“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
#MeToo and #HimToo: Jonathan Grover and Father Gordon MacRae
Jonathan Edward Grover died in Scottsdale Arizona just before his 49th birthday. His role in the case against Father Gordon MacRae leaves many unanswered questions.
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by independent writer Ryan A. MacDonald whose previous articles include “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae” and “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”
When I read Father Gordon MacRae’s Holy Week post on These Stone Walls this year, I was struck by a revelation that he offered Mass in his prison cell for the soul of a man who helped put him there by falsely accusing him. I do not know that I could have done the same in his shoes, and even if I could, I am not so certain that I would. His post took a high road that most only strive for.
The unnamed subject of that post about Judas Iscariot was Jonathan Edward Grover who died in Arizona in February two weeks before his 49th birthday. An obituary indicated that he died “peacefully,” and cited ‘a “long career in the financial industry.” Police determined the cause of death to be an accidental overdose of self-injected opiates weeks after leaving rehab. In Arizona, he had charges for theft, criminal trespass, and multiple arrests for driving under the influence of drugs. A police report described him as “homeless.”
In the early 1990s, Jonathan Grover was one of Father MacRae’s accusers. MacRae first learned of Mr. Grover’s death from a letter written by a woman who had been a young adult friend of Grover at the time of MacRae’s trial in 1994. She wrote that she is now a social worker with “expertise in PTSD” (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The letter accused MacRae of having “murdered” 48-year-old Grover. This requires a rational and factual response.
Of interest, Mr. Grover’s obituary – despite his being 48 years old at the time of death – featured his 1987 Keene High School (NH) graduation photograph when Grover was 18 years old. I had seen this photo before. It was among the discovery materials in MacRae’s defense files in preparation for his 1994 trial. The photograph raised the first of many doubts about Grover’s claims.
At age 18 in 1987, Grover gave Father Gordon MacRae, his parish priest and friend at the time, a nicely framed copy of that photo with a letter written on the back. It thanked MacRae for his “friendship and support,” and “for always being there for me.” It was a typically touching letter from a young man to someone he obviously admired. It was written before addiction and the inevitable justification of enablers took hold in his life.
Five years later, apparently forgetting that he ever wrote that letter, Jonathan Grover became the first of four adult brothers to accuse MacRae of a series of sexual assaults alleged to have occurred more than a decade earlier. So what happened between writing that letter in 1987 and accusing MacRae five years later in 1992? It is one of the burning questions left behind in this story.
The framed high school photograph and its accompanying letter never found their way into MacRae’s 1994 trial, or into the public record, because the trial dealt only with the claims of Jonathan’s brother, Thomas Grover. Jonathan was the first to accuse MacRae, but a trial on his claims was deferred. His story had many holes that did not reconcile with the facts. Investigators have since uncovered a different story from the one Grover and his brothers first told.
Bombshells and Black Ops
The two common denominators in the case against Father Gordon MacRae were expectations of money and James F. McLaughlin. In the 1980s, the city of Keene, New Hampshire, with a population then of about 26,000, employed a full-time sex crimes detective on its small police force. In 1988, McLaughlin launched investigations of at least three, and possibly more, Catholic priests in the area including Father Gordon MacRae.
His targeting of MacRae seems to have begun with a bizarre and explosive letter. In September 1988, Detective McLaughlin received a letter from Sylvia Gale, a social worker with the Division of Children, Youth and Families, the New Hampshire agency tasked with investigating child abuse. Ms. Gale’s letter to McLaughlin revealed that she had uncovered information about “a man in your area, a Catholic priest named Gordon MacRae.”
The letter described explosive information from an unnamed employee of Catholic Social Services in the Diocese of Manchester, who developed a slanderous tale that MacRae had been “a priest in Florida where he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” The letter went on to claim that the case was still unsolved, and that MacRae was removed from Florida by Catholic Church officials to avoid that investigation.
The libelous letter also named a Church official, Monsignor John Quinn, as the source of this information reportedly told to an unnamed Church employee on the condition that she would be fired if she ever divulged it. The 1988 letter generated a secret 70-page report developed by Detective James McLaughlin. He launched a dogged pursuit of MacRae who was unaware at the time that any of this was going on.
This all began to unfold one year after Jonathan Grover graduated from Keene High School and presented Father MacRae with that framed photograph and letter of thanks. Armed with Sylvia Gale’s letter, Detective McLaughlin proceeded to question 26 Keene area adolescents and their parents who had known MacRae including members of the Grover family.
Up to that point, not one person had ever actually contacted McLaughlin with a complaint against MacRae, but rather it was McLaughlin who initiated these contacts. As reported below, some of them today claim to have been solicited by McLaughlin to accuse MacRae, some with the enticement of money.
