“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
If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!
There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.
There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.
February 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae
Back in the summer of 2011 in Massachusetts, Independence Day brought dismal news for devoted Catholics already bent under the millstone of scandal. On that morning I turned on New England Cable News to learn that a forty-two year old Massachusetts priest ordained only six years, had taken his own life. It was heartbreaking, and I know his family must have been devastated. However, I feared that far too many in his other family — the Catholic Church — had so steeled themselves against the relentless tide of painful news that such a tragedy was just part of another news day. That was an even greater tragedy. If you have never read my article, “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” about the suicide of a priest I knew, please do. I wish this priest, and his diocesan family had read it. It may have helped him to seek another way to deal with whatever immense pain brought him to this horrific act. I have been where he was in the final moments of his life. I wrote about surviving that painful day in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”
I do not know the particular anguish of that young priest in 2011. He died sometime the previous Saturday night after celebrating Mass and then ministering to a family in a hospital emergency room where he was a chaplain. When he did not show up for his Mass that Sunday morning, someone went in search of him. In between was the darkest night of his own priestly soul. Please, please pray for him. Though this was a major news story in 2011, I am sparing his family from reliving this again in 2024.
Some thirty American Catholic priests have taken their own lives since priests became a favorite target of the news media, of S.N.A.P., and of Satan himself. I have personally known eight of them, and three others who were murdered. A psychiatrist friend who has been conducting research on the priesthood told me that it is extraordinary that I have known 11 priests who were either murdered or died by their own hand. He said that I have been hanging out with the wrong crowd — or, if you read the Gospel, the right one.
I do know this: simply casting off the most wounded among our priests has been the sin of the Church, and it is a sin that would not happen in our own families. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote of this in one of his last letters to me before his death in December 2008:
“Thank you for keeping me informed about the great scandal of the failure of the Church to support her priests in their time of need. Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. I am sure that in the plans of Divine Providence your ministry of suffering is part of your priestly vocation.”
No corporate bottom line would dictate whether we care for our fathers, our grandfathers, our brothers, or our sons, but lately in the Church in America, it does, and it has compounded The Scandal. Christ came into the world to call forth a community’s soul, not a corporate sole. One bishop I know wrote in a whining missive to Rome that if he helped one accused priest in his diocese he would fear an uproar. At least the bishop was honest. His response toward a brother left beaten on the side of the road was moved by fear.
The problem was strictly American back then. But it has since spread to other parts of the world where the same draconian and terminal measures have been imposed upon priests who are merely accused without due process leading to their being simply discarded — sometimes on the streets with no place to go. I fear sometimes that the Catholic Church in America is becoming far more American than Catholic. America is a disposable culture that does not abide problems, and the Church has come to reflect this ugly side of America. Not long ago, Pope Francis derided our “cancel culture,” then he proceeded to cancel the careers of many priests and bishops who did not fall immediately into his ideological plan. The stewards of our faith have capitulated to cancel culture.
For full article tap image.
Disposable Priests in a Disposable Culture
There are priests who, for various reasons, are not assigned to ministry. Under a tenet of Canon Law (Canon 1722) a bishop, with just cause, may forbid a priest from the exercise of public ministry for a period of time, but he remains a priest. For seven years before I was accused and faced trial in 1994, I was not assigned by my bishop and diocese. For the first two years, I was director of a drug and alcoholism treatment center, and vice-president of the New Hampshire Association of Chemical Dependency Service Providers. But I was still very much a priest living under obedience to the authority of my bishop. I celebrated Mass and other sacraments. For the following five years I served in ministry to other priests as Director of Admissions in a residential psychological and spiritual renewal center for Catholic priests and religious.
Even now, in my 30th year in prison for a crime that I insist never took place, I witness to the Gospel and to the Mission of the Church every day in conditions that most priests cannot imagine. That is not a boast. Who would boast of such a thing? I celebrate the sacraments, as you know, and I am still a priest.
A priest may also petition the Holy See for voluntary removal from the clerical state, known popularly as “laicization.” Some years ago this blog had a comment from a man who left ministry as a priest to marry. As far as the Church was concerned, he remained a priest and entered into a civil, but invalid marriage. He reported that he was only recently granted his petition for laicization so that he may now have his marriage blessed by the Church. For reasons that are both sound and prudent, the Church has never been in any hurry to return a priest to the lay state.
One of the most destructive fallouts of the sex abuse scandal in the American Church has been the reality of involuntary laicization. When enacting the 2002 Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the US Bishops quoted a statement of Pope John Paul II in his address to American cardinals on April 23, 2002: “There is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.” Some American bishops have used that statement to seek forced laicization of accused priests under Canon 290, by judicial sentence or by a special act of the Pope. Prior to the Dallas Charter, such a permanent and unappealable removal from the priesthood was exceedingly rare. After the Charter, there was a wave of involuntary laicizations, and some believe they have done irreparable harm to the very Catholic theology of priesthood.
From a practical standpoint, forced laicization — popularly but erroneously called “defrocking” in the media — might satisfy some vindictive urges in certain victim groups, but it does nothing to prevent any possible victimization. It merely discards a priest with problems, or an innocent one falsely accused, upon the dung heap of Job with no support, no supervision, and no accountability because of claims that are decades old and often unsubstantiated. Families do not discard their fathers, sons, or brothers, and the Church should not discard her priests.
A Puritan Response to Sin
The Bishops’ Charter failed to add a qualifying statement of Pope John Paul II to the American cardinals summoned to Rome in 2002:
“At the same time . . . we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depth of a person’s soul and can work extraordinary change.”
By omitting the most important part of the Pope’s statement, the U.S. Bishops adopted a punishment with no allowance for repentance. In an essay for Homiletic & Pastoral Review (“Sex Abuse and Anti-Catholicism“) Ryan A. MacDonald wrote:
“The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood now underway in Western Culture, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”
In a landmark article in America magazine, “The Rights of Accused Priests” (June 21, 2004), the late Cardinal Avery Dulles issued a stinging rebuke of the bishops. What follows are some excerpts:
“The United States bishops have taken positions at odds with [their own] high principles.”
“Under intense pressure from various survivors’ networks, they hastily adopted, after less than two days of debate, the so-called Dallas Charter . . . ”
“In their effort to . . . restore public confidence in the Church as an institution and to protect the Church from liability suits, the bishops opted for an extreme response.”
“The dominant principle of the Charter was ‘zero tolerance’ . . . Having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgement in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid having to make any judgements in these cases.”
Cardinal Dulles went on to address the often near impossibility of judging the truth of allegations against priests without investigation, and the inherent injustice of taking actions that brand a priest as guilty before such investigation. He then outlined the rights of priests under Canon Law, and how the Charter and current policies ignore or even destroy those rights. I urge every priest and every Catholic to read Cardinal Dulles’ article.
I am not a canon lawyer, and I have only limited training in Church Law. What I have learned has been from experience, and my own experience has been a crash course in fending off what I believe is a seriously flawed and unjust process faced by many accused priests who simply did not commit the crimes.
To highlight how flawed this process is, I would like to reproduce a letter I received in 2002 from a prominent priest, canon lawyer, and professor of Canon Law at a leading Catholic University. I am printing the entire letter, but without his name since I have not asked his permission to print his name. I will let his letter speak for itself:
“Dear Father MacRae:
Don’t ever discount the real spiritual good accomplished by your words at Beyond These Stone Walls. You make people like me, with consciences dulled by repetitious prevalence of procedural abuses, face our responsibilities to protest and to act. You make it personal and compelling.
