Pornchai Moontri: A New Year of Hope Begins in Thailand

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

January 3, 2024 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lion Kings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independence Day Delayed

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Train to Singapore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Umm, did I just mention “Hope?”

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

Note from Father Gordon MacRae :

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

You may also like these related posts by Pornchai Moontri:

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

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

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

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 Not-So-Subtle Wake-Up Call from Christ the King

The Gospel for the Solemnity of Christ the King is the Judgment of the Nations, an invitation to Glory and a road map on how to get there.

November 25, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

— Saint Paul, Romans 8:18

The image atop this post is one that we used at the end of my final post on These Stone Walls, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.” It was written for All Souls Day which just happened to fall this year on the day before the most contentious and bitterly divided U.S. election of the last century. Its echoes of civil unrest reverberated out of America to circle the globe. So we are using the image again and reposting the link because in the heat of battle a lot of readers missed that post.

The image is a powerful one of Christ leading prisoners through the gates of Dachau — or is it Purgatory? It is a hopeful image, and one that reflects the Mind of God as revealed by the Prophet Ezekiel at Mass on the Solemnity of Christ the King:

“As a shepherd tends his flock when he finds himself among his scattered sheep, so will I tend my sheep. I will rescue them from every place where they were scattered when it was cloudy and dark... The lost I will seek out; The strayed I will recover; The injured I will bind up; The sick I will heal.”

— Ezekiel 34:15-17

That describes the Mission of the Church as well, or at least what it should be. I recently received a message from a lawyer who asked if I would be willing to talk with a young priest who has had a catastrophic and very public failure. His bishop’s only public comments were that the priest will be expelled from ministry and will never function as a priest again. The lawyer wants to find spiritual and psychological treatment for him. I am still stricken by this confusion of roles and expectations. The lawyer calls for healing while the shepherd calls only for vengeance.

There is a lot in the readings for Christ the King that should give us pause about our own roles and expectations — not our expectations of faith, but rather faith’s expectations of us.

The Gospel for Christ the King is from Matthew 25:31-46, a passage referred to as the “Judgement of the Nations.” It ends with a familiar condemnation, not of what some of us did in life, but of what we didn’t do:

“I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me; sick and in prison and you did not come to me... Truly I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

— Matthew 25:42-46

It is interesting that in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the plot of the Pharisees and High Priest to kill Jesus unfolds just after the above passage. There are certain things that human nature is loathe to hear, and one of them is to have our hypocrisy mirrored and laid bare. I am no exception. Welcoming the stranger and the alienated requires the strength of will to resist some potent peer pressure.

Some years ago, at about the time I first began writing posts for publication from prison, a man was moved into the housing unit where I lived. He was horribly disfigured and everyone just avoided him. He was living out in the open in an overflow bunk with no place to retreat from the scowls and stares of other prisoners. I was disgusted by the way he was shunned.

And then I awoke in the middle of the night disgusted with myself. While passing judgment on the avoidance and shunning of the crowd I was oblivious to my own. This is called spiritual blindness, among the most self-righteous of our sins. So after a sleepless night I went to him, pulled a chair up to his bunk as he sat alone, and talked for awhile. After some days, he trusted me enough to tell me that his disfigurement was the result of a suicide attempt. My heart went out to this broken man, and we remained friends for the entire time he was in prison.

There but for the Grace of God

The fact that my own life had once spiraled into what the Prophet Ezekiel described above as a place “cloudy and dark,” became in that instance a tool for aiding that man. I wrote of my own venture into cloudy and dark in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.” Had I never experienced such darkness, I could not have imagined what my friend was enduring.

The image atop this segment of this post is one we have used before, but it is a perfect image for the Solemnity of Christ the King. “When I was in prison you came to me” is perhaps one of the Gospel’s most daunting challenges. The image depicts a priest hearing a confession through the food slot of a door in a supermax prison in solitary confinement. I like to think that this brave priest ministering to the darkness is someone who has come to terms with a hard truth. “If my life had veered even slightly from the path I was on, that could just as easily be me living behind that door. There but for the grace of God go I.”

Coming to terms with such a truth strips away all pretense of moral or spiritual superiority. As you know, my good friend, Pornchai spent many years behind such a door before he ended up here with me. It took some time for the demons he encountered to leave him, but they eventually did. He once described his coming to faith as the result of a long, slow exorcism. Now, as described here a week ago in “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls,” his prison sentence is fully served. But he is not at all free. He now approaches ten weeks in ICE detention which his keepers keep reminding him is not a prison.