I had to read up to page 54 of McLaughlin’s 1988 report before I came across any effort to corroborate the Florida “murder and mutilation” story with Florida law enforcement officials. By the time he learned that MacRae had never served as a priest in Florida and that no such crime had been committed there, the damage to MacRae’s reputation was already done, and the seeds were sown for the Grover brothers to ponder claims yet to come.
Among those approached by McLaughlin armed with Sylvia Gale’s slanderous letter was Mrs. Patricia Grover, Jonathan’s mother. A parishioner of Saint Bernard Parish in Keene where MacRae had served from 1983 to 1987, Mrs. Grover was also a DCYF social worker and an acquaintance of Sylvia Gale. She had previously worked with McLaughlin in the handling of other cases.
Mrs. Grover also knew Father MacRae. According to McLaughlin’s 1988 report, she was alarmed by the Sylvia Gale letter but doubted that MacRae had ever served as a priest in Florida. She nonetheless vowed to talk with her young adult sons about their relationship with MacRae. Four more years passed before the first of them, Jonathan Grover, accused him.
The “fake news” in the 1988 Sylvia Gale letter set this community abuzz with anxiety and gossip about the potentially lecherous and murderous priest in its midst. Later, Monsignor John Quinn and other Diocese of Manchester officials denied having any involvement in the untrue information about MacRae. They also denied that there was ever any priest who relocated from Florida to New Hampshire under the circumstances described.
Four years later in late 1992, Jonathan Grover became the first of four members of the Grover family to accuse Father Gordon MacRae of sexual abuse dating back to approximately the early 1980s. I use the word “approximately” because Grover and his brothers each presented highly conflicting and multiple versions of their stories and the relevant time frames.
As becomes clear below, Jonathan Grover’s claims became problematic for the prosecution of MacRae, but instead of questioning Grover’s veracity, the police detective engaged a contingency lawyer on Grover’s behalf. In a September 30, 1992 letter from McLaughlin to Jonathan Grover, the detective detailed his conversations with Keene attorney William Cleary who ultimately obtained a nearly $200,000 settlement for Grover from the Diocese of Manchester. From McLaughlin’s letter to Grover:
“As agreed, I contacted William Cleary about your case. Bill believes the statute of limitations has lapsed for a civil action, but this does not rule out the church being financially responsible Bill [Cleary] states he would like to meet with you for a conference. You would not be charged for this. Your options could then be outlined and discussed.”
There is reason to question Detective McLaughlin’s police reports in this case. In most of McLaughlin’s prior cases, he practiced a protocol of audio recording every interview with complainants. In many of his other reports that I have read, he made a point of explaining that he records interviews to protect the integrity of the investigation.
Two years prior to the Grover claims, for example, McLaughlin investigated a complaint against another former Keene area priest, Father Stephen Scruton. From the outset, his reports took pains to document his practice of securing both video and audio recordings of his interviews. He even administered a polygraph test on the accuser. All were standard protocol, but McLaughlin did not create a single recording of any type with any accuser in the case of Father Gordon MacRae. This is suspect, at best, and it has never been explained.
It is made more suspicious by the emergence of other information that has been developed by former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott who spent three years investigating the MacRae case. One of MacRae’s accusers, a high school classmate of Jonathan Grover, recanted his story when questioned by Mr. Abbott in 2008. An excerpt of Steven Wollschlager’s statement may shed light on why Detective McLaughlin chose not to record these interviews.
“In 1994 I was contacted by Keene Police Detective McLaughlin… I was aware at the time of Father MacRae’s trial knowing full well that it was bogus and having heard of the lawsuits and money involved and also the reputations of those who were making accusations… The lawsuits and money were of greatest discussion, and I was left feeling that if I would go along with the story I could reap the rewards as well. McLaughlin had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about this priest and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had.
McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could go easier for us with a large amount of money… I was at the time using drugs and would have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money.”
In “The Trials of Father MacRae,” a 2013 article by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal, Detective McLaughlin described the above account simply as “a fabrication.” What struck me about Mr. Wollschlager’s statement, besides the fact that he had nothing whatsoever to gain by lying, is that he never went to Detective McLaughlin with an accusation. Instead, he alleges that it was McLaughlin who approached him, and the approach alleges the enticement of money.
Steven Wollschlager was not the first person to report such an overture. Given the nature of his account and others, it is unclear today whether Jonathan Grover and his brothers initiated their first contacts with this detective. This suspicion was a contentious issue in MacRae’s 1994 trial. Thomas Grover, the brother of Jonathan Grover, was asked under oath to reveal to whom he went first with his claims, the police or a personal injury lawyer, but he refused to answer. To this very day, that question has never been answered.
