The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life

Racial justice and a dubious idea of critical race theory are now center stage in our culture, but they give no voice to the most urgent Civil Rights issue of all.

For the entire second term in the presidency of Barack Obama, Ohio Republican congressman John Boehner was Speaker of the House of Representatives. He left that office in 2015. A devout Catholic, he had been honored by the University of Notre Dame with the Laetare Medal, a distinction awarded to Catholics in public life who witness to their faith in extraordinary ways. During Speaker Boehner’s first address to the House of Representatives in 2011, he said that “America is more than a country. It’s an idea.” Like any great idea, it did not begin in its current form. The idea of America evolved with fits and starts in response to both prophets and protests — and wars, and great losses, and immense sacrifices. From my perspective, in the decade from 1963 to 1973 the very idea of America gave birth to a Civil Rights movement that was hard fought and continues to be. Milestones were reached, but the Civil Rights movement never ended. It now just takes another form.

Civil Rights as an idea is not yet a done deal. Just as the idea formed and took shape for some in America, it failed an entire class of others. Just as the idea of Civil Rights embraced our fellow Americans living lives marked by racial divisions and distinctions, it failed millions of others not yet living outside the womb.

In the decade of the 1970s, it sometimes felt like I would be in school forever. After four years studying psychology and philosophy at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school just outside Manchester, NH, I commenced another four years at Saint Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland from where I was awarded a Master of Divinity and a Pontifical degree in Sacred Theology. Saint Mary’s is the oldest Catholic seminary in the United States and, at that time at least, was the most academically demanding.

Like many seminarians then, I was chronically poor. During the rationing and long gas lines of the late 1970s, I paid $900 for a clunker of a 1969 Chevy Malibu. It had a V-8 engine that could pass everything but gas stations, and when I bought it, it burned almost as much oil as gasoline. A friend and I spent all our spare time in the summer of 1978 rebuilding its engine before I drove it off to Baltimore to begin the great adventure of faith seeking understanding. I was proud of the fact that we got the Malibu’s gas mileage up to a point where I could sit in the long gas lines with a clear conscience, though I don’t think General Motors would have still recognized its engine. I loved that car, not the least for where it took me.

Roaring around Baltimore from 1978 to 1982, I quickly learned that the great city was second only to my native Boston for the lure and lore of its history. Outside the seminary, there was a whole other field of education within 100 miles of Baltimore in any direction. So Saturdays in the seminary were devoted to field trips to the birth and growth of America; to the places where the idea first took shape. That’s when visiting history became my hobby, and an important part of my education. Much more than my loss of freedom, now, I mourn the passing of the world beyond these stone walls.

Upon the Field of Battle

One place stands out strikingly against the background of monuments and memories I visited and studied. I had some friends among the seminarians at Mount Saint Mary Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, a two+ hour drive from Baltimore. On several Saturdays, my speedy Malibu drove north to pick up my friends and head for Gettysburg, just a few miles from Emmitsburg straddling the Maryland and Pennsylvania state line.

It’s hard to describe what I felt the first time I stood surveying the very heart of America’s most terrible war. The Battle of Gettysburg was fought there over the first four days of July in 1863. President Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address was delivered on that field on November 19, 1863, just three months after the horrific four-day battle that took the lives of over 80,000 Americans.

For some reason, standing on that field of battle for the first time in 1979, I thought of John F. Kennedy and his signature cause, the Civil Rights movement which was in turn taken up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson after Kennedy’s untimely death in 1963. It came as a shock to me to realize that the defining battle of the American Civil War — that I once thought to be ancient history — was fought and then immortalized in Lincoln’s great speech just l00 years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was exactly 100 years, barely three generations in the lives of men. The Battle of Gettysburg, and all that led up to it, took place in the lifetime of my grandfather’s grandfather.

Suddenly, with that revelation, I felt linked to all that came before. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1974 historical novel, The Killer Angels relived this most decisive battle of the American Civil War, and my first visit came just after this great work of historical storytelling.

It felt strange standing for the first time upon Cemetery Hill where the Civil War pivoted toward victory for the North. But there was really no victory. It was America against itself, and the powerful imprint of death and sacrifice was still upon that battlefield as I stood there 116 years later. It was both eerie and inspiring. My friends went off to tour the museum and stare at row upon row of cannonballs and muskets, but I couldn’t leave that field. I realized standing there for the first time just what an idea can cost, and what hardship and sacrifice it can demand from those who serve it.

The Right to Life and the Cost of Liberty

By the time the Civil War was over, it demanded of America more lives of its citizens than World War I and World War II combined. Some 500,000 lost their lives fighting this nation’s war against itself. I didn’t understand then just how this happened, but standing on that Gettysburg field, I resolved to one day understand. Men and women can sacrifice their lives for an idea, or an ideal, or a principle that is far greater than themselves. They can sacrifice freedom, even, to stand firm on a ground made solid by conscience.

Many historians and legal scholars draw a direct line between the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and a single case decided before the U.S. Supreme Court four years earlier in 1857. As a causal connection, the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford enraged conscience-driven abolitionists and encouraged slave owners. It broadened the political and ideological abyss between the North and the South, and it led directly to a war of nothing less than the demands of conscience versus the realities of economic necessity and convenience.

Dred Scott was a fugitive slave. In 1848 at the age of 62, having spent decades in secret learning to read and write, he brought suit to claim his freedom on the ground that he resided in a free territory established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. This is a piece of American history that must not be overlooked or forgotten, though many would prefer not to know. Dred Scott was purchased and lived his life as a slave, but was then taken by his “master”, an Army surgeon, to a free territory rendered free by the Missouri Compromise.