In reality, he says it is the worst prison he has ever been in. Packed forty to eighty in a room, he is surrounded by mostly young men awaiting forced, but horribly slow, deportation. If solitary confinement is the cruelest thing we do in America, ICE detention comes a close second. His travel documents that were valid for 90 days when they were issued by his Embassy three months ago have been negligently allowed to expire by indifferent ICE handlers.

He is fortunately able to reach out to me through some of those who help to publish these posts. The for-profit ICE detention center sells food to detainees at highly inflated prices and allows telephone calls at the rate of eleven cents per minute. What we all thought would be a two-week stay there has turned into ten, and I have had to sacrifice to get funds to him each week for food and phone calls, both of which are a necessity to ward off total discouragement.

The disappointment and discouragement in his voice when he calls are painful to hear. But in the midst of such suffering, Pornchai has done something remarkable. He has fulfilled the Gospel for Christ the King. There are a few young men around him who have been stranded there with nothing for many months with no funds, no food, and no way to call anyone. Their families impoverished in Honduras do not even know where they are and they have no way to reach out to them. I felt embarrassed when Pornchai asked me if it is okay for him to share his food with them.

Then he made a list of their names, ICE detention numbers, and countries of origin for our helpers to call their Consulate and begin the process of obtaining travel documents for them to move on. The irony is that, thanks to him, they have all left before him. This week he told me that he has a new friend, age 22, who speaks no English and has been stranded there for six months. They pray together and Pornchai shares his food with him. I asked how they communicate and Pornchai said, “by food and prayers.” The young man’s name — this floored me — is Maximilian.

“Come you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you came to me.”

— Matthew 25:34-36

In a World Cloudy and Dark

One night some months ago while Pornchai was still in this cell with me, I stumbled upon EWTN in the middle of a talk by our friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC. I told Pornchai to leave his football game and turn his little TV to EWTN. At the moment he did so, he saw himself on the screen. Father Gaitley had put up a photograph of Pornchai and me reciting our Consecration to Jesus through Mary in the prison chapel on the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013.

That seems so very long ago now. We had just completed Father Gaitley’s “33 Days to Morning Glory” retreat, and we felt as though we had just discovered a bright light in what was a very dark time for us. Marian Helper magazine published this account back then in “Mary Is at Work Here,” (Marian Helper, Spring 2014). The author, Felix Carroll, paid a special tribute to Pornchai:

“The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions... Fr. Gordon MacRae joined Pornchai in the consecration and called it a ‘great spiritual gift that opened a door to the rebirth of trust’ at a particularly dark time for both men.”

Inmates Pornchai Moontri (second from left) and Fr. Gordon MacRae (third from left) make their consecration to Jesus through Mary on Nov. 24 in New Hampshire State Prison for Men. They pray to become instruments in Mary's "immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God."

Now for so many, Pornchai and I included, this seems like an even cloudier and darker time with tension and uncertainty part of our daily experience. I plan to read the above excerpt from Marian Helper to Pornchai when we speak on the night I am typing this. In the bleak setting in which he now finds himself, this reminder of the ray of light that beckoned to us is much needed.

The callousness of ICE handlers notwithstanding, the real culprit in all these delays extending Pornchai’s imprisonment has been the global pandemic. Thailand has closed its borders to all international travel and presently allows only repatriation flights for its own citizens to return to their country. Pornchai seems to be far down the list, but he must not forget who his Mother is.

Many people are hurting and anxious over the times that we are in and the perils that lie before us. Trust seems to have gone out of our world, and the reign of Christ the King feels for many like a vague notion of the past. It is not. The task before us is to look into the present darkness to reach out to souls worse off than ourselves. I am humbled by how much Pornchai just spontaneously does this in a place that offers little beyond anxiety and hopelessness.

Gospel for the Solemnity of Christ the King, don’t ask yourself how you could possibly be expected to go visit the imprisoned. If you read this far, you already have. Now open your heart to do the rest, and inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

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Editor’s Note: On April 29, 1995 — the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Dachau — the Russian Orthodox Memorial Chapel of Dachau was consecrated. Dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ, the chapel holds an icon depicting angels opening the gates of the concentration camp and Christ Himself leading the prisoners to freedom.

Dachau 1945: The Souls of All Are Aflame 

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please visit our Special Events Page for information on how you can help us behind and Beyond These Stone Walls. Thank you and God Bless you.

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.”

