“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/16/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 10/16/24

In the Rearview Mirror: Tom Clancy and The Hunt for Red October

Tom Clancy passed from this life on October 1, 2013. A devout Catholic, he was a master of the military techno-thriller and a prophet of the World War III end times.

Tom Clancy passed from this life on October 1, 2013. A devout Catholic, he was a master of the military techno-thriller and a prophet of the World War III end times.

October 16, 2024 by Father Gordon MacRae

Hurricane season has prevented a new post at Beyond These Stone Walls in mid-October this year. I have heard from both helpers and readers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and other states greatly impacted by a hurricane season like no other in recent memory. The meteorological storms seems almost to reflect the winds of political discord as we face an uncertain future in the slowly unraveling United States. No matter the election outcome, or the winds of change it brings, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

To write and publish a post each week, I am entirely dependent on a small number of kind and generous people who assist me with their time and talent. We have all learned to roll with the punches in these times, but in this stormy October one essential helper lost her phone, and another lost his home. Both are safe, thank God, but the combined impact for us this week is a rerun.

But it is no ordinary rerun. I wrote it eleven years ago this week to honor the life of an author and prophetic figure who taught me much of what I know about the political winds of this world. His first book, The Hunt for Red October, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1984. I mentioned it in a recent post that a multitude of readers have since urged me to link to again. That post was “September 11, 2001, Freedom, Terrorism and Kamala Harris.” It serves as a diagram about threats posed by the Middle East, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and our current state of global unrest.

Over the course of two decades, Tom Clancy has educated me about how we got to where we are in global politics. In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, I learned of the seedbed of terrorism that was and now is again Afghanistan under Taliban control. Red Storm Rising, gave me a terrifying preview of World War III led by Russia and China, a war that must be prevented at all cost. In Patriot Games Northern Irish terrorism carried out atrocities agains the United Kingdom on both British and American soil.

In The Sum of all Fears, the middle East pursuit of nuclear weapons and nuclear war kept me up at night. In Red Rabbit, the Russian KGB link to an assassination attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II was exposed. Clear and Present Danger took me to the U.S. southern border and its infiltration by drug cartels and other criminal enterprises.

Then Debt of Honor and Executive Orders in a combined 1,600 pages, told the gripping story of Middle East Islamic jihad as a highjacked passenger jet was flying at high speed into the U.S. Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress. That account now hauntingly familiar, was told by Tom Clancy three years before the events of September 11, 2001 were conceived in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden.

Finally, in 1,028 pages, The Bear and the Dragon in 2000, Clancy told another prescient story about the brink of World Wall III as China faced an economic crisis, while Russia struggled to regain the power and the glory of the former Soviet Empire. I read them all — some of them twice . Clancy wrote these stories with wide acclaim for the accuracy of his research. He wrote them to inform us about the risks and hazards of our engagement in geopolitics.

But the story I want to stand in for my post this week is none of the above. Another personal hero of mine, the late President Ronald Reagan, called this story “unputdownable!” The sun should not set on the month of October without paying respects to “Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan, and the Hunt for Red October.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post.

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.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 3/13/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 3/13/24

Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

In 1989, Pope John Paul II added a new title to honor Saint Joseph. As “Guardian of the Redeemer” Joseph’s dream set us on a path from spiritual exile to Divine Mercy.

In 1989, Pope John Paul II added a new title to honor Saint Joseph. As “Guardian of the Redeemer” Joseph’s dream set us on a path from spiritual exile to Divine Mercy.

Out of my sometimes inflated separation anxiety, you may have read in these pages an oft-mentioned thought. From behind these walls, I write from the Oort Cloud, that orbiting field of our Solar System’s cast-off debris 1.5 light years from Earth out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It was named for its discoverer, the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrick Oort (1900-1992).

There are disadvantages to being way out here cast off from the life of the Church. I am among the last to receive news and the last to be heard, if at all. But there is also one distinct advantage. From out here, while dodging the occasional asteroid, I tend to have a more panoramic view of things, and find myself reflecting longer and reacting less when I find news to be painful.

It’s difficult to believe, but it was just eleven years ago, March 13, 2013 that Pope Francis was elected to the Chair of Peter. In the previous month we had news from Rome that, for many, felt like one of those asteroids had struck at the very heart of the Church. I wrote a series of posts about this in the last week of February and the first few weeks of March 2013. The first was “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”

Like most of you, I miss the fatherly Pope Benedict, I miss his brilliant mind, his steady reason, his unwavering aura of fidelity. I miss the rudder with which he stayed the course, steering the Barque of Peter through wind and waves instead of causing them.

But then they became hurricane winds and tidal waves. Amid all the conspiracy theories and “fake news” about Pope Benedict’s decision to abdicate the papacy, I suggested an “alternative fact” that proved to be true. His decision was a father’s act of love, and his intent was to do the one thing by which all good fathers are measured. His decision was an act of sacrifice, and the extent to which that is true was made clear in a post I wrote several years later, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.” Benedict was firm that he was guided by the Holy Spirit.

For some, the end result was a Holy Father who emerged from the conclave of 2013 while silently in the background remained our here-but-not-here “Holier Father.” Such a comparison has always been unjust. Some years ago a reader sent me a review by Father James Schall, S.J., in Crisis Magazine. “On Pope Benedict’s Final Insights and Recollections” is a review of a published interview by Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: Last Testament.

The word, “final” in Father Schall’s title delivers a sting of regret. It hearkens back to that awful March of 2013 when the news media pounced on Pope Benedict’s papacy and delivered news with a tone of contempt too familiar to Catholics today. The secular news media is getting its comeuppance now, and perhaps even finding a little humility in the process. Even the late ever fatherly Benedict XVI took an honest poke at its distortions:

“The bishops (at Vatican II) wanted to renew the faith, to deepen it. However, other forces were working with increasing strength, particularly journalists, who interpreted many things in a completely new way. Eventually people asked, yes, if the bishops are able to change everything, why can’t we all do that? The liturgy began to crumble, and slip into personal preferences.”

— Benedict XVI, Last Testament, 2016

Benedict the Beloved also wrote back then from the Oort Cloud, but it is one that he cast himself into. I have always hoped I might run into him out here one day and I might have. His testament ended with these final, surprising words:

“It has become increasingly clear to me that God is not, let’s say, a ruling power, a distant force, rather He is love, and loves me, and as such, life should be guided by Him, by this power called love.”

Carnage in the Absence of Fathers

In the winter of a life so devoted to a dialogue with the deep theological mysteries of our faith, it seemed surprising that Benedict XVI would choose this as the final message he wants to convey to the Church and the world. My own interpretation is that he chose not the words of a theologian, but those of a father, an equal partner in the ultimate vocation for the preservation of life and the sake of humanity: parenthood.

Fathers who live out the sacrifices required of them are an endangered species in our emerging culture of relativism and self-indulgence. In his inaugural address to the nation, President Donald Trump spoke of the “carnage” that our society has failed to face, and he was widely ridiculed for it. If he was wrong about anything else, he was right about that. I see evidence of that carnage every day in the world I am forced to live in here, and I would be a negligent father if I did not write about it.

So, I did write about it, and it struck a nerve. “In the Absence of Fathers A Story of Elephants and Men” has been shared over 30,000 times on social media and reposted in hundreds of venues. It seemed to awaken readers to the wreckage left behind as fathers and fatherhood are devalued into absence in our society. I am a daily witness to the shortsighted devastation of young lives that are cast off into prisons in a country that can no longer call itself their fatherland.

We breed errant youth in the absence of fathers, and those who stray too far are inevitably abandoned into prisons where they are housed, and fed, and punished, but rarely ever challenged to compensate for the great loss that sets their lives askew. Prison is an expensive, but very poor replacement for a caring and committed father

I saw this carnage in a young man I once wrote about, but to whom I never returned because I wanted to shelter readers from the truth of what befell him. A light-hearted post several years ago — “Prison Journal: Looking for Lunch in All the Wrong Places” — included some of the culinary creations of other prisoners who greatly delighted in seeing them in print. One of them was a young man named Joey who made us all laugh with his recipe for a concoction called “mafungo” and his weird instructions for making it.

Joey descended into prison at age 17 as the result of a simple high school fight with another student who was injured. While in prison, he discovered the plague of opiates that is fast consuming a nation in denial. The extent to which drugs have consumed life in this prison was back then the subject of a Concord Monitor article “As drugs surge, inmate privileges nixed” (Michael Casey, Associated Press, Feb 27, 2017).

Joey reached out to me repeatedly throughout the ordeal of his imprisonment. As a member of a small group of prisoners tasked with negotiating over prison conditions, I argued for treatment over punishment when Joey’s addiction kept disrupting his life. The interventions were simply too little too late. At age 23, after six years here, Joey left prison with a serious problem that he did not come in with. Just two months after his release, Joey fatally overdosed on the street drug, fentanyl. He became a statistic, one of hundreds of overdose deaths of young adults in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire which, according to reports, led the entire nation in the rate of young adults opioid overdose deaths. If this is what President Trump meant then by “carnage,” we must face the reality that we are tightly in its grip, and the absence of fathers has been a devastating risk factor.

Now Comes Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer

I do not think it is mere coincidence that in the midst of this cultural crisis of fatherhood and sacrifice, our Church and faith are experiencing a resurgence in devotion to Saint Joseph, Spouse of Mary. His Feast Day on March 19th was honored by “sensus fidelium” over twelve centuries ago. He was declared Patron of the Universal Church by Pope Pius IX in 1870. In 1989, he was given a new title, “Guardian of the Redeemer,” by Saint John Paul II. This title beckons fathers everywhere to live their call to sacrifice and love so essential to fatherhood.

I had barely given Saint Joseph a passing thought for all the years of my priesthood, but in the last two years he surfaces in my psyche and soul repeatedly with great spiritual power. It haunts me that he shares his name with my young friend, Joey, who personified a life in the absence of a father, sacrificed to some south-of-the-border cartel and the carnage of our culture of death.

And it is not lost on me that he shares his name with the late Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, who in life and death personified for the Church a summons to Divine Mercy. The winter of Benedict’s own life spent in silent but loving witness to the Church reflects the life of Saint Joseph in the Infancy Narratives of the Gospel, silent but still so very present. I suddenly hear from readers constantly with a growing interest in Saint Joseph. Last Christmas, I wrote what I consider to be a most important post for our time, and a prequel to this summons to Divine Mercy. It was “Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah.”

Ii was a post about love, fidelity, and sacrifice, the hallmarks of fatherhood and the foundations of Divine Mercy. And I wrote a sequel to that post which contains a painful but vital story. It was “Joseph’s Second Dream: The Slaughter of the Innocents.”

These biblical stories were lived by one who remains utterly silent in the pages of the Gospel, but whose life and actions as Guardian of the Redeemer were like a trumpet call to fatherhood and sacrifice. I am hereby bestowing upon him another title. He is, Saint Joseph, “Guardian of Fatherhood Redeemed.”

