How SNAP Foisted McCarthyism Upon the Catholic Church

Generating fears, shameful to our ears, ruining careers; personal attacks, alternative facts, financial kickbacks: the rap of SNAP for a modern American witch hunt.

September 3, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

Ever so slowly awakening across America is a long-suppressed awareness of an ugly part of history that keeps repeating itself. There are prophets arising among us who are finding the courage to speak truth to power — in this case the power of mob justice. One of them is columnist Michelle Malkin whose article, “Fighting for the Falsely Accused” was sent to me some time ago.

Michelle Malkin tells the gruesomely familiar tale of former Fort Worth, Texas police officer, Brian Franklin. Convicted of the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in 1995, he spent the next twenty-one years in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. As Ms. Malkin describes, “There were no witnesses. There was no DNA.” There was just one person’s word against another’s, and the jury — after lots of media hype — was conditioned to bring no skepticism to the heavily coached testimony of a distraught teen.

The sole evidence was a medical report of a physical examination concluding that the girl had in fact been sexually assaulted. That, and a claim that the assault occurred in the backyard of her biological father who was a friend of the police officer-suspect, was enough to satisfy prosecutors and a jury.

It was a prosecutorial perfect storm, and the fact that there was no other evidence, no DNA to test, no witnesses to the peripheral circumstances of the crime, left the defendant-turned-prisoner with nothing to satisfy the court’s demand for proof of actual innocence. So with no one having to “prove” Brian Franklin’s actual guilt, his imprisonment went on and on, passing two decades in the long, slow parade of lost time that struck home hard for me. “It’s the easiest crime to be falsely accused of,” Mr. Franklin says today.

Before reading any further, try to place yourself in Brian Franklin’s shoes for a moment. It’s easy to feel immune from the gravity of such injustice because we have no frame of reference for it happening to ourselves — or to a brother, a father, a son, a close friend, a parish priest — until it does. How would you defend yourself against such a charge when no evidence at all is needed to convict you?

After 21 years in prison — what Michelle Malkin described as “a harrowing 7,700 days of a life sentence” — Mr. Franklin had to fight for freedom even after newly discovered evidence emerged showing that the girl’s stepfather was the actual assailant. In a new trial 21 years after the first, Mr. Franklin was acquitted. He then had to fight again, that time for a declaration of actual innocence from a Texas court that would make him eligible for reparations for the 21 years of life stolen from him.

Over time, laws have been passed that make such exonerations very difficult to obtain. Judges in my own appeals have declined to even review newly discovered evidence because of laws that don’t require them to. Under current New Hampshire law, a convicted defendant has one year from the date of conviction to find and bring forward new evidence that might challenge it, an impossible task from prison.

In a majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that “actual innocence is not, in itself, a constitutional claim,” that would support a federal habeas corpus  petition for a new trial. Rehnquist wrote for the majority court that innocent defendants in such cases can seek a political solution by asking for a pardon or sentence commutation from their governors. In the entire history of the State of New Hampshire, not a single such petition has ever been granted for a claimed sexual offense. As Brian Franklin said, “it’s the easiest crime to be falsely accused of,” and the most difficult from which to obtain justice once accused.

And as for reparations for the wrongly convicted, two decades ago, the New Hampshire Legislature, passed a law limiting reparations for wrongful imprisonment to a $20,000 cap regardless of how many years or decades a wrongfully convicted person spent in prison. It would cost more than that just to hire a lawyer to pursue such a claim for reparations.

The Catholic Rise of McCarthyism

In the case of Brian Franklin, he reports that he was sustained throughout those 21 lost years by the fact that, as Michelle Malkin wrote, “his family and church stood by him.” On the day this is posted, I awaken to my 11,286th harrowing day of a life sentence in prison for crimes that never took place at all. The things that sustained Brian Franklin have been largely absent from my experience and that of any other American Catholic priest so accused.

When a Catholic priest is accused, the first line of defense for a bishop and diocese is driven by lawyers and insurance companies and it has one goal: to get as much distance as possible from the accused. When I was accused, my bishop and diocese issued a press release that pronounced me guilty before jury selection in my trial. My diocese added to the published pre-trial statement that I also victimized the entire Catholic Church.

I don’t think anyone in the Diocese of Manchester would stand by that today, but they don’t stand against it either. I think that today they have a hard time explaining it so they just don’t even try, but I know exactly what happened, and it’s time to say it out in the open. In the current climate, few accused Catholic priests could have a fair trial in America. No convicted Catholic priest could be heard justly by an American appellate court or judge. No one in the Church or judicial system wants to admit this, but it is true, and we can learn why from a 1950s moral panic called “McCarthyism”.

Church officials, after getting their distance from the accused, leave it to the civil courts to sort out guilt or innocence. Maintaining a pretense about the integrity of the outcome, they remain blind or silent, or both, about the role played by money and the practice of mediated settlements in generating accusations. I described how this played out in my own diocese in my post, “David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

From 1990 to the present, activists from SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — carried out a highly effective campaign modeled after the community activism of Saul Alinsky and the tactics of ACORN, the radical Association for Community Organization for Reform Now. The activist campaign used public demonstrations and the news media to shame anyone who challenged or dissented in any way from the moral panic they promoted. The nature of the forces at work in this were described by The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger in “McCarthyism at Middlebury” (March 9, 2017):

“America’s campuses have been in the grip of a creeping McCarthyism for years. McCarthyism, the word, stands for the extreme repression of ideas and silencing of speech. In the 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy turned his name into a word of generalized disrepute by using the threat of communism, which was real, to ruin innocent individuals’ careers and reputations.”

Just substitute “campuses” with “Catholics,” “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy” with “SNAP’s David Clohessy,” and “the threat of communism” with “sexual abuse,” and the McCarthyist aura around the abuse narrative in the American Catholic church is clear.

That aura was created by SNAP, and maintained by its director, David Clohessy. Like Communism in the 1950s, sexual abuse is real, a fact harnessed by David Clohessy at SNAP and Terence McKiernan at Bishop Accountability to fuel the moral panic they created. It thus became a weapon for an open assault on the Catholic Church. In every media venue that would have them, SNAP stood ready to pounce on any bishop or Church official who called for even the most basic due process and civil liberties for Catholic priests so accused.

In “SNAP Implodes” in the March 2017 issue of the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, Bill Donohue described how SNAP manipulated the media with picket signs and feigned “Holy Childhood” photos, and harmed the Church through what he called “the conspiratorial savaging of innocent priests.” I am one of them, and I thank Bill Donohue for this truth, and for having the courage to write it when few others would. Now it’s on you, dear reader. Please share this post. Shout it from the rooftops in the public square of your social media.

SNAP obliterated the lives, reputations, and civil rights of hundreds of merely accused priests by publicly shaming them as “predators” and “pedophiles.” They knew well that these terms carried the same force of shock and moral panic as the political panic that ensued when a charge of “communist” or “communist sympathizer” was leveled in the 1950s. The manipulation of those terms, and of a news media hungry for scandal, characterized and empowered the shaming, blackballing, and ruined lives of the McCarthy Era, the widely accepted model for the modern American witch hunt.

For a stark example of the power of those words to shock even judges and deny priests the basic rights of American citizens, see our recent post, “Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae.”

Be Wary of Crusaders

In the later 1980s and 1990s, SNAP had the terminology right. The scandal in the priesthood was first and foremost a story of homosexual predation and blackmail. But to maintain the moral panic, the language had to change to suit political correctness. The terminology did not sit well with the gay rights movement, so SNAP had to change its tactics and its language. Even the bishops went along with the new script, and to this day many Catholic commentators still stick to the “pedophile priest” story. I wrote about this in a 2011 post, “Be Wary of Crusaders The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well.” One sentence has often been quoted from it:

“It is a testament to the power of reaction formation [a classic Freudian defense mechanism] that an entire institution would now prefer the term ‘pedophile scandal’ to ‘homosexual scandal’ even when the facts say otherwise.”

David Clohessy was masterful at abusing the term and using its force of shock to manipulate the news media. SNAP activists labeled as “pedophile enablers” any person of conscience who called for the application of less outrage and more due process when a priest was accused.

Like an accusation of witchcraft in 1692 Massachusetts, or of being a Communist in 1955 Washington, “The P-Word” — pedophile — was fired like a bullet from an automatic weapon by SNAP activists with rancor and an intent to demean and disarm any skeptic asking for due process. The extent to which this one word was misused and manipulated was a key factor behind what writer, Ryan A. MacDonald wrote was “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court,” another post that screams for justice and for both Church and State to take notice.

An example of the tactics of SNAP came from an activist writing under the name, “Neal Allen.” He seemed to stalk cyberspace for any positive comments or articles that called my own case into question, or presented a review of the facts. “Neal Allen” posted the same toxic comment everywhere, fired like a bullet calling me a “convicted pedophile,” and anyone writing in favor of my innocence a “pedophile enabler.”

Then it was discovered and exposed — by the heroic David F Pierre, of TheMediaReport.com — that “Neal Allen” does not even exist. It was a fake screen name used by a member of SNAP to give the impression that a mob was building to gang up on any dissenter from the attacks on me, on other priests, and the Church. Once “Neal Allen” was exposed as a fraud, he simply disappeared, but not before bullying lots of people into silent submission.

Now, from the recent lawsuits, resignations, and a kickback scandal within SNAP itself, it seems that none of this was ever about helping survivors or protecting children. It was just about money. In the name of nothing more redemptive than money, great, great harm has been brought upon the Church and priesthood.

The United States bishops going into their meeting in Dallas in 2002 were utterly terrified of Clohessy and SNAP, and the mesmerized news media that seemed to hang on their every word. When the USCCB invited David Clohessy and SNAP founder Barbara Blaine to address the 2002 U.S. Bishops Conference in Dallas in full view of the news media, the bishops had settled on a harsh reality that the best way to avoid being targeted by a witch hunt was to join it.

When it was over, and the “Zero Tolerance” language of the Dallas Charter was set in place, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote in his masterful analysis, “Scandal Time,” that the bishops scrambled to the newspapers “to check their score.” Fr. Neuhaus was one of the few Catholic voices to speak out in conscience against this assault on the American priesthood, and in this he gets the posthumous last word from his essay, “Scandal Time”:

“Zero tolerance. One strike and you’re out. Boot them out of ministry. Of course, the victim activists are not satisfied, and, sadly, may never be satisfied. The bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and unCatholic approach to sin and grace. They ended up adopting a policy that was sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost everything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

— Source: Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square

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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post for the cause of justice for accused priests and the wrongfully imprisoned. This story needs greater exposure to take it out of the shadows for, sadly, most of our news media has avoided this aspect.

Don’t stop here. There is more to learn on this from Beyond These Stone Walls:

David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae
A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court

From the Catholic League: Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates

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.”

Bombshells and Black Ops Defeated Justice in New Hampshire

Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F McLaughlin is retired but his legacy of bombshells and black ops left a lingering trail of deceit, injustice and ruined lives.

June 26, 2024 by Ryan A. MacDonald

(Editor’s Note: The photo above depicts the Keene, NH Central Square gazebo. Photo: “Keene NH 26” by Alexius Horatius, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 / cropped)

On the day this article is published, a Catholic priest in America will awaken in a prison cell at age 71 in his thirtieth year of wrongful incarceration for fictitious crimes, sans evidence alleged to have occurred in 1983.

Every time I write about this story, my Inbox fills with messages from readers stunned and appalled by the facts of the 1994 trial of Fr Gordon MacRae. A small minority pose questions such as “How do you know he is innocent?” to which I usually reply, “What makes you think he may not be?” Then the tirades begin, but they never answer my question. Those who labor to suppress this case of false accusation preface their answers with statements like, “Priests did terrible things and bishops covered it up!” “We all know these priests are guilty,” and (from a SNAP activist) “The Catholic Church is a child raping institution!”. The prevailing logic here is that the details of this specific case do not matter. Father MacRae went to prison in 1994 for the sins of the Church, the sins of the bishops, and the sins of the priesthood. For too many silent Catholics who just want to move on from The Scandal, that is okay. It is not okay.

Then there are those who trumpet the fact that after Fr MacRae’s trial he pled guilty to other things. It is a favorite chant of the prosecutorial voices in all this which, sadly, include some officials of MacRae’s diocese. But it is true only if one is jaded enough to view the truth in its narrowest sense, disconnected from its factual history. It is not the whole truth. I explored that phenomenon in depth in “The Post Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae,” a previous chapter in this series.

In the trial of Father MacRae, the sole evidence was the word of Thomas Grover, a 27-year-old, 200 pound former high school football player who fell on bad times. Grover had a criminal rap sheet for assault, theft, forgery, and narcotics charges — all kept from the jury by Judge Arthur Brennan. He had a long history of drug abuse, and gained nearly $200,000 for “telling a lie and sticking to it,” as his ex-wife later described his testimony. She also says, today, that he punched her and broke her nose when she questioned his perjury.

And yet throughout this case, with all these factors in plain sight of everyone but the jury, not one person questioned whether this man might be lying for money. Not the zealot Detective James F. McLaughlin who today reportedly responded to the question of injustice with one of his own: “Why didn’t MacRae just take the plea deal?” Not the two prosecutors, one of whom was fired after this trial while the other later committed suicide. Not Judge Arthur Brennan who sent this priest to prison for the rest of his life while citing evidence that no one has ever seen or heard, evidence that never existed. Evidence that Grover was lying for money would have been in plain sight in a legitimate investigation. It emerged only years later in the Statement of Charles Glenn.

Nor was the possibility of lying for money ever openly considered by anyone in the Diocese of Manchester as they wrote six-figure checks to pay Grover and his brothers off. By the time it was all over, Thomas Grover, Jonathan Grover, David Grover and Jay Grover — all adults “remembering” their claims in the same week over a decade later — emerged from the case with combined settlements in excess of $650,000. Father MacRae boldly addressed the nature of such settlements, which continue to this day, in “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.”

MacRae took, and passed, two pre-trial polygraph (lie detector) tests in this case. Thomas Grover and his brothers never assented to take a polygraph.

In “The Ordeal of Father MacRae,” President Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights charged that Fr MacRae, “has been treated unjustly by the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil.” Bill Donohue is not the first Church figure of note to suggest this. The late writer and editor, Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote that this case “reflects a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.” The late Cardinal Avery Dulles expressed a similar analysis of the case. I do not imagine any of them would blithely suggest that some Church officials — by commission or, more likely, omission — abetted a process in which a priest was wrongly imprisoned less than twenty miles from the Chancery Office of his diocese while denied proper legal assistance and due process for three decades.

