“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
Advent of the Mother of God
The Vigil of the First Sunday of Advent opens a time to release ourselves from the grip of Earthly powers to prepare the Way of the Lord and make straight His paths.
The First Sunday of Advent begins a time to release ourselves from the grip of Earthly powers to prepare the Way of the Lord and make straight His path.
Advent by Father Gordon MacRae
The Gospels According to Matthew and Luke are the Scriptural sources for the events of Advent and Christmas. They have many similarities and some differences. Matthew alone tells the story of the Magi, a story I unfolded here in “Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear.” Only Luke has the story of Saint Gabriel the Archangel and the Annunciation. It seems that Mary herself was his source for that account and the events to follow. That Gospel passage graces two important Feast Days within Advent: The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12. I unfolded the deeper recesses of that account as well in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”
Both Evangelists often present two stories, one on the surface, and one with much deeper meaning and historical context for those “with eyes to see and ears to hear” making these accounts far richer stories with deeper significance. What lies beneath the lines of the Gospel has to be excavated by seeing and hearing with the hearts and minds of the original hearers of this Good News.
Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation is followed immediately by Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth who awaits the pending birth of John who would become known as the Baptist. It’s a short account, easy to read and ponder, but it tells two stories — maybe even three — one on its surface and one or two that lay beneath. I am going to reproduce it here:
“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the child [who would become John the Baptist] leaped in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
— Luke 1:39-45
This account comprises the Second Joyful Mystery of the Rosary and is familiar to all of us. At face value, it relates a joyous encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, her cousin and the wife of Zechariah and expectant mother of John the Baptist.
Then there is a second level of meaning, though subtle, that astute Jewish hearers might detect in Luke’s account. The experience of the child leaping in Elizabeth’s womb in the presence of the prenatal Jesus recalls the Old Testament story of Rebekah (Genesis 25: 22-23), pregnant with the twins, Jacob and Esau. Both Luke’s Gospel and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, use the Greek word “skirtáō” to describe this “leaping” or “struggling” of the child in the womb.
In Saint Luke’s account, “the child leaped (skirtáō) in her womb” is used to infer that the child in Mary’s womb would be greater than his slightly older cousin, John (expressed in John 3:16 and 3:27-30). In the Old Testament case of Rebekah, it was to show that Jacob would have preeminence over his slightly older brother, Esau, as God Himself explains:
“The children struggled (skirtáō) together within her… And the Lord said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born to you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”
— Genesis 25: 22-23
Also, Elizabeth’s declaration, “Blessed are you among women,” reverberates in Jewish ears back to the experiences of Jael and Judith (Judges 5:24-27 and Judith 13:18). Blessed for their heroic courage in warding off the enemies hostile to Israel, Jael and Judith struck mortal blows to the head of the enemy. In Mary’s case, the victory will be even greater as she puts the head of the enemy beneath her feet (Genesis 3:15).
Elizabeth’s question put to Mary — “Why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” — does not denote a simple visit between cousins. Every occurrence of “Lord” in this account and throughout this chapter in Luke (there are seven such references in this chapter) refer to God. Elizabeth’s declaration that Mary is the Mother of God (Theotokos, in the Greek) became the first Marian dogma to be expounded by the Church and defined, at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431.
Preceding these verses in Luke’s Gospel — and found nowhere else — is the beautiful account of the Archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Zechariah and then to Mary, and the very different ways the Archangel approaches them with Divine News. It demonstrates the great reverence and deference with which the Evangelist and early Church viewed Mary. It was a reverence that spilled over into art, as evidenced in the great painting “The Annunciation” by Fra Angelico.
The New Ark of the Covenant
And then there is yet another layer of meaning for keen Jewish ears in Saint Luke’s Visitation account. There are several striking parallels between Mary’s visit with Elizabeth and King David’s reaction to the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem 1,000 years before. In Luke 1:39, Mary proceeds in haste “into the hill country to a city of Judah.” In the Second Book of Samuel (6:2) David arose and went to the very same place. In Luke 1:43, Elizabeth asks, how is it “that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” In Second Samuel 6:9, David asks, “How is it that the Ark of the Lord comes to me?” In Luke 1:41, “When Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the child leaped in her womb…” In Second Samuel 6:16, “As the Ark of the Lord came into the City of David, Michal the daughter of Saul saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord.”
The parallel is extremely important for the hearers of Luke’s words. The importance rests in the way the Ark of the Covenant was viewed by the people of God. It was a chest made of acacia wood — about 3.75 feet long and 1.5 feet wide (1.1 meters by 0.5 meters) lined both inside and outside with gold (Exodus 25:10-26). At its four corners were placed heavy rings of gold through which acacia poles could be slipped to carry the Ark since it could not be touched by human hands.
The lid was composed of a solid slab of gold that formed the “kapporet” or “mercy seat,” the place of atonement. It was surmounted by two solid gold cherubim which formed a throne so that the Ark itself became a footstool for God (Numbers 10: 33-35).
The Ark was built upon the command of God at Mount Sinai, and it housed the two stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. It also contained a golden vessel of manna (Exodus 16:34) and the rod of Aaron (Numbers 17:10). The Ark became the evidence of the Lord’s intimate association with Israel, a sign of the Covenant, and a housing for the Presence of God. When the Jews encamped, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies where Moses “conversed with the Lord” (Numbers 7:89).
During a struggle with the Philistines, the Ark was captured (1 Samuel 4:11) and taken. The Philistines suffered seven months of earthquakes and plagues (1 Samuel 5:3-9) until the Ark was returned. It stayed for twenty years at Kiriath-Jearim until that scene above in Second Samuel (6:16) when David leaped before it as it returned to the Tabernacle in Jerusalem.
The Ark remained there for the next 400 years until the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. to the Babylonians (Jeremiah 3:16). It was not counted among the spoils claimed by the Babylonians but the Second Book of Maccabees (2 Macc 2-5) described that it was saved from destruction by the Prophet Jeremiah and hidden on Mount Nebo where it would stay “until God gathers His people together again and shows His mercy” (2 Macc 2:7).
Thus emerged throughout Israel the expectation of a Messiah, a Branch of David and a Son of God. In Saint Luke’s subtle but powerful short paragraph about the Visitation is found an entire nation’s wealth of understanding about the return of the Ark of the Covenant and the hope of a Messiah. In the subtle hand of Saint Luke, it is in Mary, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Ark of the New Covenant that the Dawn from On High broke upon us. Hers is a soul that magnifies the Lord.
The vision of the Ark in the Book of Revelation (11:19-12:1) hints at this identification: the “woman clothed with the sun” is the Mother of God. And she wants the last word. The door to that Word was opened on the Solemnity of her Immaculate Conception. The Word is “Mercy,” a divine Christmas gift, and it is the great tragedy of our age that so many do not even know they need it.
O Come, O Branch of Jesse’s stem;
From Every foe deliver them
That trust Your mighty power to save,
And give them victory over the grave.
O Come, O Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that sets us free,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel.
To thee shall come Emmanuel.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Our regular weekly post will appear here on Wednesday. The above post was first published several years ago in an older version of this blog. Because of its popularity and focus on Advent, we have restored it and updated it substantially. You may note that some of the wonderful reader comments were posted on the original version of this post.
We have all been through a lot in the few three years. Advent is a time to correct our focus on all that really matters. For more Advent reading we recommend the following posts:
Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
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.”
The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe
In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord.
In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord.
August 14, 2024 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII solemnly defined as a dogma of faith the bodily Assumption into Heaven of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The precise words of Pope Pius are found in the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, “The Most Bountiful God,” defining what much of the Church already believed, and now holds as a matter of truth:
“We pronounce, declare and define it to be a divinely revealed truth that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”
It was not without controversy. Pius XII thus became the first pope in a century to define a new dogma of faith. Five papacies earlier, in 1869, Pope Pius IX sought, cajoled, and in the end imposed, the doctrine of papal infallibility. In his book, Making Saints, former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward described the doctrine of infallibility as a “sheathed sword” (Making Saints, p. 314). He described it that way because, from the time of the doctrine’s inception in 1869, a declaration of papal infallibility has only been invoked once: a century later in 1950 when Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary to be an infallible tenet of faith.
This was not just a unilateral pronouncement from on high. Before defining the dogma in 1950, Pius XII sought and received an amazing response of affirmation from the “sensus fidelium,” the assent of the faithful from throughout the world. The Our Sunday Visitor Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine describes this beautifully:
“Infallibility in belief pertains to the whole Church. ‘The whole body of the faithful … cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (the ‘sensus fidei’) of the whole people when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent to matters of faith and morals.” (Lumen Gentium)
“To understand properly how the whole people of God is infallible in its sense of the faith (sensus fidei, sensus fidelium) it must be born in mind that the body of the faithful goes beyond limits both of place and, especially, of time. The People of God always includes those of past generations as well as those in the present moment. The former are in fact the vast majority, and it is easier to ascertain what they believed. It is that belief that marks the sensus fidelium and points infallibly to the truth." (p. 334)
To help in understanding this concept of the Universal Church that includes the faith of all generations past, see my post, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead” (linked again at the end of
this post). It is evidence of the ongoing connectedness of the faithful departed to the life of the Church.
I found this concept to be a stunning affirmation, not only of what we believe, but of why we believe it. The idea that infallibility includes the unwavering faith of the vast majority of the People of God taken as a whole over the span of millennia is mind-boggling truth.
The faith of the entire Church, from its birth at Pentecost to the present, points to a belief in Mary as Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the New Ark of the Covenant. Pope Pius XII strongly considered this before defining as infallible the Dogma of the Assumption in 1950. From the Chair of Peter, Pius XII sought the assent of the faithful in the present through his encyclical, Deiperae Virginis Mariae, to inquire whether Mary’s bodily Assumption should be defined.
