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

Facing the truth about the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas will require courage. Something has gone terribly wrong in our culture and Pornchai Moontri knows it firsthand.

June 15, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Moontri

Note to readers: Fr. Gordon MacRae interviewed Pornchai Moontri in Thailand for this post. Pornchai’s most recent post was “A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.”

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A dense, dark cloud has been hanging over America since the recent inexplicable and shocking murders of 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers by 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos in Uvalde, Texas. The close knit community will feel the effects of this trauma for decades to come. A lot of soul searching has gone on about what could have triggered such an event, about how it developed, how it might have been prevented, and what could have been done differently by responding police.

The tragedy at Uvalde was devastating, and was preceded just a week earlier by the racially charged rampage of another 18-year-old shooter brandishing the same sort of weapon. He killed 12 people — ten of them targeted for being African American — at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

After the shocking but unrelated stories unfolded, half the nation went immediately for the guns and political talking points. President Biden’s loudest and most immediate response was, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? Where in God’s name is our backbone?” They were not exactly the words of consolation the nation and the people of Uvalde needed in the moment. The politics should have waited.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott explained rationally that 18-year-olds in Texas have been able to own long guns (not hand guns) since frontier days while only in recent years have these mass shootings occurred in schools. That is true, but it is also true, as Governor Abbott added, that there are currently many reports of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people that did not exist a hundred years ago. Why does it exist now?

After both stories dominated the news media, I reached out to our friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. I knew that when he learned of these accounts, he might relate them to his own offense at age 18 at a supermarket in Bangor, Maine 30 years ago. During a parking lot struggle with a much larger man, 18-year-old Pornchai killed him. It happened on March 21, 1992. Pornchai never saw freedom again until almost 30 years later.

The major difference between that incident and the two young assailants in Buffalo and Uvalde is that Pornchai never set out to harm anyone that day or on any day. He carried a knife for self-protection. Having been torn from a rural village in Thailand at age 11, Pornchai was abused and tormented in Bangor, Maine until he escaped into homelessness on the streets of a foreign country. As the only Asian in town, he was often the subject of racial hatred, hunted by a Bangor street gang.

Most people who read this blog know Pornchai’s story. It is told in multiple places, but the best source is a widely read article at Linkedin. If you read it, you may wonder, as many already have, how one young man could endure so much and ever trust life again. The article is “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.”

In the Absence of Fathers

When I asked Pornchai for his thoughts about what might have driven 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos to this end, he put his response in the first person:

“I didn’t care about anyone; and then someone cared about me. If I did not find God, and you, and acceptance, and Divine Mercy, I might have stayed on a road to destruction. It was all I knew or expected. Hatred left me when something came along to replace it. Do you remember your Elephants post? It makes total sense. The one thing missing from my life and the lives of those two kids in America was a father. Without one, a decent one, a kid is at the mercy of dark forces and his mind just breaks.”

The “Elephants post” that Pornchai referred to was a Fathers Day post I wrote in this same week in 2012. It was a huge eye-opener for many people and began a serious discussion about the crisis of father absence in our time and the retreat of good men from engagement in the public square. The post was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

It is interesting that, ten years after writing it, that post began appearing in search engines all over the United States just hours after news struck about the horror in Uvalde, Texas. I had also made the same connection and decided that I would share that post anew on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. When our editor looked at traffic reports that day, even before we shared it, the post was showing up everywhere.

Despite the story and research covered in that post being suppressed in our agenda-driven mainstream ne ws media, people instinctively know the truth of it. There are two factors, both speaking loudly and clearly, about the burgeoning mental health crisis among the young that is now clearly evident in our culture. Those two factors are the growing and spreading of fathers from the lives of struggling young men and the diminishment of faith and hope as our culture separates itself from God. Along with this, incidents of violence and other criminal behavior among young men have increased 1,000 fold in two decades, and deaths by suicide and accidental opioid overdose are now the number one killers of young men ages 15 to 30.