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Note Number 1 from Father Gordon MacRae: On occasion the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, stewards of The National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, send me a book from their own publishing house that they would like to see reviewed at Beyond These Stone Walls. We have featured several of them over time, but the last one they sent is a real treasure, and here it is: Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father, by Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC.

Please also note that the beautiful top graphic for this post is “Saint Joseph and the Christ Child” by Jacob Zumo (2019). It was commissioned by Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC for inclusion in Consecration to Saint Joseph. This and other wondrous works of art are available at Art By JZumo.

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Note Number 2 from Father Gordon MacRae: Some years ago his Eminence Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke wrote to me in prison. It was a personal letter which in many ways was a gift of Divine Mercy and Divine Compassion. Now he has invited me to take part in a worldwide call to prayer, Return to Our Lady through devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a nine-month novena. Here is Cardinal Burke’s invitation to us. I have subscribed for the good of our Church, and I hope you will join me.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 2/28/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 2/28/24

If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!

There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.

There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.

February 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Back in the summer of 2011 in Massachusetts, Independence Day brought dismal news for devoted Catholics already bent under the millstone of scandal. On that morning I turned on New England Cable News to learn that a forty-two year old Massachusetts priest ordained only six years, had taken his own life. It was heartbreaking, and I know his family must have been devastated. However, I feared that far too many in his other family — the Catholic Church — had so steeled themselves against the relentless tide of painful news that such a tragedy was just part of another news day. That was an even greater tragedy. If you have never read my article, “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” about the suicide of a priest I knew, please do. I wish this priest, and his diocesan family had read it. It may have helped him to seek another way to deal with whatever immense pain brought him to this horrific act. I have been where he was in the final moments of his life. I wrote about surviving that painful day in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

I do not know the particular anguish of that young priest in 2011. He died sometime the previous Saturday night after celebrating Mass and then ministering to a family in a hospital emergency room where he was a chaplain. When he did not show up for his Mass that Sunday morning, someone went in search of him. In between was the darkest night of his own priestly soul. Please, please pray for him. Though this was a major news story in 2011, I am sparing his family from reliving this again in 2024.

Some thirty American Catholic priests have taken their own lives since priests became a favorite target of the news media, of S.N.A.P., and of Satan himself. I have personally known eight of them, and three others who were murdered. A psychiatrist friend who has been conducting research on the priesthood told me that it is extraordinary that I have known 11 priests who were either murdered or died by their own hand. He said that I have been hanging out with the wrong crowd — or, if you read the Gospel, the right one.

I do know this: simply casting off the most wounded among our priests has been the sin of the Church, and it is a sin that would not happen in our own families. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote of this in one of his last letters to me before his death in December 2008:

“Thank you for keeping me informed about the great scandal of the failure of the Church to support her priests in their time of need. Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. I am sure that in the plans of Divine Providence your ministry of suffering is part of your priestly vocation.”

No corporate bottom line would dictate whether we care for our fathers, our grandfathers, our brothers, or our sons, but lately in the Church in America, it does, and it has compounded The Scandal. Christ came into the world to call forth a community’s soul, not a corporate sole. One bishop I know wrote in a whining missive to Rome that if he helped one accused priest in his diocese he would fear an uproar. At least the bishop was honest. His response toward a brother left beaten on the side of the road was moved by fear.

The problem was strictly American back then. But it has since spread to other parts of the world where the same draconian and terminal measures have been imposed upon priests who are merely accused without due process leading to their being simply discarded — sometimes on the streets with no place to go. I fear sometimes that the Catholic Church in America is becoming far more American than Catholic. America is a disposable culture that does not abide problems, and the Church has come to reflect this ugly side of America. Not long ago, Pope Francis derided our “cancel culture,” then he proceeded to cancel the careers of many priests and bishops who did not fall immediately into his ideological plan. The stewards of our faith have capitulated to cancel culture.

Disposable Priests in a Disposable Culture

There are priests who, for various reasons, are not assigned to ministry. Under a tenet of Canon Law (Canon 1722) a bishop, with just cause, may forbid a priest from the exercise of public ministry for a period of time, but he remains a priest. For seven years before I was accused and faced trial in 1994, I was not assigned by my bishop and diocese. For the first two years, I was director of a drug and alcoholism treatment center, and vice-president of the New Hampshire Association of Chemical Dependency Service Providers. But I was still very much a priest living under obedience to the authority of my bishop. I celebrated Mass and other sacraments. For the following five years I served in ministry to other priests as Director of Admissions in a residential psychological and spiritual renewal center for Catholic priests and religious.

Even now, in my 30th year in prison for a crime that I insist never took place, I witness to the Gospel and to the Mission of the Church every day in conditions that most priests cannot imagine. That is not a boast. Who would boast of such a thing? I celebrate the sacraments, as you know, and I am still a priest.

A priest may also petition the Holy See for voluntary removal from the clerical state, known popularly as “laicization.” Some years ago this blog had a comment from a man who left ministry as a priest to marry. As far as the Church was concerned, he remained a priest and entered into a civil, but invalid marriage. He reported that he was only recently granted his petition for laicization so that he may now have his marriage blessed by the Church. For reasons that are both sound and prudent, the Church has never been in any hurry to return a priest to the lay state.

One of the most destructive fallouts of the sex abuse scandal in the American Church has been the reality of involuntary laicization. When enacting the 2002 Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the US Bishops quoted a statement of Pope John Paul II in his address to American cardinals on April 23, 2002: “There is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.” Some American bishops have used that statement to seek forced laicization of accused priests under Canon 290, by judicial sentence or by a special act of the Pope. Prior to the Dallas Charter, such a permanent and unappealable removal from the priesthood was exceedingly rare. After the Charter, there was a wave of involuntary laicizations, and some believe they have done irreparable harm to the very Catholic theology of priesthood.

From a practical standpoint, forced laicization — popularly but erroneously called “defrocking” in the media — might satisfy some vindictive urges in certain victim groups, but it does nothing to prevent any possible victimization. It merely discards a priest with problems, or an innocent one falsely accused, upon the dung heap of Job with no support, no supervision, and no accountability because of claims that are decades old and often unsubstantiated. Families do not discard their fathers, sons, or brothers, and the Church should not discard her priests.

A Puritan Response to Sin

The Bishops’ Charter failed to add a qualifying statement of Pope John Paul II to the American cardinals summoned to Rome in 2002:

“At the same time . . . we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depth of a person’s soul and can work extraordinary change.”

By omitting the most important part of the Pope’s statement, the U.S. Bishops adopted a punishment with no allowance for repentance. In an essay for Homiletic & Pastoral Review (“Sex Abuse and Anti-Catholicism“) Ryan A. MacDonald wrote:

“The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood now underway in Western Culture, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”

In a landmark article in America magazine, “The Rights of Accused Priests” (June 21, 2004), the late Cardinal Avery Dulles issued a stinging rebuke of the bishops. What follows are some excerpts:

“The United States bishops have taken positions at odds with [their own] high principles.”

“Under intense pressure from various survivors’ networks, they hastily adopted, after less than two days of debate, the so-called Dallas Charter . . . ”

“In their effort to . . . restore public confidence in the Church as an institution and to protect the Church from liability suits, the bishops opted for an extreme response.”

“The dominant principle of the Charter was ‘zero tolerance’ . . . Having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgement in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid having to make any judgements in these cases.”

Cardinal Dulles went on to address the often near impossibility of judging the truth of allegations against priests without investigation, and the inherent injustice of taking actions that brand a priest as guilty before such investigation. He then outlined the rights of priests under Canon Law, and how the Charter and current policies ignore or even destroy those rights. I urge every priest and every Catholic to read Cardinal Dulles’ article.

I am not a canon lawyer, and I have only limited training in Church Law. What I have learned has been from experience, and my own experience has been a crash course in fending off what I believe is a seriously flawed and unjust process faced by many accused priests who simply did not commit the crimes.

To highlight how flawed this process is, I would like to reproduce a letter I received in 2002 from a prominent priest, canon lawyer, and professor of Canon Law at a leading Catholic University. I am printing the entire letter, but without his name since I have not asked his permission to print his name. I will let his letter speak for itself:

“Dear Father MacRae:

Don’t ever discount the real spiritual good accomplished by your words at Beyond These Stone Walls. You make people like me, with consciences dulled by repetitious prevalence of procedural abuses, face our responsibilities to protest and to act. You make it personal and compelling.

I want to pass along some bad news. You may already be aware of it, since you seem very well informed, but, if not, at least it will give you occasion to reflect. It seems that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has turned to ‘penal dismissals from the clerical state’ as a routine solution to the cases being sent by American bishops after preliminary investigations. The decrees of dismissal are not subject to appeal or review.

The procedural injustice of this practice is obvious.

In the preliminary investigation process, the accused priest has no opportunity to defend himself. The cases are sent by bishops to CDF sometimes with an expectation that they will instruct the diocese to proceed with a canonical trial for dismissal or allow the accused priest to remain [in the priesthood] in a penitential state but removed from public ministry. Instead, the CDF seems to be taking this drastic and terminal action based solely on the information provided by a bishop in the preliminary investigation — often when the priest is accused of abuse alleged to have occurred thirty years ago or more.

I don’t want to discourage you or any petitions to the Holy See on your behalf. Quite the contrary, I would urge any and all possible interventions.

Think about the implications if this shameful result should fall on you. It is really an empty juridical gesture with no practical consequences. You remain a priest. No one can take that away. You can pray, and you can celebrate the Holy Eucharist validly, absolve or anoint in emergencies, and, I presume, you could continue your very valuable ministry of consciousness raising. What I am trying to say is please do not be discouraged or lose hope if this awful expedient is aimed at you.”

Ganging Up on the Already Down

To date, at least, that final chapter of my nightmare has not taken place. But the Church must be made aware — you must be made aware — of the inherent injustice of “piling on” that occurs when most priests are accused.

When I faced trial in 1994, I was entirely on my own against an assault on three simultaneous fronts. First, I faced a criminal trial, a highly sensationalized and problematic one that Ryan A. MacDonald recently described in these pages in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Very few priests earn a salary or have access to funds that would assure a fair trial. I certainly did not, but my diocese issued a letter to my attorneys instructing them: “To the extent he is without funds, he should contact the public defenders’ office.” The cost of my defense would have been but a tiny fraction of the cost of mediated settlements.

Secondly, simultaneous to a criminal defense and preparing for trial, I also faced civil lawsuits naming both me and my diocese as defendants. The accusers were represented by their contingency lawyers, and both they and their lawyers had a clear financial stake in the outcome. My diocese was represented by a high profile law firm seeking, from day one, the quietest path to settlement that would generate the least publicity. With my meager assets dissolved in only partial funding of a criminal defense, I was not represented at all against the civil claims. When I protested the possibility of a settlement without substantiation, my accusers and their lawyers simply dropped me as a defendant so that I would no longer have any standing in the matter.

