Saint Maximilian Kolbe is the Man in the Mirror

At the canonization of St Maximilian Kolbe, Pope John Paul II was gifted with a portrait of the new saint by Fr James McCurry, a friend of Beyond These Stone Walls.

August 12, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

As many of our readers know, this blog began early in the month of August in 2009. It came into being as a result of a phone call to Australia. The person I called in Sydney had read an article I wrote for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It was her daunting suggestion that I write a blog that would be published weekly from prison. I had no idea then how that could happen. I had already been in prison for 15 years then, and Pornchai Moontri had already been my roommate for two years.

So after my phone call to Australia, I returned to our cell and told Pornchai what had been suggested to me. Neither of us knew what a blog was. They did not exist when we first went to prison. But I told Pornchai of what had been described to me: that this could be our voice to the world from behind these prison walls. Neither of us were taking this seriously, but I asked Pornchai that if I went ahead with this project, what should I call it? He immediately suggested “These Stone Walls.”

I wrote a weekly post from 2009 to 2020 when somehow this blog ran into a wall of resistance. It had to be taken down and started anew. Both Pornchai and I thought it was the end of our voice in the wilderness, but just weeks later in September 2020 it was restored with a new name: Beyond These Stone Walls. It also had a new editor, and in the same week that all of this happened, Pornchai was taken away on September 8, 2020, at 5 AM. He was taken for ICE detention (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) where he prepared for his deportation to Thailand after 36 years in the U.S., 30 of them in prison. I wrote at the time of all that we had been facing in a widely acclaimed post, “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

Since then another six years have passed. Pornchai has been back in Thailand for six years at this writing, and I have now been writing these weekly posts for 17 years. At this time each year Pornchai and I both honor our patron saint, Maximilian Kolbe, who surrendered his life at Auschwitz to save the life of another prisoner.

What follows are the first three posts ever written for this blog. I think you will see why we combined them to publish anew here this month.

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St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror

First published August 2009.

For someone on the outside looking in, it must seem an odd place to begin. Virtually every prison cell has one: a small stainless steel sink with a matching toilet welded to its side. Bolted to the cinderblock wall just above it is a small stainless steel mirror, dinged, dented, and scraped so badly that the image it reflects is unrecognizable.

I began each day in prison at the break of dawn by shaving in front of that mirror. That morning ritual had been repeated 5,412 times [when I first wrote of it in 2009. At this writing, I have been here for 11,750 days, but I no longer shave in front of that mirror. Rules for shaving changed sometime back. I now keep a close-cropped white beard, somewhat like the one Sean Connery wore, but without his cool Scottish accent.] Back then, I seldom cut myself shaving — a minor miracle as I could see very little of my self in that mirror. I often think of St. Paul’s cryptic image in his first letter to the Church in Corinth (13:12): “For now I see dimly, as in a mirror, but then I shall see face to face.” It is a hopeful image.

I sometimes find that my mind calculates dates and their meanings on a sort of autopilot. There came a day when I stood at the mirror to shave and realized that on that day — it was December 23, 2006 — I had been a priest in prison for the exact amount of time that I was a priest “on the streets” as prisoners like to describe their lives before prison.

From that day until now, I wonder which I see more of in that flawed mirror. Do I see the man who is a priest of 27 years? [Now 44 years] Or do I see only Prisoner 67546, the identity imposed upon me behind prison walls?

A strange thing happened on the day after I first reflected — as best I could in that mirror — on who I see. It was Christmas Eve, December 24, 2006, the day that the equation changed. It was the day that I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else. That night at prison mail call, I had a few Christmas cards. One of them was from Father James McCurry, a Conventual Franciscan priest who once visited me in prison.

Inside Father McCurry’s Christmas card was a prayer card that is now one of my enduring treasures. It is taped to the stone wall just above the mirror in my cell and has been there ever since. In later years I was moved to other places, but the card always came with me. The holy card has an image of St. Maximilian Kolbe who offered himself for execution by starvation in place of another prisoner in Auschwitz in 1941. The card depicts Father Kolbe in his Conventual Franciscan habit. He has one sleeve in the striped jacket of his prison uniform with the number 16670 emblazoned across it. There is a scarlet “P” above the number indicating his Polish nationality. He was also a priest and a falsely accused prisoner. Does either designation extinguish the other? Father Kolbe is at once both, though only one identity was chosen by him.

The image is a haunting image for it captures fully that struggle I have so keenly felt. Father Maximilian appeared in my cell just a day after I asked the question of myself. Who am I? I thought at the time, that it was a rhetorical question, but it was a prayer. As such, it begged a reply — and got one.

Saint Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning

Not long after that card first arrived, so did my friend Pornchai Moontri. He had just spent 13 years in solitary confinement in the Maine State Prison since he was age 18. When they could no longer hold him in the cruelty of such a place, they sent him here where he ended up with me. On the day he arrived in my cell, he dropped his trash bag of belongings, stared at the image above the mirror and asked, “Is this you?” That, too, was not a rhetorical question.

How I came to be in this prison is a story told elsewhere, by me and by others. How I “met” Father Maximilian Kolbe 60 years after he surrendered his life at Auschwitz is a story about actual grace. In his Catholic Catechism, Jesuit Father John Hardon defined actual grace as God’s gift of “the special assistance we need to guide the mind and inspire the will” on our path to God. Sometimes, it is very special.

My first years in prison are a blur in my memory. There is no point trying to find words to express the sense of loss, of alienation, of being cast into a dark abyss that was not of my own making — a loss that could not be grounded in any reality of my own. Thousands of days and nights had passed in the abyss before what Father Hardon described as “special assistance” crossed my path.

Someone, somewhere — I don’t know who — sent the prison’s Catholic chaplain (a layman then) a book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, M.D. Somewhere in my studies, I heard of this book, but only a prisoner can read it in the same light in which it is written. The chaplain called me to his office.  He wanted to know whether he should recommend this book, but didn’t have time to read it.  He wanted my opinion.

It had been years since anyone had asked my opinion on anything.  I didn’t read Dr. Frankl’s book so much as devour it.  I read it through three times in seven days.  As a priest, I often counseled others that grace is a process and not an event. It is not always so.  I was meant to read Man’s Search for Meaning at the precise moment that it landed upon my path. A week earlier, I would not have been ready.  A week later may have been too late.

I was drowning in a solitary sea of hopelessness.  I was not going to make it across.  My priesthood and my soul were dying.  The Book, as I have come to call it, is Viktor Frankl’s vivid account of how he alone among his family survived imprisonment in Auschwitz.  This was an imprisonment imposed on him for who he was: a Jew.

There is a central message in this small book.  A profound message, so clear in meaning, that it has within it the hallmark of inspired truth.   Like Saul thrown from his mount, I remember sinking to the floor when I read it.

“There is a freedom that no one can ever take from you: The freedom to choose the person you are going to be in any set of circumstances.”

This changed everything. Everything! You will see how later.  At the very end of his book, Dr. Frankl revealed the name of his inspiration for surviving Auschwitz. He wrote of Sigmund Freud’s cynical view that man is self-serving. And a man’s instinctual need to survive will trump “quaint notions” such as grace and sacrifice every time.  For Dr. Frankl, Auschwitz provided the proof that Freud was wrong.

That proof was Father Maximilian Kolbe.

The Sacrifice of Saint Maximilian

“Greater love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for another.”

— John 15:13

As a young priest in 1982, I was only vaguely familiar with the name Maximilian Kolbe. I remember reading of his canonization by Pope John Paul II, but Father Kolbe’s world was far removed from my modern suburban priesthood. I was far too busy to step into it.

I didn’t know that nearly two decades later, Father Kolbe’s life, death, and sainthood would be proclaimed triumphantly on the wall of my prison cell, and not only by me. I also didn’t know this would help define the person I choose to be in prison.

Being a Jew and not a Catholic, Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, said nothing about Maximilian’s sainthood or any miracles attributed to his intercession. Instead, Dr. Frankl was moved by the profound sacrifice of Maximilian, which defies the narcissism of our times.

For those unfamiliar with him, the story is simple.

The prisoners of Auschwitz were packed into bunkers like cattle. To encourage informants, the camp had a policy that if any prisoner escaped, 10 others would be randomly chosen for summary execution.

At the morning roll call one day, a prisoner from Maximilian’s bunker was missing. Guards chose 10 men to be executed. The 10th fell to the ground and cried for the wife and children he would never see again. Father Kolbe spontaneously stepped forward and said,

“I am a Catholic priest, and I would like to take the place of this man.”

Two weeks later, he alone was still alive among the 10 prisoners chained and condemned to starvation. Maximilian was injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, and his remains unceremoniously incinerated.

For the unbeliever, all that Maximilian was went up in smoke and ash in the bleak sky above Auschwitz. Viktor Frankl shared some other corner of that horrific prison. The story of the person Father Kolbe chose to be rippled through the camp. This story offered proof to Viktor Frankl that we can be as much inspired by grace as doomed by despair. We get to choose which will define us.

Within days of reading Man’s Search for Meaning  and learning of Father Kolbe’s sacrifice, I received a letter from out of the blue. Conventual Franciscan Father James McCurry had been in an airport in Ireland when he heard an Irish priest nearby mention that he corresponds with a priest in a Concord, New Hampshire prison. Father McCurry said he was on his way to visit his order’s house in Granby, Massachusetts and would arrange to visit the Concord prison.

Weeks later, Father McCurry and I met in the prison visiting room. When I asked him what his “assignment” is, he said,

“Well I just finished a biography of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Have you heard of him?”

Father McCurry went on to say that he was involved in Father Maximilian’s Cause for Sainthood, and was officially appointed by the Vatican to be Vice-Postulator for Maximilian’s Cause. He had met the man whose life was saved by Father Kolbe.

A few years later, Father McCurry arranged a Father Maximilian Kolbe exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum. It was then that he sent me the card depicting Father Maximilian clothed in his Franciscan habit with one sleeve in his prison uniform. I keep the card above my mirror in my cell.

I can never embrace these stone walls. I can’t claim ownership of them. Passively acceding to injustice anywhere contributes to injustice everywhere. Father Maximilian never approved of Auschwitz.

One cannot understand how I now respond to these stone walls, however, without hearing of Father Maximilian’s presence here.

Above my mirror, he refocused my hope in the light of Christ. The darkness can never overcome it.

What hope and freedom there is in that fact! The darkness can never, ever, ever overcome it!

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I will be offering Mass late at night on August 14, the Feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, which is also the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, his Immaculata and ours. Regarding the letter from Father James McCurry at the end of this post, I only just now realized that it had not come to me from our editor; rather, Father McCurry sent it by U.S. mail to Pornchai Maximilian in Thailand, where it arrived after weeks with all its wrinkles still intact. Pornchai was so proud of it that he quickly took a photo and mailed it to me in prison.

You may also like these related posts in honor of our Patron Saint:

Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s Gift of Noble Defiance

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Maximilian Kolbe: The Other Prisoner Priest in My Cell

Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s Gift of Noble Defiance

At the end of July, 85 years ago in 1941, Father Maximilian Kolbe stepped out of line at Auschwitz. His gift of noble defiance has spread throughout the known world.

July 30, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Auschwitz 1941:

After the so-called dinner, I was invited between Blocks 18 and 19 where some prisoners had gathered among whom were several priests … Our colleague, Kolbe, spoke of the Feast of Corpus Christi, of the great omnipresent God, and of our sufferings by which He was trying to make us ready for a better life.

— A priest at Auschwitz, from Depositions of Fellow Prisoners, 1970, p. 34

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Pornchai Moontri once looked at the death chamber of Maximilian Kolbe and saw devouring jaws of evil. I saw that evil too, but choking on a brave soul’s noble defiance.

The photograph in this post has deep meaning and significance for us.  BTSW  reader Lupe Gwiazdowski, on a tour of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, stood with her camera before the gaping maw of a prison window. She photographed the window of the death chamber that consumed the life of our Patron Saint but could not extinguish the light of his sacrificial priesthood.

When Lupe’s letter with the photograph arrived in early July, 2017, when Pornchai “Max” Moontri was still here with me, he and I were standing with 100 other prisoners for Mail Call. The mail handlers here reversed the pages before stuffing the letter back in its envelope so the page with this photo was on top when I unfolded the letter.

I did not know what the photo was, but right off Pornchai pointed to it. “It’s a face!” he said. “An evil face!” Study the photograph above for a moment. Once I saw what Pornchai saw, I could not look at the photo again without instantly seeing that same demonic face. You will see it too.

But what Pornchai saw as the gaping jaws of evil ready to devour, I saw those same jaws choking on whatever was inside. When I suggested this to Pornchai, he saw it too. Stare at the photo for another moment, and you may see what I mean.

Then I read the letter that accompanied Lupe’s photo, and realized with a jolt that it was behind these gaping jaws that our Patron Saint, Maximilian Kolbe, surrendered his life in defiance of the great evil that manifested itself at Auschwitz.

Over two weeks of forced starvation followed his choice to die in place of an innocent young man. When Father Kolbe did not die in a timely manner that suited his captors, his life was taken by lethal injection on August 14, 1941. After a lifetime of devotion to “The Immaculata,” death came on the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption. Lupe tells the story of the photo in her letter of June 29, 2017 that touched our hearts deeply:

“Hi Father G: I wanted to send you this photo and I hope you get it. I went to Poland this month, and I made a mental note to pray for you and Pornchai “Max” Moontri at the Auschwitz cell of St Maximilian Kolbe.

