God in the Dock: When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I hear often from readers who struggle with a midlife crisis of faith. I have even had one of my own. Drifting from faith only disarms you from your one true defense.

March 8, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: In the image above Simon of Cyrene considers “Bearing the Cross,” by 19th Century German artist Ludwig Thiersch. (Plate 147 in The Great Painter’s Gospel).

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In 1982, the year of my priesthood ordination, Rabbi Harold Kushner caused a stir in the publishing world with his classic book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Rabbi Kushner addressed the question of the ages. Why does a benevolent, omnipotent God allow innocent people to suffer? The book was an instant bestseller. Our quest to answer that question has sent humanity down some strange and destructive side roads.

On October 21, 2021, we posted a title that alarmed the majority of our readers who saw it. It was, “The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education.” Actually, I think it was the top graphic that shocked some but not quite enough into getting to the voting polls last November. A radically “woke” segment of our society has captured much of the news and social media and is rapidly moving to the center of social consciousness to become the new normal. The assault on gender and gender identity is its most obvious battleground. The assault on God, and life itself, is at its center.

The latest example comes, sadly, from Kamala Harris. In a recent speech she quoted from one of the nation’s foundational documents saying, “The Declaration of Independence guarantees the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” For the Vice President of the United States to edit the Right to Life out of the Declaration of Independence is the height of hubris.

I wrote of the fallout from this trend in “Disney’ s Disenchanted Kingdom Versus Parental Rights.” Thousands of readers have since viewed the 50-minute Catholic League documentary, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom.” Many have told me that it is an eye-opener. The heart of its message is that the Disney franchise has openly endorsed and promoted the indoctrination of young children on sexual identity and transgender issues — a trend forced upon us sparking Florida’s new parental rights law.

Ironically, our publisher went to link to the Catholic League documentary last month only to learn that YouTube restricted it from viewers under age 18. The hypocrisy of that is staggering. Fortunately, the Catholic League quickly found an alternative for viewing the landmark film so the link above is valid.

This seemingly political battle is a spiritual battle as well, and its second battleground is a conscious and deliberate intent to remove God from the public square in which we live. I was recently struck by some of the subtle rhetoric in network news coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Several news commentators expressed sentiments that Queen Elizabeth “is in our thoughts.” You might not think that strange, but it was a sentiment that seemed to take great pains to omit that she was also in our prayers.

This subtle restraint on language and content that acknowledges God is most visibly growing in education which sadly has become the indoctrination of the young to woke ideas. Actually, it is even worse than that. References to God or to any of the tenets of Judeo-Christian faith are not only discouraged, but actively suppressed. In a September, 2021 post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.” I told the story of the Prophet Jonah. After it was published, a reader sent me this humorous exchange between a second-grade student and his teacher. The teacher had been talking about the anatomy of whales:

Boy raising hand: “The Prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale.”

Teacher: “Actually, Joseph, that is not possible. A whale could not swallow a man.”

Boy: “But it happened to Jonah. I read it in my Bible.”

Teacher: “Do you believe everything you read in the Bible?”

Boy: “Well... yes. God told the story.”

Teacher: “Well, it never happened.”

Boy: “When I go to Heaven I will ask Jonah if it is true.”

Teacher: “What if Jonah isn't in Heaven?”

Boy: “Then YOU can ask him.”

Actually, I liked my own ending of that story better. Once Jonah was coughed up by the giant fish in the parable, he could never sell it at market. There was no longer any prophet in it.

Photo | APK

God in the Dock

There are several accepted meanings of the word, “dock” in modern English. As a verb, it is a nautical term that means to tie off a boat at a pier or station that is also called a dock. It comes from an archaic Dutch word, “doken” which originally meant to submerge under water. There is an even more obsolete usage from the Flemish term, “docke” which refers to a place from which a defendant testifies before a judge. There are those in this culture who are hell-bent on placing God in that dock. It is human arrogance to even imagine that we could ever serve on a jury of God’s peers.