I live with many who live without hope. For year after year, this prison sees a steady stream of lost, fatherless young men trapped in adolescence and unable to developmentally move on. They are 35 going on 12 emotionally, they suffer from panic attacks and other critical anxiety states, and they are subject to fits of overwhelming emotion. Over ninety percent of them grew up in the care of single mothers with absent fathers. The steady stream of social weapons aimed at men in recent decades — such as the #MeToo movement — has further diminished manhood and, by extension, fatherhood.

In the Name of the Father

Once God and Fatherhood are cast aside, only the feminine remains. That may sound great for the causes of radical feminism, but in the psyches of young men it wreaks havoc and chaos when coupled with the diminishment of fatherhood. The results are all around us: a marked increase in transgender ideology and great political pressure to embrace it, chronic gender confusion, identity confusion, self-medicating drug abuse, and the breakdown of identity and self-awareness. The great psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson predicted that adolescence cannot end until the crisis of identity is resolved. Our culture has extended that crisis to engulf a lifetime.

Before the election of 2020, then nominee Joe Biden said in a news conference “if an eight-year-old boy wakes up one morning and wants to be a girl, he should be given all the tools and medical support necessary and parents should have no say in it.”

That is not verbatim, but it is the context and content of what was said. Media heads were bobbing as they took notes.

Dr. Paul McHugh, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and a widely recognized expert in this field, has stated that most transgender people suffer from a mental disorder and the idea of sex reassignment is simply mistaken — and leaves much psychological damage in its wake. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is now finalizing plans to require transgender treatment under healthcare plans. Catholic League President Bill Donohue recently addressed this in “Transgender Mania Grips the White House.”

These developments have all come about as a natural result of removing God from the public square. One of the last bastions of faithful witness has been the Catholic Church, but the sexual abuse crisis, though in too many ways real, was also hyped and manipulated to remove a Catholic voice from public discourse on moral issues. Gone also are the Boys Scouts of America. It is actually a hopeful sign that pro-abortion groups are attacking Catholic churches right now. It’s a sign that the Church is still perceived as being on the front line in the defense of life. Still, the eradication of God has made inroads that deeply affect young people and their ability to hope through hard times.

In a fine commentary by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, she added the obvious, that it is one thing for an 18-year-old to have a gun to shoot rattlers in the 18th Century. It is quite another to allow an 18-year-old to buy a military grade assault rifle in the middle of a mental health crisis. Some common sense and compromise are likely to eventually prevail, even in an election year. Ms. Noonan went on, however, to point to a far deeper crisis and contributing factor to such tragedy in a recent column, “Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb,” (WSJ, May 28, 2022):

“I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it ... I tell the young, I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby — it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing ... Consolation is not why you believe, but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it.”

I share with Peggy Noonan the consolation that the good people of Uvalde, Texas at least have that. This is part of our collective crisis. Too many have been robbed of the consolation of faith because of the relentless progressive assault on faith over the last few decades.

And she is also right about the crisis of mental health among the young. Signs of it are reported everywhere, and it is much exacerbated by the government enforced Covid lockdowns of the last two years.

I admire Peggy Noonan also for her unapologetic faith the absence of which is also a crisis among the young. It is the most common prayer request I receive from parents — a hope that their teen and young adult children will return to faith. As mentioned a week ago in these pages, Saint Paul famously wrote that only three gifts have lasting value, Faith, Hope, and Love. To impart Love without also imparting Faith and Hope diminishes love as a shallow and empty affair.

Among the Refugees of Thailand

What happened in Uvalde deeply impacted me. It made me double down on my own commitment as a father to Pornchai Moontri — even as he now lives many thousands of miles from me. When I asked him if he could explain Salvatore Ramos, he said, “I didn't care about anyone either; then someone cared about me.” He talked at length about my post, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.” Pornchai never knew his biological father, and then ended up in the hands of a sadistic abuser who did great harm to him mentally, spiritually and physically.

