Eternal Life Matters: Spiritual Survival in Trying Times

#EternalLifeMatters because God is a God of the living, not of the dead. As political and cultural chaos descends all around us, it is our end game that matters most.

October 25, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

One of my favorite political columnists is Gerald F. Seib. He is retired now, but still writing occasional feature articles. For several years, he wrote The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Capital Journal” column. He always managed to open my eyes to a more panoramic view of what is going on in America and throughout Western Culture. On October 6, 2020, his title was, “Turning-Point Year Heads to Parts Unknown.”

My immediate concern was what he meant by “turning point” and “parts unknown.” You may not be able to see this landmark column without a WSJ subscription, but I don’t think Mr. Seib will mind if I summarize his main points. There have been times in the history of this nation when one shocking event after another became an “inflection point” that turns the culture in a new direction and ushers in a new era with a radical redirection of the future. For example, in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Civil War broke out which in historical hindsight turned out to be a major inflection point for this nation. In 1932, the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal which was not nearly as radical as the left’s proposed “Green New Deal,” but nonetheless was an inflection point for life in America.

By the standard of shocking points that become “inflection points,” the year 2020 appears to be one of these moments in history. A global pandemic, four years of a highly contentious and divided political climate, a major party turning decisively left while the party in power turns the Supreme Court decisively right. The Covid pandemic has changed everything about us in just three years. It has altered how we live, interact, work, and recreate. It has also greatly altered our politics. It has become very important to sift through the politics of Covid lest we repeat them to our detriment. For example, potential courses of treatment became shunned, not for medical reasons but for political ones. The shuttering of schools and churches while liquor stores and casinos remained open had the effect of shattering rational dialogue about what is good for America and Americans. The origins of Covid, necessary to identify, were defined based on politics and not science. I wrote of this to much criticism from the left in “Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media.”

Polls have been little help as predictors of what comes next for either our politics or our culture. Our lives as individuals also experience a kind of “inflection point” tendency in the face of crisis. A radical change of direction within ourselves is usually associated with some sort of event or a series of events. Here is a small example. You likely recall that our friend, Pornchai Moontri, stepped onto my path after spending several years in a solitary confinement prison. For a view of how life-changing and destructive that was, see the riveting PBS Frontline documentary “Locked Up in America — Solitary Nation,” a production that depicts the very prison and cell that held my friend for fourteen years, seven in one long grueling stretch.

Just before writing this post, I received a lengthy message from John C., a young man who was in that same prison with Pornchai and knew him well. They helped each other to survive. John wrote to me after coming across posts about Pornchai’s current life at Beyond These Stone Walls. He was deeply impacted not only by the revelations about all that Pornchai suffered in life, but by the story of his Divine Mercy conversion. John wrote that he was brought up Catholic as a child, but became an atheist in prison.

When Pornchai told me sixteen years ago that he does not believe in God, I told him that I, too, lost all faith as a young man. I said that I awoke one morning uttering the words, “God, I do not believe in you.” What I heard simultaneously in my head and in my heart was, “Just be glad it isn’t mutual!” That was one of the inflection points in my life at age 16, and hearing about it became one of Pornchai’s as well. Perhaps that may also become true for John. The mere fact that he is now reading this blog of all things is a signpost of its own.

As for Pornchai, I do not think he could have coped with all that he endured if he had not become a person of faith. After leaving prison in September 2020, he spent the next five months imprisoned not only in an ICE deportation warehouse in Louisiana, but by Covid which left all international travel frozen in place. He was packed into a room with seventy ICE detainees — most from Central America, where the noise was unbearable and the blazing lights were kept on 24/7. He was sleep-deprived and suffered terribly. However, he also reached out to help several others who suffered much more. He protected and helped a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese refugee who spent a year in that place before we were able to help hasten his return to his mother and family in Vietnam. Pornchai recruited me to find others to assist “Tri.” In Vietnam he is still in touch with Pornchai and me. He does not understand the Catholic use of the word “Father.” So in his messages he refers to me as “Dad Gordon.”

A conversation between Father G and Pornchai Max, “breaking through ICE.”