I want to pass along some bad news. You may already be aware of it, since you seem very well informed, but, if not, at least it will give you occasion to reflect. It seems that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has turned to ‘penal dismissals from the clerical state’ as a routine solution to the cases being sent by American bishops after preliminary investigations. The decrees of dismissal are not subject to appeal or review.
The procedural injustice of this practice is obvious.
In the preliminary investigation process, the accused priest has no opportunity to defend himself. The cases are sent by bishops to CDF sometimes with an expectation that they will instruct the diocese to proceed with a canonical trial for dismissal or allow the accused priest to remain [in the priesthood] in a penitential state but removed from public ministry. Instead, the CDF seems to be taking this drastic and terminal action based solely on the information provided by a bishop in the preliminary investigation — often when the priest is accused of abuse alleged to have occurred thirty years ago or more.
I don’t want to discourage you or any petitions to the Holy See on your behalf. Quite the contrary, I would urge any and all possible interventions.
Think about the implications if this shameful result should fall on you. It is really an empty juridical gesture with no practical consequences. You remain a priest. No one can take that away. You can pray, and you can celebrate the Holy Eucharist validly, absolve or anoint in emergencies, and, I presume, you could continue your very valuable ministry of consciousness raising. What I am trying to say is please do not be discouraged or lose hope if this awful expedient is aimed at you.”
Ganging Up on the Already Down
To date, at least, that final chapter of my nightmare has not taken place. But the Church must be made aware — you must be made aware — of the inherent injustice of “piling on” that occurs when most priests are accused.
When I faced trial in 1994, I was entirely on my own against an assault on three simultaneous fronts. First, I faced a criminal trial, a highly sensationalized and problematic one that Ryan A. MacDonald recently described in these pages in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”
Very few priests earn a salary or have access to funds that would assure a fair trial. I certainly did not, but my diocese issued a letter to my attorneys instructing them: “To the extent he is without funds, he should contact the public defenders’ office.” The cost of my defense would have been but a tiny fraction of the cost of mediated settlements.
Secondly, simultaneous to a criminal defense and preparing for trial, I also faced civil lawsuits naming both me and my diocese as defendants. The accusers were represented by their contingency lawyers, and both they and their lawyers had a clear financial stake in the outcome. My diocese was represented by a high profile law firm seeking, from day one, the quietest path to settlement that would generate the least publicity. With my meager assets dissolved in only partial funding of a criminal defense, I was not represented at all against the civil claims. When I protested the possibility of a settlement without substantiation, my accusers and their lawyers simply dropped me as a defendant so that I would no longer have any standing in the matter.
Lastly, from the moment I was accused, I faced a trial-by-media that set an impossible boundary between me and justice. The accusers had contingency lawyers who were relentless spokespersons for their feigned “victimization.” My diocese had a spokesperson who advocated for the distance the diocese was motivated to obtain from me. As I faced trial in 1994, knowing that I maintained my innocence, and knowing that I was not represented at all as settlement negotiations ensued in the background, my bishop and diocese issued a press release stating:
“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”
— Press Release of the Diocese of Manchester, September 6, 1993
My attorneys protested this to deafened ears. With that public statement came the end of my civil rights to a presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Throughout the trial, the local news media cited that statement. The jurors in my trial read the statement. To pretend that this scenario represents justice requires far more skill in the art of pretense than I have ever been capable of.
And it’s even worse still, today.
The Bishop Accountability website publishes every sordid detail about every money-driven claim taking no responsibility whatsoever for whether their information is true or corroborated. The site administrators publish the names and lurid details claimed of every accused priest while removing the names of all accusers. In some instances, this amounts to aiding and abetting them in the commission of the crimes of fraud and larceny.
And now, as is clear from the canonist’s dismal letter above, if the accused priest cares anything at all about preserving his priesthood then he must also hire a canon lawyer to defend himself against yet another tier of simultaneous judicial processes: the possibility of canonical dismissal from the priesthood.
If night befalls your father, you don’t discard him! You just don’t!
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. Please consider these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe
Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study
Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood
When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked
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.”
Catholic Grief and Faithful Shepherds in Death and Exile
2023 began in sorrow with the death of two beloved and faithful Catholic shepherds. It ended in sorrow with the exile of two beloved and faithful Catholic shepherds.
2023 began in sorrow with the death of two beloved and faithful Catholic shepherds. It ended in sorrow with the exile of two beloved and faithful Catholic shepherds.
December 27, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” King Henry II (1133-1189) referring to Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who opposed the King’s effort to subject priests to trials under English law instead of Church law. Four of King Henry’s knights took the words as a directive. They murdered Thomas Becket as he offered Mass in the Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170.
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Of the 54 posts published here in 2023, fully half of them were consumed with the painful internal affairs of the Catholic Church — affairs in which both priests and faithful Catholics always seem to come out on the losing end of things. My second post of 2023 was “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”
Its title speaks for itself. The results of CUA’s broad study demonstrated a huge chasm between the perspective of bishops and that of priests in the trenches. The consensus among priests was that their bishops are largely oblivious and unresponsive to the pressures and challenges of their ministry. The consensus among bishops was the opposite, that they are right on top of things and are supportive of their priests in challenging times.
Perhaps the most glaring result of the study was the perception among priests that they can be “canceled” by their bishops for any reason or no reason at all. It is a grave irony, as we will explore later in this post, that the year began with an in-depth review of this study and ended with the removal of a faithful bishop from his ministry with no clear canonical crime or reason other than his fidelity.
Many Catholic laity also spent much of 2023 in a state of high anxiety about their lived experience of Catholic faith. As I began typing this post, I received a letter from a reader who revealed that she and her family have been spiritually enriched from weekly participation in the Traditional Latin Mass. “Please pray that this is not taken from us,” she pleaded. It gripped my heart to realize that the Catholic version of “cancel culture” is a source of torment for traditional Catholics.
This year began as the previous year ended — with breaking news of the December 31, 2022 death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. His longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, revealed that Benedict was alarmed and saddened by the new restrictions placed by decree on any celebration of the Latin Mass, a practice that Benedict himself had restored to the faithful by Motu Proprio, the same means by which Pope Francis restricted it. The “optics,” as politicians often say, were terrible.
Much of the last year of Benedict’s Earthly life was spent fending off the exploitation and unjust smearing of his good name while the liberal secular news media feasted on the spoils. Much of the mud thrown at him seemed to emanate from the heart of the German synodal path. I wrote of this story and its fallout in 2022 in “Benedict XVI Faces the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.”
The matter at hand was the elderly Benedict’s failure to instantly recall accurately, and without consulting notes, a meeting he attended forty years earlier in which an accused priest was discussed. Benedict was thus accused of obfuscating, minimizing, and covering up the truth. The real agenda, according to Archbishop Gänswein, was to undermine Benedict’s reputation as a bulwark of Catholic Truth and orthodoxy, and to drive a wedge between faithful Catholics and his papacy. I addressed this again in early 2023 in “Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell.”
George Cardinal Pell v. Vatican Corruption
Just ten days after the death of Benedict XVI, Cardinal George Pell died during routine surgery in a Rome hospital on January 10, 2023. Between 2020 and 2023, I wrote twelve posts about the plight of Cardinal Pell. I wrote them perhaps because I can most identify with all that he endured from explosive accusations and charges, a trial by media, exploitation by enemies of the Church from without and within, false imprisonment, and suspected corruption from both secular and ecclesiastical sources.
