How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

Prayers for justice, for the fall of prison walls, are prayers for hope. On the night hope fell, Fr Benedict Groeschel served upon me a summons from the Highest Court.

I don’t think I have ever struggled with a post as I struggle now with this one. It is painful to write, and, in part at least, I know it will be painful to read. What I am about to describe is an earlier scene in the story of my own passion narrative that you do not know about, and now it is time to put it openly before you. I only ask you to withhold judgment for the judgment on this story is not yours to have. And I ask that you bear with me to the end for, as you will read, that is exactly what I am doing.

This confession of sorts was prompted by the 54-day Rosary Novena in which so many readers of Beyond These Stone Walls are engaged on my behalf. Many others who could not commit to that effort are offering prayers and sacrifices for those who are. Some include our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in these prayers, and I am most grateful for that. I mentioned in a post two weeks ago that I have been simply lost for words by this outpouring of faith and hope, and I will have something to say about it in my post this week.

But that was not entirely true. I have not been as “lost for words” as I claimed. It’s just that the words that come, the words that I must convey to you now, are from a time when my own faith and hope fell into the darkest of nights, and I fear you may think less of me for it. That is what I risk for total candor, but I risk far more if I do not speak up.

When my post, “Seven Years Behind These Stone Walls” appeared on BTSW on June 29, some readers surprised me with an overture to begin a 54-Day Rosary Novena for the cause of justice. It was to begin on the following day, June 30, the Commemoration of the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome.

Your prayer for me is much more a prayer for hope, and you may have no idea how much that prayer is needed. Most have no idea how fragile hope can be for the falsely accused. BTSW reader, Helen, sent me a note asking if I am conscious of the prayer support of so many. What I have been most conscious of is what happened on the morning this Rosary Novena began.

At 3:00 AM that Thursday morning, June 30th, I was awakened in my cell from a very vivid and troubling dream. You know that in February I underwent surgery and now have a seven-inch scar extending under my ribcage from the front to my side. In the dream, I woke up with a strange sensation. I lifted my shirt to discover with horror that my scar had opened and blood and water were pouring out from it drenching everything. It was not water mixed with blood. Both were streaming out of the open wound, blood on one side and water on the other. I tried to put my hand over it to stop it, but the flow continued right through my hand. It went on for a long time, and in my subconscious mind this was somehow connected with your prayers.

When I finally awoke for real, I quickly sat up and lifted my shirt. I grabbed my book light and a mirror, but all was dry and the scar was sealed and intact. It was a little after 3:00 AM and I was filled with anxiety and had trouble breathing.

So I got up and paced around this cell. Soon after, Pornchai was awakened in the bunk above me. He asked me what was wrong. I was shaken, but I told him about the dream. As I spoke, he glanced over my shoulder at the Divine Mercy image on our cell wall. Pornchai got it immediately, but I am a little slow in such matters. Saint Faustina wrote:

“During prayer I heard these words within me: The two rays denote Blood and Water. The pale ray stands for the Water which makes souls righteous. The red ray stands for the Blood which is the life of souls... These two rays issued forth from the very depth of my tender mercy when my agonized heart was pierced by a lance on the Cross.… Happy is the one who will dwell in their shelter for the just hand of God shall not lay hold of him.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 299

Later that morning, I called Father George David Byers and told him about this dream. It was only then that I connected it with an event in the Gospel of John (19:34), “But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.” Please do not misunderstand me. I have no messianic delusions whatsoever. Christ asked, and I merely fled. The first stunning lines of Francis Thompson’s haunting, “The Hound of Heaven” capture best what happened when I was first issued a summons to Divine Mercy:

“I fled him, down the night and down the days; I fled him, down the arches of the years; I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the midst of tears, I hid from him.”

Christ at the Crossroads

A note on John 19:34 describes the flow of blood and water as evidence of Christ’s humanity, that place where His life and that of fallen humanity intersects. The dream has stayed with me through the days of your prayers, and I find it to be both scary and hopeful. The hardest, most unrepentant criminal here fears only one thing: dying in prison. You can imagine then the toll that such a prospect takes on someone wrongfully imprisoned.

So of course I want your prayers to have real meaning, and to succeed despite the fact that I am not worthy of them. I am not worthy of them because there was a time in my life when, on the night of my own Gethsemane, faith and hope utterly failed me and I fell. In my hopelessness, I attempted to take my own life, and was hospitalized for it.

I have to try to convey the context. It was May of 1993, weeks after I had been accused. At the time, ironically, I served in ministry as Director of Admissions of the New Mexico Servants of the Paraclete residential center for priests.

There is no point in the details, but what I did was serious, and deadly, and I should not have survived it. But I did survive. It is one thing for someone justly accused to face such charges, but to be falsely accused, summarily declared guilty by my own bishop and diocese, disposed for the sake of thirty pieces of silver, is devastating for a priest.

Complicating this picture was the fact that I have epilepsy — specifically, complex-partial seizure disorder with a focus bilaterally in the temporal lobes. That, combined with the crushing experience of being falsely accused and discarded, swept away in a moment of despair all frame of reference for my life as a priest, and left me drained of all resources.

This was a time when the U.S. church was reeling over the sudden emergence of many such claims from decades past, and many in the Church pretended to believe them all just to ease the path to quick, quiet financial settlement. It was the dawn of what Father George David Byers described as “The Judas Crisis.” As my broken spirit descended into chaos, I believed that a sacrifice was required, the sacrifice of the life of a priest, and I believed I was to be that sacrifice. It was a moment when all hope went out of my world, and my faith and sanity fell along with it.

By some miracle of actual grace, I survived. On that night late in May of 1993 I regained consciousness in the Intensive Care Unit of Albuquerque Presbyterian Hospital. I did not, for a time, know where, or even who I was, but within a day my mind came back on line as though rebooted. I felt the deepest darkest shame and despair over this shattering of all hope as my life and priesthood lay before me in utter ruins.

My friend, Father Clyde Landry, was there with me. He told me that I had written a letter to the Servant General, Father Liam Hoare, asserting my innocence of these charges, but asking his forgiveness for the sacrifice of my life because of the harm these false claims brought upon priesthood and Church. I do not know what became of that letter.

That night in my hospital room, my friend Father Clyde brought me something that he knew I treasured and might want. It was a portable shortwave radio. Later, when I was alone, still deeply shattered, I turned it on and placed the earpiece in my ear. I randomly turned the dial, then stopped suddenly.

I had used that radio on many nights as I surfed the shortwave band for broadcasts from around the world, but I had never before come across what I heard that night in Gethsemane. I distinctly heard intoned the “Salve Regina,” and then an announcer’s voice that I was listening to EWTN broadcasting on a shortwave band from Irondale, Alabama. Then I heard a clear and very familiar voice. It was the voice of someone I had known well many years earlier, but lost touch with. The lilting voice and Yonkers accent were unmistakable. It was Father Benedict Groeschel.

My Gift to the Lord: An Empty Vessel

Some time ago, I wrote a post in defense of Father Groeschel entitled, “Father Benedict Groeschel at EWTN: Time for a Moment of Truth.” What happened on the night I am now describing is why I wrote that post. He was accused of calling into question a claim of victimhood in the Catholic scandal, and the Gospel of Political Correctness that American bishops had cowardly agreed to was not going to spare him. The wolves began to circle Father Groeschel and several Catholic institutions he so generously served all began to get some distance from him. In my challenging post, I drew a line in the sand that many stood behind. “Not this time! Not this priest!” I wrote.

I wrote that post because twenty years earlier, Father Benedict Groeschel entered my darkest night with a message of hope, and a plan for redemption when all was lost. In that hospital bed that night, it was as though he was addressing me directly. I can only paraphrase it here, and hope that I am doing it justice:

“When life seems as though it has fallen apart, and you face an immeasurable sense of loss, whether the cause is tragic illness, or loss of a loved one, or financial ruin, or public shame, or grave injustice, the loss of all hope seems to be the final loss. It leaves you as though an empty vessel which you feel can never be filled again. This is a crucial and vulnerable time. It is also a moment when God is nearest to you.”