What became clear, however, is hard evidence that placed Detective James McLaughlin investigating at least some of this case, not from his office in the Keene Police Department, but from the Concord, NH office of Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer, Robert Upton, before MacRae was even charged in the case.
A Conspiracy of Fraud
In a report labeled Case No. 93010850, Detective McLaughlin produced the first of several conflicting accounts of untaped interviews with Jonathan Grover. Note that the first two digits of McLaughlin’s report, “93,” seem to indicate the year it was typed, but the date on the report is August 27, 1992. The content of this report is sexually explicit so I will paraphrase. The report has Grover claiming that when he was 12 or 13 years old he “would spend nights in the St. Bernard rectory in Keene.” During those nights, he alleged, he was sexually assaulted by both Father Gordon MacRae and Father Stephen Scruton.
But there was an immediate problem. MacRae was never at St. Bernard’s Parish in Keene until being assigned there on June 15, 1983, when Grover was 14 years old. Father Stephen Scruton was never there before June of 1985 when Grover was 16 years old. These dates were easily determined from diocesan files, but McLaughlin never investigated this. The report continued with claims alleged to have taken place in the Keene YMCA hot tub:
“It was during these times that Grover would be seated in the whirlpool and both Father MacRae and Father Scruton would be joined in conversation and they would alternate in rubbing their foot against his genitals. Grover was unsure if the priests were acting in concert or if they were unaware of each other’s actions.”
This report is highly suspicious. Just months earlier, Detective McLaughlin had previously investigated Father Stephen Scruton for an identical claim brought by another person alleged to have occurred in 1985 after Scruton’s arrival at this parish. “Todd,” the person who brought that claim against Scruton, was also a high school classmate of Jonathan Grover.
After McLaughlin’s investigation, “Todd” obtained an undisclosed sum of money in settlement from the Diocese of Manchester. That interview with “Todd” was labeled Case No. 90035705 dated just 18 months before Jonathan Grover’s identical claims emerged. Unlike the Grover interviews, the interview with Todd was tape recorded by McLaughlin. Here is an excerpt from the report:
“Father Scruton was a regular at the YMCA. Todd went to the YMCA with Father Scruton. They decided to use the hot tub… At one point, Father Scruton took one of his feet and placed it between Todd’s legs and rubbed his genitals… The touching was intentional and not a mistake. A rubbing motion was used by Father Scruton… I asked Todd where he stood on civil lawsuits.”
It defies belief that a small town police detective could write a report about a Catholic priest (Scruton) fondling a teenager’s genitals in a YMCA hot tub, then 18 months later write virtually the same report with the same claims of doing the same things in the same place, only this time adding a second priest, but nothing in the second report seemed to even vaguely remind the detective of the first report.
After “Todd’s” YMCA hot tub complaint in 1990 — 18 months before Jon Grover’s own YMCA hot tub story — Father Stephen Scruton was charged by McLaughlin with misdemeanor sexual assault. He pled guilty and received a suspended sentence and probation. One year later, McLaughlin has someone else repeat the same story, only now involving both Scruton and MacRae, but two to four years before either of them was present in Keene.
What is most suspect about this claim of Jonathan Grover involving both priests is that in 1994, one year after writing the report, McLaughlin responded to a question under oath:
On occasion, I have had conversations with Reverend Stephen Scruton, however I have no recollection of ever discussing any actions of Gordon MacRae with the Reverend Scruton.
(Cited in USDC-NM 1504-JB)
But this all becomes more suspicious still. In the investigation file on these claims was found a transcript of a November 1988 Geraldo Rivera Show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It was faxed by the Geraldo Show in New York to Detective McLaughlin at the Keene Police Department two months after his 1988 receipt of the Sylvia Gale “Florida letter.” It was two years before “Todd’s” YMCA hot tub claim about Father Scruton and four years before Jonathan Grover’s claims. Here is an excerpt:
“Geraldo Rivera: What did the priest do to you Greg?
Greg Ridel: Around the age of 12 or so, he and I went to a YMCA. And I was an altar boy at the time. And the first time I was ever touched… he began stroking my penis in a hot tub, I believe it was, at a YMCA. From there it went to what you might call role playing in the rectory where the priests stay.”
Detective McLaughlin’s 1993 police report also had Jonathan Grover claiming that Father MacRae paid him money in the form of checks from his own and parish checking accounts in even amounts of $50 to $100 in order to maintain his silence about the abuse. McLaughlin never investigated this, but Father MacRae’s lawyer did investigate. Father MacRae’s personal checking account was researched from between 1979 to 1988. It revealed no checks issued to Jonathan or Thomas Grover.