In Dred Scott v. Sanford, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney wrote for the majority that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and violated the Fifth Amendment because it deprived Southerners of a right to bring their private property — i.e., slaves — wherever they wanted. The decision further ruled that Congress did not have the authority to establish free territory, and in its most alarming language, Justice Taney’s decision established that black men are not citizens of the United States and had “no rights any white man is bound to respect.”

Reflecting upon this now, five generations later, is made all the more painful by the recognition that Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney was a Catholic, though one who surely put the realities of national economics above the tenets of faith or conscience. As I wrote in “The True Story of Thanksgiving,” the Catholic Church had three centuries earlier established slavery as a moral evil, and declared it unacceptable in any Catholic country. It would take another 250 years from the founding of America for this nation to put economic interest aside and catch up with the conscience of the Catholic Church.

Justice Taney’s decision caused some in his day to conclude that there is a higher moral law than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution at any given time in history. There is a higher moral law, and it led the nation on a direct path from Dred Scott to Civil War. The war came as a result of the conscience of individuals gradually forming a consensus about slavery, racial justice and the rights of man.

Rev. Martin Luther King and Father John Crowley

One hundred years after that war was fought, its ripples continued throughout this nation. In 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated for his unwavering and prophetic public witness in a story that we all know only too well. My friend, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus (who contributed to our “About” page) wrote of the radical grace exemplified by Martin Luther King in American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. He wrote of Dr. King’s notion of “The Beloved Community” and described his movement as a new order . . .

“. . . sought by all who know love’s grief in refusing to settle for a community of less than truth and justice uncompromised.”

Think for a moment, please, about that statement. There are not many of us who escape love’s grief — unless we become so shallow as to so steel ourselves against grief that we can ignore it. What a tragedy! Those of us who know love’s grief and refuse to settle for a community — a nation, a Church — of less than truth and justice uncompromised are in for some prophetic suffering.

Three years before Martin Luther King was assassinated, Father John Crowley, a heroic Catholic priest, was nearly driven from Selma, Alabama when he took out a full-page ad in the Selma Times-Journal on February 7, 1965.

His ad contained a brilliant essay entitled “The Path to Peace in Selma.” It urged the white community to speak out against racial segregation and discrimination not for the good of the black man and woman, but for the good of ALL men and women. Like the famous Lutheran Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler on April 9, 1945, Father John Crowley called upon fellow priests and other Catholics to put aside their fears of loss and stand by the truth uncompromised. I share a date of birth with the date of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death, and I share my June 5th date of priesthood ordination with Father John Crowley. These very special men compel me to stand always by the truth uncompromised, and not to fear its cost.

Stand against the Culture of Death

Martin Luther King lost his life just five years before another divisive Supreme Court decision with grave implications for Civil Rights. There are some, and they are many, who see in the 1857 decision in Dred Scott the roots of the 1973’s Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Anthony Kennedy have both cited this connection. In 1973, after the Supreme Court handed down its divided decision in Roe v. Wade, the State of Texas joined other states in filing a petition for a rehearing before the full Court. The Texas dissent declared that the decision in Roe that an unborn child was not a human being with rights to be protected was not at all unlike the decision in Dred Scott that virtually no just person in this nation would ever stand by today.

And just as Dred Scott inspired dissidents of conscience to hear the Commandments of a Higher Authority, Roe v. Wade has inspired similar heroism, most of it barely noticed in the mainstream media, or, worse, taunted. Have you noticed that much of the loudest ridicule of the Catholic Church in America comes on the heels of legislation that chips away at the right to life and human dignity? Many a media barrage against the Catholic Church has been for the purpose of silencing its pro-life voice in the public square.

Life Site News has carried the stories of two Canadian women whose sacrifices on behalf of civil rights for the unborn had landed them in prison. Linda Gibbons, a grandmother and prisoner of conscience, spent seven years in an Ontario prison because she refused to comply with a court order demanding that she cease and desist from standing on the sidewalk near an Ontario clinic to present alternatives to abortion. In eerie echoes of the Dred Scott decision, the clinic staff and the Ontario court charged her with interfering with fair commerce by suggesting to clients another way. Linda Gibbons first went to prison at the same time I did, in September 1994.

Mary Wagner took leave from a French convent to “witness to life” as Life Site News has called her sacrifice. In Holy Week, 2010, Mary was arrested by Vancouver police and remained in jail for months for refusing to obey court orders to cease talking to abortion clinic clients about Project Rachel.

And you may have heard of the late Norma McCorvey. She’s better known as “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Norma became a Catholic in 1998 and also became a dedicated pro-life activist. She was author of the 1998 book, Won by Love. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition by Norma McCorvey to reverse Roe v. Wade. In May 2009, she was among the Catholic pro-life witnesses arrested at the University of Notre Dame during President Obama’s Commencement address.

We can deduce where Martin Luther King would stand on the pressing civil rights issues of this day. There is some annual controversy that his niece, Dr. Alveda King, endeavors to clear up. She staunchly defends Rev. King against claims that he would be a pro-choice or pro-abortion supporter today. She insists that his civil rights agenda would today include a defense of life. It’s no irony that the week that begins in honor of his martyrdom for civil rights ends with the National March for Life in Washington, DC.

Beginning in the fall of 2004, 40 Days for Life has held prayer vigils at 238 locations in the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia. The US Catholic Bishops would do well to heed the courageous voices of those who have sacrificed much for the pro-life cause while the bishops debate the sanctity of the Eucharist and the demeanor necessary to receive the Body of Christ. The great Lutheran pastor, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, went to prison for writing to his fellow Lutherans that they cannot both profess their belief in Christ and support the Third Reich and its culture of death.