Lastly, from the moment I was accused, I faced a trial-by-media that set an impossible boundary between me and justice. The accusers had contingency lawyers who were relentless spokespersons for their feigned “victimization.” My diocese had a spokesperson who advocated for the distance the diocese was motivated to obtain from me. As I faced trial in 1994, knowing that I maintained my innocence, and knowing that I was not represented at all as settlement negotiations ensued in the background, my bishop and diocese issued a press release stating:

“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

— Press Release of the Diocese of Manchester, September 6, 1993

My attorneys protested this to deafened ears. With that public statement came the end of my civil rights to a presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Throughout the trial, the local news media cited that statement. The jurors in my trial read the statement. To pretend that this scenario represents justice requires far more skill in the art of pretense than I have ever been capable of.

And it’s even worse still, today.

The Bishop Accountability website publishes every sordid detail about every money-driven claim taking no responsibility whatsoever for whether their information is true or corroborated. The site administrators publish the names and lurid details claimed of every accused priest while removing the names of all accusers. In some instances, this amounts to aiding and abetting them in the commission of the crimes of fraud and larceny.

And now, as is clear from the canonist’s dismal letter above, if the accused priest cares anything at all about preserving his priesthood then he must also hire a canon lawyer to defend himself against yet another tier of simultaneous judicial processes: the possibility of canonical dismissal from the priesthood.

If night befalls your father, you don’t discard him! You just don’t!

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. Please consider these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

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

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood

When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 11/1/23 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 11/1/23

Saint John Paul the Great: A Light in a World in Crisis

Karol Wojtyla became a priest on All Saints Day 1946. On Divine Mercy Sunday 2014 the Church affirmed what the world already knew: he is Saint John Paul the Great.

Karol Wojtyla became a priest on All Saints Day 1946. On Divine Mercy Sunday 2014 the Church affirmed what the world already knew: he is Saint John Paul the Great.

***November 1, 2023 by Fr* *Gordon MacRae***

Two names were added to the Communion of Saints on Divine Mercy Sunday 2014, and midway through this third decade of the 21st Century, one of them still looms large in the living memory of billions, Catholics and not. I must write especially of Saint John Paul II because his Holy Father-hood is like a set of bookends framing my life as a priest. I have written of him before, and of the origin of his being dubbed “John Paul the Great” for his monumental impact on the state of world affairs.

That post, which we will link again at the end of this one, was “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II.” It began, ironically enough, in the era in which Angelo Roncali became Pope John XXIII. It’s an ironic twist that John XXIII was beatified by John Paul II, but on Divine Mercy Sunday 2014 they were canonized together. So in a sense, this tribute to one is a profound bow to the sainthood of both.

I don’t want to begin with the negative, but sometimes it’s best to just get the detractors out of the way. The Media Report had an article about a 2014 PBS Frontline presentation entitled “Secrets of the Vatican.” The Frontline piece was co-produced for PBS by Jason Berry, and it was clear, for those who would see, that the agenda behind it had nothing to do with the Truths about the Catholic Church.

The triple crown PBS and Jason Berry aimed for was Holy Week, Easter, and the Divine Mercy Canonization of Pope John Paul II. One prisoner who watched it thinking it might be a tour of the Vatican Museum called it “Jason Berry’s hatchet job on the Catholic Church.” Had PBS settled on that more honest title, its ratings might have been higher. The timing of such productions is carefully choreographed, of course, to coincide with any big Catholic news coming out of Rome.

As the Canonization of these two 20th Century popes made headlines, so did the predictable efforts to defame them. I wrote of the timing of such ploys recently in “Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.” It has become a tradition of sorts in modern media to deck the halls with anti-Catholic slurs during the seasons of both Christmas and Easter. The strategy is that if enough mud can be thrown during times when Catholics on the fence assess their faith, some will ultimately abandon it.

It must be terribly frustrating for those behind such campaigns that at Easter every year, tens of thousands of adults thinking for themselves in the U.S. alone are received into the Catholic faith. Thousands more return after decades away. Our readers heard from one of them in the moving post, “Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind.” Will such stories find their way into Jason Berry’s next PBS Holy Week special? Don’t count on it! But there is now a far more important story to tell.

A Pope’s 33 Days

The summer of 1978 was a strange one for me. I had graduated early that summer from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. A life-changing discernment to leave the Capuchin order to become a diocesan priest had culminated in sweeping change for me that summer. I became a priesthood candidate for the Diocese of Manchester and was assigned to commence graduate studies toward M. Div. and S.T.M. degrees at St. Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland, a Pontifical Institute and the nation’s oldest Roman Catholic seminary. It was a summer of transition, and in the background of its whirlwind of change for me was the death of Pope Paul VI and the election of Albino Luciani, Archbishop of Venice, who became Pope John Paul.

Thirty-three days later, on the morning of September 28, 1978, came a knock on my seminary room door. “The Pope has died,” said an unidentified voice on the other side. “Um . . . that was a month ago,” I responded. “No,” said the voice, “the NEW Pope has died.” I never knew who the voice was, but as I made my way through the cavernous corridors toward class that morning the shock of the story was everywhere.

Eighteen days later, on October 16, 1978, the same Conclave of papal electors, who chose the first Pope John Paul just 51 days before, elected a successor. Karol Jozef Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, became the first non-Italian pope since 1522. He took the name, John Paul II in honor of the first whose reign was the shortest in Church history. The new pope was 58 years old, spoke 14 languages, and would reign for 27 years — one of the longest in Church history — until his death on April 2, 2005.

With my nose buried in a textbook when that knock came on my door in 1978, I had no way to know of the long, twisted road upon which priesthood would take me. I instantly remembered that day as though yesterday, however, when 27 years later on April 2, 2005, a knock came on my cell door as a prisoner’s voice reported the news: “The Pope has died.” In between these two events, Pope John Paul the Great visited 129 countries, beatified 1,342 souls, canonized 483 saints, declared one Doctor of the Church, promulgated 14 encyclicals, and in his spare time he dismantled the Soviet Union, tore down the Berlin Wall, and brought European Communism to its knees.

Is that last point an exaggeration? Not according to the KGB. When John Paul II and John XXIII were canonized in April 2014, Catholic press was filled with accounts of the legacies of both, but for John Paul II the secular media were also filled with tributes to him, and foremost among these was John Paul’s role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I rely on some of these tributes more than I do the Catholic press for this post because we might expect all but chronically dissenting Catholics to hold John Paul in high regard. The key to his witness, however, is found elsewhere.

One such source is a superb book by Eric Metaxas entitled Seven Men and the Secret of their Greatness (Thomas Nelson, 2013). Seven Men is a profile in courage with subjects chosen by Eric Metaxas because they were exemplars of manhood, bravery, and public witness to the courage of their convictions. Among them, for this prolific and highly regarded non-Catholic writer, was Pope John Paul II:

“Of all the men in this book, there is only one who has come to be called ‘the Great.’ John Paul the Great . . . . The man whom the Polish authorities once regarded as harmless became one of the key figures in the collapse of communism across Europe.”

— Seven Men, pp. 141, 157

The threat this pope posed to the communist agenda did not go unnoticed by the KGB. In “The Enduring Legacy of John Paul II” (Catalyst, December 2010) Ronald Rychlak chronicled Soviet KGB involvement in the assassination attempts, first of John Paul’s reputation and character, and then of John Paul himself. Reviewing Witness to Hope (HarperCollins 1999), George Weigel’s magisterial biography of Pope John Paul II, Ronald Rychlak described the KGB anxiety about this pope:

“Within months of his election, John Paul II ignited a revolution of conscience in Poland and it ultimately led to the collapse of European Communism and the demise of the Soviet Union.”

— Ronald Rychlak, Catalyst

I also wrote of the story of KGB targeting of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Pius XII in “Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.” I was not at all alone in seeing the great thorn in the side that Pope John Paul had courageously become for communism and its intent to dominate Europe, and then the world. In “Popes, Atheists and Freedom” (WSJ, December 30, 2010) Daniel Henninger wrote of Pope John Paul’s courageous confrontation with the Soviet Union:

“In 1984, after John Paul had completed two pastoral pilgrimages to Communist Poland, a conference was convened by members of the KGB, Warsaw Pact, and Cuban intelligence services. Its purpose: to discuss joint measures for combating the ‘subversive activities’ of the Vatican.”

Pope John Paul II and the Miracle of Fatima

I sometimes think that I am among the priesthood’s worst skeptics. I write of measurable things, after all: history and science, the Voyager Spacecraft among the stars, and “The James Webb Space Telescope.” If someone told me when I was ordained 41 years ago that I would one day be writing about a connection between Pope John Paul and the Miracle of Fatima, I would not have believed it.

It was Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, who opened my eyes. The great Marian author of 33 Days to Morning Glory wrote something about John Paul II that did more than open my eyes. It shook my world. What follows is a summary.

In 1917, during World War I, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. I have always accepted this because the Church accepts it, but I have also always tried not to think too much about it. No, it’s much worse than that. I once, as a much younger priest, scoffed at it all. I kept my scoffing to myself, but the whole story of Fatima was reduced in my mind to a lot of pre-scientific nonsense.

It was Mary herself who straightened me out, aided somewhat by Father Michael Gaitley. I wrote about some of this in “Behold Your Son, Behold Your Mother,” a feature article at Marian.org. I wrote that Father Gaitley’s presentation on Pope John Paul II was powerful and compelling.

The first vision at Fatima took place at 5:00 PM on May 13, 1917. After the prophesies about the conversion of Russia, the child visionaries saw a “bishop dressed in white” who “would suffer much and then be shot and killed.” This became known as the last secret of Fatima, and was kept hidden, for a time, by the Church.

Exactly 64 years later, on May 13, 1981 at exactly 5:00 PM, Pope John Paul II was shot four times as he blessed the crowds in St. Peter’s Square. One of those bullets would have surely killed him had it not missed his abdominal artery by a tiny fraction of an inch. John Paul attributed the guidance of this bullet to the hand of Our Lady of Fatima whose first apparition shared that same date.

The Soviet Empire was created in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it became the largest nation on Earth. In his 1948 book, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote of a proposal to the ruthless Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. The proposal was that the Soviet Union should not suppress Catholicism, but should rather encourage it in order to build a relationship with the Pope. “The Pope?” Stalin famously retorted. “How many divisions has he got?”

That conversation took place on May 13, 1935, 46 years to the day before the Soviet Union tried to eliminate Pope John Paul II because he became communism’s biggest obstacle in all of Europe. The Pope survived. Stalin’s successors in the Soviet Union learned the answers to his questions far too late for their own survival.

As a wise friend once said to me, “There are no coincidences, only signs.” My scientific mind could still have dismissed all this had I not witnessed what up to then I thought to be impossible: the 1989 fall of the Soviet Empire and the collapse of communism in Europe. On November 9, 1989, thousands danced upon the Berlin Wall before it finally crumbled. I scoffed no longer as I pondered “How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis.” As Communism swept Europe and threatened to engulf the world in Godless darkness, Pope John Paul II was her instrument of powerful resistance.

Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest on All Saints Day, 1946, and is now in the company of the Communion of Saints, including the 483 saints who were canonized by a Saint. As a priest and bishop, he studied Sister Faustina’s Diary and promoted her devotion to Divine Mercy, and later her cause for sainthood. He once wrote that as a priest he always felt spiritually close to Sister Faustina. Karol Jozef Wojtyla surrendered his Earthly life on the Vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday, 2005.