As a result, an amazing number of petitions reached Rome from every corner of the Church. The petitions included those of 8,000,000 laity, 50,000 religious women, 32,000 priests, 2,505 archbishops and bishops, 311 cardinals, and 81 patriarchs of the Eastern Church. If this demonstration of assent had been able to span the entire life of the Church the result would have been immeasurable.
From the earliest days of the Church many considered the Assumption of Mary — centuries before it was defined as a tenet of faith — to be, in the words of Pius XII, “the fulfillment of that most perfect grace granted to the Blessed Virgin and the special blessing that countered the curse of Eve” — original sin. In the Eastern Church, a “Memorial of Mary” was already being celebrated on August 15 in the Fifth Century. It spread from the East and came ot be known as the koimesis in Greek and the dormitio in Latin, both of which mean the “falling asleep.” By the Eighth Century, belief in the bodily Assumption of Mary was widely accepted in both the East and West.
In the 19th Century, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote that both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary are implicit in her identification as the “New Eve,” a title given to Mary since the Second Century. Just as the Resurrection of Jesus was the essential element of His victory over sin and death, Mary shares that victory in her designation as the New Eve, and in the words of Jesus at the foot of the Cross as the spiritual Mother of all. Seeing His Mother at the foot of the Cross, Jesus said ot her, “Woman, behold your son.” And then to the Disciple John, “Behold your Mother.” It was an adoption arrangement (John 19:26-27).
Among the earliest titles of Mary is Theotokos, Greek for “The Bearer of God.” For the Scriptural foundation of this belief and its implications, see my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
“What Will Become of You?”
In the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:2), Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus at Mount Tabor. Both Moses and Elijah, according to Scripture, entered heaven in both body and soul. The appearances of Mary at Fatima, Lourdes, Tepeyac Hill in Mexico, and others all point to an understanding of Mary as existing still in that same form. I wrote of the details of one of these visits in “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
There is no saint of modern times with a stronger and more dedicated devotion ot Mary than Saint Maximilian Kolbe who seemed to live with a perpetual presence of the Immaculata in his field of view. Long before he was the Saint of Auschwitz and Founder of the Militia Immaculata, Saint Maximilian Kolbe was simply “Raymond,” a highly intelligent and gifted boy born into poverty in a rural farming community in Poland.
Like me, Raymond Kolbe was fascinated by the sciences of astronomy and cosmology and actually once built a working rocket as a boy. Also like me, he exasperated his mother at times. One day his frustrated mother scolded him, “Raymond! Whatever will become of you?” Filled with grief, young Kolbe went immediately to a local church and turned to the Mother of God with the same question. According to Kolbe’s own words as reported by my friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC in his wonderful book, 33 Days to Morning Glory,
“Then the virgin appeared to me holding in her hands two crowns, one white and one red. She looked at me with love and she asked me if I would like to have them. The white meant that I would remain pure, and the red meant that I would be a martyr. I answered, ‘yes, I want them.’ Then she looked at me tenderly and disappeared.”
Father Gaitley went on to describe that what was meant by “pure” in this sense was that Kolbe would never allow evil or dishonesty to take root in his heart. And it never did. On August 14, the date this is posted, the Church honors Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He also happens to be my own Patron Saint as well as that of my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and the Patron Saint of this blog. To the best of our ability, we follow in his spiritual footsteps, but his footsteps took him to an ultimate sacrifice. The nature of that sacrifice, along with Maximilian’s Auschwitz prison number 16670, now a badge of honor, is expressed on Pornchai’s T-shirt atop this section of our post. Our friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, described the footsteps of Saint Maximilian in brief but familiar prose in 33 Days to Morning Glory :
“In 1941, after decades of incredibly fruitful apostolic labors in Poland and Japan, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Before his arrest, his brother Franciscans had pleaded with him to go into hiding. He said he was grateful for their loving hearts but couldn’t follow their advice.
“He later explained why: ‘I have a mission to fulfill.’ That mission was fulfilled on the eve of the Feast of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven when, after he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner condemned to starvation, the impatient Nazis finished Kolbe off with a lethal injection. Thus, St. Maximilian died a martyr of charity and received the red crown from his Immaculata.”
Two hours before his arrest, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe penned what Father Gaitley called “the single most important theological reflection of his life. It was nothing less than the answer to a question that eluded him for many years, the question he had pondered over and over throughout his life was: “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?”
In the document, according to Father Gaitley, Kolbe raised a key point. In the appearances of Mary at Lourdes, Mary did not say to St. Bernadette, “I am immaculately conceived,” but rather she said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” It was thus clarified for Maximilian that through a special grace from God, Mary was in fact immaculately conceived in the womb of her own mother with no stain of original sin and that grace became her very identity by the as yet unseen merits of her Son. Understanding this means stepping out of conventional time and space for a moment into the mystery of the “nunc stans” the "Eternal Now" in which God dwells and in which He envisions all time and space as one. It is a difficult concept for our linear existence to ponder, but I have pondered it for my entire life.
Father Gaitley asks (p. 52): “Why does Mary make the grace she received at her conception her very name?” Clearly, Mary is not a divine being. Kolbe wrestled with this divinity problem for decades, and it ultimately led to a solution.
There are two Immaculate Conceptions, one created (Mary) and the other uncreated (the Holy Spirit). Before Mary, there was the uncreated Immaculate Conception, “the One Who for all eternity springs from God the Father and God the Son as an uncreated conception of love, the prototype of all conceptions that multiply life throughout the universe. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is the 'conception' that springs from their love. The Holy Spirit is the “Immaculate Conception” b e c a u s e, being God, He is without sin.
Is Mary then a personification of the Holy Spirit? The truth of this union between the Holy Spirit and Mary is found in a somewhat difficult passage in Maximilian’s own writings as reported by Father Gaitley:
"What type of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the ‘essence’ of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. This was true from the first instant of her existence. It was always true; it will always be true.” ( Gaitley, p. 53)
“In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves Himself, the very Love of the Most Holy Trinity ... . In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the depths of her very being” (Gaitley, p. 53-54)
"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, henceforth all generations shall call me
blessed.”
— From the Magnificat of Mary, Luke 1:46-48
In “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God,” I explored a similar Marian theology, and from it I think I can finally make sense of what Saint Maximilian has proposed. Mary, Theotokos , the Bearer of God, is an eternal repository of the Holy Spirit. Both my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I owe her a great debt — not for saving us from Earthly Powers of destruction, because they actually mean little, but for preserving us in faith despite them.
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“Remember that those who ask for Heaven of the Immaculata will surely achieve it because she is unable to deny us anything nor is the Lord God able to deny her anything. We shall shortly know exactly what it will be like in Heaven. Surely in a hundred years none of us will be walking on this Earth. But what are a hundred years in the face of what we have been through? Soon, therefore, provided we are well prepared under the protection of the Immaculata.”
— St. Maximilian Kolbe, 1941
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please spend some time in prayer and thanksgiving at the live feed of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s own Adoration Chapel featured below after all our posts at Beyond These Stone Walls.
You may also like these related posts:
The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead
The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God
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.”
Listen to Our Mother: Mary and the Fatima Century
The century since the Miracle of Fatima in 1917 saw an explosion of Marian devotion throughout the world. For me, one skeptic priest, resistance was futile.
The century since the Miracle of Fatima in 1917 saw an explosion of Marian devotion throughout the world. For me, one skeptic priest, resistance was futile.
Back in May, 2017, Mother’s Day in the United States was on the day after the 100th anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady of Fatima which occurred on May 13, 1917. There was a lot taking place in preparation for the observance of that day, but very little of it was available to me. Months earlier I received a wonderful letter from Annie Karto, a Catholic songwriter and music composer. She had composed a beautiful song entitled “Rise Up All People,” and she performed it in 2016 as part of a special Divine Mercy production that included a slide presentation. She wanted me to know that I was a part of that presentation and that she was dedicating the song to me. She wanted to send me a link to the video so I could hear it and see the presentation. I was most grateful to her but there was simply no format available to me in prison to make that happen.
For the previous 23 years, I had been living in what was widely understood here to be punitive housing. I was told that it was because I do not admit guilt. So for 23 years I just endured it. I endured it far longer than any other prisoner. For half of those years, Pornchai Moontri lived in a cell with me. As you know, some very important things took place in those years that were filled with grace personally inspired by Saint Maximilian Kolbe who pointed us always to the Immaculata.
During a Divine Mercy workshop in the prison chapel that year, one of the volunteers from the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy told me that Concord, NH has a Catholic radio station. I had no idea. The only radio available for purchase where I happened to be living was a small hand-held model manufactured by Sangean and sold to prisoners here for just under $50. It was a pricey item considering that there are many radios for a fraction of that price, but in prison we had no other options. I decided against the purchase because the world of concrete and steel where we lived blocked out most radio signals. So why would anyone here buy a radio? That was a question I was asking myself even as I filled out the order form to send to a friend who wanted to order one for me from a catalog of items approved for prisoners. At the time, I needed other things more than a radio. I had holes in my socks but for reasons I do not understand to this very day, a friend was insistent that I have a radio. So when my radio arrived, I installed two AAA batteries, tuned into the FM frequency that carried the signal for Ave Maria Radio, and heard nothing but disappointing static.
So in mid May 2017, the morning of Mother’s Day, the day after hearing all that static on my new radio, Pornchai and I went outside to the prison Ball Field. He was pitching for a baseball game that day, and I just wanted to walk the perimeter of the field. On our way there, after we had passed through several locked doors and barriers, Pornchai said, “Why don’t you bring your radio?” So I rushed back through multiple barriers, patiently waiting at each for unseen entities to buzz me through a multitude of electronic locks. I got back to our cell, grabbed the radio, and reversed the process of waiting at each of the locked doors.