“As is often the case with my mental notes, when I got to the cell I was so overwhelmed that I forgot it. As soon as we exited the block of cells I remembered. I left the group and tried to push my way back to the cell, but Polish tour guides are not to be pushed against! I didn’t make it.

“I was downcast as I caught up with the group, and then realized that the guide was pointing to the bars of the Saint’s cell window from the outside. I didn’t even hear what she was saying as I looked upon this sacred spot. I thought of how this priest and his companion prisoners died giving such powerful witness through those same bars to so many whose hope was perishing. I lifted you and Pornchai up right there, and then snapped this photo for you. Father, I do not know what else to say.

“When I got back to a computer, I saw your post, “Thoughts Upon My 35th Anniversary of Priesthood Ordination,” and realized that your anniversary was on the same day I prayed for you and Pornchai-Max at Auschwitz. Father, thank you for your priesthood.”

In Noble Defiance of Evil

Today, virtually everyone knows the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. His Earthly remains were reduced to smoke and ash in the ovens of Hitler to drift in the skies above Auschwitz. But what he wrote and said and did, the glow of his soul, still moves mountains and the hearts of millions.

In Father Maximilian Kolbe, evil did not destroy what it set out to destroy. It imprisoned and killed the body of a man, but the priest lived on in noble sacrifice and love. The jaws of that window choked on the goodness of the soul contained therein.

Of all the thousands of accounts about the witness and strength of Father Maximilian Kolbe, for me the most powerful account comes from Herrmann Langbein, who was a prisoner at Dachau and then at Auschwitz. He is best known for his book, Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1938-1945. He singles out one man’s defiance that I have cited in other posts about our Patron Saint:

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

— People in Auschwitz, p. 241

Langbein went on to write powerfully of the witness, not only of Father Kolbe’s sacrifice by volunteering to take upon himself the death sentence of a fellow prisoner, but of his demeanor in prison:

“Kolbe and his companions in misfortune had to spend almost three weeks [in starvation] in an unlit cell. On August 14 (1941) a lethal injection ended the suffering of the man whose bearing elicited the respect of the supervising SS men to the very end.”

— People in Auschwitz, p. 241

I pray for the gift of this brave priest’s noble defiance of evil. It is easier to just succumb to it, enduring it for as long as we can until it starts to bring about subtle changes in our resolve. My favorite passage in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (Harper, 1942) is Letter 12. You have seen this passage before in these pages. The demonic “Uncle Screwtape” describes perfectly the slippery slope that suffering and sin conspire to spread the contagion of evil. Their cumulative effect …

“… is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing … . Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

— The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, Letter 12

In no place is a man or woman without defiance “edged away from the Light out into the Nothing” more than in prison. Like all prisons — whether they be prisons of iron, or fear, or trauma, or loneliness, or sickness, or pain — year upon year of it can set us upon the subtle turnings C. S. Lewis describes. For some, no doubt, resistance to the evils of our prisons seems futile.

Something happened recently — something profoundly humbling — that I thought about when I read the short passage at the top of this post from a priest-prisoner in Auschwitz with Maximilian Kolbe. The passage is from a published collection, Depositions of Fellow Prisoners, in the investigation of Maximilian Kolbe’s cause for sainthood.

More than 12,000 priests died in Auschwitz and the other camps of Germany and Poland, but the priest who wrote the passage atop this post survived. I wonder about those who perished there, those whose hope was siphoned off by the evil in their midst.

But for Maximilian Kolbe, resistance to evil was the one charism of a sacrificial priesthood available to him in a place where priesthood and sacrifice were deemed meaningless by worldly powers. Prison can quickly descend into “every man for himself,” but Maximilian lived and died on life’s road less traveled.

Priesthood Lost in Translation

Over the many years that I have been in this prison unjustly, there was another priest here. He was a priest of my Diocese, but I never knew him outside of prison. In fact, I barely knew him here. He was convicted of a sexual abuse charge in 1997, one alleged to have taken place long before then, and had been here ever since.

I know that in 2001, this priest acquiesced to a demand that he be voluntarily laicized (dismissed from the clerical state). Over the ensuing years, after 25 years of priesthood, he never again heard from our Bishop or Diocese. He was discarded. The prisoner-priest lost his faith. He became unable to be present at Mass for the next sixteen years. He was in a different prison unit than I, and I saw him only in rare passing.

However, when printed copies of some BTSW posts were mailed to me, the sender would often send two. So, with the clandestine help of friends here, I started to send the other copy to this priest. I did not send him every post, just the ones about priesthood. One post reached an untapped well of faith and hope.

It was “Saint Maximilian Kolbe: A Knight at My Own Armageddon.” It was the middle of an important three-part post, and was the only post for which the priest sent back — via the same circuitous prison channels — a request to see more. These posts were the limits of our contact.

The same week that Lupe’s letter and photo arrived, Pornchai Max and I were climbing the multiple tiers of stairs on a Sunday morning for Mass in the prison chapel. As we passed the second floor landing, the priest mentioned above was just then emerging from the prison medical unit. I greeted him and shook his hand (another act of resistance as shaking someone’s hand is forbidden here) and then something strange happened.

Pornchai did not even know who he was and I did not want to put the priest on the spot so we parted company and proceeded up the next flight of stairs. Then Pornchai turned and said, “Do you want to come with us?” The priest paused for a moment looking puzzled, and then quietly followed us up the stairs. Before we entered the chapel, I asked Pornchai to go find us some seats while the prisoner-priest told me that this was his first time at Mass in 16 years. He became reconciled, and we sat with him.

The next week — being an idiot sometimes — I took our usual seats and Pornchai stood glaring at me. “What are you doing?” he asked, and then pointed to that other priest still standing outside the door. “Go get him and bring him in to sit with us,” said Pornchai. God bless Pornchai!

In early July back in 2017, I spotted that prisoner-priest on the local news. He was appearing before the New Hampshire Parole Board with a request for medical parole because he was dying of cancer.

A physician who spoke at the hearing reported that he had no more than six months to live, and his care would be a burdensome expense for the state. After some callous remarks from a victim advocate on the State’s payroll about whether he “looks sick enough,” and whether twenty years in prison exacts sufficient reckoning, the Parole Board granted his medical parole.

On the Move

A week later, Max and I were suddenly moved — he to one place and I to another. Apart for the first time in over ten years, this had been a great hardship for us both. We were trying to reunite, but once anything like this is done here, it resists being undone. Max was trying to be moved to the same place I was in. We saw each other only once in the prison law library where I work. I invited Max to pray with me the Memorare:

“Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, we flee unto you, O Virgin of virgins, our Mother; to you do we come, before you we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer us. Amen.”

The place I was sent to is the unit the other priest had been living in for the previous twenty years. My first week there was his last week there, and we were able to walk each morning and talk. He was restored to faith and hope that our sufferings will make us ready for a better life.

I was with him early on the morning he left prison, and went home to his sister to die. I like to think that we managed to fill in some of the cold abyss in which our Church let him wander alone in exile for twenty years. I cannot imagine, even in my most vengeful thoughts, that such alienation and abandonment are what Christ summons forth from the Apostolic witness of His Church.

Most of all, I like to think we helped to prepare my brother-priest for something essential imparted to us by a Patron Saint who guides us on a right path through prison: the gift of a noble defiance of evil with the living witness of sacrificial priesthood.

On the day after that priest left prison, one week after Max and I prayed the Memorare, I returned from work to see him living once again in the bunk above me. He remained there until he entered ICE detention to prepare for his return to Thailand in 2020.

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Fr Richard Drabik Introduced Divine Mercy to Saints and Villains

Fr Richard Drabik, MIC, my longtime spiritual director and friend who wrote the Preface to the Diary of Saint Faustina, passed into Divine Mercy on July 4, 2026.

July 8, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Let the greatest sinners place their trust in My mercy. They have the right before others to trust in the abyss of My mercy . . . To such souls I grant even more graces than they ask. I cannot punish even the greatest sinner if he makes an appeal to My compassion, but on the contrary, I justify him in my unfathomable and inscrutable mercy.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 1146

In April of 1993, my friend Father Richard Drabik and I both served on the staff of the Servants of the Paraclete Spiritual and Psychological Renewal Center for priests. Father Drabik was at the time preparing to go to Rome to concelebrate with Pope John Paul II the Mass of Beatification of Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, now known as Saint Faustina, the Saint of Divine Mercy. Her Beatification took place on the Sunday after Easter that year, and Pope John Paul II decreed that henceforth that Sunday would be universally known in the Roman Calendar as Divine Mercy Sunday.

Father Richard Drabik was formerly Provincial Superior of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. He wrote the Preface to the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska that has become globally famous. Just before leaving for her Beatification in Rome in 1993, Father Drabik stopped by my office to invite me to write a brief prayer, which would be placed on the altar by Pope John Paul during the Offertory in the Mass for Beatification. I did not know what to write, so on the day of my friend’s departure I handed him a small scrap of paper to place with his intentions for the Mass. I folded it and sealed it in a small envelope that would fit easily in his breast pocket.

No one ever knew what I wrote. The note with my petition was simple: “I ask for the intercession of Blessed Faustina that I may have the courage to be the priest God calls me to be.” It was an odd petition, and today I have no idea what I was thinking about when I wrote it and handed it to Father Drabik on his way out the door.

Exactly two weeks after the Beatification of Sister Faustina, on May 3, 1993, police showed up at my door. They carried with them a secret indictment and a warrant for my arrest for claims alleged to have occurred sometime between 1978 and 1983, ten to fifteen years earlier. They were the claims for which I faced trial and was summarily sent to prison as Ryan A. MacDonald wrote in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Those claims of abuse never took place at all, but I will always remember the words of a police detective as the officers took me away despite my denials: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty. Your Church is!” It was a scene reminiscent of another era I wrote of in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

The detective’s words could just as easily have been heard in Sister Faustina’s own World War II-era Poland as Father Maximilian Kolbe and many other priests were led off to prison on trumped up charges.

Divine Mercy Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

Last April 9, I turned 73 years old in prison. I was 41 years old when I was sent to prison, and was in my twenties when my fictitious crimes were alleged to have been committed. I will be age 108 when I next see freedom. The process of reopening a case alleged to have occurred over 30 years ago, and which never contained any evidence to debunk or attack, is a grueling uphill battle. If there is any hope at all for freedom and justice, it is vague hope. It is a hope that exists on the other side of an abyss.

Astute readers remember that I was given several opportunities before my trial to plead guilty and serve only one year in prison. I simply could not fathom doing this. Many years later, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Wall Street Journal, took up this case for investigation. She reported that she questioned the detective about the absolute lack of any corroborating evidence. The detective was reported to have said, “Why didn’t he just take the deal?” In a five-minute video interview years later, Ms. Rabinowitz summed up the true nature of this matter.

The readers of Beyond These Stone Walls have helped in so many ways to show us the face of Divine Mercy. Your reading BTSW has given me a global voice when having any voice at all is usually denied to any priest so accused. And having a voice is also often denied to prisoners, as a class of American citizens stripped of rights, including the right to vote. I do not use my access to this voice just to whine about prison conditions. That would be a waste. Instead, I try to employ this voice as an extension of my priesthood, one that is influenced and encapsulated, even defined, by Divine Mercy.

Earlier in my years in prison, my old friend and spiritual director, Father Richard Drabik, visited me. He did so until age and distance made such visits no longer possible. During one of his visits after my publishing began in 2009, I asked him if he had seen the blog that I write from prison, but have never seen. Being a prisoner, I also had no sense of its reach or impact. “It isn’t a blog,” Father Richard said. “It’s a bullhorn!”

Later, the community of Marians of the Immaculate Conception at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy took up the slack. They came with an invitation to me and other prisoners to take part in a great Divine Mercy adventure. For some, it became the most important part of our lives here. This was especially so for my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, whose life story was captured by Felix Carroll in the book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Pornchai’s story is well known around the world now thanks to the efforts of Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Dr. Donohue invited Pornchai to write his story in his own words. The result was published by the Catholic League as “Pornchai’s Story.” In just four pages, it was powerful and phenomenal. Pornchai was oppressed by the thought that at the end of his own prison sentence he would be deported to Thailand where he no longer knew anyone or had any support at all. Pornchai had been taken from Thailand against his will at age 11, and now would be left there alone at age 47. It was a chilling thought for Pornchai, and also for me. I assured him that we would find a way to build a bridge to Thailand.

Divine Mercy, being what it is, created a roadmap for Pornchai. Father Richard, who was deeply moved by Pornchai’s Story, shared it with others who became links in a chain. One of them was the late Father Seraphim Michalenko, Vice Postulator for the cause of Sainthood for Saint Faustina. He ended up in Thailand meeting with a group called Divine Mercy Thailand. Father Seraphim went there armed with a copy of the Diary of Saint Faustina and a copy of Pornchai’s Story, which he read in English to the assembled group. Suddenly, our bridge to Thailand was built.

Felix Carroll also wrote a wonderful article for Marian Helper Magazine entitled, “Mary Is at Work Here.” The truth of that is today without question.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post about my great good friend and mentor in the priesthood, Father Richard Drabik, MIC. Don’t misunderstand the opening quote here in this post. Only God knows whether Father Richard is a saint, but he was certainly no villain. He spent a lifetime reaching out to them, however, and reeling them in to show them the Light of Divine Mercy. That was what I liked most about my friend, and what I most try to emulate. You might find his enduring presence in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Pornchai’s Story

A Priest and Prisoner in the Light of Divine Mercy

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

I greatly treasure the image atop this post. Father Richard’s smile is now engraved upon my heart.

