Christmas for Those Bowed Down by the Fatigue of this World

At Christmas 2023 the world is frazzled by the winds of war: Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Hamas, the Culture Wars, the political wars, and even a divisive Catholic war.

December 20, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“I have often thought it very well that Christmas should fall out in the Middle of Winter.”

— Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English poet and statesman

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Because of the limits under which I write, I had to begin to ponder this Christmas post just a few days after publishing “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel” on December 6 this year. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not make the leap from what happened to those young Thai men at the vicious hands of Hamas to find any joy in Advent hope and a Christmas spirit. I am hearing of a similar quandary from lots of readers.

Then, when the mail arrived later that same day, I picked up my copy of the December 6 edition of the National Catholic Register a very good newspaper owned by EWTN. On the front page was a large, simple, but beautiful Advent candle array with the inscription, “O Come, Divine Messiah ... .” It was very nice.

But that was all above the fold. As I flipped the paper over to see below the fold, I was assailed by the glaring headline, “Searching for Answers : Why Was Bishop Joseph Strickland Removed?” Just to the right of it on the front page was an op-ed by Fr Raymond De Souza declaring Bishop Strickland to be the former Bishop of Tyler, Texas and the current “Bishop of Twitter.”

Father De Souza ended his op-ed with a criticism that Bishop Strickland could have attended the US Bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore even after his removal, but “preferred to pray the Rosary outside as the still-presiding Bishop of Twitter.” I was in no mood by then to make light of what happened to Bishop Strickland. The NC Register news account on the same page ended with a statement that Bishop Strickland was asked by the Apostolic Nuncio not  to attend the USCCB meeting.

This edition of the NC Register was dated December 6. The news account about Bishop Strickland continued on page 6, and the op-ed by Fr De Souza also continued on page 6. There were a lot of sixes in this story. Three, to be exact.

Then, on the heels of this, it was announced that the honorable and ever faithful Cardinal Raymond Burke was told to vacate his apartment in Rome and was stripped of his retirement income and any official position. No public reason was given, but the assumption of many is that both men were removed for being critical of Pope Francis. I am loathe to jump to such a conclusion, but in the absence of any other plausible one it is what most Catholics conclude.

On “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on EWTN on November 30 (replayed on December 5), the guests included the Catholic Register Vatican reporter Edward Pentin and Damien Thompson from The Spectator of London. Of interest, I quoted both men at length in my recent post, “Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truths and the Synod.” On EWTN, both men drew the same conclusions that I described above. It was riveting, but profoundly sad.

This all seems embarrassingly petty next to the non-Catholic headlines running parallel to it: Russia’s imperial crushing of Ukraine, the Hamas brutality in Israel, Israel’s apocalyptic response, and the woke world’s decision to not see or speak the truth about the grotesquely inhuman physical and sexual violence Hamas has inflicted on innocent victims.

The Ukraine, Russian, Israeli and Hamas battles will not pause for Advent and Christmas while the relatively petty Catholic battles seem to have chosen Advent and Christmas for their escalation. That is difficult to get past. Can we move Christmas to mid-summer when many battlefields take a time-out from the heat? I suppose not.

But we can do the next best thing. We can pause for more than just a cursory time-out to honor the Birth of the Messiah. So we are repeating our BTSW Christmas card of past years with new inspired music videos, some thoughts on Christmas, a few links to inspiring Christmas posts, and an invitation to come together in a time of Eucharistic Adoration in the chapel of our Patron, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, who was no stranger to the winds of war.

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How December 25 Became Christmas

Father Abraham first heard God 21 centuries before a star rose above Bethlehem. We now live in the 21st century after. At the center of all things, Christ is born.

“For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, thy all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed.”

— Wisdom of Solomon 18:14-15

No one really knows when or why tradition first places the Birth of Christ on December 25th, but the custom is ancient. Some theorize that it was influenced by a Roman pagan feast called Saturnalia that stretched for twelve days from the winter solstice into January. The “Twelve Days of Christmas” are thus linked by some historians to pre-Christian Roman tradition. The Persian cult of Mithra, “Sol Invictus” (the “Unconquerable Sun”) practiced by many Roman legionnaires, was also marked on December 25th, and some propose a link between that and the date for Christmas.

However the observance of Christ’s birth on December 25th is far older than the time when Christianity became respectable in the Roman Empire. The first recorded mention of December 25 as the date of observance of the Feast of the Holy Birth was in a Roman document called the Philocalian Calendar dated as early as 336 A.D. Popular observance of the December 25 date of the Nativity, however, was at least a century older.