I made it back to the Ball Field just as the last door was about to slam shut. I walked toward the back of the field, took my radio out of my pocket, and unraveled its earbud headphones. It was still tuned to the local Catholic station from which I heard only static the night before. At the moment it came alive in the Ball Field, I heard the voice of Teresa Tomeo say, “Our guest today is Catholic singer and songwriter Annie Karto to discuss her latest CD, ‘Rise Up All Peoples.’” And then I heard for the first time Annie’s now famous song. I had imagined that song in my mind many times, but never heard it. Months before, Annie Karto, produced a video for that song for a national conference on Divine Mercy, and the video included, among many images, a photograph of me from an article for the Year of Mercy entitled “The Doors that Have Unlocked.”
Having neither seen nor heard any of this before, I could only imagine it until that morning outside when I had the right receptor at just the right time to hear the music play. My friend, Pornchai Moontri was on the pitcher’s mound in a game when he stopped to wonder why I was standing mesmerized and immobilized at the far outfield.
Click or tap image to play Annie Karto’s 4-minute presentation of “Rise Up All People.”
Listening to Mary with the Right Receptors
When that was over, and Teresa Tomeo’s Catholic Connection had signed off for the day, I had another five minutes out in the field. I continued listening to a call-in show about Scripture. The first caller was a man who identified himself as a fallen away Catholic who is now a Protestant Evangelical. He said that he left the Church because of the Catholic focus on Mary as “a conduit of grace” which, he seemed to believe, is not supported by Biblical truth.
At that moment, my new radio just stopped working. It died two months after I received it. I tried everything to get it working again, but to no avail. I cannot return it, and given its limited use (outside only) I could not justify buying a new one. So now I just walk in the Ball Field in silence. But I have the strangest sense that I heard the things that I was supposed to hear when I had the right receptor to hear them. I do not know how the Catholic radio commentators responded to the Evangelical’s concern about Mary, but the answer came to me immediately. I was thunderstruck by it, and by how little thought I had ever given to this before.
The basis of religious authority for Evangelical Protestants is “Sola Scriptura,” Latin for “Scripture Alone.” The concept embraces not just Biblical authority, but also a deeply held belief in Biblical inerrancy. Both notions clearly support Catholic belief in the role of Mary in Salvation History. It’s a truth that I was once deaf to as well, because I did not employ the right receptors to hear it. There was a time as a younger priest inspired only by science, when I scoffed at notions such as Marian apparitions at Fatima. But I have come to understand that such things are highly valued in our life of faith, less by the events themselves and more by their impact on our spiritual history. I was a little slow in my heart to come to understand Mary in our life of faith as Catholics. I knew all that there was to know about her, but I did not know her. I did not “hear” Mary because I did not have inner receptors tuned to her. The deep reverence that Catholics hold for Mary, and the notion that she can be, and has been, an emissary from Heaven and a conduit of grace make total sense.
The appearances of Mary in the Gospel are like bookends for the story of salvation. Her first appearance — in the Gospel of Saint Luke (1:26-56) — opens with an angelic declaration that is unprecedented in all of Sacred Scripture:
“In the sixth month the Angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.’”
— Luke 1:26-28
Scripture contains 326 references to angelic appearances between the fall of Adam and the Resurrection of Christ. This brief passage in the Gospel of Luke is the first and only place where an angel refers to a human person with a title instead of a name. And the title — rendered “full of grace” in its English translation — is fascinating.
The term appears in only one other place, the Book of Acts of the Apostles which was also authored by Saint Luke. It’s a reference to Stephen who would become Christianity’s first martyr: “Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). However, these English translations of the term fail to capture the full meaning the Evangelist intended. In Saint Luke’s original Greek, the terms have very different meanings.
In the case of Stephen, the original Greek words of Luke for “full of grace” were “plērēs charitos.” You can see in this the Greek roots of the word “charity.” But in the angel’s reference to Mary, a very different Greek term was used to convey the words, “full of grace.” It was a title much more than a trait. The Greek term Saint Luke used is “kecharitomēnē,” a far more revealing concept. It refers not just to a facet of her character, as in the case of Stephen, but of her essence. “Kecharitomēnē” refers to a prior action of God in which Mary was “graced” in the sense of her being a “vessel” in multiple tenses — past, present, and future — who is instilled with divine life, a soul that magnifies the Lord.
This does not mean that Mary was divine. It means that God prepared her from the moment of her conception. Some English translations use the term “highly favored one” instead of “full of grace” in the Angel’s greeting, but this in no way captures the truth of the Evangelist’s meaning which is far more profound than “favor.” It is closer to “innate holiness.” Saint Luke’s unique Greek title became the Scriptural basis for the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It points not to a trait of Mary’s character, but to a revelation of her lifelong holiness and unique place in Salvation History as the Mother of both the Redeemer and the redeemed — the new Eve.
In the angelic declaration to Mary (Luke 1:28) the next phrase is rendered in English, “the Lord is with you.” Its more proper sense is, “the Lord is within you.” Her Greek title, “Theotokos,” literally “Mother of God,” was defined at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431 and reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium (53). For the entire life of the Church, Mary has been venerated — not worshipped, but venerated — as the Mother of God. This is a theological truth that I described in “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
The Miracles of Fatima
I owe a debt today to the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, stewards of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I wrote of this debt, and of my all-too-human resistance to their great gift, in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare.” That debt was deepened in 2022. That is when the Church marked the 100th anniversary of our Blessed Mother’s first of six appearances to three small shepherd children in the village of Fatima, Portugal. She appeared to them in this little known, out-of-the-way village in Portugal as World War One raged on all around them. It was the time of what Pope Benedict XV (not XVI) described as “the suicide of Europe.” It was at this very time that Mary reentered human history to convey a message through the smallest of voices in a most insignificant place. Then it echoed with ever increasing volume across the century to follow.
I had never fully understood the apparitions at Fatima. My scientific mind with its natural skepticism had always been in the way, making real moments of grace hard won for me. But now I think, for the first time in my life, I understand what happened at Fatima commencing on May 13, 1917 and the 13th of each of five months to follow. And thanks to Fr Michael Gaitley’s book The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, I finally understand Fatima’s meaning in the context of faith and in the context of human history.
My understanding has also been greatly aided by a wonderful gift by a superb Catholic writer and friend of Beyond These Stone Walls, Felix Carroll. You have met Felix Carroll in these pages before. He is the Executive Editor of Marian Helper magazine, which has published two major articles about my friend Pornchai Moontri’s Divine Mercy conversion and my place in that remarkable story. Felix is also the author of the great Divine Mercy book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions with a chapter about the life of Pornchai.
As I was pondering how to approach a post about the Fatima Century, I quickly found myself wading into waters I am only now beginning to sound for spiritual depth. Knowing the facts is one thing, but knowing the necessary story under the story is quite another. The Spring 2017 issue of Marian Helper with a cover entitled “Fatima: 100 Years Later” filled in a lot of the blanks for me. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. Its centerpiece is an amazing article by Felix Carroll entitled, “Fatima. The Place. The Message.” I am simply in awe of his achievement. I urge you to visit Marian Helper and read Felix Carroll’s outstanding writing, his historical analysis, and the depth of his understanding of the message and miracle of Fatima — all in just a few very readable pages.
In 2017, at the behest of Fr Michael Gaitley and Felix Carroll, I wrote an article about the journeys of both me and Pornchai Moontri into the Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The article was, “Behold Your Son, Behold Your Mother!” Felix told me that it “ lit up the Marians’ website as never before.” It was not me and Pornchai who got the attention of so many people. It was her. It is no mystery in our troubled time that so many are finally coming to listen to our Mother. After writing the article I received this brief reflection from an Evangelical Protestant college student:
“I finally get it! I am a college student and a lifelong Protestant. I never understood the Catholic connection to Mary until I read this. Thanks to this I finally understand Mary and her place in the life of faith.”
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Please honor our Mother by sharing this post. You will behold her place in history as never before by reading and sharing with others another amazing post written for Beyond These Stone Walls and LifeSite News by Craig Turner entitled:
“How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis”
The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist and historian Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.
July 12, 2017 by Craig Turner with an Introduction by 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.”
The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God
A theological expedition into Salvation History reveals a startling truth about the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament and the identity of Mary, Mother of God.
A theological expedition into Salvation History reveals a startling truth about the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament and the identity of Mary, Mother of God.
December 21, 2021
Most long time readers of these pages might guess my favorite among the canonical Gospels. Back in 2019, I wrote a post entitled “St. Luke the Evangelist, Dear and Glorious Physician.” In part, it profiled a 1959 book by Taylor Caldwell that I read at age 21 during my novitiate year as a Capuchin. Several years later, life took me in another direction to diocesan priesthood, and then down darker roads that seemed to have a will of their own. These were roads of betrayal and false witness that sent me ever further from the dream of my vocation to priesthood as I first envisioned how it would be.
That story is told in small snippets in multiple places. One day, I will compose the whole story. For this post, suffice it to say today that one book always stood out in the back of my mind as a story of Divine Providence that very much influenced my life. It was Dear and Glorious Physician, the 1959 novel by Taylor Caldwell on the life of Saint Luke. It was Taylor Caldwell's Magnum Opus, forty years in the making, and a masterpiece of Catholic literature.
Two years after I first wrote about the book, I saw it in a library catalog from Ignatius Press. I was looking for a copy of Prison Journal Volume 2 by George Cardinal Pell when I spotted a reprint of Dear and Glorious Physician and decided that I could afford another $22.00. Forty-seven years after my first reading of it, I am reading it again for Advent in honor of St. Luke. Dear and Glorious Physician is indeed a masterpiece.
Among the four New Testament evangelists, Saint Luke provides the most theologically nuanced information about the identity of Mary and her role in Salvation History. The Gospel of Luke is unique. He is the only Gentile author to compose a New Testament book and the only evangelist to write a sequel — the Acts of the Apostles which begins where Luke’s Gospel narrative ends.