Conceived in Liberty

On the Saturday after my first visit to Gettysburg in 1979, I drove an hour south from Baltimore to Washington, DC. I went first to the Lincoln Memorial where the famous Gettysburg Address is etched into the stone behind the immense man’s monumental presence. The great speech immortalized the struggle for civil rights as an ongoing struggle that must never be set aside if the idea of America is to survive.

As I read it, I thought of that awful battlefield where I stood 116 years later, and also of the civil rights battlefields of today where millions are denied the right to life, and the millions more who sacrifice to witness for them. Lincoln’s memorable words apply no less to them.

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Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger-sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from those honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: As readers know, we have restored a few older posts in the last three weeks while I have been unable to write. This post was first written in 2011. It has been substantially updated and revised so it is actually a new post. Among the several pro-life posts I have written, many readers thought this one to stand out.

The Supreme Court has announced that it will review limits on abortion which in turn could lead to a review of Roe v Wade. President Biden just announced his new commission to study packing the Court. There is too much at stake to stay on the sidelines. Please share this post.

You might also be interested in this related post:

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

The Story Buried Under the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case

A troubling back story in the trial and lawsuits against Father Gordon MacRae has been in open view for two decades, but suppressed by both Church and State.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald who writes at A Ram in the Thicket and is a contributing writer for Beyond These Stone Walls.

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In an article I wrote last September entitled “Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison,” I aimed a spotlight at the glaring injustice of the 1994 prosecution of Father Gordon MacRae. Also in these pages, Fr. George David Byers wrote “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits.” It aimed another spotlight at a Church hierarchy morally paralyzed by litigation. A full and transparent view of justice now requires unveiling a related story in the background of the troubling case against Father Gordon MacRae. It’s a story, as the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus once described in the pages of First Things magazine (June/July 2009), “of a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

This account begins in tragedy. Shortly after noon on Friday, May 11, 1979, Peter Linsley, 35, and Jane Linsley, 28, both of Concord, New Hampshire, walked unannounced through the open door of the rectory at Saint Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Littleton, NH, a town of (then) about 5,400 in the north of that state. A year earlier, in May, 1978, Peter Linsley was discharged from the state psychiatric hospital on the grounds of the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord. He had been declared no longer a danger to himself or others. He previously entered a plea of innocent by reason of insanity to a charge of aggravated assault on a police officer in July, 1977.

As the Linsleys barged into the Littleton church rectory in May, 1979, two parishioners, Mrs. Patricia Lyons and her son, Michael, had been working inside. The home invaders brandished a pair of .357-caliber Magnum revolvers and declared themselves to be “King and Queen of the Church” sent there by God to “cleanse the temple.” They demanded to see the parish priest.

The priest assigned at Saint Rose of Lima Parish at the time was the Rev. Stephen Scruton. As the drama unfolded in his parish rectory that day, Fr. Scruton was aboard a plane somewhere over the Atlantic headed for a vacation in Ireland. With her son held at gunpoint, Mrs. Lyons telephoned Rev. Joseph Sands in the nearby town of Lancaster, about 15 miles away. At gunpoint, she asked the priest to come immediately. A half hour later, Father Sands became the Linsleys’ third hostage.

After the arrival of Father Sands, the couple ordered Mrs. Lyons to retrieve a dog left in their car, but once outside she ran for help. Meanwhile, the priest convinced her son, Mike, to escape by jumping from a second floor window, reportedly telling him, “If you want to get out alive, get out quickly.” Father Joe Sands thus made himself the sole hostage.

Mrs. Lyons went right to the police. Within a half hour, a State Police SWAT team surrounded the parish house, and established a telephone link with the Linsleys. The tape-recorded negotiations went on for the next five hours, ending at 5:22 PM when four shots were fired inside the rectory. Peter Linsley murdered Father Joe Sands, then shot and killed Jane Linsley, and then, finally, turned his gun on himself.

At the time in 1979, sitting New Hampshire Governor, the late Honorable Hugh Gallen was a native of Littleton and a friend of Father Stephen Scruton whose vacation was cut short as he was quickly returned to a parish mired in tragedy. According to a priest who had once lived in that rectory with Father Scruton, Governor Gallen took command of the scene and ordered the five hours of taped negotiations between the Linsleys and police negotiators to be sealed. The tapes never became public.

That priest, the late Rev. Maurice Rochefort, was a friend of both Father Joe Sands and Father Gordon MacRae, who , in 1979, was still three years away from priesthood ordination. Father Rochefort reportedly once told MacRae that the Littleton rectory and its parish priest were not random targets. He said that the gunman sought revenge against Father Stephen Scruton specifically for some unknown previous encounter at the church. That has long been rumored among priests of the Diocese of Manchester who knew Scruton, but none would respond to inquiries about Father Scruton or this incident.

A few years ago, Father MacRae wrote a haunting and deeply sad article entitled “Dark Night of a Priestly Soul.” It was about a priest he knew in his Diocese who in 2002 tragically took his own life after an accusation surfaced against him from 1972. That accusation was also alleged to have occurred at St. Rose of Lima Parish in Littleton. The accuser in that case also accused another priest, Fr. Stephen Scruton.

During the five years before the tragedy that took the life of Father Joe Sands, Gordon MacRae had been a seminary student with the New York Province of the Capuchin Order. After completing the one-year Capuchin novitiate in 1974, MacRae was assigned to Saint Anthony Friary in Hudson, NH from where he attended nearby Saint Anselm College. He graduated with degrees in philosophy and psychology, with honors, in 1978. During the summer of 1978, the young seminarian sought the counsel of fellow Capuchin and mentor, Father Benedict Groeschel, as he discerned leaving the Capuchins to pursue graduate studies in theology toward diocesan priesthood.