One obscure theory points to an early Roman Empire legend that great men are fated to die on the same date they were conceived. One tradition traced the date of Passover at or near March 25 in the year Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. If thus among some Romans it became popular belief that he was conceived on that date, then nine months to the day later would be December 25. In the Roman Calendar which preceded our Gregorian Calendar, March 25 was considered the first day of the new year, and to this day it remains observed as the Feast of the Annunciation.

The Roman Martyrology also includes a solemn and far more ancient reach into Judeo-Christian Tradition. The “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” is sometimes read at the Midnight Mass at Christmas after a procession from the entrance of a church to the Nativity scene. That proclamation places us at a special point in Salvation history. In fact, from our perspective, it places Christ at the very center of that history.

The Proclamation declares that Christ was born in the 21st century after Abraham, our Father in faith, ventured out of Ur of the Chaldees and first encountered God. We now live in the 21st century after. So we kneel before Him this Christmas season knowing that Christ is exactly equidistant between us and the very genesis of the human experience of God. It’s a realization that ought to shake us out of our political and theological divisions, out of our spiritual doldrums, out of any more mundane concerns.

Instead of quibbling over who among the alienated might be saved and how, this Christmas makes us fall on our knees, in sin and error pining, as He appears and our souls feel their worth. All divisions cease.

The Roman Martyrology Proclamation of the Birth of Christ:

The twenty-fifth day of December when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created the heavens and earth, and formed man in His own likeness; when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace — In the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees; in the thirteenth century since the people of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt; in the tenth century since David was anointed King; in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel; in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the founding of Rome; in the forty-second year in the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace — Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since His conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.

— The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh

O Come! Let us adore Him!

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Credit: Jobs for Felons Hub

Our Christmas Card from East of Eden

I am forced by circumstance to live in a place with men who are banished, not just from home and family and freedom, but too often also from hope. Some with even the darkest pasts have come into the light to thrill us with their stories of grace and true repentance and conversion. You have read of several in these pages and there are other stories yet to come. Some of these wounded men become saints, I am not fit to fasten their sandals.

We live East of Eden, a place from which the Magi of the Gospel saw a star and heard good news, the very best of news: Freedom can be found in only one place, and the way there is to follow the Star they followed. If you follow Beyond These Stone Walls, never follow me. Follow only Christ.

My Christmas card to you is this message, a tradition of sorts from behind these stone walls. My small, barred cell window faces East. It is there that I offer Mass for readers Beyond These Stone Walls. So my gaze is always toward the East, a place to which we were all once banished to wander East of Eden.

At the end of these cold and gray December days I step outside to watch toward the West as the sun descends behind towering prison walls. It reminds me of my favorite prayer,

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead Thou me on
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path, but now, Lead Thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: Remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone.
And with the morn those Angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

— Saint John Henry Newman

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Here is composer Eric Genuis with his original composition of Panis Angelicus, courtesy of Catholic TV.

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Here is the great Celine Dion with my favorite Christmas hymn, “O Holy Night.”

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

While Russia invaded Ukraine with its nuclear arsenal on high alert, the White House and media were compromised by partisan secrets and selective reporting.

March 9, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of media angst and ink have been spilled over the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has silenced Russian media to keep his own citizens from witnessing the horror he has inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. However, the Free World has a media problem of its own. As I began this post on March 4, 2022 my account on Facebook was disabled and taken down. This is the message I received from Facebook: “Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” The offending post, which Facebook disabled based solely on the title and introductory quote was “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

I actually wrote that post several years ago, and shared it then on Facebook with no problem. This time I shared it on Facebook’s Catholic groups which should have a particular interest in its subject matter. Eighty years ago the government of Germany launched a moral panic accusing and arresting without evidence, 300 Catholic priests on trumped up sexual abuse charges. It was all a fraud, and after many months in prison all but six were exonerated, and even several of them were falsely accused. For unknown reasons, Facebook did not want Catholic groups to see that post. I can no longer share my posts among the fifteen or so established Catholic groups and News groups such as Catholic News Agency on Facebook. But you can. Today, it seems, that the media of the “Free” World cannot abide such a story. We will be reassessing our use of social media, so if you have suggestions, please let us know.

I very much miss Walter Cronkite, the most trusted broadcast journalist of the 20th Century. He was the longtime anchor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. I grew up with him on my TV screen from the age of nine to almost twenty-nine. Walter Cronkite guided us through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. From our living rooms, he navigated the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam. He was with us as the nation held its breath in 1969 while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he navigated a long cold war with the Soviet Empire. Yet no one I know could tell me today whether his personal politics leaned left or right.

