“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Pornchai ‘Max’ Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae 9/18/24 Pornchai ‘Max’ Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae 9/18/24

Unjustly in Prison for 30 Years: A Collision of Fury and Faith

From opposite ends of the world Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae share thoughts on a dark milestone: Thirty years wrongly in prison on the Day of Padre Pio.

From opposite ends of the world Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae share thoughts on a dark milestone: Thirty years wrongly in prison on the Day of Padre Pio.

September 18, 2024 by Pornchai ‘Max’ Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae

HERE’S MAX

On September 8, 2020, I left my best friend, Father-G, inside the walls of New Hampshire State Prison where we spent the previous 15 years as cell mates. The term, “cell mates” might seem foreign to you. Having to share a space of about 60 square feet around the clock with another human being can be like torture. The daily drama of cell mates thrown together but never able to live together was the all-day every-day prime time drama of our prison.

I was an angry young man with a very short fuse which caused me to spend most of my prior years in prison in solitary confinement beginning at age 18. I was not very sociable. I trusted no one, and least of all could I trust a priest convicted of the very crimes that tormented my life and set me on a road to destruction. We went through a lot in those years, and over time I came to know with total certainty that this priest was a victim of false witness and a Catholic witch hunt. He became my best friend and the person I trust most in this world. We became each other’s family.

I know in my heart that I would not be free today — physically, mentally, or spiritually — if Father-G had not been present in my life. I wake up each day now on the other side of those stone walls of prison and on the other side of the world from where Father-G lives in captivity still. I now live in Thailand, a land I was taken from at age 11 for someone else’s dark agenda. It is a land I thought I would never see again. I am here today, and free, only because of God and His servant, Father-G.

The day this little introduction appears with Father-G’s post is September 18. It anticipates the September 23rd date on which he was sent to prison thirty years ago in 1994. There was no truth or justice in it. None at all! That is also the date that one of our Patron Saints was freed from another kind of bondage — a bondage that has been a grace for millions of souls. Father-G once described the heroic virtue of the life Padre Pio lived ...

“A half century bearing the wounds of Jesus — all of them, including false witness, rejection, ridicule, public shaming, and the crucifixion of his body and his priesthood, sometimes even by the very Church he served.”

With some help from Dilia, our Editor, I wrote a whole post about this day, about Father-G, and about the sacrifices he made that restored my life and freedom, and saved my soul. I would trade them back to restore his freedom, but he will have none of that. He said that sacrifice is sacred and it is not refundable. I hope you will read my post for it is very important to me. It is my tribute to hope from a time when all mine was stolen from me so Father-G sacrificed his. It is “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Now here, from our prison cell thousands of miles away from where I wake up each day in freedom, is Father-G:

Parallax Views and Inflection Points

On the night before starting my part of this post, I called my friend, Pornchai-Max in Thailand. He asked me how I feel about approaching a 30th year in prison for crimes that never took place. I spent much of that night rehearsing in my mind a long angry rant. How could intense anger not be part of the equation of how I face the injustice, corruption, a cover-up by police and prosecutors and lawyers and judges who heard and ruled on their corruption in secret? How could I feel anything but fury for the people who profited from it all? In the fictitious case against me alone, a million dollars changed hands.

If you have been following publications by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Claire Best, Ryan MacDonald, and a few others over recent years then you are already familiar with all this and there is no need for me to waste your time ranting about it. It would indeed be a waste of my time and yours.

I thank my friend, Max, for his part in this post, and in this story. He and our editor, Dilia E. Rodríguez, have conspired to point me toward a parallax view. That’s a scientific term for what happens when an event or series of events is observed from a new position or angle with insights that were limited or unavailable before. In his introduction, Max mentioned a post he wrote with Dilia’s help just after his return to Thailand in 2020. It is linked at the very end of his Introduction and again at the end of this post. It is very important, and it is my parallax view.

And in recent weeks in these pages, Dilia E. Rodríguez wrote “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It, too, presents a parallax view, a summary of these 30 painful years in this abomination of unjust imprisonment. Dilia’s conclusion was in part about the mystical connections between me and Max now living on opposite sides of the planet, and the introductions of two Patron Saints into our world. Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe are inflection points in both our lives in and beyond these stone walls.

In science and history, an inflection point is a point at which, usually only in hindsight, an event becomes pivotal, and, once experienced, all perceptions about it change. When I could bring myself, through grace, to look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment, our Patron Saints became inflection points and the powers that bind us. Even my language describing this needs a background explanation. To “look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment” recalls vividly another “inflection point” that occurred in a dream.

I know I risk sounding a little pretentious here, but in that dream I was instructed by a nighttime visitor on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, to “look beyond the prison lights,” and when I did, my eyes were opened. I hope to return to this in a week or so in these pages when I write about the Great Patron of Justice, Saint Michael the Archangel.

Prison is not a good place. Let me put that differently. Prison is not a place where much good happens. But what good DOES happen in prison is often spectacular and it accomplishes spectacular things. One could easily dismiss those things as mere coincidence. I did just that for a long time. But a steady stream of graceful events in a place where grace seems otherwise to be entirely absent brings us back to seeing the ordinary as extraordinary. Saint Paul described such a place permeated by the light of faith: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Romans 5:20)

Convergence : St Maximilian Kolbe Lets Himself In

In my twelfth year of priesthood, I was convicted in a sham trial after refusing multiple plea deals to serve only a year or two in prison. My refusals were met with fury by Judge Arthur Brennan who ridiculed and mocked me before imposing on me a sentence that would live longer than I would live.

The numbers are important. In my twelfth year of priesthood I went to prison, and in my twelfth year in prison, I came as close as I ever had or ever will to despair. The year was 2006. The series of “accidents” leading up to this point are, in hindsight, astonishing. From seemingly out of nowhere, I was contacted by a priest who arranged with this prison’s Catholic chaplain, a deacon, to visit me, though I never understood why. In the previous 12 years, not a single priest had ventured behind these prison walls. Father James McCurry is a Conventual Franciscan priest who said only vaguely that he heard or read about me somewhere and felt compelled to reach out (or in) to me.