However, the attorney uncovered several checks written from parish accounts to both Jonathan Grover and Thomas Grover. All were in even amounts between $40 and $100 and dated between 1985 and 1987 when these two brothers were 16 to 20 years of age respectively. The checks were filled out and signed by Rev. Stephen Scruton.
Days before Father Gordon MacRae’s 1994 trial commenced, his attorney sought Father Scruton for questioning. He declined to respond. When the lawyer sought a subpoena to force his deposition, Scruton fled the state. During trial, the jury heard none of this. Because the trial involved the shady claims of Thomas Grover alone, the defense could not introduce anything involving his brother, Jonathan.
In April, 2005, The Wall Street Journal published an extensive two-part investigation report of the Father MacRae case (“A Priest’s Story” Parts One and Two), but it omitted Father Stephen Scruton’s role in the story — perhaps because he could not be located. Diocese of Manchester officials reported for years that they had no awareness of Scruton’s whereabouts.
In November 2008, former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott was retained to investigate this case. He located Father Scruton at an address in Newburyport, Massachusetts just over the New Hampshire State Line. First reached by telephone, Scruton was reportedly agitated and nervous when he learned the reason for the call. The investigator heard a clear male voice in the background saying, “Steve if this is something that might help Gordon I think you should do it.” Scruton reluctantly agreed to meet.
The former FBI agent drove from his New York office to Newburyport, MA on the agreed-upon date and time, but Scruton refused to open the door. He said only that he had “consulted with someone” and now declines to answer any questions. The investigator then sent Scruton a summary of his involvement in this case and requested his cooperation by telling the simple truth.
Days after receiving it, Stephen Scruton suffered a mysterious fall down a flight of stairs and never regained consciousness. Father Stephen Scruton died a month later in January of 2009. He took the truth with him, and now Jonathan Grover has done the same. But facts speak a truth of their own. Readers can today form their own conclusions about this story.
I have formed mine, and I remain more than ever convinced that an innocent man is in prison in New Hampshire, a blight on the American justice system. Having thus far served 24 years of wrongful imprisonment for crimes that never took place, Father Gordon MacRae still prays for the dead.
“After three years of investigation of this case, I have found no evidence that Father MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes.”
Editor’s Note: Please share this post which could be of great importance to Father MacRae for justice in both Church and State.
Ryan A. MacDonald has published extensively in both print and online media. Ryan’s articles include:
The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud
How Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison
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
Judas Iscariot: Who Prays for the Soul of a Betrayer?
Judas Iscariot: The most reviled name in all of Sacred Scripture is judged only by his act of betrayal, but without him among the Apostles is there any Gospel at all?
Judas Iscariot: The most reviled name in all of Sacred Scripture is judged only by his act of betrayal, but without him among the Apostles is there any Gospel at all?
False witness and betrayal are two of the most heinous themes in all of world literature, and Sacred Scripture is no exception. Literature is filled with it because so are we. Not many of us get to live our lives without ever experiencing the false witness of an enemy or the betrayal of a friend.
Recently, I was confronted by the death of someone whom I once thought of as a friend, someone who once betrayed me with a self-serving story of false witness for nothing more redemptive than thirty pieces of silver. It’s an account that will be taken up soon by some other writer for I am not objective enough to bring justice, let alone mercy, to that story.
But for now, there is one aspect of it that I must write about at this of all times. As I was preparing to offer Mass late on a Sunday night, the thought came that I should offer it for this betrayer, this liar, this thief. Every part of my psyche and spirit rebelled against that thought, but in the end, I did what I had been beckoned to do.
It was difficult. It was very difficult. And it cost me even more of myself than that person had already taken. It cost me the perversely comforting experience of eternal resentment. I have not forgiven this false accuser. That is a grace I have not yet discovered. Nor could I so easily set aside the depth of his betrayal.
In offering the Mass, I just asked God not to see this story only as I do. I asked Him not to forever let this soul slip from His grasp, for perhaps there were influences at work that I do not know. have always suspected so.
The obituary said he died “peacefully” just two weeks before his 49th birthday. It said nothing about the cause of death nor anything about a Mass. There was a generic “celebration of his life.” False witness does not leave much to celebrate. Faith, too, had been betrayed for money.
I am still angry with this person even in death, but I take no consolation that his presence in this world has passed. My anger will have to be comfort enough because at some point I realized that my Mass was likely the only one in the world that had been sacrificed for this soul with any legitimate hope for salvation.
