The Twilight of Fatherhood: Cry, the Beloved Country

Fatherhood fades from the landscape of the human heart to the peril of the souls of our youth. For some young men in prison, absent fathers conjure empty dreams.

June 12, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.”

— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, 1948

I was five days shy of turning fifteen years old and looking forward to wrapping up the tenth grade at Lynn English High School just north of Boston on April 4, 1968. That was the day Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. On that awful day, the Civil Rights struggle in America took to the streets. History eventually defined its heroes and its villains.

There is an unexpected freedom in being who and where I am. I can write the truth without the usual automatic constraints about what it might cost me. There is only one thing left to take from me, and these days the clamor to take it seems to have abated. That one thing is priesthood which — in this setting, at least — places me in the supporting cast of a heart-wrenching drama.

But first, back to 1968. Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream” speech still resonated in my 14-year-old soul when his death added momentum to America’s moral compass spinning out of control. I had no idea how ironic that one line from Martin’s famous speech would be for me in years to come: “From the prodigious hills of New Hampshire, Let Freedom Ring!”

Two months later, on June 5, 1968, fourteen years to the day before I would be ordained a priest, former Attorney General and Civil Rights champion, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August was marked by calamitous riots as Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the nominee only to lose the 1968 election to Richard Nixon in November.

Cry, the Beloved Country

It was at that moment in history — between the murders of two civil rights giants, one black and one white — that a tenth grade English teacher in a racially troubled inner city high school imposed his final assignment to end the school year. It was a book and a book report on Alan Paton’s masterpiece novel set in South Africa during Apartheid. It was Cry, the Beloved Country.

In a snail mail letter some months ago, a reader asked me to write about the origins of my vocation. His request had an odd twist. He wanted me to write of my call to priesthood in light of where it has put me, “so that we might have hope when God calls ordinary people to extraordinarily painful things.” I recently tried to oblige that request when I wrote “The Power and the Glory If the Heart of a Priest Grows Cold.”

I gave no thought to priesthood in the turmoil of a 1968 adolescence. Up to that time I gave little thought to the Catholic faith into which I was born. At age 15, like many adolescents today if left to their own devices, my mind was somewhere else. We were Christmas and Easter Catholics. I think the only thing that kept my family from atheism was the fact that there just weren’t enough holidays.

My first independent practice of any faith came at age 15 just after reading Cry, the Beloved Country. It started as an act of adolescent rebellion. My estranged father was deeply offended that I went to Mass on a day that wasn’t Christmas or Easter, and my decision to continue going was fueled in part by his umbrage.

But there was also something about this book that compelled me to explore what it means to have faith. Written by Alan Paton in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country was set in South Africa against the backdrop of Apartheid. I read it in 1968 as the American Civil Rights movement was testing the glue that binds a nation. That was 56 years ago, yet I still remember every facet of it, for it awakened in me not just a sense of the folly of racial injustice, but also the powerful role of fatherhood in our lives. It is the deeply moving story of Zulu pastor, Stephen Kumalo, a black Anglican priest driven to leave the calm of his rural parish on a quest in search of his missing young adult son, Absalom, in the city of Johannesburg.

South Africa during Apartheid is itself a character in the book. The city, Johannesburg, represents the lure of the streets as a looming cultural detriment to fatherhood, family, faith and tradition. Fifty-six years after reading it, some of its lines are still committed to memory:

“All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black, they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg.”

— Cry, the Beloved Country, p. 83

Apartheid was a system of racial segregation marked by the political and social dominance of the white European minority in South Africa. Though it was widely practiced and accepted, Apartheid was formally institutionalized in 1948 when it became a slogan of the Afrikaner National Party in the same year that Alan Paton wrote his influential novel.

Nelson Mandela, the famous African National Congress activist, was 30 when the book was published. I wonder how much it inspired his stand against Apartheid that condemned him to life in prison at age 46 in 1964 South Africa. His prison became a symbol that brought global attention to the struggle against Apartheid which finally collapsed in 1991. After 26 years in prison, Nelson Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize with South African President F.W. de Klerk in 1993. A year later, Nelson Mandela was elected president in South Africa’s first fully democratic elections.

In the Absence of Fathers

I never knew my teacher’s purpose for assigning Cry, the Beloved Country at that particular moment in living history, but I have always assumed that it was to instill in us an appreciation for the struggle for civil rights and racial justice. I never really needed much convincing on the right path on those fronts, but the book had another, more powerful impact that seemed unintended.

That impact was the necessity of strong and present fathers who are up to the sacrifices required of them, and especially so in the times that try men’s souls. There is a reason why I bring this book up now, 56 years after reading it. I had a friend here in this prison who had been quietly standing in the background. I will not name him because there are people on two continents who know of him. He is African-American in the truest sense, a naturalized American citizen brought to this country when his Christian family fled Islamic oppression in their African nation. He was 20 years old when we met, and had been estranged from his father who was the ordained pastor of a small Evangelical congregation in a city not so far from our prison.

I came to know this young prisoner when he was moved to the place where I live. He disliked the new neighborhood immensely at first, finding little in the way of common ground, but Pornchai Moontri and his friends managed to draw him in. Perhaps what finally won him over was the fact that we, too, were in a strange land here. Pornchai brought him to me and introduced me as “everyone’s father here.”

We recruited him on Porchai’s championship baseball team which won the 2016 pennant defeating eight other teams.

I broke the ice one day when I showed our new friend a copy of a weekly traffic report for this blog. He was surprised to see a significant number of visits from the land of his birth. Our friend’s African name was hardly pronounceable, but many younger prisoners have “street names.” So after some trust grew a little between us, he told me some of the story of his life. It was then that I began to call him “Absalom.” The photo at the top of this post is Pornchai’s 2016 championship baseball team in which Pornchai, our old friend Chen (now in China), Absalom, and I are all pictured.