He vowed that he would never again be anyone’s victim and would never trust anyone again. When he finally took that chance, life fell back into place. Divine Providence steered the circumstances of our lives until they were on a collision course, and Pornchai courageously let me in.

Some readers have asked me what Pornchai is doing for work to support himself in Thailand. We are simply not there yet. American money goes a long way in Thailand so I manage to support Pornchai for just a small amount of money each month. A few good friends who understand that effort help me with it. I believe it is a necessity and I have dissuaded him from finding a menial job just to support himself right now. This is because I have a fully informed sense of what Pornchai has been through in life, of what others took from him.

So I have asked him to spend his time restoring his life by facing openly the traumas of his past without having to worry about where his next meal is coming from. He spends his days in learning, and when the need arises he spends whatever time is left assisting Father John Hung Le in caring for the Vietnamese refugees in Thailand.

This is of great importance. By caring for others, Pornchai is caring for himself just as the Father in his life taught him. That is why the photo below is so very special to me. In his last sixteen years here with me, at my urging, Pornchai sought the help of a therapist in the prison system to work through a lifetime of trauma and grief and loss. When the therapist saw the photo below, she said, “No one could have accomplished this but Gordon. No one else!”

I had little to do with it. It is God who directed this path. It required only sacrifice from me, and men need to be reminded that sacrifice is at the very heart of fatherhood.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading this post with an open mind and heart, and for sharing it. It can only accomplish some good if others see it.

Please visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page and these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

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

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

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

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2021 Saw Challenges to Life, Liberty, Even Laughter

The Year of Our Lord 2021 in review: a second pandemic wave worse than the first, wide political divisions, many losses, some regrets and even a few funny moments.

December 29, 2021

As I conducted a reality check over this “2021 Year End” post, I felt rather hard pressed to put the word “laughter” in its title. I don’t know about you, but I did not encounter much this past year that caused me to even smile let alone laugh out loud. I considered just reposting our first post of 2020, “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.” It resonated with more readers than most subsequent posts, and not much has changed since then in the landscape of our lives. If anything, the climate feels worse.

But as the year wore on, I found myself laughing a little at life in spite of it all. Also in January 2021 I wrote, “Pandemic in Prison: When the Caged Bird Just Can't Sing.” It described how difficult it is to write a weekly post where I live, and how the seemingly never-ending pandemic turned “difficult” into a high-endurance obstacle course. That post's top image — created by our excellent volunteer graphic designer— made me laugh anew so I am using it to top this post about our year in review. It is also fitting, as you will read below, because this year two “Catholic” venues barred me from ever posting at their sites.

So given that I am the caged bird in question, the graphic above is a reminder that letdowns and obstacles should not suppress our ability to smile. However, canary yellow is not my color. I might have preferred a cardinal to a canary, but some might think that a bit pretentious. I also laughed when I proofread this post. I had mistyped “Year End” and referred in the first paragraph to my “Rear End” post. I want to put 2021 behind me, but I’m glad I caught the error.

Despite many obstacles, we published 52 posts in 2021. I wrote most of them while others were by our friends, Fr George David Byers in North Carolina, Fr Stuart MacDonald and Fr Tim Moyle in Ontario, Fr Andrew Pinsent in the U.K., Ryan MacDonald in New York, and two by Pornchai Moontri in Thailand.

My apologies in advance for all the links, but a year in review is just that. I want to profile the four posts you seemed to like the most. That short list will be interspersed with four others that I think deserve a second view. The criteria for your top choices will be an algorithm composed of the post's number of readers at the time it was posted, the number of times it was shared on social media, and the number of times it has been revisited during the course of the year.

My own choices have more to do with how much time was spent in reading, writing and research to produce some posts with limited resources made even more limited in this pandemic. By the way, at the expense of sounding political, have you noticed that “pandemic” is the word, “panic” with a “dem” inserted in the middle?

