, any spark of optimism or hope in his eyes.

“Then, when finally age 18, Alberto was allowed to live in the prison’s general population where the art of war is honed in daily physical and spiritual battle. It is a rare day that a City of Concord Fire Department ambulance doesn’t enter these prison walls shutting down all activity while some young man is taken to a local hospital after a beating or a stabbing or a headlong flight down some concrete stairs. The catalyst for such events is the same here as it was in the alley that sent Alberto here. There is no honor in any of it. It is just about drugs and gangs and money.

“Alberto’s path to prison seemed inevitable. Abandoned by his father, he was raised by a single mother who lost all control over him by age 12. Drugs and money and avoiding the law were the dominant themes of his childhood. By age 14, he was a child of the streets and nowhere else, but the streets make for the worst possible parents. In ‘Big Prison’ it was discovered that there is more to Alberto than the violence of his childhood. Alberto was 22 when he earned his high school diploma here. He will soon be released after having spent more than two-thirds of his life behind bars.”

The photo atop this section is that of his graduation class at Granite State High School within the New Hampshire State Prison. I wish today that I could have made a movie clip of that graduation. Pornchai Moontri was the class valedictorian so he had to give a speech. Alberto, who is just over Pornchai’s shoulder to the right, snickered when Pornchai momentarily lost his place, but quickly recovered.

Back to the concert again. When Alberto was brought back to New Hampshire from prison in another state to prepare for his upcoming release on parole, he was housed in a different unit than the one I am in. When he saw a poster for the Eric Genuis concert, he signed up hoping that he might see me there. It is for Alberto and Pornchai and thousands like them in prisons across America that Eric Genuis so gracefully and generously shares his God-given gifts.

It is very difficult to describe in words. Eric Genuis is a world class classical pianist and a composer of the most stirring music I have ever heard. Eric’s piano, along with accompaniment from a cello, a violin and the angelic voice of a vocalist reached deeply into our souls. After the ensemble’s rendition of “Panis Angelicus,” an original composition by Eric Genuis with words composed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Alberto turned to me with a look of awe. “I have never heard anything like this before,” he whispered with tears in his eyes. For the next two hours, we and others in that gym were lifted up and out of prison into a melodious visit to the lower heavens. I began to fear that we might all get charged with attempted escape.

Just a few days later, Alberto was gone again — this time to a minimum security prison unit outside these walls where he can prepare to reconstruct his broken life. Divine Mercy is real, and because it is real, Mrs. Rose Emerson read of Alberto in these pages. She is the mother of the young man Alberto killed all those years ago at age 14. She contacted me asking me to convey to Alberto her forgiveness of him, and her wish to help him when he is ready for parole and release.

On the evening after the concert, I called Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. I told him that Alberto was back, and that we had spent two hours together in a magnificent concert by Eric Genuis. I told Pornchai that we had very little by way of Advent hope going for us this year. Just little snippets of fleeting hope that we cling to on dark winter days in prison. Eric Genuis set that fleeting hope to music, and then set it ablaze.

+ + +

Notes from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Please visit the music of Eric Genuis at www.ericgenuis.com. His cds would be a gift of hope in any Christmas stocking.

Albums — Buy them here.

You may also like these related links:

Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being

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

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri from His Prisons

+ + +

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.”

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

Padre Pio was proclaimed a living saint for the wounds he bore for Christ, but his reputation for sanctity became another wound, this one inflicted from the Church.

September 20, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“Six Degrees of Separation,” a famous play by John Guare, became a 1993 film starring Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, and Stockard Channing. The plot revolved around a theory proposed in 1967 by sociologists Stanley Milgram and Frigyes Karinthy. Wikipedia describes “Six Degrees of Separation” as:

“The idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of ‘a friend of a friend’ statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.”

It’s an intriguing idea, and sometimes the connections are eerie. In “A Day Without Yesterday” I wrote about my long-time hero, Fr. Georges Lemaitre, the priest-physicist who changed the mind of Albert Einstein on the creation of the Universe. A few weeks after my post, a letter arrived from my good friend, Pierre Matthews in Belgium. Pierre sent me a photo of himself as a young man posing with his family and a family friend, the famous Father Lemaitre, in Switzerland in 1956. In a second photo, Pierre had just served Mass with the famous priest who later autographed the photo.

When I wrote of Father Lemaitre, I had no idea there are but two degrees of separation between me and this famous priest-scientist I’ve so long admired. The common connection we share with Pierre Matthews — not to mention the autographed photo — left me awestruck. The mathematical odds against such a connection are staggering. Something very similar happened later and also involving Pierre Matthews. It still jolts my senses when I think of it. The common bond this time was with Saint Padre Pio.

When Pierre visited me in prison in 2010, I told him about this blog which had been launched months earlier. When I told Pierre that I chose Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio as the patrons of Beyond These Stone Walls, Pierre quietly and modestly said, “I’ve met Padre Pio.”

Pierre’s casual remark dropped like a bomb on our conversation. What were the odds that I would be sitting at a table in the prison visiting room with a man who traveled from Europe to tell me of how he met Padre Pio. The saint imposed his wounded and bandaged hands in blessing upon Pierre’s head over a half century earlier.

The labyrinthine ways of grace are far beyond my understanding. Pierre told me that as a youth growing up in Europe, his father enrolled him in a boarding school. When he wrote to his father about a planned visit to central Italy, his father instructed him to visit San Giovanni Rotondo and ask for Padre Pio’s blessing. Pierre, a 16-year-old at the time, had zero interest in visiting Padre Pio. But he obediently took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo. He waited there for hours. Padre Pio was nowhere to be seen.

Pierre then approached a friar and asked if he could see Padre Pio. ‘Impossible!’ he was told. Just then, he looked up and saw the famous Stigmatic walking down the stairs toward him. Padre Pio’s hands were bandaged and he wore gloves. The friar, following the young man’s gaze, whispered in Italian, ‘Do not touch his hands.’ Pierre trembled as Padre Pio approached him. He placed his bandaged hands upon Pierre’s head and whispered his blessing.

Fifty-five years later, in the visiting room of the New Hampshire State Prison, Pierre bowed his head and asked for my blessing. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I placed my hand upon Pierre knowing that the spiritual imprint of Padre Pio’s blessing was still in and upon this man, and I was overwhelmed to share in it.

This wasn’t the first time I shared space with Padre Pio. Several years ago, in November 2005, we shared the cover of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I also share a painful date with Padre Pio. September 23 was the date he died in 1968. On September 23, 1994 I was put into chains and taken to prison to begin a life sentence for crimes that never took place.

That’s why we shared that cover of Catalyst. Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote of his appearance on NBC’s “Today” show on October 13, 2005 during which he spoke of my trial and imprisonment declaring, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.” That issue of Catalyst also contained my first major article for The Catholic League, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” written from prison in 2005.

The Indictment of Heroic Virtue

Padre Pio was on that Catalyst cover because three years after he was canonized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II, Atlantic Monthly magazine carried a brief article by Tyler Cabot entitled “The Rocky Road to Sainthood” (November 2005). Of one of the most revered priests in Church history, Cabot wrote:

“Despite questions raised by two papal emissaries – and despite reported evidence that he raised money for right-wing religious groups and had sex with penitents – [Padre] Pio was canonized in 2002.”