I do not think that I was even conscious at the time of the place in my psyche from which that name was dusted off. He did not object to being called “Absalom,” but it puzzled him.

It puzzled me, too. Absalom was the third son of King David in the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament. In the Second Book of Samuel (15:1-12) Absalom rebelled against his father, staging a revolt that eventually led to his own demise. In the forest of Ephraim, Absalom was slain by Joab, David’s nephew and the commander of his armies. David bitterly mourned the loss of his son, Absalom (2 Samuel 19:1-4).

When I told this story to our new friend,he said, “that sounds like the right name for me.” I told him that in Hebrew, Absalom means “my father is peace.” But even as I said it, I remembered that Absalom is also the name of Pastor Stephen Kumalo’s missing son in Cry, the Beloved Country.

So I told my friend the story of how Absalom’s priest-father in South Africa had instilled in him a set of values and respect for his heritage, of how poverty and oppression caused him to leave home in search of another life only to be lured ever more deeply into the city streets of Johannesburg. I told of how his father sacrificed all to go in search of him.

I also told my friend that I read this book at age 15 in my own adolescent rebellion, and the story was so powerful that it has stayed with me for all these years and shaped some of the most important parts of my life. I told Absalom of the Zulu people and the struggles of Apartheid, a word he knew he once heard, but had no idea of what it meant. I told him that the Absalom of the story left behind his proud and spiritually rich African culture just to succumb to the lure of the street and of how he forgot all that came before him.

“That’s my story!” said Absalom when I told him all this. So the next day I went in search of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. The prison library had a dusty old copy so I brought it back for Absalom to read, and he struggled with it. A part of the struggle is the Zulu names and terms that are vaguely familiar deep in our Absalom’s cultural memory. Another part of the struggle is the story itself, not just of Apartheid, but of the painful estrangement that grew between father and son, an estrangement that our Absalom could not articulate until now.

So then something that I always believed was going to happen, did happen. Absalom told me that he has contacted his mother to ask his father to visit him for the first time in the years that he has been in prison. He said they plan to visit on Father’s Day. They have a lot to talk about, and that is a drama for which I feel blessed to be in the supporting cast — all the rest of prison BS notwithstanding!

But there is something else. There is always something else. When I began writing this post, I asked Absalom to lend me his copy of Cry, the Beloved Country. When he brought it to me, he pointed out that he has only twenty pages left and wanted to finish it that night. “This is the first book I have ever read by choice,” he said, “and I don’t think I could ever forget it.” Neither could I.

As I thumbed through the book looking for a passage I remember reading 56 years ago (the one that begins this post), I came to a small bookmark near the end that Absalom used to mark his page. It was “A Prisoner’s Prayer to Saint Maximilian Kolbe.” I asked my friend where he got it, and he said, “It was in the book. I thought you put it there!” I did not. God only knows how many years that prayer sat inside that book waiting to be discovered, but here it is:

O Prisoner-Saint of Auschwitz, help me in my plight. Introduce me to Mary, the Immaculata, Mother of God. She prayed for Jesus in a Jerusalem jail. She prayed for you in a Nazi prison camp. Ask her to comfort me in my confinement. May she teach me always to be good.

If I am lonely, may she say, ‘Our Father is here.’
If I feel hate, may she say, ‘Our Father is love.’
If I sin, may she say, ‘Our Father is mercy.’
If I am in darkness, may she say, ‘Our Father is light.’
If I am unjustly accused, may she say, ‘Our Father is truth.’
If I lose hope, may she say, ‘Our Father is with you.’
If I am lost and afraid, may she say, ‘Our Father is peace.’

And that last line, you may recall, is the meaning of Absalom.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: South Africa is also home to Kruger National Park which forms its eastern border with Mozambique. Kruger National Park was also the setting for the most well read of our Fathers Day posts, the first those linked below:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind

If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!

Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

+ + +

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.”

Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift

Like many single mothers of prodigal sons, Evenor Pineda’s Mom struggled against formidable forces — the streets, the gangs, jail, then prison — but never gave up.

May 15, 2024 Fr Gordon MacRae

Toya Graham is not exactly a household name, but odds are you’ve seen her. Just about every cable and network news outlet in America carried a video clip of Mrs. Graham chasing her masked and hooded teenage son down a Baltimore street back in 2015. She searched for him, and found him in the middle of an urban protest surrounded by police in riot gear. Not long after she left with her prodigal son in tow, the crowd erupted into a rampaging mob that laid waste to one of the poorest neighborhoods of Baltimore.

As the news footage of a desperate mother chasing down her son went viral, Toya Graham quickly became a national icon of sorts, a single mother struggling to raise her son alone against the lure of the streets. My heart went out to this woman. The very scene she unwittingly brought to national attention was one I described in a post entitled, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.” Seven years after it was published, it was cited by the National Catholic Register as being among the best of Catholic blogs because it struck a very exposed nerve in our culture.

I hope you will read it and share it in these weeks between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in America. That article has been the most widely read and shared post at Beyond These Stone Walls, having been republished in hundreds of venues and shared over 30,000 times on Facebook alone. It told a story that might be the real catalyst behind the looting, raging mobs that overtake inner city streets across America. It is a story about much more than race.

Toya Graham became an icon of the one thing necessary to keep a peaceful and legitimate protest from descending into a lawless mob: a loving, caring, responsible and available parent — preferably two of them in faithful partnership — willing to meet head-on the challenge of parenting. In the now epidemic absence of fathers in neighborhoods like that one in Baltimore — and in prisons all over America — Toya Graham met that challenge heroically, and alone.

A few days later, Mrs. Graham and her son, Michael Singleton, appeared on one of the morning network news shows. He presented as a remarkably articulate and respectful son, traits that no doubt spoke more of his Mom than himself, and he joked that running toward the police in riot gear on that street that day made more sense to him after seeing the look on his mother’s face.

