The Lonely Life of an Internet Underdog

In 16 years of publication, Beyond These Stone Walls faced some daunting challenges. Among the worst is contending with media and social media anti-clerical bias.

November 5, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

The image above is of Underdog, who was one of Father G’s favorite comics in childhood. “There’s no need to fear, UNDERdog is here!”

It is very rare that we publish two posts in one week, but this one is far shorter than most, and is mostly an informational post. I wanted to publish “Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes” on November 1st out of respect for a Catholic tradition that the entire month of November is dedicated in remembrance of our beloved dead. There is a surprising comment on it by the late Claire Dion, a dear friend of this blog, who in turn commented upon the November 5th date of the death of my mother in 2007. Those surprising comments alone are worth a revisit to that post. But you also may find there some tools in our Catholic tradition for coping with life and death.

This post will be a lot shorter. Not many readers noticed that at the end of the summer of 2025, this blog quietly marked 16 years in weekly publication. When it began in the summer of 2009, I thought it might last only a few months. I could not fathom then that I would be able to find anything to write about beyond that time. I remember a conversation back then between my roommate, Pornchai Moontri, and Claire Dion who interviewed him for a post of her own. Pornchai had mentioned to her that “Father G could write about a rock and make it sound interesting.” Claire asked him if he thought that I had perhaps “kissed the Blarney Stone,” an old Irish tradition. Pornchai pondered this and said, “No, I think he bit off a big chunk and swallowed it.”

I could not foresee at the time that I would find enough to write about beyond those few months in 2009. I was also keenly aware of my handicaps in the public square, not least of which is that I have never even been able to actually see what I write. If felt as though I were putting messages in a bottle to cast them into the sea, having no awareness of where they might wash up on some distant shore.

I also feared that the situation in the U.S. Catholic Church at that time was such that the writings of a priest in prison — even one unjustly imprisoned — could not possibly defeat the stone walls of bias in media coverage of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis. We ran into those headwinds almost immediately. Some of those collisions were painful.

Many in the media — even the Catholic media — seemed determined that mine was a voice in the abuse narrative that no one should ever hear. There is simply no remedy to being falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned. No one can unring that bell.

In this blog’s first year of existence, I shied away from any presence in social media, but that gradually changed. Around 2010, a popular Catholic news magazine cited this blog as its “Readers’ Choice for the Best of the Catholic Web.” That was an eye-opener for me. So we boldly ventured into the public square by establishing a Facebook account for Beyond These Stone Walls. Within a year, it had accumulated almost 5,000 followers. My weekly posts were shared there among dozens of Catholic groups hosted (or tolerated) by Facebook. Then it came to a screeching halt when a Facebook algorithm decided that we had violated its “Community Standards.” I wrote about this in a 2021 post, “Falsely Accused by Facebook: Like Déjà vu All Over Again.”

After a long and tedious internal appeal process, Facebook agreed that we never violated Community Standards and reinstated our account, but never fully. Several months later, Facebook suspended us again with a vague suggestion that we were posting “spam” by sharing our posts with Facebook’s Catholic groups.

Adding to the distraction, we also began posting at the Catholic Community group r/Catholicism on Reddit. However, an unnamed Catholic moderator was not having it. After several thousands Reddit users reposted and recommended a BTSW post, we were summarily banned from ever posting at Reddit again.

Both of these incidents felt like punches to the gut for me in prison, but if the goal was for me to give up, it was not working. By that point, our international weekly readership doubled, then tripled. We received some citations from less frivolous groups that really mattered, groups that also suffered under and then challenged the crisis of information in and about the Catholic Church. Many of our posts began receiving citations in Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. (BTSW earned five citations in the October 2025 issue.) I was very proud to see us in the trenches with the Catholic League, and I highly recommend your membership.

A page has also been established for our posts at the international Catholic site, “gloria.tv” while our direct subscriber base grew into the thousands — without the help of Facebook or Reddit.

Elon Musk’s media site, X (formerly Twitter) also welcomed our content and published several articles written by me. Elon Musk’s advanced artificial intelligence model, SuperGrok, entered into a prolongued dialogue with me about Catholic issues in the public square, which we hope to publish here very soon.

Lastly, a Florida-based news aggregator, Newstex, recently partnered with Beyond These Stone Walls to syndicate our posts around the world. Newstex also syndicates postings by the Catholic League placing us in very good company.

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Note from the BTSW Editor: There are simple ways in which you may help magnify this Voice in the Wilderness.

• It helps much to subscribe to Father Gordon’s posts. Note that you will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription.

• Though we have given up sharing Father Gordon’s posts on Facebook, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri has a Facebook Page in Thailand, which he uses to share our posts in Southeast Asia communities. You may send your “Friend Requests” to Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.

• It would also help Father Gordon substantially if you follow him on X, formerly Twitter.

• Both Father Gordon and Pornchai Moontri have a strong following at LinkedIn.

• And lastly, Father Gordon’s page at gloria.tv is always worth a visit.

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.”