Bearing the Cross of My Neighbor

With the help of BTSW reader Claire Dion, who put two cellphones together enabling us to communicate for about ten minutes each day, Pornchai and I were able to talk by phone during his five months in ICE detention. Pornchai himself wrote of the impact of this time, and his survival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

I wrote recently in these pages a post entitled “The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God.” I wrote it because each week when I sit down to write a post, I look at the Mass readings for the Sunday that will follow it. That is often, besides the depressing news, my first source for something to write about. In the post I just cited, the Prophet Isaiah’s unintended connection to current events was striking. The connections in this post with the next Sunday’s Gospel (from Matthew 22:34-40) are much more subtle, but they are in there and I hope to pull them out. The connections of the First Reading (from Exodus 22:20-26) are much more clear:

“Thus says the Lord: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”

It is one thing to require that an alien observe the laws on entering and remaining in a country legally. It is quite another to treat him as something less than a human being.

In Sunday’s First Reading from the Book of Exodus (22:20-26), if the oppressed alien in your midst cries out to me, “I will surely hear him, for I am compassionate.” That compassion is an attribute of God that is supposed to be a life-changing inflection point for us.

The Gospel, from Matthew 22:34-40, is much more subtle. It opens with an account that the Pharisees gathered when they learned that Jesus had somehow managed “to silence the Sadducees.” How Jesus did that requires a little background. The Sadducees make a brief, but important appearance in the Gospels. Their approach to Jesus is consistently hostile. They are a caste of priestly aristocrats who manage the affairs of the Jerusalem Temple. But their management is primarily political.

The Sadducees reject the Hebrew Prophets and all Scripture except the Pentateuch, the first five books that comprise the Torah, also called the Books of Moses. That is their sole source of religious consideration. They arose in the Second Century BC as a political interest group whose most important goal is to remain in good stead with whatever occupying force has swallowed up Jerusalem. In the case of the Gospel, it is the Roman Empire. The Sadducees are well represented in my post reflecting on John 19:15: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”

The Sadducees also reject the existence of angels, an afterlife, and resurrection from the dead. They took their name from the High Priest, Zadok, who served the Temple under King Solomon centuries earlier. They were political and doctrinal enemies of the Pharisees who took great interest in the fact that Jesus silenced them. He did so, as he is prone to do with the Pharisees as well, by trapping them in the hypocrisy of their own words.

To discredit the words of Jesus about resurrection, they concocted a story based on a fragment of law from the Book of Deuteronomy (25:5-6) holding that if a man dies childless, his brother is to take his wife and fulfill his duty to bear a son to continue his deceased brother’s name. The Sadducees presented Jesus with a query about a woman who lost seven husbands, taking in marriage each of the surviving brothers in turn. “In the resurrection,” they asked, “which of the seven will she be wife?” Jesus could have cited the Prophets on the hope of resurrection, but he knew the Sadducees rejected them. So he cited the only Scripture to which they gave credence:

“Have you not read what was said to you by God? ‘I Am the God of your Fathers, of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

By declaring the Patriarchs of Israel — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — to be alive and in the Presence of God, Jesus amazed the crowd and silenced the Sadducees who had no response.

The Pharisees and Saduccees Come to Tempt Jesus by James Tissot (cropped)

The Greatest Commandment

Having satisfied themselves that Jesus is right and the Sadducees most certainly wrong about resurrection, the Pharisees in this Gospel account (Matthew 22:34-40) went on to test Jesus further. One of them, “a lawyer” set up a question. The Greek word this Gospel account used for “lawyer” is “νομικός,” found only once in Matthew’s Gospel, but six times in Luke’s. The word is synonymous with “Scribe,” and therefore denotes a man very well versed in both the Law and the Prophets. The question posed is this “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Laws?”