I’m not sure whether the bigger scandal for Tyler Cabot and Atlantic Monthly was the sexual accusation or “raising money for right-wing religious groups.” Bill Donohue expressed surprise that such a “highly regarded magazine would publish such trash.” I was more dismayed than surprised by the irresponsibility. Yes, it’s irresponsible to tell half the story and present it as the truth.

It wasn’t the first time such attacks were launched against Padre Pio. Four years before his canonization, and thirty years after his death, The New York Times (September 24, 1998) carried an article charging that Padre Pio was the subject of no less than twelve Vatican investigations in his lifetime, and one of the investigations alleged that “Padre Pio had sex with female penitents twice a week.” It’s true that this was alleged, but it’s not the whole truth. The New York Times and Atlantic Monthly were simply following an agenda that should come as no surprise to anyone. I’ll describe below why these wild claims fell apart under scrutiny.

But first, I must write the sordid story of why Padre Pio was so accused. That’s the real scandal. It’s the story of how Padre Pio responded with heroic virtue to the experience of being falsely accused repeatedly from within the Church. His heroic virtue in the face of false witness is a trait we simply do not share. It far exceeds any grace ever given to me.

Twice Stigmatized

Early in the morning of September 20, 1918, at the age of 31, Francesco Forgione, known to the world as Padre Pio, received the Stigmata of Christ. He was horrified, and he begged the Lord to reconsider. Each morning in the month to follow, Padre Pio awoke with the hope that the wounds would be gone. He was terrified. After a month with the wounds, Padre Pio wrote a note to Padre Benedetto, his spiritual advisor, describing in simple, matter-of-fact terms what happened to him on that September 20 morning:

“On the morning of the 20th of last month, in the choir, after I had celebrated Mass . . . I saw before me a mysterious person similar to the one I had seen on the evening of 5 August. The only difference was that his hands and feet and side were dripping blood. The sight terrified me and what I felt at that moment is indescribable. I thought I should die and really should have died if the Lord had not intervened and strengthened my heart which was about to burst out of my chest.

“The vision disappeared and I became aware that my hands and feet and side were dripping blood. Imagine the agony I experienced and continue to experience almost every day. The heart wound bleeds continually, especially from Thursday evening until Saturday.

“Dear Father, I am dying of pain because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment I feel in my soul. I am afraid I shall bleed to death if the Lord does not hear my heartfelt supplication to relieve me of this condition.

“Will Jesus, who is so good, grant me this grace? Will he at least free me from the embarrassment caused by these outward signs? I will raise my voice and will not stop imploring him until in his mercy he takes away . . . these outward signs which cause me such embarrassment and unbearable humiliation.”

— Letters 1, No. 511

And so it began. What Padre Pio faced that September morning set in motion five decades of suspicion, accusation, and denunciation not from the secular world, but from the Catholic one. From within his own Church, Padre Pio’s visible wounds brought about exactly what he feared in his pleading letter to his spiritual director. The wounds signified in Padre Pio exactly what they first signified for the Roman Empire and the Jewish chief priests at the time Christ was crucified. They were the wounds of utter humiliation.

Within a year, as news of the Stigmata spread throughout the region, the people began to protest a rumor that Padre Pio might be moved from San Giovanni Rotondo. This brought increased scrutiny within the Church as the stories of Padre Pio’s special graces spread throughout Europe like a wildfire.

By June of 1922, just four years after the Stigmata, the Vatican’s Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) began to restrict the public’s access to Padre Pio who was accused of self-inflicting his own wounds and sexually abusing penitents. He was even accused of being a political agitator for a fascist group, and helping to incite a riot. His accusers included fellow friars, and neighboring priests, bishops, and archbishops increasingly threatened by Padre Pio’s growing fame and influence. A physician and founder of Rome’s Catholic university hospital labeled Padre Pio, sight unseen, “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited peoples’ credulity.”

Padre Pio and I have this one thing in common. You would not believe some of the things I’ve been called, sight unseen, by people presenting themselves as the voice of the faithful.

From 1924 to 1931, accusation after accusation was investigated by the Holy See which issued a series of official statements denying the supernatural origin of Pio’s wounds and the legitimacy of his gifts. At one point, the charge that his wounds were self-inflicted was withdrawn. Several legitimate examinations found no evidence for this. It was then charged that Padre Pio’s wounds were psychologically self-induced because of his “persistent concentration on the passion of Christ.”

Finally, in the one instance in which I can personally relate to Padre Pio, he responded with sheer exasperation at his accusers: “Go out to the fields,” he wrote, “and look very closely at a bull. Concentrate on him with all your might. Do this and see if horns grow on your head!”

By June of 1931, Padre Pio was receiving hundreds of letters daily from the faithful asking for prayers. Meanwhile, the Holy See ordered him to desist from public ministry. He was barred from offering Mass in public, barred from hearing confessions, and barred from any public appearance as sexual abuse charges against him were formally investigated — again. Padre Pio was a “cancelled priest” long before it became “a thing” in the Church.

Finally, in 1933, Pope Pius XI ordered the Holy Office to reverse its ban on Padre Pio’s public celebration of Mass. The Holy Father wrote, closing the investigation: “I have not been badly disposed toward Padre Pio, but I have been badly informed.” Over the succeeding year his faculties to function as a priest were progressively restored. He was permitted to hear men’s confessions in March of 1934 and the confessions of women two months later.

Potholes on the Road to Sainthood

The accusations of sexual abuse, insanity, and fraud did not end there. They followed Padre Pio relentlessly for years. In 1960, Rome once again restricted his public ministry citing concerns that his popularity had grown out of control.

An area priest, Father Carlo Maccari, added to the furor by once again accusing the now 73-year-old Padre Pio of engaging in sex with female penitents “twice a week.” Father Maccari went on to become an archbishop, then admitted to his lie and asked for forgiveness in a public recantation on his deathbed.

When Padre Pio’s ministry was again restored, the daily lines at his confessional grew longer, and the clamoring of all of Europe seeking his blessing and his prayers grew louder. It was at this time that my friend, Pierre Matthews encountered the beleaguered and wounded saint on the stairs at San Giovanni.

The immense volume of daily letters from the faithful also continued. In 1962, Padre Pio received a pleading letter from Archbishop Karol Wotyla of Krakow in Poland. The Archbishop’s good friend, psychiatrist Wanda Poltawska, was stricken with terminal cancer and the future pope took a leap of faith to ask for Padre Pio’s prayers. When Dr. Poltawska appeared for surgery weeks later, the mass of cancer had disappeared. News of the miraculous healing reached Archbishop Wotyla on the eve of his leaving for Rome on October 5, 1962 for the convening of the Second Vatican Council.

Former Newsweek Religion Editor Kenneth Woodward wrote a riveting book entitled Making Saints (Simon & Shuster, 1990). In a masterfully written segment on Padre Pio twelve years before his canonization, Kenneth Woodward interviewed Father Paolo Rossi, the Postulator General of the Capuchin Order and the man charged with investigating Padre Pio’s cause for sainthood. Fr. Rossi was asked how he expects to demonstrate Padre Pio’s heroic virtue. The priest responded:

“People would better understand the virtue of the man if they knew the degree of hostility he experienced from the Church . . . The Order itself was told to act in a certain way toward Padre Pio. The hostility went all the way up to the Holy Office, and the Vatican Secretariat of State. Faulty information was given to the Church authorities and they acted on that information.”