That’s the problem with false witness. Its purveyors tell themselves they have no need for salvation. I do not know whether he is any better off for this Mass having been offered, but I do know that I am.
Ever Ancient, Ever New
The experience also focused my attention on history’s most notorious agent of false witness and betrayal, Judas Iscariot. Who has ever prayed for the soul of a betrayer? Not I — at least, not yet — but I also just weeks ago thought it impossible that I would pray for the soul of my accuser.
I cannot get Judas off my mind this week. And as with most Biblical narratives, once I took a hard look, I found a story on its surface and a far greater one in its depths. In those depths is an account of the meaning of the Cross that I found to be staggering today. It changes the way I today see the Cross and the role of Judas in bringing it about. It strikes me that there is not a single place in the narrative of salvation history that does not reflect chaos.
Understanding the Sacrifice of Calvary requires a journey all the way back to the time of Abraham, some 2000 years before the Birth of the Messiah. God had earlier made a covenant with Abraham, a promise to make of his descendants a great nation.
The story of the birth of his son, Isaac, foreshadows that of John the Baptist who in turn foreshadows Jesus. Abraham and Sarah, like Zechariah and Elizabeth, were too old to bear a child, and yet they did. And not just any child. Isaac was the evidence and hope of God’s covenant with Abraham. “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven.”
Then, in Genesis 22, God called Abraham to do the unthinkable: to sacrifice his only son, the one person who was to fulfill God’s covenant. The scene unfolds on Mount Moriah, a place later described in the Book of Chronicles (2 Ch 3:1) as the very site of the future Jerusalem Temple. In obedience, Abraham placed the wood for the sacrifice upon the back of his son, Isaac, who must carry the wood to the hilltop (Gen 22:6).
On that Via Dolorosa, the child Isaac asked his father, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” Abraham’s answer “God will provide Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” Notice the subtle play on words. There is no punctuation in the original Hebrew of the text. The thought process does not convey, “God Himself will provide the lamb…. but rather, “God will provide Himself, the lamb for sacrifice.”
An Angel of the Lord ultimately stayed Abraham’s hand, and then pointed out a ram in the thicket to complete the sacrifice. In his fascinating book, The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (Image Books 1999) author Scott Hahn provides a reflection on the Genesis account that I had long linked to the Cross:
“Christians would later look upon the story of Abraham and Isaac as a profound allegory for the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.” (p. 18)
The similarities in the two accounts, says Scott Hahn, are astonishing. The first line of the New Testament – Matthew 1:1 — identifies “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham…” Jesus, like Isaac, was a faithful father’s only son. Isaac, like Jesus, carried “the wood” for his own sacrifice upon Mount Moriah. In fact, Calvary, the place of the Crucifixion of Christ, is a hillock in the Moriah range.
This places three pivotal Scriptural accounts — each separated by about 1,000 years — in the same place: The site where Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac, the site of the Jerusalem Temple of Sacrifice, and the site of the Crucifixion of Christ.
In Hebrew, that place is called “Golgotha,” meaning “the place of the skull.” Its origin is uncertain, but there is an ancient Hebrew folklore that the skull of Adam was discovered there. Before the Romans arrived in Palestine, it was a place used for public executions, primarily for stoning. The word “Calvary” is from the Latin “calvaria” meaning “skull.” It was translated into Latin from the Greek, “kranion,” which in turn was a translation of the Hebrew, “Golgotha.”
No angel would stay the Hand of God. God provided Himself the Lamb for the sacrifice. This interplay between these Biblical accounts separated by 2,000 years is the source for our plea in the Mass, “Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”
At the Hour of Darkness
The four Gospel accounts in the Canon of Scripture all came into written form after the apostolic witnesses experienced the Resurrection of Jesus. So everything they set out to preserve for the future was seen in that light. The outcome of the story is triumphantly clear in the minds of the New Testament authors. Had the Gospel ended at the Cross, the accounts would be very different.
Judas Iscariot, therefore, is identified early in each Gospel account when he is first summoned by Jesus to the ranks of the Apostles as “the one who would betray him.” John (6:71) adds the Greek term, “diabolos” (6:70), to identify Judas. It is translated “of the devil,” but its connotation is also that of a thief, an informer, a liar, and a betrayer, one drawn into evil by the lure of money.
These adjectives are not presented only to explain the character of Judas, but also to explain that greed left Judas open to Satan. Each Gospel account is clear that Jesus chose him among the Twelve, and in all three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus presents a constant awareness of the coming betrayal of Judas — seemingly as a necessary part of the story.