Father Groeschel went on that night to speak of the only response left for an empty vessel: a spirit of abandonment and surrender to God’s Providence. God alone can fill what has been torn asunder by the forces of this world. “Surrender control, for control of your life is an illusion,” he said. “Embrace surrender to God’s Providence so that your empty vessel may serve Him in the salvation not just of your soul, but of many souls.” I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, ready to hear these words and absorb them. Nothing made sense up to then, but Father Groeschel made total sense.

You may remember a post of mine about the suicide of another priest from my diocese, Father Richard Lower. I wrote of this tragedy in “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul.” After being informed by Monsignor Edward Arsenault of the emergence of a decades-old sexual abuse claim, Father Lower was given the usual 24 hours to vacate his parish and residence without a word to his parishioners whom he had served for a dozen years. He was to be just another priest who disappears in the night. In his darkest night, he walked out to a deserted mountain path and took his own life. In “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul” I wrote that I would have given anything to have been on that path with him. It’s because I HAVE been on that path, and I survived.

Some twenty-six accused U.S. Catholic priests have taken their own lives since the U.S. Bishops entered into The Judas Crisis by presuming every money-driven claim against a priest to be true. Whatever cynic presumes from this their guilt knows nothing of the identity of priesthood and its permanent bond with the notion of sacrifice. No priest should be required to sacrifice his life to satisfy the demands of contingency lawyers, insurance companies, and the agendas of those who despise the Church.

The Summons of Divine Mercy

The summons served upon me by Father Benedict Groeschel that night came from the Highest Court of justice, a Court in which Divine Mercy is its mirror image. It was actually the second time that summons was served. The first time was exactly one month earlier. A friend and coworker in the Servants of the Paraclete ministry to priests was Father Richard Drabik, MIC. He was also my spiritual director. You may recognize him as the former Provincial Superior of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, and the author of the Preface to the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina.

In early April, 1993, Father Drabik came to my office with a request. He was leaving for Rome a week later to concelebrate Mass at the Beatification of (then) Blessed Faustina on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 18, 1993. Father Drabik invited me to draft a petition that he would place on the altar at the Beatification. The petition I wrote was this simple note sealed in a small envelope:

“I ask for the intercession of Blessed Faustina that I may have the courage to be the priest God intends for me to be.”

Fifteen days after the Beatification, I was charged with crimes alleged to have taken place over a decade earlier, crimes that never took place at all, and the violent emptying of the vessel of my life and priesthood began. Two weeks later, the courage I asked for gave way to hopelessness as I lay in ICU hearing this summons repeated by Father Benedict Groesechel.

So on that awful night, I solemnly vowed to go the distance, to remain an empty vessel with hope and trust as my only choices in life while discerning God’s Providence. Since then, as you know if you have been an attentive reader of Beyond These Stone Walls, that summons to Divine Mercy has become woven into every fiber of my life, and not only my life, but many others.

The stunning evidence for this is found in many places, but one of the more striking is the medical miracle confirmed as attributed to Saint Faustina by the Vatican Congregation for the Cause of Saints. The recipient of that miracle was Mrs. Maureen Digan who shares a chapter along with Pornchai Moontri in Felix Carroll’s wondrous book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Seeing Pornchai’s and Maureen’s stories together in that volume is to see Divine Mercy come full circle in my life and priesthood, and this empty vessel filled with hope beyond imagining. I thank you for your heroic prayers for justice on my behalf. The most fundamental aspect of justice is the preservation of hope.

“O Blood and Water which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as Fount of Mercy for us, I trust in You.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 309

“To priests who proclaim and extol My mercy, I will give wondrous power; I will anoint their words and touch the hearts of those to whom they will speak.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 1521

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Editor’s Note: This post continues next week on Beyond These Stone Walls with “Saint Maximilian Kolbe: A Knight at My Own Armageddon.”

And with joy and thanksgiving, Father Gordon MacRae wants you to know about the publication of an inspiring biography, A Friar’s Tale: Remembering Father Benedict J.Groeschel, C.F.R. by John Collins available from Our Sunday Visitor.

A Friar’s Tale — Remembering Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel by John Collins (Our Sunday Visitor)

A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court

Federal Judge Joseph Laplante dismissed without testimony Fr Gordon MacRae’s recent hope for justice. No U.S. court has allowed this defendant to utter a single word.

June 22, 2016 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald, author of “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud.”

I am not here to cast Donald Trump-like aspersions upon a judge whose decision I simply do not like. I have no doubt that Father Gordon MacRae would bar me from publishing here if I did. I am simply here to describe a grievous error that occurred in United States District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, and other facts that continue to trouble me greatly a year after I published an important article on this site: “Judge Joseph Laplante Denies Priest’s Appeal.”

Many people have come to believe that the 1994 prosecution and trial of Father Gordon MacRae, and subsequent appeals, have left an innocent man in prison and a gaping wound on the integrity of the criminal justice system. One issue that I and others simply cannot comprehend is that no one in this system — absolutely no one — has allowed this accused priest to utter a single word in his own defense.

After the prosecution rested its case in 1994 — with lots of theatrics but no evidence — Judge Arthur Brennan addressed MacRae directly, outside the presence of the jury. He cautioned MacRae against testifying in his own defense. If he did so, the judge warned, the door would be opened to allow other claims from Thomas Grover, his brothers, and others to come before the jury and taint its view of this case.

The public defender who minimally handled MacRae’s direct appeal in 1996 said that he was surprised by Judge Brennan’s warning, but could find no legal precedent to cite it as an appeal issue. At one point in the trial, Judge Brennan instructed the jurors to “disregard inconsistencies in Thomas Grover’s testimony.” As Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “they had much to disregard” (WSJ, “A Priest’s Story,” April 28, 2005).

In a sentencing hearing weeks after the trial, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced MacRae to a term of 67 years in prison — more than thirty times the two-year maximum sentence proposed to MacRae pre-trial, deals that the priest rejected citing his innocence of the charges. During the sentencing phase, he was not permitted to say a single word in his own defense while the Judge berated him for observing his Constitutional right to a jury trial.

When sentencing MacRae, Judge Arthur Brennan offered some evidence and testimony of his own: “This court has heard clear and convincing evidence that you created child pornography of your victims.” In the entire trial, not a single word about child pornography was ever raised. Eleven years later, the lead detective in the case admitted to Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

MacRae, in prison after the trial, was neither present nor represented by counsel as Thomas Grover and his brothers continued the fraud in civil court seeking lucrative settlements from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester. Everyone had a voice and a lawyer except Gordon MacRae.

And he was silenced yet again, not even permitted to be present, in his direct state appeal in 1996 when judges dismissed as “harmless error” the egregious testimony of a psychological expert that should not have been admitted at trial while MacRae’s defense was allowed no expert. As Innocence Project founders, Attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld described in their book, Actual Innocence  (Random House 2000):

“For an innocent person, the two most dangerous words in the language of the law are ‘harmless error.’ These are the magic words that appellate courts use to absolve police officers and prosecutors of misconduct.”

— Actual Innocence, p. 172

“Especially a Catholic Priest”

There was a lot to absolve. As The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz described (see “The Trials of Father MacRae,” May 13, 2013): “Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents.” I exposed some concrete examples of those perversions of justice in “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud.”

It is an inescapable fact of injustice that from 2012 to 2015 three additional judges and courts heard motions to revisit this trial, but dismissed them without permitting a single word of testimony from defendant Gordon MacRae or any of the witnesses who have come forward, some quite courageously.