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

An AI Analysis of Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

The April 18, 2000 murder of Pornchai Moontri’s mother, Wannee, on the Island of Guam still cries to Heaven for justice. This new AI forensic review provides hope.

June 24, 2026 by xAI Grok

Writing for The Wall Street Journal on November 7, 2025, Mike Cherney penned an insightful essay entitled, “A Campaign to Make Guam the 51st State Is Gaining Traction.” To help make the case, the author cites the geopolitical strategic importance of Guam:

“As US competition with China intensifies, the Pentagon is building up Guam as a hub for its security strategy in the Pacific. It is upgrading bases, moving more troops to the island and building a multibillion-dollar missile defense system to guard against a possible Chinese attack.”

I have long had a personal interest in the affairs of Guam as recent articles published on this site reveal. Hovering in the dim distance in the background of this important story about the political status of Guam is another story that impacts the public image of Guam and its people. From my standpoint, any ambition for statehood or major changes in the US administration of Guam must first address a lurking problem in the administration of justice. That problem was laid out in a November 7, 2021, Guam Daily Post report on the extraordinary number of Guam’s unsolved ‘cold-case’ homicides.

At the time of that writing, there were 103 unsolved murders on Guam’s list. One of them should be a great concern to our readers. Number 70 on that list is the as-yet-unsolved murder of Pornchai Moontri’s mother, Wannee, who was beaten to death in Guam at age 47. All the elements of that shocking crime were exposed by me in a 2022 article at this site entitled, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

My article circled the globe moving many hearts about this tragic story. What it failed to move was the administration of justice in Guam, which touts a new cold-case task force to investigate or reinvestigate the cases on this list.

In the four years since I wrote, “Getting Away with Murder,” many Guam residents have read and shared that account, but to no apparent avail.

Most recently, a reader submitted that article for a forensic review from the advanced AI model xAI Grok. The result was staggering, and I have decided to publish it here, in its raw form without any editing, as our weekly post. I am very open to suggestions about what we now do about this lingering grave injustice.

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xAI Grok Forensic Review of a Guam Cold-Case Homicide

xAI GROK:

Synopsis

The article, titled “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam” and written by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae (published September 14, 2022 on beyondthesestonewalls.com), examines the unsolved 2000 homicide of Wannee Laporn Bailey in Talofofo, Guam (Guam Police Department Cold Case #70). It frames the crime within the broader story of severe sexual and physical abuse inflicted on Wannee’s sons, Pornchai Moontri and Priwan Moontri, by their stepfather, Richard Alan Bailey. The piece argues that Bailey murdered Wannee shortly after their divorce was finalized, when she was pressing for the enforcement of court orders on alimony, asset division, and restitution. Wannee (age 47) was beaten to death; the autopsy showed broken ribs causing internal damage and a broken wrist (defensive wound). Bailey reportedly notified police that she was missing, then claimed to have found her body himself. The article contends that Guam authorities conducted an inadequate investigation at the time and that Bailey evaded accountability despite a clear motive tied to silencing Wannee and avoiding exposure of his abuse. Bailey was later convicted in Maine (2018) on 40 felony counts of gross sexual assault against the sons but received only probation and sex-offender registration — no prison time. The post calls for the case to be reopened with “new eyes,” highlighting systemic failures in Guam’s handling of cold cases (103 unsolved homicides noted in 2021 reporting).

Key Details Relevant to Investigation

• Victim: Wannee Laporn Bailey (née Laporn), Thai national, age 47 at death on April 18, 2000.

• Suspect Identified: Richard Alan Bailey (former Vietnam-era helicopter pilot, later FAA controller in Guam; resided in Westlake, Oregon as of the warrant period ~2017).

• Motive: Financial obligations from the divorce decree; preventing Wannee from exposing years of documented child sexual/physical abuse.

• Opportunity/Timeline: Bailey was in Guam; Wannee made a frantic call to her niece on the day of the murder with Bailey shouting in the background (recalled in a 2016 interview). The niece later reported Wannee saying words to the effect of “If I am found dead, Richard did it.” Bailey quickly sold property and left Guam after the death.

• Prior Conduct: Extensive 1989–1990 Maine records (Youth Center, DHS) document the sons’ abuse allegations; sheriff interviews with Bailey were superficial and did not include victim or witness statements. Bailey also sent a letter to the judge in Pornchai’s 1993 trial and allegedly had Wannee deliver threats to Pornchai in jail.

• Other Notes: Pornchai Moontri (the author’s friend and fellow prisoner at the time) was a victim of the abuse and later convicted in Maine of a separate 1993 homicide (influenced by trauma). No physical description of an unknown assailant is provided; the article focuses exclusively on Bailey as the perpetrator.

Assessment: Sufficient Information for Identifying a Person of Interest Under Current Professional Investigatory Standards?
Yes—decisively so.

Modern US law-enforcement standards (including those applicable in Guam as a US territory) for designating a person of interest in a cold-case homicide rely on reasonable suspicion supported by specific, articulable facts — not proof beyond a reasonable doubt or even probable cause for arrest. Factors typically weighed include motive, opportunity, means, prior similar conduct, witness statements, timeline alignment, and behavioral indicators. The article supplies all of these in detail and with verifiable documentary anchors (divorce decree, Maine abuse records from 1989–1990, autopsy findings, 2016 niece interview, Bailey’s 2018 Maine conviction). It explicitly names Richard Alan Bailey, provides his biographical identifiers, last known residence (Westlake, Oregon), and a clear circumstantial chain that would allow any competent investigator to:

1. Locate him (or confirm current status).

2. Obtain his criminal and civil records.

3. Re-interview living witnesses (niece, Pornchai, Priwan, Bailey’s sister).

4. Review preserved evidence (autopsy, original case file, divorce records).

This meets or exceeds the threshold used by agencies such as the FBI’s ViCAP or cold-case units for opening or prioritizing an investigation. Notably, the article itself cites a 2017 arrest warrant issued in Oregon based on the sons’ interviews — further evidence that law enforcement has already treated the information as actionable. The piece does not claim to be a formal police report; it is advocacy journalism. Professional investigators would still independently corroborate statements, seek any remaining physical/forensic evidence (DNA, if preserved), and rule out alternatives. However, nothing in the article is vague or anonymous; it supplies a fully identifiable suspect with a coherent investigative theory.

Additional Comments

The writing is clear, heavily sourced, and emotionally powerful, effectively linking Wannee’s death to decades of documented family trauma and institutional oversights (Maine authorities in the 1989–1990 period and Guam police in 2000). It raises legitimate questions about investigative diligence, especially given Guam’s high number of unsolved homicides and the fact that Bailey left the island quickly after the crime. As of 2026, public sources continue to list the case as unsolved, with no reported breakthroughs.

That said, the article is written from an advocate’s perspective (MacRae has long championed Pornchai Moontri’s cause). It relies heavily on accounts from the victims’ family, which, while credible and partially corroborated by official records, would require fresh, independent validation in a formal re-investigation. No new forensic breakthroughs or direct eyewitness testimony to the murder itself are presented — only strong circumstantial evidence.

Overall, this is a well-constructed public call to revisit a cold case that, on the facts presented, appears to have had a viable suspect from the outset. It would give any current Guam Police Department cold-case detective or federal partner (e.g., FBI Violent Crimes Against Children or cold-case task force) an immediate, named starting point for renewed inquiry. If the goal is justice for Wannee Laporn Bailey, the information here is more than sufficient to justify official action.

The House That Wannee Built

In the year 2000, after Wannee found the courage to divorce Richard Bailey on the Island of Guam and return to Thailand, she began building a small house on her family property where Pornchai was born. The partially built house in the photo above was the result of her dream to recover her sons and restore what had been taken from her. She had to stop work on the house in 2000 to return to Guam to seek the Court’s enforcement of its divorce rulings regarding restitution to Wannee and her family, Court rulings that Bailey simply ignored. She wanted the funds so she could complete the house for Pornchai to live in at some unforeseen future. She did not know she was going to her death.

Pornchai and Father John Le visited this house when Pornchai first arrived in Thailand after his deportation in 2020. He was only age two when he was abandoned in Thailand by his mother, who was unable to support him. Nine years later his mother returned, though he had no memory of her. She took him to live in Bangor, Maine, where his nightmare of physical and sexual trauma ensued. Wannee was determined to make up for that, but then her life was taken from her.

Pornchai is just now in the process of reclaiming his mother’s house. He is moving into it, in the village of Phu Wiang, where he was born. The house is not yet completely built and has been left dormant for 26 years. Pornchai hopes to complete his mother’s dream and bring it to fulfillment. There is much left to do. If any of our readers would like to assist him in this effort, please consult our “How to Help” page.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about restorative justice. Pornchai Maximilian Moontri now enters into a life of true freedom from the nightmares of the past.

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

In the Desert Wilderness of Prison, a Priest Meets the Devil

After forty-four years of priesthood, thirty-two of them in the darkness of unjust imprisonment, my faith has been sorely tested but I remain a priest in full.

June 10, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

Note from Father MacRae: My friend, Pornchai Moontri and I are indebted to Rebecca Virelles for her fine reflection on my life as a priest and prisoner published here last week. It caused me to reconsider this post about a demonic encounter first written in 2023. So much of the aftermath of that story has evolved, and new information has caused me to want to delve into it again. As Rebecca has described in last week’s post, Pornchai Maximilian and I have been on a road less traveled, and now we are far along that road. Your prayers, support and openness to the truth we tell have been the greatest Gospel witness for us.

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In 1945, at the end of World War II and eight years before I was born, the film, Going My Way swept the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Musical Score. The film about a Catholic priest and his efforts to save a dying urban parish was a huge box-office hit in 1945. Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Father Chuck O’Malley, a young priest with a golden voice sent to revitalize a quickly fading parish. Barry Fitzgerald won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the role of the elderly pastor, Father Fitzgibbon. It was a different Church, a different time, and a very different world.

Bing Crosby’s character, Father Chuck O’Malley, saved the day and the parish when he organized a neighborhood gang of street kids into a “bit rough around the edges” choir. Father O’Malley then composed a hit song and taught them to sing it. “Swinging on a Star” topped the charts and won the Oscar for Best Song. The young men saved the church while Father O’Malley saved them. Going My Way also swept the Golden Globe and New York Film Critic Awards.

Now jump ahead 60 years. In 2005 another film about Catholic priests won the Academy Award for Best Picture and won The Boston Globe an ill-conceived Pulitzer for “Public Service.” That scornful film was Spotlight, a one-sided, jaded, cynical effort to smear the Catholic Church and priesthood with a broad brush as “slayers of the soul.” The critics and media were delighted, but one brave journalist, JoAnn Wypijewski, performed a much-needed autopsy on it. Though I never figured into the film, I had a strong presence in its autopsy in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

The 60-year period in between Going My Way and Spotlight saw perhaps the greatest cultural shift the Western World had ever known. Our news media turned left, and the left became its master. Then the Second Vatican Council radically altered the world’s view of the Church. Then Roe v Wade happened and the not-yet-woke Church came down on the side of life. All the attacks hence were really about Roe v Wade. Then the “woke” were born.

On June 5, 1982, as this rapid descent in the world’s view of the Church and priesthood was well into its decline, I was the sole candidate for priesthood ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. How I got to that point is a longer story that I have never been able to fully comprehend. In hindsight, it has elements of the demonic, and I will get back to that.

There is for now a “rest of the story” fully known only to one other person, and that person has since passed from this life. In 1977 and 1978, I spent long hours with this story in the company of Father Benedict Groeschel. Before he became a founder of the Friars of the Renewal (CFR), we were members of the same Capuchin Franciscan Province based in New York. Father Groeschel was aware of all that had happened, and he listened intently to its impact on me. In 1978, he and I together discerned a different path that I had to take. I will get back to that too, but first back up a few years.

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Priesthood in the Coming Cancel Culture

At the age of twenty-one, four years after my high school graduation, I entered the novitiate of the Capuchin Order in 1974. I felt immediately that I was on the right path in life. I did not have much of a family life growing up, and the Capuchin emphasis on life in community drew me in. I also strongly believed that I had a vocation to religious life. One of my friends in the Order grew up in an orphanage, and, like him, I treasured the accountability and support of a religious community that many others took for granted.

I was also a very good student. I had carried a double major in psychology and philosophy on a scholarship at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. I thought I had a perfect balance of intellectual growth, spiritual life, and physical work. When I was not studying, I chopped firewood for long hours each day. A lot of stress was vented, and some wounds long neglected began to heal.

I loved my Capuchin community and I developed many close friendships among its members. Two of those friendships were with classmates from the Western Pacific Island of Guam. We were the same age and often studied together. I learned a great deal about the home and culture they left behind on the far side of the world. At that time, Guam was a mission territory for the Order and several members of our Capuchin province were assigned there. I began to discern that Guam might be where my future lay, so I began to study its culture and native language, Chamorro.

Then tragedy struck. It blindsighted me and forever altered my path. Being far from home for long periods of time had an effect on my friends. One of them began to exhibit signs of extreme stress manifested in paranoia. One night he knocked on my friary door awakening me at 3:00 AM. He was very upset and shaken, and he asked me to come to his room. I went with him and found there a kitchen knife impaled in his mattress with a typed note threatening his life.

My friend was very shaken by this, and I remained with him until dawn and then took him and the evidence to the room of our religious superior. My friend was questioned at length while I remained outside the room. Similar incidents occurred on two more occasions over the next few weeks. I told the local superior of my growing concern that my friend was under extreme stress, and I believed that he had been doing this to himself and needed immediate help.