In his career, Cronkite won five Emmys and the George Polk Journalism Award. He was a newsman and pundit in the strict sense of the term, and I wanted to emulate him. For some today, the word, “pundit” has a negative connotation confused with “spin doctor.” Its origin, however, is the word “pandit” from the Sanskrit word “pad itah” spoken in parts of India and Sri Lanka. It refers to a learned sage or scholar, someone to whom everyone else would be wise to listen.

Few stand out in the news media of today as Walter Cronkite did. I am just a minor voice in modern media, but as I began this post I was surprised to receive an invitation from the PEW Research Center to join its survey of journalists. “The views you share will tell us about experiences of journalists like you across the country.” While writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I was also invited to serve as a Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. That may be the reason for my PEW Research Center invitation, but I hope it is also because I try to write truth without political filters. As a result of writing with that in mind, some have come to appreciate Beyond These Stone Walls as a source of truth and reflection about truth. Over the last few years, BTSW has received several citations as a reliable news source at the “In the News” section of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Our most recent Catalyst citation was for a post that demonstrated a double standard in public perceptions about accused Catholic priests. It was one of the most widely read posts of 2021 and still dominates traffic in 2022. Of interest, that post was widely read and shared by the thousands of readers at the r/Catholicism forum at Reddit. That post was “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

I was happy about its success because that post in particular strove to cover the truth without spin. Its bottom line was something challenging to the news media status quo: that to be accused means to be guilty. In that case, the accused was my own bishop. I also have an unhappy history with him due to some of his actions and policies. Ryan MacDonald laid those out in a most important post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”

But I was proud that I set those concerns aside to take the high road in reporting on the story of allegations against my bishop. I believe him to be innocent of any such suspicion against him. However after publication of my post about a connection between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and claims in a civil lawsuit against my bishop, I was “permanently banned” from ever again posting content at the Reddit r/Catholicism community. Then BTSW’s invitation for membership in the Catholic Media Association was rescinded without cause or explanation. The reasons for these, and the Facebook dismissal, were political and had nothing to do with the truth of what I posted.

Political Fallout at CNN

Long after posting that first story, above, its connection to former Governor Andrew Cuomo kept it in the neon lights of online interest, something I neither intended nor expected. Because the Governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo, was a lead anchor at CNN, the spotlight of investigation fell on him as well. It was discovered that he used his position as a news anchor to coach his older brother on how to navigate the news media against multiple sexual misconduct allegations. Then similar allegations were leveled at Chris Cuomo as well, among other ethics concerns.

On his way out the CNN door under a cloud, it is suspected by some in the media that he acted as a whistleblower pointing at CNN Executive Director Jeff Zucker for a long term consensual relationship with another CNN upper management employee, Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. In the end, both of them were also forced to resign from CNN under a cloud of ethical concerns amid charges of violations of their due process rights leveled by some of the remaining CNN staffers.

Allison Gollust also once briefly served as Governor Cuomo’s spokesperson. Sources at CNN today claim that Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust “pushed hard” to orchestrate and promote a series of CNN interviews between Chris Cuomo and Governor Cuomo while navigating the earlier days of the pandemic. The interviews were for the sole purpose of countering President Donald Trump’s daily news briefs about managing the pandemic. Some staff at CNN now charge that the daily Covid-19 pandemic interviews between the Cuomo brothers set the stage for the very thing for which Chris Cuomo eventually lost his job: a blurring of the borders between news and politics.

The CNN on-air interviews between Chris and Andrew Cuomo were pushed by CNN despite their straddling an ethical line because they were a boost for ratings. Since the presidential election of 2020, ratings at all three of the 24-hour cable news networks plummeted costing the networks billions in advertising dollars, but CNN and MSNBC suffered far more than Fox News. So journalistic ethics took a back seat to ratings concerns at CNN.

This is something I have long noticed. The blurring of news and opinion at all three of these networks spilled over into the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news formats. Ratings and advertising dollars at all three were lagging behind the cable news networks which in turn were lagging behind their pre-2020 election standings. It became clear that former President Donald Trump was the cause.

CNN and MSNBC had to find ways to compete with FOX News which maintained comparatively healthy post election ratings. They could only do this by appealing to their virulently anti-Trump base. So you may have noted, as I did, that at some point around mid-2021 both CNN and MSNBC returned in their prime time news and opinion formats to a daily disparagement of Donald Trump long after he left office. This also spilled over into some print journalism. As I type this post, I have in hand a resent copy of The Week magazine which decidedly leans to the usual journalistic left. The issue I am looking at, dated in mid February 2022, contains one reference to sitting President Joe Biden and five references, all negative, to former president Donald Trump.