Life and Liberty Beyond These Stone Walls

By a wide margin, your choice for the most important post of 2021 was “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul” published on July 7. It remains the number one most widely read and revisited post of the year. The Catholic League e-blasted it to its members and hundreds of readers printed off a PDF of it to send to their bishops. Two U.S. bishops wrote to thank me for writing it. In twelve years of writing, that has never happened before.

I fear, however, that the major point of that post became shrouded in the heat of our bipolar politics. The U.S. bishops ended up avoiding any political fallout at their annual meeting in Baltimore by avoiding any real clarity on the subject after Pope Francis cautioned them not to politicize the Eucharist. But sidestepping the questions raised was also a political statement. The bottom line of that post is that our bishops have a sacred duty to care for the souls of all, including Catholic politicians who openly support a pro-abortion agenda.

Receiving the Eucharist while promoting abortion, sans repentance, places a soul in grave spiritual danger. On this, Scripture and Church law could not be clearer as laid out in that post and in Canon Law. In the aftermath of my post and the U.S. Bishops’ meeting, President Biden quoted Pope Francis claiming that he called Biden “a good Catholic” and told him to “keep receiving Communion.” That has not been verified, and whatever you think of Pope Francis, I do not believe it is accurate.

It is ironic that new state laws in Texas, Mississippi, and Arizona might now serve as a catalyst for a stronger defense of life from the U.S. Supreme Court while our bishops — who ought to be our collective guardians of morality on the right to life — shrunk from such an expectation. There was another pro-life post that I wrote earlier in 2021. It was widely acclaimed by many in the pro-life community who read it, but it was not otherwise widely read. Some may have been daunted by its detailed but important historical view. From my perspective, a nation that fails to understand history is doomed to repeat it. That post, published on May 19, 2021, was “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life.”

By a wide margin, your choice for one of the most important posts of 2021 was a boost to my spirit. Posted on September 22, 2021 it was, “A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America.” That post was shared over 5,000 times on social media and became a featured post at the National Catholic Register news aggregator, The Big Pulpit. It was also one of several of our posts this year chosen for promotion by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. If you are not yet a member, please subscribe to this much needed effort. More than any other Catholic organization in the cause of Religious Liberty, the Catholic League has our backs.

But alas, that September 22 post was followed just two weeks later with my being “permanently banned” from posting or commenting by the unnamed Moderator of the r/Catholicism community at Reddit which boasts nearly 130,000 members none of whom even know of the ban. Then, just another week later, the Catholic Media Association declined this blog’s membership after inviting Catholic blogs to apply. Writer and media critic, Ryan MacDonald wrote of this at our new “Voices from Beyond” menu item under the not-so-subtle title, “At the Catholic Media Association, Bias and a Double Standard.”

Should a Vocation to Priesthood Be Perilous?

The state of Catholic priesthood was the focus of twelve of my posts in 2021, and two more by our Canon Law advisor, Fr Stuart MacDonald. Now a doctoral candidate in Canon Law, Father Stuart’s expertise shined brightly in “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction” published to wide acclaim on May 26. Just two weeks later, we published my post about a controversial priest in “Catholics to Fr. James Altman: ‘We Are Starving Out Here.’”

Father Altman brought some much needed prophetic witness to the assault on priesthood that has emerged not only in our culture, but, sadly, also in some corners of our Church. The Internet footprint of that post was as broad as that of Father Altman himself. The post was read by thousands and shared on social media nearly 4,000 times.

Father Altman was set aside with his priestly faculties withdrawn by his bishop, not because of any moral failure or impediment, but because of his tone. He never spoke a word contrary to Church teaching. Since then, removing priests from ministry without just cause seems to have become fashionable and has taken a bizarre and tyrannical turn. In some dioceses, bishops are suspending priests who decline to be vaccinated on legitimate moral and conscience grounds — even those who have natural immunity from already having and recovering from Covid.