Saint John Paul the Great, pray for us as we face, yet again, a world in crisis.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts which we hope you will share with others:

A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 9/20/23 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 9/20/23

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.

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!

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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.

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Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 4/5/23 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 4/5/23

Simon of Cyrene Compelled to Carry the Cross

Simon of Cyrene was just a man coming in from the country to Jerusalem for the Passover when his fated path intersected the Way of the Cross and Salvation History.

Simon of Cyrene was just a man coming in from the country to Jerusalem for the Passover when his fated path intersected the Way of the Cross and Salvation History.

Holy Week 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I first wrote about Simon of Cyrene in Holy Week, 2010. While restoring that post, I ended up completely rewriting it. It led me almost immediately to a vivid example of the descent of this world at a time when faith invites us to ascend to Eternal Life. We are all going to die. It is an ordinary part of life. But don’t just die. Set out now for home. The only true path to life leads “To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate.”

A single sentence about Simon of Cyrene in each of the Synoptic Gospels conveys a wealth of meaning with a roadmap to the way home. Several readers told me privately and in comments that they were struck by these last few sentences in a recent post that mentioned Pornchai Moontri. In “God in the Dock: When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” I wrote,

“It was upon reading [a] passage from Pope Benedict that Pornchai made his decision to journey with me from the Exodus, through the desert, to the Promised Land toward which we, in hope, are destined. Faith never rescued us from our trials, but it taught us to carry one another's cross like Simon of Cyrene. That is the key to Heaven. Even in suffering and sorrow, it is the key to Heaven.”

Under the weight of Earthly Powers, this world loses sight of our true destiny while the great masses of people focus only on what they have stored up in this life. When a bank fails those whose treasury contains little more than money in life, people panic, some even commit suicide. It's a tragedy unfolding before our very eyes in the weeks leading up to Holy Week.

I turn 70 years old on Easter Sunday this year. It haunts me to reflect on how much the values of this world have changed in my lifetime. While researching this post about Simon of Cyrene, I came across a reference to The Greatest Story Ever Told, a 1960 United Artists film production of the life of Jesus from his birth to his Resurrection. Today, many of the woke denizens of Hollywood might shun such a project, but in 1960 it drew an enormous cast of Hollywood stars clamoring to be part of 'it.

Some of the film industry's most stellar actors were cast, some surprisingly in even minor roles: Max von Sydow portrayed Jesus, Dorothy McGuire was Mary, Claude Rains was Herod the Great, Jose Ferrer was Herod Antipas, Charlton Heston was John the Baptist, Telly Savalas was Pontius Pilate. He shaved his head for the role and never grew his hair back again. This is why he was bald when he played the famous NYPD detective, Kojak. David McCallum was Judas Iscariot. The list of Hollywood stars goes on and on.

The great John Wayne was cast as a captain of the Roman Centurions who professed his belief in Jesus at the foot of the Cross, as depicted in the top graphic on this post. John Wayne became a Catholic not long after this film. Today, his grandson is a Catholic priest in California.

Simon of Cyrene was portrayed by Sidney Poitier who three years later won an Academy Award for his portrayal of a drifter who became a handyman for a community of nuns in Lillies of the Field. He was an interesting choice to play Simon of Cyrene. In New Testament times, Cyrene was a major city in Northern Africa with a large Jewish population in what is present day Libya. It was the home of Lucius, a prophet and teacher of Antioch mentioned in Acts 13:1, and of Simon, a man who ventured to Jerusalem for the Passover but found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time or, depending on your perspective, in the right place at the right time.

Weep Not for Me, Jerusalem

My first inkling to learn about Simon of Cyrene was during Holy Week in 2000, nine years before this blog began. An old friend planning a visit to the Holy Land asked me to write a prayer that he promised to leave in a crevasse in the famous Western Wall. Known popularly as the “Wailing Wall,” it was built by Herod the Great (who was not so great, really!). That section of wall was all that remained standing after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. Known in Hebrew as “ha-Kotel ha-Maaravi,” it is today one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land.

According to the Midrash, a collection of ancient rabbinic scholarship, the Wall survived the destruction of the Temple because the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, rests there. My friend left my handwritten prayer in a crevasse in that Wall. Just a day later, during a historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope John Paul II left his own prayer in that same place in the Wall. I recall hoping that his was not blocking mine!

On that same day, just beyond the city walls, my friend came upon a tourist area where a photographer was capitalizing on the presence of the Pope. He tried to coax my friend into picking up a mock cross and carrying it for a photograph. My friend was appalled by the disconnect between what happened at Calvary 2000 years earlier and what was happening in that present scene. He refused to pick up the cross.

Reflecting on the scene upon his return from Jerusalem, my friend wrote to me in prison asking, “What can you tell me about Simon of Cyrene?” His question took me to a single sentence in each of the Synoptic Gospels from which I felt compelled to unpack some hidden meaning. It turned out that there was much to unpack.

Jesus, denounced by the Chief Priests, tried and condemned before Pilate, was mercilessly scourged to the point of near death. Roman soldiers tasked with his crucifixion feared that he may die before the ascent of Golgotha while bearing history's heaviest cross. Roman law allowed soldiers to press Jews into service for Rome so they forced a passerby to assist the “King of the Jews” as recounted in all three of the Synoptic Gospels:

“As they went out, they came upon a man of Cyrene, Simon by name; this man they compelled to carry the cross.”

— Matthew 27:32

“And as they led [Jesus] away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross to carry it behind Jesus.”

— Luke 23:26

“And they compelled a passer-by, Simon of Cyrene who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.”

— Mark 15:21

Sidney Poitier as Simon of Cyrene in *The Greatest Story Ever Told*

He Was There When They Crucified My Lord

Crucifixion was entirely unknown in Jewish history until the Roman occupation of Palestine in 31 BC. Sacred Scripture, however, contained echoes of the sacrifice to come. Some 2,000 years before Jesus ascended Calvary bearing his Cross, Abraham was summoned by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac in the land of Moriah (Genesis 22).

Israelite tradition (2 Chronicles 3:1) identifies Moriah as the site of the future Jerusalem Temple. What became Golgotha or Calvary was one of its foothills. Obedient but brokenhearted, Abraham placed upon his son the wood for his sacrifice and together they climbed Mount Moriah.

Isaac asked his father, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” Abraham answered, “God will provide himself the lamb for the offering, my son” (Genesis 22:8). In the end, an Angel of the Lord stayed Abraham’s hand, and his obedience became the basis for God’s covenant with Israel. Two millennia later, in that same place, God Himself did provide the lamb for the sacrifice. Hence, in our Liturgy, Jesus is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Crucifixion was a common form of capital punishment among Persians, Egyptians, and Romans from the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD. The punishment was ritualized under Roman law which required that a criminal be scourged before execution. The accused had to carry the entire cross or just the crossbeam from the place of scourging to the execution. Crucifixion was abolished in 337 AD by Emperor Constantine out of respect for the emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Jews carried out their own form of capital punishment by stoning, but the Romans forbade such executions when they occupied Palestine. This is why Jesus was handed over to Pilate for trial.

The gruesome punishment of crucifixion was reserved by the Romans for criminals, seditionists, and slaves. Roman law forbade the crucifixion of a citizen for any crime. Saint Paul, who was a Roman citizen, could not be crucified so he was martyred by Emperor Tertullian, likely by beheading, in 60 A.D.

When Pilate had Jesus scourged, he may have instructed his tormentors to go beyond the usual torture hoping to convince the Sanhedrin and the mob that scourging was punishment enough. That plan failed when the crowd, spurred on by the Chief Priests, shouted “Crucify Him!”

However Jesus had been beaten so severely that Roman soldiers doubted that he could carry his cross the entire distance to Calvary alone. Note that I use the terms “Golgotha” and “Calvary” interchangeably. They are one and the same place. Golgotha is a Greek translation from an Aramaic word meaning “Place of the Skull,” a name likely derived from the fact that many executions were carried out there. “Calvary” is derived from “calvaria,” the Latin translation of Golgotha.

A condemned man was then led through the crowds to the place of crucifixion. Just as today, most of the people in the crowds assumed that an all-powerful and righteous state has justly condemned a real criminal to punishment, so many joined in the mocking and humiliation even if they knew nothing of the accused or the alleged crime. It was part of the ritual. Along the way, the condemned was forced to carry his cross — or at least the crossbeam upon which his arms would be tied and his hands or wrists nailed (see John l9:l7).

In 1994, the year I was sent to prison, archeological remains of a crucified man were discovered intact near Jerusalem. It was the first evidence of what actually took place in a typical Roman crucifixion.

It is unclear from the Gospel passages above exactly what part of the Cross was imposed upon Simon of Cyrene. Luke’s Gospel refers to Simon carrying the Cross behind Jesus, a position which also came to be symbolic of discipleship. It is likely that Jesus, like other condemned, carried the crossbeam upon which he would be nailed, while Simon may have carried the vertical beam or the rear of the entire Cross.

I learned from Mel Gibson’s famous film, The Passion of the Christ, that Simon of Cyrene is the person in the Gospel to whom I can most relate. I did not pick my cross willingly, nor do I willingly carry it. I did not see it as a share in the Cross of Christ at first. Few of us ever do.

The Passion of the Christ portrayed with power what I have always imagined must have become of Simon of Cyrene. Something stirred within him compelling him to remain there. He became a part of the scene, setting his own journey aside. The lights went on in Simon’s soul and he became compelled not just from Roman force, but from deep within himself.

Note that Saint Mark alone mentions that Simon of Cyrene had two sons, Alexander and Rufus. The Gospel implies that both became well known to the early Church. Being the earliest of the Gospels to come into written form, Mark addressed his Gospel to Gentile Christians in Rome. So did Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans. Mark was with Paul at the time he was imprisoned in Rome so he was likely aware of Simon’s profound transformation as a witness to the Crucifixion and Saint Paul’s knowledge of his sons, Rufus and Alexander cited in Saint Mark’s Gospel.

Hence in the concluding verses of Paul’s Letter to the Romans Paul wrote: “Greet Rufus, eminent in the Lord, and also his mother who is a mother to me as well” (Romans 16:13).

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post which is now on our list of Holy Week posts for our sponsored Holy Week Retreat. It is not too late to follow the Way of the Cross this week by pondering and sharing our

A Personal Holy Week Retreat from Beyond These Stone Walls.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 8/10/22 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 8/10/22

A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a prolific writer before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1941. He died a prisoner of Auschwitz, but true freedom was his gift to all who suffer.

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a prolific writer before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1941. He died a prisoner of Auschwitz, but true freedom was his gift to all who suffer.

“There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.”