— Making Saints, p.188

It is one of the Church’s great ironies that Saint Padre Pio was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002 just as the U.S. bishops were implementing a response to the newest media furor about accused U.S. priests. I am one of those priests. The irony is that if the charter the bishops adopted was imposed in Italy forty years earlier, Padre Pio may have been denied any legitimate chance of ever clearing his name. The investigations that eventually exposed those lies simply do not take place in the current milieu.

I’ll live with that irony, and I’m glad Padre Pio didn’t have to. Everything else he wrote to his spiritual director on that fateful morning of September 20, 1918 came to pass. He suffered more than the wounds of Christ. He suffered the betrayal of Christ by Judas, and the humiliation of Christ, and the scourging of Christ, and he suffered them relentlessly for fifty years. As Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote of him in First Things (June/July 2008):

“With Padre Pio, the anguish is not the absence of God, but the unsupportable weight of His presence.”

Fifty years after receiving the Stigmata, Padre Pio’s wounds disappeared. They left no scar — no trace that he ever even had them. Three days later, on September 23, 1968, Padre Pio died. I was fifteen years old — the age at which he began religious life.

In April, 2010, the body of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was moved from its shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo to a new church dedicated in his honor in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI. Padre Pio’s tomb is the third most visited Catholic shrine in the world after the Vatican itself and the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

The New York Times might still spread another story, but the people of God have spoken. Padre Pio was canonized by the sensus fidelium — by the near universal acclaim of believers long before the Church ratified their belief. Padre Pio is a saint of the people.

Some years ago, a priest in Dallas — who read of Padre Pio’s “Patron Saint” status on our About Page sent me a relic of Saint Pio encased in plastic. He later wrote that he doesn’t know why he sent it, and realized too late that it might not make it passed the prison censors. Indeed, the relic was refused by prison staff because they couldn’t figure out what it was. Instead of being returned to sender as it should have been, it made its way somehow to the prison chaplain who gave it to me.

The relic of Saint Pio is affixed on my typewriter, just inches from my fingers at this moment. It’s a reminder, when I’m writing, of his presence at Beyond These Stone Walls, the ones that imprison me and the one I write for. The relic’s card bears a few lines in Italian by Padre Pio:

“Due cose al mondo non ti abbandonano mai, l’occhio di Dio che sempre ti vede e il cuore della mamma che sempre ti segue.”

“There are two things in the world that will never forsake you: the eye of God that always sees you, and the heart of His Mother that always follows you.”

— Padre Pio

Saints alive! May I never forget it!

+ + +

EPILOGUE

In 2017, Pierre Matthews, my friend and Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather, passed from this life. After his death someone in his family sent me a photograph of him kneeling at the Shrine of Saint Padre Pio where he offered prayers for me and for Pornchai.

+ + +

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.”

Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri from His Prisons

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the setting for a profound story of how Mother Mary sought out a son lost in darkness and led him to the light of Divine Mercy.

“The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri.”

Felix Carroll, “Mary Is At Work Here,” Marian Helper magazine

This story describes a most unlikely series of events in a most unlikely series of places. Some of it has been told in these pages before, but putting theses threads together in one place creates an inspiring tapestry of Divine Providence. I first thought of writing about this several months ago at the conclusion of a six-week retreat program in the New Hampshire State Prison.

Over the summer of 2019, Pornchai Moontri and I were asked to take part, for a second time, in the Divine Mercy retreat, 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Father Michael Gaitley. It was offered here in the summer months amid lots of competing activities. The organizers needed 15 participants to host the retreat, but only 13 signed up. So Pornchai and I were to be “the filler.”

We ended up benefitting greatly from the ‘retreat,’ and I think we also contributed much to the other participants. At the end of it, one of the retreat facilitators, Andy Bashelor turned to Pornchai and said “I want you to know that I saw your conversion story. It is the most powerful story I have ever read.” I wrote of this in “Eric Mahl and Pornchai Moontri: A Lesson in Freedom.”

But before returning to that story, I want to revisit something that happened several months before it was posted. Late in the afternoon of December 11, 2018, I was at my desk in the prison Law Library where I use two computer systems side by side. Neither can be used for my own work. I still write posts on an old typewriter.

One computer at my work desk connects directly to Lexis Nexus, a legal database that all law libraries have. The other connects to the prison library system database. As I was shutting down the computers before leaving for the day, I decided to change the background screen on that second computer. For the previous two years it was a graphic image of our Galaxy with a little “You Are Here” arrow pointing to a tiny dot in the cosmos that depicted our solar system. It made me feel very insignificant.

I had but moments left before rushing out the door at 3:00 PM. I called up a list of background screens which displayed only hundreds of numbered graphic files with no way to view them. So I decided to just pick a number – there were pages of them — and get what I get. Then I shut down the system without seeing it.

The next morning, December 12, I arrived at my desk and booted up the computer for work. The image that filled my screen is the one you see here. It’s a magnificent mural in Mexico City. I was not yet even conscious of the date. On the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, from a thousand random numbers, she appeared on my screen and has been there since.

I was not always conscious of any spiritual connection with Mary. Her sphere of influence in my life was first directed to Pornchai Moontri. The segment from Marian Helper magazine atop this post attests to that. I wrote of it in “Crime and Punishment on the Solemnity of Christ the King.”

A Mystery in Her Eyes

But back, for a moment, to Our Lady of Guadalupe which became my favorite among all the Marian images I have come to reverence. Its origin is fascinating. Nearly five centuries ago, on the morning of December 12, 1531, young Juan Diego, an early Aztec convert to Catholicism in the New World, was walking at the foot of Tepayac Hill outside Mexico City.

Days earlier in the same location, Juan Diego heard the beautiful voice of a lady, but saw no one. On this day, she appeared. She instructed Juan Diego to build a church on that spot. She then told him to gather up in his tilma — a shawl that was commonly worn at the time — a bunch of Castillian roses that appeared nearby. Castillian roses were never in bloom in December, but there they were. He was told to bring these to the local bishop.

When Juan Diego removed his tilma in the presence of the bishop and a group of people with him, he and they were surprised to see the roses. But they were stunned to also see imprinted in the tilma an amazing image of a beautiful young woman surrounded by the rays of the Sun with the crescent moon under her feet, surrounded by roses and with angels attending her. The woman had asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop that she is “Coatloxopeuh,” which in Nahuati, the language of the Aztecs, means “The One Who Crushes the Serpent.”

Juan Diego’s tilma, a garment of the poor, was made of coarse fiber completely unsuitable for painting. Since 1666, the tilma image has been studied by artists and scientists who have been unable to explain how the image became incorporated into the very fibers of the tilma. The shawl is the only one of its kind still in existence after nearly 500 years. It is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

Hundreds of years later, in 1929, a photographer revealed that when he enlarged photographs of the Lady’s face on the tilma, other images appeared to be in her eyes. In 1979, scientist and engineer, Dr. Jose Aste Tousman, studied the tilma using more sophisticated imaging equipment enlarging her eyes 2,500 times.

After filtering and processing the images using computers, it was discovered that the Lady’s two eyes contain another imprint — the image of the bishop and several other people staring at the tilma apparently at the moment Juan Diego presented it in 1531. It was a permanent imprint equally appearing upon the retinas of both eyes in stereoscopic vision. It appeared to be what Our Lady of Guadalupe saw when Juan Diego first presented his mysterious tilma to the bishop.