Celebrating a Witch Hunt

The truth is worse than you know. During these same three decades , Fr MacRae — and he is still “Father” MacRae — has been forced to divide his less than meager resources to also fight off a simultaneous attempt by his Bishop to have him dismissed from the clerical state based on the fact that he is convicted and in prison. In a commentary for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, I referred to such forced laicization as “a sort of ecclesiastical equivalent of lethal injection.” To date, that one-sided effort has not yet been successful in the MacRae case, but the effort was initiated by the same bishop who was the subject of this letter from a former official at PBS television:

“I contacted the Manchester Diocese from WGBH… A few weeks later, when I met with Bishop [John] McCormack, the very first words he said to me were, ‘This must never leave this office. I believe Fr MacRae is innocent and his accusers likely lied.’.”

— Letter to Judge Brennan, Oct. 24, 2013

This whole story began with an explosive, slanderous lie. But the question remains, “Whose lie was it?” Bill Donohue wrote that MacRae’s troubles began in 1983 with a vague claim that was investigated, but nothing came of it. In 1985 the same claim surfaced again, was investigated by state officials, and was formally dismissed as “Unfounded.” This story should have ended there, but it was only just beginning.

In September of 1988, Ms. Sylvia Gale with the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) sent a letter to Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F. McLaughlin. The letter claimed that she had developed information that before coming to New Hampshire, Father Gordon MacRae was a priest in Florida where “he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” She identified MacRae as the primary suspect in that case, and claimed in the letter that the case remained unsolved when MacRae was sent by Church officials to “Berlen (sic) NH” to avoid that investigation. The Sylvia Gale letter was at best, a bombshell.

The explosive letter went on to claim that this information was passed on to Sylvia Gale by a former employee of Catholic Social Services who claimed to have been told this account by her supervisor, Monsignor John Quinn of the Diocese of Manchester. Ms. Gale’s letter alleged that Msgr Quinn threatened to fire his employee if she divulged this story further. This unnamed Catholic social services worker appears to have also been the therapist who began the MacRae case with the repeated but unfounded claims in 1983 and 1985.

Until 1994, when he received it as part of pre-trial discovery, Fr MacRae was entirely unaware of the libelous letter from Sylvia Gale implicating him in molestation and murder. But in New Hampshire, state social workers, prosecutors, and judges are immune from lawsuits. Nor was MacRae even aware of Detective McLaughlin’s investigation that ensued as a result of the Sylvia Gale letter. He had no idea that Detective McLaughlin, armed with this letter, proceeded to track down every family whose adolescent sons knew Father MacRae at any time during the 1980s. His report describes questioning twenty-six Keene, NH adolescents and their parents while generating little more than gossip and innuendo for most, and the first thoughts of lucrative opportunities for some.

Among those approached by Detective McLaughlin armed with the Florida molestation and murder story in 1988 was Patricia Grover, the mother of accusers yet to come and herself a state social worker in the same child protection agency that employed Sylvia Gale. It appears from the reports that the two had already collaborated about the Florida letter, and Ms. Grover vowed that she would begin speaking with her sons who knew Father MacRae.

One of them, Jonathan Grover, was soon to be discharged from the U.S. Navy for refusing its alcohol intervention program after a drunk driving arrest. Jonathan years later died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 48 in Phoenix, Arizona. Another, Thomas, then age 21, had been terminated from his third or fourth stint in residential treatment for drug addiction after he was caught smuggling drugs into the treatment facility. In 1988, these approaches to the Grover brothers yielded no accusations. Five years later, as the prospect of money loomed, they changed their minds.

In regard to the slanderous Florida, claim, Father MacRae had never been a priest in Florida, had never even visited Florida, and had never been assigned in Berlin, NH, as Sylvia Gale’s letter alleged. A simple check with the records of the Diocese of Manchester would have revealed that he was ordained for that diocese in 1982. He spent the previous four years at St Mary Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland and the four years before that at St Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Detective McLaughlin ran with the Sylvia Gale letter without ever bothering to check the facts. This is consistent with a reading of all of his reports in the MacRae case and with new witness statements. It appears that McLaughlin skillfully avoided asking questions or pursuing leads that might yield any information contrary to his bias.

I read up to page fifty of Detective McLaughlin’s voluminous, outrageous witch hunt that was his 1988 report before the Florida story emerged again. He learned from unnamed Florida police that the story was bogus and never happened, that there was never a molestation and murder case involving a Catholic priest, and that they had never before even heard the name of Father Gordon MacRae.

However McLaughlin’s report also claimed that another Florida sheriff, a “Sgt. Smith,” revealed that some other priest molested two boys there and was moved by the Church to New Hampshire. “But the names don’t match and your suspect is too young to be that suspect,” McLaughlin quoted the Florida sheriff. His report gives the impression that McLaughlin did not even think to ask for the name of that priest. Officials of the Diocese of Manchester later wrote that no priest ever came to the Diocese of Manchester under those circumstances.

It is of interest in these reports that Fr MacRae was somehow transformed from a “subject” to a “suspect,” but of what? This was never a case in which individuals went to the police with a complaint about this priest. From all the witness statements I have seen, it was McLaughlin who went to them, and it was McLaughlin who suggested that “a large sum of money” could be had by accusing MacRae. In another report McLaughlin wrote, “I asked him where he stood on a civil lawsuit.”

Meanwhile, written questions to Monsignor John Quinn about his reportedly being the source of the Florida story were answered minimally, with one-word denials but no light. Others in the Diocese of Manchester cooperated in similar fashion and often only after prompting by the suggestion of a subpoena.

The door and window of Father MacRae’s office at Saint Bernard rectory in Keene, New Hampshire in 1983. It overlooks Main Street and the busiest part of downtown Keene, NH.

“Going for a Sex Abuse Victim World Record”

A year before the above investigation ensued, Thomas Grover was a patient at Derby Lodge, a drug treatment center in Berlin, NH, and his third or fourth attempt at such treatment. While there, according to his counselor, he was repeatedly confronted for his distortions, dishonesty, and manipulation. He reportedly told his counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett , that he had been sexually abused by his adoptive father who by this point had been divorced from Patricia Grover.

According to Ms. Collett’s statements, Grover also claimed to have been sexually abused by so many people in the past that it appeared that he was “going for some sort of sexual abuse victim world record.” Also according to her statements, he never accused Fr Gordon MacRae. Ms. Collett went on to reveal an alleged series of coercive harassment and overt threats from Detective McLaughlin to get her to alter her account before testifying at MacRae’s 1994 trial.

Four and a half years after the Florida letter and Detective McLaughlin’s investigation swept through Keene, NH, Thomas Grover and two of his brothers — and later a third brother, Jay Grover, who once told Detective McLaughlin that MacRae had never done anything wrong — all now accused the priest. Two of them also accused another priest, Father Stephen Scruton, providing highly detailed accounts of rape and molestations by Scruton. Fr Scruton was also named as someone who witnessed MacRae’s abuse of Jonathan Grover, and in two of his claims, the two priests abused him simultaneously at age 12. Then it was changed to age 14.

However, Fr Scruton was not present in that parish with MacRae until Jonathan Grover was over sixteen years old. When that fact became apparent, it never raised a doubt in McLaughlin’s mind. He just excised Scruton’s name from future reports as though never mentioned, and MacRae became the sole priest accused. The entire file contains no evidence that Detective McLaughlin ever questioned Rev. Stephen Scruton about Jonathan Grover’s claims despite having already investigated and charged Scruton with an entirely unrelated claim brought by Todd Biltcliff who was a high school classmate of Jonathan Groven. That claim resulted in a financial settlement by the Diocese of Manchester.

McLaughlin wrote in one of his reports that he gave the Grovers a copy of MacRae’s resume “to help them with their dates.” At the end of this three-ring circus, Father MacRae ended up in a trial of the facts where there were no facts, in a courtroom where credibility was the sole measurement of guilt or innocence. But there was also no credibility. Hype and a stellar performance by a practiced con artist had to suffice, and it did.

Witness Tampering

Late in 2013, a man who was present at that 1994 trial wrote a letter about it to retired Judge Arthur Brennan who presided over the MacRae trial. What follows are some excerpts of that letter postmarked November 24, 2013:

“My wife and I were present in the courtroom throughout most of the trial of Fr Gordon MacRae in 1994. I have had many questions about this trial and much that I’ve wanted to clarify for my own peace of mind… We saw something in your courtroom during the MacRae trial that I don’t think you ever saw. My wife nudged me and pointed to a woman, Ms. Pauline Goupil, who was engaged in what appeared to be clear witness tampering. During questions by the defense attorney, Thomas Grover seemed to feel trapped a few times. On some of those occasions, we witnessed Pauline Goupil make a distinct sad expression with a down-turned mouth and gesturing her index finger from the corner of her eye down her cheek at which point Mr. Grover would begin to cry and sob on the stand. The questions were never answered.

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

One of the challenges for the prosecution of this trial was to get Thomas Grover to look like a victim. It was not easy. At 27 years old at trial, Grover was a 5’ 11”, 200-pound ex-high school football player with a history of alcoholism and a police record including domestic violence, assault, forgery, narcotics, and theft charges — all suppressed in this trial by Judge Arthur Brennan. The sobbing Thomas Grover on the witness stand could not mask his real persona for long. Consider this next excerpt from the above letter to Judge Brennan from a witness at trial:

“Secondly, I was struck by the difference in Thomas Grover’s demeanor on the witness stand in your court and his demeanor just moments before and after outside the courtroom. On the stand, he wept and appeared to be a vulnerable victim. Moments later, during court recess, in the parking lot he was loud, boisterous and aggressive. One time he even confronted me in a threatening attempt to alter my own testimony during sentencing.”

The presence of Ms. Pauline Goupil in this story is highly problematic, and, to a layman’s eyes, most suspicious. A masters level psychotherapist, she was retained pre-trial by Grover at the behest of his contingency lawyer “because it would look better for the jury,” according to Grover’s ex-wife, Trina Ghedoni, whose later Statement cast some previously unseen light on this trial.

At one point in the trial, Ms. Goupil, once exposed, was forced under a court order to turn over her treatment file. It contained but a few pages, and not a single therapeutic record pertaining to any claims of abuse of Thomas Grover by Father MacRae. However, Ms. Goupil’s file did contain this letter purportedly written by her to Thomas Grover who apparently had not been showing up for his pre-trial coaching sessions with her:

“Jim tells me MacRae is being offered a deal his lawyers will want him to take so there won’t be a trial. We can just move on to the settlement phase.”

I discussed this letter previously in “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud,” my first installment in this series. The letter was part of a file of perhaps six pages that Pauline Goupil turned over upon orders of the court. A year later, during evidentiary proceedings from lawsuits brought by Thomas Grover and two of his brothers — a hearing in which everyone but the imprisoned priest had lawyers representing them — Ms. Goupil testified at length about her pre-trial sessions with Thomas Grover and her work in aiding the reconstruction of his memories of abuse at age 15. For excerpts of that testimony see my article, “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”

None of Ms. Goupil’s role in this case ever became known by the Fr MacRae trial jury. Like everyone else involved in the prosecution of this case, she has since declined to be interviewed or to answer any questions.

“Jim” in Ms. Goupil’s above letter to Thomas Grover refers to Detective James McLaughlin, a now retired sex crimes investigator for the Keene, NH Police Department. In 2018, his name was briefly added to a secret list of police officers with a history of official misconduct. McLaughlin sued in a secret “John Doe” lawsuit heard with no public accountability. In May 2024, he was allowed to have his name removed from that public list. The prevailing belief among court observers in New Hampshire was that McLaughlin was afforded this level of anonymity and the judicial outcome because leaving his name on that list could have reopened hundreds of other cases like MacRae’s.

At some point in his investigation of Thomas Grover’s claims against Gordon MacRae, the detective appears to have taken up some sideline work on behalf of Grover’s contingency lawyer. In 1993 before Fr MacRae was charged or even aware of the claims against him, McLaughlin obtained a warrant for a “one-party intercept,” a sting attempt to record a telephone call from Thomas Grover to the priest who at that time was involved in in New Mexico. Little, if any, of the resultant call made its way into the 1994 trial, however. The recorded claims from Grover elicited nothing more than the bewildered voice of Father MacRae apparently wondering what on Earth the caller was talking about. However, this attempt at a telephone sting revealed something far more interesting.

Detective McLaughlin had apparently learned of a toll-free “800” number for contacting Fr MacRae. His police report detailed his attempts to call that number from his office at the Keene Police station. However, phone records which coincided with McLaughlin’s reports about executing the warrant indicate that the calls were not placed from his office at Keene Police headquarters, but from the office of Grover’s contingency lawyer 50 miles away. This has never been explained. Also never explained are statements from Grover’s family members who today reveal that the contingency lawyer gave Grover repeated cash advances before MacRae’s criminal trial, a practice that, if true, was a violation of the New Hampshire Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers. It is but another example of the pervasive lure of money in this story from start to finish.

An immediate problem for anyone trying to get to the bottom of all this is the absence of recorded interviews. It seemed to be Detective McLaughlin’s standard procedure to record interviews with accusers — referred to as “victims” in every one of his reports that I have read.

Another new witness statement from Steven Wollschlager alleges that McLaughlin knowingly elicited false accusations against Fr MacRae in exchange for cash and an implication that “life could go easier with a lot of money.” Wollschlager was subpoenaed to testify before a Grand Jury to process a new indictment against Fr MacRae just before the Grover trial, but decided at the last minute that he could not pursue this lie. Wollschlager added that McLaughlin’s reports contain statements that he never said, and distortions of what he did say.

The one recording McLaughlin did appear to make was that of his interview with Thomas Grover’s counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett. Today, she reports that he badgered her, threatened her, and allegedly bullied her into restating her account into something he wanted to hear, and he did all of this on tape. That recording was never turned over to the defense and has never seen the light of day.

Detective McLaughlin did not seem to record his interviews with any of the Grover brothers accusing Gordon MacRae. This was a startling departure from his own longstanding methods and protocols. The choice not to record anything in this one case seems calculated, and it has never been explained. The fact that today, multiple witnesses claim to have been bribed, coerced, badgered, and otherwise manipulated by this detective could lead a rational observer to question what has gone on here, and to doubt the credibility of the claims against this priest.

It is true that there has been a cover-up in the Catholic clergy sex abuse story, but it is not the one everyone thinks it is. It took place twenty years ago in beautiful downtown Keene, New Hampshire.

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Editor’s Note: The above article continued a series by Ryan A. MacDonald. Other titles in this series include “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud,” “The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence,” and “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.”

Judge Arthur Brennan, who sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to life in prison, being arrested in the Congressional Chambers in Washington, DC as part of the “Occupy Movement.”

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.”

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

Former Boston Archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law was vilified by The Boston Globe and SNAP, but before that he was a champion of justice in the Civil Rights Movement.