There is a third rail in our spiritual battleground that is manifested not so much in the denial of God, but in the blaming of God. It’s easy to refute or ignore God from a secure place of privilege. This is why some of the disenfranchised poor often seem to have greater faith than the entitled wealthy. They have more practice calling upon God in the absence of their own resources. The poor tend to be more attuned to the limits of human nature. Spiritual enrichment is often — but not always — in inverse proportion to material wealth.

As I set out to write this post about challenges to faith in the midst of suffering and loss, I received a moving and humbling account from a reader. It centers around a tragedy that took place in a New Hampshire Catholic parish. Sheila, a faithful parishioner, lost her 23-year-old daughter, Mary. In a high-profile case, Mary was murdered by a deeply troubled former boyfriend. Sheila’s 20-year-old son previously died from a cardiac abnormality, and her husband died in his 40s from the same illness.

How does someone cope with such a cascade of traumatizing loss? The account to follow is a moving excerpt from a eulogy letter that Sheila wrote and read after the Mass of Christian Burial for her daughter, Mary:

“Hail Mary, full of grace... Holy Mary... In ‘The Hail, Holy Queen,’ I resonate with the title of our Lady as ‘Mother of Mercy,’ as well as ‘to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this Valley of Tears.’ I believe most of us, if not all of us, at one time or another have cried these tears in small or large amounts. In the Prayer to St. Michael, we are reminded of ‘The wickedness and snares of the devil.’

“As we live in these times, we continue to witness these valleys of tears and the wickedness and snares of the devil here on Earth within our lives. How does one find peace amongst all this turmoil? We may find it within the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus has given to us directly: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

“If we are to find peace within ourselves, we must allow God to be one with us. He dwells within us, but we need to be in His graces to find true peace. There is no hate within God. He is pure love. Forgiveness is what He speaks of in the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

“If I am to carry hate within me, and hold onto these thoughts of anger, how can I be able to pray for my daughter’s soul? I cannot expect God to hear my truest prayers for my daughter, Mary, if I am holding on to anger and hate within me. I want her soul to be swiftly received by our Lord, and to find her Eternal Peace with God the Almighty who is Eternal.

“We are sometimes given crosses that we see as a burden and filled with sorrow. We turn our backs to our Lord Jesus Christ and become angry and curse Him. Perhaps we do not realize what we have been given, what we are allowing ourselves to let go of. It’s His Love. We need to offer all this pain and suffering to our Lord through our Lady, Mary, His Mother. When we do that, we will receive 100-fold of graces.”

My heart also struggled with Sheila’s losses, and I pray that the Lord will ease her trials. We are summoned by such accounts to emulate Simon of Cyrene. We pray for Sheila while aware that we are united in the fellowship of the poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. If privilege and entitlement stand in the way of our feeling such things, and praying such prayers, then we are pitiful indeed.

Prophetic Witness

My seminary years were spent in the awful 1970s at St. Mary Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland. While there, I learned first and foremost that no priest ever has a vocation to the seminary. There were always those for whom seminary life was not a means to an end, but a safe haven that was an end in itself. For some, leaving seminary to be thrust into priesthood was traumatic, like being raised out of the womb for the first time. None of us were ever prepared for the “Priests in Crisis” I described in a recent Catholic University of America study.

Perhaps the last few decades of “priesthood in the dock” have, if nothing else, grounded us in humility. There is an element in our Church that would look upon Sheila’s painful cross, and our friend Pornchai Moontri’s crushing life story, with something less than “there, but for the Grace of God, go I.” Simon of Cyrene never stopped to ask what Jesus did to deserve the Cross thrust upon Him. Simon just silently carried it, and was ultimately changed by doing so. There are readers who have helped us to carry our crosses as well. Without them, there was only despair.