On March 17, 2015, Judge Joseph Laplante heard oral arguments from attorneys Robert Rosenthal and Cathy Green representing the imprisoned priest, and Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Woodcock for the prosecution. Neither Father MacRae nor any of the newly presented witnesses in this case were present, nor was any of their testimony heard. The arguments took just under two hours, a flash in time compared to the twenty-two years MacRae has thus far spent in wrongful imprisonment. On March 25, 2015, Judge Laplante dismissed the habeas corpus petition from going forward. There was to be no further hearing on testimony, merits or evidence.

Additionally, Judge Laplante declined to grant a Certificate of Appealability to bring this matter to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. This had the effect of forcing MacRae to fund an added appeal of the denial of a Certificate of Appealability. One full year later, in April of 2016, the First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reverse the decision not to allow a further appeal. I held my pen until that decision was rendered.

I do not want to use limited space here to rehash what I wrote in “Judge Joseph Laplante Denies Priest’s Appeal.” I hope that after reading this article, you will go back to read it for yourselves for it lays out all the reasons why I believe this outcome to be an abuse of judicial discretion. Denying the Certificate of Appeal had the effect of bankrupting the defense of a man who has spent twenty-two years in prison for crimes that most observers today conclude never took place.

The Grievous Error

However, none of that addresses the error that I am here today to address. I have spent considerable time reading a transcript of that hearing and Judge Laplante’s ruling. A significant part of both troubled me greatly, and I know that it troubled Father MacRae as well. It simply did not concur with MacRae’s memory of this case, and his memory, according to Dorothy Rabinowitz, is “encyclopedic.” The error involves a point that was heavily stressed by Judge Laplante in both the transcript and his dismissal order. I will begin with the transcript. The speaker is Judge Laplante:

“Now, leaving [Thomas] Grover’s credibility aside, nothing that [new witnesses] say undermines what seems to be a very important piece of evidence in the underlying criminal trial which is that when [James] McLaughlin, a detective from Keene, confronted MacRae with these accusations, he didn’t deny them. He had a very unusual response, basically quibbling with [Detective] McLaughlin over the proper terminology to apply to a person who is sexually attracted to children under 14 or 15. I don’t even remember the terms right now, but he basically corrected the detective for using the word pedophile. He came up with a more correct term — a more precise term. Whether that was even correct is debatable. But it was a very unusual response. It wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t the type of conduct that one would expect one to undertake when accused in that way. Especially a Catholic priest … MacRae did not react in a manner one would expect of an innocent person.”

— T: 51-52

Now, the excerpt above reflects just two paragraphs of a 70-page court transcript, but it was an extensive part of the reasoning behind Judge Laplante’s two-page decision dismissing the federal habeas petition. What Judge Laplante described above is a claim that Detective McLaughlin confronted Father MacRae about the charges involving Thomas Grover, referred to MacRae as a “pedophile,” and then instead of simply denying it, MacRae supposedly corrected McLaughlin by telling him that the correct term is “hebophile.”

There is just one major problem here. It never happened! Detective James McLaughlin never once “confronted MacRae with these accusations,” nor did any of what Judge Laplante refers to above have any connection with the case at hand. This is an egregious perversion of justice.

When I read this I was very troubled. Father MacRae has been confined in a 96-square-foot cell for twenty-two years with very limited access to documents in this case and no access to online research. As the above scenario surfaced, his lawyers sent him a statement to sign stating that he never made any such admission to Detective McLaughlin, but “told him that someone who might be attracted to someone Grover’s age would be an ‘phebophile,’ not a ‘pedophile.’ “

MacRae was troubled because he has no memory of McLaughlin ever discussing any aspect of the Thomas Grover case with him. He simply assumed that someone (his own lawyers? the prosecutors?) who have access to transcripts, must have found such a reference somewhere.

But they did not. No such reference exists. In the case for which Father MacRae was indicted and faced trial, McLaughlin and the prosecutors brought secret indictments. This priest first learned of the very existence of this case on the night of May 5, 1993, the night that police showed up at his door to arrest him on charges that were then over a decade old. He had no subsequent or even previous discussion about these charges with McLaughlin.

So what is going on here? When I got to the bottom of it, the truth was spine-chilling in its gross manipulation of this defendant, but it had no connection whatsoever with Thomas Grover’s charges or this trial or the appeal of this case. Bear with me, please, for this is indeed a complex account.

Whack-a-Mole Justice Holds Court

In 1988, a full five years before Thomas Grover and his brothers concocted their scheme to accuse Gordon MacRae, Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James McLaughlin targeted a number of Catholic priests who had lived and worked in the Keene area. One of them was Father MacRae who was assigned in Keene from 1983 to 1987. In 1987 and 1988, on a leave from parish ministry, MacRae was Executive Director of a regional chemical dependency treatment center near Keene, and in 1989 he became Director of Admissions for the Servants of the Paraclete facility for troubled priests in Albuquerque, NM.

No one had come to Detective McLaughlin with a complaint about MacRae. He launched an exhaustive investigation based on a letter from state social worker, Sylvia Gale, claiming that MacRae was once a priest in Florida where he “molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote about that contrived and slanderous account in “A Priest’s Story” (WSJ, April 27, 2005). The Florida story had no basis in fact. MacRae had never been a priest in Florida nor had such a crime ever occurred there. The social worker’s claimed source was an official of the Diocese of Manchester who later denied it. For Detective McLaughlin, however, it became probable cause to launch a moral panic.

On September 19, 1989, Father MacRae received a telephone call from his sister in the Boston area. Upset and angry, she informed him that she received a call from Detective McLaughlin in Keene who told her that he was investigating MacRae for creating pornographic photographs of Keene youths. She gave her brother the number that McLaughlin left, and of course, knowing there was no truth to the claim, the priest called that number.

This was all set up in advance. That particular telephone line into the Keene Police Department was automatically recorded so McLaughlin was not required to obtain a warrant to call and record the priest. A warrant would require evidence, and there was none. This was a fishing expedition. In this telephone call, McLaughlin accused MacRae of taking pornographic photos of 15-year-old Jon Plankey who was later described by McLaughlin as an employee of his in “a family owned business.” It was also later discovered that McLaughlin and Plankey had made similar claims against three others, one of them Timothy Smith, a local Protestant church choir director who was charged and pled guilty.

MacRae vehemently denied the claim. He did not know he was being recorded, but at some point he invited McLaughlin to search his earthly possessions which were still stored in New Hampshire. McLaughlin declined to search anything, but stated that Plankey’s claims would become part of a lawsuit against the Diocese of Manchester. MacRae insisted that no such photographs were ever taken and do not exist. He asked McLaughlin why he isn’t even interested in searching for them. The detective reportedly replied, “Because I know there will be nothing there. You probably gave them to another priest.”

The detective wrote a report about this telephone conversation. It was report file number 89-12196 dated September 19, 1989. In that report, McLaughlin wrote that he recorded the conversation. His report claimed that he and Jon Plankey listened to the tape together, and that “a transcript will be made of this tape.” MacRae states (above) that McLaughlin said, “You probably gave [the photographs] to another priest.” If true, McLaughlin omitted this from his report, but it would have been present on the tape and transcript. So, where are they? And where are the condemning photographs?

Also in that report, McLaughlin wrote that he asked MacRae if he is a “pedophile.” His report claims that MacRae corrected him saying, “the correct term would be ‘hebophile.’” MacRae says he has never even heard of this word. I have found a reference to that word in only two places: McLaughlin’s 1989 report, and a transcript of a 1988 Geraldo Rivera Show faxed to McLaughlin (described below).