On the next day, I was again summoned to the office of the superior. I was summoned alone. Accompanied by two other senior members of the Order, he accused me of plotting to murder my friend. I could not fathom what was behind this, but I insisted that my friend was under extreme stress and had been doing this to himself. I insisted that he needed immediate help. Then the superior revealed that he had in his hands the ribbon from my typewriter where the threatening notes had clearly been typed — but not by me.

Under obedience, for the next two weeks I was confined to my quarters and forbidden from speaking with anyone else. I was going through final exams for the semester in that same week. I excelled in them, but to this day I do not know how. This all happened in the spring of 1977.

At the end of those two weeks, the local superior summoned me again. One priest on the formation staff had been skeptical of the story and its outcome, so he spent a few nights in the friary library from where he could observe my friend’s room from a distance. On one of those nights he saw him come out of his room, return with a knife, and then plunge it with another note into his own mattress. My friend was then taken away.

The superior who later summoned me again told me only that his investigation was complete, and that he concluded that I had nothing to do with these events except that I was a friend of the other Capuchin. “You should just forget about all this and keep doing what you’ve been doing,” he said. And it was over.

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Still in the Eye of the Storm

But it wasn’t really over. Because I was barred from discussing these incidents, no one else in the Province was told the truth of this story or its outcome. All anyone knew was that my friend disappeared in the night, and I had been a suspect. I was also very concerned for my friend. I had not been able to learn any of what had happened to him, or why it happened, or where he went. To protect him from any further exposure, I told only one person, about this story and what I knew to date. That person was Father Benedict Groeschel, a psychologist and respected member of the Province. Among all the feelings of betrayal, injustice, and anger at the rush to judgment, I was first and foremost heartbroken.

When I learned that my friend had typed these notes on my typewriter while I was away and then carried out these assaults upon himself just as I had feared, I was furious — not with him but with those in authority in the Order who would not listen because their minds were already made up. I never saw or heard from my friend again, and I never learned what was behind his pleading cry for help made through me. I also never learned what became of him.

I was 24 years old then. I am nearly 74 now, and I still carry this after all these years. I also had no idea then that such devastating false witness would be repeated in my life 15 years later as a diocesan priest.

In 1978, one year after the events described above, the Province gave a strong recommendation, under the direction of Father Groeschel, in support of my decision to transfer to studies toward diocesan priesthood. In the ensuing years, I completed a Master of Divinity degree and Pontifical degree in Sacred Theology at Saint Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore. As written above, I was ordained for the Diocese of Manchester on June 5, 1982. There was one other candidate for ordination that year, but he dropped out just weeks before being ordained.

The story about my friend from Guam stayed buried for the next 42 years. Then, in 2019, a previously unknown factor in the story was revealed to me. A Capuchin priest from my former Province came to this prison for Mass and asked to speak with me after. He told me that he remembered this incident and hoped that I did not. I told him that my life was radically altered as a result of it. He said that he felt partially responsible. He had been pursuing a sabbatical study in Sacred Scripture at Harvard Divinity School in 1977, the same year as the events above. My uncle, a Jesuit priest and renowned Scripture scholar was a faculty member at Harvard at that time, and they had a chance meeting.

I mentioned earlier that there were hints of the demonic in this story. It was in the form of events that were set up like dominoes intended to fall in just the right way and at just the right time to steer this story.

My uncle approached the Capuchin priest at Harvard and asked him if he and I were in the same province. The Capuchin said that we were, and my uncle inquired about how I was. The events written above had all taken place in just the two previous weeks in 1977, but my uncle knew nothing of what had transpired in those weeks. The Capuchin told my uncle about these events, but this was before the discovery that I was not the cause of them. Upon hearing this partial story, my uncle shared with the Capuchin that I had a difficult life growing up in a home and family destroyed by alcoholism. My uncle expressed to the Capuchin that he was glad to know that I had the support of a religious community.

Forty-two years later, the Capuchin priest told me that he shared my uncle remarks with the leaders of my Province in 1977. It was what my uncle innocently divulged that caused the Capuchin superior and Provincial staff to jump to a conclusion that I must have been the deranged person responsible for the threatened acts of violence against my friend from Guam.

Gauging my reaction upon learning of this 42 years later told me how much the wounds left by these incidents still festered. Everyone in this account — the Capuchin priest, my Jesuit uncle, even my accusing religious superiors — all believed they had acted in what they thought was my best interest balanced with that of my friend. The betrayal did not belong to any one person, but I was the only one in this scene who knew of its insanity and acted to save my friend. Forty-two years later, my feelings of anger and betrayal smoldered anew.

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Haunting Echoes from the Past

In 1994, as you know, I was falsely accused again and faced trial with no evidence or corroboration beyond the jaded suspicions of a police officer now known to have been corrupt. Journalist Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of this account in “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.” The demonic dominoes continued to fall.

After being so accused again, echoes of how helpless and oppressed I was during the first such encounter decades earlier were still with me. I became, perhaps understandably, despondent, and again I could reach out to no one. At the time, it was more than I could bear, and I fell. You can read about this in a post that has been in plain sight since I wrote it in 2017. It is, “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.” I could have added the words, “… for the Second Time.”

In September, 2022, I wrote an article in these pages that shocked readers around the world. It might have shocked them a lot more had they known of the crucible of memories I had to face and set aside in order to write it when no one else could. It is a centerpiece of my priesthood. Had I not gone through everything described in this post, I would not have been wounded enough, wise enough, or strong enough to become for another the saving grace that Father Groeschel had become for me.

It was a story long overdue, but justice required it. I meticulously researched it and then wrote it. It is about events in the life of my friend, Pornchai Moontri, and it has eerie echoes of the past. The article is “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

I mentioned earlier that this story has elements of the demonic. I wrote of the devil’s ominous stage presence here, a presence that tips over the dominoes to great effect at just the right time and in just the right way. The post I wrote about this is “Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still.” We will link to it again, and to other posts described here, at the end of this post. For now, Pornchai Moontri and I have both followed the advice of Saint Peter:

“Cast all your cares on the Lord for he cares for you. Stay sober and alert for your opponent the devil is prowling like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your brethren throughout the world.”

— 1 Peter 5:7-9

On June 5, 2026, I marked 44 years of priesthood out here in the Oort Cloud, that distant region of space where, among our Solar System’s detritus, I encounter others cast out among the unwanted debris. Most of those I encounter here have suffered far greater wounds than my own.

Bing Crosby notwithstanding, priesthood has never been going my way. But I have done what is recommended in another post I wrote, “The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost.” I have mourned what was lost. I have let it ascend. And I surrender to the life, and priesthood, that I am called to live now. As I mark 44 years of priesthood in pursuit of the True Presence, in spite of all, the Lord has done great things for me, and perhaps even a few great things through me.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this painful post, and these related posts:

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

And for those Blessed among us who thirst for justice …

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

The Prison of Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Marking 44 years of sacrificial priesthood, Father Gordon MacRae has been an instrument of Divine Mercy securing freedom for many wounded and imprisoned souls.

June 3, 2026 by Rebecca Virelles

From the Editor:

This Friday, June 5, 2026, marks the 44th anniversary of the ordination of Father Gordon MacRae. On this occasion, we have a guest author. Rebecca Virelles has been a regular reader for years. A while back, she interviewed me about BTSW, which resulted in my article, “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” She then wrote her insightful article, “A Voice for the Voiceless: Beyond These Stone Walls.”

Recently, she has been reflecting on the literature of those unjustly incarcerated. Her aim is to make their lives and writings more accessible to new audiences. She has considered various saints and moral icons from history, and also Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, whose lives are deeply intertwined. We have asked her to share with BTSW readers the part of her work concerning our two friends.

We think it is a fitting way to reflect on the priesthood of Father Gordon MacRae on his anniversary of ordination. We thank God for the gift this priesthood has been to the Church, and we ask Him to continue to bless him and be his strength.

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Dear Reader,

Before you read about the two men named above, please know they are real people, living at the time of this writing, who are dear to many on earth and in heaven. Though you may never meet them in this life, please extend mercy with your heart and read their stories carefully.

Historical Context

Father Gordon MacRae is an American priest who is currently serving up to 67 years in prison. He was wrongly convicted of sexual assault in 1994. At the time of this writing, he has spent 32 years in prison for crimes for which he is wholly innocent, crimes that never took place. Because Father MacRae maintains his innocence, he will never receive parole and thus will serve the full 67 years, a life sentence, unless some other intervention materializes.

The Evidence

In 2005 and 2013, Dorothy Rabinowitz, an award-winning journalist wrote multiple articles for The Wall Street Journal covering this egregious injustice: “Trials of Father MacRae” (2013), “A Priest’s Story” (2005). Dorothy Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the “Champion of Justice Award” from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In 2022, Boston criminal justice and civil rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate also wrote for The Wall Street Journal in “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.” His article revealed new information which came to light about the “falsification of records” of the lead detective behind Father MacRae’s case, James F. McLaughlin.

Additionally, a post-trial investigation by former F.B.I. Investigator James Abbott revealed that Detective McLaughlin threatened a defense witness, a therapist, with arrest if she did not change her testimony which would have helped to exonerate Father MacRae. The therapist had planned to testify that the accuser, Thomas Grover, had never accused MacRae of anything, though he accused several others of sexual abuse. This would have weakened McLaughlin’s case. She stated, “McLaughlin told me he would personally come to my home, drag me out of it bodily if necessary, and force me to appear in court and testify despite my information to him.” Her statement is here: Statement of Debra Collett.

Here is an excerpt of a letter dated October 24, 2013 by a media official for PBS to Judge Arthur Brennan, who sentenced Father MacRae to prison:

“My wife, Penny, and I were present in the courtroom throughout most of the trial of Fr. Gordon MacRae. For all these years, I have had many questions about this trial and much that I’ve wanted to clarify for my own peace of mind. I learned recently that both a superior court judge here in New Hampshire and the NH Supreme Court declined to hold a hearing on the evidence and merits of a habeas corpus petition in this case. Now that state courts seem no longer to be involved, I feel more inclined to approach you on what has been bothering me, as you were the presiding judge.

“We saw something in your courtroom during the MacRae trial that I don’t think you ever saw. My wife nudged me and pointed to a woman, Ms. Pauline Goupil [now Pauline Vachon], who was engaged in what appeared to be clear witness tampering. During questioning by the defense attorney, Thomas Grover seemed to feel trapped a few times. On some of those occasions, we witnessed Pauline Goupil make a distinct sad expression with a downturned mouth and gesturing with her finger from the corner of her eye down her cheek at which point Mr. Grover would begin to cry and sob on the stand. The lawyer’s questions were never answered.

“I have been troubled about this for all these years. I know what I saw, and what I saw was a clear attempt to dupe the court and the jury. If the sobbing and crying was not truthful, then I cannot help but wonder what else was not truthful on the part of Mr. Grover. If he was really a victim who wanted to tell the simple truth, why was it necessary for him and Ms. Goupil to have what clearly appeared to be a set of prearranged signals to alter his testimony? The jury was privy to none of this, to the best of my knowledge.

“Signed, Leo Demers”

His full statement is here: Statement of Leo Demers.

Here is an excerpt of a statement by Steven Wollschlager on October 27, 2008:

“McLaughlin asked me many times if Gordon ever tried to come onto me sexually or offered me money for any sexual favors. He had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about Gordon and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could be easier for us with a large amount of money [...] I was at the time using drugs and could have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money.

“A short time later after being subpoenaed to Court, I had a different feeling about the situation. I did not want to lie or make up stories. After speaking with the Clerk of Courts I was approached by another person. After telling this person that I did not want to be there and I stated Gordon had never done anything wrong towards me sexually or otherwise. I was told I could leave. This person seemed visibly upset that I had nothing to say.”

His full statement is linked: Statement of Steven Wollschlager.

The last to make a statement in support of Father MacRae’s innocence whom I will mention is Charles Glenn, Thomas Grover’s former stepson. An excerpt of his signed statement reads as follows:

“From 1993 to 1997 I was assigned to the Youth Development Center in Manchester, New Hampshire. During this period, my mother Trina Ghedoni was dating and later married to Thomas Grover. Almost every week my mother would visit me with Thomas Grover and on numerous weekends I would receive a furlough and be allowed to go to my home at 410 Prescott St. in Manchester where my mother and Thomas Grover lived.

“During these visits, and over a number of months and years, Thomas Grover discussed the sex abuse allegations against Gordon MacRae with me. Grover often stated to me that he was going to set MacRae and the church up to gain money for sexual abuse. Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church. On several occasions Thomas Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae.”

His full statement is here: Statement of Charles Glenn.

These statements are not the only evidence of wrongdoing, manipulation, and fraud in the case against Father Gordon MacRae, however for the sake of brevity I will conclude with linking Father MacRae’s own synopsis of the case against him: Synopsis of the Case.

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Where To From Here?

Now that we have covered this injustice, we can turn our attention to what Father MacRae has done with his time and talents within those stone walls. He has successfully encouraged many prisoners to seek and complete higher education, and he has helped multiple prisoners prepare for deportation to countries where they had few or no connections or means of assistance. Some of the best work Father Gordon MacRae has done is not material: he has cooperated with the Holy Spirit to bring people, in and outside of prison, to hope and to God despite what they have endured or what they have done. Pornchai Max Moontri, one of Father MacRae’s closest friends, and a free man now living in Thailand, says of him:

“Father Gordon MacRae freed me from the evil inflicted on me. He taught me that this evil is not mine to keep. What do I do with such a story? If Father G had not been here, what would have become of me? He freed my mind and soul from the horror inflicted by a real predator. It breaks my heart that the man responsible for my freedom will now be left behind in prison.”