June 19, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr MacRae: I first wrote this post in November 2015. I wrote it in the midst of a viral character assassination of a man who had become a convenient scapegoat for what was then the latest New England witch hunt. That man was Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop of Boston. I have to really tug hard to free this good man’s good name from the media-fueled availability bias that so mercilessly tarnished it back then. A good deal more has come to light, and I get to have the last word.

By coincidence, and it was not planned this way, but the date of this revised reposting is June 19, 2024, the day that the United States commemorates the emancipation of African American slaves on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas. As you will read herein, Cardinal Bernard Law was a national champion in the cause for Civil Rights and racial equality.

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Four years after The Boston Globe set out to sensationalize the sins of some few members of the Church and priesthood, another news story — one subtly submerged beneath the fold — drifted quietly through a few New England newspapers. After a very short life, the story faded from view. In 2006, Matt McGonagle resigned from his post as assistant principal of Rundlett Middle School in Concord, New Hampshire. Charged with multiple counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old high school student six years before, McGonagle ended his criminal case by striking a plea deal with prosecutors. McGonagle pleaded guilty to the charges on July 28, 2006.

He was sentenced to a term of sixteen months in a local county jail. An additional sentence of two-and-a-half to five years in the New Hampshire State Prison was suspended by the presiding judge in Merrimack County Superior Court — the same court that declined to hear evidence or testimony in my habeas corpus appeal in 2013 after having served 20 years in prison for crimes that never took place.

In a statement, Matt McGonagle described the ordeal of being prosecuted. He said it was “extraordinarily difficult,” and thanked his “many advocates” who spoke on his behalf. In the local press, defense attorney James Rosenberg defended the plea deal for a sixteen month county jail sentence:

“The sentence is fair, and accurately reflects contributions that Matt has made to his community as an educator.”

— Melanie Asmar, “Ex-educator pleads guilty in sex assault,” Concord Monitor, July 29, 2006

Four years earlier, attorney James Rosenberg was a prosecutor in the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office from where he worked to prosecute the Diocese of Manchester for its handling of similar, but far older claims against Catholic priests.

The accommodation called for in the case of teacher/principal Matt McGonagle — an insistence that he is not to be forever defined by the current charges against him — was never even a passing thought in the prosecutions of Catholic priests. Those cases sprang from the pages of The Boston Globe, swept New England, and then went viral across America. The story marked The Boston Globe’s descent into “trophy justice.”

Cardinal Sins

I have always been aware of this inconsistency in the news media and among prosecutors and some judges, but never considered writing specifically about how it applied to Cardinal Bernard Law until I read Sins of the Press, a book by David F. Pierre, Jr. On page after page it cast a floodlight on The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-endorsed lynching of Cardinal Law, offered up as a scapegoat for The Scandal and driven from Boston by the news media despite having never been accused, tried, or convicted of any real crime.

Does the “lynching of Cardinal Law” seem too strong a term? Historically, the word “lynching” came into the English lexicon from the name of Captain William Lynch of Virginia who acted as prosecutor, judge and executioner. He became notorious for his judgment-sans-trial while leading a band to hunt down Loyalists, Colonists suspected of loyalty to the British Crown in the War for Independence in 1776.

The term applies well to what started in Boston, then swept the country. Most of those suspected or accused in the pages of The Boston Globe, including Cardinal Bernard Law, were never given any trial of facts. As I recently wrote in, “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants,” many of the priests were deceased when accused, and many others faced accusations decades after any supportive evidence could be found, or even looked for. The Massachusetts Attorney General issued an astonishing statement given short shrift in the pages of The Boston Globe:

“The evidence gathered during the course of the Attorney General’s sixteen-month investigation does not provide a basis for bringing criminal charges against the Archdiocese and its senior managers.”

— Commonwealth of Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly, “Executive Summary and Scope of the Investigation,” July 23, 2003

So I decided to explore the story of Cardinal Bernard Law for Beyond These Stone Walls. When I first endeavored to write about him, he had been virtually chased from the United States by some in the news media and so-called victim advocates deep into lawsuits to fleece the Church. Though not intended originally, my post was to be published on November 4, 2015, which also happened to be Cardinal Law’s 84th birthday.

When I wrote of my intention to revisit the story of Cardinal Bernard Law from a less condemning perspective, it sparked very mixed feelings among some readers. A few wrote to me that they looked forward to reading my take on the once good name of this good priest. A few taunted me that this was yet another “David v Goliath” task. Others wrote more ominously, “Don’t do it, Father! Don’t step on that minefield! What if they target you next?” That reaction is a monument to the power of the news media to spin a phenomenon called “availability bias.”

A while back, I was invited by Catholic League President Bill Donohue to contribute some articles for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. My second of two articles appeared in the July/August 2009 issue just as Beyond These Stone Walls began. It was entitled “Due Process for Accused Priests” and it opened with an important paragraph about the hidden power of the press to shape what we think:

“Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on a phenomenon in psychology and marketing called ‘availability bias.’ Kahneman demonstrated the human tendency to give a proposition validity just by how easily it comes to mind. An uncorroborated statement can be widely seen as true merely because the media has repeated it. Also in 2002, the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal swept out of Boston to dominate news headlines across the country….”

This is exactly what happened to Cardinal Law. There was a narrative about him, an impression of his nature and character that unfolded over the course of his life. I spent several months studying that narrative and it is most impressive.

Then that narrative was replaced by something else. With a target on his back, the story of Cardinal Law was entirely and unjustly rewritten by The Boston Globe. Then the rewrite was repeated again and again until it took hold, went viral, and replaced in public view the account of who this man really was.

Even some in the Church settled upon this sacrificial offering of a reputation. Perhaps only someone who has known firsthand such media-fueled bias can instinctively recognize it happening. Suffice it to say that I instinctively recognized it. I offer no other defense of my decision to visit anew the first narrative in the story of who Bernard Law was. If you can set aside for a time the availability bias created around the name of Cardinal Bernard Law, then you may find this account to be fascinating, just as I did.

From Harvard to Mississippi

As this account of a courageous life and heroic priesthood unfolded before me, I was eerily reminded of another story, one I came across many years ago. It was the year I began to seek something more than the Easter and Christmas Catholicism I inherited. It was 1968, and I was fifteen years old in my junior year at Lynn English High School just north of Boston. Two champions of the Civil Rights Movement I had come to admire and respect in my youth — Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy — had just been assassinated. And just as my mind and spirit were being shaped by that awful time, I stumbled upon something that would refine for me that era: the great 1963 film, The Cardinal.

Based on a book of the same name by Henry Morton Robinson (Simon & Schuster 1950), actor Tom Tryon portrayed the title role of Boston priest, Father Stephen Fermoyle who rose to become a member of the College of Cardinals after a heroic life as an exemplary priest. It was the first time I encountered the notion that priesthood might require courage, and I wondered whether I had any. I was fifteen, sitting alone at Mass for the first time in my life when this movie sparked a scary thought.

Father Fermoyle was asked by the Apostolic Nuncio to tour the southern United States “between the Great Smokies and the Mississippi River” — an area known for anti-Catholic prejudice. He was tasked with writing a report on the state of the Catholic Church there during a time of great racial unrest.

In the script (and in the book which I read later) Mississippi Chancery official, Monsignor Whittle (played in the film by actor, Chill Wills) was fearful of the racist, anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan. He tried to dissuade Father Fermoyle from making any waves, but his mere presence there would set off a tidal wave of suspicion. In a horrific scene, Father Fermoyle was kidnapped in the night, blindfolded, and driven to the middle of a remote field — a field where many young black men had disappeared.

His blindfold removed, he found himself surrounded by men in sheets and white hoods, illuminated by the light of a burning cross. Father Fermoyle was given a crucifix and ordered to spit on it or face the scourging of Christ. Henry Morton Robinson’s book conveys the scene:

“He held the crucifix between thumb and forefinger, lofting it like a lantern in darkness…. Ancient strength of martyrs flowed into Stephen’s limbs. Eyes on the gilt cross, he neither flinched nor spoke. [The music played] ‘In Dixieland I’ll take my stand.’ Stephen prayed silently that no drop of spittle, no whimpering plea for mercy, would fall from his lips before the end… The sheeted men climbed into their cars. Not until the last taillight had disappeared had Stephen lowered the crucifix.”

— The Cardinal, pp 412-413

This could easily have been a scene from the life of Father Bernard Law. Born on 4 November 1931 in Torreon, Mexico, Bernard Francis Law spent his bilingual childhood between the United States, Latin America, and the Virgin Islands. His father was a U.S. Army Captain in World War II and Bernard was an only child. Very early in life, he learned that acceptance does not depend on race, or color, or creed, and once admonished his classmates in the Virgin Islands that “Never must we let bigotry creep into our beings.”

At age 15, Bernard read Mystici Corporis, a 1943 Encyclical of Pope Pius XII that Bernard later described as “the dominant teaching of my life.” He was especially touched by the language of inclusion of a heroic Pope in a time of great oppression. The encyclical was banned in German-occupied Belgium for “subversive” lines connecting the Mystical Body of Christ with the unity of all Christians, transcending barriers such as race or politics.

As a weird aside, I was in shock and awe as I sat typing this post when I asked out loud, “How could I find a copy of Mystici Corporis while stuck in a New Hampshire prison cell?” Then our convert friend, Pornchai Moontri jumped from his bunk, pulled out his footlocker containing the sum total of his life, and handed me a heavily highlighted copy of the 1943 Encyclical. I haven’t yet wrapped my brain around that, but it’s another post for another time.

While attending Harvard University, Bernard Law found a vocation to the priesthood during his visits to Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard in 1953, the year I was born, a local bishop advised him that Boston had lots of priests and he should give his talents to a part of the Church in need. At age 29, Father Bernard Law was ordained for what was the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson, Mississippi.

Standing before the Mask of Tyranny

The year was 1961. The Second Vatican Council would soon open in Rome, and the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam (and I do mean steam!) in the United States, Father Law immersed himself in both. A Vicksburg lawyer once remarked that Father Law “went into homes as priests [there] had never done before.” With a growing reputation for erudition and bridge building on issues many others simply avoided, Bernard was summoned by his bishop to the State Capital to become editor of the diocesan weekly newspaper, then called The Mississippi Register.

It was there that the courage to proclaim the Gospel took shape in him, and became, along with his brilliant mind, his most visible gift of the Holy Spirit. Another young priest of that diocese noted that Father Law’s racial attitudes — shaped by his childhood in the Virgin Islands — were different from those of most white Mississipians. “He felt passionately about racial justice from the first moment I knew him,” the priest wrote. “It wasn’t a mere following of teaching, it came from his heart.”

I know many Mississippi Catholics today — including many who read Beyond These Stone Walls — but in the tumultuous 1960s, Catholics were a small minority in Mississippi. They were also a target for persecution by the Ku Klux Klan which was growing in both power and terror as the nation struggled with a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

An 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in “Plessy v. Ferguson” had defined the doctrine of “separate but equal” as a Constitutional nod to racial segregation, but in 1954 in “Brown v. Board of Education,” the Supreme Court based a landmark desegregation ruling on solid evidence that “separate” was seldom “equal.” Opposition to the ruling grew throughout the South, and so did terrorist Klan activities. In 1955, the murder of a black Mississippi boy, 14-year-old Emmett Till, rocked the state and the nation, as did the acquittal of his accused white killers.

This was the world of Father Bernard Law’s priesthood. Up to that time, the diocesan newspaper, The Mississippi Register, had been visibly timid on racial issues, but this changed with this priest at the helm. In June of 1963 he wrote a lead story on the evils of racial segregation citing the U.S. Bishops’ 1958 “Statement on Racial Discrimination and the Christian Conscience.”

One week later, the respected NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down outside his Jackson, Mississippi home. Both Father Law and (then) Natchez-Jackson Bishop Richard Gerow boldly attended the wake for Medgar Evers under the watchful eyes of the Klan. Father Law’s next issue of The Mississippi Register bore the headline, “Everyone is Guilty,” citing a statement by his Bishop that many believe was written by Bernard Law:

“We need frankly to admit that the guilt for the murder of Mr. Evers and the other instances of violence in our community tragically must be shared by all of us… Rights which have been given to all men by the Creator cannot be the subject of conferral or refusal by men.”

Father Law and Bishop Gerow were thus invited to the White House along with other religious leaders to discuss the growing crisis in Mississippi with President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Later that summer, Father Law challenged local politicians in The Mississipi Register for their lack of moral leadership on racial desegregation, stating “Freedom in Mississippi is now at an alarmingly low ebb.” Massachusetts District Judge Gordon Martin, who was a Justice Department attorney in Mississippi at that time, once wrote for The Boston Globe that Father Law…

“…did not pull his punches, and the Register’s editorials and columns were in sharp contrast with the racist diatribes of virtually all of the state’s daily and weekly press.”

Later that year, Father Law won the Catholic Press Association Award for his editorials. In “Freedom Summer” 1964, when three civil rights workers were missing and suspected to have been murdered, Father Bernard Law openly accepted an invitation to join other religious leaders to advise President Lyndon Johnson on the racial issues in Mississippi. When the bodies of the three slain young men were found buried at a remote farm, the priest boldly issued a challenge to stand up to the crisis:

“In Mississippi, the next move is up to the white moderate. If he is in the house, let him now come forward.”

Later that year Father Law founded and became Chairman of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations. Then the home of a member, a rabbi, was bombed. Then another member, a Unitarian minister, was shot and severely wounded. The FBI asked Father Law to keep them apprised of his whereabouts, and Bishop Gerow, fearing for his priest’s safety, ordered him from the outskirts of Jackson to the Cathedral rectory, but Bernard Law feared not.

Cardinal Law’s life and mine crossed paths a few times over the course of my life as a priest. I mentioned above that while attending Harvard University, Bernard Law found his vocation to the priesthood during visits to Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge. Many years later, in 1985, my uncle, Father George W. MacRae, SJ, the first Roman Catholic Dean of Harvard Divinity School and a renowned scholar of Sacred Scripture, passed away suddenly at the age of 57. I was a concelebrant at his Mass of Christian Burial at Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge. Concelebrating with me was Cardinal Bernard Law where his life as a priest first took shape.

In 2013, The New York Times sold The Boston Globe for pennies on the dollar.

On December 20, 2017, Cardinal Bernard Law passed from this life in Rome.

Oh, that such priestly courage as his were contagious, for many in our Church could use some now. Thank you, Your Eminence, for the gift of a courageous priesthood. Let us not go gentle into The Boston Globe’s good night.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I am indebted for this post to the book, Boston’s Cardinal : Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, edited by Romanus Cessario, O.P. with a Foreword by Mary Ann Glendon (Lexington Books, 2002).