In the prison visiting room, his first words after shaking my hand were, “Have you ever heard of St. Maximilian Kolbe?” Fr McCurry told me that he had been the Vice Postulator for the cause of sainthood leading up to St. Maximilian’s canonization in Rome in 1982, the year I was ordained. On the twelfth anniversary of that canonization, and my ordination, Father McCurry felt compelled to visit me. The visit had to be brief.

The year was 2006. One week later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry along with something that I should not have received. It was a laminated holy card depicting Maximilian in both his prison garb from Auschwitz and his Franciscan habit. I should not have received it because laminated cards had been strictly banned for security reasons then. This one, however, mysteriously made its way from the prison mail room to my cell. I was mesmerized by the image on the card. On the backside was “A Prisoner’s Prayer to St. Maximilian Kolbe.” It was about despair.

I taped the card to the top of the battered steel mirror in my cell. It was December 23, 2006. Then I realized with near despair that on that very day, I was a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. I was losing myself. There is nothing here that supports in any way an identity of priesthood. The image on the mirror impacted me greatly, and painfully. It was three years before Beyond These Stone Walls would begin with my first post, “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.”

Months earlier, unknown to me at that time, another prisoner was dragged in chains out of years in solitary confinement in a Maine prison and shipped against his will to New Hampshire. After several weeks in “the hole” in high security housing, he arrived on the pod where I live. Walking around the pod to stake out his new turf, a very tough-looking Thai fighter stuck his head in my cell door. Upon seeing the image of Maximilian on my mirror, he stared at it for a time, and then he stared at me asking, “Is this you?”

This man had been through a lot, and was a little rough around the edges. The only part of that he might disagree with today is “a little.” He wore the wounds life had inflicted on him like a shield of armor to keep everyone else away. Everything about him spoke “dangerous,” and indeed he was at times. He had a short fuse, and that kept everyone else at a safe distance — except me.

We somehow became friends. He paid rapturous attention to the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life and especially how his earthly life ended as he gave it over to the Nazis, his false accusers, to spare the life of a despairing young man. My inflection point with Saint Maximilian was this: The image on my mirror was not about all that I had lost. It was about all that I was called to become. Like Maximilian, I could not change my prison. Not one bit. I could only place it in service to my priesthood.

Saint Maximilian, in turn, led both Max and me to the Immaculata. Through his Divine Mercy Sunday conversion and his consecration to the Lord through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pornchai Moontri took the name Maximilian. Like many in Sacred Scripture, a new name also came with a new life.

Over at our Voices from Beyond section this week, we are featuring “Mary is at Work Here” by Felix Carroll first published in Marian Helper magazine (Spring 2014). It tells the story of Mary, Maximilian, Pornchai-Max, and me, and the wonder of Divine Mercy we embraced as it also embraced us.

Out of Time and Space, Padre Pio

Our second inflection point — the point at which our spiritual fortunes changed — was Saint Padre Pio who is venerated in the Church calendar on the same date on which I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. It is also the date Padre Pio died. This was briefly alluded to by Max in his part of this post, but I would like to expand on it a bit because I know that Max will be reading this from half a world away.

Because of the connection between Padre Pio and the date of my imprisonment, I decided to write a post about this mysterious saint. Padre Pio died in 1968 when I was fifteen years old and had just begun my return to a long neglected Catholic identity. I today cannot articulate what exactly called me to that change in such a tumultuous time as 1968. I wrote a story about the calumny and false witness Padre Pio suffered in his priesthood. It was that which I could initially most connect with. The post was titled, “Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial.” It was published in the early days of this blog.

After I wrote it, I received a rather frantic letter from the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium. Pierre learned about me from a lengthy 2005 article by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. He and I exchanged several letters back in the few years after those articles first appeared in 2005. Pierre was alarmed about my Padre Pio post. He urgently wanted me to know that he had a personal encounter with Padre Pio when he was 15 years old.

Like many in Europe at that time, Pierre’s father had sent him to a boarding school. The school was sponsoring a train trip to a few points in Italy. When Pierre’s father learned of this, he sent Pierre a letter instructing him to take a train to a place called San Giovanni Rotondo, and go to a Capuchin Friary. Pierre was instructed to ask for a blessing from Padre Pio.

Pierre was skeptical, but did as his father asked. He took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo, and rang the bell. A friar answered the door and led young, nervous Pierre to a foyer. Pierre asked to see Padre Pio. “Impossibile!” the friar snapped back. He gave Pierre a prayer card and started to usher him back toward the door.

Just then, from a wide staircase leading to the foyer, a bearded Capuchin with bandaged hands came slowly down the stairs with eyes focused on Pierre. Padre Pio approached him while the astonished friar at the door whispered in Italian, “Do not touch his hands.” Padre Pio then placed his bandaged hands on Pierre’s head and spoke a blessing, making the Sign of the Cross.

Sixty years later, when Pierre read at Beyond These Stone Walls that Pornchai Moontri had decided to become Catholic and would enter the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, Pierre pleaded with me to ask Pornchai to allow him to act as Godfather to sponsor his reception into the Church. Then, again, things that should not have happened did happen. Pierre could not attend a Baptism in the prison chapel so I acted as proxy. But he could arrange to visit either me or Max in the prison visiting room a few days before. Under the rules, he could be on the visiting list of only one of us. That rule was impenetrable, firmly embedded in stone.

“The worst they can say is no,” Pornchai said. So I wrote to the prison warden and explained the details. The request came back miraculously just in time. It was approved that Mr. Matthews could visit with both of us on the same day, but separately. This was, and still is, unheard of. Pierre told us both the story I told above — the story of his strange encounter with Padre Pio many years earlier.

In his visit with me, Pierre bowed his head and asked for my blessing. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I placed my hand upon Pierre knowing that the spiritual imprint of Padre Pio’s blessing was still in and upon this man, and I was overwhelmed to share in it.