Among my posts about Cardinal Pell in 2023, one of them, the last one, drew a huge readership from around the globe. It was “Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod.”
In the trials of my own life, I have not yet been able to attain the reversal of injustice that ultimately set Cardinal Pell free, but only because U.S. courts function with a different standard than Australia’s courts. In the U.S., finality in a case is given more weight than other considerations and it is difficult to overcome. When I started this post, I found a letter written to me by Cardinal Pell in Rome after his exhoneration. He wrote that I had been on his mind since his release from prison. He spoke of his plan to raise my case during various meetings in and around Rome, but he never got that chance.
While Cardinal Pell was in prison, I wrote an article about something I had researched heavily. The article is entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Well, it turned out that he was. My article was sent to him in prison, and it became an entry in his celebrated Prison Journal, which was published after his release. He wrote the entry in his prison cell after reading my post.
Four of my dozen posts about the injustices that befell Cardinal Pell were written in 2023. One of them became recommended reading by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It tied together, though unintentionally, several stories that are now prominent in the news. That post was “Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell.”
Readers may have seen recent news of the trial and conviction of Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu charged with embezzlement in a Vatican Court. Vatican magistrates alleged that Becciu had embezzled more than $100,000 through a non-profit group run by his brother. Cardinal Becciu has been on trial since 2020 and was the first cardinal in history to face trial in the Vatican criminal court. On December 13, 2023, just a few days before the verdict of guilty, The Wall Street Journal’s Vatican correspondent, Francis X. Rocca, ran an extended story analyzing the case in “A Cardinal Once Seen as Future Pope Now Faces Prison.” Here is an excerpt:
“The Secretariat of State managed around $700 million in financial assets, including the investment that later engulfed Becciu and other Vatican officials in scandal.... Around that time, Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm. Pell considered Becciu his main opponent in the secretariat. Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes. The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was canceled.... Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died this year.”
In an October 15 commentary on this account in The Wall Street Journal, I added some further context to this story:
“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of Pope Francis to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms after [the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances. Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court. This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison. There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances and these false charges in Australia. Pell himself suspected this.”
While researching this, I discovered yet another similarity between the Pell case and my own. In both of our legal matters, police misconduct and government corruption played a substantial role. It is a little known fact in the Cardinal Pell case that a 2014 email reveals an exchange between a media assistant in the Victoria, Australia Police Department and the Deputy Commissioner of Police suggesting that promoting these charges in the media could deflect from public exposure of a burgeoning scandal within the Police Department.
Bishop Joseph Strickland and Raymond Cardinal Burke
Then, seemingly dwarfing all of the above in shock value, Pope Francis swiftly and mysteriously removed Bishop Joseph Strickland from his role as shepherd of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas in November 2023. Then, in rapid succession he ordered Cardinal Raymond Burke to vacate his Vatican apartment and reportedly left this faithful shepherd without income or position. Lots of ink has been spilled over both stories, especially in the United States. I covered the Bishop Strickland story a week ago in the first segment of “Christmas for Those Bowed Down by the Fatigue of this World,” my Christmas post this year.
Both stories have been heavily covered by so many Catholic writers and commentators that there is nothing left for me to add except sorrow. These are faithful shepherds. Perhaps in time, the hidden truth of both matters will emerge. Absent that, I am sad to write, the buck stops only at the top.
In a stunning article in the January 2024 edition of Newsmax magazine (Pope Pushes Radical Agenda that Shocks Faithful) the National Catholic Register’s Vatican correspondent, Edward Pentin, commented on both stories:
“This past November, Francis removed [Bishop Joseph] Strickland from heading the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, citing his criticism of the Pope’s liberal social agenda and allowing the faithful to partake in the Latin Mass.... But the biggest surprise was his late November targeting of Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of Saint Louis and one of the Vatican’s most influential prelates.
“Burke has been an open critic of Francis for some time, alleging that the Holy Father has been discarding some of the most basic church teachings on communion, sexuality, and marriage. In a private meeting in Rome, Francis reportedly declared that Burke was ‘my enemy’ and he would strip him of his Vatican salary and even his apartment residence in Rome.”
Early in his pontificate, I wrote several posts in defense of Pope Francis. However, what Edward Pentin describes above seems more reminiscent of the court of Caligula than the Vicar of Christ.
Scandal and sorrow were not the only news items dominating this blog in 2023. There were other major events. We took a break from all the bad news of the Church to launch “A Personal Holy Week Retreat at Beyond These Stone Walls” in March. It was composed of most of our past special Holy Week posts and the invitation had many takers. In a Church wandering in the desert mired in political controversy it was encouraging to see this vast lay interest in the events of Holy Week.
In June, documentary film producer Frank X. Panico unveiled his project about my trial and imprisonment in a 45-minute video production, “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam.”
As I marked the beginning of a 30th year in prison on the Feast of Saint Padre Pio in April, our friend Pornchai Moontri moved the world to tears with his deeply moving post that left me and many others speechless. It was, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”
Not wanting to leave justice dangling, Los Angeles documentary researcher, Claire Best, caused a New Hampshire earthquake with her bombshell post, “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”
That led us finally into December with the much needed shining light of the year, “The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope.”
And on that note, this is where I leave you until 2024. Keep the faith. Keep it close to your heart. And may the Lord Bless you and keep you in the New Year ahead.
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. You may like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :
Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study
Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell
Christ the Good Shepherd
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass
In Traditionis Custodes restricting the Traditional Latin Mass, Pope Francis insists that his goal is ecclesial communion. Then he dropped a bombshell of division.
In Traditionis Custodes restricting the Traditional Latin Mass, Pope Francis insists that his goal is ecclesial communion. Then he dropped a bombshell of division.
In the above composite photo Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis offer Mass Ad Orientem in the Sistine Chapel.
August 11, 2021
The Year of Our Lord 2003 seemed a lot more like a year of Our Lord’s Calvary. It was a most painful year for me personally and for many Catholics. Starting in Boston with a rapid ripple effect across the land, diocese after diocese faced relentless Catholic scandal over the horror of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse. A spotlight was cast upon the Catholic Church to the delight of the news media, but the subject needed a flood light. There was little justice in the moral panic to follow. This is a story I wrote about in a recent post, “A Sex Abuse Cover-Up in Boston Haunts the White House.”
Just beyond the glare of The Boston Globe spotlight, there was another event that had an even more profound impact on another church community in 2003. It took place just north of Boston in New Hampshire and from there it, too, rippled across the land, and many lands. Its most distinctive feature was its contrast to the Catholic story. While Catholic priests were judged and condemned in the media, one Episcopal clergyman in New Hampshire became a celebrity of pop culture.
In 2003, The Reverend V. Gene Robinson became the first openly gay Episcopalian priest to be nominated to become a bishop. The announcement had the immediate effect of alienating conservative members of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. Born Vicky Gene Robinson in 1947, the nominee had been married, raised a family, divorced, and was in a conjugal same-sex relationship at the time of his nomination. For many, this seemed more of a politically correct statement than a serious nomination. If The Reverend Robinson had been divorced and living with another woman who was not his wife, this nomination would have gone nowhere.
Bishop Robinson’s nomination was confirmed by the Episcopal church of New Hampshire to equal parts applause and dismay. Then the cascade of damage was set in motion. With the support of the Nigerian Anglican church, many American conservative Episcopalians broke from the Worldwide Anglican Communion to form the Anglican Church in North America. The Anglican bishops of Uganda announced that they too broke from communion with the Episcopal church. This spread among conservative Anglican bishops across Africa and other parts of the world.