This all highlights something that Catholic League President Bill Donohue asserted in an appearance on NBC’s Today Show in 2005 in a discussion about my own case: “There is no segment of the U.S. population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

A twist in the matter of the rights of accused priests came up near the end of July when I wrote, “Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy About Fallen Priests.” Once accused of virtually anything, a priest has a very steep climb to restore his life and priesthood. Ryan MacDonald reframed the “Catholic Abuse Crisis” this year as the “Catholic Accuse Crisis.” I think it is a much more accurate term. Anyone who wants to be rid of any priest for any reason has found a potent weapon of Mass destruction. In no other venue in America can a person lose his good name, his housing, his livelihood based solely on an unproven 30-year-old claim brought for financial gain.

The bigger twist came this year, however, with my post, "Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo." I have no doubt that Bishop Libasci, Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire, is entirely innocent. Unlike any accused priest, however, he remains in office with his rights and priestly faculties intact.

A Long Farewell, but Not Goodbye

The first five months of 2021 were overshadowed by the immense trial of ICE detention for Pornchai Moontri. He was trapped in a huge, overcrowded warehouse filled with detainees who had illegally crossed the U.S. southern border. Sleeping seventy to a room, with overhead lights blazing around the clock and unbearable noise, Pornchai’s spirit was fraying while I did all I could to get him out of there. Finally, in early February, five months after leaving this prison, Pornchai was flown to Thailand. I wrote of this ordeal, and the triumph of his trust in Divine Mercy in “ICE Finally Cracks: Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”

This was the closing of one long chapter in our story and the beginning of another. All our carefully crafted plans for support and housing for Pornchai fell apart in the eleventh hour just a day before he boarded his deportation flight. My own trust in Divine Mercy and Divine Providence were heavily taxed by that point. Then, mysteriously from seemingly out of nowhere, in stepped Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, a Vietnamese missionary from the Society of the Divine Word. On the morning of Pornchai’s flight, Father John contacted me with an offer to provide support and a home for Pornchai upon arrival in Bangkok.

As a teenager in the 1970s, Father John was himself a stranded refugee, one of the infamous “Boat People” forced to flee Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Today he is a priest of heroic virtue, selflessly providing food and sustenance to Vietnamese migrant worker families scattered across Thailand with no ability to earn an income during the global pandemic. But the threads of the Tapestry of God kept intertwining beyond these stone walls.

As Advent began, Fr. Tim Moyle and the people of St. Anne Parish, one of the poorest Catholic parishes in Canada, reached out to me with an Advent project to assist Father John and his people half a world away. I wrote of this profound example of the Gospel of the Widow’s Mite (Luke 21:1-4) in “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.” The good people of Mattawa, Ontario made a great difference. There are many other parishes that are struggling less, and many other opportunities to make such a difference. Lent is coming. Just sayin’.

That post above was not the most read of the year, but for me it was one of the most important posts. It came into being because Fr. Tim Moyle in Ontario had been following Beyond These Stone Walls all year. He was deeply moved by our stories about Pornchai’s progress and his good fortune, brought about by Divine Providence, to become connected to the refugee work of Fr. John Hung Le, SVD.

We devoted nine posts in 2021 to Pornchai’s odyssey. Two of them were written by Pornchai himself who now merits his own Category under “Pornchai Moontri” in the BTSW Public Library. The several posts about him tell a deeply moving and magnificent story of suffering and Divine Providence that has gained notice all over the world. My own favorite among these posts is one I wrote on April 14. It was a real-life version of the Book of Tobit entitled "Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri." And there is a dog involved, and the story is beautiful.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: It is with profound thanks and admiration that I commend Fr. Tim Moyle and the good people of St. Anne Parish in Mattawa, Ontario for their sacrifice and mission of mercy this past Advent. And I hold in equal measure our readers who also responded to this Corporal Work of Mercy. It is not too late to visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page.