— Statement of Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in a post written from Thailand: “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Sigmatized.”

Father MacRae has a blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, in which he posts weekly reflections about Faith, Science, current events, and updates on the lives of his friends. Two of my favorites of his posts are: Science and Faith Are Not Mutually Incompatible and In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.

Here is a link to a post written on September 26, 2018, about his friend Pornchai Max titled: Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.

My Analysis: Finding Light in the Dark

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

— Joseph to his brothers who sold him into slavery, Genesis 50:20

The purpose of this essay is to share the literature and lives of those who chose freedom of the soul over physical freedom. Other lives I have recounted and written about were courageous for facing death, but it is inspiring to see two people not give up after so much injustice and years of confinement. It is also wonderful to see how the effects of this hope have spread to others. At the end of Pornchai Max’s sentence in 2020, he faced five months in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention and deportation to a land he had not seen or spoken the language of for many years. This was due to Richard Bailey’s meaningful choice not to allow Pornchai Max’s mother (Wannee) to apply for U.S. citizenship, as he knew it helped him to keep a higher control of the mother and sons. It is likely Bailey threatened Wannee that if she did not do what he said that she would be deported to Thailand without means or assistance, as this was one of the reasons Wannee pleaded with Pornchai Max not to testify against his stepfather, Bailey.

However, what man intended for evil, God used for good. Thanks to Divine Providence, Beyond These Stone Walls readers, the “bridge” Father MacRae and Pornchai Max built, and the hard work and faithfulness of Pornchai Max in meeting these challenges, he was able to find housing and meaningful employment. He now lives in Thailand and volunteers to help those less fortunate. If Father Gordon MacRae had taken the lenient plea deals offered to him, he would not have met him and Pornchai Max would likely have never seen any measure of justice for what he endured.

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Pornchai Moontri was selected to be the flag bearer for Thailand at the Fifth Asian Apostolic Congress in the Philippines in 2024.

“ ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ ”

— Revelation 21:5

Pornchai Max’s triumph over the past is also evidenced by his accomplishments: earning his diploma and graduating as class Valedictorian in 2012, completing social work and psychology academic certificates at Stratford Career Institute “with highest honors”, and completing Theology courses at Catholic Distance University through a scholarship with all “A’s”. The late Clare Dion, who interviewed, visited, and befriended Pornchai Max during his imprisonment wrote, “What Pornchai has accomplished is nothing short of amazing given that he learned English in prison. He and ‘Father G’ encourage other prisoners to become educated, and Pornchai spent time mentoring and tutoring them, especially in mathematics in which he excels. He also spent his days in the woodworking and Hobby Craft shop where he taught safety training to other prisoners on the use of carpentry tools and machines.”

Testimony

A recent comment on the “Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri” reads:

“What a beautiful faith-filled story! What left me with goosebumps is the fact that I know that every word of it is true. I have known Father Gordon and Max for many years. I was a lost 17-year-old when I was sent to prison, and I spent many years in hopelessness before meeting these two incredible guys. Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, they were at my side bringing light to my very dark journey. I am a different person today because of them. I have wept over Max’s journey and the continued challenges he faced even in freedom. But Father G was there for him, even from a distance, and that is true of me as well. I also love dogs and this is the best dog story ever! I treasure you guys.
God bless you.
Bobby T”

A comment on a different post reads:

“WOW! I spent a couple of years in that prison. Because of overcrowding, there were no cells available for me. So I was stuck in an overflow bunk right outside cell #1 on Bravo Pod in Hancock Building. In time I came to see that I was the luckiest person in the world because the two prisoners living in cell #1 were Father G and Pornchai. When the gangs tried to recruit me, they weren’t having it. When a predator tried to extort me, they sent him packing. I felt so exposed going to prison at a very young age that these two guys made me feel perfectly safe. They weren’t taking any BS from me either. In exchange for looking after me, they made me go to school and I earned my high school diploma. That is a miracle because I have always been a dumbass. My worst enemy was Math, but Pornchai was a whiz at Math and got me through it. These two guys were seen by everyone as a team and I was fortunate enough to be their gatekeeper. I was popular by default. I have a lot of gratitude toward them both, and I thank them for their patience with me. I admire Pornchai so much more now to see that he is a man of deep faith. God bless them both.
With love from Ralph”

According to “Mercy Inside These Stone Walls,” a chapter in a book by Felix Carroll, fellow inmate, Donald Spinner, a Catholic convert, says his faith took root through Pornchai’s example. “Pornchai, especially, has influenced so many people here,” he says. “We all expect Father G. to be a good person, but Pornchai’s life of grace is inspiring to everyone. … The cost of discipleship for me has been the loss of my selfishness. No one can be selfish in such company.”

Conclusion

Evil and injustice are the hardest things to grapple with, especially as we witness our own struggles with light and dark. As others have written before, in our lives we cannot control the evil that happens to us, but we do always have the choice in how we respond. Even after meeting Father Gordon, Pornchai Maximilian could have chosen not to trust in him — he had every reason not to. Yet his courage and hope in setting aside the past propelled him forward, to freedom and to seeing some measure of justice served. Father Gordon could have chosen the easy way out, yet he would not have touched many lives, as several of the comments on his posts attest.

In an echo of one of his writings quoting St. Padre Pio: We often do not see how things are being woven together in God’s tapestry; we only see what looks like a tangled mess on the back. Yet, if we trust and do our part, even in the dark, even in pain, we will do what is right and one day understand it all. That is the essence of choosing the freedom of your soul over convenience, over your family, even over your life. True freedom comes from choosing to do the right thing, the will of God written on our hearts, and returning to it again when we stumble and fall. Our lives look different in the light of eternity.

In the photograph above, Pornchai Moontri is at the center of his graduating class, who obtained their high school diplomas in the most trying circumstances but with hard work and honor. They are smiling at Father Gordon MacRae, who took the picture in 2012.

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Appended by the Author:

Father MacRae has thus far assisted prisoners throughout their deportation process from the United States to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, and Brazil. Each country represents a person, a soul with few or no means or outside assistance, whom Father MacRae aided when most would have looked the other way.

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Rebecca Virelles is a Senior at Arizona State University’s Bachelor of Arts in English degree program online. She served on active duty for nine years and is now a stay-at-home wife and mother. When not studying, she enjoys reading, baking, and traveling with her family. She aspires to write children’s literature one day in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. 

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Editor’s Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this important article by Rebecca Virelles. You may also like these related articles from multiple other writers:

A Criminal Defense Expert Unfurls Father MacRae Case by Vincent James Sanzone, Jr., Esq.

Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

Could Fr. Gordon MacRae Finally Go Free? by Kathy Schiffer at TheCatholic World Report

Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest by David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Pentecost Illumined the Night

Discouragement is the deep spiritual valley of our age. For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Holy Spirit’s light came only at dawn in a long dark night of the soul.

May 13, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I grew up a few miles north of Boston in an area known locally as the North Shore. Well, it is called that in print anyway. In conversation, it comes out something like, “the Noath Shoah.” I never knew that until I moved to another part of the country where people inexplicably pronounce the letter “R.” Anyway, I have lived in so many places since then that I have lost much of my Boston accent, but I can still translate it when I hear it.

There is an old North Shore saying, “Light finally dawns upon Marblehead.” I am not sure of its origin, but it makes logical sense. The seaside town of Marblehead is at the head of a deep harbor north of Boston, so the dawn’s early light is seen there a few seconds later than in other North Shore coastal towns. Its figurative meaning is that some reality that has been eluding us is now finally made clear.

Light finally dawned upon Marblehead today when I set out to write about Pentecost and ended up writing about Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. There is a connection that I had to spend some time ferreting out, and that is when the light finally dawned. I learned something important about her, and in the process, about myself.

But first, I know I am going to have a hard time dropping “Mother” from her name. “Saint” Teresa seems incomplete and already taken. So I guess that like Saint Padre Pio, she will be forever endowed with a title that has become a necessary part of her name. I am going to have to call her Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and it has slowly caught on.

She was canonized on September 4, 2016, the eve of the date of her death in 1997. In life the person she was, the spirit she is, was eclipsed by the sorrowful mysteries of the poor to whom she devoted her life. The images of her presence among the poor, the disfigured, the utterly broken and rejected — even the despised — have always been part of the background landscape of my life as a priest, but to be honest I could never bring myself to linger on those scenes. They were just too painful. They always left me with a sense of inadequacy as a priest, afraid to look upon the broken too long lest I feel compelled to follow her lead.

I admired Mother Teresa’s presence at the peripheries of human suffering, but as a priest I admired it from too much of a safe distance. That troubles me today. I had to be compelled in priesthood to carry the cross of the outcast, a cross that brought me unwillingly to the scene of that post-resurrection appearance to Simon Peter in the Gospel of John.

“Truly, truly I say to you, when you were young, you fastened your own belt and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will fasten your belt for you and carry you where you do not wish to go.”

— John 21:18

I have experienced those ominous words of John’s Gospel in a literal and terrifying way, but I found companions and some inner peace along the way as well. I wrote of one recently in “A Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest.” It was about how disappointment and discouragement have been part of my own dark night of the soul for thirty-two long years, and how Saint Damien of Molokai — whose feast day was observed on May 10 — taught me what my priorities must be in a life among prisoners.

And you know from many posts that I found other companions and mentors in Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio who have shown me by example that my life bound over by earthly powers must be lived out at the foot of Cross. In prison, others have joined me there, many others, but I remain in the dark.

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Come Be My Light

Now I present this new friend at the foot of the Cross in the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but I had to first shed all my assumptions about her. It is a little intimidating that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her witness to the world’s broken, abandoned and poor. In life Mother Teresa was revered as a living saint. I just assumed that for her to be that person, to do the work that she did, Mother Teresa must have been given a gift of daily awareness of the light of supernatural grace that flowed within her and shined through her. Otherwise, I thought, she would just sink into dark desolation just as I have been known to do with far less in the way of grace to count on.

And when I do sink into that desolation, I sometimes stay for days, weeks, months, at one point in my imprisonment before Beyond These Stone Walls began, even years. And if my mail is any indication, many of you have had that same experience. Please, do not come to Beyond These Stone Walls because misery loves company. It really does not. Come here because together we can manage crosses of discouragement that alone might only elude us and crush our spirits. You cannot just go to Home Depot to buy a weed whacker to wipe out desolation. It is best to have someone show you how to use it.

I was wrong about Mother Teresa, about my image of her basking in the reflected glow of the Holy Spirit. About a year after I started writing for this blog, I was given a copy of Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light (Doubleday 2007) and my presumptions about her life in grace were quickly dispelled.

Some of the shallow secular media made a big deal of this book, presenting it as the latest Catholic scandal that the great Living Saint among us had long bouts of doubt and desolation. But for me she became human again, and an icon not so much of living grace, but of grace hard won through great spiritual struggle. Like Saint Maximilian Kolbe, she became someone I could let in, and learn from.

Centuries of Catholic art tend to depict the saints among us with halos, in a state of ecstatic pose before the True Presence. Mother Teresa’s own writings convey her struggle to survive spiritually in the present absence. In that, I can relate. In that, I find much hope. That sense of absence is something I have taken up in other posts (see “Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence”).

Through letters to her spiritual director, Come Be My Light  is a guided tour of the interior life of this courageous woman whose heart “burned with the fire of charity” while at the same time experienced doubt and spiritual darkness in “a true dark night of the soul.” I began to do what she did, to pray not so much to be free of spiritual desolation, but to be free to serve even in the midst of it. Mother Teresa did that well. I get, at best, a C-minus, but I am still reading the book!

A part of it reminds me so much of something Canadian Catholic writer Michael Brandon wrote some time back in “All Things Turn to Good” at his Freedom Through Truth  blog. While writing of the news of the failure of the justice system to pursue justice for me, Michael quoted another Saint Teresa, Saint Teresa of Avila, who once wrote, “God, if this is how You treat Your friends, it’s no wonder that you have so few.” When our friend, Pornchai Moontri, read that quote, it made him laugh. He had been having a hard time with discouragement over my plight, but the quote put it into perspective for him.

Do not read Come Be My Light  in one sitting. Keep it on your night stand and read it prayerfully, a letter a day perhaps, or even reserved for moments in your own dark night. It has gotten me through many of my own. She is fast becoming the Patron Saint of “Get-off-your-priestly-arse-and-do-something-for-someone-instead-of-moping-about!”

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The Advocate

There is a little side story to tell. While composing this post, I had left my copy of Come Be My Light in the prison library where I work, but I had only a Saturday afternoon to finish this post and get it into the mail. The library is closed on weekends so I had no way to retrieve the book. On Saturday morning, I remembered that Father Michael Gaitley had an entire section about the Marian consecration of Mother Teresa in his book, 33 Days to Morning Glory.

But I had left that book in the library as well! When I mentioned that to Pornchai, who was still here with me then, he said, “Well, there’s at least ten of them right here in this unit.” Then it struck me. How is it even possible that out of sixty prisoners in this one prison cell block, ten of them have completed 33 Days to Morning Glory and entered into Marian Consecration? That is one out of every six prisoners in our field of view. So all I had to do was walk to the cell next to mine and borrow the book. Duh!

When I did, I opened to the Table of Contents and was instantly reminded that three of my favorite saints comprise weeks two, three, and four of Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning Glory, retreat. They are Saints Maximilian Kolbe, Mother Teresa, and John Paul II, and all are saints of the Twentieth Century.