It was an amiable transition. For the next four years (1978 to 1982) seminarian Gordon MacRae studied at St. Mary Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland where he earned simultaneous graduate degrees in divinity and pastoral counseling, and a Pontifical degree in theology. For the next four summers MacRae worked in a three-year internship as a counselor with the Baltimore County Police Crisis Intervention Unit.

A year after the tragic murder of Father Sands, in June of 1980, Father Stephen Scruton was transferred from Littleton to Saint John Parish in Hudson, NH on the state’s southern border. Because seminarian Gordon MacRae had lived in that community as a Capuchin, he requested to be ordained at Saint John Church on June 5, 1982. He was the only candidate for priesthood ordination for the Diocese of Manchester that year. It was there, in late May and early June of 1982 that he first met Father Stephen Scruton.

During his first year of priesthood, Father MacRae was assigned to a deeply troubled parish where four nuns teaching in the parish school had an open and bitterly fought lawsuit against MacRae’s bishop and diocese. It was a situation that Father MacRae inherited, but had no connection to. His first assignment was in a parish deeply divided by this lawsuit and its state-wide publicity.

For an occasional day off, he would drive to Hudson where he had developed many friendships during his years as a Capuchin. On a few occasions, he also visited the three priests at Saint John Parish in Hudson where he was ordained.

During one of those visits in 1983, a Hudson parish secretary pulled Father MacRae aside and told him of a troubling incident in the rectory. She said that she suspected that Father Scruton’s assistant, Father Mark Fleming, had been sexually abusing an 11-year-old boy in this rectory. She told Father MacRae that she saw nothing specific, but that her instinct on this was very strong. She said she tried to discuss this with Father Scruton, the pastor, but he brushed it aside and told her not to mention it to anyone else. Father MacRae reportedly told her that if she saw anything at all that caused her to make such a conclusion, she was obligated to report it to police. Other than that conversation, Father MacRae had no connection whatsoever to that case.

Soon after in 1983, Father Stephen Scruton reported to officials in the Diocese of Manchester that he walked in on and witnessed his associate, Father Mark Fleming, in a sexual incident with a minor boy from the parish. A report was made by the Diocese to state officials as required by New Hampshire law, and the state launched an investigation.

Nothing of this became public until two decades later when the Diocese of Manchester released its priests’ personnel files in an unprecedented agreement with the State Attorney General’s Office. It was revealed only twenty years after the 1983 investigation by the state, that Father Mark Fleming had abused three boys, all brothers. No criminal charges were filed, but Fleming was removed from ministry and placed at a psychiatric treatment center in St. Louis. In a 2003 article, the Nashua (NH) Telegraph reported on this story (Albert McKeon, “Priest Turned in another, then was also caught,” March 6, 2003).

In 1984, a year after the Hudson case involving Fathers Scruton and Fleming, Father Stephen Scruton was arrested for lewd conduct and indecent exposure at a highway rest area near Londonderry, NH. According to news accounts, those charges were dropped when he agreed to a plea deal for a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass. Scruton was placed on leave of absence for six months, then assigned to a small parish in Bennington, NH to replace a priest on sick leave. Upon that priest’s return, he complained to Diocesan officials that Father Scruton embezzled parish funds. The priest threatened civil litigation, and Scruton was placed on leave again. During this period he was arrested a second time for lewd conduct and indecent exposure at a highway rest area in Massachusetts. Those charges were never fully processed.

In June of 1985, Father Stephen Scruton was assigned as pastor of Saint Bernard Parish in Keene, NH where Father Gordon MacRae had already served as associate pastor for the preceding two years. I have updated this story in an article at this site entitled, “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” This document is well worth the time to understand the nightmarish conditions faced by MacRae in these years of priesthood.

Father Stephen Scruton was arrested once again for lewd conduct and indecent exposure at a highway rest area near Keene. His arrest occurred on the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 1987. In police reports, Father Scruton cited the stresses of Holy Week as the cause for his behavior. He pled guilty to the charge in Keene District Court.

To Father MacRae’s shock, Scruton was not immediately removed from the parish by Diocese of Manchester officials. In fact, MacRae heard nothing from anyone connected to his Diocese throughout Scruton’s arrest and the subsequent news accounts. Father Scruton granted an interview with a Keene Sentinel reporter to tell of how his arrest was an “opportunity” to educate the public about sexual addiction. It was then that Father MacRae picked up the phone and called Church officials to demand Scruton’s removal from the parish. Scruton was sent to a treatment facility in Golden Valley, MN, but not before a local bank official called Father MacRae to report Scruton’s embezzlement of $20,000 in parish funds.

Six years later, in 1994, Father Gordon MacRae faced criminal charges and simultaneous civil lawsuits brought by three brothers, Thomas, Jonathan, and David Grover alleging abuses from sometime between 1978 and 1983. Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote masterfully of the details of MacRae’s trial and the charges brought by these brothers and other related claims in “The Wall Street Journal on the Case of Fr. Gordon MacRae.”

Jonathan and David Grover, the first of the Grover brothers to make accusations, claimed to have been repeatedly assaulted in Saint Bernard Rectory in Keene, and in other places, by both Father Gordon MacRae and Father Stephen Scruton acting both separately and simultaneously. Both brothers had claimed that these assaults first occurred when they were twelve years old.