I just received this message from Fr. Tim Moyle writing from Mattawa, Ontario:

“Dear Father Gordon and Father John: I just wanted to drop you both a note to tell you that we have reached the $5000 mark in contributions from our parishioners in support of John’s missionary work in Thailand. We will forward the funds shortly after the start of the New Year to allow for any last minute contributions that have yet to be received.

My deepest appreciation to both of you for being so instrumental in focusing my parishioners needs on something beyond our local concerns. It has served as an excellent opportunity for them to appreciate the world-wide reach of our Church, as well as our obligation to support those areas in the world most in need of our assistance. I cannot think of a better Christmas gift to have presented to my community than to have their eyes opened to the realities of our universal ministry as Catholics so that they can truly live out their obligations to the least among us… a requirement for salvation for all who carry the names Christian and Catholic. Thank you so very much for becoming such effective ministers of God’s mercy and love. Wishing you both all the blessings of this festive season of hope.”

Many of our BTSW Readers also took part in this effort and added over $4,500 to the sacrifices of the people of Mattawa. $2,500 of this was earmarked by donors to be added to what was raised for Father John’s Refugee Assistance Foundation, and $2,000 was earmarked to assist with the special challenges faced by Pornchai Moontri while assimilating into his homeland after 30 years in a U.S. prison, 15 of them with me. I am beyond thankful for the response to this effort.

With Blessings for the New Year, Father Gordon MacRae

(Clockwise from upper left in the photos above: Saint Anne Church in Mattawa Ontario, Father Tim Moyle in Mattawa, Father Gordon MacRae in Concord NH, and Father John Hung Le SVD in Bangkok. All collaborating this season for an Advent of the Heart.)

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Left to right: Pornchai Moontri, Yela Smit, Father John Le, SVD, and behind them the one who brought them together.

The following is our first guest post by Pornchai Moontri in Thailand with a message of thanks and hope for our readers Beyond These Stone Walls.

Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae : I will be forever in debt to our readers who have opened their minds and hearts to the plight of my friend, Pornchai Moontri. The task now ahead of him is immense. It was an ordeal getting Pornchai out of prison. Now we face the task of getting prison out of Pornchai. He needs the help and prayers of all of us to conquer this adjustment.

If you have read Pornchai's traumatic history best captured in “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri” — then you know that the last real home he knew was at age 11 before he was removed from Thailand. Fleeing from a nightmare existence in Bangor, Maine, he became a homeless teenager and then, at age 18, a prisoner.

For the last 29 years, his entire world consisted of a prison cell and a 300-yard walk to a woodshop where he became a proficient craftsman. Now he is dropped into the middle of Bangkok, Thailand. The adjustment ahead is immense.

Sensing his anxiety in a recent telephone conversation, I asked Pornchai what he is feeling and experiencing. What he said in response nearly brought me to tears. He said, “People have to understand that the only home I have ever had was in a prison cell with you.”

I choked on those words. In one sense, it is a testament to grace. Only Divine Mercy could make a prison cell feel like a home. But now Pornchai has the daunting challenge of leaving the traumas and trials of the past behind and living life in the light of Divine Mercy, a light that has captured him — has captured us both — in the great adventure of faith and hope.

I asked Pornchai to write candidly about this turning of the tide in his life. These are his words:

A Letter from Pornchai

To My Dear Friends Beyond These Stone Walls: I am at a loss for words, but I will try my best to tell you about where I am right now, and how I got here. A couple weeks ago, my friend, Father G, wrote about my return to Thailand after being away for 36 years. His Post was “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” It made me laugh in parts, and it also made me cry.

Father G left something out. This is something that I told him about in a phone call right after my first night in hotel quarantine solitary confinement. I have to first say that it was a lot nicer than my last stay in solitary confinement which lasted seven long years. Then I was sent to another prison where I ended up in a cell with Father G.