Having torn the Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder, Bishop Robinson announced his retirement seven years later in 2010. At some point he checked into drug rehab, and then used his voice as a retired bishop to promote same-sex marriage before the New Hampshire Legislature. He and his partner were among the first to “marry” under the new law he helped to pass. Then he announced his divorce to a news media that kept it very low key.
Among the protests came a multitude of petitions to Pope Benedict XVI who, in 2009, promulgated the Motu Proprio, Anglianorum Coetibus accepting into the Roman Rite entire Anglican parishes desiring to “cross the Tiber” to join the Roman Church. The first was a parish that became part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston-Houston, Texas in 2009.
We Are on a Road to Calvary Not Schism
The reactions that resulted in a breakup of the Worldwide Anglican Communion could not happen in the Catholic Church. Canon Law does not allow for the decisions to leave promoted by the Anglican bishops of Africa and other conservative communities. Only the Holy See can declare that a schism exists in a region or diocese. Popes have gone to great lengths to avoid schism. Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of Bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) to heal a longstanding rift with traditionalists. In 2007, Pope Benedict further mended that rift with his Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, which removed obstacles to the Traditional Latin Mass.
Now Pope Francis has reopened those wounds anew with Traditionis Custodes, his Motu Proprio: announced on July 16, 2021 which contradicts and revokes the permissions granted by Pope Benedict. I wrote of this last week in these pages in “Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful.”
I used that title because in many ways my experience of the vast majority of those who seek out the Latin Mass are among the most faithful. In a published Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal on July 30, 2021, writer Ray Martin of Ridgefield, Connecticut described what has become a lax and often disrespectful atmosphere in too many parishes. This is an impression that I hear about frequently from readers:
“I do not regularly attend a Latin Mass but I do remember it from childhood ... Nowadays, fewer Catholics attend Mass regularly, they tend to come late and leave early, and it is not unusual to see T-shirts, short-shorts and flip flops. Everyone presents at the altar for Communion. One study found that around one in three Catholics believes in the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. I would guess that more than 90-percent of Latin Mass attendees do.”
— Ray Martin, WSJ.com
My experience of the many Catholics I hear from who seek out the Latin Mass either weekly or even just on occasion is that they are our modern day Essenes. I wrote of the Essenes and their role in preserving the faith of both Israel and the early Jewish Christians in “Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse.” When Pope Benedict XVI opened the Church door to those requesting the Tridentine Latin Mass, many thought it would draw only senior citizens and some “far-right cranks,” as one writer put it back then. That has been far from true. Pope Francis expressed a concern that many who take part in the Latin Mass deny the validity of the Novus Ordo, the form of the Mass promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970. This also is far from true. I hear from many Latin Mass attendees who also take part in the Novus Ordo Mass. All they ask for is a sense of the sacred, and a communal acknowledgment that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. Their appreciation of the Novus Ordo has been strengthened by the Latin Mass.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp magazine, penned an eye-opening op-ed one week after Pope Francis announced new, severe and immediate restrictions on the Latin Mass. Entitled, “Pope, Francis, the Latin Mass, and My Family” (July 23, 2021), Mr. Lamb described the reaction of those in his Catholic community of faith:
“We are loyal children of the Church on the receiving end of a harsh punishment. Pope Francis ... seemed to suggest that things had gone too far and were threatening to undo the liturgical reforms of the 1960s. The gradual displacement of the new rite, which emerged after Vatican II, was in fact the half-articulated ambition of many traditionalists. Until recently many had looked forward to a future in which the 'extraordinary form' of the Mass, as Benedict referred to it, was set to become rather ordinary.”
— Matthew Walther
Perhaps that is the point. The solemnity, majesty, and sacredness of the sacrifice taking place is just that — extraordinary. I want to contrast that with an experience I had as a newly ordained priest in one New Hampshire parish whose pastor made a weekly show of rushing through Sunday Mass at warp speed. After his hasty final blessing he would look at his watch and declare, “Twenty-two minutes, and I didn’t miss a thing!”
Standing with Peter v. Standing Our Ground
In some ways, Pope Francis has been unpredictable for so-called progressive Catholics as well. After playing down the issue of homosexuality with oft-quoted remarks like, “Who am I to judge?”, he disappointed many in liberal Catholic enclaves like Germany when he refused to allow blessings of same-sex unions. He dismissed the proposition while shocking liberal German priests with the definitive statement, “God cannot bless sin.” In an open letter to German Catholics in 2019, he cautioned them against “multiplying and nurturing the evils the Church wants to overcome.” He also gave a definitive “no” on the topic of ordination of women.
With all the open, and often flagrant, dissent from Church teaching and discipline in Germany and other parts of Europe, why would Francis choose to label traditional Catholics who appreciate the Latin Mass as “divisive?” I do not have answers.
But I do have more questions and a few suspicions. As I pointed out in these pages a week ago, there is an immense and growing contrast between the state of the Catholic Church in Germany and other areas in Europe, and that of the Church in Africa. The former has been in a state of stagnation for decades, and is now deeply involved in the embrace of what has come to be called, “Cancel Culture.” In its Catholic manifestation, I can only describe this as the setting aside of the “sensus fidei,” the sense of the faith as it has been expressed across two millennia, in favor of populist social trends of just the first two decades of the 21st Century.
With that understanding, “Cancel Culture” has become a modern plague on humanity that is far more destructive than any viral pandemic. If we do not understand history, and learn from it, we are doomed to repeat its most destructive patterns. Joining this secularized culture by placing God on the shelf while morphing Roman Catholicism into a mirror image of the flailing American Episcopal church is perilous.
The rapid growth of the Traditional Latin Mass since Pope Benedict XVI re-opened that door may well be the work of the Holy Spirit. Pope Francis knows well that the entire Church — and not just the bishops with whom he consulted — comprises the “sensus fidelium,” the action of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds and souls of the faithful from the Sacrifice at Calvary to the present day. The faithful witness of those who embrace the Traditional Latin Mass may prove to be a gift to the Church.
But the faithful must not stand against Peter to achieve that end. We are a Church built upon the blood of martyrs, and faithful witness may now require paying the cost of discipleship. Sometimes in the Church’s story of faith, white martyrdom has not only been for the Church. Sometimes it has been from the Church. Padre Pio knew this. So did Cardinal George Pell. So do I.
I have been most struck by the two volumes of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal. He frequently repeated his longing for Mass and the Eucharist in a place where he was barred from them. I recall reading from Father Walter Ciszek’s book, With God In Russia, that he sat on the edge of his bunk in a Siberian labor camp and would mouth from memory the words of the Roman Canon of the Mass.
My experience of Mass as a prisoner is reduced to the contents of a small plastic box. On Sunday nights at 11:00 PM, after the last prisoner count of the day, I take that box from a shelf and place it at the foot of my prison bunk. It serves as both a container and an altar. It has a Corporal that I spread over its surface. I attach a small battery powered book light to the wall just above it, and begin my preparation for Mass. The Mass is always “Ad Orientem,” toward the East, not by any design of my own, but because the cell window faces in that direction.
I have no sacred vessels. I have a coffee cup purchased years ago but never used for any other purpose. I have a weekly supply of a host placed on a clean linen purificator, and a one-quarter ounce of unfermented wine with no additives approved for liturgical use by Catholic priests serving in a war zone. I have a small wooden crucifix on a stand on a shelf just above where my Mass is offered.