You may also like these related links: 

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

Life Goes on Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

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

Background photo by Sue Thompson (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Writing from Thailand, Pornchai Moontri hopes and prays for justice for Fr Gordon MacRae who begins a 30th year unjustly in prison on the Feast Day of St Padre Pio.

September 23, 2023 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Note from our Editor: Pornchai Moontri wrote this post in 2020 as he was returning to Thailand after a 36 year absence. The post is mostly about a very important person in his life whom he had to very painfully leave behind. Father Gordon MacRae was wrongly sentenced to prison on the Feast Day of his Patron Saint, September 23, 1994. As Father G begins his 30th year under this injustice, Pornchai implores us all to pray for him that his faith and strength and hope will never fail.

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To My Dear Friends and Family Beyond These Stone Walls : It was not until my friend, Fr Gordon MacRae wrote “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom’’ in 2020 that the weight of this immense change in our lives really hit me. My emotions were on a roller coaster then. Father G and I worked long and hard over the previous 15 years that we had been friends, family and roommates. I could not have imagined on the day we first met that I would be facing this day with hope.

Hope is just one of the emotions competing for space in my heart back then. I was also scared beyond measure, and anxious, and excited, and I was very deeply sad. I guess I have to try to sort this out for myself and for you. I was scared because my whole life, and all that I have known since I was a homeless and lost teenager 32 years ago, was about to change completely.

I was anxious because I was to be cast among strangers for a time, and it was a long time due to Covid-19 pandemic and the constraints on international flights. Weeks after leaving Father G in Concord, New Hampshire Prison, ICE agents took me away to be a prisoner in another crowded, chaotic place where I lived among strangers, taking only the clothes I was wearing.

I was excited because this journey may well be the last of the nightmares of my life. At the other end of that ICE nightmare five months later, I was left in Bangkok, Thailand where I was entirely free for the first time in my living memory. I was adjusting to freedom and a new country and culture all at once. From inside the prison cell we shared for all those years, Father Gordon miraculously built a bridge to Thailand for me through this wonderful blog. Where there was once only darkness ahead, there were now people in Thailand waiting for me and I was not alone.

Father G wrote about my life before prison in an article that changed everything for me. I have not read it myself because I can’t. I will explain why, but I already know what is in it because I have lived it. I am just not ready to see it in print. The article was “Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

All that had become familiar to me had to be left behind. Far worse, Father G had to be left behind and for that I am also sad beyond measure. I knew that when that day came, I would likely never see my friend, my mentor, my father, again in this life. There were times as that day approached when I would lay in the dark in my upper bunk in our prison cell at night, and my darkness and dismay about this felt overwhelming. The person who gave me hope would remain in prison while I would be set free, while banished to a foreign land.

But I was set free in another way, too, and it was Father Gordon MacRae who set me free. I can only barely remember being a happy 11-year-old boy living and working on a small farm in the North of Thailand. In December of 1985, I was taken from there and brought against my will to the United States. Though it was my mother who took me, I did not know her. She had abandoned my brother and me in Thailand when I was only two years old. She waited until I was age eleven to come and take me away because her life was under the control of a monster who sent her to bring me to him. It is that simple, and that terrible.

I have always wondered if readers know how unlikely this alliance between me and Father G is. To explain it, I have to go into what happened to me in life. That is very painful, even unspeakable, so I will spare you what is known only to Father G and God. Father G would later write about this in more general terms in an article that shattered my childhood shame for once being a victim. That post was “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

I was brought to America as a child. I was eleven when taken from my home and twelve years old when I arrived here. I spoke no English at all so I could not tell anyone what was happening to me. I became afraid to go to sleep at night. This went on for over two years before I escaped into the streets. I was fourteen in a foreign country fending for myself. While trying to protect my mother from what she was also suffering, I kept what had been happening to me a secret even though it had severely affected my mind and destroyed my spirit. This was no story about repressed memories like so many of the stories against Father G and other Catholic priests. My burden was that I could not forget a single moment of what happened no matter how much I tried.

So when I was sent to prison at age 18, I was broken and bitter. It is not a good place to grow up. I was forced to fight, a lot, and I convinced myself that I will never again be anyone’s victim. Eight years after I was sent to prison, I learned that my mother was murdered on the Island of Guam. She was brought there by the man who arranged for me to be taken from Thailand. It’s all in Father G’s article linked above and it is an American horror story.

I ended up in solitary confinement for years, a prison within a prison that just magnified the inner madness. In 2005, at the age of 32, I was chained up and transported to a prison in another state, New Hampshire. As you already know, I met Father G there. I heard why he was in prison. I wanted him to help me transfer to a Thai prison, something that he refused to do, but I also thought that he and I could never be friends. Then I heard that there were articles about him and his charges in The Wall Street Journal so I read them. The articles were the result of an honest investigation. I was shocked by them.