On January 26, 1979, Pope John Paul II offered Mass in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe before an overflow crowd of 300,000. Years later, St. Juan Diego was canonized by him. Now, seemingly by random “accident,” that image is enshrined on the computer screen in the place where I work in prison each day. The mathematical odds against this happening are as astronomical as the odds against the image itself.

Her Summons to Pornchai Moontri

The icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now also on the wall of our cell. It has been widely accepted by many as a representation of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Moon Under Her Feet” as described in the Book of Revelations (12:1). In the Mystical City of God, Venerable Mary of Agreda discerned that evil greatly fears this image, and flees from it.

Both Sacred Scripture and Catholic Tradition are filled with accounts of good men and women who suffer terrible ordeals only to be transformed into great men and women. I told the devastating story of how Pornchai Moontri came into my life in 2005 and all that he endured before and after in “Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

Seemingly by some mysteriously Guiding Hand, the events of both our lives steered us toward the point of our being in the same place at the same time and meeting. After all that Pornchai had suffered in life, he would have had nothing to do with me if not for a 2005 set of articles about me that Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in two parts in The Wall Street Journal (“A Priest’s Story”).

Pornchai read them and was moved that he has met a friend whose life had been unjustly shattered in almost equal measure to his own. It was then that he made a decision to trust me.
In 2007, the next catastrophe in his life took place. After fifteen years in prison, many of them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement, Pornchai was ordered by a U.S. Immigration Judge to be deported to his native Thailand upon completion of his sentence. Pornchai despaired about the prospect of one day being left alone in a country of only vague memories, a country from which he was taken against his will as a young abandoned child.

I told Pornchai in 2007 that we will have to build a bridge to Thailand. He scoffed at this, saying that it was impossible to do from a prison. Then the first sections of the bridge began to be laid out. This was two years before These Stone Walls began in 2009. First, Mrs. LaVern West, a retired librarian in Cincinnati, Ohio also read those WSJ articles and began corresponding with me.

In a return letter, I mentioned my friendship with Pornchai and the challenges we faced. LaVern began researching and printing rudimentary lessons of Thai language and culture and sending them to Pornchai who began to study them. One of the lessons mentioned a Thai language series produced by Paiboon Publishers, a Thai language bookseller in California. So I wrote to them. Pornchai had not heard Thai spoken since before he became a homeless 13 year-old lost in America.

Paiboon Publishers donated a set of Thai language DVDs to the prison library for the exclusive use of Pornchai to study Thai several hours per week. He quickly became proficient in the spoken language of his early childhood. Writing in Thai, however, was simply beyond his grasp. Mine too.

We both gave learning the Thai writing system a serious effort, but it seems just a complex series of squiggles beyond the capacity of most Western adult minds to assimilate. Pornchai reads and writes fluently in English, however, which in Thailand is an asset.

In 2008, the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights published “Pornchai’s Story” as the conversion story of 2008. In 2009, These Stone Walls began, and I also began a quest to make our presence known in Thailand. On the Tenth Anniversary of this blog — in “Prison Journal: A Decade of Writing at These Stone Walls” — I told the story of how it started and the impact it has had on both our lives.

Charlene Duline, a reader of These Stone Walls from Indianapolis, wrote a post for her own blog entitled “Pornchai Moontri is Worth Saving.” I scoffed at it. It was an appeal for an attorney to help Pornchai, but my experience with lawyers left me very pessimistic. Across the globe, trademarks attorney Clare Farr read it and began an investigation into the life of Pornchai in both Thailand and the State of Maine.

My efforts to reach out to Thailand at first seemed to no avail. Everything written and mailed from prison bears a disclaimer stamped on our envelopes declaring that the contents were written and mailed from prison. With only a few exceptions, my letters to anyone I thought might help us were met with silence. Meanwhile, Pornchai was brought into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. This resulted in several articles and a chapter in the book, Loved, Lost, Found, by Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll. [Editor’s note: that chapter is reprinted with permission with important pictures and a stunning video link to a PBS Frontline documentary about the solitary confinement prison cells where Pornchai spent seemingly endless years. This is to be found at the website dedicated to Pornchai: MercyToTheMax.com]

The book was especially powerful, and it made its way to Bangkok where it was read by a prominent group of Catholics who founded a Divine Mercy mission and ministry. The rest is told gloriously in a post I will link to at the end: “Knock and the Door Will Open: Divine Mercy in Bangkok, Thailand.”

My Surrender to Her Fiat

I gradually became aware that what I once thought and hoped was a Great Tapestry of God designed to rescue me was really designed to rescue Pornchai Moontri, and I was but an instrument in a Divinely inspired Script. It became increasingly clear to me why Mary sent another of her spiritual sons, St Maximilian Kolbe, into our lives.

I came to understand in my heart and soul that I am to emulate what he did. I am to offer my life — or at least my freedom — for the salvation of another prisoner upon whom Mary has placed the safety of her mantle. This is how we got to where we are.

Pornchai’s survival has taken on a life of its own as a result of our growing years of trust in Divine Mercy. The Divine Mercy Thailand group has obtained a commitment from the Redemptorists of Thailand and The Father Ray Foundation to receive Pornchai for a period of adjustment and re-assimilation into Thailand and its culture.

I am trying to raise his room & board for a year. When prisoners are deported from America, they are left in a foreign country with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Without contacts in the receiving country, many are doomed. We have learned much about the process of forced deportation from our experience with others. (See: “Criminal Aliens: The ICE Deportation of Augie Reyes.”)

Late on the night of November 22, 2019, I watched on EWTN as Pope Francis was greeted in Thailand in a beautiful ceremony as Thai Catholics in a predominantly Buddhist culture sang for him like an angelic choir. I realized I will be handing Pornchai over to them in a matter of months, and I could not contain my emotions any longer. As Pornchai was fast asleep late at night as I watched Pope Francis being received in Thailand, I began to cry.

I do not know where our long road turns next, but what started as tears of loss and sorrow that night were also tears of triumph. They were the tears of St. Joseph, summoned to a Fatherhood he never envisioned but from which he would never retreat. Through grace, and the gifts of powerful advocates in Heaven and on Earth, we did all this from inside a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire. At every turn I heard Mary’s Fiat to Divine Providence: “Be it done to me according to Thy Word.”

O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

For more on the above story, please read and share these related posts from Father Gordon MacRae:

The Paradox of Suffering: An Invitation from St. Maximilian Kolbe

Knock and the Door Will Open: Divine Mercy in Bangkok Thailand

When Justice Came to Pornchai Moontri, Mercy Followed by Attorney Clare Farr

Advent of the Mother of God

We invite you to like and follow Beyond These Stone Walls Facebook.

Please share this post!

An Important Message from Ryan A. MacDonald:

To the Readers of These Stone Walls:

I have had the honor of twice interviewing Pornchai Maximilian Moontri behind those stone walls, and have written about him. As so many of you know, his story is staggering in the depths of its sorrow and yet inspiring in the heights of his spiritual conversion.

TSW reader Bill Wendell from Ohio has kicked off a funding effort with a gift of $1,000 to assist in the restoration of Pornchai’s life. Readers who wish to join in this effort may do so using the PayPal link at Contact & Support. Please indicate on the PayPal form memo line the name of Pornchai Moontri. You may also have a check made out to Pornchai Moontri forwarded to him at Pornchai Moontri c/o These Stone Walls, P.O. Box 205, Wilmington MA 01887-0205. In either case, these funds will be forwarded to a savings account set aside for Pornchai-Max who will be starting his life over. Thank you.