There was a time when I did not have even these. For many years in prison, I had no access at all to the Mass. So I look upon this present drama unfolding now in our Church, and see it as madness that is hopefully brief. If you have appreciated the Traditional Latin Mass, you must not leave. The Church needs you. We need you to remind us of a lesson that I have long since learned harshly, and can now never forget.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. And please visit our Special Events page. It contains a story that is dear to my heart.
You may also like these relevant posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful
The feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, our patron saint, is August 14. The above photo is his prison cell.
It Is the Duty of a Priest to Never Lose Sight of Heaven
Marking 39 years of priesthood, 27 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to higher truths. For those who suffer in life, eternal life matters more.
Marking 40 years of priesthood, 28 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to a higher truth. For those suffering in life, eternal life matters more.
“When suffering is far away, we feel that we are ready for everything. Now that we have occasion to suffer, we must take advantage of it to save souls.”
I am indebted to my friend, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, for his remarkable and timely guest post, “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In it, he concluded that some of our bishops have acted in regard to their priests by caving into the cancel culture mob even before it was called that. “The mob can be a frightening place when we have lost sight of heaven,” he boldly wrote. I was struck by this important insight which lends itself to my title for this post: It is the duty of a priest to never lose sight of heaven.
In the weeks before I mark forty years of priesthood, I have heard from no less than three good priests who have been summarily removed from ministry without a defense. Like many others, they are banished into exile following 30-year-old claims for which there exists no credible evidence beyond the accusations themselves and demands for money.
This sad reality, imposed by our bishops in a panicked response to the Catholic abuse crisis, has been the backdrop of nearly half of my life as a priest. As Father Stuart mentioned in his post, I wrote of this a decade ago in regard to the demise of the celebrated public ministry of Father John Corapi at EWTN. Given the resurgence of priests falsely accused, I decided to update and republish that post on social media. It is “Goodbye, Good Priest! Fr. John Corapi’s Kafkaesque Catch-22.”
The point of it was not Father Corapi himself, but rather the matters of due process and fundamental justice and fairness that have suffered in regard to the treatment of accused priests. In republishing it, I was struck by how little has changed in this regard since I first wrote of Father Corapi a decade earlier.
My article presents no new information on the priesthood of Father Corapi, but lest our spiritual leaders think that interest in this story among Catholics has diminished, within 24 hours of publishing, that post was visited by over 6,500 readers and shared on social media 3,700 times. (Note: We now give it a permanent home in the “Catholic Priesthood” Category at the BTSW Library.)
The only priests who land in the news these days are those accused of sexual or financial wrongdoing and those who make their disobedience to Church authority in matters of faith and morals a media event. In regard to the latter, several priests and bishops in Germany have openly defied Pope Francis and his decision to bar priests from blessing same-sex unions.
Blessing the individuals involved would not be an issue, but, as Pope Francis put it, “The Church cannot bless sin.” The open defiance of this among some German priests brought them 15 minutes of fame in our cancel culture climate in recent weeks, but it does nothing to bring us any closer to heaven.
Appearing on The World Over with Raymond Arroyo recently, Catholic theologian and author, George Weigel, addressed the German situation plainly:
“These bishops think that they know more about marriage than Jesus, that they know more about worthiness for the Eucharist than Saint Paul. This is apostasy, and it is time to call it what it really is.”
The Setting for My Priesthood
In every age, people tend to see the struggles of their current time as the worst of times. My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982. It was the only ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire that year. President Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term in office. The U.S. economy was suffering its most severe decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment was at its highest level in decades and the housing industry was on the verge of collapse.
Just over a year earlier, on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times at close range as he entered Saint Peter’s Square to mark the 64th anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. John Paul was severely wounded and so was the spirit of the global Catholic Church. He recovered, though a lesser man might not have.
One year later, three weeks before my ordination, Pope John Paul made a thanksgiving visit to Fatima on May 12, 1982. It was the day before the anniversary of both the Visions of Fatima and the attempt on his life. As the Pope walked toward the altar of the Fatima shrine, a man in clerical garb lunged at him with a bayonet, coming within inches of killing John Paul before being subdued by security guards.
The assailant was Juan Fernandez y Krohn, then age 32, a priest ordained by the suspended traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Fernandez was subsequently expelled from Lefebvre's movement. As he lunged at the Pope with his bayonet, he shouted in denouncement of the Second Vatican Council while accusing Pope John Paul of collaborating with the dark forces behind the spread of Communism.
That latter accusation was highly ironic. Over the next decade, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II collaborated to become the two major forces behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism that had held the Western World in the grip of Cold War since the end of World War II.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down by a crowd of citizens from both East and West as soldiers watched in silence. On Christmas Day, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a television address. The next day, the Soviet parliament passed its final resolution ratifying the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Within a week, all residual functions of the Soviet Communist state ceased. The USSR was no more, thanks to the strength and fidelity of a Pope and a President.
The footprints of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul on modern human history are immense. This and the chaos of the world at that time formed the backdrop against which I became a priest in 1982. I wrote of this in “Priesthood: The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times.”
The sins of the times were many. On the world stage, Pope John Paul courageously confronted the Marxist “cancel culture” movement of his time. His bold witness to the world and his fidelity are highlighted in a new and important book by George Weigel entitled Not Forgotten.
In contrast, much of the current Catholic ecclesial leadership seems bogged down in demonstrations of tolerance for dissent and the rise of socialism and Marxist ideology that again springs up anew as “cancel culture.” Some bishops cannot even decide whether open promotion of abortion should bar its adherents who are nominally Catholic from presenting themselves for the Eucharist.
Ironically, recent polls have suggested that 66-percent of American Catholics are uncertain whether they still even believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is that exact same percentage who also believe that President Biden should be admitted to the Eucharist without question despite his open promotion of abortion as a civil right. Our Catholic crisis is not just one of fidelity. It is a crisis of identity. But as has been famously asked by another well-known priest, “Who am I to judge?”
Witnessed in a Prison Journal
Now here I stand, 39 years into my priesthood on the peripheries with 27 of those years in wrongful imprisonment for abuse claims that never took place. I could have left prison 26 years ago had the truth meant nothing to me. I have been reading the far better known story of another falsely accused priest in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press.
I find in it much solace and peace. I am strengthened in my priesthood by the great effort of Cardinal Pell to maintain his identity as a priest even in prison. I know from long experience - too long - that there is nothing in prison, absolutely nothing that sustains an identity of priesthood. It is so easy and a constant temptation to simply give up. For page after page in the Journal, I find myself thinking, “I felt that very same way,” or “I did these very same things.” Our prisons were similar, although from Cardinal Pell descriptions, Australia’s prisons seem a bit more humane.
Cardinal Pell was in prison for 400 days before his unjust convictions were recognized as such in a unanimous exoneration by Australia’s High Court. On my 39th anniversary of ordination on June 5th this year, I mark 9,750 days in wrongful imprisonment. I do not point this out to contrast my experience with that of Cardinal Pell. His ordeal, like mine, was defined by his first failed appeals after which he had every reason to believe that prison could thus define the rest of his life.
I have no known recourse because, unlike Australia, the United States courts have given greater weight to states’ rights to finality in criminal cases than to innocent defendants’ rights to a case review. When I had new witnesses and evidence, the court not only declined to hear it, but declined to allow any further appeals. We even appealed that, but to no avail.
But a distinction between justice for Cardinal Pell and for me is not the point I want to make. I felt the lacerations to his good name in every step of his Way of the Cross as news media in Australia and globally exploited the charges against him. What a trophy his wrongful conviction was for those who hate the Church!