As a childhood survivor of horrible sexual abuse and violence, I felt disgusted by what I knew to be accusations made up for money. This guy, Thomas Grover was seen as credible by a police detective, a prosecutor, and a biased judge, but I did not see how that could be possible. Any real survivor of sexual abuse should see right through this. There was a claim that this con man, high school football player at age 15, was raped by Father G in a rectory office, then the guy returned five times saying that he repressed all memory of it from week to week. The stories of his brothers were even more incredible. Then I read that they all stood to get a $200,000 check from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester and no one questioned any of this???

I read that Father G was offered a plea deal from a corrupt detective and prosecutor. One year in prison. If he was guilty, of course he would take it. Even if he was innocent, but had no integrity, he might still take it. But he was innocent, and he did have integrity, so he refused the deal. Then he was sentenced to more than sixty times the time in prison he would have got if he was guilty. When I read all this, I was furious just as every real survivor of sexual abuse should be furious.

Now I have to jump ahead several years. I made a decision to trust Father G. This was a miracle all by itself because I never really trusted anyone. There is a writer in France named Marie Meaney who somehow wrote about this story. It is not a long version, but she caught every important detail and its meaning in just two pages. Her article is “Untying the Knots of Sin — In Prison.”

Ever Deeper Into the Tangled Threads

As the trust grew between me and Father G, I began to reveal all that happened to me. I did not imagine then that he was storing every detail in support of some future deliverance. We had been living in the same cell for two years when Beyond These Stone Walls began in the summer of 2009. I had been secretly thinking about becoming Catholic then, and had been taking correspondence courses in Scripture and Catholic teaching through the Knights of Columbus. My interest in the Catholic faith was growing because I saw it quietly working every day in the person I was living with in a small prison cell. I remember a day, just after I was moved into the area where Father G lived. It was a few months before we became roommates. I walked into his cell and the first thing I saw was a picture taped to a beat up steel mirror on the wall. I stared at it. The man was balding with glasses, and half in priest’s clothes and the clothes of a prisoner. Father G was busy writing something. I asked, “Is this you?”

It turned out to be the most important question of my life. Father Gordon then told me all about Saint Maximilian Kolbe, of how he was sent to prison in a Nazi concentration camp on fake charges, of how he helped other prisoners, and finally of how he gave his life to save a younger prisoner from execution. Father Maximilian was 41 years old when this happened. Father G was 41 when he was unjustly sent to prison. I learned about not only sainthood, but manhood from these two men. In another miracle, Felix Carroll, the Editor of Marian Helper magazine, wrote a book with a chapter about me. He wrote of this story:

“Eyes that once smoldered with coiled rage now sparkle with purpose and compassion. Through Fr. Gordon MacRae, Pornchai discovered the saints and the Blessed Mother. In St. Maximilian Kolbe he discovered what it means to truly be a man, what it means to be tough. A man doesn’t seek to destroy other men. A man doesn’t hold his own needs above the needs of others. A real man is selfless. St. Maximilian knew what it was like to be stripped of his humanity and dignity. In him, Pornchai found recourse because Maximilian never caved into despair. In 1941 at Auschwitz, he gave his life to save that of another man.”

— Loved, Lost, Found, pp.166-167

Over time, Father G became all of these things for me. He never once put himself first, and he made great sacrifices for me. He told me once that sacrifice is the most necessary part of being a man and a father. While I was slowly being drawn into faith and hope, Father G was always looking out for my best interests, never putting himself first. He became my best friend, and the person I trust most in this world. From prison, he opened for me a window onto Christ.

As I mentioned above, Beyond These Stone Walls began in our cell in the summer of 2009. It was another miracle I never would have thought possible. It was proposed to Father G in a phone call and he came to our cell and told me about it. He let me decide what to call it so I chose “These Stone Walls,” I always saw prison as a place where we were sent to be forgotten. Father G said that we could speak to the whole world from here, and we did.

I became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. Meanwhile, Father G’s writing at Beyond These Stone Walls got the attention of others. One of them was Mrs. Clare Farr, a Trademarks attorney in Western Australia. She and Father G teamed up to begin an investigation of my past life. They were relentless, and over time what they accomplished grew and grew. I never thought justice was even possible, but they kept probing and making connections. Then the police came to interview me. They came a second time along with a District Attorney. As a result, in 2017 Richard Alan Bailey was arrested in Oregon and held on $49,000 bail charged with forty felony counts of sexual abuse against a child.