Pictured above: Pornchai Moontri with Viktor Weyand, his sponsor from Divine Mercy Thailand.

---

My Visit with Pornchai Maximilian Moontri by Claire Dion

Claire Dion, a contributing writer for Beyond These Stone Walls, interviewed Pornchai “Max” Moontri at the New Hampshire State Prison for a tale of hope and amazing grace.

Preface by Father Gordon MacRae

The following is a guest post by Mrs. Claire Dion, a reader of Beyond These Stone Walls in Bridgton, Maine. Claire graced these pages with a Corporal Work of Mercy that touched our hearts in 2017. After two years with us, our friend, Kewei Chen from Shanghai, China, was transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to await his deportation.

After reading of the unique circumstances that brought Chen from China to an American prison, and the pain of our parting as well as our hopes for Chen, Claire drove from her home in Maine to meet with him at the place where he was awaiting deportation. The result of that visit became her first guest post on Beyond These Stone Walls, “My Visit with Kewei Chen in ICE Detention.”

Her post was comforting. From my perspective, and that of Pornchai Moontri who had become Chen’s older brother, the void in our hearts could not be filled, but Claire’s guest post left it not quite so empty. It ended with a wonderful photograph of Chen emailed from the Shanghai airport as he saw his parents for the first time after his unplanned three-year absence.

More recently, Claire asked if she could visit me and Pornchai, a much further winter drive for her. Since prison rules allow for being on the visitor list of only one prisoner, I asked her to visit Pornchai, to treat it as an interview, and to write another guest post for Beyond These Stone Walls.

I did this because, as I have hinted in some previous posts, there is a very special story coming, one that I know will both break your hearts and then mend them again with evidence of the immense power of Divine Mercy to restore the human soul. This story is coming when I am able to fully tell it, and it will be unlike anything you have ever read before on Beyond These Stone Walls.

So as a prelude, I want to present Pornchai “Max” Moontri through the eyes of a reader meeting our friend for the first time. His story should begin, after all, not upon the dung heap of Job where life took him, but at the point to which Divine Mercy has redeemed him out of darkness into a very great light.

Claire Dion is a wife and mother of five adult daughters and a devoted grandmother. She is currently retired from a career as a registered nurse in obstetrics at Lynn, Massachusetts General Hospital. She today lives in Bridgton, Maine where she has been part of the Faith Formation Team at Saint Joseph Parish and a follower of Father Michael Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning Glory and Marian Consecration. It’s an honor to present Claire Dion.

Saturday – January 8, 2018 at 8:00 AM

I pulled into the parking lot of the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord. I will be meeting Pornchai Moontri, a man I have come to know and love from reading Beyond These Stone Walls. Walking into the visiting area where I have to sign in, I feel a little uneasy. I did not have a clue what I was to do and I had not slept the night before as I was afraid I would do something wrong and the visit would be canceled.

Everything went well until I passed through a metal detector and the alarms went off. What was I thinking? I should have realized that two knee replacements and a hip replacement might present a problem. After being sent back to the waiting room with alarm bells ringing, some guards questioned me, and then led me into the visiting room. It was a large room with metal tables and chairs screwed to the floor. Each table was numbered, and I was instructed to go to table number twenty-four.

From a distance I saw Pornchai walk into the visiting room. I realized that he had not seen me before, but I recognized him from Beyond These Stone Walls. So I waved and smiled, and he smiled back. When he got to the table, I asked him if I could give him the allowed “three-second hug.” He laughed while I hugged this man whom I had only read about but was very anxious to meet.

While I was waiting for Pornchai to arrive, I wondered how we were going to fill in a two-hour visit. I was not allowed to bring anything with me so I had no notes to help me remember what I wanted to talk to him about and all the questions I had. I knew that Father Gordon wanted me to write about this visit for Beyond These Stone Walls.

We sat next to each other at the table in a room filled with cameras. The large room was also full of visitors, and, as many of them were children visiting their fathers on a Saturday morning, it was noisy. It took only seconds for us to relax and start talking. From the moment we sat down, I had a sense that I already knew this very special person.

We continued to talk nonstop for the entire two hours. We both felt that it was amazing that we were sitting here together, Pornchai from Thailand and me from Lynn, Massachusetts (which, by the way, is the city just North of Boston where Father Gordon grew up).

Soon we were talking about Pornchai’s incredible journey from a village in Northeast Thailand to Bangor, Maine and ending at the New Hampshire State Prison. I learned that Pornchai was abandoned by his mother at age two and that a teenage relative found him and brought him to live with his family.

Nine years later, when Pornchai was age eleven, his mother returned to Thailand. He did not recognize or even remember her, but against Pornchai’s will he was taken from Thailand and brought to America. A series of traumatic events broke his heart and his soul. That is another story that hopefully Father Gordon will be telling soon at Beyond These Stone Walls.

When Pornchai was fourteen years old, he ran away. He became — though not by choice — a homeless child living on the streets for the second time in his young life, and he spoke little English. While still a teen, he was involved in a struggle that resulted in the death of another man, and he was sent to prison.

While listening to his story, my heart ached as I could see and feel his pain over these events from so long ago. Sentenced to 45 years in a Maine prison, Pornchai continued to have outbursts of anger and rage which landed him in solitary confinement for many years in Maine’s “supermax” prison. [Note: PBS Frontline did a gripping story on that very place and time.]

Pornchai told me that his only plan for life was to never leave prison. It sounded as though he knew he was going to die there, and that was what he wanted. It was his “Plan B” for his life. However, God had other plans for Pornchai Moontri. Fourteen years later, he was moved to a prison in New Hampshire for the rest of his sentence, and Father Gordon MacRae stepped into the story of his life.

Here Pornchai’s eyes and expression softened as he spoke about meeting Father Gordon whom he and other prisoners call “G.” At this point, Pornchai said he felt completely alone, still angry and trusting no one. Another prisoner, a young man from Indonesia, introduced him to a man called “G” and said that G helped him a lot and that he trusted G.

Pornchai watched how G in a caring and patient way helped others and how they trusted him. In his life, the very idea of trust was entirely new. Slowly and cautiously, Pornchai let G into his life and a friendship began.

We talked for awhile about G and I learned that no matter what happens in prison G stays calm. He is a humble, steady person in the midst of the constant turmoil and darkness of prison life, and is always available to any prisoner who comes to him. With a chuckle, I have to add here that I remember Chen telling me that G is a very good man “but you don’t bother him when he is typing a BTSW post!”

“When I Was in Prison, You Came to Me” —Matthew 25:36

It was quite awhile before Pornchai found out that G is a Catholic priest. We spoke about how Father Gordon’s strong faith impressed Pornchai even though many in the Church had abandoned him. Pornchai told me that G’s faith shines in prison, and has attracted some of the prisoners to join him at Sunday Mass and in retreats sponsored by Father Michael Gaitley and the Marians of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy.

Pornchai also said that Father Gordon constantly reaches out to those he feels he can help, and Pornchai was one of them. It was during this conversation that I asked Pornchai to tell Father Gordon how much I love, respect and honor his priesthood.

Through him, Christ’s presence is being felt there, and it is making a difference for many behind those stone walls and many of us BTSW readers.