A bishop visiting this prison for Mass several years ago had obviously been reading Beyond These Stone Walls. When Mass ended, and prisoners filed out of the prison chapel, the bishop grasped my arm as I passed and whispered four chilling words: “You are a prophet!” On our way out, Pornchai turned and asked, “What does that mean?” I responded, “It means my head is about to be lopped off!” As I have written in other posts, most of the saints we revere, and the prophets we heed, suffered greatly.

Pornchai was led from his own house of bondage, but Pope Benedict XVI was also influential in Pornchai’s conversion despite the severe trials that Pornchai faced in life. When Pornchai, a Buddhist since birth, first pondered the Catholic faith, he was moved by this segment of the brilliant book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 2007) by Pope Benedict XVI:

“The most important thing about the figure of Moses is neither all the miraculous deeds he is reported to have done nor his many works and sufferings along the way from the ‘house of bondage in Egypt’ through the desert to the threshold of the Promised Land. The most important thing is that he spoke with God as with a friend... .

“It now becomes perfectly clear that the prophet is not the Israelite version of the soothsayer, as was widely held at the time and as many so-called prophets considered themselves. On the contrary, the prophet is something quite different. He shows us the Face of God, and in so doing he shows us the path we are to take. He points out the path to the true ‘exodus’ which consists in this: Among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.”

— Jesus of Nazareth, p4

Pornchai and I both faced many trials in life. It was our trials that thrust us into the same place and time in history. I do not know whether I ever spoke to God as a friend, but it was upon reading the above passage from Pope Benedict that Pornchai made his decision to journey with me from the exodus, through the desert, to the Promised Land toward which we, in hope, are destined. Faith never rescued us from our trials, but it taught us to carry one another’s cross like Simon of Cyrene. That is the key to Heaven. Even in suffering and sorrow, it is the key to Heaven.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Paths I crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

Pornchai Moontri reading from the Lectionary at Mass with Father John Hung Le, SVD and others from his order at the Divine Word Missionary Society Chapel in Nonthabury, Thailand.

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America

Father MacRae being led to prison, September 23, 1994

On the Feast of St Padre Pio, Fr Gordon MacRae marks 27 years of wrongful imprisonment amassing tools for coping mentally and spiritually with life’s unjust wounds.

September 22, 2021

Note from the Editor: The title for this post was inspired by a 2019 article at LinkedIn by Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D. entitled, “A Catholic Priest 25 Years Wrongly in Prison in America.” It was written by Father Valladares from excerpts of his acclaimed book on priesthood cited below. Still in prison two years later, this version is written entirely from the perspective of Fr. Gordon MacRae as his 27th year in prison comes to an end.

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Wounds from the Church

As most readers know, I was convicted and sent to prison on September 23, 1994, the same day the Church honors Padre Pio, a great saint whose shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo is the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. Padre Pio was canonized by another saint, Pope John Paul II, on June 16, 2002 at the height of the Catholic sex abuse scandal as it emerged out of Boston and spread like a virus.

For fifty years, Padre Pio bore the visible wounds of Christ on his body. He also bore the less visible wounds of slander and false witness inflicted from inside the Church. On several occasions in his life, his priestly ministry was suspended because lurid and ludicrous accusations were hurled at him from unscrupulous critics, many of whom were Church personnel. It was because of this, and some uncanny threads of connection, that Padre Pio entered our lives and became a Patron Saint of Beyond These Stone Walls. This is an account last told in 2020 in “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

In 2012, Australian Catholic priest, psychologist, and author, Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D., published a widely acclaimed book, “Hope Springs Eternal in the Priest1y Breast” (iUniverse). It cites a good deal of my own writing on the subjects of sacrifice, suffering, and priesthood. I am not at all worthy of this citation that appears on his "Acknowledgments" page:

“Fr. Gordon MacRae — an extraordinarily heroic priest with indomitable courage, unrelenting tenacity, unwavering patience, and Christ-like magnanimity who personally reflects what Pope Benedict XVI confessed: ‘All of us [priests] are suffering as a result of the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust or failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse.’”