You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

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

Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truths about the Synod

Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate

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.”

Weapons of Mass Destruction

At the behest of paid, unnamed ‘trauma-informed consultants,’ my diocese provided a six-figure settlement for a claim far too old to be filed in any court of law.

May 22, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

And they keep on coming. A year before the 2002 wave of clergy sex abuse claims rippled out of Boston across the country, Sean Murphy, age 37, and his mother, Sylvia, demanded $850,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston. Sean claimed that three decades earlier, he and his brother were repeatedly molested by their parish priest. In support of the claim, Mrs. Murphy produced old school records placing her sons in a community where the priest was once assigned. No other corroboration was needed. Shortly thereafter, Byron Worth, age 41, recounted molestation by the same priest and demanded his own six-figure settlement. The men were following an established practice of “mediated settlements,” a precedent set in the early 1990s when a multitude of molestation claims from the 1960s and 1970s emerged against Father James Porter and a few other priests. In 1993, the Diocese of Fall River settled some 80 such claims in a single negotiated deal. Other Church institutions followed that lead on the advice of insurers and attorneys.

Before the Murphys’ $850,000 demand was paid, however, Sean, his mother, and Byron Worth were indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury for conspiracy, attempted larceny, and soliciting others to commit larceny. It turned out that Sean and Byron were once inmates together at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Shirley where they concocted their fraudulent plan to score a windfall from their beleaguered Church.

On November 16, 2001, Sean Murphy and Byron Worth pleaded guilty to fraud charges and were sentenced to less than two years in prison for the scam. The younger Murphy brother was never charged, and Mrs. Murphy died before facing court proceedings. Local newspapers relegated the Murphy scam to the far back pages while headlines screamed about the emerging multitude of decades-old claims of abuse by priests. When two other inmates at MCI-Shirley accused another priest in 2001, a Boston lawyer wrote that it is no coincidence these men shared the same prison. “They also shared the same contingency lawyer,” he wrote. “I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that this is a current and popular scam.”

It is not difficult to understand the roots of such fraud. Prison inmates, like others, read newspapers. Just months before the onslaught of claims against priests, the Archdiocese of Boston landed on the litigation radar screen with the notorious arrest of Mr. Christopher Reardon, a young, married, Catholic layman, model citizen, and youth counselor at a local YMCA who was also employed part-time at a small, remote parish outpost north of Boston. As Mr. Reardon’s extensive serial child molestation case came to light—with substantial and graphic DNA, videotape, and photographic evidence of assaults that occurred over previous months—the YMCA quickly entered into settlements consistent with the State’s charitable immunity laws.

In a search for deeper pockets, however, a local contingency lawyer pondered for the news media about whether the rural part-time parish worker’s activities were personally known—and covered up—by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. It was a ludicrous suggestion, but it was a springboard to announce in the Boston Globe (July 14, 2001) that “the hearsay and speculation” among lawyers and clients, is that “the Catholic Church settled their cases [of suspected abuse by priests] for an average of $500,000 each since the 1990s.”

It was a dangled lure that would soon have many takers, some of whom have been to the Church’s ATM more than once. In January of 2003, at the height of the clergy scandal, a 68-year-old Massachusetts priest had the poor judgment to be drawn into a series of suggestive Internet exchanges with a total stranger, a 32-year-old man named Dominic Martin. Using a threat of media exposure of the printed exchanges, Mr. Martin demanded that the priest leave an envelope containing $3,000 in a local restaurant lobby.

The frightened priest, who never had a prior accusation, compounded his poor judgment by paying the demand. Soon after, another cash demand was made, but the priest finally called the police who set up a sting of their own. On January 24, 2003, Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna, were arrested at the drop point, and charged with extortion.

The police report revealed that Mr. Martin had changed his name. His birth name was identified as Tod Biltcliffe, a man who, a decade earlier, obtained a settlement when he accused a New Hampshire priest of molesting him in the 1980s. At the time the priest protested that Mr. Biltcliffe was committing fraud and larceny. The Church settled anyway. Biltcliffe’s claim was that when he was 15 years old, the priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA. Curiously, the investigation file contained a transcript of a 1988 “Geraldo Rivera” show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” One of the cases profiled was that of a young man who claimed that a priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA.

The 1988 “Geraldo” transcript was a sensationalized account of clergy sex abuse cases from the 1970s and 1980s. The transcript is notable because it contains many of the same claims of exposing secret Church documents, archives, and episcopal cover-ups in 1988 that lawyers and reporters claim to have exposed for the first time in 2003.

Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country. Jason Berry, who excoriates the Church and priesthood at every turn, actually defended, in 1988, the existence of so-called “secret” Church archives: “Canon law says that you have to have a secret archive in every diocese…. That’s funny because I’ve been attacking the Church for three years on this… I want to express my own irony of [now] being in a position of defending the Church.”

Enter Shamont Lyle Sapp

When Shamont Lyle Sapp first detected the smell of money, he found it too enticing to pass up. Convicted for a series of bank robberies, Mr. Sapp, then age 51, was serving a lengthy sentence in the dark peripheries of the U.S. Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania when the scent first drifted by his cell in 2008. That was when Sapp filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. Detailing his tragic past, Sapp’s lawsuit claimed that he was a stranded teenage runaway from his Pennsylvania home en route to stay with relatives in Oregon. Then Archdiocese of Portland priest, Father Thomas Laughlin took advantage of his plight to repeatedly sexually abuse him.

Sapp claimed in his highly detailed lawsuit that the priest offered the young runaway a job cutting grass, then sexually abused him at a Portland Catholic church. Then Father Laughlin sodomized him during a five-day motel stay paid for by the priest who then funded the youth’s return trip to Pennsylvania. It was the latest horror story in the Catholic abuse narrative, and one that dismayed Catholics coast to coast.

Mr. Sapp’s story rang true, so it flew. Further inquiry was deemed unnecessary. The detailed claims were reported to civil legal authorities for whom the story also rang true, but Father Tom Laughlin had already been accused and convicted by others with similar tales. Mr. Sapp’s disturbing story added to the weight of a growing millstone around the priest’s neck.

In all public documents in the case, Mr. Sapp found refuge among an ever-expanding list of “John Does” accusing priests from the Archdiocese of Portland to cash in on its bankruptcy proceedings. Sapp’s story was accepted at face value resulting in a cash settlement of $70,000. Inmate Sapp accepted the offer while lawyers, the Archdiocese, and victim advocates all pontificated about how no amount of money could compensate him for the trauma he endured. As for Father Laughlin, the “credible” (aka “settled”) accusations drove another nail into the coffin containing the remains of his priesthood as the Archdiocese sought his dismissal.

There was only one problem with Shamont Lyle Sapp’s story: “It was entirely fabricated,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer who in 2014 prosecuted Sapp for mail fraud and other federal charges for this and three similar frauds carried out against Catholic priests and dioceses in four jurisdictions. While serving another sentence in a medium security state prison in Minersville, PA, Mr. Sapp filed a second lawsuit claiming that a priest of the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona sexually abused him.

Later still, Sapp was serving a sentence in a South Carolina prison from where he sought compensation for claimed sexual abuse by another priest. And before all the above, Sapp filed a 2006 lawsuit claiming that a Spokane, Washington priest had sexually abused him in a similar account.

In all these other claims, Sapp picked from diocesan records the names of senior priests who had never before been accused, destroying not only their good names, but their vocations. Each was removed from ministry under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter. They became “Priests in Limbo,” as the National Catholic Register’s Joan Frawley Desmond described priests living, sometimes for years, under a cloud of shame and suspicion for events that could not be disproven after the passage of time. In each of his claims, Shamont Lyle Sapp simply did a little research on publicly available bankruptcy proceedings entered into by each of the four beleaguered dioceses he sued. He then attached his name and claims to each case — one by one over several years — aided and abetted by an assurance of anonymity as “John Doe” at every level in the settlement process.

He was also “John Doe” in the news media, and in the fired-up rhetoric of the activists of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests who are ready to dismiss any hard questions as “revictimizing the victims.” It was ultimately his own greed that unfolded Mr. Sapp’s hand. In 2011, Sapp gained some notoriety when he filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages against comedians Jamie Fox and Tyler Perry, falsely claiming that they stole from him an idea for a film project called “Skank Robbers.” Finally, someone took a hard look at Shamont Lyle Sapp, and it was his undoing.

“Like the Anti-Communist Witch Hunt of the 1950s”

In a 2004 article in the Boston Phoenix, “Fleecing the Shepherds,” legal expert and author Harvey Silverglate cautioned against capitulating to significant numbers of questionable claims brought after the Church entered into huge blanket settlements. In some cases, such claims were deemed “credible” — the standard established for permanent removal of accused priests — with no other basis than their having been settled.

As accusations swept over the U.S. Church, few in the media dared write anything contrary to the tidal wave gaining indiscriminate momentum against the Church. A notable exception was the left-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal, which editorialized: “Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties… All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.”

With media coverage of the unprecedented $4 billion invested in mediated settlements, the trolling for claims and litigation continues unabated. In 2007, a Boston area high school history teacher and coach of twenty years, a husband and father with no prior record or accusation, was caught up in an Internet sting by New Hampshire Detective James F. McLaughlin posing on-line as a teenage boy cruising Internet chat rooms for sexual encounters. The practice has netted the detective some 600 arrests, including — by his own estimation — one Catholic priest, six police officers, and 18 public school teachers.

The Keene, New Hampshire police detective was also known to have fielded cases for local contingency lawyers. The ex-teacher, now prison inmate, related that as the handcuffs were set upon him, before he was even led out of the YMCA to which he had been lured and arrested, Detective James F. McLaughlin reportedly asked some enticing questions: “Are you a Catholic?” “Yes,” said the suspect. “Were you ever an altar boy?” Another “Yes.” “Were you ever molested by a priest?”

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: The mainstream media, and sometimes even the Catholic media as well, too often shrinks from reporting on the story of fraudulent claims of victimhood. So please share this post on social media and elsewhere. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

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.”

Pop Stars and Priests: Michael Jackson and the Credible Standard

The late Michael Jackson settled one abuse claim for $20 million but supporters maintain his innocence. A Catholic priest is ruined for life just for being accused.

April 24, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Daniel Kahneman died last month on March 27, 2024. Just as Beyond These Stone Walls was beginning, I was asked by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, to write an article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. Published in July 2009, my article was “Due Process for Accused Priests.” It began with a revelation about the work of Daniel Kahneman, a noted psychologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in a phenomenon known as “availability bias.”

As a result of availability bias, humans tend to replace their beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs simply because a proposition has been repeated in the media and presented as widely believed. We are subjected to subtle cues of social pressure every day in marketing that convince many people to purchase things they don’t really need. We also face subtle cues and social pressure in the daily bombardment of news stories that cause many people to believe something based solely on its prevalence in the media. It is indeed possible that Michael Jackson and many Catholic priests became the subjects of classic, media-fueled availability bias.

In his 2011 bookThinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman laid out the foundations of what a stream of availability bias might look like:

“An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by ‘availability entrepreneurs,’ individuals or organizations who seek to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a ‘heinous cover-up’”

— Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p.142

Does this not sound like exactly what has taken place in the early days of the priesthood crisis? In that arena, the “availability entrepreneurs” were composed largely of contingency lawyers and groups like SNAP, which I once exposed in “David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

One of the conclusions of “availability bias” widely touted in the media is that statutes of limitation for lawsuits should be extended or discarded because it takes victims of sexual abuse many years or decades to come forward. The prison system in which I have spent the last 30 years houses nearly 3,000 prisoners. Estimates of those convicted of sexual offenses account for about 40 percent of them. This translates into a population of approximately 1,200 offenders in this one prison who stand convicted of sexual crimes, most true but some not. In addition to these 1,200 men, thousands more are currently on parole in New Hampshire as “registered” sexual offenders.

Only one among these thousands is a convicted Catholic priest, and if you have been paying attention at all, then you know that his conviction has been widely called into serious doubt. The thousands of other men convicted of sexual abuse are accused parents, grandparents, step-parents, foster parents, uncles, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, and so on, and for them the typical time lapse between abuse and the victim reporting it has been measured in weeks or months, not years — and certainly not decades.

My own diocese, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, in just the last month has provided a six-figure settlement to the accuser of a long deceased priest accused in a claim from 52 years ago. Even the lawyer involved admitted in a press report that “No lawsuit was filed because the alleged abuse happened outside the statute of limitations, but … it is important for survivors to come forward as part of the healing process,” which in this case involves a whole lot of money, forty percent of which goes to that attorney. In their own statement, Church officials said, “The Diocese of Manchester provides financial assistance to those who have been harmed, regardless of when the abuse occurred.” I live in a place with men some of whom have taken lives for far less money than that provided by my diocese to those who falsely took my reputation and freedom.

A simultaneous press release came under the title “Diocese of Manchester Adds to List of Clergy Accused of Sexual Abuse of a Minor.” Accuracy in language is important here. The press release continued, “The Diocese of Manchester added three priests to its list of clergy accused of sexual abuse.” Note that the usual term “credibly accused” is missing from these reports. Even that weakest of standards seems to have been discarded in favor of discarding priests who are merely “accused.” Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of the risks that such published lists pose to priests. His eye-opening article was, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”

Pop Stars and Priests

I kicked a hornets’ nest some years ago when I wrote an article in response to a quote from actress Marlo Thomas who suggested in some published forum that the best American role model for middle school age boys might be singer Michael Jackson. I scoffed in my own response why the suggestion was ridiculous for many reasons, not least being the taint of sexual abuse claims against him.

Despite being acquitted in a criminal trial, Michael Jackson settled a single claim of sexual abuse for a reported $20 million, and untold millions settled other claims against him. When Michael Jackson died, he was celebrated as a cultural icon of the entertainment industry. In contrast, an American bishop, under pressure from a victims’ group, reportedly ordered the remains of a posthumously accused priest exhumed from a diocesan cemetery and reinterred elsewhere.

My point was not that I thought Michael Jackson was guilty. It was that for many fans the claims and sett1ements did not destroy his name. He was acquitted at trial, so if there was any evidence at all a jury did not find it persuasive. Some people conclude that, despite acquittal in a criminal trial, Michael Jackson’s multi-million dollar settlement of civil lawsuits was itself evidence of guilt. I’ll get back to that point.

Catherine Coy, a fan and advocate of Michael Jackson, sent a shot across my bow back then for suggesting any connection between settlements and credible accusations. I knew I was in for it when Ms. Coy began her message with “You, of all people …!”  Actually, when Catherine Coy and I listened to each other, we came to a sort of detente if not agreement. In a 2005 article, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” (Catalyst, Nov. 2005), I detailed the relationship between mediated settlements and claims against Catholic priests. Did Michael Jackson become vulnerable to the same media-generated shroud under which claims against priests were seen as “credible?”