Among the many people McLaughlin approached in 1988-1989 looking for someone to accuse MacRae were members of the Grover family. Their mother, Patricia Grover, was then a social worker for the state agency that investigates child abuse cases, a position in which she interfaced often with Detective McLaughlin and with Sylvia Gale, author of the bogus Florida letter. His 1988 report indicated that Mrs. Grover would interview her three adopted sons, Thomas, David, and Jonathan Grover, all in their early twenties. None voiced a complaint about MacRae. Five years later, when the prospect of money loomed, all three changed their minds at the same time. Demonstrating the role that expectations of money played in this case, there is hard evidence that McLaughlin conducted some of his investigation from the office of Attorney Robert Upton, Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer.

In 1993, as MacRae prepared for trial in the Thomas Grover case, state prosecutors were required to turn over all police reports related to the priest. MacRae was shocked to learn of a vast 72-page 1988 report and the 1989 report of the taped phone call with the “hebophile” claim.

When Thomas Grover accused MacRae five years later in 1993, prosecutors attempted to introduce into the trial the Plankey claim from 1989 as so-called “404-B” evidence of “other bad acts.” The defense filed a motion to obtain the recordings referred to in McLaughlin’s 1989 report. Judge Arthur Brennan ordered the state to turn over all recordings that McLaughlin claimed in reports to have made. McLaughlin wrote in a sworn statement that the tapes were lost due to having been “recycled.” Judge Brennan also ordered him to turn over the transcript of the 1989 recording. McLaughlin claimed that due to a clerical error the transcript was never made. The 1989 tape recorded conversation detailed herein is well documented (see USDC-NM 1504, §§ 28-32).

I can only conclude today that McLaughlin knew the recording contained his comment, “You probably gave [the lewd photos] to another priest,” a statement that would have unmasked a vile prejudice that would have weighed heavily in the trial. So the recordings disappeared. So did the so called “404-B” evidence.

Eleven years after this trial, after claiming repeatedly and under oath that all the tape recordings of MacRae that McLaughlin referenced in his reports were “recycled” and cannot be produced, the detective mailed one of them to Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal. It contained 45 minutes of Father MacRae sounding bewildered by the lurid accusations aimed at him, and his reference that he should talk to a lawyer, a request McLaughlin claims the priest never made.

This issue of tape recordings is very suspicious and has never been explained. McLaughlin claimed to have taped three phone conversations with MacRae, without his knowledge, and though there was no evidence obtained, McLaughlin attributed remarks to MacRae that the priest says he never made. Then all the tape recordings disappeared. The only witnesses to their existence or content are the detective and the priest. So why do the courts believe one over the other? Further, it seems that it was McLaughlin’s practice to tape record all conversations with accusers, but in this one case he produced not a single tape recording of any interview with the Grover brothers. In every other case of this sort he meticulously created recordings and preserved them as evidence. In some cases, including a claimant against another priest, McLaughlin arranged a polygraph for the accuser. None of this happened in the MacRae case. It should be noted here that MacRae himself underwent two voluntary polygraph examinations and passed them both.

There is more. It seems that the source of the “hebophile” term for which Judge Joseph Laplante dismissed MacRae’s petition may have been McLaughlin himself. Among the discovery obtained from the 1989 report about Jon Plankey’s claims of pornographic photos was a transcript faxed from the Geraldo Rivera Show to the Keene Police Department on November 14, 1988. The pages of the transcript were labeled by prosecutors in the discovery material as E-326 through E-331.

The topic of the “Geraldo” transcript that became part of Detective McLaughlin’s file was “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It contains this passage that someone at either Keene Police or the prosecutor’s office underlined and marked with a bold asterisk before sending it in pre-trial discovery in 1994. The transcript has nothing to do with the MacRae case, nor was he ever a part of it. It details a conversation between Geraldo Rivera and “Roland Lewis, Attorney for Church sex abuse victims”:

Geraldo: “Did there come a time, sir, when this priest was recognized to be a pedophile by the church and was taken to St. Luke’s Institute to be treated?”

Mr. Lewis: “They sent him to St. Luke’s Institute. He was kept there 12 weeks. During that time it was determined, according to their medical records, that he was a homosexual. We finally were able to obtain copies of those medical records. We have had them evaluated. They establish without question that he is a pedophile and a hebophile.”

Geraldo: “What’s a hebophile?”

Mr. Lewis: “It’s an abuser of adolescent children.”

Geraldo: “I thought that’s what a pedophile was. Help me.”

Mr. Lewis: “The preadolescent is primarily a pedophile. The adolescent is a hebophile.”

I wrote of this same transcript, and the role it played in the MacRae case, in “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” It seems that someone has lifted the supposed 1989 telephone conversation between Father MacRae and Detective McLaughlin — mired in suspicions of misconduct over missing tapes and transcripts — implanted it into the unrelated trial involving Thomas Grover, then used it twenty-two years later to deny access to justice in Father MacRae’s appeals. If this is the state of criminal justice, it is only half right. It is criminal. But it isn’t justice.

Saint Thomas More returning the Livery Collar of his office and fealty to King Henry VIII

What Would Saint Thomas More Do?

On September 13, 2012, a full year before MacRae’s habeas corpus petition came before Judge Laplante, the annual “Red Mass” for the legal and law enforcement community took place at Saint Joseph Cathedral up in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. It was officiated by The Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester. Following the Mass, Bishop Libasci was a guest of honor as the New Hampshire Catholic Lawyer’s Guild held its annual awards dinner at the Radisson Hotel to honor the 2012 recipient of the St. Thomas More Award.

According to the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild invitation, the award is bestowed upon a Catholic lawyer or judge “who embodies the spirit of St. Thomas More in courage, dedication, integrity, civility, and compassion toward others.”  On September 13, 2012 the St. Thomas More Award was presented by Bishop Libasci and the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild to The Honorable Joseph N. Laplante.

Saint Thomas More would have heard all sides. He would not, as so many have done, simply assume a priest’s guilt. He would not have made comments like “especially a Catholic priest.” He would not have presumed the existence of evidence he had never seen nor heard for himself. He would have gotten to the truth of the matter before tossing the case off his desk. He would not have allowed the continued judicial railroading of an innocent man.

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ADDENDUM JANUARY 26, 2022:

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Keene New Hampshire sex crimes detective James McLaughlin developed claims against a Catholic priest while suppressing exculpatory evidence and coercing witnesses.

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For more information on this story, please read these other articles by Ryan A. MacDonald:

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

In the Fr Gordon MacRae Case, Whack-a-Mole Justice Holds Court

Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester

Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence

A new Manual for Eucharistic Adoration from the Poor Clares and Saint Benedict Press has found a captive audience in Fr Gordon MacRae as he marks 34 years of priesthood.

June 1, 2016 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“You have GOT to be joking!” That was my first reaction. In early April this year, I was summoned to a prison office to sign for “personal property.” I had no idea what it could be. I hadn’t ordered anything recently from the place where we in prison must purchase shoes, clothing, toiletries. So it had to be a book, but receiving books here also requires that I know in advance that the book is coming. I knew of nothing.

I signed for the mysterious item and returned to my cell where I sat down on a concrete stump — the same one I am typing upon at this moment. “You have GOT to be joking’” I said to myself as I perused the book in my hand and its cover letter. It was from Christian Tappe, Director of Marketing at Saint Benedict Press in Charlotte, North Carolina. The letter began:

“I am pleased to enclose this review copy of TAN Books’ Manual for Eucharistic Adoration… written by the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. If you would like more information, or to schedule an interview…”

I was more bewildered than ever. It was the fourth time in the last year that a Catholic publisher has sent me a book to review on These Stone Walls. Are people actually reading TSW? But this particular book was a complete mystery. First off, I should not have received it at all. The shipment and cover letter were addressed to “Father” Gordon MacRae with no prison number (67546) as required on anything sent to me. In the ordinary course, either the use of a title or the absence of a number would cause the book to be rejected and returned to sender without my even knowing about it. But here it was, in my hand nonetheless.