I do not fully understand the mystery of what happened to the angry priest who pondered prison and the fate of his priesthood, or the angry young man who pondered the deep wounds life had inflicted upon his body, mind and spirit. We are both still here, and on opposite sides of the planet now, but we are both also changed. As I am typing this, a friend sent me a letter with a brief prayer at the top. It is a parody of the Serenity Prayer, and it could now be the prayer of my priesthood:

“God, grant me
Serenity to accept the people
I cannot change,
Courage to change
the only one I can, and the
Wisdom to know
that it’s me!”

Thank you for reading these stories of our lives. May the Lord Bless you always, and keep you.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free, and we will usually haunt your Inbox only once per week. You might also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ — a Marian Helper presentation

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor

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A Special Note to our Readers: Thank you for your readership and support of this blog. As annual fees become due, Father Gordon could use your help if willing and able. Additionally, we have been notified that the National Center for Reason and Justice is ceasing operations after two decades of advocacy and sponsorship of the defense of Father MacRae and other wrongfully convicted.

For any future defense of Father MacRae it is imperative that the National Center for Reason and Justice website at ncrj.org remain active and in place. It contains volumes of crucial legal information on the Father MacRae case and must be preserved or all will be lost. We have been granted permission from the NCRJ to take over management of its site and preserve its contents. This will add to our annual operating expenses. If readers are able to help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please see Contact and How to Help

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.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/31/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/31/24

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

July 31, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

This post has been a long time in the making. It’s the result of an epiphany, a sudden realization of truth that radically changed my perception of what had previously been to me just a painful memory. Then I stumbled upon something entirely new. To convey this thunderous awakening, I have to first ask you to return with me to a time not long ago that was painful and confusing for us all: the rise of the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021. The virus, the masks, the closures, the lies, the “mostly peaceful” protests that were actually riots, the burning cities each night on the news, it was all just awful.

Then there was Covid itself. I had it twice, the first time in the month after my friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri, was taken away in the custody of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after 36 years in America and 15 years as my roommate. Prisons are not known for having empathy about the human side of things. There was not a single concern about what happens to Pornchai or where I go from there. For over 15 years Max lived in the bunk above me where we were engaged in an epic spiritual battle to reconcile his past and secure a future. Then at 0700 on the morning of September 8, 2020, he was gone. By 0900, a stranger was living in his place.

And as I struggled to regain my sense of autonomy and balance, dark forces chose that very moment to bring down this blog. The only means I had to communicate with the outside world. I had to set all this aside to focus my meager resources and attention on the biggest crisis at hand: how to help Max cope with the hellish vortex of being lost in ICE detention with little hope and no means to communicate at all.

I seem to never learn to trust, however. I instinctively lean back on to my own resources and rely on no one else. That was certainly not working and it was not going to work. Then our late friend Claire Dion revealed an ingenious plan. Pornchai Max and I could not call each other, but we both could call Claire. She cared very much for us, and being a retired RN, she put her ingenuity to work. She devised a plan that I described not long after her death from cancer this year. That post was “Claire Dion Has Fallen into the Hands of the Living God.” Here is our treasured photo of how Claire put us back together.

The ICE Follies

As you know, Pornchai Moontri was taken from Thailand at age 11 in 1985 and brought to America. This forced him into a devastating and traumatic life from which there was but one escape. So he fled from it, again and again, the last time leaving him all alone in this world, a homeless teen at age 14 in a foreign country with a language and customs he could not comprehend.

Fleeing the trauma of exploitation, Pornchai fell into life on the streets where he trusted no one. He would steal food to survive, and sleep in doorways, shelters, and sometimes on the floor in the home of a friend. One day he stole a few cans of beer from a store. Fleeing across the store parking lot in 1992, Pornchai was tackled and pinned down by a much larger man. He could not be in that situation again. He could not be someone’s victim. He snapped, and that man died over a few cans of beer.

Ironically, just as I began typing this post I received a message from “Melissa.” Nearly 40 years ago at age 12 she had been a classmate of Pornchai in the seventh grade in middle school in Bangor, Maine when he first arrived in the United States. Melissa’s comment was both caring and brave, and it struck me that the trauma to which Pornchai was subjected has echoes all around him and across the years. Here is an excerpt of Melissa’s comment:

“I met Pornchai in seventh grade. I remember him as a sweet boy who was always smiling. However, a ‘foreigner’ he was not going to be accepted into the ‘in crowd’ though I don’t recall anyone that didn’t like him. How could they not? He had a great disposition … . I was upset to learn of Pornchai’s arrest back in 1992 because I knew the kid never stood a chance. We had all heard about the abusive home in Bangor. Over the years I would check to see if he had yet been released and was infuriated to learn that he had not. He had stolen beer, was chased into the parking lot by a grown man who confronted him. Pornchai reacted as the scared, cornered boy that he was. It was a tragedy for both. However, this boy, barely a legal adult, was locked up and forgotten. His American dream was a living nightmare. He became Bangor’s forgotten son. America, Bangor, Penobscot County Courts, DCF, teachers … . We all failed him.”

Years later, Pornchai emerged from over a decade in solitary confinement. Then our lives converged, clearly by design. I drew the entire story of his life out of Pornchai including all the madness that had been inflicted upon him.

What sparked me to write this post in 2024 was something that I did not know until very recently. I stumbled upon a plea from Catholic League President Bill Donohue addressed to the White House in 2021 in the final days of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Dr. Donohue published this petition in the January 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League, under title “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee”:

We took up a very serious case at Christmastime, hoping to bring relief to a man who has paid his dues and has been through enough. We asked Catholics to appeal to President Donald Trump to release Pornchai Moontri from the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He deserves to be repatriated to Thailand.

We were encouraged by news that the embassy in Thailand was contacted by ICE just days after we made our request; Pornchai’s case showed movement for the first time. Right before Christmas we asked our email subscribers to redouble their efforts making one more push.

Bill Donohue has known of the plight of Pornchai for many years. It was Fr. Gordon J. MacRae — he is another victim of injustice — who brought Pornchai’s story to his attention. Pornchai rightly credits Fr. MacRae with mentoring him. More than that, MacRae brought him into the Catholic Church.

We explained why Pornchai deserves to be released.

