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

The Gospel for the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2023 was the Judgment of the Nations, an invitation to Glory and a map for how to get there.

November 18, 2020 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 post, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.” It was written for All Souls Day which just happened to fall in 2020 just days before the most contentious and bitterly divided U.S. election in decades. 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 posts: 

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