Jesus answers, as he did previously with the Sadducees, by a quote from the Torah in the Book of Deuteronomy (6:4-5) laid out in the chapter following the Ten Commandments given to Moses:

“Hear, O Israel, The Lord your God is One Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

But then Jesus shocks the Pharisees by finding in their Torah a necessary addendum to their Great Commandment. He quotes from another Book of Moses, the Book of Leviticus (19:18) to lay out the fulfillment of the first part, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“On these two Commandments,” says Jesus, “depend all the Law and the Prophets.” In another Gospel passage, the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37), another lawyer stood up to put him to the test with a question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer is “Keep the Commandments,” and the Commandments referred to are those cited from the Torah – not the Ten, but the Two. The Love of God is rendered empty and false without its logical manifestation: love of neighbor and the bearing of his cross.

In the end, the Scribes and Pharisees employ even their theological enemies, the Sadducees, to stack the court when they haul Jesus before Pilate. The Way of the Cross and the rejection of God in the flesh was a mirror image of today’s effort to deny our true destiny: Life! and not just this one! Eternal Life Matters!

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

As the Church prepares to honor our beloved dead on the Solemnity of All Souls, you can silence any lingering doubts of Sadducees with “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.”

Writing from Thailand as I began a 30th year of unjust imprisonment, Pornchai Moontri wrote “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

And lastly, if you have been concerned by news out of Rome and Germany about fears of a schismatic synod, you might like my post “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.”

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.”

In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo

Actor Robert De Niro has been cast as a Catholic priest in three films : True Confessions, The Mission, and Sleepers. The latter tells a spellbinding true story.

June 14, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I began this post in May, 2019, but a lot has happened since then that caused me to want to start over. This is an important story about a topic still front and center in the world of Catholic affairs: the Catholic sex abuse crisis. If you’re just plain sick of it, well, frankly, so am I. Both mainstream and Catholic media are still saturated with it. I last wrote of it in April, 2023 in “Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report.”

Fans of Robert De Niro the actor are not necessarily also fans of Robert De Niro the person. Whatever the reasons for that distinction, I want to write of his outstanding roles as a Catholic priest in three controversial films: True Confessions (1981), The Mission (1989) and Sleepers (1996). In each, his character became embroiled in an unforgettable moral quagmire.

The term, “quagmire” first appeared in British literature in 1570. It combines two older British terms, “quag,” with its origin in the word, “quake,” and “mire,” which means to find oneself bogged down in something. A quagmire was first used to refer to becoming trapped in a bog which looks solid enough to walk upon, but then entraps a person in the unseen muck. Today it is used to refer to a situation that seems innocent enough on its surface, but entraps a person in a moral dilemma.

In each of the films above, Robert De Niro portrayed a priest caught up in such a quagmire. I have written before of one of them. In True Confessions, based on a novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne, De Niro was cast in the role of Monsignor Desmond Spellacy. Groomed to become Archbishop of Los Angeles, Spellacy becomes marginally implicated in the murder of a prostitute, a crime being investigated by his L.A. homicide detective brother portrayed by Robert Duvall.

The moral quagmire of True Confessions is that the priest is entirely innocent of the crime, but is he innocent of any knowledge of it? If he knows, how does he know? The title of the film and book gives a hint to the nature of the moral quagmire, a nightmare scenario for many Catholic priests.

But the De Niro role that I want to focus on for this post is that of “Father Bobby” Carillo in Sleepers, a 1996 film based on a book of the same title by Lorenzo Carcaterra published in 1995 but written in 1994, the year of my imprisonment. The story reads like a novel, but it is actually a biographical account in which Carcaterra has changed the names of his characters to protect the innocent.

The book and film unfold in the Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan in 1966 when I was in high school. Hell’s Kitchen was then a poor bastion of mostly Irish Catholics in a tough neighborhood — a term used here with an emphasis more on “hood” than “neighbor.”

In Sleepers, Robert De Niro’s character, Father Bobby, is in stark contrast to much of the media portrayal of Catholic priests since then. He is a priest as tough as the neighborhood in which he lives. Father Bobby meets a group of adolescent boys who hang out in the neighborhood. All have absent fathers or abusive fathers, or both, and over time Father Bobby comes to fulfill a role that today would land him squarely in the crosshairs of societal and media suspicion.