There was to be no trial, however. Richard Bailey took a plea deal. He today stands convicted of all 40 felony charges. His sentence was suspended and he was given probation. This would be an international outrage if Richard Bailey were a Catholic priest. The story of the murder of my mother when he took her to the Island of Guam remains there a cold case unsolved homicide even though there is new evidence pointing to a solid suspect.

Pornchai Moontri’s mugshot at the time of his arrest at age 18 in Bangor, Maine, after having lived on the streets for two years.

True Crime and Punishment

Father Gordon MacRae freed me from the evil this man inflicted on me. He taught me that this evil is not mine to keep. I just see the horrible injustice in the handling of these two cases. My abuser did monstrous things. His assaults were more than the number he was charged with. There were witnesses ready to testify and lots of clear evidence.

He was sentenced to mere probation because I am a prisoner and the prosecutor feared that I would be assailed on the witness stand because of that. So they offered Richard Bailey a plea deal. He took the deal because he is guilty. So for forty counts of rape, he will never serve a single day in jail and all the evidence was never placed before the court.

In the case of Father Gordon MacRae, a plea deal was also offered. It was offered three times, and each time he refused the offer of a single year in prison because he is innocent. These offers were made because Thomas Grover, his 27-year-old accuser at trial, was not credible at all. He was a drug addict with a criminal record that was kept out of the trial by a biased judge. He was biased from the beginning and once told the jury to disregard all the inconsistencies in Thomas Grover’s story. As Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in “The Trials of Father MacRae” in The Wall Street Journal, “They had much to disregard.” Father G was not on trial. The whole Catholic priesthood was on trial. Convicted of five counts with zero evidence, he got 67 years in prison.

What do I do with such a story? If Father G had not been here, what would have become of me? This is part of the Cross I now carry through life. I would give my freedom to save his, but he would have none of that.

For the last 14 years in this prison while becoming a Catholic and living as a Catholic, I have also lived in very close quarters with a man I know without a doubt to be innocent. During this time, I have been scandalized by the response of most other priests, and especially by Father G’s cowardly bishop who treats him like a dangerous outcast.

When they have come here for an occasional Mass, they barely speak or even acknowledge him. I am ashamed for their cowardly and petty attitude. Father G says the Church and the Mass are much bigger than the flawed human beings behind them.

After 29 years in prison, 15 of them as Father G’s roommate, and 12 of them as a Catholic, freedom came to me in steps. Three years ago I was freed from this prison, but I will never be free of Father G. It breaks my heart that the man responsible for my freedom was left behind unjustly in prison.

When I asked that question all those years ago — “Is this you?” — I got my answer. It was Saint Maximilian in that picture on the mirror but it is also Father Gordon MacRae, the man who freed my mind and soul from the horror inflicted on me by a real predator.

I could not bear to leave my friend, and I have not. We speak every day, and his fatherly guidance is no less potent now than it was in that prison cell. We have another Patron Saint, Saint Padre Pio who brought about much healing in my life. The day the Church honors him is also the date Father G was cast into prison. They have a special bond. I entrust Father Gordon MacRae to him, and to all of you.

Please do not forget Father G behind those stone walls.

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You may also like these related links:

When Justice Came to Pornchai Moontri, Mercy Followed, by Clare Farr

A chapter in the book, Loved, Lost, Found: The Divine Mercy Conversion of Pornchai Moontri, by Felix Carroll

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood by Pornchai Moontri

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.”

An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump

In his 2020 State of the Union Address, President Trump showed mercy on some who had tragically fallen. This is a plea for mercy and justice for Pornchai Moontri.

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December 2, 2020

Dear Mr. President: 

I write on behalf of many Catholic followers of Divine Mercy with an urgent but simple appeal. Putting the politics of this nation's polarization aside, I join many American Catholics and people of other faiths who have been moved by your consistent agenda to promote both law and order and much needed reform of the criminal justice system. I wrote for publication about your landmark effort in "President Donald Trump's First Step Act for Prison Reform."

It is a basic tenet of your First Step Act that when a prison term has been fully served, it should not continue in other forms such as joblessness, job discrimination, and society's ongoing pointed finger of shame. Your First Step Act is a second chance for many to rise above the past and embrace a future of hope. This will be a part of your legacy for years to come. 