During Holy Week this year, we hear the full account of the Passion Narrative from Mark (on Palm Sunday) and John (on Good Friday). But for this post I want to focus on the version from Luke. The Gospel of Luke is unique in Scripture. It is the only Scriptural account written by a non-Jewish author.
Luke’s Gospel is the only account with a sequel, Acts of the Apostles, which was also written by Luke. And it is the only Gospel account to include the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, all of which figure into this story set in motion by the betrayal of Judas.
Luke, though a Gentile and a physician, was also a scholar. He makes few direct references to Old Testament texts, but his Gospel is filled with echoes and allusions to Old Testament themes. Greek Christians may not have readily understood this, but he also wrote his Gospel for Jewish Christians in the Diaspora who would have found in Luke a rich and valuable affirmation of salvation history in their life of faith.
What is most clear to me in Luke’s treatment of Judas is that the story is written with a theme that I readily identify with spiritual warfare. The Passion Narrative has a thread that begins with a story I have written before. In “A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ,” I wrote about the meaning of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert. It ends in Luke’s Gospel:
“When the devil had ended every temptation [of Christ], he departed from him until an opportune time.”
— Luke 4:13
Luke constructs his account of the Judas story with threads throughout his Gospel. He shows that the power of Satan, which is frustrated by Jesus in the account of his 40-day temptation in the desert “until an opportune time,” finds its opportunity, not in Jesus, but in Judas whose act of betrayal triggers “the hour of darkness” and the Passion of the Christ:
“Then Satan entered Judas, called Iscariot, who was a member of the Twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests….”
— Luke 22:3
The origin and meaning of “Iscariot” is uncertain. It is not known whether it is a name or a title associated with Judas. In Hebrew, it means “man of Keriot”, a small town marking the border of the territory of the Tribe of Judah (see Joshua 15:21.25), to which both Judas and Jesus belonged. Betrayal is all the more bitter when the betrayer is closely associated. The Greek Iskariotes has the cognate sicarias, meaning “assassin,” a name ascribed to a band of outlaws in New Testament times.
It is clear in Luke’s presentation that this act of Judas is equated with original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve lured by the serpent. At the Last Supper, after the Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus said:
“But behold the hand of him who is to betray me is with me at this table, for the Son of Man goes as it has been determined.”
— Luke 22:21
Jesus added, “But woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.” That “woe” is symbolized later in the way the life of Judas ends as described below. The phrase, “as it has been determined,” however, implies that the betrayal was seen not only in its own light but also as a necessary part of God’s plan.
Later, with Judas absent, Jesus warned his disciples at the Mount of Olives, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” They did anyway. After the arrest of Jesus at Gethsemane, they scattered. Peter, leader of the Twelve, denied three times that he even knew him. Then the cock crowed (Luke 22:61) just as Jesus predicted. This is often depicted as a literal rooster crowing, but the bugle ending the third-night watch for Roman legions at 3:00 AM was also called the “cockcrow.”
At Gethsemane, Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss, perverting a sign of friendship and affection into one of betrayal and false witness. This is what begins the Passion Narrative and the completion of Salvation History. Jesus tells Judas and the servants of the chief priest:
“When I was with you day after day in the Temple you did not lay a hand on me, but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”
— Luke 22:53
Later, in the Acts of the Apostles (26:18) Luke identifies the power of darkness as being in opposition to the power of light, an allusion to spiritual warfare. For Luke’s Gospel, it is our ignorance of spiritual warfare that leaves us most vulnerable.
Following immediately after the betrayal of Judas, one of the disciples present draws his sword and cuts off the ear of the servant of the High Priest. In the Gospel of John, the disciple is identified as Peter. This account is very significant and symbolic of the spiritual bankruptcy that Judas set in motion.
In the well-known Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, a priest came upon the broken body of an injured man left beaten by robbers on the side of the road. Jesus says in the Parable that the priest just passed by in silence, but this was readily understandable to the Pharisee to whom the parable is told.
The Pharisee, an expert in the Old Covenant law of Moses, understood that the Book of Leviticus forbade a priest who is defiled by the dead body of an alien from offering sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple. The severed ear of the High Priest’s servant at Gethsemane refers back to the same precept:
“So no one who has a blemish shall draw near [to the Sanctuary], no one who is blind or lame or has a mutilated face…”
— Leviticus 22:18
The symbolism here is that the spiritual bankruptcy of the High Priest, who is not present at the arrest, is represented by his servant. In Luke’s Gospel, and in Luke alone, Jesus heals the ear. It is the sole miracle story in the Passion Narrative of any of the four Gospels and represents that Jesus wields the power of God even over the High Priest and Temple sacrifice.