Father Carillo’s Moral Quagmire

Father Bobby does not indoctrinate these street kids into faith. That is something he walks more than talks. I hope you catch the meaning of that because it is central to fatherhood. Father Bobby does not drag them into church. Instead, he protects them, cares for them, challenges them, and becomes a father to them and the sole person on Earth that any of them trust. His lack of Catholic indoctrination might not be the witness some of us might hope for, but it is clearly the witness that these boys most need. One of the saddest aspects of the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis of suspicion in the Church is that such a scenario could never happen again.

But even in 1966, as the story unfolds, Father Carillo is keenly aware of appearances and the necessity of professional distance. As an indirect result of keeping his emotional connection to these young men in check, he is one day not present to them when trouble finds them. Several of them commit a petty crime that escalates. A corrupt judge and court system sentences them to time in “juvey” a New York juvenile detention facility. While there, four of them “earn” a stint in solitary confinement. Sleepers is the slang term for juvenile delinquents serving more than six months in solitary confinement.

While there, they are demoralized and dehumanized beyond description. They are beaten by guards and several of them are repeatedly and brutally raped. To make the awful story shorter, they survive and are restored to freedom but could never be “free” again. They emerged from their nightmare destroyed as men, but they hide the truth. They make a pact to never reveal any of this to Father Bobby — first and foremost because they are ashamed.

Twenty years pass. The 14-year-old boys are now 34-year-old men. One became a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office. Most of the others became street thugs having dropped out of school and all engagement with the human race as a result of what they endured at the hands of the State. All of them occasionally still see Father Bobby, and to a man, they still trust and revere him.

I have to remind readers at this point that this is not some seedy fictional story. It is a true account. In the early 1990s when Lorenzo Carcaterra wrote it, the mainstream media had no interest in the story because the priest in the account is not the perpetrator of sexual abuse, but rather the savior of its victims. And lest you choose to believe that such abuse could not happen in a state run juvenile justice facility, I have firsthand knowledge to the contrary.

At the time Sleepers was written in 1994, my friend Pornchai Moontri was in the solitary confinement unit of the Maine State Prison for nearly seven years. The news venue, PBS Frontline produced a segment on that very same place filmed just months after Pornchai was transferred from there to the New Hampshire State Prison. If you have never viewed PBS Frontline’s Solitary Nation [part1, part2] , be brave and consider doing so. The abuse by guards is all masked because they were on camera and knew it, but the true nature of such a place remains clear.

The Reckoning

Back to Sleepers. One day, some twenty years after Father Bobby’s friends emerged from solitary confinement, two of them ventured into a dark neighborhood bar. Seated alone in a booth was “Nokes,” the most monstrous and sadistic of the guards who sexually assaulted and dehumanized them twenty years earlier. By the end of the day, his victims exacted the justice denied.

In the aftermath, Father Carillo learned the entire truth of what happened to these men in juvenile detention. He then had to wrestle with the deepest, most perplexing moral quagmire of his life as a man and as a priest. He was told by their lawyer that he alone could save them with an alibi defense. All of this painfully reminded me of another story told in my post, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

Most who have read that story agree that all the media hype about the supposed crimes of Catholic priests — some sadly true but many not at all — pale in comparison to the crimes committed against Pornchai and his mother. And yet, the survivor in that story, like the survivors in Sleepers, fled not from the Catholic Church but to it. Pornchai himself confirmed this in a post written upon his arrival in Thailand, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai and I had another friend, TJ, who was released from prison only to find himself back here at age 26 with a new petty offense. Just after Pornchai left in 2020, TJ was moved from solitary confinement to a crowded cellblock. He unpacked his few possessions and obtained a pass to come to see me in the prison Law Library. With his head bowed in silent shame for his failure to live uprightly in freedom, he told me only that life was hard and he “did something stupid.” I don’t know the details.

What I do know, and it is well documented, is that for much of his young life until he was old enough to escape, TJ was a victim of unspeakable sexual and physical violence. The pairing of sex and violence is especially psychologically destructive. Like the young men in Sleepers, TJ and Pornchai both carried in their hearts a devastating devaluation of their lives. With every day in “fight or flight” mode, freedom was stolen from them long before prison.