Pornchai was born in Thailand in 1973 and was abandoned by his mother when he was two-years-old. She intended to sell him, but a young relative came to his rescue and brought him into his home. When he was 11-years-old his mother reemerged with a new husband; they took him to Bangor, Maine, against his will. His stepfather, Richard Bailey, immediately started raping him, and did so for three years. At age 14, Pornchai escaped (it was his second escape) and became homeless. When he was 18, he got into a fight with a much bigger man while he was intoxicated and took the man’s life during the struggle (he was so drunk he does not recall stabbing him).

While awaiting trial, Pornchai’s mother came to visit him in jail, warning him that if he disclosed to the authorities what his stepfather did to him, she would suffer the consequences. Fearing for his mother’s life, he prudently decided not to speak, even to the point of not defending himself in court. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Maine has no parole.

In 2000, his mother attempted to leave her husband; they were living in Guam. That is where she was beaten to death. The only suspect was her husband, but there was no evidence to convict him. Subsequently, many things changed.

In 2005, Pornchai was sent to a New Hampshire State Prison. That is where he met Fr. MacRae. Five years later, Pornchai became a Catholic; he soon became a fan of the Catholic League.

In 2018, after new evidence emerged — advocates for Pornchai pursued Bailey — and justice was finally done. Bailey was convicted on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai.

On September 11, 2020, Pornchai, after serving his full sentence, was released at age 47 to the custody of ICE for deportation to his native Thailand. He is still in custody, with no end in sight.

Pornchai has served his time and has suffered enough. He should now be set free.

— William Donohue, PhD, Catalyst, January 2021

A White House Intervention

When Bill Donohue published the above, and Catholic League members sent it to the White House, Pornchai had already been held by ICE in an ICE detention facility in Gena, Louisiana for five months. It was the peak of Covid contagion and he was living 70 to a room with no protection and lights blazing around the clock. Despite my daily assurances that we were working hard to get him out, he was showing signs of extreme stress and depression. While I was shielding Pornchai from false hopes and promises, I was unaware that others were also shielding me about their own efforts. I thought I was a lone ranger doing my best each day to reach out to anyone who would take a call from a prisoner — and they were few — to plea for relief from Pornchai’s plight. The Covid pandemic had the world locked tightly in its grip and the riots across America were evidence of how tightly wound our world had become. Pornchai believed that he would remain trapped in ICE until the Covid crisis was over and that could take years. So in the meantime, I asked Pornchai to try to reach out to others who were also trapped in ICE, but even less fortunate than himself. He did exactly that, and ended up saving 17-year-old Trepha, a Vietnamese teen who ended up in the same ICE facility as Pornchai, but surrounded mostly by young men from Latin America. Trepha had stowed away on a container ship departing Vietnam and then his unplanned world tour ended in Mexico.

Smugglers took what little money Trepha had saved and then led him across the Rio Grande and locked him in the trunk of an abandoned car. When Border Patrol agents found him, they made no distinction between migrants from Latin American countries and those who had come from abroad. Pornchai protected Trepha by keeping him away from the Central American gangs at Gena and then tasked me with reaching out to the Vietnamese Consulate to try to get Trepha returned home. I still hear from him on occasion. He is back in Vietnam with his grandmother and has promised me that he would not undertake any more world tours. In December 2020 we posted “An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump” asking for an intervention to move Pornchai’s relocation along despite the Covid pandemic and its international restrictions. What I did not know at the time I wrote that post was that Catholic League President Bill Donohue also reached out to the White House greatly magnifying our voice.

I learned of this only recently, three years later in 2024. I stumbled upon some fascinating paperwork from my friend Fr George David Byers in North Carolina who had been helping me then behind the scenes in this blog. Father George printed a few pages of a BTSW traffic report showing visitors to this site and what they were seeing in December 2020 and January 2021. I did not make much sense of it then, so I just put it aside out of sight and out of mind. Three years passed and I discovered it again just weeks ago. I could see that many of the site views were from ICE Headquarters in New Orleans and then in January 2021 from Homeland Security in Washington and then finally from the White House. This was the culmination of the interest of thousands of Catholic League members who intervened to assist Pornchai Moontri.

Then, upon discovering the above, I went to the prison law library where I work. I keep there a collection of the many issues of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I began to look through them, and then found one breathlessly in the January 2021 edition entitled “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee.”

It did not just move the needle, it moved a mountain. Just two weeks after its publication Pornchai was aboard a Korean Airlines flight bound for Seoul along two plainclothes ICE officers who accompanied him. From there they boarded a connecting flight to Bangkok. The flight was 23 hours.

It turned out that the ICE officers read a good deal about Pornchai and as a result treated him very well. In fact, they saved the day. Upon their arrival after midnight in the Customs area at Bangkok International Airport, an exhausted Pornchai found himself surrounded by Thai police who were waiting for him. They demanded to know why he was being deported from the United States. The two ICE officers quickly intervened telling Pornchai not to answer. The ICE officers said that Pornchai had done nothing wrong, that he was being repatriated to his native country in cooperation with the Thai government and was entirely a free man. The Thai police went silent. Pornchai had never seen anything like it. Much later Pornchai wrote of his arrival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai learned from me this week that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, and likely also then-President Donald Trump, were instrumental in a worldwide effort to restore him to freedom. He marveled at this, and so do I. “The Hand of God was on them both,” I told him, “and on you as well.”

“I could not see that then,” said Pornchai, “it took a priest and two presidents, but I see it now.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a riveting and timely new book that I hope to soon review in these pages. It is Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization defending individual Catholics and the Church against defamation. No one in the U.S. Catholic Church has done more to assist me and Pornchai Moontri than Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Join forces with us at www.CatholicLeague.org.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Pornchai Maximilian Moontri 1/3/24 Pornchai Maximilian Moontri 1/3/24

Pornchai Moontri: A New Year of Hope Begins in Thailand

Pornchai Moontri arrived in Thailand in early 2021 during a global pandemic and after a 36-year absence. Life has been a daily struggle, but hope is on the horizon.