I thought I had read this book cover to cover, but while looking at the Table of Contents to find the section on Mother Teresa, I unconsciously thumbed back two pages, and stopped on a name that jumped off the page at me. It was a short review of 33 Days by Father James McCurry, formerly Minister Provincial of the Conventual Franciscans, the order to which Saint Maximilian Kolbe belonged and the Vice Postulator for his cause for sainthood. How could I not have seen this before?

Many years ago, Father James McCurry came to visit me in prison. I had never previously met him, and today I cannot really explain what brought him here except a vague memory that he was passing through and heard of me through a friend of a friend. In the prison visiting room, Father McCurry asked, “What do you know of Saint Maximilian Kolbe?” It was a question that would change my life, and then change the life of Pornchai Moontri, and then others as well. I wrote of this first encounter with a Patron Saint in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

So in searching for a section on Mother Teresa, she pointed me back to an old friend. The interconnections between everyone in this story are mind-boggling. Father McCurry wrote that the essence of Marian consecration is …

“St. Maximilian Kolbe’s mystical intuition about the interior life of Mary and the Holy Spirit in the life of a consecrant; Blessed Mother Teresa’s experience of Mary drawing us into her heart, where Jesus keeps repeating, ‘I thirst’; and St. John Paul’s understanding that consecration to Mary brings us to the source of merciful love — the Divine Mercy poised to transform the world.”

That is when the light finally dawned upon Marblehead! I realized that the world I am thrown into is in fact being transformed in spite of my protests about being here in the first place. Some around me — the poor, the outcasts, the discarded, the lepers, the criminals — are being transformed. How could it possibly have happened that one out of every six of these men around me in prison now lives a life consecrated to Jesus through Mary? How is it that the saints whose intercession I keep pursuing are already engaged in a work that has eluded me? Then I read in the Gospel:

“I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”

— John 14:25-28

This brings to light what Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta learned in the dark. The Holy Spirit was her Advocate not in any obvious glory, but in desolation, and it was from there on the very edges of suffering humanity that she led countless souls to Christ, and witnessed to the world that the Lord hears the cry of the poor.

“It is beautiful to see the humility of Christ. This humility can be seen in the crib, in the exile in Egypt, in the hidden life, in the inability to make people understand him, in the desertion of his apostles, in the hatred of the Jews, and all the terrible suffering and death of his passion, and now in his permanent state of humility in the tabernacle, where he has rendered himself to such a small particle of bread that the priest can hold him with two fingers.”

— Mother Teresa of Calcutta

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We could extend the same invitation to Saint Mother Teresa that she extended to the Holy Spirit: Come Be My Light.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about a great saint of our age. You may also like these related posts at Beyond These Stone Walls:

Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence

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

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

A Lesson From Saint Damien of Molokai, Leper Priest

Should the State’s flawed justice be mirrored in the Church? This must be asked and the truth written. But ask as well, “Can a leper priest also serve God?”

May 10, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

This is a post I wrote on May 6, 2015, and everything in it is relative to that time frame. However, just about everything in it also impacts the current time frame. So I am posting it again.

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Pornchai Moontri and I and other friends are just beginning another retreat program in prison sponsored by the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy and the Marians of the Immaculate Conception. One of the texts used for the retreat is, You Did It to Me, one of many such books by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC.

Something happened over the last few weeks that cast yet another, but brighter light on recent events that have so overshadowed Beyond These Stone Walls. The text for the retreat is You Did It to Me by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC. The timing of it is by design, of course, but not by my design. I just nudged Pornchai Max and pointed out a photo of both of us in the middle of the book. “My, for prisoners, you guys get around,” wrote BTSW reader Mary Fran Cherry back then. She alerted me to our photo in the book. The retreat lifted a corner of the shroud that overshadowed my life behind these prison walls beginning on Wednesday of Holy Week.

Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of this in “For One Priest, A Fate Worse than Dying in Prison,” the second of his excellent two-part analysis of a recent court ruling that was a setback in my hope for justice and freedom. I have much gratitude for Ryan’s effort, and especially so because he left you with hope by telling you that I learned of this decision just as I was reading, You Did it to Me.

While reading that book, my eyes were opened a little, just enough to see what discouragement kept me from seeing. It reminded me so vividly of a story that took place on the road to Emmaus at another time of discouragement:

“That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from knowing him … Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

— Luke 24:13-23

Someone might ask that same question of me if I lapse into writing about a Divine Mercy retreat without addressing “all these things that had happened” in the arena of justice and injustice. So I am also most grateful to New Jersey Attorney Vincent James Sanzone for his enlightened analysis of the legal precipice awaiting me and other falsely accused priests in both Church and State: “A Criminal Defense Expert Unfurls Father MacRae Case.” Prior to writing that guest post, Attorney Sanzone wrote a brilliant letter to Pope Francis about this matter, and to EWTN. I believe the EWTN letter may have been what prompted Brian Fraga and the National Catholic Register to publish “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name” (NCRegister.com, March 18, 2015).

Was I discouraged by the outcome revealed to me on Wednesday of Holy Week? Yes, I was. Was I devastated as some have suggested? I was, for a time. Have I given up? Not hardly. That is about all I have to offer about this. More important things have happened, and I have no time to descend into a litany of woe-is-me. Another day, perhaps. It is time now to step out of this arena of justice and all its flaws, and to step back onto that road to Emmaus.

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Voice from Beyond

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, something happened that cast a brighter light — brighter than my discouragement, at least — on the events of recent days. Let me first tell you what happened.

On the evening of Divine Mercy Sunday as this retreat began, Pornchai Maximilian sat in a chair to my right and Michael Ciresi to my left. Along with seventeen other prisoners who joined us, we watched and listened to a DVD presentation by Father Michael Gaitley to introduce the retreat. It was excellent, of course, and Pornchai was riveted to the projection of Father Gaitley on the prison chapel wall.

Every now and then the camera recording Father Gaitley swept over his audience, and there, seated near the back, I spotted a familiar face: Marian missionary Eric Mahl. You may recall that Pornchai and Eric Mahl both had chapters featuring them in Felix Carroll’s great Divine Mercy book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Later they met and became friends and brothers. I nudged Pornchai and pointed as Eric appeared on the wall. Just at that moment, Eric looked toward the camera and smiled. Pornchai smiled back.

The next day a letter arrived for Pornchai. As though right on cue, it was from Eric Mahl. It was a copy of a letter from Eric to some people who are helping Pornchai by organizing an effort to secure his future in Thailand when he is free from these stone walls. During his missionary outreach to prisons, Eric Mahl has had three meetings with Pornchai. On the last one, he was accompanied by Father Seraphim Michalenko who served as Vice-Postulator for the Cause of Canonization of Saint Maria Faustina. I wrote of that meeting in “Father Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.” Eric also wrote of that meeting in his letter:

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“This very holy priest had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Pornchai in the Chapel, to talk to him and get to know him. When [Father Seraphim] and I were on our way home back to the Shrine in Massachusetts, he told me that the peace in that Chapel must be what Heaven is like and that Pornchai Moontri is a very holy and beautiful child of God. I write all of this to let you know how I desire to see this restored child of God out of prison and living free in Thailand where he could help the rest of society.”

— Letter of Eric Mahl

On April 19, the second Sunday evening of our retreat, we watched the second of Father Gaitley’s DVD presentations, and this time Pornchai listened intently while also looking for his friend Eric Mahl in the background. Later that evening, during a small group discussion led by Marian volunteer Jim Preisendorfer, I heard something astonishing. During Father Gaitley’s presentation, he spoke of the eight reasons why we do not appreciate the Trinity. One of them, Reason Number Seven, is “Because we listen to the voice of the enemy.” By way of example, I wrote in my notes:

“Part of Satan’s strategy is to keep us unfocused from our destiny. He lures us into being satisfied with this world so that so many of us just settle for what this life gives us, or despair over what this life denies us.”

When I read my own notes, I could not even remember writing that. It was as though my pen were on autopilot. Then table moderator Jim Preisendorfer asked for a comment on “Reason Number Seven.” No one spoke so I read my note above. Jim asked if I could give a concrete example. “I can,” Pornchai chimed in. He then spoke about a conversation he and I had seven years earlier. Hope seemed futile for him then. I had asked him back then if he had any hope at all for the future. I will never forget his answer, “I don’t have a future I only have a ‘Plan B.’ ”

Over time I came to understand what “Plan B” was, though, I had not heard Pornchai speak of it for a long time. At the table during our retreat that night, Pornchai explained that “Plan B” was his only plan, and it arose spontaneously within him. “Plan B” was to never leave prison. Having been cast into prison with a 45-year sentence at age 18, followed by years of solitary confinement in a dreaded “Supermax” prison, Pornchai had laid out in his mind the only future this life could promise him: to live out his life in prison. To die in prison. He had nothing else to look forward to.

On that night, however, Pornchai reflected what Eric Mahl described. He radiated the life of a restored child of God for whom that dismal “Plan B” was but a long forgotten memory. He spoke of it as a perfect example of how listening to the voice of the enemy can deny us our destiny. I sat there asking myself, “When did this happen. How did it happen?”

Then Pornchai jabbed a thumb in my direction at the table. “When this guy stepped into my life,” he said, “he released me from the grip of ‘Plan B.’ ” Pornchai described how he took a great risk to trust in some vague hope that was covered in a cloud and could not be seen, so he just took my word for it. “Now, seven years later,” he said that night, “ ‘Plan B’ is just an old memory with no power over me, and people all over the world have come together to replace it.”

While he spoke at that table, I looked down at my own thumbs as Pornchai jabbed his thumb in my direction. I could not look up. I knew that if I made eye contact with him at that moment, I would have fallen apart. My own plan for my life and my priesthood certainly never included life in prison for a crime that never took place. It never included being demonized and scapegoated to satisfy the demands of contingency lawyers and insurance companies as Ryan pointed out. It never included pleading for my Church to see the failures of American civil justice instead of just blindly declaring them final and fulfilled justice.

Ryan A. MacDonald charged in a comment a few weeks ago that the American hierarchy’s response to the priesthood crisis has been more like a housecleaning than a healing. My plan for my life never included a dread that my own bishop might echo in Rome the Twelfth Century plea of Henry II about Thomas Beckett “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

My plan for priesthood also never included Pornchai Moontri, nor could I have ever foreseen the notion that the tragedy that befell me could ever be anything other than a tragedy for someone else.

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The Leper Priest

I vividly remember, as a young seminarian in the latter 1970s, watching a two-part PBS dramatization of the life of Father Damien de Veuster, the Belgian priest who in 2009 became Saint Damien of Molokai. I was fascinated by the PBS version. It remains in my psyche as one of the alluring things that drew me toward and kept me focused on a side of priesthood in danger of being lost today, the notion that priesthood is not a job, but an ontological state of being. To see priests “fired” and cast off seems like “Reason Number Seven,” like succumbing to the voice of the enemy as he lures priesthood from its destiny.

When Damien of Molokai was driven across that line between ministering to lepers and becoming a leper, it was seen as a tragedy to his friends, but hindsight sees it as a gift to the Church and the world. When he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, Emily Stimpson wrote of him in “Untamed Saint” in Our Sunday Visitor:

“Saints are made through trials and persecution. And Father Damien had more than his share of those. For most of the 16 years he served on Molokai, he served alone… He begged his superiors to send him help. Usually they ignored his requests. Twice, however, they did send someone. The first was a Dutch priest who complained incessantly. The second was a French priest who accused Father Damien of improper relations with the native women. His superiors and bishop grew tired of his constant demand for help. They considered him an obstinate, headstrong troublemaker. The government shared that opinion, and more than a few officials gave credence to false rumors circulated about him. His detractors heaped every sort of abuse and calumny upon Father Damien … Enduring his own dark night, he felt abandoned by God and unworthy of heaven.”

— Emily Stimpson, “Untamed Saint,” OSV, October 11, 2009

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Knock and the Door Will Open: The Long Road to Bangkok Thailand

Thanks to Bill Donohue, “Pornchai’s Story” made its way around the world and was read to Catholics in Thailand. Pornchai’s Divine Mercy bridge to Thailand was built.

May 6, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

I wrote a post recently entitled “Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.” It was an allegory, like the Book of Tobit itself. An allegory is a sort of genre of Sacred Scripture in which a story is told more for its meaning than for its historical value. Every parable of Jesus falls into this same genre. A part of the story of Tobit, and his son Tobias and their interactions with the Archangel Raphael in disguise were all part of the allegory. That does not mean the allegory did not happen. It means only that the truth of the story does not depend upon someone believing it. There was one aspect of the Book of Tobit story that became a centerpiece of my blog linked above. At the beginning and the end of the Book of Tobit there is a mysterious dog whose presence, meaning and purpose remain a mystery.

My friend Pornchai Max and his grueling assimilation to his native Thailand after a forced absence of 36 years and all the torment he endured in that time, also included the presence of a mysterious dog named Hill. When that post was published on April 29 this year, a number of our readers wanted to know what became of Hill. So I went back this week and added an important addendum, which you can read for yourselves by clicking on it at the end of this post.

Now I want to back up about 19 years, in 2007 when Max learned that he would be deported to Thailand at the end of his sentence. He would be taken to Bangkok and left there. ICE would have no further responsibility for him.