As an accused Catholic priest, one would think that I would be the last person TJ would want anything to do with, but Pornchai and I taught him that he need not be forever defined by the sins of others. We did not allow his past to excuse his present and neither should he, but we also placed his offenses into the totality of his life. We saw through his façade and challenged him too grieve his past without letting it rule his present.

So I, too, was in a quagmire here — with Pornchai and TJ and others. I was left with the irony of sheltering them not only from what happened to them, but also from what happened to me. When leaders of the Church built upon God’s Truth, God’s Justice and God’s Mercy reflected none of these, I covered for them in the presence of Pornchai and TJ. They looked to the Church for healing and hope, and I could never deprive them of that. Neither could Father Bobby Carillo.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: This post ends in another glaring irony. At the time my diocese was besieged by a grand jury report from the State of New Hampshire in 2003, the State was itself hiding an enormous sexual abuse scandal brought by former residents of its Youth Detention Center. Over the last year, that story had come to light.

The Diocese of Manchester paid $30 million in unquestioned mediated settlements over the last 30 years, while state officials raked the Church over the coals. Now the State of New Hampshire has earmarked $100 million to settle in excess of 1,300 pending lawsuits against the state. One attorney described this as “the largest child abuse case in U.S. history.” Unlike its treatment of the Catholic Church, however, the State has not convened a grand jury to investigate and create a grand jury report as has happened to Catholic institutions across the land. Apparently, for the State some things are best left in the dark.

You may also be interested in these related links:

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

Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester

Judge Clears Way for Hundreds of YDC Child Abuse Lawsuits

Judge Questions AG’s Conflict at Heart of YDC Cases

Courtesy of NH Business Review

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

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

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded

Silencing the truth is never in the service of the Church. For one wrongly imprisoned priest, the buried truth and uncovered lies have both been crosses to bear.

“Have no fear, for nothing is covered over that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What you hear in the dark utter in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim from the rooftops.”

Matthew 10:26-29

Editor’s Note: The following is Part 2 of a guest post by Father George David Byers, SSL, STD. Part 1, was “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits.”

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Last week here at Beyond These Stone Walls, I presented some examples of a plague of omertà that has arisen in recent decades in the Catholic Church in America. Omertà is an insidious code of silence that can too easily become a part of mob justice, influencing someone to set aside truth in deference to the mob’s preferred or demanded truth. Omertà empowered the mafia, but it has no place in the Catholic Church.

When fearlessly digging into truths that some want to be kept hidden and not shouted from the rooftops, other truths are also necessarily unearthed. Before delving into some truths in the form of some affidavits by courageous people revealed here in Part 1 of this post, I want to tell you a true story. It was revealed to me by the great Pornchai Maximilian Moontri who now dwells in the Kingdom of Thailand.

Pornchai has helped me to understand a truth that is nearly universal among those who have in fact been victims of sexual assault. The only thing that is as obnoxious to them as having been raped is to see their own sufferings capitalized upon by false accusers for money, and by clericalists who make themselves into heroes by paying out settlements with no evidence or due process of law. Priests are too often considered guilty just for being accused.

Pornchai conveyed the story of one day being in the cell alone with Father Gordon. They had been cell mates for about two years then. It was about a year before Father Gordon’s blog began. Father G was reading his mail and said to Pornchai, “This woman wants to know if I am safe here.” Pornchai responded spontaneously and with total sincerity: “Does she mean from us or from other priests?” Then the next letter Father G opened was from a priest of his diocese to whom he had written. The priest returned his letter with a note on the envelope: “Communication with you is neither prudent nor welcome.”

Prison, by nature, is often a violent place. As a child of 12 brought to the State of Maine from a foreign country, Pornchai became a victim of violent sexual abuse. Father Gordon wrote that shocking story in “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.” When Pornchai went to prison at age 18, he dealt with the prison violence in the only way he could. He vowed that he would never again be someone’s victim. So he understandably met violence with violence of his own. It landed him in repeated long years in solitary confinement. After 14 years, Pornchai was transferred to the New Hampshire prison.