For her part, Mrs. Graham apologized to the nation for a few foul words delivered before cameras in the heat of the moment, but she apologized to no one for the almost comical smack she delivered to the son who towered over her. “As long as I have breath in my body,” she said, “my son will not be down there doing that!” If this blog had a Mother-of-the-Year award, it would have gone to Toya Graham.

But she would have to share it with Rosa Levesque. Rosa is the mother of another young man I know, Evenor Pineda, and I have come to admire her very greatly even though we have never actually met. You have previously met Evenor Pineda however. He appears in a photograph that you will see again below.

Evenor's is a remarkable story of the undying love and urgent hope of a single mother struggling to redeem her prodigal son. It is best to tell it in Evenor’s own words:

Here Is Evenor Pineda:

“I was born on Wednesday, December 30, 1981 to immigrant parents in Nashua, New Hampshire. My father, Cosme, was a political refugee who fought on the losing side of a civil war in Nicaragua. My mother, Rosa, was an orphan adopted into an oppressive and abusive family that emmigrated to the United States. My sister, Lina, was born two years and a day after me, and by her second birthday our mother left our father, fleeing in an attempt to protect us from the drug dealing and growing addiction that was consuming his life and our family.

“As I grew into adolescence with the wonderful woman struggling to raise us alone, I betrayed her faith, hope, and trust by becoming the next male role model in our family to become an abuser and addict, and I added a new twist — a gang member.

“While my mother struggled to pay the bills I did everything to undermine her. Our home became a hangout for the gang. I brought alcohol and drugs into our home and police to our door, because there was no one there to stop me. Under my influence, even my younger sister began to stray into my world, but our mother took a much harder line with her, pulling her back from the brink upon which I lived.

“It wasn’t that my mother didn’t take that same hard line with me. She did. But she also knew that outside our home were the streets always luring her rebellious son from beyond her influence. She knew that she risked losing me forever, so my Mom did what she always did. She struggled as best she could.

“Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen I would drop out of school, be arrested a dozen times, incarcerated four times in both juvenile detention and then county jails, but my mother never gave up on me. Not even when I gave up on myself.

“On my eighteenth birthday, I maxed out of a county jail and was able to land a real job. I held it for five years, but the ties to my gang grew stronger and I simply became better at evading arrest. And my Mom still struggled against them.

“By the time I was twenty-two, I had two beautiful children of my own, my son, Tito and my daughter, Nati. Fatherhood was something I had to learn from scratch, having had no personal experience of it in my life. The relationship I was in with their mother collapsed, but my mother was, as always, right there to help me raise my children. She was an incredible grandmother.

“I was balancing two different lives, however, one as a young father and family man and the other as a gangster. Those two lives collided on April 17, 2005. My friend Kaleek and I had a falling out over drugs that escalated. We both fell victim to the street culture we had embraced, and that would not release us from its grip. It ultimately took Kaleek’s life, and my freedom.

“This marked the lowest point in my life. It was the point at which I learned who my true friends were — and were not — and it reinforced how much the adage is true — that blood is thicker than water. It was a selfish moment in my life where I thought of no one but myself. I knew I suffered, but I had no idea how much I made my family suffer. By this time, my sister, Lina was serving in Iraq, and at a time when I should have been a support to my family, I instead went to prison. I had been in this place for ten years, with eight more left to serve.

“My mother had become both grandmother and mother to my children, and the one mainstay of my life who never stopped struggling to save me. So when there came a time when I had to decide who I am, I looked to the one person who might know. My mother taught me by the sheer force of example the meaning of love and sacrifice, the meaning of parenthood.

“In 2010, I became a volunteer facilitator for the prison’s Alternatives to Violence Program. I trained for this alongside two men you know: Michael Ciresi and Pornchai Moontri. In 2012, Pornchai Moontri and I graduated together from Granite State High School, an accredited school in the Corrections Special School District. My friend, Alberto Ramos.

“One day, my friend, Gordon MacRae showed me an article he wrote about our graduation. It told my friend, Alberto’s story and was titled, “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” It was then that I realized that I must never give up on myself. I know you have seen the photograph of us that I am told is now rather famous. That is Pornchai in the middle with Alberto just behind and to his right.

“I am on the left, and clearly in the very best of company. Gordon is not in the picture, but stood next to the photographer. We were all proudly showing him our diplomas.

“In the ensuing years I served with my friend Gordon on the Resident Communications Committee (RCC), a representative group of ten prisoners that met monthly with prison administration to keep open channels of communication and to try to make this a better and safer environment. After a year I was appointed co-chairman of the RCC having been nominated for that post by Gordon. I want to thank him. At least, I think I do!

“I also was a member of Hobby Craft and its woodworking department where I have learned the skill to produce furniture and other items that were then sold to the public. I used the funds I earned to help my mother and my children, and also to further my education. Through this effort, I was able to afford one or two courses per semester at New England College which had a presence in this prison.

“I formally renounced my gang membership. There was no longer any room for that past in my present. I remember something my friend, Pornchai Moontri wrote in an article I read. ‘One day I woke up with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past.’ Sometimes the truth just smacks you in the head. Today, I find reason to be proud, not only of my mother, but my sister, Staff Sergeant Lina Pineda of the New Hampshire National Guard, and of my children. I am their future, and it is an awesome responsibility from which I must not shrink.

“When we graduated from high school in 2012, Gordon MacRae was there to hear Pornchai’s great graduation speech. He wrote about this in an article I read. I gave a speech that day, too. My mother, Rosa, was there, and I wrote it for her. Gordon later asked me for a copy, and then asked me to let him reproduce it here.”

Evenor Pineda’s Commencement Speech:

“Not everyone is fortunate enough to have an opportunity to receive an education or to have parents to encourage their education. I, however, was one of those fortunate enough to have both an opportunity and someone who cared enough to show interest in my education.