Luke’s intended audience on the surface included Gentile Christians throughout the Mediterranean world. I write “on the surface” because Luke writes a fascinating narrative beneath the obvious one. A deeper reading reveals a secondary audience, the Diaspora, the dispersion of Jews living outside of Palestine since the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BC.
In subtle echoes of the Old Testament, Luke reaches into ancient times recalling the most sacred imagery for the people of Israel. Nowhere is this more evident in Luke’s Gospel than in his Infancy Narratives about the Annunciation to Mary and her Visitation to Elizabeth which is the Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent.
The Ark of the Covenant
That narrative requires some understanding of the most treasured and sacred object for Israel in the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant. First, I need to clarify what is meant by a “Testament.” In relation to Scripture, the word is a Latin translation by St. Jerome of the Hebrew “berit” and the Greek, “diathēkē.” Both words refer to a kinship bond with obligations between connected parties. It is the master theme of Sacred Scripture, and in that sense, the word “Covenant” captures better than “Testament” the meaning and intent of what we call the Old and New Testament.
I recently read in a secular commentary that Christianity is the only religion that includes the entire Sacred Scriptures of another religion, Judaism. That is not accurate. Christianity is not a replacement of Judaism, but rather a continuation of it. The Gospel According to St. Luke makes this most clear in Luke’s treatment of the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark was a chest constructed in the time of Moses as described in the Book of Exodus (25:10-26). It was constructed of acacia wood, a tree that grows nowhere but in the southern district of Palestine in the Jordan Valley. Acacia appears in Scripture in three places: the Books of Exodus (Ch 25-27, 30) and Deuteronomy (10:3) in reference to the construction of the Ark, and in a prophecy of Isaiah (41:19) who states that in the messianic restoration of Israel, Yahweh will make acacia grow in the desert. This is significant.
The desert in Scripture is highly symbolic of exile and wondering. It is a place of demons, a place where mankind becomes lost. To make acacia grow there is symbolic of God bringing the Ark of the Covenant even there. This is why the Gospel gave John the Baptist the title of “A Voice in the Wilderness” in fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah (40:2-5):
“A voice cries in the wilderness ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God ... and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.’”
Inside the Ark of the Covenant — also called the “Ark of Testimony” and the “Ark of the Presence” — was placed the stone tablets of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments inscribed by Yahweh and given to Moses on Mt. Sinai after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. As such, the Ark was believed by all of Israel to be the Tabernacle of the Presence of Yahweh.
The Ark was elaborately designed according to specifications issued to Moses by Yahweh. The acacia was covered inside and out by gold plating. At the four corners of the Ark were rings of solid gold to permit gilded acacia poles to carry the Ark so human hands would not touch it. Its lid was a solid gold slab that formed the “kapporet,” the seat of atonement along with two cherubim of beaten gold facing each other (Exodus 25: 17-22). The two golden cherubim formed a footstool for the Hidden Lord.
The Ark was the place of the Lord’s intimate presence among his people, and it became the most cherished object in Israel. It was secured in the Holy of Holies, the Tabernacle where Moses conversed with the Lord (Numbers 7:89). The Ark was carried into the Promised Land of Canaan appearing in the Books of Joshua (3:3; 3:11), Judges (20: 27), and First Samuel (4: 3,11). During a struggle with the Philistines, it was captured and carried off (1 Samuel 4: 11).
The Philistines suffered seven months of earthquakes and plague before returning the Ark to the Israelites. Out of fear of human contact with it, the Ark was kept in Kiriath-Jearim for 20 years in the home of Abinadab and his son, Eleazar, both consecrated with responsibility for the Ark. Then, about 1,000 years before the Birth of the Messiah, it was returned to David who placed it prominently in a Tabernacle in his established capital, Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:2ff).
Later, David’s son, Solomon, enshrined the Ark in the Jerusalem Temple where it remained for 400 years until the Fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BC. The Second Book of Maccabees (2:5-7) refers to the Ark saved from destruction by the Prophet Jeremiah and hidden on Mount Nebo “until God gathers His people together again, and shows His mercy.”
Mary, the New Ark of the Covenant
In the Book of Revelation (11:19) the Ark of the Covenant appears again, this time in the Celestial Temple in fulfillment of the prophecy of Jeremiah. This vision of the Ark leads immediately in Revelation to the vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun who was with child (Rev. 12:1). The image is that of Mary, presented as Mother of the Messiah and spiritual Mother of Israel, the New Ark of the Covenant.
I alluded to this earlier in an Advent post, “To Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” In the first two chapters of his Gospel, Saint Luke strings together some of the most beautiful traditions from both Testaments (Covenants) about the nature of the Ark of the Covenant. In subtle language, he leads the careful reader to a conclusion about Mary herself: that she, as “Theotokos,” the Bearer of the Presence of God, is thus the Ark of God’s New Covenant while the Ark of the Old Covenant prefigures a more wonderful Ark to come, the Mother of the Messiah.
Luke draws upon a tradition from the Old Covenant setting up a subtle but significant parallel between Mary’s Visitation to Elizabeth (Luke 1:30-45) and David's encounter with the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:2) about 1000 years earlier. Consider these passages:
In Luke 1:39: “In those days, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a city of Judah.” In Second Samuel 6, David arose and went in haste to the same place to receive the Ark of the Covenant.
In Luke 1:41: “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.” In Second Samuel 6:16, David danced with joy in the presence of the Ark. In the Gospel of Luke, Elizabeth asks of Mary, “Who am I that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43). In Second Samuel (9:8), David, who prefigures the coming Messiah, is then asked by the son of Jonathan, “Who am I that you should look upon someone such as me?” In Luke, Mary stays at the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth for three months. In Second Samuel (6:11), David stays in the house of Obed-edom three months.
These opening narratives from Luke have a multitude of such parallels with which Luke draws faithful Jews of the Diaspora who were familiar with the Old Covenant into the New. Finally, in Luke’s sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, Mary is present with the Apostles at Pentecost as the Holy Spirit calls forth the newborn Church. This provides a fulfillment of the declaration of Jesus from the Cross establishing Mary in the unique role of Motherhood over the whole Church:
“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved, he said, ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your Mother.’ From that hour, the disciple took her into his home.”
— John 19:26-27
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From the vision of Saint John:
“Then God’s temple in Heaven was opened and the Ark of his covenant was seen within his temple; and there were flashes of lightning, loud noises, peals of thunder, heavy hail, and the Earth quaked. And a great sign appeared in Heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child.”
— Rev. 11:19 - 12:2
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O come, O come, Thou Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes on Sinai's height
In ancient times did give the Law
In cloud and majesty and awe
O come, Thou rod of Jesse's stem,
From every foe deliver them
That trust Thy mighty power to save
And give them victory over the grave
Rejoice! rejoice! O Israel
To Thee shall come Emmanuel!
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Special Announcements:
Please visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page and please consider taking part in a most important Advent of the Heart in support of some of the poorest in our midst.
If you like this excursion into Sacred Scripture, please visit our Sacred Scripture category in the BTSW Public Library for other titles that make Scripture come alive. Just scroll through the images and titles and click or tap the ones you want to read.
Our Voices from Beyond feature has an article by Father Gordon MacRae and Felix Carroll on the work of Mary behind those stone walls. Father G says, “Don’t let the top graphic on that post scare you away.”
You may also wish to visit these related posts:
To Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary
St. Gabriel the Archangel When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary
The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe are both set during Advent. They are harbingers of the greatest story ever told.
The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe are both set during Advent. They are harbingers of the greatest story ever told.
December 8, 2021
For most of my life as a priest, I treated the visions at Lourdes, Fatima and other elements of our collective beliefs about Mary and the saints with entrenched skepticism. I considered myself to be a sort of scientist-priest. All knowledge had to be sifted by the scientific method using concepts such as objective scientific study with experiments that can be replicated in a laboratory.
Armed with studies of cosmology and astrophysics, and degrees in behavioral science, my inner world was both predictable and provable. I scoffed inwardly at the pious notion that the Mother of God has appeared in visions to some of the poorest people in some of the most unlikely places on this planet. I also, to my shame today, dismissed openly the notion that the wounds borne by Padre Pio were anything but psychosomatic evidence of an intense psychological focus on Christology.
Then came my Great Comeuppance. It was 1992 and I was living in New Mexico where I was Director of Admissions at a facility for spiritually and psychologically troubled priests. During those years I made regular pilgrimages to the Very Large Array, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the high desert of Socorro.
In 1992, I was visited by two priest friends, one from Maine and one from New York. I wanted to bring them to the desert observatory but they wanted to visit a Catholic shrine in the opposite direction north of Santa Fe where some sort of Marian miracle had once supposedly taken place there. I was not the one driving which really irked me all by itself — so their votes prevailed.
Sitting in the back seat of the car as we approached the shrine, I scoffed in silence and arrogantly dismissed their interest as spiritually immature fluff. What happened next I have never really been able to articulate with any clarity. I was stricken with a momentary inward vision of how small I am next to the immense power of grace that God has bestowed upon Mary.
It lasted only a moment. I could not see her with my eyes, but she became a momentary presence in the deep recesses of my mind. I could not have withstood more than a moment. And like an intense light, it left me with an echo of itself that has never left me. It cast me then into a state of inexplicable interior collapse. It was not fear, but rather overwhelming awe. It lingers nearly three decades later.
There was nothing about that experience that gave me any sense that I am anyone special, for I am not. Instead, it forced me to reinventory the tools necessary to see and encounter life as it is, and not as I would have it. I was wrong to think that the required tools of life are all intellectual, and I was wrong to think that I had them. Up until that day, I was missing the most essential of receivers and didn’t even know it.
Radio waves fill the atmosphere, but without a receiver, they remain silent. A spiritual life is our receiver. We ignore it, or just go through the motions, to our spiritual peril.