I felt the scourging he endured as multiple false claimants tried to use his cross for financial gain. I felt his condemnation in the halls of the high priests as cowardly men of the Church denounced him, at worst, or at best stood speechless in the shadows of silence, rarely mentioning his name, and even then only in whispers.
Reading Volume One of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal has been both consoling and distressing. Consoling in that when all else was stripped away, truth and priesthood, even more than freedom, were still at the heart of this good priest’s identity. The measure of a man is not when all is going well, but when all that is dear and familiar has been stripped away. Cardinal Pell held up well. I like to think I have, too.
I have reserved a copy of Volume Two of the Prison Journal. I am told by those who know that in a few of its pages, Cardinal Pell also wrote about me. That struck me as highly ironic in that I wrote several times about his plight, the last being “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”
And by “From Down Under,” I do not just mean Australia!
The Last Years of My Priesthood
I expect that I will die in prison. This is not a statement out of despair. No one has taken my faith in Divine Providence and Divine Mercy. There came a time in my imprisonment when I recognized a pattern of grace that began with the insinuation of Saint Maximilian Kolbe into my life as both a priest and a prisoner. This grace has been profound, and staggering in its visibility and power. Our readers — all but the most spiritually blind — have seen it.
After a lifetime of devoting himself as a priest in Consecration to Jesus through Mary, Maximilian coped with his suffering as grace rather than torment. This story culminated, as you know, in his spontaneous decision to surrender his life so that another could live. This act of sacrifice has long been heralded as an exemplar of the words of Jesus, “No greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
There came a point in my imprisonment when it was clear that all I tried to do to bring about justice was in vain. So I asked for Divine Mercy and the ability to find grace in this story. A life without grace is far worse than a life without justice. It was at that very point at which my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, arrived upon my road as a priest. He had been mercilessly beaten down in life, and robbed of all trust and hope.
I could have been the priest who saw him on that road and passed him by like the priest in the Parable of the Samaritan. But I stopped, and when I learned the whole truth of his life, I set my own hope for justice aside. It became clear to me that this was God’s action in my life and a task that He has given only to me. It became clear that Pornchai has a special connection to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and I was to be his Saint Joseph.
I wrote a post about this healing mission which I contrasted with the Book of Tobit and the mission of Saint Raphael the Archangel to be God’s instrument of healing. I wrote of this in one of my own favorite posts at Beyond These Stone Walls in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”
You should not miss that post, and if you do read it, you would do well to ponder for awhile the mysteries of grace on your own life’s path. It was well after writing and posting it that I learned something that stunned me into a better awareness of the irony of grace.
Over the course of time, the Church has devised a Lectionary that reveals all of Sacred Scripture in the readings for the Church’s liturgy spread over a three-year cycle. I discovered only while writing this post for the occasion of my 39th anniversary of priesthood ordination that the First Reading at Mass on that day — Saturday, June 5, 2021 — is the story of the Archangel Raphael sent by God to restore life and sight to Tobit and bring deliverance and healing to two souls — Tobias and Sarah — whose lives and sufferings converged upon Tobit’s at that point in time.
As I mark thirty nine years as a priest in extraordinary circumstances, the weight of imprisonment does not leave me broken. But the irony of grace leaves me hopeful — even now.
Thank you for being a part of my life as a priest. Thank you for being here with me at this turning of the tide.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We have a most important message for readers. Please visit our “Special Events” page.
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You may also like these related posts:
From Down Under, the Exoneration of Cardinal George Pell
Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times
Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse
The community of believers that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran awaited an apocalyptic battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.
The Angel Michael Binding Satan (“He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and Shut him up”), 1805 drawing by William Blake.
The community of believers that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran awaited an apocalyptic battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.
My annual Holy Week post this year was somewhat unusual. It profiled an announcement from the government of Israel about a new archeological discovery in the general region of Qumran in modern day Jordan. The discovery includes 2,000 year-old remains of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem about 100 years after the Crucifixion of Jesus. My post was, “The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage.”
It told the story of Bar Kochba and a revolt by residents of Jerusalem against the secular suppression of their religious beliefs by Roman Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century AD. The story has many parallels with current events and especially with the growing “cancel culture” disdain for Catholics, our faith, and our public witness of that faith.
Several readers have since asked me to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls, their place in Salvation History, and their connection to Sacred Scripture. Understanding the mindset of those who created and left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls can inspire and empower our own struggle against forces in our own time seeking to eradicate and silence our religious convictions.
First, a little geography. It’s ironic that I am typing this post on my 68th birthday. In the 16 years Pornchai Moontri was here with me, he organized an annual birthday acknowledgment among prisoners I knew. Part of its ritual was the unveiling of a birthday card by a local inmate-artist. The cards were always insulting, but hilarious. One of them declared, “When Father G was born, the Dead Sea was only sick!” One of the other cards was about Latin being my first language. Hmmph!
Anyway, regarding the Dead Sea, Pornchai was not so far off the mark, but its geography is very interesting. It is the lowest inland body of water on Earth. Its surface is 1,290 feet below sea level, and it reaches a depth of 1,300 feet. It is fed by the Jordan River and several smaller streams. The Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18) have long been thought to lie under the waters of the Dead Sea’s southern end.
The term, “Dead Sea” is mentioned nowhere in Scripture. It was known as the Salt Sea in Genesis (14:3) and Deuteronomy (3:37). The Prophet Ezekiel called it the Eastern Sea. The Roman historian Josephus called it the Asphalt Sea. Owing to evaporation, its salt concentration is the highest of any body of water on Earth. Neither animal nor plant life can live in it or around it. But in Biblical times in the valley created by the Dead Sea, there were several settlements such as Qumran and Masada.
In 1947, quite by accident, scrolls were discovered in ancient jars in a cave near the Dead Sea by two nomadic Bedouin shepherds who sold them to antiquities dealers. The writings made their way to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To the amazement of the Judeo-Christian world, the scrolls contained intact Hebrew and Aramaic books of the Bible composed between 250 BC and 70 AD, the latter being the date of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple mentioned in my post linked above.
In 1956, multiple excavations in multiple caves at the site yielded some 800 manuscripts containing complete scrolls and thousands of fragments of virtually every book of the Hebrew Bible. Some ancient apocryphal and Deuterocanonical texts were also discovered and I will write more about these below. A decades-long scholarly translation of the discoveries was set in motion. One of the translators was my late uncle, Jesuit Father George W. MacRae, a renowned Biblical scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages and texts at Harvard University and the Institute Biblique in Jerusalem.
The Essenes: The Community behind the Scrolls
After decades of excavation and historical analysis, scholars have settled on the identity and origin of the group that created and preserved the scrolls. They arose in the years after the Maccabean Revolt in 167 BC. Hellenism — Greek civilization — spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Jerusalem, the center of Jewish thought, culture and religion, experienced a wave similar to the progressive “cancel culture” movement of today. The elite among the aristocracy of Jerusalem fostered a strong movement toward Hellenism, and the replacement of Judaism with Greek traditions.
The majority of the Jews in Jerusalem were conservative and resisted this movement. Most, however, did not have the voice and the influence of the left-leaning liberal elite. Signs of rebellion and civil unrest gave the newly installed king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, the excuse he needed to suppress conservative thought and practices among the Jews. He did this by demoralizing them. In 168 BC, his army plundered the Temple and its treasury. They suppressed Jewish worship and the sacred Books of the Law, the Torah.