“Yet I then took for granted what I now recognize was then a luxury and I squandered a wonderful opportunity to seize a controlling stake in my future. It was a future which up until high school was very promising. All I had to do was stay the course.

“It was a far cry from other children in the world not as fortunate as I was to have a parent who cared and who valued education, children whose future is bleak, at best. The most shameful part about this is that I knew how good I had it and how bad others did.

“I know of such a woman whose childhood was the polar opposite of mine. She was parentless at the age of three, placed in an orphanage with her six sisters all of whom were eventually placed with different families. At nine she found herself in a home where she was denied an education, robbed further of her childhood, forced into a life of servitude: cooking, cleaning, caring for that family’s biological children, and abused both physically and mentally. She was told that she would amount to nothing, would be nothing.

“Yet this woman did not allow circumstance to dictate her future, and as fate would have it, when the family she was living with emmigrated to the United States, the Land of Opportunity, she did just that. She seized an opportunity and a controlling stake in her future. At the age of just seventeen in a foreign land, she struck out on her own, started her own family, learned English, and with only a third grade education, earned her GED.

“Then she earned a college certificate in her field of work, earned her citizenship, earned a home, and earned the American dream. It was a dream this woman, my Mother, struggled to obtain, and I was a product of that American dream. I was born into an opportunity not afforded to my mother, yet she — unlike me — capitalized on her opportunities.

“I had to endure great loss and suffering to finally grasp and understand to what lengths my mother had to struggle and sacrifice to solidify her place in this country, and how much it must have pained her to see me throw away the opportunities bestowed upon me.

“Not everyone is fortunate enough to have an opportunity at an education, let alone a second chance. This is why this diploma has taken on a whole new meaning. It is a step toward redeeming myself to my mother and my family. It is a symbol of my commitment to follow in the steps of my mother in pursuing the American Dream.

“I’m sorry to be late this Mother’s Day, Mom, and all the Mother’s Days past. I love you, and I thank you. I am so very proud of you. Your struggle has not been in vain.”

+ + +

Editor’s Note: Evenor emerged from prison in 2017 and has never returned. He is today the Intervention Programming Coordinator for the Manchester Police Athletic League where he diverts many young people from the lure of the streets. He has also assisted other inmates emerging from prison by challenging them to employ the tools needed to move forward. He is today an outstanding father thanks to the support of an outstanding mother.

Thank you for reading and sharing Evenor’s profoundly moving story. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

For Darryll Bifano, the Currency of Debt Is Mercy

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.”

Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

In 1989, Pope John Paul II added a new title to honor Saint Joseph. As “Guardian of the Redeemer” Joseph’s dream set us on a path from spiritual exile to Divine Mercy.

Out of my sometimes inflated separation anxiety, you may have read in these pages an oft-mentioned thought. From behind these walls, I write from the Oort Cloud, that orbiting field of our Solar System’s cast-off debris 1.5 light years from Earth out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It was named for its discoverer, the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrick Oort (1900-1992).

There are disadvantages to being way out here cast off from the life of the Church. I am among the last to receive news and the last to be heard, if at all. But there is also one distinct advantage. From out here, while dodging the occasional asteroid, I tend to have a more panoramic view of things, and find myself reflecting longer and reacting less when I find news to be painful.

It’s difficult to believe, but it was just eleven years ago, March 13, 2013 that Pope Francis was elected to the Chair of Peter. In the previous month we had news from Rome that, for many, felt like one of those asteroids had struck at the very heart of the Church. I wrote a series of posts about this in the last week of February and the first few weeks of March 2013. The first was “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”

Like most of you, I miss the fatherly Pope Benedict, I miss his brilliant mind, his steady reason, his unwavering aura of fidelity. I miss the rudder with which he stayed the course, steering the Barque of Peter through wind and waves instead of causing them.

But then they became hurricane winds and tidal waves. Amid all the conspiracy theories and “fake news” about Pope Benedict’s decision to abdicate the papacy, I suggested an “alternative fact” that proved to be true. His decision was a father’s act of love, and his intent was to do the one thing by which all good fathers are measured. His decision was an act of sacrifice, and the extent to which that is true was made clear in a post I wrote several years later, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.” Benedict was firm that he was guided by the Holy Spirit.

For some, the end result was a Holy Father who emerged from the conclave of 2013 while silently in the background remained our here-but-not-here “Holier Father.” Such a comparison has always been unjust. Some years ago a reader sent me a review by Father James Schall, S.J., in Crisis Magazine. “On Pope Benedict’s Final Insights and Recollections” is a review of a published interview by Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: Last Testament.

The word, “final” in Father Schall’s title delivers a sting of regret. It hearkens back to that awful March of 2013 when the news media pounced on Pope Benedict’s papacy and delivered news with a tone of contempt too familiar to Catholics today. The secular news media is getting its comeuppance now, and perhaps even finding a little humility in the process. Even the late ever fatherly Benedict XVI took an honest poke at its distortions:

“The bishops (at Vatican II) wanted to renew the faith, to deepen it. However, other forces were working with increasing strength, particularly journalists, who interpreted many things in a completely new way. Eventually people asked, yes, if the bishops are able to change everything, why can’t we all do that? The liturgy began to crumble, and slip into personal preferences.”

— Benedict XVI, Last Testament, 2016

Benedict the Beloved also wrote back then from the Oort Cloud, but it is one that he cast himself into. I have always hoped I might run into him out here one day and I might have. His testament ended with these final, surprising words:

“It has become increasingly clear to me that God is not, let’s say, a ruling power, a distant force, rather He is love, and loves me, and as such, life should be guided by Him, by this power called love.”

Carnage in the Absence of Fathers

In the winter of a life so devoted to a dialogue with the deep theological mysteries of our faith, it seemed surprising that Benedict XVI would choose this as the final message he wants to convey to the Church and the world. My own interpretation is that he chose not the words of a theologian, but those of a father, an equal partner in the ultimate vocation for the preservation of life and the sake of humanity: parenthood.