— Hope Springs Eternal in the Priest1y Breast, p.xviii

I don’t know about any of that, especially the part about “unwavering patience.” (Maybe Pornchai, writing from Thailand will weigh in on that.) Anyway, the book extensively cites the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal whose three major articles on my trial and imprisonment took this story out of the darkness of one-sided suppression. It also cites the work of Ryan A. MacDonald, most notably his investigative journalism compiled in “Truth in Justice.”

However, the cryptic statement of Pope Benedict cited by Father Valladares above needs clarification. The Pope’s reference to “the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust” needs no explanation. His further statement referring to those who “failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse” is broader in scope. Fr. Valladares understood it to refer to some in the Church who tried to remedy one injustice by inflicting yet another. Some bishops went far beyond what has been required by the rule of law and also acquiesced to demands of the media and others with an agenda by publishing lists of priests deemed “credibly accused” but without basic due process of law.

Before my trial in 1994, for example, a past bishop of my diocese wrote a press release declaring me guilty of victimizing not only my accusers, but the entire Catholic Church. Two years ago, twenty-five years into my unjust sentence, a subsequent bishop joined the mob with stones in hand by publishing anew such a list with the stated goal of “transparency.” A year later, that same bishop was himself accused in a case that on its face is “credible” according to the standards bishops have used against priests.

The claims against Bishop Peter Libasci are alleged to have taken place in 1983, the same year as the claims against me. His defense is being handled by a law firm that most priests could never afford. But as I have documented in the post linked below, I believe the claims against him to be untrue and unjust. I was criticized for defending my bishop after my own name appeared on his list, but I am not looking for the mob approval my bishop was apparently looking for. I wrote of the injustice he faces in “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Detective James McLaughlin celebrates his 350th arrest.

Wounds from the State

I cannot bring myself to rehash the litany of false witness and official misconduct that sent me to prison on September 23, 1994. I just read a report by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). It reveals the disturbing fact that in more than half of the cases overturned with new evidence revealing that the person in prison did not commit the crime, misconduct by prosecutors or police was the primary cause. (See Dale Chappell “Report Shows Official Misconduct Responsible for More than Half of Exonerations.”)

In the cases of many falsely accused Catholic priests, however, misconduct usually has a different outcome. There is never any “planted evidence,” but there is usually a lot of money in play as accusers become plaintiffs in civil lawsuits. Money is often an enticement to corruption and false witness. In many of these cases, no actual crime was ever committed 20, 30, or 40 years earlier when claims were alleged to have occurred.

In the Exonerations Report, sex offenses constituted the second highest category of wrongful convictions. Exonerations in that category encompassed a wide range of official misconduct including police threatening defendants and witnesses, falsified forensic evidence, police not pursuing exculpatory evidence, and police lying under oath. All of this was in the background of my trial and is documented in “Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct.”

Many people ask me why I am still in prison when others have come forward with evidence and testimony that casts doubt on the integrity of my conviction. I believe that the most important factor in my continued imprisonment is that the officer behind it has scored convictions via lenient plea deals in over a thousand cases of suspected sexual abuse. Lenient plea deals bolstered his conviction rate without totally destroying the defendants for life. As most readers know, I was offered such a deal in 1994 which would have had me released from prison by 1996 had I actually been guilty or willing to pretend so.

Reversing a conviction based on Detective James F. McLaughlin’s malfeasance in my case may have the unintended consequence of reopening a thousand others that he was involved with. It would have required moral courage and judicial integrity on the part of the judge, a former federal prosecutor who declined a hearing in my habeas corpus appeal. Judges rely on a procedural ruling giving state courts a right to finality. No judge has ruled on the evidence or witnesses that have arisen in the years since my trial. No judge has ever even heard the evidence or witnesses.

This raises a hard truth about our justice system. Guilty defendants are inclined to accept lenient plea deals while many innocent defendants cannot or will not. I am one of them. As a result, many guilty defendants spend far less time in prison than innocent ones. You have already seen a glaring example.