— John 15:13

August 10, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In his wonderful book, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (Touchstone 1990), author and former Newsweek editor Kenneth L. Woodward wrote that the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe was one of the most controversial cases ever to come before the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The essential facts of Kolbe’s martyrdom are well known. After six months as a prisoner of Auschwitz in 1941, Maximilian and the other prisoners of Cell Block 14 were ordered outside to stand at attention for commandant Karl Fritzch. Someone from the block had escaped. To encourage informants, the Commandant had a policy that ten men from the cell block of any escaped prisoner would be chosen at random to die from starvation, the slowest and cruelest of deaths.

The last to be chosen was Francis Gajowniczek, a young man who collapsed in tears for the wife and children he would never see again. Another man, Prisoner No. 16670, stepped forward. “Who is this Polish swine?” the Commandant demanded. “I am a Catholic priest,” Maximilian Kolbe replied, “and I want to take the place of that man.” The Commandant was speechless, but granted the request. Maximilian and the others were marched off to a starvation bunker.

For the next 16 days, Kolbe led the others in prayer as one by one they succumbed without food or water. On August 14, only four, including Maximilian, remained alive. The impatient Commandant injected them with carbolic acid and their bodies were cremated to drift in smoke and ash in the skies above Auschwitz. It was the eve of the Solemnity of the Assumption. God was silent, but it only seemed so. I wrote about this death, its meaning, and the cell where it occurred in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

If that event summed up the whole of Maximilian’s life, it may seem sufficient to be deemed heroic virtue. Today, the name of the brutal Commandant Karl Fritsch is forgotten from history while all the world knows of Maximilian Kolbe, and for far more than his act of sacrifice for someone he barely knew. His act of Consecration to Jesus through Mary was well known long before the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. As the occupation commenced, Maximilian had a readership of over 800,000 in Poland alone for his monthly magazine, Knights of the Immaculata.

Perceived as a clear threat to the Nazi mindset, he was arrested and jailed for several months in 1939 while his publishing ability was destroyed. Upon his release, he instituted the practice of round-the-clock Eucharistic Adoration for his community decades before it became common practice in parishes.

The Nazi occupiers of Poland were the cruelest foreign rulers in history. A detailed report on conditions of the Nazi occupation compiled and smuggled out of Poland by Catholic priests was made public in Vatican City in October 1941. More than 60,000 Poles were imprisoned in concentration camps, 540,000 Polish workers were deported to forced labor camps in Germany where another 640,000 Polish prisoners of war were also held.

By the end of 1941, 112,000 Poles had been summarily executed while 30,000 more, half of those held in concentration camps, died there. Famine and other deplorable conditions caused a typhus epidemic that took many more lives. By the end of the Nazi terror, six million Jews — fully a third of European Jews — had been exterminated. There are those whose revisionist history faulted the Vatican for keeping silent, but that was not at all the truth. I wrote the real, but shocking truth of this in “Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.”

Karol Wojtyla

These were also the most formative years for a man who would one day become a priest, and then Archbishop of Krakow in which Auschwitz was located, and then Pope John Paul II. In 1939 as the Nazi occupation of his native Poland commenced, 18-year-old Karol Wojtyla found his own noble defiance. Over the next two years he worked in the mines as a quarryman, and at the Solvey chemical plant while he also took up studies as part of the clandestine underground resistance.

In the fall of 1942, Karol Wojtyla was accepted as a seminarian in a wartime underground seminary in the Archdiocese of Krakow. Two years later, a friend and fellow seminarian was shot and killed by the Gestapo. The war and occupation were a six-year trial by fire in which young Karol was exposed to a world of unspeakable cruelty giving rise to unimaginable heroism.

One of the stories that most impacted him was that of the witness and sacrifice of Father Maximilian Kolbe. He became for Karol the model of a man and priest living the sacramental condition of “alter Christus,” another Christ, by a complete emptying of the self in service to others. In scholarly papers submitted in his underground seminary studies, Karol took up the habit of writing at the top of each page, “To Jesus through Mary,” in emulation of Maximilian Kolbe.

On November 1, 1946, on the Solemnity of All Saints, Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest in the wartime underground seminary. He was the only candidate for ordination that year. Two weeks later, he boarded a train for graduate theological studies in Rome where, like Maximilian Kolbe before him, he would obtain his first of two doctoral degrees. It was the first time he had ever left Poland.

In 1963, he was named Archbishop of Krakow by a new pontiff, Pope Paul VI. It was alive in him in a deeply felt way that he was now Archbishop of the city of Sister Faustina Kowalska, the mystic of Divine Mercy who died in 1938 and whose Diary had spread throughout Poland having a deep impact on young Karol Wojtyla. And he was Archbishop of the site of Auschwitz, of the very place where the Nazi terror occurred, the place where Maximilian Kolbe offered himself to save another.

I was ten years old the year Karol Wojtyla became Archbishop of Krakow. I was 25, and in my first-year of theological studies in seminary when he became Pope John Paul II. In June of 1979, he made his first pilgrimage as pope to his native Poland. This visit marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism. During his pilgrimage, Pope John Paul visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. He knelt on the floor of Block 11, Cell 18 at the very spot in which Maximilian Kolbe died. John Paul kissed the floor where Kolbe had prayed in agony 38 years before. He left there a bouquet of red and white roses, an act with great significance that I will describe below.

When Pope John Paul emerged from his veneration in the starvation cell that June day in 1979, he embraced 78-year-old Franciszek Gajowniczek whose life Maximilian had saved by taking his place in death. I remember this visit. It was the first time I had ever heard of Maximilian Kolbe. I would next hear of him again when he was canonized in 1982, the year of my priesthood ordination. Neither event was without controversy. I recently wrote of my own in “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost.”

A Martyr in Red and White

But the controversy around the canonization of St. Maximilian Kolbe is much more interesting. It actually changed the way the Church has traditionally viewed martyrdom. Maximilian’s sacrifice of himself at Auschwitz was a story that spread far beyond Catholic circles. In his book, People in Auschwitz, Jewish historian and Auschwitz survivor, Hermann Langbein wrote:

“The best known act of resistance was that of Maximilian Rajmond Kolbe who deprived the camp administration of the power to make arbitrary decisions about life and death.”

In 1971, the beatification process for Maximilian presided over by Pope Paul VI was based solely on his heroic virtue. Two miracles had already been formally attributed to his intercession. Shortly after the beatification, Pope Paul VI received a delegation from Poland. Among them was Krakow Archbishop Karol Wojtyla. In his address to them, Pope Paul VI referred to Kolbe as a “martyr of charity.”

This rankled the Poles and even some of the German bishops who had joined the cause for Maximilian’s later canonization. They wanted him venerated as a martyr. Strictly speaking, however, it did not appear to Paul VI or to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, that Maximilian was martyred for his faith, traditionally the sole standard for declaring a saint to also be venerated as a martyr. Pope Paul VI overruled the Polish and German bishops.

The next Pope, John Paul II, had for a lifetime held Maximilian Kolbe in high regard. In order to resolve the question of martyrdom, he bypassed the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and appointed a 25-member commission with two judges to study the matter. The Commission was presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI.

In the end, on November 9, 1982, the Mass for Canonization of St. Maximilian Kolbe took place at St. Peter’s Basilica before a crowd of 250,000, the largest crowd ever in attendance for a canonization. At the Mass, Pope John Paul II proclaimed:

“And so, in virtue of my apostolic authority I have decreed that Maximilian Maria Kolbe, who after beatification was venerated as a confessor, shall henceforth also be venerated as a martyr.”

The matter was officially settled. Maximilian Kolbe became a saint canonized by a saint. But it was really settled in the mind of John Paul three years earlier on the day when he laid a bouquet of red and white roses on the floor of the Auschwitz starvation cell where Maximilian died.

It was an echo from Maximilian’s childhood. At around the age of ten in 1904, Rajmond Kolbe was an active and sometimes mischievous future saint. He was obsessed with astronomy and physics, and dreamed of designing a rocket to explore the Cosmos. He exasperated his mother, a most ironic fact given his lifelong preoccupation with the Mother of God. One day, his mother was at her wit’s end and she scolded him in Polish, “Rajmond! Whatever will become of you?”

Rajmond ran off to his parish church and asked his “other” Mother the same question. Then he had a vision — or a dream — in which Mary presented him with two crowns, one dazzling white and the other red. These came to be seen as symbols for sanctity and martyrdom, and they were the source for Pope John Paul’s gesture of leaving red and white flowers at the place where Maximilian died.

Epilogue

I witnessed firsthand a similar experience involving the conversion of my friend, Pornchai Moontri who took the name, Maximilian, as his Christian name. He may not have been aware of his mystical heart to heart dialog with the patron saint we both shared. Pornchai is a master woodworker, a skill he has not been able to utilize yet in Thailand because organizing a work place and acquiring tools is a major undertaking.

Around the time of our Consecration to Jesus through Mary, an event I wrote of in “The Doors that Have Unlocked,” Pornchai took up a project. He had perfected the art of model shipbuilding and decided to design and build a model sailing ship named in honor of his Patron Saint. He called it “The St. Maximilian.”

Pornchai chose black for the ship’s hull, but on the night before completing it he had an insight that he had to paint the hull red and white. When I asked him why, he had no explanation other than, “It just seems right.” He could not have known about Maximilian’s childhood vision of the red and white crowns or Pope John Paul’s gesture at Auschwitz.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This story is filled with irony and coincidence, none of which is really coincidence at all. It is summed up in this quote from St. Maximilian Kolbe, which was sent to me just before I wrote this post:

“For every single human being God has destined the fulfillment of a determined mission on this earth. Even from when he created the Universe, he so directed causes so that the chain of events would be unbroken, and that conditions and circumstances for the fulfillment of this mission would be the most appropriate and fitting.

“Further, every individual is born with particular talents and gifts (and flaws) that are applicable to, and in keeping with, the assigned task, and so throughout life the environment and circumstances so arrange themselves as to make possible the achievement of the goal and to facilitate its unfolding.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe

Another note from Fr. G: The above quote was found on a bulletin from the National Shrine of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Libertyville, Illinois. It was sent from an unusual source, a retired F.B.I. Special Agent was attending Adoration at the Shrine when he spotted the quote and decided to send it to me. He also sent the message below, which will serve as the first comment for this post.

“During the third week of January of this year, I attended Adoration and the Noon Mass at Marytown, Libertyville, Illinois where The National Shrine of Saint Maximilian Kolbe is located and received a copy of the Marytown Church bulletin. The Shrine is under the sponsorship of the Conventual Franciscan Friars – the religious order that St. Maximilian was a member of. St Maximilian Kolbe was put to death at Auschwitz concentration camp on August 14, 1941 and was ‘cremated’ the next day on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. He is the patron saint of various groups but perhaps most notably known for being the patron saint of prisoners. Marytown is very much involved in ministry to prisoners throughout the United States by providing Catholic material to Chaplains of prison facilities and other outreach activities.