Catherine Coy insisted that in spite of monetary settlements, Jackson had never had a “credible” claim of sexual abuse lodged against him. That statement might evoke a dismissive “Yeah, right!” in some corners, but not in mine.

Why did so many people presume the worst of Mr. Jackson? It certainly wasn’t evidence. It is more of a spontaneous response, and one that is very similar to what happens when priests are accused and maintain their innocence. This is the point predicted by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The mere news media repetition of sordid stories about Michael Jackson and Catholic priests took on such prevalence in the news media that they became an unconscious bias against both. When the Catholic bishops of the United States refer to a 20-, or 30- or 40-year-old claim against a priest as “credible” they mean only that they have determined that both the priest and the accuser lived in the same community in the time period alleged.

Michael and I in The Wall Street Journal

Catherine Coy was right. I, of all people, should have seen the analogy instantly. Ms. Coy wrote “There isn’t a person alive who could have withstood the onslaught of lies, innuendo and slander that was heaped on Jackson for well over 20 years.” On that score, I beg to differ, but I see her point.

The very association of Michael Jackson’s name with the bizarre proclivity attributed to him may in fact be the result of media-fueled availability bias and not evidence. There is no doubt in my mind that I and many other priests have faced this same phenomenon. With no personal experience of the behaviors attributed to some accused priests, many Catholics simply adopted the point of view given them by the news media.

This does not mean that all the claims of sexual abuse by priests are false. The U.S. Bishops commissioned a formal study of the matter conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. There were really two waves in the scandal. The first was the revelations that priests were accused at the time alleged abuse happened in the 1960’s to the 1980’s, and then were quietly moved around to other parishes to avoid a public scandal. This was scandalous enough, and tragic.

The John Jay Report also revealed that a full seventy percent of the claims faced by bishops and dioceses in 2002 and following also alleged claims from the 1960’s to 1980’s, but those claims were not brought forward until 2002 when it became clear that Church institutions would settle because of the bludgeoning they took in the media. Those claims were propelled by the widely held belief that it takes victims decades to realize they were abused and report it. Lots of people now believe that, and entire states have passed legislation to accommodate that belief. However, as demonstrated in “Due Process for Accused Priests,” the “delayed reporting” principle is classic availability bias.

In June, 2005, just three months after Dorothy Rabinowitz published an explosive two-part analysis of the case against me in The Wall Street Journal, Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Daniel Henninger wrote a most interesting commentary as Michael Jackson’s criminal trial got underway (“Pushing the Envelope – Michael Jackson: A Freaky Culture’s Peter Pan,” June 3, 2005).

It was Daniel Henninger who first put into print what I hoped someone out there might grasp:

“[Prosecutor] Tom Sneddon may lose this case. If so, it will be because Mr. Jackson, like Kobe Bryant [and O.J. Simpson], was able to mount a defense equal to the accusatory powers of the state. Not everyone can do that. If Michael walks, I’ll wonder if any of the many convicted Catholic priests similarly charged were in fact innocent but found guilty because they couldn’t push back against the state’s relentless steamroller.”

I do not at all begrudge Michael Jackson’s having had the means to mount a defense equal to the state’s prosecution of him. Whatever he spent defending himself, it was less than the state spent trying to put him in prison. At the same time, I thought Daniel Henninger’s comment about convicted priests was just and fair, but he missed an important point. I no longer have the letter, but I wrote to Mr. Henninger shortly after his 2005 editorial. This is the gist of what I wrote:

“As a priest without the means to push back in equal measure to Michael Jackson, I must point out some factors you overlooked:

“Imagine how steeply uphill Michael Jackson’s battle would have been if twenty years passed between the alleged crime and the state’s prosecutorial steamroller rumbling into action for a trial. Imagine the state having to prove nothing while Michael Jackson’s defense tried in vain to prove that something alleged to have happened two decades earlier never happened at all.

“Then imagine Michael Jackson struggling to proclaim his innocence while the institution he served denounced him and his attempts to defend himself, seeking only the path of least resistance to settle with his accusers and rid themselves of liability at the expense of due process.

“Imagine all of this, and you will have captured the scene faced by most similarly accused Catholic priests.”

The Wall Street Journal

The aftermath of those articles in April, 2005 was most interesting. The accusers in the case against me — anxious to talk to the news media before receiving settlements — suddenly had nothing to say. one of my prosecutors had nothing to say. The other took his own life. The judge was quoted in a local news article saying, vaguely, “Review is a positive thing.” Then he took early retirement from the bench. The police detective who choreographed the case, reportedly offering bribes to potential accusers, had nothing to say and has since been exposed on a previously secret list of ethically challenged police.

After those WSJ articles about me, I expected an onslaught of defensive rhetoric from victims’ groups, prosecutors, and contingency lawyers, but it never came. The sole protest came from the most unexpected source. Father Edward Arsenault, my Bishop’s delegate and the man most involved in settlement negotiations in these cases, declared that I was found guilty in a court of law by a jury of my peers, and nothing else needed to be said. Father Arsenault denounced The Wall Street Journal and its writer as biased. Incredible!

A few years later, Msgr. Edward Arsenault was convicted of multiple counts of embezzlement, including charges of forgery and fraud, and sentenced to prison. He was subsequently dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis but now inexplicably has a new life and a new name: Edward J. Bolognini.

In 2005 just as the Catholic scandal was building up steam to rumble full speed ahead for a national contingency lawyer windfall, I did not expect that the world’s largest secular newspaper would publish so openly against the tide — or tidal wave — of typical media coverage of claims against priests while most in the Catholic media remained silent. With the exception of Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things and The Catholic League in Catalyst, and the Catholic World Report, the Catholic media — on both the left and the right — continued to remain silent about false claims against priests brought for money, or, worse, they have used the clergy scandal for some agenda of their own.

And of Michael Jackson, writing in The Nation, (“The Love We Lost”), JoAnn Wypijewski wrote that

“Ordinary rules of judgment have been suspended” in this sound-bite culture of news that shapes most peoples’ views on sex and the accused:

“[I]t  cannot matter that Michael Jackson was acquitted of child molestation, since he was frequently remembered in death as a pedophile… just as it cannot matter whether others who plead guilty to a sex charge really did it, or whether evidence to convict was nonsense, or whether the guilty served their time. They can never ‘pay their debt to society.’ Guilt is the presumption, forever.”

JoAnn Wypijewski went on to describe the case of the priest convicted in a trial in which the sole “credible” evidence presented to the jury was the mere fact that he is a priest — that, and a claim of repressed and recovered memory, the legitimacy of which is always questioned when the accused is not a priest.  In an all-too familiar twist, that priest’s bishop added his own sound bite by administratively dismissing the priest from the priesthood just before the sham of a trial.

JoAnn Wypijewski also bravely wrote about me just as the fiasco film, “Spotlight” was receiving its Academy Award for Public Service. Her ground-shaking article was “Oscar Hangover Special: Why "Spotlight" Is a Terrible Film.”

After what has now exceeded $4 billion in total mediated settlements nationwide, the matter of false claims is the elephant in the sacristy that no one wants to talk about. At the same time, our beleaguered Catholic bishops present case after case as “credible” despite knowing exactly what that term means and does not mean.

The “credible” standard Catherine Coy applied to Michael Jackson is admirable and hopeful. Ms. Coy’s fair-minded attitude about Michael Jackson is the polar opposite of what is now applied to Catholic priests.

There is no mechanism whatsoever beyond preserved DNA or an admission of guilt that would serve as evidence that a priest accused from decades ago is guilty. There is no investigation technique that could determine the credibility of such claims. What makes most claims against priests “credible” is the fact that someone — not them — has paid money to an accuser. Nothing else. Catholics should take note of the efforts by Michael Jackson fans to revisit credibility despite financial settlements which, in the secular world, are merely designed to make the claim go away with no statement of culpability.

For my part, I can only remember the famous scene early in Michael’s trial during which he danced on the hood of an SUV outside the court to the wild cheers of fans. Michael sure was a strange guy, but the dance gave me pause. Having been through such a trial, I know its oppression. That dance was surely the act of a delusional man …

… or perhaps an innocent one.

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Your comments are most welcome, but they are moderated, so they may not appear instantly. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

Due Process for Accused Priests, Catalyst, July 2009

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List

David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

The Wall Street Journal on the Case of Fr Gordon MacRae

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.”

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Some Older Songs

The Covid pandemic nearly ended this blog by a priest in prison. From under its wreckage came something new, but catching up and keeping up is a steep uphill climb.

November 29, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I will always be grateful to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights for seeing past the myths and agendas about the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. They got to the truth, and boldly exposed it in Bill Donohue’s recent book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse. If you are not a member of the Catholic League, please consider joining. It has done much to support the religious liberty of Catholics and has defended the reputations of Catholic priests falsely accused, including mine.

Most of our readers know that this blog began in the summer of 2009 as These Stone Walls. I had been invited by Bill Donohue to submit an article for the monthly Catholic League journal, Catalyst. My first published piece from prison was rather bluntly but truthfully titled, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud.”

It was published in November 2005 just six months after Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal published a major two-part exposé about the fraudulent case against me. Together, these articles caused a bit of an uproar with denunciations coming from the activist group, SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. It was out of fear of the relentless public condemnation of accused priests that our due process rights severely eroded while most in the Church maintained a self-preserving silent distance. That tide changed just a little when the Catholic League published “SNAP Exposed.” After terrorizing priests and bishops for two decades, SNAP president David Clohessy resigned after exposure in a kickback scheme.

Besides Bill Donohue, some other high profile Catholics — though they were few — also took courageous positions in spite of ridicule. Cardinal Avery Dulles sent words of encouragement, the first I had ever heard in prison from any prelate or priest: “Your article is an important one, and hopefully will be followed by many others. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent, and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.”

However, one Catholic blogger took umbrage with that. He need not be named now, but he published a mean-spirited criticism of Cardinal Dulles, chastising him for reaching out (technically, reaching “in”) to a convicted priest in prison. When it was read in Australia, a writer there urged me to allow her to start a blog in my name. At about the same time, Father Richard John Neuhaus published an influential editorial about my trial in First Things magazine entitled, “A Kafkaesque Tale.”

One month later in 2008, Cardinal Dulles asked in a letter to me in prison that I consider “adding a new chapter to the volume of Christian writing from those unjustly in prison.” He asked that I add to the voices of some who had already become my spiritual heroes: St. Maximilian Kolbe, Fr Walter Ciszek, Fr Alfred Delp, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If Cardinal Dulles were to make this request today, he would surely add Cardinal George Pell. All had inspired me. All had become a part of my life in prison.

Then Cardinal Dulles died on December 12, 2008, the Feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. His good friend, Father Richard John Neuhaus, who joined him in eternal life just three weeks later, eulogized him in First Things: “We thank God for love’s fire that burned to the end, and we pray that the truth to which he bore tireless witness, is now opened to him in the fullness of the Beatific Vision for which he longed with nothing less than everything.”

Thus These Stone Walls was born in 2009. It was my friend, Pornchai Moontri who suggested its name from a 17th Century poem, “To Althea from Prison,” by Richard Lovelace:

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.

This blog began in conflict but it also began in friendship. What started off as a negative slur against me and Cardinal Dulles turned into something life-changing, for both me and others. I recently recalled this story with my friend, Pornchai Moontri, who is now free in Thailand, but struggling to reclaim the life that was long ago taken from him. On September 23, to mark the start of my 30th year unjustly in prison, Pornchai wrote a deeply moving post about what happened to both of us and what this blog has accomplished in our lives. It made me cry. It also many of our readers cry, but not all tears are tears of sorrow. Pornchai’s post was, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Some Older Songs Must Now Be Sung Anew

My apologies and thanks to the great Marguerite Johnson for lending me a title for this post from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her acclaimed 1970 autobiography. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928, Marguerite began writing under the pen name, Maya Angelou at age 25 in 1953, the year I was born. She went on to become a celebrated American poet, novelist, screenplay writer, actress, film director, and an icon of the American Civil Rights movement. Her writing began in trauma, as did mine, and her trauma was followed by seven years of silence. During those seven years, Maya Angelou did not speak at all.

Some of our readers have seen the graphic atop this post before. As the Covid pandemic engulfed the world in 2020, writing from my present location became difficult to the point at which I was almost effectively silenced. Then, after publishing over 500 posts, These Stone Walls, our earlier version of this blog, collapsed entirely in October of 2020 as Covid shutdowns swept the world, and swept away my ability to write and publish from prison.

At the same time my writing from prison was collapsing, my friend Pornchai Moontri was spending five horrible months awaiting deportation in ICE detention packed 70 to a room during the worst of the Covid pandemic. I wrote of what happened in our first post for the newer version of this blog which we renamed, Beyond These Stone Walls. Posted on November II, 2020, I described the loss of our earlier blog in “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

Then this caged bird began to sing again — and without that awful mask! Now here we are, three years later, and we are running into a problem for which I need your help and patience. When These Stone Walls collapsed in 2020, we left behind more than 500 past posts that now exist in a sort of archival limbo uploaded to a computer in New York. They need to be restored one by one and then reformatted to fit the host venue at Beyond These Stone Walls. This is a time-consuming process and, as you know, I can do none of it myself. I have no access to a computer or the internet and have never actually even seen this blog.

Longtime readers may have noticed that some posts in the last month or two seem vaguely familiar. Some — especially posts about Sacred Scripture which readers seem to appreciate — follow the Church’s three-year liturgical cycle for Mass readings. For special feasts and observances, I have been asking our editor to retrieve a past post to restore and update it for posting anew. Sometimes these posts are updated to the point at which they are entirely new. Occasionally, readers note that a post seems to have been “recycled.”

Our volunteer editor spends many days preparing my new posts for publication by embedding links and choosing graphics — sometimes even creating new and inspiring graphics from scratch. It would not be possible for her to format and publish new posts while also trying to restore more than 500 older posts one by one. I resolve part of the problem by occasionally restoring a relevant older post and then posting it anew. But they are not simply “reruns.” These restored posts go through a lot of re-editing with new and updated content.

Over the last year or so, many readers have asked me to consider editing our past posts into a book format for a published journal similar to the three-volume Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell. I don’t think I have written anything worthy of such a project, but the bigger problem is that nearly everything I have written over the I4-year life of this blog has been for an electronic format. It would be a massive effort for even an experienced editor to accomplish the task of converting over 500 blog posts for publishing in a book. I cannot even see my own blog and have no access to past posts beyond what is in my own mind, so I could accomplish none of this myself.