An immediate and never explained problem was that Father MacRae was never inside the Keene rectory until June of 1983 when Jonathan Grover was 14 years old and David Grover was just two weeks shy of turning 18. Father Scruton was never inside that rectory until June of 1985 when these brothers were ages 16 and 20 respectively. However, Father Scruton refused to answer any questions put by Father MacRae’s defense before trial, and fled the state when an attempt was made to subpoena him.

As these facts emerged pre-trial, the investigating police detective James F. McLaughlin did nothing. He recorded no interviews, left no evidence to determine who said what to whom and when. At one point, he gave the Grover brothers a copy of Father MacRae’s resume so they could get their dates straight. Then he simply eliminated Father Stephen Scruton from all future reports in the case as though his name had never come up.

The progression of this story from this point on is utterly shocking. It was documented by me in “Truth in Justice,” linked above.

After the onslaught of mediated settlements, many deceased priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused, and could do nothing, of course, to defend themselves or their names. Nearly 30 years after his tragic murder in the Littleton rectory, Father Joseph Sands was posthumously accused.

In 2008 former FBI Special Agent, investigator James Abbott began a three-year investigation of this story. He located former priest Stephen Scruton living in Massachusetts. Agent Abbott placed a telephone call to the number at that address. When he asked for Stephen Scruton, a male voice was heard in the background: “Steve, this is your chance to help Gordon.” When Scruton took the phone he was highly agitated and nervous. He agreed to be interviewed by the former FBI agent, and they set a date for the interview one week later. When investigator Abbott showed up for the interview, Scruton refused to open the door, saying only that he has consulted with someone in the diocese and now declines to answer any questions. Two weeks later, Stephen Scruton suffered a catastrophic fall on the stairs of a Boston lawyer’s office. He never regained consciousness, and died just days later. He took the truth with him.

Former FBI agent James Abbott concluded his report on this investigation: “In my three-year investigation of this matter I found no evidence that Gordon J. MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes.”

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Editor’s Note: The above was sadly not the only tragedy to occur with connections to Littleton, New Hampshire. Please read The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul.

What do John Wayne and Pornchai Moontri Have In Common?

As Advent begins in the midst of some long-awaited changes and revisions in the Catholic Mass, I have been doing some thinking about the nature of change.

In “February Tales,” an early post at Beyond These Stone Walls, I described growing up on the Massachusetts North Shore — the stretch of seacoast just north of Boston. My family had a long tradition of being “Sacrament Catholics.”

I once heard my father joke that he would enter a church only twice in his lifetime, and would be carried both times. I was seven years old, squirming into a hand-me-down white suit for my First Communion when I first heard that excuse for staying home. I didn’t catch on right away that my father was referring to his Baptism and his funeral. I pictured him, a very large man, slung over my mother’s shoulder on his way into church for Sunday Mass, and I laughed.

We were the most nominal of Catholics. Prior to my First Communion at age seven, I was last in a Catholic church at age five for the priesthood ordination of my uncle, the late Father George W. MacRae, a Jesuit and renowned Scripture scholar. My father and “Uncle Winsor,” as we called him, were brothers — just two years apart in age but light years apart in their experience of faith. I was often bewildered, as a boy, at this vast difference between the two brothers.

But my father’s blustering about his abstention from faith eventually collapsed under the weight of his own cross. It was a cross that was partly borne by me as well, and carried in equal measure by every member of my family. By the time I was ten — at the very start of that decade of social upheaval, life in our home had disintegrated. My father’s alcoholism raged beyond control, nearly destroying him and the very bonds of our family. We became children of the city streets as home and family faded away.

I have no doubt that many readers can relate to the story of a home torn asunder by alcoholism, and some day soon I plan to write much more about this cross. But for now I want to write about conversion, so I’ll skip ahead.

The Long and Winding Road Home

As a young teenager, I had a friend whose family attended a small Methodist church. I stayed with them from time to time. They knew I was estranged from my Catholic faith and Church, so one Sunday morning they invited me to theirs. As I sat through the Methodist service, I just felt empty inside. There was something crucial missing. So a week later, I attended Catholic Mass — secretly and alone — with a sense that I was making up for some vague betrayal. At some point sitting in this Mass alone at age 15, I discovered that I was home.

My father wasn’t far behind me. Two years later, when just about everyone we knew had given up any hope for him, my father underwent a radical conversion that changed his very core. He admitted himself to a treatment program, climbed the steep and arduous mountain of recovery, and became our father again after a long, turbulent absence. A high school dropout and machine shop laborer, my father’s transformation was miraculous. He went back to school, completed a college degree, earned his masters degree in social work, and became instrumental in transforming the lives of many other broken men. He also embraced his Catholic faith with love and devotion, and it embraced him in return. That, of course, is all a much longer story for another day.

My father died suddenly at the age of 52 just a few months after my ordination to priesthood in 1982. I remember laying on the floor during the Litany of the Saints at my ordination as I described in “Going My Way,” a Lenten post last year. I was conscious that my father stood on the aisle just a few feet away, and I was struck by the nature of the man whose impact on my life had so miraculously changed. Underneath the millstones of addiction and despair that once plagued him was a singular power that trumped all. It was the sheer courage necessary to be open to the grace of conversion and radical change. The most formative years of my young adulthood and priesthood were spent as a witness to the immensity of that courage. In time, I grew far less scarred by my father’s road to perdition, and far more inspired by his arduous and dogged pursuit of the road back. I have seen other such miracles, and learned long ago to never give up hope for another human being.