There have been other instances when I felt that I had been spoken to. I described two of those instances in two special posts that left me feeling that it just makes more sense to believe than not. Newer readers may not have seen those posts. They were: “A Shower of Roses” and “A Corner of the Veil.”
Inmates Pornchai Moontri (left) and Fr. Gordon MacRae (right) make their consecration to Jesus through Mary on Nov. 24, 2013, the Solemnity of Christ the King, in New Hampshire State Prison for Men. They pray to become instruments in Mary’s “immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God.”
An Encounter with Christ the King
In a post some months ago, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote of the years I spent in empty exile in prison before anything like a spiritual life began to manifest itself. For twelve years, from 1994 to 2006, I did little more than survive here with no sense of a purpose for the heavy cross I carried. As that post linked above reveals, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, spent those same twelve years in prison in the torment of solitary confinement in the neighboring state of Maine. In 2006, our lives converged.
From there, looking back with hindsight, it seems as though our parallel lives were meant to cross. Today, I am certain of that. As our lives converged, we were set — apparently by “accident” on a path that led Pornchai to a Divine Mercy conversion and led both of us to a relationship with a persistent Patron Saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe entered our lives in prison in mysterious ways, and then led us on a path to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
I would have scoffed at and dismissed such a story thirty years ago, but now I cannot because it has captured me in far greater ways than any unjust prison sentence. Over the course of our long walk along the path of Divine Mercy, other events began to unfold in our lives leading me to believe that everything that happened to me — though evil in and of itself — was somehow hijacked by Divine Mercy to bring about a great and wondrous good.
About sixty miles from this prison, Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC, had been working on a book called “33 Days to Morning Glory.” It’s a self-directed retreat program that Father Gaitley used to develop a superb DVD presentation for a course in Divine Mercy which culminates in consecration of the self to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The very language of this would likely have turned me away as a younger priest. My theology was far beyond such pious nonsense. That was all before my Comeuppance, however.
I did not know Father Gaitley then. Had never even heard of him. But because I had been writing about our story and Pornchai’s conversion, someone at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts took notice. As Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning G1ory began to sweep the country with profound popularity, someone at the Shrine suggested that this retreat should be offered in a prison. Then they chose this prison, and invited me and Pornchai Moontri.
You likely know elements of this story from past posts about it, but there is a point that I must stress. Pornchai and I had, at the time, been through a series of grave disappointments and discouragement. It seemed at the time that prison was winning the battle for our souls and we felt powerless to interrupt it. We declined the invitation. In the days to follow, St. Maximilian Kolbe intervened, and we reluctantly agreed, but with my usual skepticism. There was, however, a nagging inner sense that we were being led to something of great importance.
It was the fall of 2013. The “33 Days” retreat ended with Mass in the prison chapel on the Solemnity of Christ the King on November 24 that year. It ended with our consecration to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a consecration I have renewed ever since on the Solemnity of Christ the King. Here is Fr. Michael Gaitley’s Consecration Prayer that we used:
“I,_____, a repentant sinner, renew and ratify today in your hands, O Immaculate Mother, the vows of my Baptism. I renounce Satan and resolve to follow Jesus Christ even more closely than before. Mary, I give you my heart. Please set it on fire with love for Jesus. Make it always attentive to His burning thirst for love and for souls. Keep my heart in your most pure Heart that I may love Jesus and the members of His body with your own perfect love. Mary, I entrust myself to you: my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions. Please make of me, of all that I am and have, whatever most pleases you. Let me be a fit instrument in your immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God. If I fall, please lead me back to Jesus. Wash me in the blood and water that flow from His pierced side, and help me never to lose my trust in this fountain of love and mercy. With you, O Immaculate Mother, you who always do the will of God, I unite myself to the perfect consecration of Jesus as he offers Himself in the Spirit to the Father for the life of the world. Amen.”
The Immaculate Conception
Why should anyone enter into such a personal consecration of the self? I have renewed this consecration on the Solemnity of Christ the King every year since 2013. Each time, I was carried back to that strange day at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 when Mary Herself knocked on the door of my soul. I have no other way to put it. Like Mary, I have since pondered these things in my heart (Luke 2:13), and they took over my heart.
The answer to why we should make such a consecration rests in the very identity of the Immaculate Conception. It is not a mere coincidence that at Mass for the Immaculate Conception, the Church chooses as the proclamation of the Gospel St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38). I wrote of the same passage in “St. Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”
In that exchange between the Angel of the Annunciation and Mary, Gabriel, one of the Angels who stands in the Presence of God, refers to Mary with a term never before used in all of Sacred Scripture. Never before had an angel referred to a human being with a title and not a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). When translating the New Testament Greek into Latin, St. Jerome interpreted the Greek title used by Gabriel as “gratia plena” which, in English is rendered “full of grace.” No English words can fully capture the meaning of the original Greek.
The term in St. Luke’s original Greek is “kecharitōmenē,” a title unique in Sacred Scripture. It refers to a vessel that is, and always has been, filled with divine life. St. Maximilian Kolbe developed a fascinating identification of the Holy Spirit as the “Uncreated Immaculate Conception” and of Mary as the “Created Immaculate Conception,” living in an interior union, from the first moment of her existence, a “union of essence” with the Holy Spirit.
Some Catholics (I was once one of them) and some fundamentalist Protestant Christians rebel against such an interpretation as assigning a state of divinity to Mary. That is not the case. Another Greek phrase used of Mary by the Church Fathers is “Theotokos,” the “bearer of God,” a term that identifies Mary as the New Ark of the Covenant. It makes complete sense that God, from the moment of Mary’s bodily existence, created within her a union with the Holy Spirit. The same Protestant Christians also stress vehemently the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture. There is simply no other way to interpret what the Archangel Gabriel says to Mary — and says to us about Mary — in Luke Chapter One: “Kecharitōmenē” — one who lives in a union of essence with the Holy Spirit. Among all human beings, Mary lives a unique existence in the Presence of God.
At the beatification Mass for Maximilian Kolbe on October 17, 1971, Saint Pope Paul VI addressed this: “A mysterious communion unites Mary to Christ, a communion that is documented convincingly in the New Testament ... The Church is faithful to honor Mary, her most exceptional daughter and her spiritual Mother.”
Our Patron and friend on this path, St. Maximilian Kolbe, gave Mary another name: The Immaculata. He honored her with his life, and he handed over that life in the horror of Auschwitz to free another prisoner. While writing this post, I spoke by telephone with Pornchai Moontri in Thailand who also has been pondering.
He told me that he knows he would not be free today — in every sense of that word — if not for me. And it troubles him greatly, he said, that I remain unjustly in prison. He is wrong about this. If Pornchai is free, so am I. I know without a doubt today that the powerful grace instilled in my heart was for this singular purpose. I know this for two reasons. On the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013, when Pornchai and I first entered into Marian consecration, Marian Helper magazine editor Felix Carroll wrote of it in “Mary Is at Work Here”:
“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press Title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.”
However, the strongest hint came as I pondered all of this in my heart. It came as somewhat of a bombshell. I did a deep dive into the events I describe here and realized with astonishment that the inexplicable event I experienced at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 is what set this story in motion. It was during Holy Week in 1992. Just days before, some 2,000 miles away in Bangor, Maine, a desperate teenager fleeing a horror inflicted on him committed the act of despair that would send him to prison. Fourteen years later, our paths merged, and set us upon a road to Divine Mercy.
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A Note to readers from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please share this post, and please visit our “Special Events” page to assist with an important Advent project and mission of Divine Mercy. This was the subject of my important Advent post, “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.”
Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll invited me to write for the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016. That article, “The Doors That Have Unlocked,” is the featured post this week at “Voices from Beyond.”
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“O Come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home,
Make safe the path that sets us free,
And leads us on the road to liberty.
Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel
To Thee shall come Emmanuel”
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Photo by Dennis Jarvis
The McCarrick Report and the Silence of the Sacrificial Lambs
Days before release of a Vatican report on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American Archbishop called for the laicization of all priests ‘credibly’ accused.
Days before release of a Vatican report on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American Archbishop called for the laicization of all priests ‘credibly’ accused.
In the last months of 2020, as the Catholic Bishops of the United States anxiously awaited the long sought release of a Vatican report on the Rise and Fall of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an obscure writer somewhere in France published a small but potent article on the knots of sin. Surprisingly, the subjects of the article were me and our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.
The article was published at a site entitled, in French, “Cheminons avec Marie Qui Défaits les Noeuds” — in English, “Walk with Mary Who Unties the Knots.” The article, translated into English, is “Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison” by Marie Meaney. In it, she accomplished something in just a few short paragraphs that I have never before seen nuanced so succinctly. She summed it up in a single sentence: “It is a strange twist of fate that he who had been sexually abused would be helped by a priest falsely condemned for that crime.”
I have to admit that this subtle truth overshadows and informs my perspective on every aspect of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and priesthood. I have to sum it up bluntly. From 1985 to 1988 in the State of Maine, Pornchai Moontri was the victim of an unspeakable combination of sexual assault and physical violence that nearly destroyed his life while those tasked with child protection looked the other way. At one point, local police even arrested him while running away and handed him back over to his abuser. When finally brought to justice, that man was convicted of forty felony charges of sexual abuse, but sentenced only to 18 years probation.
In those same years, less than 100 miles away in the State of New Hampshire, I became the subject of a witch hunt launched by a crusading sex crimes detective who pegged me as a suspect.
There is a lot more to this story that new evidence and witnesses will hopefully bring into the light of day, but the short version is more than disturbing as is. With no one having accused me, and no evidence to support this detective’s prejudice, he launched a determined search for a crime beginning with a horrific lie. Exactly whose lie it was, we still do not know. The detective claimed receipt of a letter attributing to a chancery official a story that I was once a priest in Florida where I molested two boys, “one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.”