Pornchai Moontri arrived in Thailand in early 2021 during a global pandemic and after a 36-year absence. Life has been a daily struggle, but hope is on the horizon.

January 3, 2024 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Editor’s Note: Pornchai Moontri is now the Asia Correspondent for Beyond These Stone Walls. The image atop this post depicts the route for a high-speed passenger and cargo rail that will have a depot in Pak Chong, Thailand where Pornchai is now living. His most recent post, which we will link to again at the end of this one, was the very moving “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

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Sawasdee Kup, my friends. When Fr Gordon MacRae asked me to write the first post of 2024 at Beyond These Stone Walls, I was excited. But when I asked him what I should write about he said “Just write whatever comes to mind.” Now I am just totally nervous! This was during a phone call to Thailand from the little barred room where we once both lived in Concord, New Hampshire. Being there was supposed to be a punishment, and in many ways it lived up to that expectation. But in spite of it, there were also very special things that happened there. I learned the ways of Divine Mercy there, and was touched by it. We conversed with St. Maximilian Kolbe and our Blessed Mother there, and they answered us.

It was from there that Father G helped to win my freedom and from there that he walked with me every day through the daily torment of ICE detention and deportation. Every day for 150 days trapped in crowded ICE custody during a pandemic, I would wake up and ask the Lord if this might be the day I will be free. Then at night I would go to bed asking for the grace to cope with yet another day. Father G reminded me that this is how we live now — in union with the Suffering of Christ.

After 29 years in prison and over five months in ICE detention, I finally arrived in Thailand on February 9, 2021. I thought I would burst with excitement, but in reality, I was filled with fear. Because it was in the middle of the Covid pandemic, the Thai government required me to stay alone, with no human contact at all, in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Bangkok for fifteen days. I have to say it was a lot nicer than all my other stays in solitary confinement.

Back in 2005, after several years in the prison version of solitary confinement, I was moved to an over-crowded prison in New Hampshire and many years of never, ever being alone. After that, the sudden aloneness of a Holiday Inn hotel room felt scary. But in a daily phone call, Father G walked with me through that trial as well. His contacts here arranged to have a Samsung Galaxy smart phone placed in the room before I arrived. You would laugh if you saw me trying to figure it out. I had never before seen one. It was like an alien device to me.

At the Home Page on the little screen, I typed in “Beyond These Stone Walls.” I did not expect anything to happen, but suddenly there it was! For eleven years I could only imagine what this magical blog looked like. I remember the Psalm, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” I think people on the Space Station could have seen my smile when Father G appeared on my screen and I heard him speaking.

I had stumbled upon a video documentary interview that he once told me about. But now I was seeing and hearing it. It was 2:00 AM and I was exhausted from jet lag and the 24-hour flight to Bangkok, but I wanted to hear it all. Just like old times, however, Father G put me to sleep! That was the end of day one in Thailand. You can read the rest if you want in one of the first posts I wrote from here: “Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand.”

Photo by Diana Robinson (**CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)**

The Lion Kings

Then came the hard adventure of adjusting and thriving as opposed to just living. That was the challenge Father G gave me. “I don’t want you to just survive. I want you to thrive.” Well, that has been a harder challenge, easier said than done, but I haven't given up on it. Neither has Father G.

Sometimes I felt like Simba in The Lion King. Banished from the kingdom and trying to find his way in a strange land separated from all he knew, Simba could only imagine his father’s voice. For a time after my arrival in Thailand, I was living with Father John Le, SVD and some members of the Missionary Society of the Divine Word. Father John, who is now the local superior for the Thailand province of his Order, became a very good friend to both me and Father Gordon.

Father John manages a Vietnamese Refugee Project in Thailand. On my last day in hotel solitary, he showed up to pick me up. People being deported can take nothing but the clothes they are wearing, and mine were meant for Concord, New Hampshire, not Thailand where the temperature was about 114 degrees Fahrenheit and super humid.

Father G and our friend Viktor Weyand had some U.S. funds sent for me ahead of time, so Father John took me shopping for clothing more suitable to Thailand. He took me to the biggest and busiest shopping mall in Bangkok where I had a panic attack from being around so many people. I heard of this happening to other former prisoners. One day a few months later, Father G challenged me to go back to that mall. I could walk to it from Father John’s SVD house where I was living then. It was a sort of personal triumph that I went back there and just walked around for a couple of hours.

I did not buy anything, but it helped me not to panic so much around crowds of people. Language was also a problem. I look Thai and have a Thai name, but no one could understand me or why I looked so confused when they spoke to me. It was embarrassing and I could not explain the long traumatic story that led up to this moment.

Over the next few months, I had the great honor of helping Father John with food distribution when visiting the Vietnamese refugee communities he serves in Thailand. One of these visits took me to the far Northeast of Thailand about nine hours drive with Father John to the place where I was born and where my mother’s little house still stands unoccupied. I lived there with my aunt and cousins until I was eleven and was taken from Thailand. My mother was later murdered. Father G told that awful story in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” I cannot bring myself to read it, but I lived it.

On one of the refugee visit trips north, Father John and I ended up staying at that house. There were lots of memories, many of them painful. Some of my mother’s things were still in the house which was left unoccupied for over 20 years. I have traveled back there a few times to work on my mother’s house and make it habitable, but it became clearer to me that I cannot live there. I had been gone for too long. The family I thought I remembered no longer remembered me. With help from Father G and Father John, I had to accept that I no longer have the family I thought I had in Thailand.

Father G and Father John are my family now, and Chalathip, a retired teacher and benefactor of Father John’s refugee work. She also took me in. She convinced Father G that I must relearn Thai, and cannot do so while living with four priests who spoke only Vietnamese. Chalathip lived just a short walk away on the same street as Father John’s SVD Community house and she offered me an empty apartment on her second floor.

Father John and Father G speak often and Father G still calls me every morning. He calls at 6:00 PM which is at 6:00 AM for me. I never imagined that someone’s guidance would become so important to me. For much of my life, the only voice I listened to was my own. That did not always go so well. I have learned that family is not always just the blood that runs though our veins. It is where our heart is. I am blessed with the example and fatherhood of two priests who live selfless lives and work tirelessly for others. They are, to me, The Lion Kings.