Sixteen years have passed since then. The story of all that happened in those years is filled, as Father G says, with pain and suffering but also with triumph. He says that he feels sad about my leaving, but more than anything, he says he feels “triumphant.” I feel that too, but I also feel deep gratitude. Both of those are sort of new to me.

I told Father G last week that as I lay on my bed in my first night in Bangkok on February 9 after 29 years in prison, I was exhausted in every way you could think of, but I could not sleep. I was overwhelmed with many emotions. All I could think about was where I would be right now if I never met Father G.

There were so many “what-ifs” raging through my mind that night. What if Father G had never been sent to prison? What if he took the easy way out with the plea deal they tried to con him into 27 years ago? We would have never met. What if I was sent to some other state besides New Hampshire? What if Father G and I never ended up in the same place? What if he never started writing to the world Beyond These Stone Walls? What if all of you never even heard of me? What if Father G had been a weaker man? What if he moved away after all my efforts to block anyone from ever entering my life? If any one of those things happened, I know today, I would be lost forever.

Every one of these questions, and many more were answered in advance by God. My head was spinning that night as I thought of all the times in the last 16 years when I was turning down one road only to find Father G pointing me toward another. Prison also brought many low points in our story that could fill these pages and depress anyone reading them. That is the nature of prison, and 29 years of it means 29 years of low points.

Prison is a humiliating, empty, meaningless existence, but Father G and I changed that. As I lay sleepless in bed pondering my freedom in my first night in Bangkok, only the high points filled my mind. There are so many of them, too many to tell you about in a single post. You already know about many of them, but I will try to tell you again about the ones that changed my life the most.

The Sacrifice of Fatherhood

I will always remember the first time I walked into Father G’s cell before we became roommates. The first thing I saw was the mirror. There was a strange card with a balding man dressed half as a priest and half as a prisoner. I asked Father G, “Is this you?” That’s when I was introduced to Saint Maximilian Kolbe who became the source of how we lived as prisoners.

When Father G and I became roommates, I was not able to trust anyone. My life’s experiences imposed that on me. I would always be in my upper bunk so I could see anyone coming in and could get to them before they got to me. Life in homelessness on the streets followed by life in prison does this to you.

Once a week, late on Sunday nights after all the prisoner counts and the lights went out, Father G had this weird ritual. I would pretend to be asleep and would watch with one eye open. What on Earth is this strange guy doing? In a corner of the concrete countertop in our cell, he would set up a little book light, some books, and put something around his neck. Then he would take a round piece of bread and a few drops of something and hold them up before eating them.

So one day I asked him about this and he said he was offering Mass. Why? I asked him. He said that it is the one time and place where Heaven touches us. I asked him if I could also do it and he said, “Only if you agree to be the lector.” So Father G told me all about the Mass and I would from then on stay awake to join him. I would do the Mass readings as well. Without my knowing it, profound changes began to take shape inside of me.

Also in 2007, I was visited by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement who told me that I would be having a court hearing that could end with my deportation to Thailand. I was summoned to a place where video hearings are held in the prison. A Judge Shapiro told me that I am ordered deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence. I had nothing in Thailand, and no one. As Father G once wrote, I had no future, no hope, and no God. There was only Father G who never wavered.

Beyond These Stone Walls

And there were times when we became separated. Prison is set up to always demonstrate that we are powerless over our lives. We were sometimes pawns in what Father G described as “spiritual warfare.” Sometimes the agendas of others were imposed on us. One time, some unknown prison official added a note to Father G’s file saying that he has a history of violence. It was not at all true, but the note sat there for six years before some official spotted it and decided I should be moved away from him.