“The day after this particular visit to Marytown, I was reading the online Catholic League newsletter and saw information about the ‘Laurie List’ and how it pertained to the trial and incarceration of Fr. Gordon MacRae. The Laurie List was evidently a ‘secret’ list of New Hampshire police officers accessible to prosecutors, who had issues arise questioning their truthfulness and veracity. Any issue that arises as to the truthfulness of a witness particularly a police officer is supposed to be made known to the defendant and his attorney. The Keene NH detective who investigated the case against Fr. Gordon is on this list. If ‘impeachable’ information regarding this detective was known, this information should have been made available to Fr. Gordon and his defense attorney. I have been following Fr. Gordon’s situation for a number of years and so I am aware of his devotion to St. Maximilian Kolbe.

“After reviewing rules to send mail to the prison housing Fr. Gordon in Concord, New Hampshire, I forwarded the weekly bulletin to him which usually quotes a passage from the writings of St. Maximilian. This has led to a correspondence and receiving Father’s weekly post. Those familiar with Father’s website — Beyond These Stone Walls — are aware of Pornchai Moontri, his tragic life, long period of incarceration, transfer to the NH prison in Concord, becoming the cellmate of Fr. Gordon, Pornchai’s entrance into the Catholic Church — taking a baptismal name of Maximilian — and his ultimate release from prison. I currently try to assist Fr. Gordon’s work (his web site, assistance to Pornchai, etc.) through prayer and financial support.”

One last note from Fr. G: Please visit our “Special Events” page for an update on ways that you can help sustain Beyond These Stone Walls.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts:

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Independence Day in Thailand by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 4/6/22 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 4/6/22

Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred for his resistance to tyranny. On April 9, 1953 another life began and resistance to tyranny has been its measure.

On April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred for his resistance to tyranny. On April 9, 1953 another life began and resistance to tyranny has been its measure.

“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

April 6, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

This story has to begin with a recent event. On its face, it may not at first seem connected to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famed Lutheran pastor and theologian who was executed on the personal order of Adolf Hitler in 1945. The connection is subtle but real so bear with me. This, too, is about tyranny.

Many readers have reacted to a LinkedIn article I wrote in early March, 2022, entitled, “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.” The anti-Catholic oppression I wrote about was a well-documented true account that took place in Hitler’s Germany in 1937. I entitled it, “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

But that was not the only anti-Catholic oppression. I shared that story with the 4,500 Facebook followers of Beyond These Stone Walls and in fourteen Catholic groups there such as the Knights of Columbus and The Catholic Writers Guild, both in which I have active membership.

Just as the post began to be widely shared by others in those groups, it was suddenly removed by Facebook with a statement that it, and the 14 copies I shared among Catholic groups, “violates Facebook Community Standards.” Minutes later, we received another message informing us that our account is now suspended and will be offline until a review takes place.

With the help of an editor, I immediately reviewed all of Facebook’s “Community Standards” and could not locate a single one that I had in any way violated. We then completed an extensive appeal using Facebook’s own format. Catholic League President Bill Donohue weighed in on this with a statement, sent to tens of thousands of Catholic League members, that this suspension was without cause and should be reversed. One week later, on March 14, we received this message from Facebook:

“Gordon J MacRae’s post is back on Facebook. We’re sorry we got this wrong. We reviewed your post again and it does follow our Community Standards. We appreciate you taking the time to request a review. Your feedback helps us do better.”

However, Facebook did not lift any of the restrictions imposed because of its staff’s alarming misreading of the post. We filed yet another appeal, but to date Facebook has remained unresponsive. I was thus barred from posting anything for the last month on my account and from sharing to any of the Catholic and Pro-Life groups to which we have contributed content over the last several years.

Mark Zuckerberg has testified before Congress that Facebook does not suppress conservative viewpoints. It has not suppressed the accounts of the Taliban, but it did suppress mine. Facebook recently suspended its “Community Standards” so that the people of Ukraine may express their honest thoughts about Vladimir Putin. In what world should Ukraine need Facebook’s permission to do that?

Facebook has stated that some of the restrictions on my account would remain in place until June 5, 2022. Ironically, June 5, 2022 is also the 40th anniversary of my priesthood ordination.

In the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I will be 69 years old on April 9, 2022. I am not certain at what point in my life I learned that I was born on the same date on which Dietrich Bonhoeffer died. I was young, likely in middle school when I learned about the great Lutheran pastor-theologian and the fact that I came into this world eight years to the day after he left it. I have long known that Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945 on the personal order of Adolf Hitler just as Allied Forces descended upon Berlin. This order was one of Hitler’s last acts before taking his own life.

Many years later, I was sent to prison on trumped up charges. It was the same sort of charges that Hitler tried to falsely pin on 300 Catholic priests in Germany in 1937. It was the story I told in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” the post that got me banned from Facebook. Ironically, it began with a quote that Facebook hated, but that we should never forget:

“The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (trans. “My Struggle”) 1937.

In prison, I developed a friendship, through correspondence, with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, publisher and editor of First Things magazine to which I had long subscribed. Father Richard had been a celebrated Lutheran Pastor and theologian when he “crossed the Tiber” and was ordained a Catholic priest on September 7, 1991. His life was richly informed and influenced by two great men: Saint Pope John Paul II — who had become a friend to Father Neuhaus in this life — and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In his famous monthly First Things column, “The Public Square” in 2008 in the June/July issue, Father Neuhaus wrote “Lives Lived Greatly.” It was, among other things, a tribute to some of the most influential persons in his life:

“This April was a time of remembering and gratitude. April 2 [2008] was the third anniversary of the death, on the Eve of Divine Mercy Sunday, of John Paul the Great. On April 4, forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. ... And on April 9, 1945, just days before the end of the war, Dietrich Bonboeffer was hanged on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s writings and witness were a formative influence in my life, as in the lives of innumerable others .... Those were extraordinary April days. They were days of sorrow and gratitude. I count it a gift beyond measure to have known two of them as friends. The life of each awakens us to the possibilities of life lived greatly.”

What made that tribute so extraordinary for me was that one of those men, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, died as a prisoner. In an earlier April — April of 1943 — Bonhoeffer was arrested by the German Gestapo after informants tipped them off to a plan in which Bonhoeffer was involved to save the lives of Jews by smuggling them out of Germany to Switzerland. He was taken to the infamous Tegel prison where he wrote much of his classic prison journal entitled Letters and Papers from Prison (1953).

On July 24, 1944, the famous “Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler went into action. That account later became a riveting film of the same name. The Valkyrie plot was the last of several such attempts on Hitler’s life, but the first in which the planted bomb actually exploded. Hitler lived, but a vast conspiracy to end his tyranny by ending his life was exposed. He ordered the arrest and torture of thousands, and one of those exposed by informants as a leader in another plot against his tyranny was the imprisoned pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The Last Station on the Road to Freedom

In February of 1945, Allied planes relentlessly began an aerial bombardment of Berlin in an effort to stop Hitler’s forces from overwhelming Europe. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was transferred from Tegel prison to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he remained for two months, and then to Flossenburg prison. As the Allied forces were advancing on Berlin to end Hitler’s tyranny, the unmoored fascist dictator issued an order for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s immediate death by hanging. It was the morning of April 9, 1945, the Monday after Holy Week and Easter.

Bonhoeffer’s remains, like those of St. Maximilian Kolbe four years earlier, went up in smoke, his ashes mingled with those of the many Jews he once tried to save. But his writing — most of it from prison — survived him and survived death. When his writings were published they had a profound effect on the faith of the world. In the words of Eric Metaxas whose biography, Bonhoeffer, met wide acclaim,

“Bonhoeffer called death ‘the last station on the road to freedom.’ Bonhoeffer worshipped a God who had emphatically conquered death in Jesus Christ through the Crucifixion and Resurrection.” In Bonhoeffer’s own words ...

“How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether in our human fear and anguish, we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold if not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”

Though a Lutheran pastor and brilliant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a most profound regard and respect for the Catholic faith. In a February 23, 1944 letter to his friend, Eberhard Bethge written from Tegel prison, Bonhoeffer wrote:

“If you have the chance of going to Rome during Holy Week, I advise you to attend the afternoon Maundy Thursday service at St. Peter’s Basilica. The twelve candles are lit on the altar and put out as a symbol of the disciples’ flight, till in the vast space there is only one candle left burning in the middle — for Christ. After that comes the cleansing of the altar in preparation for Good Friday and Holy Saturday.”

“Lives Lived Greatly” was the last substantive piece of writing by Father Richard John Neuhaus before he succumbed to cancer in January, 2009. Besides Dietrich Bonhoefer and Saint Pope John Paul II, the life and witness of fellow Catholic convert, Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Jesuit and theologian at Fordham University, had a major influence on his life and mine. Cardinal Dulles preceded Father Neuhaus in death by just three weeks. A few months before his death, Cardinal Dulles wrote to me with a request that I “Take up a new chapter in the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison.” He cited Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one whose life my own suffering in prison might emulate. I was shocked and filled with doubt.

In an earlier 2008 issue of First Things, Father Neuhaus wrote about me in an op-ed entitled, “A Kafkaesque Tale.” His urging, and that of Cardinal Dulles, became the catalyst for my own letters from prison in the form of this blog which began six months after their deaths. A decade later, in a review of Beyond These Stone Walls, another writer wrote a brief review that our editor published atop our Posts Page. I was shocked again, and again filled with doubt.

Whatever resistance I have to the tyranny of false witness, unjust imprisonment, and even being one of Facebook’s cancelled priests, is lived in the shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But if I ever stepped into his shoes, it could only be to shine them. I could never be worthy to walk — or write — in such company.

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Notes from Father Gordon MacRae:

#Meta: A lot of Catholics, both the devout and the struggling, are among the two billion users of Facebook, but they cannot read this post unless you share it in my stead. Thank you.

#Consecration: After my post, “The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine,” we posted the beautifully composed Act of Consecration Prayer at our Library Category page, “Behold Your Mother.”

#HolyWeek: In preparation for Holy Week, please walk the Way of the Cross with us through these special posts, From Ashes to Easter.

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 6/2/21 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 6/2/21

It Is the Duty of a Priest to Never Lose Sight of Heaven

Marking 39 years of priesthood, 27 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to higher truths. For those who suffer in life, eternal life matters more.

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Marking 40 years of priesthood, 28 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to a higher truth. For those suffering in life, eternal life matters more.

“When suffering is far away, we feel that we are ready for everything. Now that we have occasion to suffer, we must take advantage of it to save souls.”

— Fr. Maximilian Kolbe writing from Auschwitz, 1941

I am indebted to my friend, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, for his remarkable and timely guest post, “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In it, he concluded that some of our bishops have acted in regard to their priests by caving into the cancel culture mob even before it was called that. “The mob can be a frightening place when we have lost sight of heaven,” he boldly wrote. I was struck by this important insight which lends itself to my title for this post: It is the duty of a priest to never lose sight of heaven.

In the weeks before I mark forty years of priesthood, I have heard from no less than three good priests who have been summarily removed from ministry without a defense. Like many others, they are banished into exile following 30-year-old claims for which there exists no credible evidence beyond the accusations themselves and demands for money.

This sad reality, imposed by our bishops in a panicked response to the Catholic abuse crisis, has been the backdrop of nearly half of my life as a priest. As Father Stuart mentioned in his post, I wrote of this a decade ago in regard to the demise of the celebrated public ministry of Father John Corapi at EWTN. Given the resurgence of priests falsely accused, I decided to update and republish that post on social media. It is “Goodbye, Good Priest! Fr. John Corapi’s Kafkaesque Catch-22.”