(Not long after, PBS Frontline produced a feature about the very solitary confinement cell in which Pornchai had spent years. PBS Frontline “Solitary Nation” should not be missed.)

In New Hampshire, Pornchai ended up in a cell with a man accused and convicted of the very thing that destroyed his life. It did not take him long — with his innate alertness to predation — to discover that Father G had been falsely accused. Pornchai once told me this story that I held off writing until he was out of the prison system:

“One day, I got a notice from the prison mental health department that a new 2O-week program was beginning called ‘Interpersonal Violence.’ My friend Father G thought it might be an opportunity for me so I said I would go if he goes with me. So we both signed up for it. Prison is filled with needy young men who have really broken lives. Some of them look for safe, comfortable older prisoners who might buy them things and take care of them. The result is a sort of mutual exploitation and prisons are filled with this. One young kid, about 19, who was attending the program quickly tried to latch on to Father G without knowing anything about him. I was going to speak with him, but decided to wait.

“Over the next few sessions as I sat next to Father G, I was aware of how this kid was skillfully trying to gain his interest and maneuver his way into his life, but Father G was oblivious to it. Later that night I told him what I observed, but he had no idea what I was talking about. At the next session, Father G and I simply agreed to switch seats. In all his years in prison, Father G has been surrounded by people like this, many of them young drug addicts who would sell their soul for a few bucks for drugs. In all those years, Father G was never observed or even suspected of having any interest in them at all except to show those receptive to it a way out of their prison within a prison.”

The Egregious Double Standard of Justice

There is a lot more to Pornchai’s story of his years with Father Gordon MacRae in prison. As he came to trust Father G, he had a growing awareness of things changing for the better in his life. After a few years, Pornchai made a decision to become a Catholic. He was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday an event related beautifully by Felix Carroll in a chapter in his Divine Mercy Conversion book, Loved, Lost, Found.

In the years to follow, Father Gordon’s writing about Pornchai’s life garnered some attention in both the United States and across the globe, especially in Thailand where that story began. Thanks to Father Gordon’s writing, Pornchai’s tormentor was brought to justice 33 years after he brought destruction to this young man’s life. I am not certain we can actually call it justice, however.

In late 2017, Richard Alan Bailey was arrested at his Oregon home and indicted on forty (40) felony charges of sexual violence against Pornchai at ages 12-14. There was much evidence against him discovered in the form of police reports, school reports, social services battered child reports, medical reports, but none of it ever resulted in action. In September 2018, Richard Alan Bailey entered a plea of “no contest” but was found guilty on all forty counts in a Maine court. Bailey was sentenced to forty years in prison, all suspended, and 18 years probation. He will never serve a single day in prison.

Meanwhile, Pornchai was very much aware that in the neighboring State of New Hampshire, Father Gordon MacRae refused a plea deal that would have resulted in one year in prison, then was found guilty of five charges with no evidence at all and sentenced by a bitterly anti-Catholic judge to 67 years in prison. Pornchai was also aware that Father Gordon’s bishop and diocese stacked the jury with a pre-trial press release pronouncing him guilty of victimizing not only his accusers, but the entire Catholic Church.

Pornchai says that Father G “led by example” when explaining to him that bitterness and resentment over past wounds, however deep, are “like a toxic brew that you put in your own tea, and then drink to your own spiritual peril.”

On that Divine Mercy Sunday when Pornchai was received into the Church in 2010, it just happened to be a day that Bishop John McCormack offered his annual Mass at the Concord, New Hampshire prison. He Confirmed Pornchai in his faith and gave him First Eucharist, but never spoke a single word to Father Gordon. In the prison chapel sacristy after Mass, Pornchai shook Bishop McCormack’s hand. “You have a good friend,” said the Bishop who had read the accounts of Pornchai’s life. “You have a good priest,” Pornchai responded.