I had never been a priest in Florida, had never even visited Florida, and no such account, according to Florida police, had ever taken place there. The chancery official later denied, but minimally and without nuance, that this story was ever told to anyone by him and he had no idea of how it started. But over the next four years, from 1988 to 1992, the detective spread the story until he found someone willing to accuse me for the right price.
Today, I am serving life in prison for this prosecutorial abuse after having refused a plea deal, a negotiated lie, to plead guilty and serve only one year. To date, no one in any official capacity in either the justice system or the Church has been willing to look under the hood of this case or hear any testimony from me or any of the truth tellers who have come forward — including the statement of a young man who accused me, then recanted saying that he was offered a substantial bribe to secure his perjured testimony.
Saint John Paul II Under a Cloud
So, having read the above, you might imagine why I take with a dose of healthy skepticism rumors and innuendo that arise from or against priests and bishops. So did Pope John Paul II whose own experience in Soviet-controlled Poland made him cautious in accepting destructive rumors about priests with no accompanying evidence. His good name had been thrown under the bus in the 2020 McCarrick Report, but I will get back to this in a moment.
By the time Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was formally accused in 2017, he had been the subject of rumors for decades. He became bishop of the newly formed New Jersey Diocese of Metuchen in 1981, and previously served as an Auxiliary Bishop of New York where he was widely known to ambitiously seek eventual elevation to Archbishop of New York and the rank of Cardinal. By the time he arrived in Metuchen, rumors of a double life had already begun to circulate. I wrote of this in a controversial and not very politically correct post that I solidly stand by: “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix.”
This requires a little side story. At the time it was written, a Jesuit priest and pro LGBTQ activist, Father James Martin, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he called for increased screening and vigilance to prevent the ordination of priests with pedophilic tendencies. His editorial veered away from any consideration of the role of homosexual orientation in the McCarrick case or the abuse scandal in general.
I wrote a comment to be posted on the op-ed, but received a notice the next day that The Wall Street Journal had rejected my comment for inappropriate language. I included a link to my post on Cardinal McCarrick along with what was perceived to be this inflammatory statement: “It is a testament to the power of reaction formation that an entire institution would prefer the term ‘pedophile scandal’ to ‘homosexual scandal’ even when the facts say otherwise.”
I assumed that the offending word in my comment was “pedophile,” but that was not the case. I protested the blocking of my comment because Father Martin had used that same terminology in his WSJ op-ed. But I was wrong. The WSJ Comments Moderator contacted me and said that the algorithm employed by the WSJ had blocked the comment for use of the now politically incorrect word, ‘homosexual.’ He apologized for this, posted the comment and link, and vowed to fine tune the algorithm to prevent this from happening again.
The incident revealed the lengths that some in our culture and in the U.S. Church have employed to shield same-sex attraction from playing any role in the abuse narrative. The McCarrick story was a great threat because it lifted the veil of secrecy from the role homosexual predation played in the victimization of young men and minors. Writers like Father James Martin with an obvious agenda scrambled to again separate the two in the public eye, but to no avail.
I was a seminarian at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore from 1978 through 1982, the usual period of four years after earning college degrees in philosophy and psychology. Several of then Bishop McCarrick’s seminarians were studying with me then, and I knew them well. I heard all the rumors about his notorious beach house at the New Jersey shore. In 1986, when he became Archbishop of Newark, I was told by a chancery official in my own Diocese that McCarrick was warned by the Apostolic Nuncio to sell his beach house which became the subject of scandalous rumors.
Most, if not all, of this was kept from Pope John Paul II until the 1990s when New York Cardinal John O’Connor broke the ranks of silence and wrote about the rumors to the Pope, urging him not to appoint McCarrick to the post of Archbishop of Chicago because of the scandalous rumors circulating about McCarrick.
Of all the commentary on the 400-page McCarrick Report, the best and most readable is one by Catholic League President Bill Donohue entitled, ‘Assessing “The McCarrick Report”’ (Catalyst, Dec. 2020).
Somehow, Bill Donohue managed to summarize 400 pages of nauseating truth without leaving anything out and without sparing anyone. His assessment is blunt, factual, and truthful, providing context where needed while letting the truth speak for itself. I highly recommend it. It revealed something I had not known. McCarrick wrote to Pope John Paul in his own defense and dismissed all the rumors about him as false and politically motivated by a culture of rumor, innuendo, and jealousy. In other words, he knew exactly how to play this Pope.
Bill Donohue was disappointed that Pope John Paul listened to McCarrick and heeded his plea over that of the heroic Cardinal O’Connor. It was then, in 2001 just as the Catholic clergy abuse story was about to erupt on a national scale, that McCarrick became Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Bill Donohue also expressed grave disappointment that Archbishop Viganó was never interviewed despite being mentioned in it 306 times — and mostly negatively.
In my view, there is nothing further to be said of Pope John Paul II in this, nor is there cause to fault him. He received competing versions from Cardinals O’Connor and McCarrick, and the latter manipulatively withheld his version until Cardinal O’Connor had died. In the absence of evidence or corroboration from other U.S. bishops who remained silent, the Pope opted not to act solely on rumor and innuendo. You might understand why I would agree.
Coverup Or Smoke Screen?
I now wonder why New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond chose the week before the release of the McCarrick Report to launch a campaign seeking the forced laicization of all “credibly accused” priests. This requires more reflection than the usual knee jerk reaction that children must be protected from abuse. The increasingly alarming Catholic newsweekly, Our Sunday Visitor highlighted a letter to the editor by Steven Shea (OSV, Nov. 29) who deduced from the Report that “bishops all the way up to Pope John Paul II put clerical careers and ‘avoiding scandal’ ahead of protecting victims.” This is nonsense, and there is nothing in the Report that suggests this. The “minor” who accused McCarrick in 2017 was 63 years old at the time of the accusation.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s proposal to now laicize all accused priests is shocking, and its motive is highly suspect. Cardinal McCarrick was appointed Archbishop of Washington just in time to collaborate with then USCCB President Bishop Wilton Gregory and SNAP activists to shield homosexual clergy from being implicated in the scandal in any way. At the 2002 Dallas Bishops’ Conference, they pushed a zero tolerance policy that now bars any accused priest from ministry even decades later.
Meeting in Dallas in 2002, in full view of the news media and with SNAP’s David Clohessy and Barbara Blane as invited guests, the nation’s bishops hanged their heads in shame as accusations of a sex abuse coverup were leveled at them. But what was really going on was a smoke screen. Then USCCB President Wilton Gregory, now Archbishop of Washington, and then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick led the bishops through a carefully choreographed agenda designed to shield homosexual orientation from having any exposure whatsoever in the scandal. They presented it as a pedophile scandal and allowed the news media to do the same.
By imposing a policy of zero tolerance and “one-strike-and-you’re-out, the bishops imposed a “credible” standard on their priests which from that day forward would treat every one of them as guilty for being accused. Bill Donohue described the agenda behind it all:
“Lurking behind all this is the overwhelming presence of a homosexual network of priests, both in the U.S. and in Rome. Until and unless this web of deceit and perversion is owned up to — which it hasn’t been — lay Catholics will be wary of the hierarchy.”
— Bill Donohue, Assessing “The McCarrick Report”
Archbishop Gregory Aymond knows well that the credible standard now imposed on U.S. priests is the weakest standard of justice and would not hold up in any legitimate arena of due process. He knows well that what our bishops mean by “credible” is simply that an accusation cannot be immediately disproven on its face. If a priest and an accuser lived in the same area 40 years ago, then the accusation is credible and the priest barred from ministry.
To take the next step and also summarily dismiss these priests from the clerical state is an egregious affront to justice and an absolute denial of mercy. Archbishop Aymond also knows that the same standard does not apply to accused bishops. Catholic author and commentator, Philip Lawler, who has been no friend to accused priests, has conceded this point:
“American church leaders who once ignored the rights of innocent children now ignore the rights of accused priests.”
— Philip Lawler
In a brief but potent article in First Things magazine published just days before The McCarrick Report emerged, Father Thomas G. Guarino wrote of Archbishop Aymond’s affront to justice in “The Battered Priesthood.” He charges that this push for laicization “accelerates the profound erosion of the Sacrament of Holy Orders that began with the Dallas Charter of 2002.” I remind you that this zero tolerance and the scapegoating of accused priests was pushed forward by a concordat between SNAP activists, then Bishop Wilton Gregory who is now Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
“A bedrock principle of Catholic faith and theology is that priests are called to the altar by Jesus Christ, and are ordained priests of Jesus Christ forever. They are not priests merely until they become inconvenient or troublesome for the local bishop. And American bishops, no matter how beleaguered or besieged they may be, need to understand and ardently defend that truth.”
— Rev. Msgr. Thomas Guarino, “The Battered Priesthood”
In the era of the post-Dallas Charter no one has summed up the cost paid by good priests better than David F. Pierre, Jr., moderator of The Media Report:
“The Catholic Church has become
the safest place in the world for children,
and the most dangerous place in world for priests.”
+ + +
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. The Truth will set us free, but usually not before we suffer for standing by it. These related posts may be an additional aid in understanding The McCarrick Report:
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix
The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories,
David F. Pierre, Jr.
A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe
Just decades after Christopher Columbus explored the New World, a Marian apparition near Mexico City left behind a work of art as wondrous for science as for faith.
Just decades after Christopher Columbus explored the New World, a Marian apparition near Mexico City left behind a work of art as wondrous for science as for faith.
I am not certain about how to explain my fascination with this story. I have been a priest for over 40 years, most of them in very challenging circumstances, and for the vast majority of those years I never had even a fleeting thought about Juan Diego, his strange encounter on Tepeyac Hill, or the image left behind. It is actually even worse than that. As a “science priest,” I thought it was very uncool to have a faith focused on Marian apparitions. Then I was taught a humbling lesson by the very image atop this post. I’ll get back to this in a moment.