Fathers who live out the sacrifices required of them are an endangered species in our emerging culture of relativism and self-indulgence. In his inaugural address to the nation, President Donald Trump spoke of the “carnage” that our society has failed to face, and he was widely ridiculed for it. If he was wrong about anything else, he was right about that. I see evidence of that carnage every day in the world I am forced to live in here, and I would be a negligent father if I did not write about it.

So, I did write about it, and it struck a nerve. “In the Absence of Fathers A Story of Elephants and Men” has been shared over 30,000 times on social media and reposted in hundreds of venues. It seemed to awaken readers to the wreckage left behind as fathers and fatherhood are devalued into absence in our society. I am a daily witness to the shortsighted devastation of young lives that are cast off into prisons in a country that can no longer call itself their fatherland.

We breed errant youth in the absence of fathers, and those who stray too far are inevitably abandoned into prisons where they are housed, and fed, and punished, but rarely ever challenged to compensate for the great loss that sets their lives askew. Prison is an expensive, but very poor replacement for a caring and committed father

I saw this carnage in a young man I once wrote about, but to whom I never returned because I wanted to shelter readers from the truth of what befell him. A light-hearted post several years ago — “Prison Journal: Looking for Lunch in All the Wrong Places” — included some of the culinary creations of other prisoners who greatly delighted in seeing them in print. One of them was a young man named Joey who made us all laugh with his recipe for a concoction called “mafungo” and his weird instructions for making it.

Joey descended into prison at age 17 as the result of a simple high school fight with another student who was injured. While in prison, he discovered the plague of opiates that is fast consuming a nation in denial. The extent to which drugs have consumed life in this prison was back then the subject of a Concord Monitor article “As drugs surge, inmate privileges nixed” (Michael Casey, Associated Press, Feb 27, 2017).

Joey reached out to me repeatedly throughout the ordeal of his imprisonment. As a member of a small group of prisoners tasked with negotiating over prison conditions, I argued for treatment over punishment when Joey’s addiction kept disrupting his life. The interventions were simply too little too late. At age 23, after six years here, Joey left prison with a serious problem that he did not come in with. Just two months after his release, Joey fatally overdosed on the street drug, fentanyl. He became a statistic, one of hundreds of overdose deaths of young adults in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire which, according to reports, led the entire nation in the rate of young adults opioid overdose deaths. If this is what President Trump meant then by “carnage,” we must face the reality that we are tightly in its grip, and the absence of fathers has been a devastating risk factor.

Now Comes Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer

I do not think it is mere coincidence that in the midst of this cultural crisis of fatherhood and sacrifice, our Church and faith are experiencing a resurgence in devotion to Saint Joseph, Spouse of Mary. His Feast Day on March 19th was honored by “sensus fidelium” over twelve centuries ago. He was declared Patron of the Universal Church by Pope Pius IX in 1870. In 1989, he was given a new title, “Guardian of the Redeemer,” by Saint John Paul II. This title beckons fathers everywhere to live their call to sacrifice and love so essential to fatherhood.

I had barely given Saint Joseph a passing thought for all the years of my priesthood, but in the last two years he surfaces in my psyche and soul repeatedly with great spiritual power. It haunts me that he shares his name with my young friend, Joey, who personified a life in the absence of a father, sacrificed to some south-of-the-border cartel and the carnage of our culture of death.

And it is not lost on me that he shares his name with the late Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, who in life and death personified for the Church a summons to Divine Mercy. The winter of Benedict’s own life spent in silent but loving witness to the Church reflects the life of Saint Joseph in the Infancy Narratives of the Gospel, silent but still so very present. I suddenly hear from readers constantly with a growing interest in Saint Joseph. Last Christmas, I wrote what I consider to be a most important post for our time, and a prequel to this summons to Divine Mercy. It was “Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah.”

Ii was a post about love, fidelity, and sacrifice, the hallmarks of fatherhood and the foundations of Divine Mercy. And I wrote a sequel to that post which contains a painful but vital story. It was “Joseph’s Second Dream: The Slaughter of the Innocents.”

These biblical stories were lived by one who remains utterly silent in the pages of the Gospel, but whose life and actions as Guardian of the Redeemer were like a trumpet call to fatherhood and sacrifice. I am hereby bestowing upon him another title. He is, Saint Joseph, “Guardian of Fatherhood Redeemed.”

+ + +

Note Number 1 from Father Gordon MacRae: On occasion the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, stewards of The National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, send me a book from their own publishing house that they would like to see reviewed at Beyond These Stone Walls. We have featured several of them over time, but the last one they sent is a real treasure, and here it is: Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father, by Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC.

Please also note that the beautiful top graphic for this post is “Saint Joseph and the Christ Child” by Jacob Zumo (2019). It was commissioned by Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC for inclusion in Consecration to Saint Joseph. This and other wondrous works of art are available at Art By JZumo.

+ + +

Note Number 2 from Father Gordon MacRae: Some years ago his Eminence Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke wrote to me in prison. It was a personal letter which in many ways was a gift of Divine Mercy and Divine Compassion. Now he has invited me to take part in a worldwide call to prayer, Return to Our Lady through devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a nine-month novena. Here is Cardinal Burke’s invitation to us. I have subscribed for the good of our Church, and I hope you will join me.

Tap or click the image.

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.”

Life and Death, Defunding Police, and That Space Telescope

Science and Religion and Politics and Death are among the last things people want to ponder in summer months, but they dominate all the news beyond these stone walls.

July 27, 2022 by Father Gordon MacRae

Pay some attention, please, to the Scripture readings at Mass on the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time on July 31 this year. They are about life and death, though the latter is about the last thing anyone wants to ponder in this first summer after two years in a pandemic lockdown. We are just now beginning to live again. I have been especially struck by the Second Reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (3:1-5, 9-11):

“If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on Earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.”