As their friendship grew, Father Gordon told Pornchai that he must start taking positive steps with his life. He encouraged Pornchai to leave aside “Plan B” and plan instead for a future.

Pornchai began taking education courses, spending his days in school instead of in a cell. He proudly told me that he earned his high school diploma in prison and was Valedictorian of his 2012 graduating class. I listened and learned that his educational journey was just beginning. With Father G’s help, he then enrolled in courses in social work and psychology at Stratford Career Institute earning academic certificates “with highest honors.” This was followed by studies through a scholarship at Catholic Distance University where he took courses in theology with a straight “A” average.

What Pornchai has accomplished is nothing short of amazing given that he learned English in prison. He and “Father G” encourage other prisoners to become educated, and Pornchai now spends time mentoring and tutoring them, especially in mathematics in which he excels. He also spends his days in the woodworking and Hobby Craft shop where he teaches safety training to other prisoners on the use of carpentry tools and machines.

Pornchai designs and builds handcrafted model ships, beautiful Divine Mercy keepsake boxes, and other creations in wood. Some of these are made as gifts and some are sold in a store near the prison grounds. Pornchai used the proceeds to pay for his education courses. Father Gordon later told me that Pornchai is modest about his great skill in woodworking. One of his ships is on display in Belgium where a curator posted a brass plaque indicating that it was designed and created by “Master Craftsman Pornchai Moontri, Concord, New Hampshire.”

Divine Mercy Conversion

As Pornchai’s friendship with Father Gordon deepened, and Pornchai was influenced by his patient practice of faith, he made a decision to become a Catholic. Seeing in the many comments how much Father Gordon’s posts spiritually affect BTSW readers, we talked about how becoming Catholic has helped Pornchai in prison. He received the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation on April 10, 2010. He chose “Maximilian” as his Christian name to honor St Maximilian Kolbe.

On the next day, he received his First Eucharist from Bishop John McCormack. When this was first being planned, neither Pornchai nor Father Gordon realized the date was Divine Mercy Sunday. On that day, Jesus showered Pornchai with His love and mercy and Pornchai felt it. He said that before he became a Catholic he was always feeling unloved and alone. Now he could feel that God was with him and loved him. He also spoke about his love for the Blessed Mother. As he told me this, there was a sense of peace within him.

When I asked Pornchai what he would like me to tell BTSW readers, he became very serious. He said that he and Father Gordon are deeply impacted by the support they receive and that BTSW could not exist without it. They deeply appreciate the love, prayers, and encouragement they receive from readers all over the world. He kept going back to the BTSW readers and how important they are to both of them. He spoke of how he has done nothing to earn this outpouring of love.

Pornchai spoke about the lawyer who has helped him and Chen so much, Clare Farr in Western Australia, and how she learned of him through BTSW. He spoke of Suzanne Sadler, BTSW’s Australian-based webmaster and publisher. He spoke of Father George David Byers who helps ready Father G’s posts for publishing. He spoke of Mrs. LaVern West who prints and mails him the BTSW comments.

Pornchai also said that Father Gordon corresponds with Father Andrew Pinsent, a scientist at Oxford University who has cited his science writings. I mentioned that Father Gordon’s science posts are over my head and Pornchai said with a smile, “Mine too!” In an astonishing connection that Father Gordon later told me about, Father Georges Lemaître, the priest-physicist considered in science to be “Father of The Big Bang and Modern Cosmology,” was a close family friend of Mr. Pierre Matthews in Belgium who today is Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather.

And Pornchai also spoke of Charlene Duline who helps Father G communicate with readers, and is Pornchai’s Godmother. She once sent him a letter in which she called him “precious,” and then other prisoners teased him about it, but he laughed and said that they are jealous because no one calls them precious.

Suddenly the lights in the room flashed on and off. Our visit was over, but not before we were able to have a photograph taken together. With a hug (three seconds only) we said goodbye. I was truly blessed to meet this amazing young man, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and to see Father Gordon through his eyes. I know I will visit him again.

On the coldest day of winter, I left the New Hampshire State Prison with summer in my heart.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

I thank Claire Dion for this snapshot into our lives. In my recent post, “The Days of Our Lives,” I wrote that Pornchai Moontri and our friend, J.J. Jennings work together in the woodworking and Hobby Craft center. The photos below are of their latest project, a Jewelry Cabinet.

The design for a cabinet of this size was by J.J. Jennings, who collaborated with Pornchai Moontri for the highly skilled construction. The one on the right was made by J.J. and the one on the left by Pornchai. The woods for both are solid maple and black walnut. The drawer fronts are maple or black walnut with poplar sides and bottoms. The drawers and side cabinetry doors are lined with velour.

These beautiful pieces are 20” high, 14” width, and 8.5” depth, and are customized with wood-burned or painted designs and brass fittings. The top is hinged with a 2.5”-deep display area. Two of the drawers are for rings and the other drawers are deeper. The intricate side cabinets are for hanging jewelry such as necklaces, bracelets, and rosaries. Other photos of their work can be seen on the Pinterest Board, “Woodworking and Model Shipbuilding by Pornchai Moontri.”

De Profundis: Pornchai Moontri and the Raising of Lazarus

The raising of Lazarus, the sixth of seven signs in the Gospel of St. John, is told “so that you may believe.” The raising of Pornchai Moontri is that story retold.

Some very important things occurred on the day before I sat down to type this post. The day began for me at about 5:00 AM. I was alone in the dark, walking in silent solitude through the dew laden grass of the New Hampshire State Prison Ballfield. There was not another soul in sight. The day’s first light was but a hint of gray barely visible above the walls and razor wire. A few birds were stirring with the dawn’s early light, their song one of hope and serenity. I could smell the grass and the early morning air. All was beautiful. Succumbing to the hypnotic scene, I lay down in the beckoning grass and fell into a deep sleep.

And then I suddenly awoke from that dream to the harsh reality that ushers in my real day. The soft grass instantly transformed into cold concrete, the melody of songbirds into the snores of grown men, the smell of grass and the morning air into the stale and crowded confinement of what sometimes feels like a tomb.

I longed to drift back into my dream, but it was a luxury I could not afford that day. So I rolled over to the edge of my bunk, reached down to the floor, and plugged in a pot of water for coffee. Then I lay in the dark and placed before the Lord the important things of the day that lay before us.

A few minutes later, Pornchai-Max Moontri jumped down from his upper bunk and silently poured hot water into two cups of instant coffee. The other six denizens of our cell still slept as we prepared for a momentous day in prison. At 6:00 AM, Pornchai walked from our cell to a small bank of three telephones to place a long awaited call. For the first time since he was taken from his home and country at age 11 — 32 years ago — Pornchai placed a call to someone in Thailand. And it was not just ANY someone.

It was 6:00 PM in Thailand, and his first call to his homeland was to Yela Smit, a founding member of “Divine Mercy Thailand,” a group that reached across the world to embrace Pornchai with something he had once given up all hope for: a life beyond this long sleep of death in prison. This moment had its origin in one of the most compelling accounts of faith written at These Stone Walls, “Knock and the Door Will Open: Divine Mercy in Bangkok, Thailand.” Just how miraculous is that gift might be clearer below, but first, the story of Lazarus.

“I Have Come To Believe!”