I am writing to request the assistance of your Administration in what should be a simple matter. As a teenager at age eighteen, Pornchai Moontri committed a crime out of desperation. He has served every day of his sentence and was released  at age forty-seven on September 11, 2020 to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation to his native Thailand. 

Mr. President, it is important to note that neither Mr. Moontri nor his many advocates and friends who have become his family in America are seeking commutation of his removal order. However, that could also be a just and merciful outcome. In lieu of that, what he and we seek is his rapid repatriation to his native Thailand, a nation from which, as you will read below, he was removed at age eleven as a victim of human trafficking. Since having fully served his prison sentence, Mr. Moontri has experienced an unjust and merciless three-month extension of that sentence with no end in sight. 

Taxpayers already have spent far more for Mr. Moontri's detention than would have been spent for his removal. We, his advocates, are more than willing to purchase his airfare to Thailand if permitted. We have built a future for him there with good people who anxiously await his return. This could be remedied easily by your office with a simple phone call.

There is much more to this story which should become part of your discernment on the right course of action. Pornchai Moontri was a child victim of human trafficking. He was abandoned by his mother at age two in Thailand. She fell under the influence and control of an American, Richard Alan Bailey, who brought her to the U.S.  After a passage of nine years, Bailey sent her to retrieve Pornchai at age eleven and bring him to this country. 

Pornchai was imprisoned by Bailey who repeatedly raped and beat him. At age thirteen he escaped but was returned by local police who did not understand his Thai protests. At age fourteen he escaped again and became a homeless adolescent living on the streets of a foreign country. At age eighteen, intoxicated and broken, he took a man's life during a struggle. 

While awaiting trial at age eighteen in 1992, Pornchai was visited by his mother who told him that Richard Bailey would harm her if Pornchai divulged any of what had happened to him. In fear for his mother’s life, Pornchai thus remained silent throughout his trial, refusing to participate in his own defense. In 2000, while attempting to leave Richard Bailey, Pornchai's mother was murdered on the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam while in Bailey's company. She was beaten to death. This matter remains an unsolved “cold case” homicide despite new evidence pointing to an obvious suspect who has never answered for this crime.

In 2018, after becoming fully aware of this story, from articles I had written and published, Pornchai's advocates brought Richard Bailey to justice. On September 12, 2018 Bailey was convicted in Penobscot (Maine) Superior Court on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai Moontri. 

A simple Google search of "Pornchai Moontri" will reveal much documentation of the above. It will also reveal the talented, gifted, intelligent man that Pornchai has become. Pornchai became a devout Catholic convert and a celebrated member of the Divine Mercy movement in the Catholic Church. He has been the subject of numerous published articles and a book, Loved, Lost, Found by Marian Press editor and author, Felix Carroll. 

As I mentioned above, it would be both justice and mercy if Pornchai's deportation order could be commuted, but he would nonetheless leave the United States for Thailand of his own accord. A life and future have been built for him there as a valued member of Divine Mercy Thailand. Regardless of what you decide in this matter, Mr. President, we implore you to help us get him out of ICE custody to commence rapid repatriation to his native land. Pornchai has suffered more than enough for one lifetime. 

Respectfully Yours, 

Father Gordon J. MacRae

BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com

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Editor’s Note: Please also read and share these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls: 

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

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Help Pornchai

Please help us seek the assistance of President Trump by adding your voice to this petition. Please copy and paste the statement below to: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ in the section WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY?

Re: Pornchai Moontri ICE detention A-039064244

Pornchai went to prison at age eighteen for a crime of desperation. Having served his prison sentence in full, he was released at age forty-seven to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation to his native Thailand.

Pornchai was taken from Thailand at age eleven as a victim of human trafficking by an American who has recently been convicted of forty felony counts of sexual assault against Pornchai as a child.

With the help from a Catholic priest in prison, Pornchai sought counseling for severe PTSD, became educated graduating with highest honors, completed numerous programs in restorative justice and mental health, and is today a celebrated Catholic convert and member of the Divine Mercy movement in the Catholic Church. He has been the subject of numerous published articles and a book.

Now he is an ICE detainee held far beyond his sentence at an overcrowded for-profit ICE facility in Jena, LA. His ninety day travel documents issued by his embassy were allowed to expire with no action on his removal.

If you Google "Pornchai Moontri" you will be hard pressed to find a "criminal alien" in the results. As a person who has followed the story of Pornchai Moontri, I implore our government to secure the immediate repatriation of this remarkable man and survivor.

For further info, contact: maxmoontri (at) gmail (dot) com

Thank you!