The final straw came with the “Abomination of Desolation” as described in the Book of Daniel (9:27). Antiochus took the Temple, removed the Torah, and replaced it with an altar to the mythological Greek god, Zeus. This triggered a revolution by Judas Maccabeas and his family which became the central story of the First Book of Maccabees. In 165 BC, the Maccabees led by Judas forcefully retook the Temple, deposed the statue of Zeus, and restored the sanctuary. They held it for eight days while awaiting reinforcements. This is the origin of the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah.
The two predominant religious sects in Jerusalem at that time, the Pharisees and Sadducees, were both tolerant at best, and at worst accommodating, to the Hellenist conquerors just as they would be to Caesar nearly two centuries later. I wrote of their plot in “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’ .”
To those who have been paying attention to recent trends in our own time and culture, this should all have a ring of the familiar. Just as with the revolt of the Maccabees, resistance is not at all futile. So resist — with fidelity as your sword and Divine Mercy as your shield — the Abomination of Desolation that is being handed to us by the “woke” elite around us. Many have the spiritual depth of mud puddles.
Sorry for the editorial. By 150 BC, the accommodations of the Pharisees and Sadducees toward the wave of Hellenistic culture resulted in the emergence of a third religious identity in Israel, that of the mysterious Essenes. Jews returning from exile in Babylon heard of the successful revolt of the Maccabees and were inspired by it. Their communal reaction was to focus on fidelity to the Covenant. They came to be known by history as Essenes — Hebrew for “Pious Ones.”
The Essenes are not mentioned by name in Sacred Scripture. This was possibly due to the quiet and secret nature of their rebellion. The historian, Pliny the Elder, mentions them as having emerged as a community on the Western shore of the Dead Sea at a place that, by his description, could be none other than Khirbet Qumran. Philo and Josephus, two other historians of the period, describe the Essenes in more detail and their descriptions correspond seamlessly to what is now known of the record they left behind: the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Hosts a Living Faith
The Essenes lived as a structured community believing that over Israel’s entire history, God had prepared for this Community of the New Covenant. The Prophet Habakkuk wrote in this same period that for all those who observe the Law among the Jews, God will deliver from judgment because of their suffering and because of their faith in a Holy One. Habukkuk identifies their time as the final time, but now prolonged according to the mysterious plan of God. This was also a time when expectations of a Messiah and life beyond death became prominent themes in Israel.
In the decades after the Maccabean revolt that restored the Jerusalem Temple after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, the concept of an apocalypse spread widely throughout Judaism. The prophetic witness of the Book of Daniel, composed at about the same time the Essenes formed, was highly influential. This influence continued well into the early Christian era.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought to light the existence of the Essene sect whose way of life was heavily influenced by apocalyptic ideas as a reaction to what they saw as the secular infringement upon their Jewish, and later Jewish-Christian, faith. These ideas included an emphasis on exploration of the heavenly mysteries and a sense of participation in the angelic realm. Their commitment to fidelity and a community of faith was to prepare them for an epic final battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness — a battle that raged in both the spiritual realm and the Earthly one.
The Essenes had an influence that reflected far beyond their separatist community hidden for twenty centuries in Qumran on the Western shore of the Dead Sea. Their emphasis on apocalyptic ideas came to be widely accepted. This included a belief in resurrection from the dead and eternal life, a belief that was embraced by the Pharisees and gradually entered the mainstream of Jewish faith by the time of Jesus. The argument could be made that this development was in preparation for the time of Jesus.
It is now widely believed among scholars that the Essenes had a connection with John the Baptist. In the Dead Sea Scrolls about their own community, they described themselves in words identical to those ascribed to John the Baptist in each of the Gospels (see Luke 4:18-19). Both were citing Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
It also appears that the Essenes had an influence on the Gospel of John, the last of the four to come into written form around 90 AD. It was once believed that this Gospel was heavily influenced by Hellenistic philosophical ideas. The Dead Sea Scrolls made clear that John’s Gospel is solidly rooted in Jewish thought and traditions faithful to the Covenant, the Law and the Prophets.
The apocalyptic traditions of the Essenes were also influenced by the Book of Enoch, a Second Century BC work considered by Jewish scholars as a Deuterocanonical text. “Deuterocanonical” is a Scriptural term derived from Greek meaning “Secondary Canon.” Enoch and some other books considered to be deuterocanonical were accepted in the Jewish Canon of Scripture well into the time of Jesus until about 90 AD. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple — a cataclysmic event for Judaism and one predicted by Jesus — the apocalyptic ideas of Enoch diminished.
Michael Contends With the Devil
Other books considered to be outside the Canon of Hebrew Scripture but later accepted in the Catholic Canon were Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, First and Second Maccabees, and the Book of Tobit which was analyzed here recently in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”
The Book of Enoch is especially interesting because it had a wide influence on the Essenes — and therefore is also prominent among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Enoch also had an influence on some early Christian writings of Jude, Barnabas, and Irenaeus. Among the Christian Patriarchs, Tertullian regarded it as Scripture while Augustine and Jerome saw it as apocryphal, but influential. In the New Testament Letter of Jude (Jude 9) the Apostle refers to a story that appeared nowhere else but the apocryphal book, The Assumption of Moses, and in references in the Book of Enoch. He wrote as though this account was highly familiar to both Jews and Jewish Christians:
“When the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him [which would have been the purview only of God] but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”
The Letter of Jude included a reference to this story from an apocryphal book without explanation. This implies that the story was well known among the Jews of this period. In the story, Moses died in the desert without ever entering the Promised Land. Satan tried to take the body of Moses but the Archangel Michael fought him and won. Michael then escorted the physical body of Moses to Heaven. In the Hebrew Scriptures, only one other human being was taken into Heaven for eternity. It was Elijah. It is for this very reason that Moses and Elijah could appear with Jesus in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (see Luke 9:28ff) where they represent the Law and the Prophets, the two pillars of Jewish tradition.
It is possible that the Essenes latched upon the Book of Enoch to preserve it. Though composed in their time (the Second Century BC) it is named for the Enoch of Genesis, father of Methuselah. Here is the Genesis account of Enoch: At the age of 65,
“Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years ... thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.”
Enoch appears, by adoption through the line of Joseph, in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 3:37).
It was not lost on the writers of the Book of Enoch — or on the Essenes — that the number of his years was also the number of days in a single year. The Book of Enoch explores the Genesis reference to Enoch being taken bodily into heaven for 300 years, and is filled with visions of the cosmos, of angelic tours of the heavenly realm, of the abode of the dead awaiting redemption, and of a pre-existent Son of Man. It is likely that the Essenes sought to preserve it because it was Israel’s first example of a developed apocalyptic faith and the expectation of resurrection.
All of this apocalyptic tradition — and its call to arm for battle in spiritual warfare between light and a growing darkness — entered both Judaism and Christianity as a result of elitist secular values and their infringement upon our lives of faith. The Essenes were short lived. They died out along with the Jerusalem Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. That their legacy emerged into our world by “accident” 2,000 years later is a gift to our time.
And perhaps there is more of this gift to come. The apocalyptic message of Daniel, also influential to the Essenes, hints at books that are shut up until the end of time:
“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation ... but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt ... But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end.”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Writing from prison is difficult, and has become even more so in this time of pandemic. I rely on the postal service to mail my weekly post for scanning, and I am unable to make a photocopy so I mail the only copy I have. If there is a delay (there have been two late arrivals in the last four weeks) I have no way to inform readers.