Some years ago as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was on an official mission in Mexico City. Among her itinerary, her hosts brought her to view one of the nation’s most endearing and enduring national treasures. In the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Secretary Clinton marveled at the beautiful image and asked, “Who was the artist?” The astonished rector of the Basilica answered simply, “God.” Mrs. Clinton may have brushed that answer off, but to date there is no other rational account of how this image entered our world.
Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (we’ll settle for “Juan Diego!”) was a 15-year-old Aztec teenager when Christopher Columbus first sailed to the New World landing in the Caribbean in 1492. Two additional voyages, the last being in 1498, landed Columbus in Mexico where he charted the coast and claimed this New World for Spain. The sorely misled “cancel culture” wave of today would seek to erase this history. Saint Juan Diego might be among the most vocal in opposition to such a misguided cleansing of history.
In the ensuing years, as the Spanish colonized Mexico, many of the indigenous Aztecs converted to Catholicism. Among them was Juan Diego. Monsignor Eduardo Chavez Sanchez, the postulator of his cause for canonization, wrote of the depth of his spiritual commitment to letting faith inform the rest of his life:
“He had time for prayer in that way in which God knows how to make those who love Him understand when to exercise deeds of virtue and sacrifice.”
Like so many throughout Salvation History, God chose in Juan Diego the humble, simple, and unpretentious to make known His omnipotence, His eternal wisdom, His constant love for those He calls. It is a paradox of faith that He also saddles them with a heavy cross. Juan Diego’s cross was to rely only on his faith and his humility to speak truth to power — to bring to Church leaders who would set themselves against him the truth of what he encountered on Tepeyac Hill at the age of 55 in 1531.
Beginning on December 9 of that year, Juan Diego heard a woman’s voice call to him as he crossed Tepeyac Hill early in the morning on his way to Mass near Mexico City. Three days later, on December12, he was wearing a tilma, the broad cloak worn by the Aztecs of Mexico. It was woven from the thick, coarse fibers of a cactus called the agava plant. The fibers were known to break down and disintegrate within twenty years or so. The tilma hanging in the Basilica in Mexico City has been there for nearly 500 years with no sign of decay, and it has become the most visited shrine in the world.
Ave Maria, Gratia Plena
The Church’s Lectionary for the Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe presents a choice of two passages for the proclamation of the Gospel: the account of the Archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary foretelling the Birth of the Messiah (Luke 1:26-38), and the passage that immediately follows, the account of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth ending with Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:39-47). I have written previously of both accounts.
In “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us,” I wrote of the great theological depths of Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation which in time became the First Decade of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. Mary’s encounter with the Herald of God stands in striking contrast with the Archangel’s previous encounter with Zechariah, the father-to-be of John the Baptist. Gabriel approaches Mary with great deference and deep respect, a demeanor captured above by the artist, Fra Angelico in one of his most famous works, “The Annunciation.”
This encounter with Mary is unique in all of Sacred Scripture. It is the only instance in which an angel addresses a human with a title instead of a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). In Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of this passage from its original Greek, he rendered the title, “Gratia Plena” which was translated into the English, “Full of Grace.” It is accurate, but does not reflect the full sense of the original Greek.
Saint Luke had used the term in Acts of the Apostles as well. In his account of the demeanor of Saint Stephen at the time of his arrest and martyrdom, he again used the term, “full of grace.” It was translated from his original Greek, “pleres charitos” (Acts 6:8), referring to a characteristic of Stephen. The “full of grace” title given to Mary is very different. In Greek, the term used by Saint Luke was “kecharitomene” (Luke 1:28), referring not to characteristic, but essence. It implies that God had filled Mary with divine grace as a predestined vessel, a foundation for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
In another post, “Advent of the Mother of God,” I mined the depths of the alternate Gospel passage for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is Saint Luke’s account of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, which ends with the beautiful “Magnificat” (Luke 1:39-56). The passage begins, “In those days, Mary rose and went in haste into the hill country to a city of Judah.” These words were meaningful to the ears of Israel. A thousand years earlier, King David arose and went in haste to the very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:2).
In Luke’s Visitation account, which in time would become the Second Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped in the presence of the Divine Presence in Mary’s womb. Elizabeth is struck with a sense of awe and unworthiness in Mary’s presence, the same awe and unworthiness that David felt (2 Samuel 6:9) as he leaped for joy as the Divine Presence in the Ark of the Covenant was on the way to being restored to Jerusalem. In this passage, Saint Luke presents Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant, a vessel bearing the Divine Presence into our world. It is from this passage that she received the title, “Theotokos,” meaning, “God Bearer.”
Outside Mexico City, AD 1531
Fifty-five year old Aztec convert, Juan Diego heard a voice on his way to Mass as he crossed Tepeyac Hill outside Mexico City. It was a woman’s voice calling to him on the morning of December 9. The next day he heard the voice again in the same place, and a “beautiful lady” appeared instructing him to go to the bishop to ask for a church to be built on this site. The bishop demanded proof, of course, and told Juan Diego to return with it.
The later biographers of his cause for sainthood would describe him as a simple man who always chose to remain in the shadows. When he went back to the Lady on December 12, she pointed to some roses that had not been there previously. They were a rare variety that was never in bloom at that time of year or even in that region. She told him to bring these roses to the bishop so Juan Diego removed his coarsely woven tilma to collect them.
When Juan Diego returned to the bishop, there was a small entourage present. To their shock, he opened his tilma spilling the rare roses out, but that was not the source of the shock. Emblazoned upon the tilma was the image atop this post, an image that would become as mysterious to science as it is to faith. Nearly 500 years later, centuries after all similar tilmas have disintegrated, this image remains in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe where it is revered by millions of pilgrims each year.
Seeing the mysterious image for the first time, the Aztecs gave it the name, “Tecoatlaxope” which was translated into the Spanish, “de Guadalupe,” meaning “she will crush the serpent of stone.” After five centuries, her colors have never faded, not even after centuries of exposure to light, the smoke of incense, or the vapors released by countless vigil candles lit in her honor. Scientists and art historians who have carefully studied the tilma have no explanation for how it could exist. It has been the source of conversion for a multitude of skeptics.
And it has not been spared the spiritual warfare that sets its sights on all that is sacred. In 1791, a worker cleaning its silver frame spilled an entire bottle of nitric acid on it, but the image was unscathed. In the 1920s, when the Church in Mexico suffered under the persecution and tyranny of socialist governor, Plutarco Calles, the atheistic regime devised a plan to destroy the image and to kill the many Catholics who reverenced it. This is a dark time in Mexico history that I recounted in “Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes”
On November 14, 1921, a powerful bomb was planted in a nearby flower vase. The explosion in the middle of a Pontifical Mass destroyed the floor, the altar, the stained glass windows, and was felt a mile away. But it killed no one, and left not a scratch on the sacred image.
Studies with electron microscopes, infrared radiation, and multiple other tests have left scientists with the conclusion that no human hand could have painted this image, and none of its composition materials — other than the coarse fibers of the tilma itself — can be found anywhere on Earth. Electron microscope studies revealed no trace of any brushstroke or preliminary sketch on or within it.
In the Eyes of Mary
The most astonishing revelations about the image came 400 years after it first appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma. In 1929, Alfonso Gonzales, a professional photographer, photographed Mary’s face and enlarged it many times. He saw something very strange within her eyes. It appeared to be the face of a bearded man. From 1950 to 1990, a series of studies with more sophisticated equipment revealed a miracle within the miracle. The interior of the eyes is three dimensional allowing a depth and mirror-like reflection similar to human eyes. Reflected back to the observer looking deep within the eyes is the impossible stereoscopic reflection of twelve persons.
The Catholic site, Aleteia, published a study of this phenomenon entitled, “What’s to Be Seen by Looking into Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Eyes,” (November 1, 2016). I was staggered by what the author discovered there. So are some of the world’s leading experts in optics and ophthalmology.
But none of this is the “encore” for which I entitled this post. It was something much more personal. I wrote of this briefly in my post, “Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri From His Prisons.” Some say I was too subtle so I will write of it again. It happened in 2017 in the middle of our latest front in our ongoing spiritual warfare. I work as the sole clerk in this prison’s law library. It is a job I inherited but never wanted. I was just the only person who did not step back leaving the impression that I did step forward. I was more or less saddled with a massive headache that pays all of $2.00 per day.
On my desk are two computers, one with the library database and one with a Lexis Nexus law office database. My predecessor in the job had a screen background on one of the computers that was a Hubble image of a galaxy. I liked it a lot, but on a whim one day, I decided to change it. I deleted the galaxy, but was out of time. So I went to a list of available backgrounds and saw only hundreds of computer coded numbers. Hundreds! So I randomly clicked one, then checked “Save as Background,” and left for the day.
On the next day, I went to work and booted up the computer. The image that greeted me was staggering, and it remains there to this day. It was Our Lady of Guadalupe perfectly reproduced on a tapestry photographed outside the Basilica in Mexico City. I could not begin to explain how it found its way into a prison and onto that computer, just one numbered image among hundreds. The date this happened seemed even more astronomically impossible than the photo of the galaxy the image replaced. It was the morning of December 12.
Many of our Protestant friends are critical of the Church’s reverence for Mary. They have no problem comprehending that Jesus is the Son of God who gave His life for all, but He also had a Mother and she witnessed it.
From Saint John Henry Newman
“The glories of Mary for the sake of her Son”
(Discourse 17)
“And hence it was, that, when time went on, and the bad spirits and false prophets grew stronger and bolder, and found a way into the Catholic Body itself, then the Church, guided by God, could find no more effectual and sure way of expelling them than that of using this word Deipara (Mother of God) against them… When they came up again from the realms of darkness, and plotted the utter overthrow of Christian Faith in the sixteenth century, then they could find no more certain expedience for their hateful purpose than that of reviling and blaspheming the prerogatives of Mary. They knew full well that if they could once get the world to dishonor the Mother, the dishonor of the Son would soon follow.”