Independence Day Delayed

Back in 2006 or so, at just about the time Father G and I met, I was told by two immigration officials that I would have to be deported back to Thailand when my sentence was over. I worried about this for months back then, and I could see only doomsday scenarios in my future. I settled in my mind on my imagined “Plan B.” It was built on hopelessness. My “Plan B” was to wait until my sentence was almost over, and then in the last days of it, I would destroy myself. I saw no other way and I did not know how to ask for help and, really, I believed that there was no one I could ask. God? Who’s he? I was proud then even though I had nothing in my life to be proud about.

Father G knew about my eventual deportation, and he kept wanting to help me prepare for it. I had not heard Thai spoken since I was eleven in 1985 so by twenty years later my Thai was all but gone. Through a Thai language publisher in San Francisco, Father G got some Thai instruction books and CDs donated to the prison library and he arranged with the librarian for me to go there twice a week to study Thai. I had the added handicap of never having learned to read and write Thai as a child.

People who have no hope don’t usually prepare for the future. I did not believe I had a future. I only had a past. But Father G was relentless. He began to poke around in my past and the dark corners of my mind where I never let anyone look. He managed to get the whole story of my life out of me. Then he convinced me to let him write about it. He told me that people in Thailand would see it, and someone there would reach out to help me. I told him that I did not need anyone's help. I did not want anyone's help. Father G saw right through that lie.

He saw other things as well. He became the only person who ever looked out for my best interest, so I surrendered control of my life to him, but he told me to surrender only to God. I tried that, and ended up becoming a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. I could not believe the whole Divine Mercy thing at first but I believed that Father G believed it so I gave it a try. My mother was murdered by the evil man who took me from Thailand, but Father Gordon told me that the Mother of Jesus would be my Mother as well. She put me into the Hands of the Living God.

Then everything changed. All my problems were still there, my doubts, my mood swings, my painful past. And I was plagued with nightmares. But now there was a spark of something new. One day, Gordon sat me down and challenged me that if I want to let God in, I had to abandon all thoughts of “Plan B,” so I did.

The largest religious belief in most Southeast Asian countries is Theravada Buddhism. It began in India around the Sixth Century BC and arrived in Thailand and Cambodia in the first century AD as the primary religion and philosophy of life. Like most abandoned children in Thailand, I was handed over to a Buddhist monastery for a time as a young child. When I was taken from Thailand at age eleven, all that happened before then was forgotten. So I came to God as an empty vessel.

The Train to Singapore

After a year or so in super-hot, super-crowded Bangkok, Father John and Chalathip and Father G talked about bringing me to a property Chalathip owns in the city of Pak Chong in the mountain region of central Thailand. I have lived there since. I attend Mass at St. Nicholas Catholic Church, one of three Catholic churches right here in Pak Chong, a city of about 225,000.

There are two homes on the large property. I live in the smaller one. The picture above this section is the view from my bedroom window. Pak Chong is much cooler than Bangkok, and I see Father John often because he stops here and stays with me on his way to and from his Order’s headquarters in Nong Bua Lamphu where I was born. My greatest wish and prayer is that Father G will be free, and be able to come here and stay.

Father G recently wrote about “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” He explained how some 30,000 young Thai men applied for work in Israel because there are few job opportunities in Thailand since the pandemic. I have to work — even if it is without income which has been the case since I arrived in Thailand. So I landscaped the entire property in Pak Chong and now it is a sort of oasis. Chalathip decided to start a small business here and rent the large house out as a vacation rental that I can manage while living in the smaller house.

Pak Chong is just a few kilometers from the Khao Yai National Park, Thailand’s oldest and largest park and game preserve. It still has tigers and elephants in the wild. No one ever sees the tigers. They do not want to be seen. l repair the larger house as needed and as funds permit to make it ready for vacation rentals. In December 2023 I had our first guests, a small group that came here for an overnight to explore Khao Yai National Park. There is a lot still to be done before this small business is ready to run.

The economy here is only slowly opening up. The largest industry in Thailand is tourism, and that had been shut down for three years. Father G has been studying a promising development that will very much impact Pak Chong and the rest of Thailand. China, to our north, leads the world in shipping and transportation by high-speed railway, a technology developed in China and Japan. China recently signed a treaty with Laos — which is between Thailand and China — to construct a high-speed railway from the City of Kunming in the South Chinese Province of Yunnam running all the way to Vientiane, the Capital of Laos on the Laos-Thailand border.

Thailand did not want China to build and operate its railway system, so the Chinese agreed to provide the high-speed rail technology while Thailand builds it. It will stretch from Vientiane in Laos in the north all the way to Bangkok in the south. The hopeful news is that a major depot on the trade route and passenger rail is being built right here in Pak Chong. Father G had me take the photos of its construction above.

It is a 2.5-hour drive from Pak Chong to Bangkok, but the high-speed railway traveling at 240 kilometers per hour will reduce the travel time to just under one hour.This is promising news for Pak Chong which is situated right on that route, and for the Thai economy and its major industry, tourism.

Father G created a map of the route which is expected to be completed in Pak Chong in 2026. Once it reaches Bangkok, the Thai Capital, China plans to pick up completion of the railway again and extend it all the way down the Malay Peninsula. When complete, the high-speed rail will extend from Kunming, China through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia, and finally connect with Singapore. Father G said that a major depot on the route will exist right where I have settled in Pak Chong, and that may be an act of Divine Providence. I hope so.

Umm, did I just mention “Hope?”

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We found this June 2023 article “Phase 1 of high-speed rail ready ‘by 2026’” in the Bangkok Post.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae :

Our Tool Fund Project for Pornchai and Father John Le’s Refugee Program are still active at our “Special Events” page. Pornchai, Father John and I are deeply grateful to donors who contributed this past year.