Father Gordon saw to it that Pornchai came into the Catholic faith with eyes open about the meaning and power of both sin and grace. “If these events had not happened to me,” Father Gordon said, “Pornchai and I would have never met.” He challenged Pornchai to rise above resentment, and it was in the rising that they both found grace. This was a story, however, in which the insidious practice of Omertà, that evil code of silence that I wrote about here last week, has played a destructive role. In First Things magazine in 2008, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote:

“The Bishop and the Diocese of Manchester do not come off as friends of justice, or, for that matter, of elementary decency. You may want to read this Kafkaesque tale then you may want to pray for Fr. MacRae, and for a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

— A Kafkaesque Tale

Affidavits Expanded

In my first installment of this post, “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church,” I revealed two affidavits prepared by a New Hampshire lawyer and a senior executive of PBS which produces the award-winning investigative news program Frontline. The affidavits were entirely independent from each other. They describe meetings with former Diocese of Manchester Bishop, the late John McCormack. To recap, the following are the most pertinent statements in these affidavits:

From the Affidavit of Attorney Eileen A. Nevins:

“In June of 2000, I met with New Hampshire Bishop John McCormack at the Diocesan office .… During this meeting with Bishop McCormack and [Auxiliary] Bishop Francis Christian, they both expressed to me their belief that Father MacRae was not guilty of the crimes for which he was incarcerated.”

From the Affidavit of Leo P. Demers:

“During October 2000, I met with Bishop John McCormack at the Diocesan office in Manchester, New Hampshire .... The meeting with Bishop McCormack began with him saying, ‘Understand, none of this is to leave this office. I believe Father MacRae is not guilty and his accusers likely lied. There is nothing I can do to change the verdict.’”

Fortunately, Mr. Demers prepared careful notes immediately following his meeting. They provide a most helpful context for what was going on in the background in the Diocese of Manchester at the time. The transcript is fascinating, and I begin it here with the initial telephone call to Auxiliary Bishop Francis Christian at the Manchester Chancery office:

LEO DEMERS: “I am calling from WGBH-TV in Boston ... I am concerned that Fr. Gordon MacRae was being considered as a feature story for Frontline here on PBS. Since you are the only person left in the Chancery Office who was there at the time of the accusations and trial ... I would like to meet with you to discuss the matter.”

[Note from Father Byers: Just four months earlier, but unknown by Mr. Demers, Bishop Christian attended a meeting with Bishop McCormack and Attorney Eileen Nevins. At that meeting, as per the affidavit of Attorney Nevins above, Bishop Christian was quite clear in his view that Father MacRae was not guilty. Did something happen in the interim? Given his stacking of the jury in his 1993 pre-trial press release, was he intimidated by someone in the news media? Read on … ]

BISHOP CHRISTIAN: “This is not my responsibility. I have nothing to do with that. You will have to speak with Bishop McCormack.”

LEO DEMERS: “But you were part of what happened at that time and would have firsthand knowledge of all that occurred. Bishop McCormack was in Boston when all this happened.”

BISHOP CHRISTIAN: “You will have to speak with Bishop McCormack. He is the one who is responsible. I can arrange for you to have a meeting with him.”

LEO DEMERS: “I would rather meet with you.”

BISHOP CHRISTIAN: “Bishop McCormack handles all such inquiries. You will have to call him yourself or I can arrange a meeting with him for you.”

[ Note from Father Byers: Mr. Demers noted that he would be in Israel and the Middle East for the next two weeks. His notes indicate that a meeting was scheduled with Bishop McCormack for October 13, 2000, and that Father MacRae knew nothing of this planned meeting. He writes that upon arrival at the Chancery he was escorted to Bishop McCormack’s office. The Bishop spoke first: ]

BISHOP McCORMACK: “I don’t want any of this to leave this office because I have struggles with some people in the Chancery office that are not consistent with my thoughts, but I firmly believe that Father MacRae is innocent and should not be in prison.”

[Note from Father Byers: Mr. Demers then wrote in his notes: “This knocked the wind out of my sails. It seems to me that the wrongful imprisonment of Fr. Gordon is ongoing. Those concerned with this matter could be subpoenaed by a court of law or by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).” The transcript continued: ]

LEO DEMERS: “You know why I am here. I assume Bishop Christian has informed you of our phone conversation and my desire to speak with him. You are a busy man. Bishop Christian has firsthand knowledge of the events surrounding Fr. MacRae’s incarceration.”