When the role of Judas Iscariot is complete, he faces a bizarre end in Luke. The Gospel of Matthew (26:56) has Judas despairing and returning his 30 pieces of silver to the Temple. Luke, in Acts of the Apostles (1:16-20) explains that the actions of Judas were “so that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.” But in Luke, Judas meets an even more bitter end, bursting open and falling headlong as “all his bowels gushed out.” The field where this happened then became known as the Field of Blood, and the money that purchased it, “blood money.”
The point of the story of Judas in the Gospel of Luke is that discipleship engages us in spiritual warfare, and spiritual blindness leaves us vulnerable to our own devices, as it did Judas. This life “is your hour, and the power of darkness.” The plot against Jesus was Satan’s, and Judas was but its pawn.
So who prays for the souls of our betrayers? I did, and it was difficult. It was very difficult. But I can see today why Jesus called us to pray for those who persecute us. It is not only for their sake but for ours.
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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. For further reading, the Easter Season comes alive in these other posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
My Visit with Pornchai Maximilian Moontri by Claire Dion
Claire Dion, a contributing writer for Beyond These Stone Walls, interviewed Pornchai “Max” Moontri at the New Hampshire State Prison for a tale of hope and amazing grace.
Claire Dion, a contributing writer for Beyond These Stone Walls, interviewed Pornchai “Max” Moontri at the New Hampshire State Prison for a tale of hope and amazing grace.
Preface by Father Gordon MacRae
The following is a guest post by Mrs. Claire Dion, a reader of Beyond These Stone Walls in Bridgton, Maine. Claire graced these pages with a Corporal Work of Mercy that touched our hearts in 2017. After two years with us, our friend, Kewei Chen from Shanghai, China, was transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to await his deportation.
After reading of the unique circumstances that brought Chen from China to an American prison, and the pain of our parting as well as our hopes for Chen, Claire drove from her home in Maine to meet with him at the place where he was awaiting deportation. The result of that visit became her first guest post on Beyond These Stone Walls, “My Visit with Kewei Chen in ICE Detention.”
Her post was comforting. From my perspective, and that of Pornchai Moontri who had become Chen’s older brother, the void in our hearts could not be filled, but Claire’s guest post left it not quite so empty. It ended with a wonderful photograph of Chen emailed from the Shanghai airport as he saw his parents for the first time after his unplanned three-year absence.
More recently, Claire asked if she could visit me and Pornchai, a much further winter drive for her. Since prison rules allow for being on the visitor list of only one prisoner, I asked her to visit Pornchai, to treat it as an interview, and to write another guest post for Beyond These Stone Walls.
I did this because, as I have hinted in some previous posts, there is a very special story coming, one that I know will both break your hearts and then mend them again with evidence of the immense power of Divine Mercy to restore the human soul. This story is coming when I am able to fully tell it, and it will be unlike anything you have ever read before on Beyond These Stone Walls.
So as a prelude, I want to present Pornchai “Max” Moontri through the eyes of a reader meeting our friend for the first time. His story should begin, after all, not upon the dung heap of Job where life took him, but at the point to which Divine Mercy has redeemed him out of darkness into a very great light.
Claire Dion is a wife and mother of five adult daughters and a devoted grandmother. She is currently retired from a career as a registered nurse in obstetrics at Lynn, Massachusetts General Hospital. She today lives in Bridgton, Maine where she has been part of the Faith Formation Team at Saint Joseph Parish and a follower of Father Michael Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning Glory and Marian Consecration. It’s an honor to present Claire Dion.
Saturday – January 8, 2018 at 8:00 AM
I pulled into the parking lot of the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord. I will be meeting Pornchai Moontri, a man I have come to know and love from reading Beyond These Stone Walls. Walking into the visiting area where I have to sign in, I feel a little uneasy. I did not have a clue what I was to do and I had not slept the night before as I was afraid I would do something wrong and the visit would be canceled.
Everything went well until I passed through a metal detector and the alarms went off. What was I thinking? I should have realized that two knee replacements and a hip replacement might present a problem. After being sent back to the waiting room with alarm bells ringing, some guards questioned me, and then led me into the visiting room. It was a large room with metal tables and chairs screwed to the floor. Each table was numbered, and I was instructed to go to table number twenty-four.
From a distance I saw Pornchai walk into the visiting room. I realized that he had not seen me before, but I recognized him from Beyond These Stone Walls. So I waved and smiled, and he smiled back. When he got to the table, I asked him if I could give him the allowed “three-second hug.” He laughed while I hugged this man whom I had only read about but was very anxious to meet.