God Alone Knows What the Future Holds

Two years ago, I thought that any hope for justice in my life was a ship that had long since sailed. You may have read of our experience with New Hampshire judges who have simply declined to review any new evidence or witnesses in this matter. Ryan MacDonald wrote of this in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”

Then at the beginning of 2022 Ryan MacDonald also wrote of a new development in, “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.” Along with that came a new hope for justice, but it is justice against the tide and there are many people with nefarious agendas committed to preventing it.

However, I have declined to allow any fundraising toward this end. Many of our readers contributed generously to an appeal effort several years ago only to have it dashed in the end by New Hampshire judges who declined to hold hearings in the matter. We described how and why this was so in “Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison.” In the arena of justice, little has changed since then except perhaps in the court of public opinion.

I also know that all of our readers endured the same financial burdens I did during the long pandemic shutdown worldwide. Other countries have suffered much more than America did. In recent days, I have learned that some 24 young men from Thailand — who sought migrant labor in Israel to support their families — are now held captive by Hamas terrorists in tunnels under Palestine. As I write this, 10 have been released back to the Thai government after spending six weeks in hellish captivity underground. Many more of these young workers from Thailand were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists on October 7. I plan to write more about this soon. These innocent bystanders had nothing to do with the issues behind their captivity. They are captives of terrorists now only because they are poor.

But I cannot now shun all fundraising without also silencing my own voice. Toward the end of each year, fees for our platform and domain come due along with fees from a few services that help in the management of this site. Along with those costs, I must also, at this time, order Mass supplies and typing ribbons for the coming year. And I have to eat and replace some tattered clothing. Prisoners must also provide a co-pay for medical services. And, as many of you know I sacrifice to continue assistance to my friend, Pornchai, who could have easily been among those who were killed or in captivity in Gaza as they sought migrant work to support themselves and their loved ones.

So in the month before Christmas each year, I count on our readers for help, if able. Please visit our “Contact and Support” page for how. Thank you for considering this.

I was a Beatles fan as a youth in the 1960s. They were radical then but now they are just “old school.” Several years after the 2001 death of George Harrison, a group of musicians from that era led by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr appeared in a tribute to George Harrison on PBS. It featured many of the songs Harrison wrote for the Beatles and others. One of them was the haunting ode, “All Things Must Pass.”

The song depressed me at first, but now it inspires me. What kind of world would this be if none of us ever left it behind? This humble blog must also one day pass. I am not Jesus so my words will all one day pass away. But in the meantime, there is Truth to be told for as long as I have a voice and a forum to tell it. Unlike most Catholic blogs, this one comes to you in spite of many hurdles.

There are hopeful signs still, including a resurgence of interest in the matter of justice. And as for this Voice in the Wilderness, there is new interest there as well. The popular Catholic site, GloriaTV established a page to present some of my posts which has increased traffic to BTSW substantially.

However, no one brought more timely meaning and light to these pages than the late Cardinal George Pell of Australia. A white martyr for the cause of truth and justice, his voice seems louder and clearer now than ever. It was most recently heard in my post, “Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: If you have not already done so, please share my recent post, “Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod” which also addresses the recent plight of Bishop Joseph Strickland which has roiled the entire Church.

The late Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus, who passed from this life just three weeks apart, and just as this blog which they spawned was beginning.

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.”

Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Paul Haring | CNS

In strange ways, injustices I have known as a prisoner and a priest intersected the lives of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell who died just ten days apart.

February 8 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pope Benedict XVI passed from this life at age 95 on the final day of 2022. Ten days later, Cardinal George Pell died of cardiac arrest at age 81 while recovering from routine surgery at a hospital in Rome. Both of these men were giants in the Church as the many tributes to them from around the world make clear. They were also targets for much vitriol and injustice. It was in this targeted injustice that my path crossed with that of both men.

In “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae,” a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by famed Boston criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, he cited a ground-breaking book by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board entitled, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness, and Other, Terrors of Our Time. Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of writings about unjust sex abuse prosecutions that generated a spate of wrongful convictions of innocent people in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of her subjects in the book and subsequent writings spent decades in prison. I am one of them.

One of the tragically misguided prosecutions cited in the book is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels, then a 24-year-old nursery school teacher in New Jersey. Charged with multiple counts of child molestation in a witch hunt atmosphere, Kelly was innocent of the heinous crimes, none of which actually took place. The charges were fantastical and false, but the child abuse terror of the time resulted in easy convictions with no valid evidence.

The nature of the evidence in Kelly’s case was chilling. The prosecution’s child psych expert — who had no real expertise at all — fashioned a theory that young children who say that no sexual abuse happened actually mean the opposite. A vigilante jury bought that theory and convicted Kelly Michaels. At age 24, she was sentenced to 47 years in prison.

After failed appeals having nothing whatsoever to do with truth or justice, Kelly’s fate seemed sealed in wrongful imprisonment until Dorothy Rabinowitz began writing about it. Then New York civil rights attorney Morton Stavis came out of retirement to take the case pro bono. In her book, Ms. Rabinowitz revealed that Mr. Stavis sought the aid of a New York-based left-leaning legal think tank, the Center for Constitutional Rights that he himself founded. The CCR wanted nothing to do with this case. As Ms. Rabinowitz explained:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the politically progressive views held by many at the center. In the 1980s, as today, there was a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse was to undermine the battle against child abuse. It was to betray children and other victims of sexual predators.”

No Crueler Tyrannies, 17-18

The charges against me stem from the same time period, filtered through the same progressive political opinions, and hyped by the same prosecutorial mindset that to be accused of such things is to be guilty. It is the cruelest of tyrannies that even our Catholic bishops have cowed in fear under that progressive steamroller as priests so accused are discarded without defense. This was articulated in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

The heroic attorney Morton Stavis was not defeated by the progressive disdain for his effort from his own tribe at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He did not live to see his victory in this case, but he had put together a small team of righteous defenders who eventually prevailed by exposing the truth and winning Kelly’s freedom. One of these defenders was Robert Rosenthal whose prior legal briefs on my behalf are still on display at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

Kelly Michaels went on in life to marry a judge. She eventually recovered — to the extent one can — from the tyranny of wrongful imprisonment. She has corresponded with me in freedom, imparting as much hope for justice as she can by urging me to never give up. I haven’t, but I will be 70 on my next birthday and like Job, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25).

Vincenzo Pinto | AFP

Benedict’s “Crimes against Humanity”

However, reading Dorothy’s book was unfortunately not my final encounter with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Clinging to the progressive view that to be accused of sexual abuse is to be guilty, the Center for Constitutional Rights allowed itself to be duped and used by SNAP, the activist group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. I wrote a post some time ago that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of this organization's campaign to destroy any due process for Catholic priests. The post was, “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

Prior to writing that post, David Clohessy and SNAP manipulated the Center for Constitutional Rights into bringing a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was a shameless publicity stunt that had no hope of success, but was filed only to shame Pope Benedict and bring attention to SNAP.

Though I was aware of the charge, it was only after the International Criminal Court dismissed it that I learned that I was an unwitting pawn in this debacle. Journalist Joann Wypijewski, a reporter of courage and high integrity, wrote of it in her blistering review of the movie “Spotlight,” a film about The Boston Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the sexual abuse scandal. The following is an excerpt of her bold article, “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“The film’s advertisement for SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, faithfully represents the Globe’s affiliation. It elides SNAP’s belief that wrongful prosecutions are a minor price to pay in pursuit of its larger mission, something [The Boston Globe] did not much concern itself with either as it collected its Pulitzer for service in the public interest; something even the Center for Constitutional Rights disregarded in 2011 when it joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

“Liberals who cheer this sort of thing ought to ponder whether they have any principles at all ... . The CCR brief failed ... but to CCR’s shame, Father MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief, with respect to allegations of videotape (that is, child porn), which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

I was frozen in place by grief upon first learning of this. I knew that the charge had no substance. I also knew that in her WSJ investigation, Dorothy Rabinowitz confronted NH Detective James McLaughlin who first contrived the charge. Cornered, he finally admitted, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

This did not stop SNAP and CCR from including it in a falsified brief before the International Criminal Court. There was no repercussion for the attempt at fraud upon the court. Even now, as recently as a few months ago, biased NH reporter Damien Fisher— whose wife Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher has ties to my diocese — repeated the pornography allegation without even mentioning that it had been widely discredited, including by the dishonest detective who first raised it.

All the claims that Pope Benedict XVI enabled accused priests and failed to protect victims are of a kind with the above story. In the end, it was never any of this that really made him a target. It was his orthodoxy, his fidelity, his clear-minded exposure of Catholic truths. None of this could ever successfully be assailed, so instead they smeared him with a weapon straight from hell: false witness. Let that sink in.

The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

In the same manner that Kelly Michaels reached out to me upon her exoneration, it was because I had been so falsely accused that I reached out to Cardinal George Pell during his 400 days of unjust imprisonment. Having come to recognize signposts of dishonesty in such a case, I was certain that Cardinal Pell had been falsely accused. But because of prison rules barring direct contact with other prisoners, I could not contact in prison directly.

A friend, Sheryl Collmer, a Tyler, Texas writer for Crisis Magazine and other venues, was my intermediary. I know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this case it was perhaps a bit less deadly. There have been few really proud moments during my imprisonment, but my ability to detect and expose the truth in support of Cardinal Pell was one of them.

As a result, I found this excerpt in his published Prison Journal Volume 2 (Ignatius Press 2021). It was written from his prison cell:

“Friday, 2 August 2019: By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl Collmer, a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, ‘Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?’

“Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australia media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday, your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windshuttle, editor of the quality journal Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ (See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell,’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019).

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama's White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men.

“As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in 2015] . Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from the BTSW About Page], ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice]’”

Addendum

You may see — from Cardinal Pell’s last citation above — where Dorothy Rabinowitz got the inspiration for the title of her book, No Crueler Tyrannies. Once free from his wrongful prison sentence, Cardinal Pell was restored to his rightful position in Rome. From there, he reached out to me again in ways that I only learned about posthumously. He wrote to a mutual friend that he plans to refer to my situation in talks he is slated to present in Rome and Australia. He never got to present them.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Cardinal George Pell Faced Down a Hostile World” (January 13, 2023), Fr Raymond de Souza wrote that “His faith even during wrongful detention, was the crown of an inspiring Catholic life.” Reading his Prison Journal, I have no doubt been so inspired.

It is my prayer, and perhaps not even a necessary one, that Pope Benedict and Cardinal Pell both now stand in the Presence of God where they behold the fruition of all the graces bestowed upon them, and hopefully now upon us through them. We have not heard the last of them.

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Note from Fr. Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

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Francesco Sforza | Osservatore Romano | AFP

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 the image for live access 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 Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae

Ignoring exculpatory evidence and more honest media coverage, a writer’s selective reporting undermines the defense of a priest wrongly imprisoned for 28 years.

October 5, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The image above depicts Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin whose investigation of an early 1980s sexual assault case resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of Fr. Gordon MacRae. The following is a guest article by contributing writer, Ryan A. MacDonald. His most recent post in these pages was “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

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Writing for InDepthNH, a New Hampshire online news venue, reporter Damien Fisher presented a negligent and entirely biased overview of the case against Fr. Gordon MacRae. On the one hand, it represented well that Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin, who orchestrated the case against MacRae, is now exposed for falsifying records, tampering with evidence, and other misconduct which contributed to wrongful convictions.

On the other hand, a recent article by Damien Fisher obfuscates any future defense of MacRae with content that has already been debunked by more balanced investigations in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. (See our page on The Wall Street Journal.) Fisher’s article includes only the one-sided claims of a 2003 Grand Jury Report that a New Hampshire judge has already determined to have been published without merit or justice. Here is what Judge Richard McNamara wrote regarding the content of that report:

“[The 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester] fulfilled none of the traditional purposes of the common law grand jury. Rather than investigation of crime, the report is a post hoc summary of information the grand jury considered but did not indict on. A grand jury report that does not result in an indictment but references supposed misconduct results in a quasi-official accusation of wrongdoing drawn from secret ex parte proceedings in which there is no opportunity available or presented for a formal defense. ... Such a grand jury report is not far removed from, and no less repugnant to traditions of fair play than lynch law.”

— NH Judge Richard McNamara, August 12, 2019, In re: Grand Jury, No. 217-2017-CV-00382

Much of the content of the 2003 Grand Jury Report was generated in one-sided claims for settlement money and handed over to the State by Diocese of Manchester official Reverend Edward J. Arsenault. While settling without due process some 250 abuse claims against priests of the New Hampshire Diocese dating back 30 to 50 years, Arsenault was later charged and convicted of financial crimes in the amount of nearly $300,000 used to secretly support a relationship with a young gay musician. Now dismissed from the priesthood, he has a new name, Edward J. Bolognini. For some reason, he has been given a pass in Damien Fisher’s account.

The U.S. Department of Justice has recently disclosed an ongoing investigation into over $45 billion in fraudulent claims to reap benefits related to the Covid 19 pandemic. After the massive Gulf oil spill several years ago Exxon Oil Company had to establish a fraud task force to separate valid claims of damages from the billions of dollars in fraudulent ones. What makes anyone think that the Catholic abuse story has been spared such fraud?

This all requires a response. Today and over the next few weeks in these pages, David F. Pierre, Jr. of The Media Report.com, Catholic League President Bill Donohue and I will continue this rebuttal of that one-sided material. I hope readers of this blog will share this information widely to give this truthful side of the MacRae story the attention it deserves. Anything less is to contribute to what Dr. Bill Donohue called “a travesty of justice.”

Conflicts of Interest

In reporting on the MacRae case, however, Damien Fisher also has a conflict of interest. His wife is a columnist for Parable magazine, the official publication of the Diocese of Manchester, Father MacRae’s estranged diocese.

The Parable Managing Editor is Kathryn Marchocki, formerly a reporter for the statewide newspaper, New Hampshire Union Leader. In that capacity, Ms. Marchocki covered the 1994 MacRae trial and the 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester.

In early 2003, just before the New Hampshire Grand Jury Report was released to the public, Kathryn Marchocki met with Fr. MacRae at the New Hampshire State Prison. He presented her with a large amount of documentation that challenged the hyped contents and accusations in that one-sided report. Ms. Marchocki reportedly told the priest that his information is compelling, “but New Hampshire news media and my paper in particular are so anti-Catholic my editor will never let me write about this.”