BISHOP McCORMACK: “He was tried and found guilty.”

LEO DEMERS: “With all due respect, your Excellency, I was there and you were not. There was nobody present representing the Manchester Diocese.”

BISHOP McCORMACK: “I mentioned to you that I believe he is innocent. I plan on meeting with him when I visit the prison during the coming Christmas season and I will discuss this.”

LEO DEMERS: “You said that your hands were tied because of your belief in his innocence. How can you help him?”

BISHOP McCORMACK: “I want to do what I can to make his life more bearable under the circumstances of prison life. I cannot reverse the decision of the court system. What can I do?”

LEO DEMERS: “It is not a flawless judicial system. Many innocent people fall through its cracks. Correcting an injustice is a formidable task and Fr. Gordon does not have the resources to even begin the process.”

Epilogue: The Spin

The promised Christmas meeting with Father MacRae in prison never took place. On February 15, 2002, Bishop McCormack, Bishop Christian, and Father Edward Arsenault held a press conference to release the names of all priests of the Diocese who were “credibly accused.” Father MacRae was not on that list. (That scene is depicted in the graphic atop this post with, left to right, Father Edward J. Arsenault, Bishop Francis X. Christian, and the late Bishop John B. McCormack at the podium.)

Over the course of the next year, many “confidential” memos passed between Bishop McCormack, Father Edward Arsenault, and various attorneys for the Diocese. Father MacRae was privy to none of them. Father Arsenault, who oversaw all lawsuit settlements for the Diocese, had an egregious conflict of interest in that he was simultaneously Chairman of the Board of the National Catholic Risk Retention Group providing oversight of insurance settlements for Catholic institutions across the country. At some point, he took over communications with Father MacRae on behalf of the bishop.

Father MacRae was never told of the above affidavits and did not know of Bishop McCormack’s statements about his belief in MacRae’s innocence and wrongful incarceration. A major sticking point in the various subsequent exchanges from the Bishop’s office was a demand that Father MacRae cease all contact with Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal, submit to the Diocese a list of the names of everyone with whom he has discussed this matter, and agree in writing to limit all future contacts only to those approved by Diocesan officials. He was also asked to agree to appeal only his sentence and not his conviction, and to allow Father Arsenault to choose his legal counsel. Father MacRae rejected those conditions.

After The Wall Street Journal published an explosive series of articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Father MacRae case in 2005 and again in 2013, Father never again heard from any official of his diocese with the exception of letters described below.

In 2008, Bishop McCormack wrote in a letter to an advocate of Father MacRae denying that he ever stated a belief that Father MacRae is innocent and should not be in prison. In 2009, Father Edward Arsenault became Monsignor Edward Arsenault and assumed a $160,000 per year position as Executive Director of the St. Luke Institute in Maryland where Bishop McCormack served on the Board of Directors. In 2015 he went to prison for embezzlement and forgery. Among the documents he is now suspected of forging were letters to the Holy See about the MacRae case.

Monsignor Arsenault was subsequently dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis. He has since changed his name to Edward J. Bolognini.

Bishop Peter A. Libasci, the current Bishop of Manchester, has, to this day, not once allowed Father MacRae to speak of this case in his own defense. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of the unconscionable statements in this regard by the diocesan spokesman in “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.”

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Please share this post and review these related posts:

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

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

The Trials of Father MacRae — The Wall Street Journal

Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Father George David Byers, SSL, STD is a parish priest in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, a chaplain to law enforcement, and a Missionary of Mercy appointed by Pope Francis for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, a position the Holy Father has extended to the present day. Father Byers writes at the faithful and bold Catholic blog, Arise! Let Us Be Going!

From the BTSW Editor: Ryan A. MacDonald has a new post at A RAM in the Thicket that impacts both Father Gordon MacRae and this blog. Please read “At the Catholic Media Association, Bias and a Double Standard.”

Monsignor Arsenault served two years of a four-to-twenty year sentence with the remainder suspended. He is depicted here shaking hands with his prosecutor from the NH Attorney General’s Office after accepting a plea bargain.