Pornchai himself seemed to provide a prelude to the story of Lazarus. At Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, he stood at the lectern to proclaim the Second Reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians. I found it difficult to distinguish the words from the life’s reality of the man proclaiming them:

“You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth. Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness, rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret, but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.’”

— Ephesians 5:8-14

It amazes me how much those very words proclaimed by Pornchai-Max at Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Lent are both a summation of his life and a prelude to the raising of Lazarus in John 11:1-45. Pay special attention to this Gospel passage for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Before we tell more, it needs a little background.

It was Winter in Jerusalem, and the Feast of the Dedication, the event known to us as Hanukkah. We began Lent at These Stone Walls this year with the background story of this Feast in “Semper Fi! Forty Days of Lent Giving Up Giving Up.” When Jesus went to the Temple at the time of this Feast (described in John 10:22-42), He was walking in the Portico of Solomon on the eastern side of the Temple mentioned in Acts of the Apostles 3:11.

Some of the Jews surrounded him, and challenged him about a circulating rumor that he is the Christ. They wanted him to claim it plainly, and they had taken up stones to execute him for blasphemy if he did. Storm clouds were gathering, and rumbling calls for his death were growing in Jerusalem.

Some Pharisees had been investigating his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath. They first thought the man had been faking his blindness, but witnesses attested that he had been blind from birth. They questioned the formerly blind man about the “sinner” who had healed him, but the man shot back, “Would God listen to a sinner?”

Now, at the Portico of Solomon in the Temple, Jesus spoke of his sheep hearing his voice. He challenged the Pharisees’ spiritual blindness, “If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me.” They took up stones and tried to arrest him, “but he escaped from their hands” (John 10:39). “The Hour of the Son of God” (the Seventh sign) had not yet come.

But then Jesus received word that Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany, was ill. When Jesus heard this, he said, “This illness is not unto death; it is for the greater glory of God, so that the Son of Man may be glorified because of it.” Then he simply took his time, inexplicably letting two more days pass before departing to complete this sixth of seven signs in the Fourth Gospel’s “Book of Signs,” the raising of Lazarus from his tomb, the Gospel for the Fifth Sunday of Lent.

But first, what does the Fourth Gospel mean by its “Book of Signs?” Written in Greek, Saint John’s Gospel uses an interchangeable term – Sêmeion – for both “signs” and “miracles.” The Greek word is used sixty times through the New Testament, seventeen of them in the Fourth Gospel. Since the first six of the Gospel’s seven signs are found in Chapters one through twelve, this part of the Gospel is called “The Book of Signs.”

For this Evangelist, the signs of Jesus are mighty works, but they are also miracles told for a specific purpose. They are “signs” that lift a corner of the veil to point the readers’ gaze to the glory of God working through Christ. The signs of Jesus echo the signs of Moses during the Exodus from Egypt:

“And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and wonders… and for all the mighty wonder and all the great and terrible deeds which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel.”

— Deuteronomy 34:10-12

The Sixth Sign, the raising of Lazarus, concludes the Book of Signs, and makes way for the rest of the Gospel and the Seventh Sign, the final and climactic sign — the Resurrection of Jesus — which Jesus elsewhere calls “The Sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:39).

It is for this reason that the Church permanently chooses the Passion account from the Gospel According to Saint John for the proclamation of the Gospel on Good Friday. It is very different from the other three Gospel accounts. Here, the death of Christ is not just sacrifice and the path to redemption. It is also the moment of the enthronement of Christ the King upon the Cross. As the Seventh Sign, it is the fulfillment of the purpose of all the signs, in just the way that the Evangelist has Jesus presenting the illness of Lazarus: “To bring glory to God.” Martha, the sister of Lazarus, bridges the Sixth and Seventh signs in a dialogue with Jesus about the death of her brother:

“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whoever believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.’”

— John 11:25-27

The Raising of Lazarus

Almost inexplicably in this Gospel account, once Jesus learns of the illness of Lazarus, he “stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (11:7). The account takes great pains to present that by the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus is not asleep or in a coma, but is dead, wrapped and bound in a burial shroud, and sealed in a tomb for four days. There can be no doubt.

The disciples are incredulous that Jesus would even think of going to Bethany in Judea where many of the Jews who had been in Jerusalem have now also gone. “Rabbi, the Jews were but now seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” (John 11:8) The disciples totally misunderstand his reply — “If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble.” Throughout the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is aware that until his “hour” comes, he can walk through all of Judea in safety. (We mined the depths of this “hour” in the Fourth Gospel in a Holy Week post, “Now Comes the Hour of the Son of God.”)

I found the response of Martha (above) to be perplexing at first: “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.” What could Martha mean by “coming into the world?” Jesus is already in the world. It’s a sort of presage of the events to come. Upon the cross, in sight of His mother and the Beloved Disciple, Jesus Himself becomes the Gate of Heaven. The raising of Lazarus is a preface to that event, and with the entire scene set, it is told in the simplest terms:

“‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

— John 11:43-44

With those few words, the Fourth Gospel ends the Sixth Sign by ascribing to Jesus what was once for Israel the sole purview of Yahweh: the power over death, and life. From this point on in the Gospel of John, the Seventh Sign commences as the plot to put Jesus to death gets underway.

Another Chapter in Pornchai’s Story

There were chapters after this one awaiting in the future of Lazarus, but we will never know what they are. But this account echoes across the centuries, and still reverberates in countless lives of those called from death to life. Though Lazarus was physically dead, there is a parallel for those summoned forth from the tombs of spiritual death. One of them is our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and his story is also told to unveil the glory of God.

I cannot tell all of it yet for some important chapters are still being written. But I can tell you this: the full account, when told, will be one of the most important Divine Mercy stories of our time. In the coming months, we hope to tell more of it, for the odds against any of it unfolding as they did are astronomical.

Pornchai’s recent telephone call to Thailand was but the latest step out of darkness into the light, and like Lazarus it leads only to his unbinding and new life. In 2009 when These Stone Walls began, we did not see this as even possible. Somehow, while buried in a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire, we managed to tell a tale that circled the world, and when it came back around to us, it carried with it a multitude of good will and bonds of connection. For Pornchai, this tapestry of grace is still being woven, replacing the threads of only vague dreams and little hope with the powerful weaving of Divine Mercy. All has changed.

Among the instruments of that change is Viktor Weyand who is pictured in the photograph below with Pornchai Moontri. Viktor, an Austrian living in the United States, is a member of Divine Mercy Thailand and a founder of Divine Mercy School in Bangkok. During one of his many visits to Bangkok three years ago, he was asked to investigate the story of a young Thai man in an American prison in New Hampshire. That story drifted around the world from These Stone Walls. As happens among the hidden threads behind every tapestry of grace, Divine Mercy created bonds of connection that gathered strength and then rolled back the stone of Pornchai’s spiritual tomb. And as he put it, “I woke up one day with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past.”

The story of this other Lazarus is coming, and like the first, it will knock your socks off! For, now I can only give you once again the very words from Saint Paul that Pornchai read at Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Lent to open our hearts to the story of Lazarus:

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead. Christ will be your light.”

---

Editor’s Note: You might like these other journeys into the deeper threads of the Tapestry of God in Sacred Scripture from These Stone Walls:

Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah

A Transfiguration Before Our Very Eyes

Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand

On the Road to Jericho: A Parable for the Year of Mercy

Upon the Dung Heap of Job: God’s Answer to Suffering

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

Angelic Justice: St Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Mother’s Day Promises to Keep, and Miles to Go Before I Sleep

Honoring Mom on Mother’s Day brought me to Robert Frost’s most famous poem and its deepest meaning about life, loss, and hope.