You may also like these related posts by Pornchai Moontri:

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

Father John and I caught this giant Mekong River catfish one day. I had to hold it down before it could swallow Father Jonah ... Umm, I mean Father John. We put it back in the river where it swam away after giving me a rather nasty look. I will never swim in that river again.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 12/6/23 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 12/6/23

Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel

Young Thai migrant workers were killed or held hostage by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023. They knew nothing of the Hamas hatred for Jews. They were simply poor.

Young Thai migrant workers were killed or held hostage by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023. They knew nothing of the Hamas hatred for Jews. They were simply poor.

December 6, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

The small Thai city of Udon Thani near Thailand’s northern border with Laos is no stranger to being caught up in the shrapnel of someone else’s war. It is the home of a man we have come to know, a Catholic priest whose life and priesthood were shaped and shifted by the American war in Vietnam. Our readers became acquainted with him, and with Udon Thani, in a post published here on November 30, 2022: “For Fr. John Tabor, the Path to Priesthood Was War.”

So it caught my attention when the name of a young Thai migrant worker from Udon Thani appeared on a list of Thai citizens who found temporary field work in Israel to support their families back home only to be caught up in the winds of someone else’s war. Many young Thai men were murdered or became hostages in the barbaric Hamas slaughter of Israelis and anyone else in their path at the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, 2023. This story has been buried under the larger political issues.

The Thai economy, with tourism as its principal industry, suffered greatly over the course of the global pandemic of 2019 through 2022. Reopening and rebuilding the Thai economy has made much progress, but it has been slow. I have firsthand knowledge of the burden this creates for young Thai citizens trying to support themselves and their families. Our friend Pornchai Moontri was repatriated to Thailand in 2021 after a 36 year absence. With no employment history in Thailand, he now competes without tools with thousands of others for gainful employment.

While hoping that the gradually reopening Thai turism industry will provide more opportunities, Pornchai applied for and received a Thai passport. It took one year. In 2023, he could have easily been lured by the offshore prospects for work in Israel. He was, after all, alone with no family to support or support him. I urged him not to do so, but to stay the course to adjust to his native land while I and some friends tried to raise basic sustenance for him which amounts to only a few hundred US dollars per month. I wrote of this in “For This Prodigal Son, Homecoming Is a Work In Progress.”

Pornchai’s unique situation does not reflect that of others in Thailand struggling to support their families. Mitchai Sarabon, age 32, is the field worker from Udon Thani I mentioned above. He traveled this year with dozens of other young Thai citizens for migrant work at a southern Israel kibbutz. A kibbutz is a sort of cooperative community in Israel. It comes from the Hebrew term, gibbes, meaning, “to gather.”

Kibbutz members contribute by working according to their capacity. In return they receive food, communal housing, and other needs along with a chance to earn money to support their families back in Thailand. The Thai workers earn five times what they could earn in the struggling post-Covid Thai economy. Other kibbutz migrant worker communities include workers from the Philippines and Nepal.

These foreign field hands largely replace Palestinian workers. In 1987, after a series of militant strikes, demonstrations and riots known as the “Intifada,” many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were prevented from taking up work in Israel. The Intifada movement of violence against Israel began in the Gaza Strip. It was distinguished from earlier movements by the extent of popular participation from Palestinians, by its long duration, and by the part played by Islamic agitators.

The Intifada was comprised of multiple groups who, in the beginning, advocated for the creation of an Islamic state that included all of historic Israeli territory. However, in 1988 one of the groups, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) changed its policy. It now supported a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel. As the Intifada continued, popular participation decreased, violence increased, and the other Islamic groups grew in strength. The Intifada was a factor leading to the 1993 and 1995 agreements between the PLO and Israel, establishing Palestinian control over the Gaza Strip and portions of the West Bank.

October 7, 2023

Some Palestinians continued to work in Israel while Thai migrant workers had seasonal field work there for years after a 2012 bilateral economic treaty between Israel and Thailand. Slow recovery from the 2019 Covid pandemic greatly increased the number of young Thai citizens available for migrant agricultural work in Israel. At the time of the brutal Hamas assault, some 30,000 Thais were doing seasonal work in Israel.

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, some of the Nepalese workers from a nearby kibbutz came to join the Thais who were spending that Saturday doing chores and playing music. It was Mitchai Sarabon, aged 32, a Thai migrant worker who formerly served in the Thai military who first noticed that something was very wrong. He later described the terror that set upon them. The fact that he is alive today to tell this tale seems miraculous:

“We became used to rockets flying overhead from Gaza. Then suddenly I heard gunshots and the gunshots came closer. One of our Nepalese friends was shot. Others ran to take cover in a bomb shelter. Then the terrorists arrived in large numbers. They all threw grenades and then shot people trying to run away.”

The Hamas terrorists then walked around the compound shooting and killing the wounded. Mitchai Sarabon and five others managed to take shelter in a kitchen in one of the kibbutz structures where they hid. Sarabon reports having the impression that he and the others were intentional targets. “The Hamas appeared to know exactly where they were going and who they were targeting,” said Sarabon. As they took shelter behind a closed and blockated door, the Hamas terrorists were shouting, “Open the door!” They were shouting this in Thai.

Once the door was broken down, the Hamas raiders shot everyone inside. Sarabon was shot in the back and in the chest. Ten Nepalese were also shot and killed while four others were wounded. One was taken as a hostage. Sarabon was shot a third time, this time in the head. He lost consciousness and this is likely what ultimately saved him. The Hamas terrorists thought he was already dead. It is a miracle that Sarabon survived these wounds. His injuries were critical and he may never fully recover. He told this account from a hospital bed, and all of it has been confirmed by others.