I have long been both moved and perplexed by this haunting image. I have read it many times, but I only heard it in my heart for the first time a few years ago. When we had a weekly Sunday Mass in this prison (there has not been one for over two years), my friend Pornchai Moontri was recruited to be a lector. He did not want to accept at first because he was conscious of his Thai accent. After he finally assented, he would review the readings on the day before and ask me for correct pronunciations and the meanings of phrases.

Pornchai asked me to explain what St. Paul meant when he wrote, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” I had heard this verse many times, but never fully pondered it until that day.

That single sentence drew me into a long and mystical pondering of the meaning of life and death. We have a point of reference for life. We live it every day and it is all we know. But death remains an ominous mystery, dreaded by most and hidden beyond time and space. Those we love who have died fall into total silence except in the recesses of our hearts.

If the dead are simply “no longer,” then how would we Catholics explain our very much alive prayers for the intercession of patron saints? It is a sort of heart to heart dialog that is inexplicable for nonbelievers, but very real for most Catholics and many other Christians. I find myself in casual conversation almost daily with two patron saints. I do not believe I could have survived 28 years of unjust imprisonment without their intercession and example. And yet, by the standards of this world, they have died.

The passage of St. Paul above was meant to convey that the messianic promises have been fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Christ. It signifies the meaning of becoming a follower of Christ. To do so is to die with him, and to live with him while living here in the gap between the Resurrection of Jesus and the fulfillment of our lives in Heaven. This fulfillment is “hidden with Christ in God.”

While living in this gap, our true lives are hidden. It is a beautiful, but haunting image. It makes all things experienced here in the gap to be bearable whether they are loss, or illness, or alienation, or loneliness, or prison or death itself. The great challenge of our time is to actually live as though this were so. The pain of illness, loneliness, and loss can be either carried as the cruel burdens of life or as a share in the Sufferings of Christ. They become the tools of our advocates in spiritual battle, the Saints who are hidden with Christ in God.

Courtesy of Pete Luna / Uvalde Leader-News

The Ongoing Pain of Uvalde

After I wrote “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men were Missing,” many people spent a lot of time pondering that awful story and its aftermath. It seems that just about everyone in Texas read my post, some several times. It’s unusual that I receive letters about a particular post, but I received many about that one, and most were from men. I am still in the process of responding to them. It has been heartbreaking to witness the losses those parents endured. We will be living in the wake of Uvalde for a long time to come. Please pray for them.

As that post mentioned, Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke in defense of a longstanding Texas long gun policy. He said that 18-year-olds in Texas have been legally allowed to purchase and own long guns since the Frontier Days of the 19th Century, but only in the last two decades have these problems of school shootings emerged.

I also wrote in another post of a necessary focal point in this problem that our culture must find the courage to face and address. I wrote the post a decade before the events at Uvalde, but it seems to predict them and others like them. It was obviously already on our collective minds because it is the most-read post at this blog. It started showing up all across the nation just hours after news emerged out of Uvalde that day.

There is a lot to be learned from that post, but recent history tells us that learning it and putting it into practice are very different things. I have received mail from multiple communities urging me not to let the topic of that post fall by the wayside. It is “In the Absence of Fathers, A Story of Elephants and Men.”

Anti-terrorism vehicle acquired by the Keene, NH police force under a $286,000 federal grant for high-terror threat areas.

Support Your Local Police, But Not With Tanks

There is another matter in the aftermath of the tragedy at Uvalde that I want to address because no one else has touched it. A lot of ink is being devoted to the highly negligent response of local police that day.

After our recent post, “Dying in Prison in the ‘Live Free or Die’ State” by Charlene C. Duline, you might find it ironic that I am addressing fair treatment for police after all that she described. That was our fourth post in eight weeks to be endorsed and promoted by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights for which I am grateful. This blog received thousands of new readers after each of those posts were recommended by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

Please be clear that I do not at all excuse, or even understand, the apparent inaction of Police in Uvalde as events unfolded on that awful day, but I believe there is a more panoramic view that we as a society must consider. Our political system, especially among its Progressive and Democratic wings, has bludgeoned police since the death of George Floyd in 2020. We should not forget the urban riots across the land in the summer of 2020 as the news media and Democratic politicians dismissed the horror we were seeing as “mostly peaceful protests.” There are no Congressional hearings to discuss the events of those days.

Calls to “Defund Police” became a mantra chanted across the land, promoted heavily until we approached another election year. Then the slogan became a clear electoral liability and was quickly abandoned. For the previous two years, however, police were openly vilified and demonized through the United States. Many in politics and the news media were guilty of the same sort of profiling for which they accused the police. The misconduct of specific officers became an indictment of all police.

We have to fix this. When police face an explosive situation with guns in hand, all the training in the world will not compensate for the political burden now imposed on them. They have been forced to second guess their every move, forced to learn the race of an offender and weigh in the spur of a moment whether their actions will land them on the evening news cycle as abusive cops.

The hesitancy and indecisiveness in Uvalde was the result of a leadership vacuum. It should never have happened and must never happen again. Police, even in light of that awful negligence, must have the support of their community. The politics of Defund Police must be silenced. I wrote about a path for doing so in “Don’t Defund Police.  Defund Unions that Cover-Up Corruption.” I wrote that in the awful summer of 2020 when our cities were burning and our police stood by and watched.

Officer Derek Chauvin had numerous complaints in his police personnel file for claims of using excessive force. Before his behavior resulted in the death of George Floyd those abuses were a secret kept from the public by his union.

There is one more important step that could be taken immediately to reform police departments. Over the last twenty years or so, there has been an ever-increasing militarization of police. Beginning with the Bush Administration, and then greatly extended under the Obama Administration, unused military equipment has been reassigned to local police forces giving them the appearance of military might at the expense of community policing.