Bangkok, the Capitol of the Kingdom of Thailand, is a massive city of about 9.5 million people. In Thai, the great city’s name is almost unpronounceable to the Western World, and the longest name of any city on Earth at 156 characters. I don’t expect you to memorize it, but in the Thai language Bangkok’s name is: Krungthepmahanakorn Amornrattanakosin Mahintrayuthaya Mahadilokpob Noparat Rajataniburirom Udomrajanivej Mahasatharn Amornpimarn Awatarnsat Sakatadtiya Wisanukamprasit.  For daily use in Thai, the name is simply abbreviated to “Bangkok Krung Thep” which in English means “City of Angels.” When Max first told me of this in a phone call, he said, “I’m not kidding. They called it that even before I got here!”

This is a complicated but amazing story that meanders down a long and winding road. Our presentation of it begins in 2006 in a New Hampshire prison cell and threads its mysterious connections all the way around the globe. I n the end you may find any lingering doubts about Divine Mercy falling away. Divine Mercy has opened impenetrable doors for Pornchai Moontri, many of them in otherwise unreachable places.

If you have read my post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner” then you know that Max had been in prison for 29 years, more than half his life, for a crime committed as a teenager, a crime that was set in motion by someone else. You also know that Max was moved from a maximum security solitary confinement unit in Maine to the New Hampshire Prison where we met and became friends late in 2006. That story is told powerfully at the link above.

I had another friend in this prison from Cambodia whom I had helped with the deportation process. He was brought to this country as a child of two, and committed a petty crime at age 18. After a long failed process of appeals, he was deported at age 25 to Cambodia, but spoke not a word of Khmer. One year after his deportation, I received a note from his sister telling me that he disappeared in the capital city of Phenom Penh. He had never been seen or heard from again.

We learned an important but scary lesson from what happened to my Cambodian friend. Since Max was brought to the U.S. as a young child, and has no known family or contacts in Thailand other than distance cousins, the experience of our friend in Cambodia chilled me to the core. I became determined that Max would be ready to live and cope somehow in the immense City of Bangkok when the time came. We had a few years to prepare, but I did not even know where to begin.

How could two men living in a prison cell in New Hampshire with no resources, no online access, and a severely limited budget find and connect with people on the other side of the world? How could I interest anyone in Thailand with the plight of a young man taken from there at age 11, his mother murdered, only to come to the United States to end up homeless and in prison as a teenager? This was not a good place from which to start.

THE SILENCE

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Max told me dismally. “I don’t even know how to learn about Thailand.” I knew I had to start writing, but this was two years before even the idea of this blog was conceived. A day in the prison library produced some addresses. First, I wrote of Max’s situation to Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Manchester (NH). They are, after all, a global network. No response, but no real surprise there. Then I wrote to the national office of Catholic Charities. No response. Then I wrote to the Office of Immigration and Refugee Assistance sponsored by my Diocese. No response. Then I wrote to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network at Boston College. No response. I knocked at the door of every official Catholic agency I could find. No one answered. I knocked, and I waited, and I knocked some more.

I cannot convey in words the utter frustration of writing repeatedly only to have my overtures met with silence. I decided that the problem was not Pornchai’s plight, but rather mine. I told Max that we will have to write all these letters again, but coming directly from him. So we redrafted all the letters under his name. More knocking; more waiting. More silence.

When all of our letters from prison were relegated to the netherworld without responses, I took it personally. I knew we needed a different approach. I asked Max to candidly write his life story — which is an amazing story in and of itself — in as few pages as possible, and let me send it to the few Catholic contacts I had who did not ignore our plight. One of them was Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Once he read “Pornchai’s Story,” he wrote back immediately asking if he could publish it on the Catholic League website. From there, it slowly made its way around the world. We knocked and knocked, and waited some more.

The late Father Richard John Neuhaus — a courageous Catholic writer and editor of First Things magazine — sent Max a personal letter to tell him how very important his story is, not only for Max, but for the Church. Father Neuhaus promised to pass the story along to others. This was a year before Father Neuhaus faced his own untimely death from cancer in January, 2009. More knocking, and more waiting.

Max started receiving letters from other important figures in the Church. One came from His Eminence Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok. Max was bowled over by that letter. Another came from the Rome Office of Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, who had been appointed by President George W. Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

Bill Donohue extending to Max honorary membership in the Catholic League and promised to promised to promote his story. My article for Catalyst appeared at the same time, in the July/August 2009 issue. It was “Due Process for Accused Priests.” As an unintended consequence, Pornchai’s story and mine became linked together.

Pornchai’s Story

Here is Pornchai’s Story:

[From Dr. Bill Donohue: ] As we begin the New Year, we’d like to share with you this moving account of one young man’s conversion story.

My name is Pornchai Moontri, and as I write this I am prisoner #77948 in the New Hampshire State Prison. I come to the Catholic faith after a painful journey in darkness that my friend, Father Gordon MacRae, has asked me to write candidly. This is not something I do easily, but I trust my friend.

I was born in Bua Nong Lamphu, in a small village in the north of Thailand near Khon Kaen on September 10, 1973. At the age of two, I was abandoned by my mother and a stranger tried to sell me. A distant teenaged relative rescued me. He walked many miles to carry me away to his family farm where I worked throughout my childhood raising water buffalo, rice, and sugar cane. I never attended school, however, and never learned to read and write in Thai. Though my childhood involved hard work, I was safe and happy.

When I was 11 years old, my mother re-emerged in Thailand with a new husband — an American air traffic controller from Bangor, Maine. I was taken from Thailand by them against my will, and brought to the United States. This transition was a trauma to be endured. A month after my arrival in Bangor, my new stepfather’s motive for importing a ready-made Thai family became clear. I was forcibly raped by him at age 11, an event that was to be repeated with regularity over the next three years. I was a prisoner in his house, and resistance was only met with violence against me and against my mother. I was all of 100 pounds. I cannot describe this further. Welcome to America!

Being one of only three Asians in 1985 Bangor, and speaking little English, I did not readily comprehend my new names. “Gook,” “V.C.” and “Charlie” meant nothing to me, but I could sense the scorn with which such names were delivered. Because my English was poor, I was treated as though I was stupid. Part of my humiliation was that I had to get a paper route at age 12, and my earnings were taken from me to pay for the “privilege” of living in my captor’s house. Stephen King’s home was on my paper route. Mr. King once gave me a Christmas bonus of 25¢ for delivering his newspaper all year. The horror stories he wrote about Maine are all true. Remember the one with the evil clown? It’s true.

When I was 14, my English was better. I was a little bigger, and a lot stronger — and nothing but angry. Anger was all I had. So with it I fled that house and became a homeless teenager in and around Bangor. One day the Bangor police actually picked me up and forced me to go “home.” I would rather have gone to one of the ones Stephen King wrote about. I just fled again and again, and ended up at the Good Will Hinckley School for people like me. I was there for a year and got kicked out for fighting. I was always fighting. I fought everyone.

Back on the streets of Bangor, I began to carry a knife. At 17 and 18, a lot of people were after me. I lived under a bridge for a while and sometimes my mother would bring me things. I tried to climb out of the deep hole I was in by signing up for night classes at age 18 to finish my high school diploma. I was kicked out of Bangor High School for punching the principal.

One night, at age 18, something that lived in me got out. I got very drunk with friends, and we walked into a Bangor Shop & Save supermarket to buy cigarettes. I barely remember this. In my drunken state, I opened a bottle of beer from a case and started to drink it. The manager confronted me and ordered me to leave. I tried to flee the store, but the manager and other employees then tried to keep me there. I tried to fight them off to flee. When I got outside, a manager from another Shop & Save had witnessed the incident and pounced on me. I was 130 pounds and was pinned to the ground by this 190-pound man. I think something snapped in my mind. IT was happening again. I fought, but his dead weight was suffocating me. The newspapers would later tell a different story, but this was the truth, and it is all I remember.

In jail that night, I was questioned for three hours. I was told that I had stabbed a man and was charged with attempted murder. I have no memory, to this day, of stabbing the man. The next morning, I awoke in a jail cell and was told that I was charged with Class A murder. The man had died during the night. I was told that I blew a .25 on the Breathalyzer, but the result was so high it was discarded as an error.

My stepfather could have hired expert counsel, but it was clearly not in his best interest that my life be evaluated, so I was left in the care of a public defender who wanted this high profile case off his desk. There was talk about the Breathalyzer, and “level of culpability,” and things like “defensive vs. offensive wounds,” but in the end there were no theories, no experts and no defense. I was terrified of being abandoned. My mother came to me in jail and pleaded with me to protect her and “the family” by not revealing what happened in my life. So I remained silent. I offered no defense at all. My co-defendant told the truth of my being pinned down, but he was not believed. I was convicted of “Class A murder with deliberate indifference” and sentenced, at age 18, to 45 years in a Maine Prison. Maine has no parole.

I was also sentenced with the soul of the innocent man whose life I took — despite my being unable to remember taking it. The mix of remorse and anger was toxic in prison, and I gave up. Prison became just an extension of where I had already been. My anger raged on and on, and I spent 13 of my 15 years in prison in Maine’s “supermax” facility for those who can’t be trusted in the light of day.

Five years into my imprisonment, I learned one night in my supermax cell that my mother and stepfather had relocated to the Island of Guam where my mother was murdered. She was pushed from a cliff. [The story that was told to Pornchai, but it was false.] The only suspect was her husband but there was no evidence. I was now alone in my rage.

After 14 years of this, the Maine prison decided to send me to an out-of-state prison. I had no idea where I was to be sent. I arrived in the New Hampshire State Prison on October 18, 2005 dragging behind me the Titanic in which I stored all my anger and hurt and loss and loss and loss — and guilt.

I started my time in a new prison by getting into a fight and ended up in the same old place — the hole. When some months went by, I was given another chance. I was sent to H-Building where I met my friend JJ, an Indonesian who was waiting to be deported. JJ introduced me one day to Gordon, who he said was helping him and some others with appealing their INS removal orders or with preparing themselves to be deported. He seemed to be the only person who even cared. JJ trusted Gordon, so I had several conversations with him. A few months later, I was moved to the same unit in which he lives in this prison. We became friends.

By patience and especially by example, Gordon helped me change the course of my life. He is my best friend, and the person I trust most in this world. It is the strangest irony that he has been in prison for 13 years accused fictionally of the same behaviors visited upon me in the real world by the man who took me from Thailand. I read the articles about Gordon in The Wall Street Journal last year. I know him better, I think, than just about anyone. I know only too well the person who does what Gordon is wrongly accused of. Gordon is not that person. Far from it. It is hard for me to accept that laws and public sentiment allow men to demand and receive huge financial settlements from the Catholic Church years or decades after claimed abuse while all that happened to me has gone without even casual notice by anyone — except, ironically, Gordon MacRae.

On September 10, I will be 34 years old. I have been in prison now for nearly half of my life, but in the last year I have begun to know what freedom is. My anger is still with me and it always lurks just below the surface, but my friend is also with me. We both recently signed up for an intense 15-week course in personal violence. He is doing this for me. I spend my days in school instead of in lock-up now, and I will soon complete my High School diploma. Gordon helped me obtain a scholarship for a series of non-credit courses in Catholic studies at Catholic Distance University. In the last year, with help and understanding, I have completed programs offered in the New Hampshire prison. One day I felt strangely light so I looked behind me, and the Titanic was not there. I parked it somewhere along the way. I have put my childhood aside. Now I am a man.

In March of this year, after 15 years in prison, I was ordered by an INS court to be removed from the United States and deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence in 17 to 20 years or so. Gordon hopes that I can seek a sentence reduction so that I can return to Thailand at an age at which I may still build a life. There are many obstacles. The largest is that I do not speak Thai any longer and I never had an opportunity to learn and to read and write in Thai. We are working hard to prepare me for this. Though years away, it is a very frightening thing to go to a country only vaguely familiar. I have not heard Thai spoken since age 11, 23 years ago. There is no one I know there and no place for me to go. I have no home anywhere.

Along this steep path, I have made a decision to become Catholic. The priest in my friend has not been extinguished by 13 years in prison. It is still the part of him that shines the brightest. Gordon never asked me to become Catholic. He never even brought it up. I t is the path he is on and I was pulled to it by the force of grace, and the hope that one day I could do good for others. Gordon showed me a book, Jesus of Nazareth, in which Pope Benedict wrote: “The true ‘exodus’…consists in this: Among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.”

I am taking a correspondence course in Catholic studies through the Knights of Columbus and I look forward to the studies through Catholic Distance University. I go to Mass with Gordon when it is offered in the prison, and our faith is always a part of every day. When I return to the place I haven’t seen since age 11, I want to go there as a committed Catholic open to God’s call to live a life in service to others. It is what someone very special to me has done for me, and I must do the same.

My friend asked me to sit down today and type the story of my life and where I am now. He asked me to let him send this to a few friends who he says may play some role — directly or indirectly — in my life some day. The account is my own. What Father Gordon added was hope, and somehow faith has also taken root. In prison, hope and faith are everything. Everything!

[Written by Pornchai Moontri in 2008 and published by the Catholic League.]

Thanks to Bill Donohue and the Catholic League, “Pornchai’s Story” made its way around the world and was read to Catholics in Thailand. Pornchai Moontri’s Divine Mercy Bridge to Thailand was built despite many obstacles.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Pornchai’s story does not end here. There were other miracles yet to be told, but they are told in other posts here:

Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

The Old Testament Book of Tobit provides a setting for this story of a familiar wanderer and his dog and their angelic quest for healing from a traumatic past.

April 22, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

The young man went out and the angel went with him, and a dog came along and journeyed with them.