As a direct result of my writing about the horrific crimes perpetrated against Pornchai Moontri when he was brought to America against his will at age 12 in 1985, Richard Alan Bailey was found and arrested in Oregon. Due to extensive evidence, he pled no contest to forty felony charges of sexual assault in the State of Maine in 2018. He was sentenced to 18 years probation and never saw the inside of a prison. In nearby New Hampshire, I refused a one year plea deal and faced trial with no evidence. I was then sentenced to 67 years in prison. Let that sink in.

The Prophet Jonah: A Final Chapter

But none of this addresses what I intended to be at the heart of this post that marks those 27 years. There is nothing I can do to secure justice or freedom for myself. And there was nothing I did do to bring about my loss of them. But there was a lot I could do to secure justice and restore freedom for one whose path on this journey from Jerusalem to Jericho crossed with mine.

I did nothing so grandiose as the conversion of Nineveh, but through the Grace of God I became a necessary instrument in the conversion of Pornchai Moontri who once was lost and broken and now lives free in the light of Divine Mercy. In a September 10 telephone call to him in Thailand on his birthday, his first as a free man, he told me that his deliverance from both prison and his past could not have happened without me. I do not regret paying that ransom. I today believe this to be the purpose for what I have endured.

In my recent post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote about the Seventh Century BC Prophet Jonah and why much of the Book of Jonah is today considered to be a parable. I did not want to detract from the hopeful outcome of that story, so I held its final chapter until now. Its last chapter also took place in Nineveh, but in our time and not Jonah’s.

Though the story of Jonah and the Great Fish is a parable, the Prophet Jonah was a historical figure honored by all three of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Jonah was sent by God to the ancient city of Nineveh in the Seventh Century BC, it was the capital of the Assyrian Empire in its time of glory. Nineveh was a center for commercial trade routes on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq, just opposite the modern city of Mosul. Nineveh was established in the Neolithic period more than 8,000 years ago, and inhabited almost without a break until about 1500 AD.

In the centuries before the Prophet Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the city was known as a religious center, but it fell far away from its religious roots. The city honored the Assyrian goddess, Ishtar, a goddess of healing who somehow was transformed by the time of Jonah into a goddess of war. The Assyrians built the city with broad boulevards, parks and gardens, and a magnificent palace of more than 80 rooms.

Today, Nineveh is reduced to two large mounds beneath which are the ruins of a city once thriving. The mounds are called, in Arabic, “Kuyunjik” and “Nebi Yunus” which means “place of Jonah.” In ancient times, a massive tomb in honor of the Prophet Jonah was built in a Sunni mosque in Nineveh on the site of an Assyrian church where the remains of Jonah were thought to be buried. This part of the city was revered by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Tomb of the Prophet somehow managed to survive intact until just a decade ago. After standing for over a thousand years, the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah was blown up and destroyed in 2011 by the fundamentalist Islamic group, al Qaeda.

The Taliban had been doing the same thing in Afghanistan. Islam was preceded there by Buddhism which was eventually eclipsed by Islam and driven out around the Seventh Century AD. In the Sixth Century AD, Buddhist monks carved into a cliff side the world’s largest statue of Buddha. Standing at 180 feet, it survived for 1,500 years before it was blown up by the Taliban in 2001. It was destroyed at about the same time the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda while the September 11, 2001 assault on the United States was planned.

I bring all of this up now because witnessing in my own recent lifetime the demise of people, places, and things once held sacred by many people has had an outsized impact on me that some might find perplexing. Why would I care so much about the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah or a 1,500 year-old gigantic stone Buddha? No matter who these monuments ultimately served, they arose from the hearts and souls of a people. When religious icons are destroyed by evil intent, so is the spirit of those people.

Catholicism and the cancel culture assault on the priesthood now risk this same fate. That risk is manifested most in America over just the last two decades. This threat does not come from the Taliban or Islamic State — though they may be poised to take advantage of the vacuum of hopelessness left in its wake. The terrorism behind this threat is called “apathy.”