The small city of Keene, New Hamshire that employed Detective James McLaughlin, for example, received an armored personnel carrier from the Obama Administration. If it was really the look the Keene police wanted, it worked. That small department has been plagued by abuse claims ever since the tank arrived.

Lost in Space

Perhaps it was too soon to venture into space, but one week after I wrote of Uvalde, we posted “The James Webb Space Telescope, and an Encore from Hubble.” I apologize for the jarring change of topic, but the Space Telescope was also happening just then and I felt we needed a break from tragedy.

Parked in a neutral gravity zone one million miles from Earth, the revolutionary infrared JWST began producing images from deep into our cosmic past and transmitting them back to NASA on July 12. Our editor has managed to send a few of the early images to my GTL tablet. They are awesome, and only the first of many to come. For the first time in human history, we will be able to look deeply through time to the earliest days of the Cosmos following the Big Bang some 13.2 billion years ago. When I first wrote of the James Webb Telescope, a few readers asked me to explain the difference between it and the Hubble Telescope which has been functioning in space for three decades. The basic difference is that Hubble is tethered to the Earth and in orbit around it. The Webb Telescope is in a fixed position one million miles away from the Earth, four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and along with the Earth it orbits the Sun. Its 21.5-foot diameter primary mirror is more powerful than any telescope in existence. Another reader asked me to explain what NASA means by the claim that the Webb allows us to look deeper into space, and thus further back in time, than has ever before been possible. The image you see below, the first taken by Webb and revealed by NASA, is a section of space the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Within that space, Webb captured some of the first images of galaxies to come into existence after the Big Bang. Human beings are seeing these images for the very first time. The light that emerges from them took 13.2 billion years to get here. We are thus looking at the Cosmos in its infancy after Creation. I have long known about this theoretically, but seeing it for the first time was my “WOW” moment.

“The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven, a gleaming array in the heights of the Lord standing like sentinels on high.”

— Sirach 43:9-10

“When I look at the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you set in place, what is man that you should be mindful of him, and the son of man that you should care for him.”

— Psalm 8:3-4

+ + +

Editor’s Note: If you have assisted Father Gordon MacRae with personal expenses and the cost of this blog, please note that we have a new Paypal address for this purpose: FrGordonMacRae@gmail.com. You may also consult our Contact and Support page for further information.

Please visit these related posts linked in this one:

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: when God and Men Were Missing

Dying in Prison in the ‘Live Free or Die’ State

Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover-Up Corruption

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing

Facing the truth about the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas will require courage. Something has gone terribly wrong in our culture and Pornchai Moontri knows it firsthand.

June 15, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Moontri

Note to readers: Fr. Gordon MacRae interviewed Pornchai Moontri in Thailand for this post. Pornchai’s most recent post was “A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.”

+ + +

A dense, dark cloud has been hanging over America since the recent inexplicable and shocking murders of 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers by 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos in Uvalde, Texas. The close knit community will feel the effects of this trauma for decades to come. A lot of soul searching has gone on about what could have triggered such an event, about how it developed, how it might have been prevented, and what could have been done differently by responding police.

The tragedy at Uvalde was devastating, and was preceded just a week earlier by the racially charged rampage of another 18-year-old shooter brandishing the same sort of weapon. He killed 12 people — ten of them targeted for being African American — at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

After the shocking but unrelated stories unfolded, half the nation went immediately for the guns and political talking points. President Biden’s loudest and most immediate response was, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? Where in God’s name is our backbone?” They were not exactly the words of consolation the nation and the people of Uvalde needed in the moment. The politics should have waited.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott explained rationally that 18-year-olds in Texas have been able to own long guns (not hand guns) since frontier days while only in recent years have these mass shootings occurred in schools. That is true, but it is also true, as Governor Abbott added, that there are currently many reports of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people that did not exist a hundred years ago. Why does it exist now?

After both stories dominated the news media, I reached out to our friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. I knew that when he learned of these accounts, he might relate them to his own offense at age 18 at a supermarket in Bangor, Maine 30 years ago. During a parking lot struggle with a much larger man, 18-year-old Pornchai killed him. It happened on March 21, 1992. Pornchai never saw freedom again until almost 30 years later.

The major difference between that incident and the two young assailants in Buffalo and Uvalde is that Pornchai never set out to harm anyone that day or on any day. He carried a knife for self-protection. Having been torn from a rural village in Thailand at age 11, Pornchai was abused and tormented in Bangor, Maine until he escaped into homelessness on the streets of a foreign country. As the only Asian in town, he was often the subject of racial hatred, hunted by a Bangor street gang.

Most people who read this blog know Pornchai’s story. It is told in multiple places, but the best source is a widely read article at Linkedin. If you read it, you may wonder, as many already have, how one young man could endure so much and ever trust life again. The article is “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.”

In the Absence of Fathers

When I asked Pornchai for his thoughts about what might have driven 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos to this end, he put his response in the first person:

“I didn’t care about anyone; and then someone cared about me. If I did not find God, and you, and acceptance, and Divine Mercy, I might have stayed on a road to destruction. It was all I knew or expected. Hatred left me when something came along to replace it. Do you remember your Elephants post? It makes total sense. The one thing missing from my life and the lives of those two kids in America was a father. Without one, a decent one, a kid is at the mercy of dark forces and his mind just breaks.”

The “Elephants post” that Pornchai referred to was a Fathers Day post I wrote in this same week in 2012. It was a huge eye-opener for many people and began a serious discussion about the crisis of father absence in our time and the retreat of good men from engagement in the public square. The post was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

It is interesting that, ten years after writing it, that post began appearing in search engines all over the United States just hours after news struck about the horror in Uvalde, Texas. I had also made the same connection and decided that I would share that post anew on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. When our editor looked at traffic reports that day, even before we shared it, the post was showing up everywhere.