The Wall Street Journal report recounted that one Thai worker heroically raced to pick up an unexploded grenade and throw it away from his friends before it detonated. Another WSJ report, “Hamas Puts Its Pogrom on Video,” (October 28, 2023) recounted a snapshot of the barbarism of that day from a screening for journalists of a video of the Hamas invasion reviewed at the New York Israeli Consulate. This video then seems to have been suppressed by some mainstream media. Here is an excerpt of the WSJ report:

“Why did the Hamas men, upon confronting the dead body of a teenage girl start cheering? Why did they argue over who would get to decapitate a Thai guest worker they had shot, then proclaim ‘Allahu akbar,’ ‘God is most great’ with every swing at his neck? ‘Allahu akbar’ was on their lips over and over as they shot defenseless civilians, dragged corpses, and pumped round after round into the dead. There it was again on the terrorists’ return to Gaza, ‘Allahu akbar’ coming from crowds as a Hamas man pulled by the hair a battered hostage with pants bloodied around her groin … . During the music-festival massacre, a terrorist paused to put a bullet through each of the porta-potties lest a single girl escape.”

I am sorry you had to read the above WSJ excerpt, but the parts I left out are only more hideous and barbaric. ‘Allahu akbar!’ God IS great, but this is not God. This is the work of evil spinning up from the dark hearts of men who have over eons of inherited hatred, let their politics take the place of God.

Mitchai Sarabon, an exceptionally brave and resilient young Thai man, told an interviewer from his hospital bed, “I want the people of Israel to know that they are in my thoughts and prayers all the time.”

The Thai ambassador to Israel said that Thai workers were the second largest group next to Israelis to be killed, wounded, or taken hostage on October 7. Eric Parens, an attorney with a focus on US-Thai legal matters, said at a recent protest in a media interview at United Nations Headquarters:

“The United Nations, world governments, and international protestors have willfully ignored the targeted killing, abduction and torture of hundreds of Thai civilian nationals who had been working along side both Israelis and Palestinians by Hamas on October 7.”

The glaring irony in this tragic story is that none of these Thai, Nepalese or Philippino victims new anything about the political fractures for which organized terror groups today declared themselves to be the world’s victims, the excuse they use to maim, kill, rape and pillage the innocent.

As I write this, news and firsthand accounts are emerging about the vicious sexual assaults committed by Hamas against Israeli women even as they were being killed and taken hostage. It was unspeakable, a term employed today by members of the so-called Squad, a progressive wing of the US Congress who have minimized, obfuscated, and denied this aspect of the terror.

The scenes of pro-Palestinian protests in universities across the Western world say more about the state of Western education than the State of Israel.

**Israeli army Southern Command General Ariel Sharon with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 on the western bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt.**

War and Remembrance

The Jewish Commonwealth of Israel dates back 3,000 years to the time of King David. One thousand years later, Jewish sovereignty was disrupted with the Roman Empire’s occupation of Palestine and its destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. I wrote of how forces in the Middle East previously sent Israel into exile as a divided kingdom, and of how its capital and nation were restored in “The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God.” In November, 1947, following the Holocaust, the United Nations member states voted in General Assembly to partition British Mandated Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State. This was in part an acknowledgment of the historic homeland of the Jews and the fact that world politics had come to deprive them of a safe place to live. Jews accepted the two-state plan but Arabs did not. In May, 1948, Israel proclaimed its independence and its right to exist. One day later, Israel was attacked by a coalition of Arab states in the first Israeli-Arab War. The much smaller army of Israel put down the Arab assault.

In September 1967, in Khartoum, Sudan, the Arab League adopted a mandate of “Three No’s” — No Negotiations, No Recognition, and No Peace with Israel.

On October 6, 1973 on the Jewish High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Arab nations led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. Though there were heavy casualties on both sides, Israel again prevailed. It is important to note, for much of the world has failed to do so, that the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, occurred on the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur attack on Israel in 1973.

In December 1987, six years after the Yom Kippur attack, Hamas was formed to establish an Intifada — an Arabic term meaning a “throwing off,” as when a dog throws off its fleas. It was the designation of a manifest destiny defined by Hamas as a right and duty to destroy Israel. Hamas is actually an acronym for the Arabic, “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,” or “Islamic Resistance Movement.” It is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and most western nations.

Citizens of the Kingdom of Thailand

As traumatized hostages were released by Hamas a few at a time, the entire civilized world became its hostage. Those few released at first, including children and the elderly, reported spending 50 days in near total underground darkness with no showers and scant food in an information blackout. To its great credit, the Kingdom of Thailand launched immediately into what The Wall Street Journal proudly called “a high-gear crash course in hostage recovery and Middle East conflict politics.” A December 2, 2023 article, “How Thais Scrambled to Free Hostages” by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw tells a riveting tale of the Thai government’s relentless and heroic efforts to rescue its captive citizens. Here is an excerpt:

“Thai Prime Minister Sretta Thavisin began shuttling between countries that he hoped could reach Hamas, starting with Malaysia, his Muslim-majority neighbor, which hosts a Palestinian embassy and doesn’t recognize Israel. On October 20 he met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh. The Crown Prince said he would ‘do his utmost.’”

This was followed by a multitude of Thai entreaties to Hamas through every possible channel. The Thai former Minister of Education flew to Iran. Detachments were flown to the Thai Embassy in Tel Aviv to support efforts to house thousands of Thais searching for a safe haven in the now declared Israeli-Hamas war zone. Hamas did not even seem to know which Thais were still alive and held hostage. In four cases, families in Thailand were mourning news of the deaths of their sons, fathers, brothers, husbands only to later learn that they survived. At this writing, most but not all of the Thai hostages have been freed or accounted for. One victim of that terrible day, Mitchai Sarabon, who was left for dead but never taken captive remained in a hospital for over a month until he was well enough to be flown home to his family in Udon Thani, Thailand.

The question for the rest of the world now seems crystal clear. If Israel is sacrificed to appease terrorists, who will they come for next?

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading this important post. It was long ago said to me by a Sacred Scripture professor that “Salvation comes from the Jews.” I have long pondered that, and it continues to inform me.

Please see our “Special Events” and “Contact and Support” Pages for ways that you can help me to help our friend Pornchai Moontri to restore his life in Thailand. You may also like these related posts:

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized
(by Pornchai Moontri)

The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

Advent of the Mother of God
(Never underestimate the power of a Jewish Mom!)

**Mitchai Sarabon recovering at a Tel Aviv hospital. Photo courtesy Mitchai Sarabon.**

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 11/29/23 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 11/29/23

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.

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.**

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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