If the priesthood and the Mass fall away, it will have as its primary cause the agendas of a few and the silence of too many.

We have witnessed in just recent years a chronic disparagement of the priesthood even from Pope Francis and our bishops, a canceling of a widely reverenced ancient form of the Sacrifice of the Mass, a handing over of the Church’s patrimony to the Chinese Communist government, a disparaging of our Church and faith as a “non essential service” by secular authority, a rampant capitulation to that by some bishops, a failure to defend the sanctity of life and the sanctity of the Eucharist, and a Catholic President who believes in neither.

This is why the Taliban despise us and judge us to be “Infidels,” which means exactly what it implies: “A people of little faith.”

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From a Homily of Padre Pio

“Why does is there evil in the world? Listen closely to me. There was a mother who was embroidering on a small weaving frame. Her young son was seated in front of her on a small low stool watching his mother work. But as he watched, he saw only the underside of the weaving frame. And so he said, ‘But Mother, what are you doing? The embroidery is so ugly!’ So his mother lowered the frame to show him the other side of the work, the good side with all its colors in place and all the threads in a harmonious pattern. That is it. Have you seen what evil is like? Evil is the reverse side of that embroidery and we are all sitting on a small stool.”

— From a homily of St. Padre Pio

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I want to thank readers who have consulted our Special Events page to assist our friend Pornchai in the daunting task of rebuilding his life. As you know, he was taken from Thailand at age 11. On his September 10 birthday this month, he had a touching reunion with his cousin who was eight when they lived together and is now 45 and an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. They met on September 10th for a birthday celebration at the Gulf of Thailand.

You may also wish to review the related posts linked herein:

Padre Pio, Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

A Parable of Divine Mercy: Pornchai Moontri had a first birthday in freedom on September 10. One third of his life passed in a prison cell with a Catholic priest.

September 8, 2021

Jesus taught in parables, a word which comes from the Greek, paraballein, which means to “draw a comparison.” Jesus turned His most essential truths into simple but profound parables that could be easily pondered, remembered, and retold. The genre was not unique to Jesus. There are several parables that appear in our Old Testament. I wrote of one some time ago — though now I cannot recall which post it was — about the Prophet Jonah.

The Book of Jonah is one of a collection of twelve prophetic books known in the Hebrew Scriptures as the Minor Prophets. The Book of Jonah tells of events — some historical and some in parable form — in the life of an 8th-century BC prophet named Jonah. At the heart of the story, Jonah was commanded by God to go to Nineveh to convert the city from its wickedness. Nineveh was an ancient city on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq near the modern city of Mosul. It was the capital of the Assyrian Empire from 705-612 BC.

Jonah rebelled against the command of God and went in the opposite direction, boarding a ship to continue his flight from “the Presence of the Lord.” When a storm arose and the ship was imperiled, the mariners blamed Jonah and cast him into a raging sea. He was swallowed by “a great fish” (1:17), spent three days and nights in its belly, and then the Lord spoke to the fish and Jonah “was spewed out upon dry land” ( 2: 10) . ( I could add, as a possible aside, that the great fish might later have been sold at market, but there was no longer any prophet in it!)

Then God, undaunted by his rebellion, again commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh. Jonah finally went, did his best, the people repented, and God saved them from destruction. Many biblical scholars regard this part of the Book of Jonah as a parable. Jesus Himself referred to the Jonah story as a presage, a type of parable account pointing to His own death and Resurrection:

“Some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.' But he answered them, 'An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days in the belly of the giant fish so for three days and three nights, the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”

— Matthew 12:38-40

What I take away from the parable part of the story of Jonah is that there is no point fleeing from “the Presence of the Lord.” God is not a puppeteer dangling and directing us from strings. Rather, the threads of our lives are intertwined with the threads of other lives in ways mysterious and profound. I have written several times of what I call “The Great Tapestry of God.” Within that tapestry — which in this life we see only from our place among its tangled threads — God connects people in salvific ways, and asks for our cooperation with these threads of connection.