My first impulse was to toss the book aside as useless, at least for me. My apologies to the Poor Clares who so lovingly wrote it, and to the publisher who so kindly sent it to me. I am a slow learner, so the nicely adorned book sat unopened in a corner of my cell for a month. I was simply too caught up in the glaring irony of it. There is no True Presence here to adore. There is only the present absence.

To make matters worse, and more mysterious, on the same day I received the Manual for Eucharistic Adoration  I learned from lawyers that we had lost yet another effort at appeal of my wrongful conviction and imprisonment. It took one full year for the First Circuit Court of Appeals to notify us that they will not review an earlier decision to dismiss my appeal with no hearing on its merits or evidence. This has made the road to justice ever steeper and more treacherous. I am told that others will be taking this up to write about it.

In the Nighttime

So it was in the dim and murky light of continued injustice that I tossed aside the good sisters’ book about Eucharistic Adoration, and shrugged it off. But appearances can be deceiving, and you never know what apparently “useless” thing might have a profound influence on your view of the world — not only the world you live in, but the world that lives in you. Who you are is in large part a collision of these two worlds, and a person of faith risks great loss if the interior life is forfeited to live only in that other, more calamitous world. We have to live in and with both worlds, and we have to keep them in balance.

One day recently, I saw a vocation ad in Our Sunday Visitor for a community of sisters. The ad described them as a “monastic, cloistered and contemplative community,” and then added, “Find us on Facebook!” That, to me, seemed a collision of two worlds, but it works if the sisters can reflect in the latter world the light that shines in the former.

On June 5th I mark thirty-four years of priesthood. Twenty-two of them have been in a place where presence before the Blessed Sacrament is unavailable and simply impossible. It can only be imagined. It has been a long time since I wrote of the power of the True Presence in a place where it seems absent. In 2010 I wrote a post entitled “The Sacrifice of the Mass” (Part I and Part II), and it seemed a pivotal point not only for These Stone Walls, but for my life as a priest in extraordinary circumstances.

The two-part post described the utter deprivation of something many readers simply took for granted in their world. For my first seven years in this prison, Mass was unavailable to me, and without it I found myself growing ever more distant from my life as a priest. That post described the extreme efforts it took to gain the ability to offer Mass, beginning with what I today call a “spiritual offering.”

It wasn’t what you might think. It was along the lines of a “Spiritual Communion,” and I got the idea from reading Father Walter Ciszek’s book, He Leadeth Me. During twenty years in a Siberian prison accused of being a Vatican spy, Father Ciszek could only imagine the Mass. Sitting in the pitch dark at night on his bunk, he began to recite The Roman Canon in his mind, and to imagine himself present before the Blessed Sacrament. After reading this, I began to do the same, and my post, “The Sacrifice of the Mass” evolved from that. After I wrote that two-part post, a TSW reader sent me a letter, an excerpt of which follows:

“I cannot imagine what sustains your identity as a priest in that prison. There is nothing in that environment that in any way supports your priesthood. You are not ever in the company of other priests. Your diocese and fellow priests have cast you off. You see yourself each day in the mirror wearing the uniform of a prisoner, and you know in your mind, heart and soul that there has been no justice in your being forced to wear this role.

“And yet when I read your writings, your priesthood is always at the forefront, the part of you that shines the brightest, that speaks the loudest, that sustains not only you but apparently many of those around you in that place. Can you explain, Father MacRae, what exactly allows you to retain a priestly identity?”

Come Be My Light

I do not have an answer for this. After I wrote my recent post, “Mother Teresa of Calcutta: Pentecost Illumines the Night,” some readers wrote in comments that they are moved by my faith. It is not so obvious. At least, it is not obvious to me. I struggle with faith on a daily basis, and I found a kindred spirit in Saint Mother Teresa when I learned that she struggled as well. The truth is that it was the Poor Clares’ Manual of Eucharistic Adoration that caused me to look more deeply into the faith life of soon-to-be Saint Mother Teresa. The Manual includes an admonition from her, and it was this quote that prompted me to write “Mother Teresa of Calcutta: Pentecost Illumines the Night.”

“The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in heaven, and will help bring about everlasting peace on earth.”

Manual, p. 111

It was from writing that post that I fathomed the necessity of Eucharistic Adoration. It is not for us to be present to Him. It is for Him to be present to us in a way that “will deepen your union with Him.” That is the very purpose of the interior life, that other world that we must balance with our other foot in this world.

While writing my Pentecost post, I learned of the spiritual deprivation often experienced by Mother Teresa, but that deprivation never seemed able to diminish her commitment to serve the poor. Rather, the opposite happened. It was her service to the poor that brought her to the Paschal Mystery and kept her there, ever providing the beckoning of Christ that compelled her spiritual life. Mother Teresa sought union with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and brought Christ from there to the poor. It was never the other way around.

Eucharistic Adoration

So how could I, as a priest wrongly imprisoned for decades, possibly bring my interior life into this world where the True Presence is so overshadowed by the present absence? No matter what the source of the sense of emptiness is in your life, if you are reading this you know what I mean by “the present absence.” That is why God allowed Mother Teresa and others among our patron saints to suffer spiritual deprivation, and to endure it. It was so that we might emulate them as they serve as beacons in spiritual darkness. Their witness inspires hope in the dark, not just our rescue from it.

As has happened on so many nights in prison, I awoke one night recently, filled with an anxiety that has no name. It’s not related to anything I can identify. It’s just there, a natural side effect of the stifling nature of an American prison. I have a little battery-powered book light purchased from the same prison vendor from which we purchase clothing and other needs. Waking often in the night, I have gotten hundreds of times my money’s worth from that small light.

I switched on the light in that anxious night, and reached for my glasses and a book on a small shelf at the end of my iron bunk. I thought I had grabbed another book, but my hand landed on the previously untouched Manual for Eucharistic Adoration by the Poor Clares. It has a ribbon page marker so I opened to the ribbon and was struck by this admonition from Saint John Vianney, the Curé of Ars and the patron saint of priests:

“When you awake in the night, transport yourself quickly in spirit before the tabernacle, saying, ‘Behold, my God, I come to adore you, to praise, thank, and love you, and to keep you company with the angels.’”

Manual, p. 116

So that night I tried to imagine a time and a place in which being before the Blessed Sacrament was most meaningful to me. Sadly, it was long ago. It wasn’t during my years as a parish priest when time and again I passed by the sanctuary and tabernacle barely noticing, blindly going from one pastoral task to another, not even genuflecting, not even knowing that I failed to bring Christ with me because I failed to stop and enter into His Presence. At some point in my life as a priest, this world collided with that one, and demolished it. This has been the real priesthood scandal. Action somehow overshadowed contemplation to our priestly peril.

It was only years later, after year upon year of absence, that I became aware of this deprivation of the Presence of God. So in that night of prison anxiety my mind fled down the nights and down the days, past the parishes where I served, and the seminary I attended, to a Benedictine Abbey just twenty miles from this prison. The journey in my mind took me to 1977. I was a Capuchin then, attending school at Saint Anselm College, and my most special place on campus was a tiny alcove built into the Abbey Church.

There, before a magnificent granite tabernacle, I spent many hours in the Presence of the Lord. Last year, a reader found a photograph of the interior of the Saint Anselm Abbey Church and printed it for me. It is the opening graphic for this post. Then our Missionary of Mercy Friend, Father George David Byers, found a photo of the Blessed Sacrament alcove to the right of the main sanctuary. This is where I went back then, before the world shook lose the Holy Longing to be in His Presence. This is where I go now when I awaken in the night. Sometimes, now, I don’t think I awaken with anxiety and then go there. I think I now awaken just to go there.

In just a few months, These Stone Walls will mark seven years in publication, just one third the time that I have been in this prison. During that seven years, many readers have sent me letters and comments informing me that they have devoted an hour before the Blessed Sacrament to be in His Presence in my stead. You have bestowed upon me a most priceless gift, and for this I have much gratitude.