The Conversion of the Duke

A year ago this very week, I wrote “Holidays in the Hoosegow: Thanksgiving With Some Not-So-Just Desserts.” In that post, I mentioned that John Wayne is one of my life-long movie heroes and a man I have long admired. But all that I really ever knew of him was through the roles he played in great westerns like “The Searchers,” “The Comancheros,” “Rio Bravo,” and my all-time favorite historical war epic, “The Longest Day.”

In his lifetime, John Wayne was awarded three Oscars and the Congressional Gold Medal. After his death from cancer in 1979, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But, for me, the most monumental and courageous of all of John Wayne’s achievements was his 1978 conversion to the Catholic faith.

Not many in Hollywood escape the life it promotes, and John Wayne was no exception. The best part of this story is that it was first told by Father Matthew Muñoz, a priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and John Wayne’s grandson.

Early in his film career in 1933, John Wayne married Josephine Saenz, a devout Catholic who had an enormous influence on his life. They gave birth to four children, the youngest of whom,  Melinda, was the mother of Father Matthew Muñoz. John Wayne and Josephine Saenz civilly divorced in 1945 as Hollywood absorbed more and more of the life and values of its denizens.

But Josephine never ceased to pray for John Wayne and his conversion, and she never married again until after his death. In 1978, a year before John Wayne died, her prayer was answered and he was received into the Catholic Church. His conversion came late in his life, but John Wayne stood before Hollywood and declared that the secular Hollywood portrayal of the Catholic Church and faith is a lie, and the truth is to be found in conversion.

That conversion had many repercussions. Not least among them was the depth to which it inspired John Wayne’s 14-year old grandson, Matthew, who today presents the story of his grandfather’s conversion as one of the proudest events of his life and the beginning of his vocation as a priest.

If John Wayne had lived to see what his conversion inspired, I imagine that he, too, would have stood on the aisle, a monument to the courage of conversion, as Matthew lay prostrate on the Cathedral floor praying the Litany of the Saints at priesthood ordination. The courage of conversion is John Wayne’s most enduring legacy.

Pornchai Moontri Takes a Road Less Traveled

The Japanese Catholic novelist, Shusaku Endo, wrote a novel entitled Silence (Monumenta Nipponica, 1969), a devastating historical account of the cost of discipleship. It’s a story of 17th Century Catholic priests who faced torture and torment for spreading the Gospel in Japan. The great Catholic writer, Graham Greene, wrote that Silence is “in my opinion, one of the finest novels of our time.”

Silence is the story of Father Sebastian Rodriguez, one of those priests, and the story is told through a series of his letters. Perhaps the most troubling part of the book was the courage of Father Rodriguez, a courage difficult to relate to in our world. Because of the fear of capture and torture, and the martyrdom of every priest who went before him, Father Rodriguez had to arrive in Japan for the first time by rowing a small boat alone in the pitch blackness of night from the comfort and safety of a Spanish ship to an isolated Japanese beach in 1638 — just 18 years after the Puritan Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Squanto’s Pawtuxet, half a world away as I describe in “The True Story of Thanksgiving.”

In Japan, however, Father Rodriguez was a pilgrim alone. Choosing to be left on a Japanese beach in the middle of the night, he had no idea where he was, where he would go, or how he would survive. He had only the clothes on his back, and a small traveler’s pouch containing food for a day. I cannot fathom such courage. I don’t know that I could match it if it came down to it.

But I witness it  every single day. Most of our readers are very familiar with “Pornchai’s Story,” and with his conversion to Catholicism on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. Most know the struggles and special challenges he has faced as I wrote in “Pornchai Moontri, Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

But the greatest challenge of Pornchai’s life is yet to come. In two years he will have served twenty-two years in prison — more than half his life, and half the original sentence of forty-five years imposed when he was 18 years old. In two years time, if many elements fall into place and he can find legal counsel, Pornchai will have an opportunity to seek some commutation of his remaining sentence based on rehabilitation and other factors.

It is a sort of Catch-22, however. Pornchai could then see freedom at the age of forty for the first time since he was a teen, but it will require entering a world entirely foreign to him. On the day Pornchai leaves prison — whether it is in two years or ten or twenty — he will be immediately taken into custody under the authority of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, flown to Bangkok, Thailand, and left there alone. It is a daunting, sometimes very frightening future, and I am a witness to the anxiety it evokes.

For every long term prisoner, there comes a point in which prison itself is the known world and freedom is a foreign land. Pornchai has spent more than half his life in prison.

Even I, after seventeen years here, sometimes find myself at the tipping point, that precipice in which a prisoner cannot readily define which feels more like the undiscovered country — remaining in prison or trying to be free. I had a dream one night in which I had won my freedom, but entered a hostile world and Church in which I was a pariah, living alone and homeless in a rented room in hiding, pursued by mobs of angry Catholics.  I know well the anxious fears of all the prisons of men.

Pornchai was brought to the United States against his will at the age of eleven. That story is told in deeply moving prose by Pornchai himself in “Pornchai’s Story.” I think we became friends because by the strangeness of grace I knew only too well the experience of having the very foundations of life and family and all security fall out from under me. Pornchai spoke a language that I understood clearly. The transformation of pain and sorrow into the experience of grace is the realm of God, and enduring it to one day lead another out of darkness is a great gift. In the end, who can ever say what is good and what is bad? It is not suffering that is our problem, but rather what we do with it when it finds us.

But what Pornchai faces in the future is daunting. With no opportunity for schooling as an abandoned child in Thailand, he never learned to read and write in Thai and hasn’t heard the Thai language spoken since he was eleven. He remembers little of Thai culture, has no prospects to support himself, no home there, no contacts, and no solace at all. Like Father Rodriguez in Silence, Pornchai will be dropped off in a foreign country, and left to fend for himself with no preparation at all beyond what he can scrape up from behind prison walls in another continent. Welcome to the new America!