Of interest, CNN now plans major changes. After a merger between its parent WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., former MSNBC producer Chris Licht will become chairman and CEO of CNN Global. He is reported to be planning to adjust CNN’s broadcast format to include an emphasis on hard news and less opinion especially in its prime time schedule.

A Laptop Window onto Corruption

As I write this, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a full scale invasion of Ukraine. It is frightening to watch this unfolding reminder of the old Soviet Union and its savage consumption of neighbor states. For the most part, MSNBC and CNN are taking a little break from disparaging Donald Trump, but even now I hear the occasional blame aimed at Trump's foreign policy. We are not at all well served in this partisan distortion of news, but it is even worse than you think. Vladimir Putin knows well that both the sitting President of the United States and the American news media are compromised. There is simply no other way to say this, and I know that, for some, it will label me as a pro-Trump partisan which is not at all the truth.

A few months ago, a reader gifted me with a small book entitled Laptop from Hell by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. I was interested in the book because I was fascinated by media — and social media — treatment of this story in the months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We were a nation in denial about our own addiction to partisan politics, and the news media had become our greatest enabler as it struggled for ratings and advertising dollars. Now, with the Russian thirst for war, the truth of this story is at risk of being buried forever. So please let me do my own small part in preventing this even if it is painful. It is nonetheless the truth.

Our President is compromised, and so is much of our mainstream media. In 2019, drug-addicted Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Mac repair shop in Delaware, and then promptly forgot about it. It was just six days before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Months later, just as the 2020 primaries got underway, the owner of the repair shop discovered the abandoned laptop along with a signed repair invoice from Hunter Biden who never returned to retrieve it. The laptop ended up in the hands of the New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in the United States.

Hunter Biden was unresponsive to inquiries to ascertain that the laptop was his. He later finally owned it by stating in an interview that “I just wasn’t keeping very good track of my possessions then.” Since no one claimed it in time, the Post began to have it analyzed and discovered the entire contents of its hard drive. Miranda Devine described it as:

“A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs and voice recordings spanning a decade. The laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine and beyond despite repeated denials. Hunter [Biden] had something to sell. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.”

While Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden mysteriously landed a $1 million per year position on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine oil company under suspicion for corruption. Hunter Biden had zero previous experience in that industry. Miranda Devine’s account of the contents of the “Laptop from Hell” reveals a series of emails to Hunter from shady figures in Ukraine demanding that he make good on his position by bringing political pressure to bear to remove a Ukraine prosecutor who had set his sights on investigating Burisma.

Joe Biden, while vice president, then set his own sights on that same prosecutor. In an impromptu speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, Joe Biden told the story of how he had flown into Kyiv aboard Airforce-2 and threatened to withhold from the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Prosecutor General Shokin was fired. Vice President Biden boasted:

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

— Laptop from Hell p. 95

In the months leading up to the presidential election of 2020, most of the mainstream media, and the powerful social media platforms at Twitter and Facebook, suppressed this story and many other related accounts covered by the New York Post. This is not about the outcome of that election. It is about trust in government and the news media to cover news without partisan political considerations. The existence of the book, Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine, and the political efforts to silence it before a national election, now place our trust in both the media and our government at risk in a time of war. As Miranda Devine points out: “Hunter Biden found himself at the center of a titanic struggle between the US and Russia over energy... How the vice president’s son got involved with such a shady operation has always been obscured.”

Truth be told, our president and much of our news and social media credibility are now compromised by this story and Vladimir Putin knows this.

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Update from Father Gordon MacRae: As reported in this post, our Facebook page was taken down on March 4th. On March 8th, after I wrote the above post, I published a short article at Linkedin entitled “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

A few hours after it was published, our Facebook page was reinstated without explanation and is now back online. However, when we attempted to post this post on my Facebook page, Facebook refused it with a message stating that other readers may not agree with it. Welcome to the world of the Facebook Speech Police.

We also want to bring to your attention a new addition to our “Voices from Beyond” section. It was first published a few years ago in the National Catholic Register newspaper, and it was the first time mainstream Catholic media had taken up my case. The article, by Brian Fraga, is “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name.”

There is more to come next week on the terror unfolding in Ukraine. Please share this post, and please pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia who are now pawns in these current events.