Now the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, along with author Paul Thigpen and Saint Benedict Press, have provided a road map to the interior life, and a tool to converse with the Living Christ among us. I most highly recommend the Manual for Eucharistic Adoration and, if you are not there already, the restoration of the Lord’s Presence in your interior life.

I humbly thank you for thirty-four years of priesthood, even out here on the dark peripheries from which I write. Without you, I might have forgotten how to be a priest, and might today be just a prisoner. There are two kneelers before the Blessed Sacrament at Saint Anselm Abbey Church in Manchester, New Hampshire. Some night when anxiety awakens you in the dark, join me there. I’ll have the Manual for Eucharistic Adoration in my hands.

A Criminal Defense Expert Unfurls Father MacRae Case

Criminal Defense Attorney, Vincent James Sanzone, explains why the case of Father Gordon MacRae has been no measure of justice for either Church or State.

The unjust imprisonment and suffering of Catholic priests at the hands of communist, fascist and other evil despots has and will unfortunately never end. And let’s not forget that Jesus Christ himself told his apostles that the world will hate them as they hated him. Christ was falsely accused and condemned because one man, Pontius Pilate, like most of us, did not have the courage to stand up against the hysterical crowd which did not know, or want to know the truth. As our Lord taught, “The Son of Man came … not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mt 20:28)

When such persecutions occur there is little if anything that the Church can do. Could even our Holy Father, Pope Francis do anything to stop the daily killing of Christians throughout the world today?

Such unjust punishments are not limited to these regimes, and one such travesty of injustice which has been occurring for the last 30 years right here in the United States is the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Father Gordon MacRae. In 1994 this young and dedicated priest was sentenced by a New Hampshire state judge to the draconian sentence of 33 ½ to 67 years, effectively a life sentence. Because Father MacRae refused to admit to a crime which he did not commit so as to take a plea offer before trial, nor will he do so now, he will not be paroled from prison, and is likely to die in jail.

Any reasonable person examining the trial with any degree of fairness can come to no other conclusion: the prosecution and continuing imprisonment of Father Gordon is not only a tragedy for this good and holy priest, for all clergy and the faithful, but is also a blight on our criminal justice system. The machine of the criminal justice system of the State of New Hampshire is not attempting to re-examine this case and rectify it.

It is without dispute that our society in general is quick to condemn someone accused of committing a crime, especially when there is an allegation of a sexual crime, and more so when the accuser claims involvement of a Catholic priest. Even one with the most conservative law enforcement mindset would deny that for the last 25 years the deck has been stacked against any priest charged with a sexual offense, and that it is almost impossible for a Catholic priest to be processed fairly by jury and judge.

At the time of Father Gordon’s prosecution there was a climate of media-fueled national hysteria regarding any allegation of sexual offenses on anyone under 18 years of age, whether true or false, especially if a Catholic priest was purportedly involved. Such a climate almost entirely preempted juries from fairly applying the reasonable doubt standard, as they were and are prone to believe any allegation of sexual misconduct no matter how bizarre. Many legal scholars have examined the hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, and equate this period to the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century. The prosecution of Father MacRae was also fueled by sensationalistic media hype with little concern for civil liberties and the presumption of innocence. As one court put it at that time:

“[A] series of highly questionable child sex abuse prosecutions … were fueled by a vast moral panic … a period in which allegations of outrageously bizarre and often ritualistic child abuse spread like wildfire across the country and garnered world-wide media attention.” “[T]remendous emotion [was] generated by the public” as a result of which “the criminal process often fail[ed]”

— ”Friedman v. Rehal”, 618 F.3d 142, 155, 158 (2 Cir. 2010).

The genesis of the criminal prosecution of Father Gordon MacRae is no different than what is to be found in most other wrongful convictions. The convergence of factors in this case was a perfect storm for this wrongful conviction. In the wake of these factors, Father Gordon had zero chance of receiving a fair trial and being acquitted of the false charges at trial. As a practicing criminal defense attorney involved in many such cases over the last 25 years, any defendant charged with such a crime must actually attempt to prove his or her innocence. The jury has a sacred duty when charged with deliberating a criminal case: they are to respect that the defendant is innocent and has no burden to prove that innocence, with the burden of proving guilt beyond any reasonable doubt belonging to the prosecution. All of this is often ignored by juries.

In Father Gordon’s case, the evidence is overwhelming that false criminal allegations were brought by a manipulative man with a financial motive to lie. The accuser was trained and coached during the entire process by his attorney, who was seeking a large payout from the diocese of Manchester. The accuser had a long history of alcohol and drug abuse and involvement in the criminal justice system as well as a long history of opportunistic and manipulative lying. Years after the verdict, it was discovered that he bragged to friends and family members how he manipulated the justice system and the diocese. The entire prosecution of Father MacRae hinged upon the inconsistent, contradictory, and incredulous testimony of this one accuser. Father Gordon’s only “crime” had been to try to help this young man who had no family support and was heading down the path to destruction.

In the early 1990s it was common knowledge in New Hampshire that the Diocese of Manchester, as other dioceses in the United States, was paying huge sums of money to anyone claiming to have been abused by a priest. The Diocese was making these payments while conducting little or no investigation to determine the validity of the claims. It was a windfall for predatory personal injury attorneys making money off the backs of faithful parishioners, and a dream come true for scammers and fraudsters looking to cash in. Such was Thomas Grover, a foster child of the Grover family, which sought the help of Father Gordon to counsel and help Thomas. His foster parents struggled with their son’s alcohol and drug abuse, as well as with his mental health problems and frequent run-ins with the law. Years later, when Thomas Grover became aware of the large amounts of money that the Diocese was paying out to accusers, saw his opportunity to make a large amount of money. This was the way he “thanked” Father Gordon for all that he had done for him, weaving a string of lies impossible to refute.

There was not a single witness except Grover himself, which makes his story absurd, since he claimed that he was assaulted by Father Gordon in very public areas. Yet, Manchester Diocese paid him nearly $200,000.00.

Based on legal papers submitted in federal court, credible witnesses have now been located and have come forward, willing to testify that Grover admitted committing perjury at trial, and bragged about how he scammed the diocese and the justice system. Grover’s former wife, Trina Ghedoni, and stepson, Charles Glenn, have admitted that he was a “compulsive liar”, “manipulator”, “drama queen” and “hustler” who had a long history of lying to get what he wanted. When confronted with his lies, he “would lose his temper”, and would then admit himself into the psychiatric unit at Elliot Hospital. While seeking “help”, he would accuse others of molesting him. He accused another unnamed clergyman as well as his foster father and baby sitters when he was a child. In addition to his psychological state and alcohol and drug addition, he had an extensive criminal history prior to making his false allegations against Father Gordon. Grover was arrested and convicted for two burglaries, two forgeries, two thefts, theft by deception, assault on a police officer, and aggravated assault on his former wife when he broke her nose during one of many such beatings. His former wife considered him to be a sexual predator, and never left her two daughters from another relationship alone with him while they were living together, as he would eye and grope them.

In April of 2005, the lead detective James F. McLaughlin was confronted with these sobering facts about Grover in The Wall Street Journal articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz about the unjust conviction of Father Gordon. In response to his botched and incompetent investigation, McLaughlin made himself a self-appointed psychologist and responded remarkably by saying: “So we had all these elevated activities with our male victims, so in a sense, when you have a victim present that has this baggage, it’s corroborative of their victimization” (“Story of Jailed Priest Retold”, The Union Leader: Manchester NH, April 28, 2005).

At trial, Grover lied and told the jury that he needed money from his lawsuit with the Diocese for therapy because of the “abuse.” However, after his $200,000.00 payout, and after the trial was over, Grover did not attend one therapy session but took his former wife to Arizona, where he blew it all on alcohol, drugs, cars, pornography and gambling. In fact on that trip he lost about $70,000.00 on a Las Vegas gambling spree. In addition, he stiffed the casino another $50.000.00 on a credit line which he fraudulently applied for by providing false information about his job and income. A collection action initiated by the casino was unsuccessful. His wife finally left him in 1998 when the money was gone, and Grover was caught in bed with his biological sister.