Despite the story and research covered in that post being suppressed in our agenda-driven mainstream ne ws media, people instinctively know the truth of it. There are two factors, both speaking loudly and clearly, about the burgeoning mental health crisis among the young that is now clearly evident in our culture. Those two factors are the growing and spreading of fathers from the lives of struggling young men and the diminishment of faith and hope as our culture separates itself from God. Along with this, incidents of violence and other criminal behavior among young men have increased 1,000 fold in two decades, and deaths by suicide and accidental opioid overdose are now the number one killers of young men ages 15 to 30.

I live with many who live without hope. For year after year, this prison sees a steady stream of lost, fatherless young men trapped in adolescence and unable to developmentally move on. They are 35 going on 12 emotionally, they suffer from panic attacks and other critical anxiety states, and they are subject to fits of overwhelming emotion. Over ninety percent of them grew up in the care of single mothers with absent fathers. The steady stream of social weapons aimed at men in recent decades — such as the #MeToo movement — has further diminished manhood and, by extension, fatherhood.

In the Name of the Father

Once God and Fatherhood are cast aside, only the feminine remains. That may sound great for the causes of radical feminism, but in the psyches of young men it wreaks havoc and chaos when coupled with the diminishment of fatherhood. The results are all around us: a marked increase in transgender ideology and great political pressure to embrace it, chronic gender confusion, identity confusion, self-medicating drug abuse, and the breakdown of identity and self-awareness. The great psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson predicted that adolescence cannot end until the crisis of identity is resolved. Our culture has extended that crisis to engulf a lifetime.

Before the election of 2020, then nominee Joe Biden said in a news conference “if an eight-year-old boy wakes up one morning and wants to be a girl, he should be given all the tools and medical support necessary and parents should have no say in it.”

That is not verbatim, but it is the context and content of what was said. Media heads were bobbing as they took notes.

Dr. Paul McHugh, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and a widely recognized expert in this field, has stated that most transgender people suffer from a mental disorder and the idea of sex reassignment is simply mistaken — and leaves much psychological damage in its wake. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is now finalizing plans to require transgender treatment under healthcare plans. Catholic League President Bill Donohue recently addressed this in “Transgender Mania Grips the White House.”

These developments have all come about as a natural result of removing God from the public square. One of the last bastions of faithful witness has been the Catholic Church, but the sexual abuse crisis, though in too many ways real, was also hyped and manipulated to remove a Catholic voice from public discourse on moral issues. Gone also are the Boys Scouts of America. It is actually a hopeful sign that pro-abortion groups are attacking Catholic churches right now. It’s a sign that the Church is still perceived as being on the front line in the defense of life. Still, the eradication of God has made inroads that deeply affect young people and their ability to hope through hard times.

In a fine commentary by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, she added the obvious, that it is one thing for an 18-year-old to have a gun to shoot rattlers in the 18th Century. It is quite another to allow an 18-year-old to buy a military grade assault rifle in the middle of a mental health crisis. Some common sense and compromise are likely to eventually prevail, even in an election year. Ms. Noonan went on, however, to point to a far deeper crisis and contributing factor to such tragedy in a recent column, “Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb,” (WSJ, May 28, 2022):

“I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it ... I tell the young, I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby — it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing ... Consolation is not why you believe, but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it.”

I share with Peggy Noonan the consolation that the good people of Uvalde, Texas at least have that. This is part of our collective crisis. Too many have been robbed of the consolation of faith because of the relentless progressive assault on faith over the last few decades.

And she is also right about the crisis of mental health among the young. Signs of it are reported everywhere, and it is much exacerbated by the government enforced Covid lockdowns of the last two years.

I admire Peggy Noonan also for her unapologetic faith the absence of which is also a crisis among the young. It is the most common prayer request I receive from parents — a hope that their teen and young adult children will return to faith. As mentioned a week ago in these pages, Saint Paul famously wrote that only three gifts have lasting value, Faith, Hope, and Love. To impart Love without also imparting Faith and Hope diminishes love as a shallow and empty affair.

Among the Refugees of Thailand

What happened in Uvalde deeply impacted me. It made me double down on my own commitment as a father to Pornchai Moontri — even as he now lives many thousands of miles from me. When I asked him if he could explain Salvatore Ramos, he said, “I didn't care about anyone either; then someone cared about me.” He talked at length about my post, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.” Pornchai never knew his biological father, and then ended up in the hands of a sadistic abuser who did great harm to him mentally, spiritually and physically.

He vowed that he would never again be anyone’s victim and would never trust anyone again. When he finally took that chance, life fell back into place. Divine Providence steered the circumstances of our lives until they were on a collision course, and Pornchai courageously let me in.

Some readers have asked me what Pornchai is doing for work to support himself in Thailand. We are simply not there yet. American money goes a long way in Thailand so I manage to support Pornchai for just a small amount of money each month. A few good friends who understand that effort help me with it. I believe it is a necessity and I have dissuaded him from finding a menial job just to support himself right now. This is because I have a fully informed sense of what Pornchai has been through in life, of what others took from him.

So I have asked him to spend his time restoring his life by facing openly the traumas of his past without having to worry about where his next meal is coming from. He spends his days in learning, and when the need arises he spends whatever time is left assisting Father John Hung Le in caring for the Vietnamese refugees in Thailand.

This is of great importance. By caring for others, Pornchai is caring for himself just as the Father in his life taught him. That is why the photo below is so very special to me. In his last sixteen years here with me, at my urging, Pornchai sought the help of a therapist in the prison system to work through a lifetime of trauma and grief and loss. When the therapist saw the photo below, she said, “No one could have accomplished this but Gordon. No one else!”

I had little to do with it. It is God who directed this path. It required only sacrifice from me, and men need to be reminded that sacrifice is at the very heart of fatherhood.

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading this post with an open mind and heart, and for sharing it. It can only accomplish some good if others see it.

Please visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page and these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

+ + +