The Parable of the Priest

I was slow to awaken to this. For too many days and nights in wrongful imprisonment, I pled my case to the Lord and asked Him to send someone to deliver me from this present darkness. It took a long time for me to see that perhaps I have been looking at this unjust imprisonment from the wrong perspective. I have railed against the fact that I am powerless to change it. I can only change myself. I know the meaning of the Cross of Christ, but I was spiritually blind to my own. Ironically, in popular writing, prison is sometimes referred to as “the belly of the beast.”

After a dozen years of railing against God in prison, I slowly came to the possible realization that no one was sent to help me because maybe I am the one being sent. My first nudge in this direction came upon reading one of the most mysterious passages in all of Sacred Scripture. It arose when I pondered what exactly happened to Jesus between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the three days He refers to in the Sign of Jonah parable in the Gospel of Matthew above. A cryptic hint is found in the First Letter of Peter:

“For it is better to suffer for good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which he also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in former times did not obey.”

— 1 Peter 3:17-20

The second and much stronger hint also came to me in 2006, twelve years after my imprisonment commenced. This may be a familiar story to long time readers, but it is essential to this parable. I was visited in prison by a priest who learned of me from a California priest and canon lawyer whom I had never even met. The visiting priest was Father James McCurry, a Conventual Franciscan who, unknown to me at the time, had been a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Maximilian Kolbe whom I barely knew of.

Our visit was brief, but pivotal. Father McCurry asked me what I knew about Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I knew very little. A few days later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry with a holy card (we could receive cards then, but not now). The card depicted Saint Maximilian in his Franciscan habit over which he partially wore the tattered jacket of an Auschwitz prisoner with the number, 16670. I was strangely captivated by the image and taped it to the battered mirror in my cell.

Later that same day, I realized with profound sadness that on the next day — December 23, 2006 — I would be a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. At the edge of despair, I had the strangest sense that the man in the mirror, St. Maximilian, was there in that cell with me. I learned that he was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. I spent a lot of time pondering what was in his heart and mind as he spontaneously stepped forward from a line of prisoners and asked permission to take the place of a weeping young man condemned to death by starvation. I wrote of the cell where he spent his last days in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

On the very next day after pondering that man in the mirror on Christmas Eve, 2006 — a small but powerful book arrived for me. It was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl, a Jewish medical doctor and psychiatrist who was the sole member of his family to survive the horror of the concentration camps. I devoured the little book several times. It was one of the most meaningful accounts of spiritual survival I had ever read. Its two basic premises were that we have one freedom that can never be taken from us: We have the freedom to choose the person we will be in any set of circumstances.

The other premise was that we will be broken by unending suffering unless we discover meaning in it. I was stunned to see at the end of this Jewish doctor’s book that he and many others attributed, in part, their survival of Auschwitz to Maximilian Kolbe “who selflessly deprived the camp commandant of his power over life and death.”

The Parable of a Prisoner

God did not will the evil through which Maximilian suffered and died, but he drew from it many threads of connection that wove their way into countless lives, and now I was among them. For Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor with an unusual familiarity with the Gospel, Maximilian epitomized the words of Jesus, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

I asked the Lord to show me the meaning of what I had suffered. It was at this very point that Pornchai Moontri showed up in the Concord prison. I have written of our first meeting before, but it bears repeating. I was, by “chance,” late in the prison dining hall one evening. It was very crowded with no seats available as I wandered around with a tray. I was beckoned from across the room by J.J., a young Indonesian man whom I had helped with his looming deportation. “Hey G! Sit here with us. This is my new friend, Ponch. He just got here.”

Pornchai sat in near silence as J.J. and I spoke. I was shifting in my seat as Pornchai’s dagger eyes, and his distrust and rage were aimed in my direction. J.J. told him that I can be trusted. Pornchai clearly had extreme doubts.