Grover’s testimony at trial did not border on the absurd; it was absurd. His shifty testimony was fantastic, nonsensical and contradictory. When he was spoon-fed by the direct questioning of prosecutor Bruce Elliot Reynolds, he was able to recite his rehearsed testimony. However, on cross-examination it was far different. Every time he was trapped in a lie or inconsistent statement he fell back on his rehearsed line, saying that question “overloads my mind and… leaves me more or less in shock for days after…”

When Grover was confronted as to why he did not report the abuse for 10 years he claimed that he repressed the memory of the abuse, and it was “difficult to talk [about it] in front of people” until he spoke to his attorneys.

The fundamental question must be asked about our justice system; how could any reasonable jury, having the sworn duty to acquit Father Gordon unless the prosecution proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, find him guilty under this type of incredulous testimony? The State had the burden of proof. How could they have gotten it so wrong? Before a jury could find him guilty they would have to have found Grover’s testimony completely credible. Under our criminal justice system no competent and reasonable jury should have found this type of testimony sufficient to convict a Catholic priest who, previous to these series of false allegations, had never been convicted of anything.

Not unlike other unjust convictions, the law enforcement investigation of Father Gordon was both overzealous and intentionally unfair. The lead detective, James F. McLaughlin, was not interested in a fair and impartial investigation, but only in creating and spinning the facts to support his — and eventually the prosecution’s — theory of the case. McLaughlin also suppressed any facts which clearly pointed out that Father Gordon was innocent of the false allegations made by the accuser. McLaughlin engaged in investigating this matter in a way that was patently unfair and used his power as a law enforcement officer to suppress witnesses who were willing to testify for Father Gordon MacRae.

To make matters worse, Father Gordon’s bishop at the time of his trial did not support him, but in fact allowed his office to issue a press release prior to trial which literally condemned the accused priest. This misstatement by the bishop helped fuel media hysteria, and it unquestionably tainted the potential jury pool, insuring the prosecution of a conviction. The bishop did not stand up for one of his priests with courage, but rather retreated to bureaucratic-clericalism, more worried about pleasing his lawyers, insurance carrier and insulating the diocese from potential civil liability. This abandonment by the diocese has continued for 30 years. The bishop’s technique accomplished nothing because the diocese paid out monetary awards to any and all accusers. The greater cost, of course, was the loss of any trust of the priests of the diocese for the bishop and chancery. Not only was Father Gordon not able to count on his bishop for support, but the bishop negligently or intentionally acted in such a way as to let the public be given the message that Father Gordon was guilty. The bishop needs to answer questions about sacrificing priests on the altar of insurance considerations. To date it is conservatively estimated that the Church in the United States has paid over $4 billion in claims because of the sexual abuse scandal. How many of these claims were outright false can only be guessed. In any case, the bishop distanced himself from Father MacRae and left him on his own.

If the cards were not already stacked against Father Gordon, his defense attorney at trial was no help. Father Gordon was represented by Ron Koch, an attorney from New Mexico, who died in the year 2000 at the age of 49. Although this attorney did his best to defend Father Gordon, he nevertheless made critical trial errors which hurt the defense and opened the door for the prosecutor to introduce prejudicial evidence which the trial judge had already ruled was inadmissible and not relevant. Mr. Koch was forced to split his time between his active criminal practice in New Mexico and preparing for Father’s Gordon’s trial, which Mr. Koch was unable to do. Mr. Koch failed to conduct important pretrial discovery and inadequately prepared the case for trial. Father Gordon trial counsel was unprepared and out matched, and therefore constitutionally ineffective. Father Gordon’s constitutional rights to procedural due process and a fair trial were eviscerated. Mr. Koch failed to interview and subpoena critical witnesses for the defense, failed to go to the scene in which Grover alleged that he had been touched, and lastly, failed to preserve attorney-client privileged documents which Koch turned over to the prosecution.

Many people unfamiliar with the criminal justice system in the United States believe that the criminal justice system eventually corrects an unjust conviction. This sadly is the exception and not the rule. Under our judicial system the jury verdict is final, and most appeals, regardless as to the justice of the verdict are denied. Father Gordon is going on 30 years of imprisonment. Every appeal has been rejected without hearing. No judge in New Hampshire would agree to hear new evidence or new witnesses in this matter. On March 17, 2015, federal district court Judge Joseph Laplante, who many had high hopes would grant Father MacRae’s writ of habeas corpus, instead, granted the State of New Hampshire’s motion to dismiss on the pleadings. The judge did not even grant Father Gordon an evidentiary hearing.

The Catholic Church cannot proclaim the fullness of the truth without its priests. Every priest has been called by God for this mission. The Church has no alternative but to pursue and fight for authentic justice, and it must start with Father Gordon MacRae. No pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, or anyone among the laity can sit by and permit this injustice to continue. Diabolic advocacy and persecution of the Church has prevailed and will continue. Satan knows his enemy, and his enemy is the Holy Roman Catholic Church, in particular its clergy. Satan’s relentless pursuit is against the only institutional defender of natural law and of life in the world, from the moment of conception to natural death, the Catholic Church.

St. John Vianney, the patron of parish priests, understood this all too well. He was also subjected to outrageous lies about his character when he made this profound statement over 150 years ago:

“When people wish to destroy religion, they begin by attacking the priest, because where there is no longer any priest, there is no sacrifice, and where there is no longer any sacrifice, there is no religion.”

At the end of our brief temporal life all of us will be judged for what we “did and failed to do”; did we all do what is right and just?

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Vincent James Sanzone, Jr., Esq., loves his Catholic faith, and has been a practicing criminal defense attorney in New Jersey for the last 35 years. Attorney Sanzone is a member of the New Jersey Bar Association, of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, and of the Legal Center for Defense of Life. He is admitted to the bar in the State of New Jersey and the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey as well as Federal Appeals Courts for the Third and Fourth Circuits. In addition, he has been admitted to practice pro hac vice in the Southern District of New York, and in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. Attorney Sanzone has argued successfully before the New Jersey Supreme Court, and has tried hundreds of criminal trials. Many of his clients were minority young men and women who were acquitted of all charges at trial and went on to live exemplary lives.

Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb

History unjustly sullied her name without evidence, but Mary Magdalene emerges from the Gospel a faithful, courageous and noble woman, an apostle to the Apostles.

As an imprisoned priest, a communal celebration of the Easter Triduum is not available to me. My celebration of this week is for the most part limited to a private reading of the Roman Missal. Still, over the five-plus years that I have been writing for These Stone Walls, I have always agonized about Holy Week posts. I feel a special duty to contribute what little I can to the Church’s volume of reflection on the meaning of this week.

Though I have little in the way of resources beyond what is in my own mind, I feel an obligation in this of all weeks to “get it right,” and leave something a reader might return to. So I have focused in past Holy Week posts not so much on the meaning of the events of the Passion of the Christ, but on the characters central to those events. In so doing, I have developed a rather special kinship with some of them.

I hope readers will spend some time with them this week by revisiting my Holy Week tributes to “Simon of Cyrene, Compelled to Carry the Cross,” and “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.” I wrote a follow-up to that one in a subsequent Holy Week post entitled, “Pope Francis, the Pride of Mockery, and the Mockery of Pride.” Last year in Holy Week, I visited a haunting work of art fixed upon the wall of my prison cell in “Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands.”

Lifting these characters out of the lines of the Gospel into the light of my quest to know them has enhanced a sense of solidarity with them. This has never been truer than it is for the subject of this year’s TSW  Holy Week post. Any believer whose reputation has been overshadowed by innuendos of a past, anyone who stands in possession of a truth that must be told, but is denied the social status to be believed will marvel at the faith and courage of Mary Magdalene.