Pornchai’s options are limited. He can try to bring about this trauma sooner by seeking commutation of his sentence at an age at which he may still somehow build a life in Thailand. Or he can remain quietly in prison another decade or more, postponing this transition until he is much older, with fewer chances for employment, but perhaps can find connections in Thailand.

These are not great choices. “Pornchai’s Story” got the attention of the Thai government and the Cardinal Archbishop of Bangkok two years ago, but the Thai government has been in chaos since, and the Archbishop has retired. All overtures to both since 2009 have been met by silence.

So in the midst of all this dismal foreboding, and in the face of a future entirely unknown, and perhaps even bleak, Pornchai Moontri became a Catholic. He embraced a faith practiced by less than one percent of the people who will one day be his countrymen again, and in so doing, he piled alienation upon alienation.

And yet this man who has no earthly reason to trust anything to fate, trusts faith itself. I have never met a man more determined to live the faith he has professed than Pornchai Moontri. In the darkness and aloneness of a prison cell night after night for the last two of his twenty years in prison, Pornchai stares down the anxiety of uncertainty, struggles for reasons to believe, and finds them.

I am at a loss for more concrete sources of hope for Pornchai. But like Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, whom I have quoted so often, I believe that “I am a link in a chain; a bond of connection between persons.”

Someone out there holds good news for Pornchai — something he can cling to in hope. I await it with as much patience as I can summon. Pornchai awaits it with a singular courage — the courage of conversion that seeks the spring of hope in the winter of despair.

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Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

The Gospel of Saint Luke opens with a news flash from the Archangel Gabriel for Zechariah the priest, and Mary — Theotokos — the new Ark of the Covenant.

Prisoners, including me, have no access at all to the online world. Though Wednesday is post day on Beyond These Stone Walls, I usually don’t get to see my finished posts until the following Saturday when printed copies arrive in the mail. So I was surprised one Saturday night when some prisoners where I live asked if they could read my posts. Then a few from other units asked for them in the prison library where I work.

Some titles became popular just by word of mouth. The third most often requested BTSW post in the library is “A Day Without Yesterday,” my post about Father Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein. The second most requested is “Does Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” Prisoners love the science/religion debate. But by far the most popular BTSW post is “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”  And as a result of it, dozens of prisoners have asked me for copies of the prayer to Saint Michael. I’m told it’s being put up on cell walls all over the prison.

Remember “Jack Bauer Lost The Unit On Caprica,” my post about my favorite TV shows? In the otherwise vast wasteland of American television, we’re overdue for some angelic drama. For five years in the 1980s, Michael Landon and  Victor French mediated the sordid details of the human condition in Highway to Heaven. The series was created and produced by Michael Landon who thought TV audiences deserved a reminder of the value of faith, hope, and mercy as we face the gritty task of living. Highway to Heaven ended in 1989, but lived on in re-runs for another decade. Then in the 1990s, Della Reese and Roma Downey portrayed “Tess and Monica,” angelic mediators in Touched by an Angel which also produced a decade of re-runs.

Spiritual Battle on a Cosmic Scale

The angels of TV-land usually worked out solutions to the drama of being human within each episode’s allotted sixty minutes. That’s not so with the angels of Scripture. Most came not with a quick fix to human madness, but with a message for coping, for giving hope, for assuring a believer, or, in the case of the Angel of the Annunciation, for announcing some really big news on a cosmic scale — like salvation! What the angels of Scripture do and say has deep theological symbolism and significance, and in trying times interest in angels seems to thrive. The Archangel Gabriel dominates the Nativity Story of Saint Luke’s Gospel, but who is he and what is the meaning of his message?

We first meet Gabriel five centuries before the Birth of Christ in the Book of Daniel. The Hebrew name, “Gabri’El” has two meanings: “God is my strength,” and “God is my warrior.” As revealed in “Angelic Justice,” the Hebrew name Micha-El means “Who is like God?” The symbolic meaning of these names is portrayed vividly as Gabriel relates to Daniel the cosmic struggle in which he and Michael are engaged:

“Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to understand, and humbled yourself before God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. So I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to befall your people in the latter days . . . But I will tell you what is inscribed in the Book of Truth: there is none who contends at my side against these except Michael.”

— Daniel 10:12-14, 21

In the Talmud, the body of rabbinic teaching, Gabriel is understood to be one of the three angels who appeared to Abraham to begin salvation history, and later led Abraham out of the fire into which Nimrod cast him. The Talmud also attributes to Gabriel the rescue of Lot from Sodom. In Christian apocalyptic tradition, Gabriel is the “Prince of Fire” who will prevail in battle over Leviathan at the end of days. Centuries after the Canon of Old and New Testament Scripture was defined, Gabriel appears also in the Qu’ran as a noble messenger.

In Jewish folklore, Gabriel was in the role of best man at the marriage of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I found that a strange idea at first,  but then it dawned on me: Who else were they going to ask? In later rabbinic Judaism, Gabriel watches over man at night during sleep, so he is invoked in the bedside “Shema” which observant Jews must recite at bedtime in a benediction called the Keri’at Shema al ha_Mitah:

“In the name of the God of Israel, may Michael be on my right hand, Gabriel on my left hand, Uriel before me, behind me Raphael, and above my head, the Divine Presence. Blessed is he who places webs of sleep upon my eyes and brings slumber to my eyelids. May it be your will to lay me down and awaken me in peace. Blessed are You, God, who illuminates the entire world with his glory.”