Over the next month, Pornchai was moved in and out of heightened security because he was marked as a potential danger to others. Then one day as 2006 gave way to 2007, I saw him dragging a trash bag with his few possessions onto the cell block where I lived. He paused at my cell door and looked in. He stepped toward the battered mirror and saw the image of St. Maximilian Kolbe in his Franciscan habit and Auschwitz jacket and he stared for a time. “Is this you?” he asked.

Within a few months, Pornchai’s roommate moved away and I was asked to move in with him. Less than four years later, to make this long and winding parable short, Pornchai was received into the Catholic faith on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. Two years after that, on the Solemnity of Christ the King, 2012, we both followed Saint Maximilian Kolbe into Consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Most readers likely know by now the depth of the wounds Pornchai experienced in life. He was abandoned as a child in Thailand, suffered severe malnutrition, and then, at age eleven, he fell into the hands of a monster. He was taken from his country and the only family he knew, and was brought to the U.S. where he suffered years of unspeakable abuse. He escaped to a life of homelessness, living on the streets as a teenager in what was to him a foreign land. At age 18, he accidentally killed a much larger man during a struggle, and was sent to prison.

Pornchai’s mother, the only other person who knew of the years of abuse he suffered, was murdered on the Island of Guam after being taken there by the man who abused him. In 2018, after I wrote this entire account, that man, Richard Alan Bailey, was brought to justice and convicted of forty felony counts of sexual abuse of Pornchai. After the murder of his mother at that man’s hands, Pornchai gave up on life and spent the next seven years in the torment of solitary confinement in a supermax prison in the State of Maine. From there, he was moved here with me.

Over the ensuing years, as I gradually became aware of the enormity of Pornchai’s suffering, I felt compelled to act in the only manner available to me. I followed Saint Maximilian Kolbe into the Gospel passage that characterized his life in service to his fellow prisoners: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

I asked the Lord, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to free Pornchai from his past and the seemingly impenetrable prisons that held him bound. I offered the Lord my life and freedom just as Maximilian did on that August day of 1941. Then I witnessed the doors of Divine Mercy open to us.

This blog began just then. In the time he spent with me, Pornchai graduated from high school with honors, earned two additional diplomas in guidance and psychology, enrolled in theology courses at Catholic Distance University, and became an effective mentor for younger prisoners in a Fast Track program. He tutored young prisoners in mathematics as they pursued high school equivalency, and, as I have written above, he had a celebrated conversion to the Catholic faith, a story captured by Felix Carroll in his famous book, Loved, Lost, Found.

Pornchai became a master craftsman in woodworking, and taught his skill to other prisoners. One of his model ships is on display in a maritime museum in Belgium. His conversion story spread across the globe. After taking part in a number of Catholic retreat programs sponsored by Father Michael Gaitley and the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, Pornchai was honored as a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. So was I, but only because I was standing next to him.

One of the most beautiful pieces of writing that has graced this blog was not written by me, nor was it written for me. It was written for you. It was a post by Canadian writer Michael Brandon, a man I have never met, a man who silently followed the path of this parable for all these years. His presentation is brief, but unforgettable, and I will leave you with it. It is, “The Parable of the Prisoner.”

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Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Book: Man’s Search for Meaning

Book: Loved, Lost, Found

The Parable of the Prisoner

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: On September 10, Pornchai will mark his 48th birthday. It is his first birthday in freedom. In 2020 on that date he was just beginning a grueling five months in ICE detention awaiting deportation. For the previous 29 years he was in prison. For the four years before that he was a homeless teenager having fled from a living nightmare.

I asked him what he would like for his birthday, and this was his response:

“I have never seen the ocean. I would like to go to the Gulf of Thailand and visit my cousin who was eight years old when I was eleven and last saw him. He is now an officer in the Thai Navy.”

Please visit our “SPECIAL EVENTS” page, and our BTSW Library category for posts about Pornchai.