Nonetheless, she asked MacRae — then in his ninth year in prison — to send her everything he had. He did, but never heard from Ms. Marchocki again. Now she is the editor of the Diocese of Manchester news magazine in which Damien Fisher’s wife is a columnist appearing in the monthly publication just opposite the musings of Father MacRae’s bishop, Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, who himself now stands accused in a sexual abuse civil lawsuit in the State of New York. (See “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”)

Readers are likely aware of developments in the matter of former Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin and his brief appearance on the Attorney General’s “Laurie List,” also called the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. When the first rumblings about rampant dishonesty on the part of Detective McLaughlin began to appear in 2021, I personally reached out to Damien Fisher with a concern that the Father MacRae case had not been properly investigated and did not receive a fair trial.

Mr. Fisher shot back immediately with a verbal attack. He declared MacRae to be guilty based solely on untried rumor, innuendo, and uncorroborated claims for monetary settlement, such as those brought without trial in the discredited 2003 Grand Jury Report. He offered nothing that could be interpreted as evidence. I offered to send Mr. Fisher some compelling documentation that challenged his narrative, but I received this final message in reply: “Stop! I do not want to see anything you send. My mind is made up!” So much for journalistic integrity and objectivity.

Father MacRae in 1983, the time of the alleged charges (Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal)

A Pornographic Priest?

Much of Mr. Fisher’s current media coverage of MacRae centers on a claim that the priest produced pornographic photographs and videos of his accusers. The truth about this is in plain sight right at Mr. Fisher’s fingertips, but he omitted it. The accusation of creating pornography was first lodged by Detective McLaughlin himself in 1988. He had no evidence for it beyond a claim that he choreographed and promoted for a civil lawsuit involving an individual named Jon Plankey described in McLaughlin’s report as his “employee in a family-owned business.”

The first accusation elicited by McLaughlin was that MacRae had attempted to verbally solicit the teen. It was only after some evolution that a more substantial — and more lucrative — claim emerged that MacRae took photographs of the youth. McLaughlin actually wrote in his report that these claims will be the basis for a civil lawsuit against the Catholic Church. The lawsuit was settled without question by MacRae’s diocese over his strenuous objections.

The pornography accusation later weighed heavily in Father MacRae’s 1994 trial and sentencing in an unrelated case, that brought by accuser Thomas Grover. When sentencing the priest to life in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan cited MacRae’s “aggressive denials of wrongdoing [and] the evidence of child pornography is clear and compelling.”

But none of it ever happened. In 2005, Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal investigated this entire case for her extensive report, “A Priest’s Story,” which served as a factual refutation of much of the content appearing in the 2003 Grand Jury Report. The accuser in the pornography matter, then in his 20s, declined to answer any questions, but Ms. Rabinowitz questioned Detective McLaughlin about the “clear and compelling” evidence of child pornography. The detective was cornered, and admitted,

“There was never any evidence of pornography.”

— Detective James McLaughlin

This information was available to Damien Fisher, but if he found it he could not continue the pornography victimization narrative, so he apparently never bothered to look.

There is a lot more to that story. In 1988, McLaughlin interviewed MacRae about Plankey’s claims for four hours on tape. McLaughlin, as was his practice, wrote reports claiming several admissions by MacRae that the priest says today were never made. MacRae insists that those claims could not possibly be on the tape. Later, when MacRae faced trial in 1994, the judge ordered all tape recordings turned over to his defense. Neither MacRae nor his lawyer ever received a single one. McLaughlin claimed, under oath in sworn Interrogatories, that the tapes in question were accidentally taped over for another case and the transcripts he cited were never made due to “clerical error.”

Eleven years later in 2005, McLaughlin apparently forgot his earlier perjury and sent that tape to The Wall Street Journal : Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of how McLaughlin badgered MacRae again and again to plea to a misdemeanor of attempting to endanger a minor, but without legal representation. Here is her 2005 report about the tape:

“Fr. MacRae, summoned to meet with Detective McLaughlin, was informed that there was much more evidence against him, that the police had an affidavit for an arrest, and that it would be in everybody’s best interest for him to sign a confession. On the police tape, an otherwise bewildered-sounding Fr. MacRae is consistently clear about one thing — that he in no way solicited the Plankey boy for sex or anything else. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says more than once, his tone that of a man who feels that there must, indeed, be something for him to understand about these charges that eludes him.

“He listens as the police assure him that he can save all the bad publicity. ‘Our concern is, let’s get it taken care of, let’s not blow it out of proportion... . You know what the media does,’ they warned. He could avoid all the stories, protect the Church, let it all go away quietly.”

— The Wall Street Journal, “A Priest’s Story”

From here on the recording was shut off. MacRae says the badgering went on for another three hours. The priest had never before been in such a situation. When he asked if he should consult a lawyer, the detective reportedly said, and today denies saying it, doing so “will only muddy the waters.” In the end, MacRae signed the paper without legal counsel just to end this. In concluding the matter, McLaughlin wrote a press release: “Though no sexual acts were committed by MacRae,” it noted, “there are often varied levels of victimization.” Indeed there are!

In his police report on this matter, Detective McLaughlin wrote that Plankey worked for him in a family-owned business. Plankey’s mother was also an employee of the Keene Police Department. Before MacRae even knew about the claims, The Wall Street Journal reported, MacRae’s diocese received a call from Mrs. Plankey informing officials there that MacRae was being investigated on solicitation charges and a quick out-of-court settlement would “avoid a lawsuit and lawyers.”

Ah, but there’s more! This was not Detective McLaughlin’s first use of Jon Plankey to bring down a target. Plankey made an identical set of claims against Timothy Smith, a Keene Congregational church choir director with whom he struck up a relationship. That case was prosecuted by McLaughlin and ended in a similar misdemeanor plea deal. And Plankey accused a local Job Corp supervisor of soliciting him. That was another misdemeanor case pursued by McLaughlin. Then he accused a man who picked him up hitchhiking of soliciting him.

It was only after the above interview that the claim of producing photographs was made. The priest was never charged with this because that would require producing some evidence. Instead, McLaughlin capitalized on it for a civil settlement for Plankey despite later revealing to The Wall Street Journal that the story was contrived and there was never any evidence of pornography. The story nonetheless had a long shelf life. It was used by Judge Arthur Brennan to enhance MacRae’s sentence after trial in 1994.

And it was used by David Clohessy at SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to bolster a Crimes Against Humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI in the International Criminal Court at The Hague. This aspect of McLaughlin’s handiwork was explored by journalist, Joann Wypijewski in “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

The Plankey case was among the files investigated by former FBI Special Agent Supervisor Jim Abbott, a specialist in counter-terrorism. Like most claimants, Jon Plankey took his money from the Diocese and disappeared. When Agent Abbott found him, Plankey refused to answer any questions without a lawyer. I had been writing about this matter and received an email message from Jon Plankey’s brother. Agent Abbott went to interview him and was told that the claims were a scam for settlement money. The brother said there is more to tell, but he, too, wanted money.

The Plea Deal Injustice

Damien Fisher relentlessly referenced Father MacRae’s post-trial acquiescence to a plea deal coerced by circumstances, presenting it as his sole evidence to bolster his implications that MacRae must be guilty. I do not want to belabor this point for I have written about it extensively already. When MacRae was convicted at trial — after Judge Arthur Brennan instructed the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in [accuser] Thomas Grover’s testimony” — he still faced additional “pile-on” charges from Grover’s brothers and two others who had climbed aboard for the inevitable monetary settlements.

When one of the newer accusers learned that MacRae was not likely to take any deal, he left the country to avoid testifying in a trial and he never filed his civil claim. Another accuser groomed by McLaughlin, Keene native Steven Wollschlager, received a summons to appear before a grand jury to indict the priest on a new charge.

Steven later went on to describe that he was solicited by McLaughlin to join other accusers in fabricating claims against MacRae. The enticement was a $50 bill and an assurance that a lot more money could be obtained in a civil lawsuit against the Church. When Steven balked, McLaughlin allegedly pointed out the girlfriend and child Steven had and said that life could be so much easier for them with a lot of money. Steven pondered this, and then agreed. He later described these meetings with McLaughlin:

“It was all about the lawsuits and the money. I was led to believe that all I had to do was make up a story about MacRae like others had done and I could obtain a lot of money. I was using drugs at the time and could have been influenced into saying anything they wanted for money.”

On the way to the court, Steven explained, he found his moral center and could not go through with it. He said that he knew MacRae as a teen and that the priest only tried to help him. He was told by an unnamed court official, “We won’t be needing anything further from you.”

When the trial was over, MacRae was penniless, abandoned by his Bishop and Diocese. He was placed in jail in custody until sentencing and had nowhere to turn. His lawyer resigned, exasperated at the three-ring circus in the trial and the lack of being allowed to put on an adequate defense. McLaughlin and prosecutors then offered MacRae another deal: a concurrent one-year sentence ending all remaining charges to be served simultanously with the sentence yet to be handed down in the Thomas Grover case.

MacRae’s trial lawyer, who left the trial before it was over, told MacRae in a telephone call from jail that he had no choice but to accept the deal. His bishop and Diocese, anxious to provide settlements and be rid of this, had issued a pre-trial press release declaring that the entire Catholic Church was victimized by MacRae. Everyone around him told him he had no choice. He went to the Court men’s room and vomited after entering his negotiated lie. I wrote extensively of this in “The Post-Trial Extortion of Fr. Gordon MacRae.”

All of this — my articles, the extensive coverage by The Wall Street Journal, the investigation by FBI Special Agent Jim Abbott, the polygraph examinations that Fr. MacRae passed conclusively, the findings of the National Center for Reason and Justice now sponsoring MacRae’s defense — has been in plain sight, readily available to Damien Fisher. He opted instead to spread another narrative, and God alone knows why.

There is more still, and it is coming. Perhaps the most egregious “evidence” cited by Damien Fisher came from supposed psychological evaluations of the accused priest. This will be the topic of a follow-up post next week in these pages.

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“In my three-year investigation of this matter, I have found no evidence that Gordon MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes.”

— Sworn Affidavit of former FBI Special Agent James Abbott

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Editor’s Note: Ryan A. MacDonald has written extensively on the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church. You may also be interested in these related posts.

Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Some of Sigmund Freud’s map of the human psyche has been debunked in modern psychology, but Freud also knew well that some moral crusaders doth protesteth too much.

I have debated this post in my mind for days, arguing with myself whether I really wanted to write it. I have always dreaded offending people, and there’s just no way I’m going to be able to write this without someone feeling offended. But I also believe that simply not ever offending anyone is not a worthy goal for either a writer or a priest. I once asked a priest why he decided not to preach on the sanctity of life on “Respect Life Sunday.” He responded that he just doesn’t like offending anyone and someone is always offended when he preaches a pro-life homily. Sometimes, not offending anyone means avoiding ever speaking the truth.

It takes a degree of courage to point out the truth to ears that would rather not hear it. One newer reader of this blog has a recent example. Chris Tressa discovered Beyond These Stone Walls because Spero News reprints some of my posts. Spero News is sort of the online frontier. Like many sites, civil discourse takes a back seat to free flowing reader opinion. So Spero News  posts pretty much anything anyone wants to say.

We can’t really fault Spero News for this when standards for civil discourse don’t apply on many Catholic sites as well. Some of the comments posted on just about any subject in the Catholic Church by readers of the National Catholic Reporter  demonstrate the steep decline in online Catholic civility.

Spero News seems to have a lot of readers, but not a lot of comments. The relatively rare comments on my articles there are often printed and mailed to me. Some are very positive, but some are just outright attacks. I’m never offended, however. Invariably, the attacks are turned around by other readers and often backfire on their authors — who never identify themselves, by the way.

Sometimes this is even humorous. One writer identifying herself as an unnamed SNAP leader wrote in a comment that she finds it “despicable and deplorable” that an accused and convicted Catholic priest is given a voice online at a site called Beyond These Stone Walls. The sole comment posted in response made me laugh out loud:

“I clicked on that link and just spent several hours reading Beyond These Stone Walls. I found it to be riveting and uplifting. Thank you for telling us of this wonderful site.”

I don’t think that’s the response the SNAP writer hoped for, but Chris Tressa learned of BTSW in just that way. A man who leaves negative comments about priests throughout the Catholic online world posted a really toxic one on the Spero News reprint of one of my recent posts there. It was obvious that he didn’t actually read that post before spouting off, because he demonstrated in graphic prose the very points I set out to make. What was really of interest to me, however, was Chris Tressa’s comment in response:

“In one brief comment, the writer above used the term ‘pedophile priest’ five times, along with multiple variations of ‘child rape’ — all in just a few sentences of text. Who does that? To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘The man doth protesteth too much, me thinks!’ This sounds to me like classic reaction formation. Is it time to visit the shrink?”

From an analysis of typical comments in Catholic media, it might appear that a lot of people have ongoing and extremely negative views about Catholic priests. That may not be the case. What’s really going on is that a relatively small number of crusaders are “seeding” the Internet with their comments. If you take the time — and have the stomach for it — to track comments throughout the Catholic online world, and at mainstream media articles about Catholic scandal, you’ll see the same few screen names over and over.

They seem to be everywhere, and Chris Tressa ran into one of them. They are on a very personal crusade, but what makes this so personal for them? As Chris Tressa asked, “Who does that?” Is it because they are victims of sexual abuse? Perhaps so, but I know MANY adult victims of sexual abuse who are not crusaders. This prison and prisons everywhere are filled with men who were seriously victimized as children. A number of the readers and supporters of Beyond These Stone Walls  are survivors of childhood sexual abuse who resent the venom being spewed in their names.

But it’s also a fact that many of the most vocal crusaders at SNAP, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and Bishop-Accountability are not victims of sexual abuse. So what’s behind the nasty crusade of vilification and suspicion?

SNAP leaders offered to provide protesters with fake “Holy Childhood photos” to hold up for news cameras.

Classic Defense Mechanisms

We got a hint of the answer in the case of Dr. Steve Taylor, a Louisiana psychiatrist and member of SNAP who has been one of the more vocal advocates for an end to all civil rights for accused priests. Dr. Taylor has argued loudly for an end to any state respect for the seal of the Catholic confessional. Dr. Taylor was also the founder of a local chapter of SNAP. “We have faces now,” he bitterly exclaimed to legislators and news cameras while SNAP members held up the contrived “Holy Childhood photos” described in “SNAP Exposed” by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

Over the last three years, Dr. Steve Taylor has lost his medical license to practice psychiatry. He is now serving a sentence in a federal prison convicted on multiple charges of possessing child pornography.

Before he was sentenced to prison, SNAP founder Barbara Blaine and anti-Catholic author Jason Berry both pleaded for leniency for Dr. Taylor citing that his “problem” does not undo or overshadow all the good he has done. I had this solidly in mind when SNAP leaders vilified Bishop Robert Finn, charged with a misdemeanor for not reporting a priest fast enough when the priest was allegedly discovered with child pornography.