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post so that it may one day end up before someone who needs it.
You may also like these related posts mentioned in this one:
Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri From His Prisons
Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
The Gospel of Saint Luke opens with a news flash from the Archangel Gabriel for Zechariah the priest, and Mary — Theotokos — the new Ark of the Covenant.
Prisoners, including me, have no access at all to the online world. Though Wednesday is post day on Beyond These Stone Walls, I usually don’t get to see my finished posts until the following Saturday when printed copies arrive in the mail. So I was surprised one Saturday night when some prisoners where I live asked if they could read my posts. Then a few from other units asked for them in the prison library where I work.
Some titles became popular just by word of mouth. The third most often requested BTSW post in the library is “A Day Without Yesterday,” my post about Father Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein. The second most requested is “Does Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” Prisoners love the science/religion debate. But by far the most popular BTSW post is “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.” And as a result of it, dozens of prisoners have asked me for copies of the prayer to Saint Michael. I’m told it’s being put up on cell walls all over the prison.
Remember “Jack Bauer Lost The Unit On Caprica,” my post about my favorite TV shows? In the otherwise vast wasteland of American television, we’re overdue for some angelic drama. For five years in the 1980s, Michael Landon and Victor French mediated the sordid details of the human condition in Highway to Heaven. The series was created and produced by Michael Landon who thought TV audiences deserved a reminder of the value of faith, hope, and mercy as we face the gritty task of living. Highway to Heaven ended in 1989, but lived on in re-runs for another decade. Then in the 1990s, Della Reese and Roma Downey portrayed “Tess and Monica,” angelic mediators in Touched by an Angel which also produced a decade of re-runs.
Spiritual Battle on a Cosmic Scale
The angels of TV-land usually worked out solutions to the drama of being human within each episode’s allotted sixty minutes. That’s not so with the angels of Scripture. Most came not with a quick fix to human madness, but with a message for coping, for giving hope, for assuring a believer, or, in the case of the Angel of the Annunciation, for announcing some really big news on a cosmic scale — like salvation! What the angels of Scripture do and say has deep theological symbolism and significance, and in trying times interest in angels seems to thrive. The Archangel Gabriel dominates the Nativity Story of Saint Luke’s Gospel, but who is he and what is the meaning of his message?
We first meet Gabriel five centuries before the Birth of Christ in the Book of Daniel. The Hebrew name, “Gabri’El” has two meanings: “God is my strength,” and “God is my warrior.” As revealed in “Angelic Justice,” the Hebrew name Micha-El means “Who is like God?” The symbolic meaning of these names is portrayed vividly as Gabriel relates to Daniel the cosmic struggle in which he and Michael are engaged:
“Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to understand, and humbled yourself before God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. So I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to befall your people in the latter days . . . But I will tell you what is inscribed in the Book of Truth: there is none who contends at my side against these except Michael.”
— Daniel 10:12-14, 21
In the Talmud, the body of rabbinic teaching, Gabriel is understood to be one of the three angels who appeared to Abraham to begin salvation history, and later led Abraham out of the fire into which Nimrod cast him. The Talmud also attributes to Gabriel the rescue of Lot from Sodom. In Christian apocalyptic tradition, Gabriel is the “Prince of Fire” who will prevail in battle over Leviathan at the end of days. Centuries after the Canon of Old and New Testament Scripture was defined, Gabriel appears also in the Qu’ran as a noble messenger.
In Jewish folklore, Gabriel was in the role of best man at the marriage of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I found that a strange idea at first, but then it dawned on me: Who else were they going to ask? In later rabbinic Judaism, Gabriel watches over man at night during sleep, so he is invoked in the bedside “Shema” which observant Jews must recite at bedtime in a benediction called the Keri’at Shema al ha_Mitah:
“In the name of the God of Israel, may Michael be on my right hand, Gabriel on my left hand, Uriel before me, behind me Raphael, and above my head, the Divine Presence. Blessed is he who places webs of sleep upon my eyes and brings slumber to my eyelids. May it be your will to lay me down and awaken me in peace. Blessed are You, God, who illuminates the entire world with his glory.”
In a well written article in the Advent 2010 issue of Word Among Us (www.WAU.org) – “Gabriel, the Original Advent Angel,” Louise Perrotta described Gabriel’s central message to Daniel:
“History is not a haphazard series of events. Whatever the dark headlines — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, economic upheavals — we’re in the hands of a loving and all-powerful God. Earthly regimes will rise and fall, and good people will suffer. But . . . at an hour no one knows, God will bring evil to an end and establish His eternal kingdom.”
East of Eden
The Book of Tobit identifies the Archangel Raphael as one of seven angels who stand in the Presence of God. Scripture and the Hebrew Apocryphal books identify four by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. The other three are not named for us. In rabbinic tradition, these four named angels stand by the Celestial Throne of God at the four compass points, and Gabriel stands to God’s left. From our perspective, this places Gabriel to the East of God, a position of great theological significance for the fall and redemption of man.
In a previous post, “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden,” I described the symbolism of “East of Eden,” a title made famous by the great American writer, John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for it in 1962. I don’t mean to brag (well, maybe a little!) but a now-retired English professor at a very prestigious U.S. prep school left a comment on “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden” comparing it to Steinbeck’s work. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Archangel Gabriel, but I’ve been waiting for a subtle chance to mention it again! (ahem!) But seriously, in the Genesis account of the fall of man, Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden to the East (Genesis 3:24). It was both a punishment and a deterrent when they disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:
“Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and to the east of the Garden of Eden he placed a Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every which way, to guard the way to the Tree of Life.”
— Gen.3: 22-24
A generation later, after the murder of his brother Abel, Cain too “went away from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, East of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16). The land of Nod seems to take its name from the Hebrew “nad” which means “to wander,” and Cain described his fate in just that way: “from thy face I shall be hidden; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14). The entire subsequent history of Israel is the history of that wandering East of Eden. I wonder if it is also just coincidence that the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the only source of the story of the Magi, has the Magi seeing the Star of Bethlehem “in the east” and following it out of the east.
An Immaculate Reception
In rabbinic lore, Gabriel stands in the Presence of God to the left of God’s throne, a position of great significance for his role in the Annunciation to Mary. Gabriel thus stands in God’s Presence to the East, and from that perspective in St. Luke’s Nativity Story, Gabriel brings tidings of comfort and joy to a waiting world in spiritual exile East of Eden.
The Archangel’s first appearance is to Zechariah, the husband of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth. Zechariah is told that he and his wife are about to become the parents of John the Baptist. The announcement does not sink in easily because, like Abraham and Sarah at the beginning of salvation history, they are rather on in years. Zechariah is about to burn incense in the temple, as close to the Holy of Holies a human being can get, when the archangel Gabriel appears with news:
“Fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife, Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John . . . and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God and will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah . . .’”
— Luke 1:12-15
This news isn’t easily accepted by Zechariah, a man of deep spiritual awareness revered for his access to the Holy of Holies and his connection to God. Zechariah doubts the message, and questions the messenger. It would be a mistake to read the Archangel Gabriel’s response in a casual tone. Hear it with thunder in the background and the Temple’s stone floor trembling slightly under Zechariah’s feet:
“I am Gabriel who stand in the Presence of God . . . and behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass.”
I’ve always felt great sympathy for Zechariah. I imagined him having to make an urgent visit to the Temple men’s room after this, followed by the shock of being unable to intone the Temple prayers.
Zechariah was accustomed to great deference from people of faith, and now he is scared speechless. I, too, would have asked for proof. For a cynic, and especially a sometimes arrogant one, good news is not easily taken at face value.
Then six months later “Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the House of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.” (Luke 1: 26-27). This encounter was far different from the previous one, and it opens with what has become one of the most common prayers of popular devotion.
Gabriel said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” His words became the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that and centuries of “sensus fidelium,” the consensus of the faithful who revere her as “Theotokos,” the God-Bearer. Mary, like Zechariah, also questions Gabriel about the astonishing news. “How can this be since I have not known man?” There is none of the thunderous rebuke given to Zechariah, however. Saint Luke intends to place Gabriel in the presence of his greater, a position from which even the Archangel demonstrates great reverence and deference.
It has been a point of contention with non-Catholics and dissenters for centuries, but the matter seems so clear. There’s a difference between worship and reverence, and what the Church bears for Mary is the deepest form of reverence. It’s a reverence that came naturally even to the Archangel Gabriel who sees himself as being in her presence rather than the other way around. God and God alone is worshiped, but the reverence bestowed upon Mary was found in only one other place on Earth. That place was the Ark of the Covenant, in Hebrew, the “Aron Al-Berith,” the Holy of Holies which housed the Tablets of the Old Covenant. It was described in 1 Kings 8: 1-11, but the story of Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary draws on elements from the Second Book of Samuel.
These elements are drawn by Saint Luke as he describes Mary’s haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea. In 2 Samuel 6:2, David visits this very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. Upon Mary’s entry into Elizabeth’s room in Saint Luke’s account, the unborn John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. This is reminiscent of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6:16.
For readers “with eyes to see and ears to hear,” Saint Luke presents an account of God entering into human history in terms quite familiar to the old friends of God. God himself expressed in the Genesis account of the fall of man that man has attempted to “become like one of us” through disobedience. Now the reverse has occurred. God has become one of us to lead us out of the East, and off the path to eternal darkness and death.
In Advent, and especially today the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we honor with the deepest reverence Mary, Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the new Ark of the Covenant. Mary, whose response to the Archangel Gabriel was simple assent:
“Let it be done to me according to your word.”
“Then the Dawn from On High broke upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet on the way to peace.”
— Luke 1:78-79
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post in honor of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. You may also like these related posts:
The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God
Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
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.”