You may remember a post I wrote a few years ago entitled “A Corner of the Veil.” It was about my mother, Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, who died on November 5, 2006 during my 12th year in prison. That hasn’t stopped her from visiting, however. I had a strange dream about her a few nights ago, and I keep going back to it trying to find some meaning that at first eluded me.

The United Kingdom celebrates Mothering Sunday on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, but in North America, Mother’s Day is on the second Sunday of May. I wonder if that was what prompted my vivid dream. It was in three dimensions, sort of like looking through one of those stereoscopic View Masters we had long ago. Pop in a disk of images and there they were in three dimensions and living color. My dream was like that, even the color — which is strange because I am colorblind since birth. My rods and cones are just not up to snuff, and though I do see some color, my view of the world is, I am told, not far afield from basic black and white and many shades of gray. Priesthood saved me from a lifetime of wondering why people grimace at my unmatched clothes.

Back to my dream. I was standing on Empire Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, in front of the urban home where I grew up. My mother was standing with me, but in the dream, as in today’s reality, we could not go inside that house because neither of us lived there any longer. My dream contained overlapping realities. It was clear to me that my mother had died, but there she was. And it was clear to me that I am in prison, but there I was with her on that street in front of the home I left forty years ago.

The scene was the stuff of dreams, and it strikes me now that this dream was a reminder of something essential, some truth I could easily let slip away, but must not. I once wrote of that house and that street in an early TSW post called “February Tales.” I wrote of the books that captivated me in childhood, books that I read for hours on end perched high in the treetops along our city street. To this day I can hear my mother calling out a window in her Newfoundland brogue, “IF YOU FALL OUT OF THAT BLOODY TREE AND BREAK YER LEG, DOEN’T COME ARUNNIN’ TO ME!”

As my mother and I crossed the street away from that house in my dream, we spoke, but nothing of that conversation survived in my consciousness except one sentence, and it was perplexing. I said, as I kissed her good-bye, “I have promises to keep.” With a pack over my shoulder in my dream, I turned away to walk toward the end of our city street. In my youth, there was a bus stop there where I could board a bus that would take me the ten miles to Logan Airport or on to Boston’s North Station. From there, I could go anywhere. As I walked down the street in the last scene of my dream, I looked back to see my mother waving. I was leaving. I was always leaving.

You may recognize my final words to my mother in the dream. They are a line from a famous, multi-layered and haunting poem by the great Robert Frost entitled “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Here it is:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

A Life and Death Conversation

I say this poem is multi-layered because all by itself, with no search at all for deeper meaning, it tells a nicely unadorned tale on its surface. However, I believe Robert Frost packed this little verse with profound meaning about life and death. For me, the owner of the woods who lives in the village is God, the Author of Life, our Redeemer from death, and One who calls us to a task that gives meaning to our lives — even when we have no idea what that meaning is just yet. Even when we do not even know the task to which we are called.

There is something haunting and alluring about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. If you have ever stood in the woods at night while it snows, then you know the awesome, mesmerizing silence of that experience. All sound is absorbed, and the powerful sense of aloneness can produce inner peace. But it can also trigger a sense of foreboding, of being cut off from the sounds and sights of humanity, cut off from life in the village. Today’s fear of death is, in its essence, a fear of utter silence, of the world of no more.

Even the poem’s “little horse” is a symbol of the simplicity of our animal nature. The horse ponders not the meaning of the woods, and “gives his harness bells a shake” to bring his rider back to his senses. “We’ve no reason to stop here.” The horse knows nothing of his rider’s yearning for surrender, for a time of removal from the civilization and social responsibility in which the Owner of those woods is engaged in the village ahead.

It’s okay to stop by the woods on a snowy evening. We just can’t stay there. Not yet. Robert Frost’s woods represent death. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” and they stand in the poem as an invitation to final surrender and rest. “Sleep” in the poem is a metaphor for death, just as it is for Jesus as he awakens Lazarus from the sleep of death:

“‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.’ Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead; and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we too may die with him.’”

— John 11: 11-16

If you have read this far, and my analysis of Robert Frost’s poem hasn’t put you to sleep, then like me you might wonder what exactly I meant when I whispered to my mother that “I have promises to keep.” The dream didn’t spell it out for me, so I had to search for its deeper meaning.

In our poem, the rider seems to be on a journey, though Frost gives us no indication of its purpose or destination. At the end of his journey, the rider has “promises to keep” but the woods, “lovely, dark, and deep” are an enticing release from both the journey and his burdens. But the responsibility of his promises pulls harder than the woods, and his release — his inevitable death — is postponed. The rider moves on toward his destiny and the fulfillment of his promises — both those he has made and those made to him. He moves on, as I did in the dream of my mother, with “miles to go before I sleep.”

The Promise

My mother died a terrible death, having suffered for three years from hydrocephalus, the build-up of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. It was misdiagnosed in her early seventies, and by the time it was properly diagnosed, it could not be treated. She visited me in prison with a cane, and then a walker, and then a wheelchair, and then, for the last year of her life, not at all. Though only sixty miles away from my prison, she could not even speak with me by telephone for the last six months of her life. She became paralyzed, and entered a prison of her own.

In our last visit in the New Hampshire State Prison visiting room a year before my mother died, I told her I was sorry for what had become of my life and my priesthood. Most mothers of priests — especially Irish mothers — take a certain pride in the priesthood of their sons. My mother left this world with her own priest-son in prison. I worried about the wounds to her pride my false imprisonment wrought.

But all was not lost. There was grace even in that. Sometime near Mother’s Day I hope you might read anew — or for the first time — “A Corner of the Veil.” It describes a promise I made to my mother that I would never take the easy way out of the crisis to which priesthood brought me. I intend to keep that promise, and in a dream last week, my mother showed up to help strengthen its resolve. But more than that, “A Corner of the Veil” is about the continuity of relationship between the living and the dead. That post described a very subtle but deeply meaningful connection with my mother beyond this life, and I might have missed it if I let the growing spiritual cynicism of this world take root in prison and take my faith as it grew and festered.

What I described in that post is a true tale, and a powerful one, and I haven’t yet recovered from the nudge — a smack upside the head, really — from my mother. It was her wake-up call to me to stop by the woods on a snowy evening just long enough to peer through a corner of the veil between this life and the next, and to renew my engagement with both the mysteries and promises of my faith despite where I must, for this moment, live it.

I have heard from so many readers Beyond These Stone Walls asking me for prayers for their mothers, living and dead, some beloved and some estranged, some deeply missed and some slowly leaving this world. On Mother’s Day I promise, the Owner willing, to offer Mass for all the readers of Beyond These Stone Walls who are mothers, and for all of your mothers. Those who have passed from this life are, I think, also reading, and they can hold me to it. Perhaps they’ll gather. Perhaps they’ll even plot. Were that the case, my mother would surely be in Heaven!

We, the living, have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep. First among those promises is to engage in a vibrant life of faith that opens itself to the continuity of life between this world and the next, something our culture of death denies.  Fostering that faith, and making fertile its ground, is a great responsibility, and the source of all freedom. That’s the absolute truth! Just ask Mom!

“And he said to them, ‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them. And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things within her heart.”

— Luke 2: 49-51