The crusade against accused priests that Dr. Steve Taylor was on has many of the elements of classic reaction formation, a concept first proposed by the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. His descriptions of human ego defense mechanisms and hysteria included this entirely unconscious phenomenon which he described as an attempt to cover up something unacceptable in oneself by adopting a stance in opposition to it. It is the formation of a reaction to an encounter with self. When something disdained is discovered there, defense mechanisms like reaction formation can develop into an elaborate ruse in which the thing feared in oneself becomes the thing attacked in others.

There are many modern examples. Congressman Mark Foley railed in Congress for bills targeting those who would sexually exploit young people. In 2006, Congressman Foley resigned after he was confronted with sending sexually explicit e-mail and text messages to teenage male pages working for the U.S. House of Representatives.

The televangelist scandals of the 1980’s involving famed TV preachers Jimmy Swaggart, PTL’s Jim Baker, and others also come to mind. Week after week, they railed against the licentiousness of the modern era while caught in their own sexual and financial scandals. Former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer mercilessly prosecuted officials caught in prostitution and other crimes before he was himself arrested in a prostitution sting. In the 1970’s, Covenant House Founder, Father Bruce Ritter testified before Congress to expose what he called the rampant exploitation of homeless youth on America’s streets only to leave the country when several of the very young people he claimed to be saving accused him of sexual abuse.

Debbie Nathan on “Sybil” and Hysteria

Much of what Sigmund Freud brought to the field of psychology and its understanding of hysteria has been debunked. One of the latest debunkings — and one of the finest — is a book by Debbie Nathan entitled Sybil Exposed (Free Press, 2011). Debbie Nathan serves on the advisory board of the National Center for Reason and Justice. (For full disclosure, I should tell you that this heroic organization endorses Beyond These Stone Walls and assists in sponsorship of my own defense).

Debbie Nathan is also the author (with Michael Snedeker) of an earlier landmark book, Satan’s Silence, which exposed the great fraud behind the ritual sex abuse stories of the 1980’s. Debbie Nathan continues this theme in Sybil Exposed, a riveting account of the fraud perpetrated in the story of Shirley Mason, known to the world as “Sybil.”  Debbie Nathan here exposes the truth behind the world’s most famous case of multiple personality ever brought to print and the silver screen.

Sybil, aided by an ambitious psychiatrist, claimed to have sixteen separate personalities brought on by a childhood traumatized by sexual and physical abuse. But Debbie Nathan exposed that it was all an elaborate hoax, a hoax that sold six million copies of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s 1973 book, Sybil. It turns out that neither the abuse nor the multiple personalities were real. In Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan has performed a great service to victims of the “hysteria prosecution” craze.

The story of Sybil was also a fraud on the American courts. The two decades from 1980 to 2000 saw multiple cases of “victims” claiming to have trauma-induced repressed and recovered memories of sexual abuse. Many men — including some Catholic priests — went to prison on those fraudulent claims. Some are still in prison. Writer Ryan MacDonald wrote of how the “psychological trauma” fraud played out in my own case in “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”

But “reaction formation,” one of Freud’s signature theories about hysteria and ego defense mechanisms, has survived all the debunking. One of the most advanced modern psychology studies demonstrating the power of reaction formation (Adams. Wright & Lohr, 1996) was on the topic of homophobia. It pointed out the difference between a moral belief that society should not promote homosexuality as a social good, and a more personal belief that society should persecute homosexuals. They are not one and the same. The 1996 study found that people who cross the line between a moral opposition and a moral crusade are often “protesting too much” a tendency in themselves that they find unacceptable.

Reaction formation also influences our views about what constitutes prejudice. Political or religious opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, is often — and wrongly — interpreted as active persecution and outright bigotry. I have known gay rights activists who interpret any opposition to their political goals and social agenda as religious persecution and a denial of their civil rights. This is the second way reaction formation is manifested. People who see all disagreement as judgment, condemnation, and persecution may really be passing judgment on themselves. I have read repeatedly that the Catholic Church “condemns gay people.” This is simply untrue.

Reaction Formation against Prejudice

American society since the 1960s has been especially conscious of any appearance of racial bias or prejudice, and has widely endorsed strong norms condemning prejudice. If Americans are led to believe that they may hold unacceptable prejudiced beliefs, or if they even believe that others are seeing them in this light, “they may respond with exaggerated displays of not being prejudiced” (Adams, Wright and Lohr, 1996).

The debate that surrounded same-sex marriage may have been an example of that response. When concerns were raised that same-sex marriage laws are an example of legislation and social reform by judicial fiat instead of by a democratic process, gay rights activists typically, and wrongly, dismissed the objection as bigotry. The media has given strength to that interpretation by underwriting it, and many Americans have withdrawn or silenced their opposition to same-sex marriage because of a politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced.

A striking example of how the fear of appearing prejudiced creates reaction formation is something that occurred in the Episcopal church in New Hampshire. The World Wide Anglican Communion has been in a state of civil war since the 2003 election of Bishop Gene Robinson. At the time he was nominated as bishop, he was a divorced, openly-gay man in a relationship with another man. This has played out in New Hampshire almost perfectly parallel to the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, but never the two shall meet.

And yet I have no doubt whatsoever that if Gene Robinson was not a gay man — if he was simply a heterosexual divorcee living with another woman, he would never have been a candidate for bishop in any U.S. Episcopalian diocese. This seems an example of a group so wishing to demonstrate its lack of prejudice that a new standard for its episcopacy was created. Bishop Robinson was not elected bishop in spite of being openly gay, but because of it. The global Anglican Communion has been torn asunder by this one example of reaction formation. Yet I have read repeatedly that one of the goals of “reform” groups like Voice Of the Faithful is to foster an American Catholic church that mirrors the Episcopal church and its “sensitivity” to politically correct American values. Thanks, but no thanks.

In New Hampshire, Bishop Gene Robinson campaigned for the passage of a same-sex marriage law. Once it was passed, he and his partner were among the first to enter a same-sex marriage in this state. Then he checked himself into rehab. Then he got divorced. Finally, having torn the entire Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder, he retired.

This same politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced has also radically altered the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. When the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was commissioned to study the causes and contexts, both the researchers and the bishops were left with a conundrum. The results were clear that this was not a crisis involving pedophilia as it is clinically defined — though that did exist on a much smaller scale. The problem was predominantly, and clearly, claims of homosexual predation of adolescent and young adult males during the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s. There is no greater evidence of the power of reaction formation than when an entire institution would prefer the term “pedophile scandal” to “homosexual scandal” even when the facts say otherwise.

Truth and honesty are truly golden things, and most of you, in your own heart of hearts, know them when you see them. We are in a culture, however, in which the views of many are manipulated by the agendas of a few. But sometimes the few are themselves manipulated by the quirks of their own psyches. Be wary of crusaders. Freud and Shakespeare both knew the truth about them. Sometimes they doth protesteth too much.

The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe

As Father Dominic Menna, a senior priest at Saint Mary’s in Quincy, MA, was sent into exile, The Boston Globe’s role in the story of Catholic Scandal grew more transparent.

“I’m a true Catholic, and I think what these priests are doing is disgusting!” One day a few weeks ago, that piece of wisdom repeated every thirty minutes or so on New England Cable News, an around-the-clock news channel broadcast from Boston. I wonder how many people the reporter approached in front of Saint Mary’s Church in Quincy, Massachusetts before someone provided just the right sound bite to lead the rabid spectacle that keeps 24-hour news channels afloat.

The priest this hapless “true Catholic” deemed so disgusting is Father F. Dominic Menna, an exemplary priest who has been devoting his senior years in service to the people of God at Saint Mary’s. At the age of 80, Father Menna has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

There is indeed something disgusting in this account, but it likely is not Father Menna himself. He has never been accused before. Some of the news stories have not even bothered to mention that the claim just surfacing now for the first time is alleged to have occurred in 1959. No, I did not transpose any numbers. The sole accusation that just destroyed this 80-year-old priest’s good name is that he abused someone fifty-one years ago when he was 29 years old.

Kelly Lynch, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston, announced that Father Menna was placed on administrative leave, barred from offering the Sacraments, and ordered to pack up and leave the rectory where he had been spending his senior years in the company of other priests. These steps, we are told, are designed to protect children lest this 80-year-old priest — if indeed guilty — suddenly decides to repeat his misconduct every half century or so.

Ms. Lynch declined to reveal any further details citing, “the privacy of those involved.” That assurance of privacy is for everyone except Father Menna, of course, whose now tainted name was blasted throughout the New England news media last month. Among the details Kelly Lynch declines to reveal is the amount of any settlement demand for the claim.

Some of the fair-minded people who see through stories like this one often compare them with the 1692 Salem witch trials which took place just across Massachusetts Bay from Father Menna’s Quincy parish. The comparison falls short, however. No one in 1692 Salem ever had to defend against a claim of having bewitched a child fifty-one years earlier.

Archdiocesan spokesperson Kelly Lynch cited “the integrity of the investigation” as a reason not to comment further to The Boston Globe. Does some magical means exist in Boston to fairly and definitively investigate a fifty-one year old claim of child abuse? Is there truly some means by which the Archdiocese could deem such a claim credible or not?

Ms. Lynch should have chosen a word other than “integrity” to describe the “investigation” of Father Menna. Integrity is the one thing no one will find anywhere in this account — except perhaps in Father Menna himself if, by some special grace, he has not utterly lost all trust in the people of God he has served for over fifty years. 

Transparency at The Boston Globe

The June 3rd edition of The Boston Globe  buried a story on page A12 about the results of an eight-year investigation into the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Eight years ago, it was front page news all over the U.S. that the Los Angeles Archdiocese was being investigated for a conspiracy to cover-up sexual abuse claims against priests.

After eight years of investigation at taxpayer expense, California prosecutors reluctantly announced last month that they have found insufficient evidence to support the charges. That news story was so obviously buried in the back pages of The Boston Globe  that the agenda could not be more transparent. The story of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is front page news only when it accommodates the newspaper’s editorial bias. That much, at least, is clear.

But all transparency ends right there. The Globe article attributed the lack of evidence of a conspiracy by Catholic bishops to the investigation being “stymied by reluctant victims.” Now, that’s an interesting piece of news!

The obvious question it raises is whether these claimants were reluctant to speak BEFORE obtaining financial settlements in their claims against the Archdiocese. If they are reluctant witnesses now, then, at best, it may be because the true goal of some has long since been realized and there is nothing in it for them to keep talking. At worst, the silence of claimants in the conspiracy investigation could be interpreted as an effort to fend off pointed questions about their claims. Perhaps prosecutors were investigating the wrong people.

I have seen this sort of thing play out before. Last year, a New Hampshire contingency lawyer brought forward his fifth round of mediated settlement demands against the Diocese of Manchester. During that lawyer’s first round of mediated settlements in 2002 — in which 28 priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused in claims dating from the 1950s to the 1980s — the news media announced a $5.5 million settlement. The claimants’ lawyer was astonished that $5.5 million was handed over with no real effort at proof or corroboration sought by Diocesan representatives before they paid up and deemed the claims “credible.” The lawyer was quoted in the news media:

“During settlement negotiations, diocesan officials did not press for details such as dates and allegations for every claim. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

— Mark Hayward, “NH Diocese will pay $5 million to 62 victims,” New Hampshire Union Leader, Nov. 27, 2002

“He and his clients did not encounter resistance from the Diocese of Manchester in their six months of negotiations. Some victims made claims in the last month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days.”

— Albert McKeon, “Settlement reached in abuse claims,” Nashua Telegraph, Nov. 27, 2002

That lawyer’s contingency fee for the first of many rounds of mediated settlements was estimated to be in excess of $1.8 million. When the mediation concluded, the news media reported that at the attorney’s and his clients’ request, the diocese agreed not to disclose the claimants’ names or any details of their claims or the amounts they received in settlement. “No confidentiality was sought by the Diocese,” the lawyer declared.

In contrast, the names of the accused priests — many of whom were deceased and none of whom faced criminal charges — were repeatedly released and publicized throughout the news media. This process served one purpose: to invite new claimants against those same priests with assurances that their names would remain private and no real corroborating details would ever be elicited. It was clear that non-disclosure clauses were demanded by the contingency lawyer and his clients, though the diocese and its lawyers were eager to oblige as part of the settlement.

It is fascinating that the news media now blames “reluctant victims” for stifling an investigation into cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That is a scandal worthy of the front page, but we won’t ever see it there. If the news media now has concerns about the very people whose cause it championed in 2002, we won’t be reading about it in the news media. Transparency in the news media, after all, is a murky affair.

Transparency and the U.S. Bishops

Writer Ryan A. MacDonald has a number of contributions published on These Stone Walls. His most recent is, “Should the Case Against Father Gordon MacRae Be Reviewed?” I am told that Mr. MacDonald has an essay published in the June/July, 2010 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review entitled, ”Anti-Catholicism and Sex Abuse.” In the essay, the writer also recommends These Stone Walls to H&PR readers. Though I subscribe to the well respected H&PR, I have not at this writing seen the current issue.

Ryan MacDonald also has a letter published in a recent issue of Our Sunday Visitor (“Raising the Alarm,” June 13, 2010). Ryan makes a point very similar to one I made last month in “As the Year of the Priest Ends, Are Civil Liberties for Priests Intact?” Here is an excerpt from Ryan’s OSV letter:

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“A number of courageous bishops have argued in opposition to retroactive application of revised civil statutes of limitations. Such revised statutes typically expose the Catholic Church to special liability while exempting public institutions.

“But I must raise the alarm here. As a body, American bishops lobbied the Holy See for retroactive extension of the time limits of prescription, the period of time in which a delict (a crime) exists and can be prosecuted under Church law …

“… Many accused priests now face the possibility of forced laicization with no opportunity for defense or appeal because our bishops have embraced routine dispensation from the Church’s own statute of limitations. The bishops cannot argue this point from two directions. Some have defended this duplicity citing that the delicts involve criminal and not civil matters. This is so, but these men are also American citizens, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits retroactive application of criminal laws as unconstitutional.

“Statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.  Our bishops cannot have it both ways on this issue.”

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Ryan MacDonald made this point far better than I ever could. The issue for me is not just the obvious double standard applied when the spirit of Church law is set aside. The issue is one of fundamental justice and fairness, and what Cardinal Dulles called “The great scandal of the Church’s failure to support Her priests in their time of need.” Pope John Paul II said that the Church must be a mirror of justice. Let’s hope our bishops can respond to the public scandal of sexual abuse without perpetrating a private scandal of their own.

There are people in groups like S.N.A.P. and Voice of the Faithful who clamor for the Church to ignore the rights of priests in favor of an open embrace of “survivors.” It is always easy to deny someone else’s rights and restrict someone else’s civil liberties, and that, historically, is how witch hunts begin.

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