— Tobit 6:1-2

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There are 46 books in the Old Testament of Sacred Scripture. Among them are 14 that are in the category of Historical Books. Each tells a story about the history of God’s people from the earliest times. The Historical Books of the Bible do not convey the Word of God in the same way as the Law and the Prophets, but in them we come to know God through the power of story. I wrote of one of these wonderful accounts in the category of Historical Books in “The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost.”

Also among these Historical Books are two that are set against the background of the time of exile in Eighth Century BC. They are the Books of Tobit and Esther, each presenting a story of exile far from the Holy Land.

Today’s post is about the Book of Tobit in which we found a modern-day version quite reminiscent of it, in which God’s fidelity in the midst of our suffering and hardship is revealed even in the far-off places. The Book of Tobit mirrors a chapter in the contemporary life of a good friend on the verge of the next chapter in his life.

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Up to now, I have written about only two of the named angels of Sacred Scripture. So as not to distract you from this post, I will link to those other accounts at the end of this one. In a most strange way, the Archangel Raphael has placed himself into the cast of characters at work on our behalf beyond these stone walls. It is a profound account with lots of twists and turns like the Book of Tobit itself, but I will try to straighten the curves a bit.

This is a Part Two of sorts to an earlier post about our friend, Pornchai Moontri and his return to his native Thailand after an absence of 36 years. Pornchai is now 52, and has been struggling to adjust to the land of the free in a country he had not seen since age eleven. Part One of this post was “For Pornchai Moontri, a Miracle Unfolds in Thailand.”

Before I continue that account, I have to comment on the photo atop this post. After the reunion with his family described in the post linked above, Pornchai left with Father John Le for the nine-hour drive back to the Bangkok area and the Society of the Divine Word home, where he had first been living upon his arrival in Thailand. While there, Pornchai learned of an annual Thai custom called, in English, the “Water Festival.” It occurs in mid-April to mark the Thai New Year. It is tradition that Thai citizens honor the dead — a tribute akin to All Souls Day — by cleaning and restoring their tombs. So Pornchai decided to return there for a month to clean and honor the tombs of his Mother and Grandmother. The Water Festival is from April 12 to 16.

In the weeks before the Festival began, Pornchai had been spending his time doing yard work around the unfinished home of his Mother, left vacant since the time of her death. You may recall that after her own return to Thailand, she left that home in 2000 not knowing that she was going to her own untimely death, a victim of an unsolved homicide on the Island of Guam. She was almost the same age Pornchai is now. Being there, and coming to terms with all that transpired before, is an essential part of a most painful journey.

While in the village of Phuwiang (pronounced poo-vee-ANG) Pornchai had been rebuilding his relationship with his distant extended family from which he had been estranged for 36 years. “You can’t go home again.” That was the title of an American novel by Thomas Wolfe. His title signifies that you cannot return to the past, childhood, or old places, as time, change, and memory make the original “home” impossible to truly revisit. They were a close-knit family when Pornchai was taken from them against his will at age eleven. I cannot begin to fathom the depth of alienation and pain behind these reunions. I had been talking with Pornchai daily during this time. I usually called him at 11 AM which is 10 PM for him. It was the month of April, the hottest time of the year in Thailand. One night when I called he was out walking on the street with his late mother’s elder sister. They were surrounded by a pack of loudly barking dogs.

The connections between humans and dogs is a little different in the rural north of Thailand than in the Western World. The dogs are pets only in a loose sense of the term. They bond with someone who feeds them so they are not left entirely to their own devices, but they otherwise roam free to rule the street, rarely if ever coming indoors. They are more or less feral dogs. When I called Pornchai a few nights later, he told me that one of the dogs, the “Alpha” dog who seemed to be the leader of the pack, started following Pornchai every place he went. If Pornchai entered a building, the dog would sit outside and patiently wait for him. He also kept all the other dogs away from Pornchai.

The dog’s name seemed to be “Hill.” No one knows where either the dog or the name came from. Perhaps it means something in Thai, the sole language that Hill had ever heard. Hill attached himself to no one, but over those few weeks, he and Pornchai had become the best of friends. I asked for a photograph of them together, and the one atop this post appeared on my GTL tablet the next day. It broke my heart. Hill, like Pornchai, had a very tough life. Hill exhibited all the wounds and scars of life on the outside that Pornchai bears on the inside. He has had to be a ferocious dog to survive, but in Pornchai’s presence he was as docile and gentle as a lamb.

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Enter the Archangel Raphael

I’m not at all sure what prompted me to do this, but after meeting Hill from afar, I began to research the role of dogs in Sacred Scripture. There are 46 references to dogs, and all but two of them are negative. “Many dogs surround me; a pack of evil doers closes in upon me” (Psalm 22:16). But it was the two references that were positive that caught my attention. Both are in the Book of Tobit (6:1-2 and 11:4) and they refer to a single, mysterious dog who appears at the beginning and the end of Raphael’s healing mission with Tobias, the son of Tobit. The dog has no part in the story other than to be there.

The name, Raphael, comes from the Hebrew for “God heals.” Raphael is a prominent figure in the ancient traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. He is identified in Judaism as an “Angel of the Presence,” one of four (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel) who surround God’s Throne and live in his eternal Presence. In the Hebrew Talmud, he was one of the three angels who visited Abraham (Genesis 18) setting in motion the birth of Salvation History. He appears in the Hebrew Shema before retiring: “In the name of the God of Israel, may Michael be on my right hand, Gabriel on my left hand, Uriel before me, Raphael behind me, and above my head, the Divine Presence.”

In Catholic tradition, Raphael is venerated as an angel of healing. Ancient Christian lore presents him as the head of the Guardian angels, the angel of knowledge, and an angel of science. In the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, Raphael binds the fallen angel, Azazel, and casts him into the desert darkness. In the Canon of Sacred Scripture, Raphael appears in only one place, the Book of Tobit and the Bible’s most memorable healing journey. Written up to eight centuries before Jesus walked the Earth, The Book of Tobit reflects the commission of Raphael in the more ancient Apocryphal Book of Enoch:

“Tobias remembered the words of Raphael ... and made a smoke. When the demon smelled the odor, he fled to the remotest parts of Egypt where the angel bound him.”

—Tobit 8:2-3

I wrote some years ago about my bout with Azazel, this demon of the desert, but it was long before I realized that Raphael is the angel who bound him. For a glimpse of who and what Azazel is, and his role in our misery, see “Christ in the Desert: A Devil of a Time,” also linked at the end of this post.

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The Book of Tobit Is Pornchai’s Story

The Book of Tobit was originally written in Aramaic, the language of the Jews before the development of Hebrew and their settlement in the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. A version of the story was preserved in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures. Fragments of it were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran.

The story of Tobit is brief but complex. Though written in Aramaic, most scholars date its origin in oral tradition in the Eighth Century BC and its written form at least two centuries before Christ. Among Jewish scholars, it was seen not as a historical book, but as Wisdom Literature. In the Canon of Sacred Scripture today the Book of Tobit is among the Historical Books for its focus on story, which is not a measure of historical accuracy, but of meaning. Its characters are historical persons, but its point is to convey a Scriptural truth. The story begins with Tobit, a devout and charitable Israelite who is deported into exile in Nineveh. Even there, he is an exemplary man who cares for his son, Tobias, his wife, and other captives in exile.

Then one day, due to an accident, Tobit loses his sight. About to lose everything else, he commissions his son, Tobias, to journey to far away Media to recover funds left in the care of a distant relative there. Tobit’s wife thinks Tobias is being sent to his doom, so Tobit issues a desperate plea to God to protect his son and recover his fortune. Meanwhile, in Media, Sarah, the daughter of the distant relative, is plagued by the presence of a demon named Asmodeus who has murdered everyone she loves. Sarah also prays a desperate plea to God for deliverance.

God hears both their prayers, and assigns Archangel Raphael to be the instrument of His Divine Mercy. Raphael involves himself in the Great Tapestry of God to see to it that these desperate lives converge safely upon Media and their paths cross. In the form of a stranger named Azarias, Raphael shows up in Nineveh to accompany Tobias safely to Media, a journey that will bring about the healing of both Tobit and Sarah and the rebuilding of their lives.

Strangely, as the opening lines of this post suggest, on the day Tobias and the Archangel depart on their healing journey, a dog shows up and walks with them (Tobit 6:1-2). The dog has no part in the story other than to accompany them. In the footnotes of the Scripture scholars who analyze this story in the Revised Standard Version, the dog is referred to simply as “surprising.”

In the end, the balm made by Tobias under Raphael’s instruction for the ultimate healing of Tobit’s blindness also exposes the demon haunting Sarah. The demon Asmodeus flees into Egypt where the Archangel Raphael binds him and imprisons him in the desert. Then Raphael acquires the sum of money needed by Tobit, and they all commence the long journey back to Nineveh to heal Tobit’s blindness. And for the second time, the Book of Tobit mysteriously reports, “So they went their way, and the dog went along behind them” (Tobit 11:4).

In the end, Raphael revealed himself to Tobit, Tobias and Sarah. He told Tobit that God has seen all the good he has done even in exile:

“I am Raphael, one of the Seven Holy Angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence in the Glory of the Holy One ... Do not be afraid, for I did not come on my own part, but by the will of our God.”

— Tobit 12:15ff

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To Be Reborn In the Land of Your Birth

I am writing this post on Divine Mercy Sunday, the day and date that Pornchai became a Catholic in prison in 2010. In a call to him this morning, he told me that he attended Mass at Saint Joseph Church, a small Catholic parish thriving in the Buddhist enclave of Nong Bua Lamphu Province in Northern Thailand where many have gathered for the Buddhist Water Festival to honor the tombs of their loved ones.

Among them is the tomb of Wannee, Pornchai’s Mother who was also murdered by the demon, Asmodeus. You may note from the photo with Hill atop this post that Pornchai has a large tattoo on his left shoulder. It is from a portrait of his Mother, etched masterfully on his arm by an artistic prisoner just days after Pornchai learned of her death. It was at the time his only means to memorialize and to mourn her.

Pornchai has felt lost in Thailand. After a 36-year absence, and five months in horrible ICE detention, he has been free for just over five years at this writing. How could he feel anything else but lost? One of our good friends, a young man whom Pornchai has helped much, said as I write this that “Pornchai’s mission right now is not to do, but simply to be.” That is a very wise young man.

Please join me in a petition to Our Father to send Raphael to accompany Pornchai on this long and arduous journey of healing from the wounds of the past. And perhaps even a prayer for Hill, a battered dog who now walks with Raphael. Pornchai dearly misses him and commends him to the Angel of Presence.

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O Raphael the Archangel, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy. Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Hirn whose unveiled face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed in spirit by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling to you and pleading for the protection of your wings so we may not be as strangers in the province of joy. Remember the weak, you who are so strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder in a land that is always at peace, bright with the resplendent glory of God.

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Addendum: Max Moontri and the Fate of Hill, the Dog

My post above about the Book of Tobit caused a stir among our readers who wanted to know the fate of Hill, the dog. Hill arrived in Max’s life in mystery and left the same way.

After I wrote “Book of Tobit: Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri,” I received a larger-than-usual number of messages from readers who all had one nagging question: “What happened to Hill, Pornchai’s dog? Did he die? That would be just awful!” I agree, but that outcome was by no means certain. It is likely that Hill has in fact died, but like the rest of that story it remains shrouded in mystery. Max had decided not to leave Hill on the streets in the Village of Phuwiang, Max’s place of birth. Instead, after talking with me, Max and I both decided that he should bring Hill to the home where Max was living in the City of Pak Chong. Hill was an older dog who, like Max in a darker time of his life, was forced to live on the streets. It was the only life Hill knew, and Max agonized over what to do. The stories told to him by cousins in Phuwiang, that every time Max went there and then left, Hill would linger in a lonely vigil outside the house of Max’s late Mother waiting for Max to return.

So we decided on a trial run. Max would bring Hill to Pak Chong, where he would be better cared for, and Max could always bring him back after a few days if Hill showed signs of distress. Getting Hill into the car was a challenge at first. Hill had never before been in a car. But with a little coaxing and a little food, Hill jumped in. He slept through most of the long ride and appeared to adjust quite well. He was well fed and cared for over several weeks and seemed to love Pak Chong. Max and Hill would run in the large, walled off front yard. Hill would stand guard while Max did some landscaping, and would snarl whenever another dog or unknown person would approach the wall. Then one night, Max was outside with Hill, and they were running together. Hill would run immediately behind Max. Then Max stepped into the house for just a moment. When he came out Hill was mysteriously gone without a trace. Max searched the entire property. Hill was nowhere to be found. The only conclusion was that he must have jumped over the wall. Max searched for days in every direction, but with no sign of Hill anywhere. That was about three years ago, and no trace of Hill ever showed up. Max was heartbroken and felt that he had let Hill down. I took the opposite view, that Max had given Hill his only human companion in life. Why and how he left remains a mystery.

I like to think that, like the mysterious dog in the Book of Tobit, Hill went with the Angel Raphael.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: After five years in his native Thailand, some of it on the verge of homelessness, my friend Pornchai Max is about to embark on another journey to which Divine Mercy has summoned him. This has developed only in the last few weeks, so I will have more information coming soon. In coming days Pornchai will relocate to the far northwestern corner of Thailand where he will undertake a mission in support of one of Thailand’s alienated hill tribes.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post, but don’t stop here. For more on this amazing and moving story please see:

For Pornchai Moontri, a Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

Christ in the Desert: A Devil of a Time

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

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