The point of it was not Father Corapi himself, but rather the matters of due process and fundamental justice and fairness that have suffered in regard to the treatment of accused priests. In republishing it, I was struck by how little has changed in this regard since I first wrote of Father Corapi a decade earlier.

My article presents no new information on the priesthood of Father Corapi, but lest our spiritual leaders think that interest in this story among Catholics has diminished, within 24 hours of publishing, that post was visited by over 6,500 readers and shared on social media 3,700 times. (Note: We now give it a permanent home in the “Catholic Priesthood” Category at the BTSW Library.)

The only priests who land in the news these days are those accused of sexual or financial wrongdoing and those who make their disobedience to Church authority in matters of faith and morals a media event. In regard to the latter, several priests and bishops in Germany have openly defied Pope Francis and his decision to bar priests from blessing same-sex unions.

Blessing the individuals involved would not be an issue, but, as Pope Francis put it, “The Church cannot bless sin.” The open defiance of this among some German priests brought them 15 minutes of fame in our cancel culture climate in recent weeks, but it does nothing to bring us any closer to heaven.

Appearing on The World Over with Raymond Arroyo recently, Catholic theologian and author, George Weigel, addressed the German situation plainly:

“These bishops think that they know more about marriage than Jesus, that they know more about worthiness for the Eucharist than Saint Paul. This is apostasy, and it is time to call it what it really is.”

— George Weigel

The Setting for My Priesthood

In every age, people tend to see the struggles of their current time as the worst of times. My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982. It was the only ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire that year. President Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term in office. The U.S. economy was suffering its most severe decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment was at its highest level in decades and the housing industry was on the verge of collapse.

Just over a year earlier, on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times at close range as he entered Saint Peter’s Square to mark the 64th anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. John Paul was severely wounded and so was the spirit of the global Catholic Church. He recovered, though a lesser man might not have.

One year later, three weeks before my ordination, Pope John Paul made a thanksgiving visit to Fatima on May 12, 1982. It was the day before the anniversary of both the Visions of Fatima and the attempt on his life. As the Pope walked toward the altar of the Fatima shrine, a man in clerical garb lunged at him with a bayonet, coming within inches of killing John Paul before being subdued by security guards.

The assailant was Juan Fernandez y Krohn, then age 32, a priest ordained by the suspended traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Fernandez was subsequently expelled from Lefebvre's movement. As he lunged at the Pope with his bayonet, he shouted in denouncement of the Second Vatican Council while accusing Pope John Paul of collaborating with the dark forces behind the spread of Communism.

That latter accusation was highly ironic. Over the next decade, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II collaborated to become the two major forces behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism that had held the Western World in the grip of Cold War since the end of World War II.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down by a crowd of citizens from both East and West as soldiers watched in silence. On Christmas Day, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a television address. The next day, the Soviet parliament passed its final resolution ratifying the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Within a week, all residual functions of the Soviet Communist state ceased. The USSR was no more, thanks to the strength and fidelity of a Pope and a President.

The footprints of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul on modern human history are immense. This and the chaos of the world at that time formed the backdrop against which I became a priest in 1982. I wrote of this in “Priesthood: The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times.”

The sins of the times were many. On the world stage, Pope John Paul courageously confronted the Marxist “cancel culture” movement of his time. His bold witness to the world and his fidelity are highlighted in a new and important book by George Weigel entitled Not Forgotten.

In contrast, much of the current Catholic ecclesial leadership seems bogged down in demonstrations of tolerance for dissent and the rise of socialism and Marxist ideology that again springs up anew as “cancel culture.” Some bishops cannot even decide whether open promotion of abortion should bar its adherents who are nominally Catholic from presenting themselves for the Eucharist.

Ironically, recent polls have suggested that 66-percent of American Catholics are uncertain whether they still even believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is that exact same percentage who also believe that President Biden should be admitted to the Eucharist without question despite his open promotion of abortion as a civil right. Our Catholic crisis is not just one of fidelity. It is a crisis of identity. But as has been famously asked by another well-known priest, “Who am I to judge?”

Witnessed in a Prison Journal

Now here I stand, 39 years into my priesthood on the peripheries with 27 of those years in wrongful imprisonment for abuse claims that never took place. I could have left prison 26 years ago had the truth meant nothing to me. I have been reading the far better known story of another falsely accused priest in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press.

I find in it much solace and peace. I am strengthened in my priesthood by the great effort of Cardinal Pell to maintain his identity as a priest even in prison. I know from long experience - too long - that there is nothing in prison, absolutely nothing that sustains an identity of priesthood. It is so easy and a constant temptation to simply give up. For page after page in the Journal, I find myself thinking, “I felt that very same way,” or “I did these very same things.” Our prisons were similar, although from Cardinal Pell descriptions, Australia’s prisons seem a bit more humane.

Cardinal Pell was in prison for 400 days before his unjust convictions were recognized as such in a unanimous exoneration by Australia’s High Court. On my 39th anniversary of ordination on June 5th this year, I mark 9,750 days in wrongful imprisonment. I do not point this out to contrast my experience with that of Cardinal Pell. His ordeal, like mine, was defined by his first failed appeals after which he had every reason to believe that prison could thus define the rest of his life.

I have no known recourse because, unlike Australia, the United States courts have given greater weight to states’ rights to finality in criminal cases than to innocent defendants’ rights to a case review. When I had new witnesses and evidence, the court not only declined to hear it, but declined to allow any further appeals. We even appealed that, but to no avail.

But a distinction between justice for Cardinal Pell and for me is not the point I want to make. I felt the lacerations to his good name in every step of his Way of the Cross as news media in Australia and globally exploited the charges against him. What a trophy his wrongful conviction was for those who hate the Church!

I felt the scourging he endured as multiple false claimants tried to use his cross for financial gain. I felt his condemnation in the halls of the high priests as cowardly men of the Church denounced him, at worst, or at best stood speechless in the shadows of silence, rarely mentioning his name, and even then only in whispers.

Reading Volume One of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal has been both consoling and distressing. Consoling in that when all else was stripped away, truth and priesthood, even more than freedom, were still at the heart of this good priest’s identity. The measure of a man is not when all is going well, but when all that is dear and familiar has been stripped away. Cardinal Pell held up well. I like to think I have, too.

I have reserved a copy of Volume Two of the Prison Journal. I am told by those who know that in a few of its pages, Cardinal Pell also wrote about me. That struck me as highly ironic in that I wrote several times about his plight, the last being “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

And by “From Down Under,” I do not just mean Australia!

The Last Years of My Priesthood

I expect that I will die in prison. This is not a statement out of despair. No one has taken my faith in Divine Providence and Divine Mercy. There came a time in my imprisonment when I recognized a pattern of grace that began with the insinuation of Saint Maximilian Kolbe into my life as both a priest and a prisoner. This grace has been profound, and staggering in its visibility and power. Our readers — all but the most spiritually blind — have seen it.

After a lifetime of devoting himself as a priest in Consecration to Jesus through Mary, Maximilian coped with his suffering as grace rather than torment. This story culminated, as you know, in his spontaneous decision to surrender his life so that another could live. This act of sacrifice has long been heralded as an exemplar of the words of Jesus, “No greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

There came a point in my imprisonment when it was clear that all I tried to do to bring about justice was in vain. So I asked for Divine Mercy and the ability to find grace in this story. A life without grace is far worse than a life without justice. It was at that very point at which my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, arrived upon my road as a priest. He had been mercilessly beaten down in life, and robbed of all trust and hope.

I could have been the priest who saw him on that road and passed him by like the priest in the Parable of the Samaritan. But I stopped, and when I learned the whole truth of his life, I set my own hope for justice aside. It became clear to me that this was God’s action in my life and a task that He has given only to me. It became clear that Pornchai has a special connection to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and I was to be his Saint Joseph.

I wrote a post about this healing mission which I contrasted with the Book of Tobit and the mission of Saint Raphael the Archangel to be God’s instrument of healing. I wrote of this in one of my own favorite posts at Beyond These Stone Walls in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”

You should not miss that post, and if you do read it, you would do well to ponder for awhile the mysteries of grace on your own life’s path. It was well after writing and posting it that I learned something that stunned me into a better awareness of the irony of grace.

Over the course of time, the Church has devised a Lectionary that reveals all of Sacred Scripture in the readings for the Church’s liturgy spread over a three-year cycle. I discovered only while writing this post for the occasion of my 39th anniversary of priesthood ordination that the First Reading at Mass on that day — Saturday, June 5, 2021 — is the story of the Archangel Raphael sent by God to restore life and sight to Tobit and bring deliverance and healing to two souls — Tobias and Sarah — whose lives and sufferings converged upon Tobit’s at that point in time.

As I mark thirty nine years as a priest in extraordinary circumstances, the weight of imprisonment does not leave me broken. But the irony of grace leaves me hopeful — even now.

Thank you for being a part of my life as a priest. Thank you for being here with me at this turning of the tide.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We have a most important message for readers. Please visit our “Special Events” page.

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How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis

The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.

The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.

Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: In “Mary and the Fatima Century,” a recent post at Beyond These Stone Walls, I wrote of the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima that began on May 13, 1917. They continued on the 13th of each of several months to follow.

Before posting it, I received a message from journalist and historian Craig Turner writing from Virginia. He sent along the outline of a CD he produced for Lighthouse Catholic Media entitled “The Rise and Fall of Communism: How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a world in Crisis.” He described his historical analysis as “How Mary intervened during a time of great crisis in the Church and the world, to save us from a great evil.”

As I read through the outline, I discovered that Mr. Turner’s description was the understatement of the year. His historical summation of world events parallel to the apparitions at Fatima is fascinating: So I invited him to submit his outline as a guest post. It is a privilege to present this riveting overview of the Fatima Century by Craig Turner.

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Tours, France

In 1847 a young Carmelite nun made the astonishing claim that Jesus had begun appearing to her. Upon telling her superior, the claim was met with skepticism. In 1846, Jesus warned her of an approaching storm: “the malice of revolutionary men.” The following year, on March 14, he appeared again to her, stating that a society known as the “Communists” was working to spread…

On March 30, 1848, Jesus appeared to her for the last time telling her that she had completed her earthly mission and would soon die. Though she was in good health, she accepted this revelation with peace. She suddenly developed pulmonary tuberculosis and died on July 8, 1848, at the young age of 33.

Brussels, Belgium

At the same time Jesus appeared to the nun in Tours, France in 1847, an unknown political theorist living in exile in Brussels wrote his social contract called The Communist Manifesto. His name was Karl Marx. His financier and fellow author was Frederick Engels. Shortly after the work was published, a wave of unexplainable revolutions broke out in Europe.

The Manifesto presented what it claimed to be an answer to class struggle, and was quickly published in other languages. In France, socialists set up a government after the fall of Napoleon, but their government was overthrown and many of its members executed.