Her Demon Haunted World

First, a word about language. You might note that I always use the Aramaic term, “Golgotha,” instead of the more familiar “Calvary” for the place where Jesus was crucified. Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew. It became the language of the Middle East sometime after the fall of Nineveh in 612 B.C., and was the language of Palestine at the time of Jesus. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and so did his disciples.

The Aramaic word, “Golgotha” means “place of the skull.” When the Roman Empire occupied Palestine in 63 B.C., it used that place for crucifixions. It isn’t certain whether that is the origin of the name “Golgotha” or whether the hill resembles a skull from some vantage point. The Gospels were written in Greek, so the Aramaic “Golgotha” was translated “Kranion,” Greek for “skull.” Then in the Fourth and early Fifth Century, Saint Jerome translated the Greek Gospels into Latin using the term, “Calvoriae Locus” for “Place of the Skull.” That’s how the name “Calvary” entered Christian thought.

Mary Magdalene is one of only two figures in the Gospel to have been present with Jesus during his public ministry, at the foot of the Cross at Golgotha, and in his resurrection appearances at and after the empty tomb. The sole other figure was John, the Beloved Disciple. Mary the Mother of Jesus was also present at the Cross, but there is no mention of her at the empty tomb. In the Gospel of Saint Luke, the Twelve were with Jesus during his public ministry …

“… also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Suzanna, and many others who provided for them out of their means.”

— Luke 8: 1-2

The presence of these women openly challenged Jewish customs and mores of the time which discouraged men from associating with women in public. Add to this the fact that these particular women “had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities” could have set the community abuzz with whispers at their presence with Jesus. In the Gospel of John (4:27), the Apostles came upon Jesus talking with a woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well, and they “marveled that he was talking with a woman.”

A revelation that seven demons had gone out of Mary Magdalene is in no way suppressed by the Gospel writer. On the contrary, it seems the basis of her undying fidelity to the Lord. The Gospel of Saint Mark adds that account in the most unlikely place — the one place where Mary’s credibility seems a necessity, the first Resurrection appearance:

“Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.”

— Mark 16: 9-11

In all four of the Gospel accounts, it was Mary Magdalene who first discovered and announced the empty tomb, and in all four places the announcement sowed doubt, and even some propaganda. In the Gospel of Matthew (28:1-10), “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb … .” There they were met by an angel who instructed them, “Go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead and behold, he is going before you to Galilee.”

Then, in Saint Matthew’s account, Jesus appeared to them on the road and said, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” Put yourself in Mary Magdalene’s shoes. She, from whom he cast out seven demons; she, who watched him die a gruesome death, is to find Peter, tell this story, and expect to be believed?

Immediately after in the Gospel of Matthew, the Roman guards went to Caiaphas the High Priest with their own story of what they witnessed at the tomb. Like the thirty pieces of silver used to bribe Judas, Caiaphas paid the guards to spread an alternate story:

“Go report to Pilate that Jesus’ disciples came and stole his body while the guards slept…’ This story has been spread among the Jews even to this day”

— Matthew 28:11

Apostle to the Apostles

It makes perfect sense. I, too, have seen “truth” reinvented when there is money involved. Remember that Mary Magdalene is a woman alone, with demons in her past, and she must convey her amazing account to men. So suspect is she as a source that even the early Church overlooked her witness. When Saint Paul related the Resurrection appearances to the Church at Corinth about twenty years later, he omitted Mary Magdalene entirely:

“He appeared to Cephas [the Greek name for Peter], then to the Twelve, then to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James then to all the Apostles. Then last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me, for I am the least of the Apostles.”

— 1 Cor. 15:5-9

Saint Paul lists six appearances of Jesus during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension. One of those appearances “to more than 500” appears in none of the Gospel accounts. Saint Paul likely omitted the fact that it was Mary Magdalene from whom news of the Resurrection first arose, and to whom the Risen Christ first appeared, because at that time in that culture, women could not give sworn testimony.

And remember that there was another matter Mary Magdalene had to reconcile before conveying her news. It is the elephant in the upper room. She must not only tell her story to men, but to men who fled Golgotha while she remained. Among all in that room, only Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple John saw Christ die. Peter, their leader, denied knowing Jesus and remained below, listening to a cock crow.

I have imagined another version of Mary Magdalene’s empty tomb report to Peter. I imagined reading it between the lines, but of course it isn’t really there. Still, it’s the version that would have made the most human sense: Mary Magdalene burst into an upper room where the Apostles hid “for fear of the Jews.” She summoned the courage to look Peter in the eye.

Mary M.: “I have good news and not-so-good news.”
Peter: “What’s the good news?”
Mary M.: “The Lord has risen and I have seen him!”
Peter: “And the not-so-good good news?”
Mary M.: “He’s on his way here and he’d like a word with you about last Friday.”

Of course, nothing like that happened. The words of Jesus to Peter about “last Friday” correct his three-time denial with a three-time commission of the risen Christ to “feed my sheep.” The Gospel message is built upon values and principles that challenge all our basest instincts for retribution and justice. The Gospel presents God’s justice, not ours.

Of the four accounts of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection Appearances, the Gospel of John conveys perhaps the most painful, beautiful, and stunning portrait of Mary Magdalene, all written between the lines:

“Standing by the Cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister [possibly Salome, mother of James and John], Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.”

— John 19:25

Also standing there is John, the Beloved Disciple, and Mary Magdalene becomes a witness to one of the most profound scenes of Sacred Scripture. Jesus addressed his mother from the Cross, “Woman, behold your son.” Is it a reference to himself or to the young man standing next to his mother? Is it both? Standing just feet away, the woman from whom he once cast out seven demons is fixated by what is taking place here. “Behold your Mother!” he says among his last words from the Cross, bestowing upon John — and all of us by extension — the gifts of grace and the care of his mother.

“Woman, Why Are You Weeping?”

“From that point on, John took her into his home,” and we took her into the home of our hearts. Mary Magdalene could barely have dealt with this shattering scene as her Deliverer died before her eyes when, on the morning of the first day of the week, she stood weeping outside his empty tomb. “Woman, why are you weeping?” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote of this scene from the Gospel of John in his beautifully written book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week (Ignatius Press, 2011):

“Now he calls her by name: ‘Mary!’ Once again she has to turn, and now she joyfully recognizes the risen Lord whom she addresses as ‘Rabboni,’ meaning ‘teacher.’ She wants to touch him, to hold him, but the Lord says to her, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17). This surprises us…. The earlier way of relating to the earthly Jesus is no longer possible.”

— Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, p. 285

Hippolytus of Rome, a Third Century Father of the Church, called Mary Magdalene an “apostle to the Apostles.” Then in the Sixth Century, Pope Gregory the Great merged Mary Magdalene with the unnamed “sinful woman” who anointed Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (7:37), and with Mary of Bethany who anointed him in the Gospel of John (12:3). This set in motion any number of conspiracy theories and unfounded legends about Jesus and Mary Magdalene that had no basis in fact.

The revisionist history in popular books like The Da Vinci Code, and other novels by New Hampshire author Dan Brown, was contingent upon Mary Magdalene and these two other women being one and the same. The Gospel provides no evidence to support this, a fact the Church now accepts and promotes. This faithful and courageous woman at the Empty Tomb was rescued not only from her demons, but from the distortions of history.

“While up to the moment of Jesus’ death, the suffering Lord had been surrounded by nothing but mockery and cruelty, the Passion Narratives end on a conciliatory note, which leads into the burial and the Resurrection. The faithful women are there…. Gazing upon the Pierced One and suffering with him have now become a fount of purification. The transforming power of Jesus’ Passion has begun.”

— Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, p. 220

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