Such things are never reversed in prison, but he asked me to trust in God. I was forced to live with a transgender man while some gangster with a real history of violence was moved in with Father G. I prayed. Within 24 hours, it was exposed as a big mistake and I was moved back with Father G. Every time this sort of thing happened, and we were separated, it was reversed in just a few days. I began to feel that we had an invisible shield around us. Father G told me that our Patron Saints are our allies in spiritual warfare. I went from doubting this to very much believing it. I saw this with my own eyes.

When I was told that I must be deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence, it was hard for me to find any hope. I told Father G that in my own mind I had what I called “Plan B.” I thought my only option was to make sure that I never left prison. It was all I knew and I could not imagine another existence. Father G asked me to set “Plan B” aside because another plan will come along to take its place. He said, “We will just have to build a bridge to Thailand.” “Yeah, Right!” I thought. How are we going to do this from inside a prison cell? “Get real!”

Then one day in summer of 2009, Father G came into our cell after talking with someone on the telephone. He told me that someone asked him to write on a weekly basis for a blog from prison. I was sent to prison in 1992 and Father G in 1994. Neither of us knew what a blog was. He said it would be a sort of prison journal and people around the world would read it.

Father G found a British poem that he liked called “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make.” He said we need a name for this blog so I suggested “These Stone Walls” so that’s what we called it until I left in September. Then it became “Beyond These Stone Walls.” Father G would sit at his typewriter on a Saturday morning with no idea what to write, then he would type all afternoon and mail his posts to Father George David Byers for scanning.

We could never see the site, but we got a monthly report which was a total mystery to us. In the first month we had 40 readers. In the next month, four times that, then month after month it turned into many thousands in many countries. We could not figure this out. In my writing class, I wrote a poem about his constant “tap-tap-tap” in our cell every Saturday. Here it is:

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“My roommate is a rabid writer.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He types until my mind winds tighter.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He never has an unpublished thought.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He types and types til my nerves are naught.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

My roommate’s also a real good friend,
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
And stays that way to the bitter end.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
And we all like the result, you see,
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
Cuz some of what he types is ’bout me!”
TAP, tap. Tap, TAP, tap. Tap, TAP.”

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Our Summons to Divine Mercy

From here on, my life began to change with what I once thought was just my own hard work. Not so. Today I see a powerful grace at work in that cell. I did not have a name for it then, but I do now. It’s called Divine Mercy. I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

In the time to follow, I earned my high school diploma with top honors. Then I earned two continuing education diplomas from the Stratford Career Institute in psychology and social work, and excelled in theology courses from Catholic Distance University. I became proficient in woodworking and model shipbuilding. You can see some of my work at “Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood.”

I never had much in life to brag about except maybe for one thing. Despite all the darkness, when I finally saw some light I walked toward it. I decided to become Catholic. Father G never even mentioned this to me. It was just the sheer force of grace. To honor him, I chose his birthday (April 9) as the date for my conversion, but the prison chaplain, a Catholic deacon, asked me to postpone it until the next day. It was Divine Mercy Sunday, something that would become the very center of my life.

Everything changed. Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll read our blog (yes, it’s now “our” blog!) and he contacted me for an interview. He included my conversion story in his now famous book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. You can read the chapter about me at “Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Behind Those Stone Walls.”

The book made its way to Thailand, and now, so have I. The bridge that I once thought was impossible was built right before my very eyes. I thank you, my friends, for I would not be here without you. It was your reading and sharing these writings around the world that made this story possible. You have been the instruments of a miracle.

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A Post Script from Father Gordon MacRae: I have been able to talk with Pornchai daily since his arrival in Thailand. This has helped much to ease him into this new chapter in his story. It is an immense task to go from 29 years in prison to a foreign land.

I have deeply felt gratitude to Yela Smit, Co-Chair of Divine Mercy Thailand, and Father John Le, SVD, from the Society of the Divine Word. Father John and his community have offered sanctuary to Pornchai to help in this transition. It is a great gift to which I have pledged some monthly support. Want to help? See how at our SPECIAL EVENTS page.

You may also want to read and share the posts referenced herein:

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

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