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Please also share this post, and these related posts that appear herein:
The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage
The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’
Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri
and one I didn’t mention, but should have:
The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage
Prayerful observance of Holy Week is a challenge in a climate of pandemic restrictions and political outrage. Spend time with us this week Beyond These Stone Walls.
Prayerful observance of Holy Week is a challenge in a climate of woke ideology and political outrage. Spend time with us this week Beyond These Stone Walls.
Something timely and fascinating was unearthed in the days just before Holy Week in 2021. It actually began in 1960 near the Dead Sea in Qumran, an ancient Hebrew settlement in Jordan. Archeologists discovered fragments showing that caves there were used as a hide-out by Bar Kochba’s rebel army which staged a three-year revolt against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem from AD 132-135.
The 1960 discovery included Roman coins, arrows, and a fragment of parchment bearing sixteen verses in Hebrew from the Book of Exodus. In a deep cave in Wadi Haver, archeologists also discovered several of Bar Kochba’s letters on papyri and wood.
Sixty-one years later, on March 16, 2021 the Israeli government announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments of Hebrew texts from the Prophets Zechariah and Nahum from an adjacent cave. The “Cave of Horrors,” as it is called, contained other evidence that it was used by followers of Bar Kochba to evade the Roman armies. The cave is located in the Judean desert about 262 feet (80 meters) below a cliff top.
The Bar Kochba rebellion took place about 60 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, an event predicted by Jesus during his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:28ff). In AD 70, Romans destroyed the Temple. The revolt of Bar Kochba was triggered 60 years later when Roman emperor Hadrian decided to erect a shrine to the mythological Roman god, Jupiter, upon the site of the Temple.
Emperor Hadrian came personally to Judea to put down the Bar Kochba revolt which ultimately cost the lives of over a half million Jews. The revolt was called the “Liberation of Jerusalem” by its adherents. It was led by Simon Ben Kosibah, known to the documents of the early Christian Church as Bar Kochba.
Hadrian and his General, Sextus Julius Severus, crushed the revolt by a long, slow starvation of the Jewish revolutionaries and their families who had been driven into the desert to take refuge in the desert caves. When it was all over, Hadrian destroyed what was left of Jerusalem. He then decreed that the whole Jewish nation should be barred, from that day forward, from entering the City of Jerusalem and its surrounding area so that “they may not even view from afar their ancestral home.”
Little is known today about the state of Christianity at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. It was a time in which a break between synagogue and church was taking place for Jewish Christians. A succession of thirteen Jewish-Christian bishops ruled Jerusalem until the time of Hadrian. At the time of the first destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Simeon, son of Clopas, was Bishop of Jerusalem and was martyred there. The Second Century historian Eusebius, reported that between the martyrdom of Simeon and the Bar Kochba revolt, “many thousands of Jews had come to believe in Christ.”
A Revolution in the Soul
These remnants of a revolution seem an almost fitting discovery just before Holy Week in this of all years. I believe that the bones of Bar Kochba’s faithful Jewish and Jewish-Christian revolutionaries are calling to us from those caves. I have never written a Holy Week post like this before because we have never had a Holy Week like this before in our lifetimes. For the second year in a row, many Catholics face a drastic reduction in their ability to participate in the liturgy and Sacraments of their Faith.
The first time Holy Week was limited by fears of a pandemic — in Holy Week 2020 — Christianity was caught off guard on a global scale. We never imagined that the restrictions set in place by both civil and religious authorities would further impede our faith as we approach another Holy Week a year later. We never imagined that many of our spiritual leaders would continue their passive acceptance of the severe limits placed on our practice of faith. I wrote of this at the turn of the year in “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.”
On what we today call “Passion Sunday,” Jesus entered Jerusalem as the triumphant Son of David, a title given to him by Sacred Scripture. As he entered the Holy City, he wept. It is notable that he did not weep over his knowledge that he enters Jerusalem to commence the Passion of the Christ. Saint Luke’s Passion Narrative makes clear that Jesus wept over Jerusalem and what he knew to be the coming destruction of the Temple and Holy City by Earthly Powers. He knew that many would lose their lives in revolt against it.
Many people in our era are just now awakening to a revolution in the soul as clarity dawns that demonic forces behind so-called “cancel culture” are using a pandemic to suppress our churches, our liturgy, our voices, and our communal values and expressions of faith. Many are also awakening to the reality that some — but certainly not all — of our religious leaders have acquiesced to this suppression, most by their silence, but some by outright endorsement of government-imposed shutdowns.
I have written of at least two instances in which the courts have overruled political impositions on Mass attendance and Catholic practice only to have the local Catholic bishop re-impose the same restrictions the courts had declared unconstitutional. I feel indebted to the many priests — and, in fairness, some bishops too — who have found courage in their fidelity to reject the modern version of one of my most memorable Holy Week posts: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”
That Whisper in the Ear of Judas
There is another force, also seemingly demonic in its origin, that has impinged upon our expressions of fidelity in the public square. I could sense it all around us throughout the last year and it has not abated. It has just festered and grown deeper within many of us as persons and as communities. I had a hard time putting a name on it until I saw it spelled out by one of my favorite columnists in The Wall Street Journal.
On March 9, 2021, political columnist Gerald F. Seib published a masterful analysis entitled “The Perpetual Outrage Machine Churns On.” You may not be able to read it without a subscription but I will give a brief summary of its evidence.
Two months after the January 6 events at the U.S. Capitol, prison-like fencing still surrounded the area. In Minneapolis, the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd — seemingly every horrid moment of it caught on national television — has commenced amid another round of protests. Innocent Asian Americans have suddenly become targets of physical and verbal assault across the nation. Four women at a Bed and Body Works store in Arizona erupted into a wild brawl. Eight persons were killed by a single gunman in a spa in Atlanta. Ten more were murdered while shopping in a Colorado supermarket.
This list of present day atrocities spawned by rage could go on for pages. There is an influence behind it. A master opportunist has been doing what he does best. In Holy Week 2020, I wrote “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light.” Its point was that the whisper into the ear of Judas at the Last Supper was preceded by other events. Before it happened, Satan entered into Judas (Luke 22:3) as Judas entered into a deal with the chief priests to betray Christ. His sin of greed left him vulnerable to the exploitation of Satan and his minions. That is always the case. The mere whisper in the dark is never enough. Through a long, slow, barely noticeable descent toward ever greater darkness, Satan finds an opportunity just as he found one in Judas Iscariot.
Our rage against the affairs of this world can also be a point of vulnerability. The great Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, described that path to spiritual destruction in his allegorical story, The Screwtape Letters (1940). He captures Satan instructing his nephew in the ways of spiritual warfare: “It is the cumulative effect of sin that draws the Man away from the Light and out into the Nothing ... The safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle curves, soft underfoot, without turns, without signposts, without a roadmap. (The Screwtape Letters, p. 61)
Satan exploits fear, rage, even political contention and a pandemic to drive a wedge not only between persons, but within them. If your life of faith has been assailed by the world, the flesh, and the devil in this past year, we invite you to walk the Way of the Cross Beyond These Stone Walls this week.
We are posting on Monday of Holy Week instead of our usual Wednesday post day to present this special Holy Week post and a short list of six others for you to read and share in each day of Holy Week. The list begins in an hour of darkness and ends in the glory of Salvation.
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Satan at The Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light
Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane
The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’
Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands
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.”
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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.
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Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri From His Prisons