In Germany, the German Socialist-democratic party was created in 1875 but it was deemed a threat to the country and outlawed by the German government led by Otto von Bismarck. In 1890 it was once again legalized and fully adopted Marxist principles. In 1893, Karl Marx died in poverty, but The Communist Manifesto continued to attract adherents. Standing over his grave, Engels declared him to be the greatest thinker of their age.

Vatican City

On October 13, 1884, Pope Leo XIII had an extraordinary vision: He had just finished offering Mass at the Vatican when he was knocked to the floor of his chapel by a supernatural force and heard the voices of Jesus and the devil in conversation.

The devil declared in a raspy and guttural voice that he can conquer the world and boasts he will have ultimate victory, but needs time and power “to those who have given themselves over to my service.” [It was at this time that Pope Leo XIII composed the well-known Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel.]

Russia

By 1905, three competing parties evolved in Russia. The Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party advocated for a complete revolution. Social upheaval erupted in Russia and Europe. Though Karl Marx stated that Russia was an unlikely candidate for communism, it proceeded slowly along this path.

Western Europe

Other parts of Europe experienced socialist leanings and anti-religious fervor. The conflicts centered around two factions: those wanting to retain their personal liberties vs. the new forms of socialist governments and a conflict between the Catholic Church and atheist communism. [How history repeats!]

At this time, religious persecution broke out in Portugal. Between 1911 and 1916, 1,700 priests and religious were murdered. Religious property was confiscated and a law passed forbidding public religious ceremonies. Alfonso Costa, the head of state, publicly declared that “Thanks to this law, Portugal within two generations will have succeeded in completely eliminating Catholicism.”

On May 12, 1914, two weeks before the outbreak of World War I, 22 people mowing fields in Hrushiv, Ukraine saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told them, “There will be a war; Russia will become a Godless country, and their country will suffer terribly for 80 years, and will have to live through the world wars [spoken in the plural] but afterward will be free.”

Two weeks later, World War I broke out across Europe. Coupled with a global epidemic of tuberculosis, the war claimed tens of millions of lives. By 1917, more than 1.3 million Russian men had been killed in battle, 4.2 million were wounded, and another 2.4 million were captured. In the midst of this desperate struggle, Pope Benedict XV issued a public letter with an urgent plea to Mary to help bring peace to the world.

Fatima, Portugal

On May 13, 1917, eight days after the Pope made his plea, three shepherd children in a remote region of Portugal experienced the vision of a magnificently beautiful woman who descended from the sky surrounded by a supernatural light. She stood suspended at the top of a large tree. They asked where she was from, and she said, “I am from Heaven.” She asked that the children return on the 13th of each month for five more months. During the following months, great crowds began to assemble.

On the third visit, July 13, 1917, the “Beautiful Lady,” as the three children called her, declared that war is going to end, but that if the people do not cease offending God, a worse war will break out “When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign” of the impending future war, she said, as well as persecutions of the Church.

She promised to return to ask for the consecration of Russia to her, a form of entrustment or dedication. She did this in a future visit to one of the visionaries in 1929. Russia, she continued at Fatima, will soon become Communist.

On October 13,1917, the final apparition, more than 70,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. For 12 minutes, they saw the sun spin and “dance” in the sky but their eyes were not harmed. It was exactly 33 years to the day since Pope Leo XIII had seen his vision in the Vatican chapel.

Moscow, Russia

In the same hour in which the Miracle of the Sun took place at Fatima, Vladimir Lenin entered Russia with a plan to establish a Communist state. At that same time, Bolsheviks in Moscow seized control of the great cathedral of the city, built by the Czars, and destroyed it. The miraculous and prized icon of Kazan housed in the cathedral was swiftly taken to safety outside Russia. Less than one month later, all of Russia fell to communism.

Lenin, the leader of Communist Russia, declared that religion is the “opiate of the masses,” and worked to stamp out religious belief. In 1918 he dissolved democracy and began remodeling the country upon Marxist principles by nationalizing industries and confiscating land. In 1922, he formally founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Lenin was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who would ultimately be responsible for 20 million deaths. He believed that religion must be removed in order for the ideal Communist society to be constructed. As a result, the government promoted atheism as the state belief system and carried out a campaign of terror against religious adherents.

In the 1930s, it became dangerous to be openly religious in Russia as churches were destroyed or confiscated and religion was violently persecuted. In 1917, there were 54,000 Russian Orthodox parishes in Russia. By 1939, they numbered only in the hundreds, and tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns had been persecuted or killed. Approximately 100,000 people were shot during the religious purge of 1937-1938.

In Spain, Catholics fared no better than the Orthodox in Russia. During the Spanish Civil War, 11,000 priests and nuns were killed by communist loyalists, and more than 20,000 churches, convents, and Catholic schools were desecrated or destroyed.

Berlin, Germany

On the evening of January 25, 1938, an enormous light appeared in the sky across the globe, attributed later to be the greatest aurora borealis since 1709. The New York Times headline the following day was “Aurora Borealis Startles Europe.” Though usually seen in northern climates, the lights were seen as far south as southern Australia and knocked out radio transmissions.

Ten days later, Adolf Hitler took command of the armed forces of Germany. The following month he began his plan of world conquest by marching troops into Austria. The war that followed was devastating and catastrophic as disparate countries were pulled into the conflict. Several nations were ravaged by war, fulfilling the prophecy of the “Beautiful Lady” at Fatima.

By 1945 the tide had turned and World War II in Europe was nearly over, but with a staggering cost: 50 million dead. The most viciously persecuted were the Jews. Catholics fared only a little better. Of the 20,000 Catholic priests in Germany when Hitler came to power, 14,364 were killed, imprisoned, or exiled.

Seeing that his failure was imminent, Hitler dictated his will, blaming the Jews for World War II, and justifying their extermination. The following day he swallowed a cyanide capsule and died.

Japan was also at war with the United States and her allies in the Pacific. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It leveled every building within one mile of the center of the blast with the exception of one structure: a parish house, eight blocks from the epicenter where eight Jesuits were living and had prayed the rosary daily.

Included in their prayers each day was a plea given at Fatima, “save us from the fires of hell.” They were the only people within a four-mile radius to have survived.

Eastern Europe

In an ironic twist of fate, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the patroness of the United States. On the day of the feast itself, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan was forced to surrender and accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary (also the name of the church in Hiroshima where the eight Jesuits survived).

On May 13, 1955, the 38th anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima, the Soviets began to withdraw their troops from Austria after a massive prayer campaign. In 1950, 66 years after Pope Leo XIII had his vision, Pope Pius XII defined as dogma the Assumption of Mary.

Meanwhile, communism had spread from the countries of Eastern Europe to China. In 1949, Mao Zedong established The People’s Republic of China as a communist nation. That same year, Western nations for NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — aligned as a defense against the spread of communism. In 1955 the Warsaw Pact formed among the communist nations. In 1961, construction of the Berlin Wall began, a symbol of the Cold War.

**Pope John Paul II after being shot multiple times at point-blank range in Saint Peter’s Square.**

Vatican City

In 1978, a little-known cardinal from Communist Poland was elected pope. He subsequently condemned both communism and “unbridled capitalism.” The following year, a trade union at the Gdansk, Poland shipyard went on strike demanding freedom and democracy. The new pope managed to keep communist Polish authorities from succeeding in suppressing the strikers.

On May 13, 1981, the 64th anniversary of the first appearance of Mary at Fatima, Pope John Paul II was shot and nearly killed in Saint Peter’s Square by a man with ties to Bulgarian Communism. The following year, Pope John Paul visited Fatima and stated that Mary “guided the bullet” saving his life.

The surgeon who removed the bullet affirmed that its trajectory should have passed directly through the main arteries of his heart, but somehow moved around the organ sparing the Pope’s life.

Seeing the connection between these events, Pope John Paul II asked for the documents pertaining to Fatima in the Vatican Archives. He read them, concluding that the consecration of Russia to Mary, in union with the bishops of the world, would fulfill Mary’s request and end Russian Communism.

One hundred years after Pope Leo XIII had his vision of satanic influence, Pope John Paul II consecrated Russia to Mary in a ceremony in Saint Peter’s Square. The following year, an obscure communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, became leader of the USSR. Pope John Paul, in a letter to the last surviving Fatima visionary, asked if the consecration was done correctly. She responded, “Our Lady will keep her promises.”

On April 27, 1987, there were reports of the Virgin Mary appearing again in Hrushiv, Ukraine to a 12-year-old above a small church. Other reports followed in the ensuing months. Suddenly, and almost without warning, the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989 and citizens passed freely between the East and the West. That same year, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania became independent states followed by the Ukraine in 1991.

Later in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared for a news conference on Russian television and announced that he is dissolving the Soviet Union and ending Russian Communism. The date was December 25, 1991, Christmas Day.

Craig Turner is a columnist and business owner in Washington, DC. He began his career in journalism in the 1980s covering Capitol Hill for Government Information Services. He has worked in both communications and public relations. His articles have been published in both print and online media including MSNBC, Business Week, and Reuters.

“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Tom Clancy passed from this life on October 1, 2013. A devout Catholic, he was a master of the military techno-thriller and a prophet of the World War III end times.

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In 1989, Pope John Paul II added a new title to honor Saint Joseph. As “Guardian of the Redeemer” Joseph’s dream set us on a path from spiritual exile to Divine Mercy.

Carnage in the Absence of Fathers

Now Comes Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer

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There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.

Disposable Priests in a Disposable Culture

A Puritan Response to Sin

Ganging Up on the Already Down

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Karol Wojtyla became a priest on All Saints Day 1946. On Divine Mercy Sunday 2014 the Church affirmed what the world already knew: he is Saint John Paul the Great.

November 1, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

A Pope’s 33 Days

Pope John Paul II and the Miracle of Fatima

Saint John Paul the Great, pray for us as we face, yet again, a world in crisis.

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

The Indictment of Heroic Virtue

Twice Stigmatized

Potholes on the Road to Sainthood

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EPILOGUE

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Simon of Cyrene was just a man coming in from the country to Jerusalem for the Passover when his fated path intersected the Way of the Cross and Salvation History.

Weep Not for Me, Jerusalem

He Was There When They Crucified My Lord

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St. Maximilian Kolbe was a prolific writer before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1941. He died a prisoner of Auschwitz, but true freedom was his gift to all who suffer.

Karol Wojtyla

A Martyr in Red and White

Epilogue

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On April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred for his resistance to tyranny. On April 9, 1953 another life began and resistance to tyranny has been its measure.

In the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Last Station on the Road to Freedom

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Marking 40 years of priesthood, 28 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to a higher truth. For those suffering in life, eternal life matters more.

The Setting for My Priesthood

Witnessed in a Prison Journal

The Last Years of My Priesthood

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The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.

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Tours, France

Brussels, Belgium

Vatican City

Russia

Western Europe

Fatima, Portugal

Moscow, Russia

Berlin, Germany

Eastern Europe

Vatican City

***November 1, 2023 by Fr* *Gordon MacRae***