In a well written article in the Advent 2010 issue of Word Among Us (www.WAU.org) – “Gabriel, the Original Advent Angel,” Louise Perrotta described Gabriel’s central message to Daniel:

“History is not a haphazard series of events. Whatever the dark headlines — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, economic upheavals — we’re in the hands of a loving and all-powerful God. Earthly regimes will rise and fall, and good people will suffer. But . . . at an hour no one knows, God will bring evil to an end and establish His eternal kingdom.”

East of Eden

The Book of Tobit identifies the Archangel Raphael as one of seven angels who stand in the Presence of God. Scripture and the Hebrew Apocryphal books identify four by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. The other three are not named for us. In rabbinic tradition, these four named angels stand by the Celestial Throne of God at the four compass points, and Gabriel stands to God’s left. From our perspective, this places Gabriel to the East of God, a position of great theological significance for the fall and redemption of man.

In a previous post, “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden,” I described the symbolism of “East of Eden,” a title made famous by the great American writer, John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for it in 1962. I don’t mean to brag (well, maybe a little!) but a now-retired English professor at a very prestigious U.S. prep school left a comment on “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden” comparing it to Steinbeck’s work. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Archangel Gabriel, but I’ve been waiting for a subtle chance to mention it again! (ahem!) But seriously, in the Genesis account of the fall of man, Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden to the East (Genesis 3:24). It was both a punishment and a deterrent when they disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

“Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and to the east of the Garden of Eden he placed a Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every which way, to guard the way to the Tree of Life.”

— Gen.3: 22-24

A generation later, after the murder of his brother Abel, Cain too “went away from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, East of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16). The land of Nod seems to take its name from the Hebrew “nad” which means “to wander,” and Cain described his fate in just that way: “from thy face I shall be hidden; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14). The entire subsequent history of Israel is the history of that wandering East of Eden. I wonder if it is also just coincidence that the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the only source of the story of the Magi, has the Magi seeing the Star of Bethlehem “in the east” and following it out of the east.

An Immaculate Reception

In rabbinic lore, Gabriel stands in the Presence of God to the left of God’s throne, a position of great significance for his role in the Annunciation to Mary. Gabriel thus stands in God’s Presence to the East,  and from that perspective in St. Luke’s Nativity Story, Gabriel brings tidings of comfort and joy to a waiting world in spiritual exile East of Eden.

The Archangel’s first appearance is to Zechariah, the husband of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth. Zechariah is told that he and his wife are about to become the parents of John the Baptist. The announcement does not sink in easily because, like Abraham and Sarah at the beginning of salvation history, they are rather on in years. Zechariah is about to burn incense in the temple, as close to the Holy of Holies a human being can get, when the archangel Gabriel appears with news:

“Fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife, Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John . . . and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God and will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah . . .’”

— Luke 1:12-15

This news isn’t easily accepted by Zechariah, a man of deep spiritual awareness revered for his access to the Holy of Holies and his connection to God. Zechariah doubts the message, and questions the messenger. It would be a mistake to read the Archangel Gabriel’s response in a casual tone. Hear it with thunder in the background and the Temple’s stone floor trembling slightly under Zechariah’s feet:

“I am Gabriel who stand in the Presence of God . . . and behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass.”

I’ve always felt great sympathy for Zechariah. I imagined him having to make an urgent visit to the Temple men’s room after this, followed by the shock of being unable to intone the Temple prayers.

Zechariah was accustomed to great deference from people of faith, and now he is scared speechless. I, too, would have asked for proof. For a cynic,  and especially a sometimes arrogant one, good news is not easily taken at face value.

Then six months later “Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the House of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.” (Luke 1: 26-27). This encounter was far different from the previous one, and it opens with what has become one of the most common prayers of popular devotion.

Gabriel said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” His words became the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that and centuries of “sensus fidelium,” the consensus of the faithful who revere her as “Theotokos,” the God-Bearer. Mary, like Zechariah, also questions Gabriel about the astonishing news. “How can this be since I have not known man?” There is none of the thunderous rebuke given to Zechariah, however. Saint Luke intends to place Gabriel in the presence of his greater, a position from which even the Archangel demonstrates great reverence and deference.

It has been a point of contention with non-Catholics and dissenters for centuries, but the matter seems so clear. There’s a difference between worship and reverence, and what the Church bears for Mary is the deepest form of reverence. It’s a reverence that came naturally even to the Archangel Gabriel who sees himself as being in her presence rather than the other way around. God and God alone is worshiped, but the reverence bestowed upon Mary was found in only one other place on Earth. That place was the Ark of the Covenant, in Hebrew, the “Aron Al-Berith,” the Holy of Holies which housed the Tablets of the Old Covenant. It was described in 1 Kings 8: 1-11, but the story of Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary draws on elements from the Second Book of Samuel.

These elements are drawn by Saint Luke as he describes Mary’s haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea. In 2 Samuel 6:2, David visits this very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant.  Upon Mary’s entry into Elizabeth’s room in Saint Luke’s account, the unborn John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. This is reminiscent of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6:16.

For readers “with eyes to see and ears to hear,” Saint Luke presents an account of God entering into human history in terms quite familiar to the old friends of God. God himself expressed in the Genesis account of the fall of man that man has attempted to “become like one of us” through disobedience. Now the reverse has occurred. God has become one of us to lead us out of the East, and off the path to eternal darkness and death.

In Advent, and especially today the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we honor with the deepest reverence Mary, Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the new Ark of the Covenant. Mary, whose response to the Archangel Gabriel was simple assent:

“Let it be done to me according to your word.”

“Then the Dawn from On High broke upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet on the way to peace.”

— Luke 1:78-79

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.”