While I was waiting for Pornchai to arrive, I wondered how we were going to fill in a two-hour visit. I was not allowed to bring anything with me so I had no notes to help me remember what I wanted to talk to him about and all the questions I had. I knew that Father Gordon wanted me to write about this visit for Beyond These Stone Walls.
We sat next to each other at the table in a room filled with cameras. The large room was also full of visitors, and, as many of them were children visiting their fathers on a Saturday morning, it was noisy. It took only seconds for us to relax and start talking. From the moment we sat down, I had a sense that I already knew this very special person.
We continued to talk nonstop for the entire two hours. We both felt that it was amazing that we were sitting here together, Pornchai from Thailand and me from Lynn, Massachusetts (which, by the way, is the city just North of Boston where Father Gordon grew up).
Soon we were talking about Pornchai’s incredible journey from a village in Northeast Thailand to Bangor, Maine and ending at the New Hampshire State Prison. I learned that Pornchai was abandoned by his mother at age two and that a teenage relative found him and brought him to live with his family.
Nine years later, when Pornchai was age eleven, his mother returned to Thailand. He did not recognize or even remember her, but against Pornchai’s will he was taken from Thailand and brought to America. A series of traumatic events broke his heart and his soul. That is another story that hopefully Father Gordon will be telling soon at Beyond These Stone Walls.
When Pornchai was fourteen years old, he ran away. He became — though not by choice — a homeless child living on the streets for the second time in his young life, and he spoke little English. While still a teen, he was involved in a struggle that resulted in the death of another man, and he was sent to prison.
While listening to his story, my heart ached as I could see and feel his pain over these events from so long ago. Sentenced to 45 years in a Maine prison, Pornchai continued to have outbursts of anger and rage which landed him in solitary confinement for many years in Maine’s “supermax” prison. [Note: PBS Frontline did a gripping story on that very place and time.]
Pornchai told me that his only plan for life was to never leave prison. It sounded as though he knew he was going to die there, and that was what he wanted. It was his “Plan B” for his life. However, God had other plans for Pornchai Moontri. Fourteen years later, he was moved to a prison in New Hampshire for the rest of his sentence, and Father Gordon MacRae stepped into the story of his life.
Here Pornchai’s eyes and expression softened as he spoke about meeting Father Gordon whom he and other prisoners call “G.” At this point, Pornchai said he felt completely alone, still angry and trusting no one. Another prisoner, a young man from Indonesia, introduced him to a man called “G” and said that G helped him a lot and that he trusted G.
Pornchai watched how G in a caring and patient way helped others and how they trusted him. In his life, the very idea of trust was entirely new. Slowly and cautiously, Pornchai let G into his life and a friendship began.
We talked for awhile about G and I learned that no matter what happens in prison G stays calm. He is a humble, steady person in the midst of the constant turmoil and darkness of prison life, and is always available to any prisoner who comes to him. With a chuckle, I have to add here that I remember Chen telling me that G is a very good man “but you don’t bother him when he is typing a BTSW post!”
“When I Was in Prison, You Came to Me” —Matthew 25:36
It was quite awhile before Pornchai found out that G is a Catholic priest. We spoke about how Father Gordon’s strong faith impressed Pornchai even though many in the Church had abandoned him. Pornchai told me that G’s faith shines in prison, and has attracted some of the prisoners to join him at Sunday Mass and in retreats sponsored by Father Michael Gaitley and the Marians of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy.
Pornchai also said that Father Gordon constantly reaches out to those he feels he can help, and Pornchai was one of them. It was during this conversation that I asked Pornchai to tell Father Gordon how much I love, respect and honor his priesthood.
Through him, Christ’s presence is being felt there, and it is making a difference for many behind those stone walls and many of us BTSW readers.
As their friendship grew, Father Gordon told Pornchai that he must start taking positive steps with his life. He encouraged Pornchai to leave aside “Plan B” and plan instead for a future.
Pornchai began taking education courses, spending his days in school instead of in a cell. He proudly told me that he earned his high school diploma in prison and was Valedictorian of his 2012 graduating class. I listened and learned that his educational journey was just beginning. With Father G’s help, he then enrolled in courses in social work and psychology at Stratford Career Institute earning academic certificates “with highest honors.” This was followed by studies through a scholarship at Catholic Distance University where he took courses in theology with a straight “A” average.
What Pornchai has accomplished is nothing short of amazing given that he learned English in prison. He and “Father G” encourage other prisoners to become educated, and Pornchai now spends time mentoring and tutoring them, especially in mathematics in which he excels. He also spends his days in the woodworking and Hobby Craft shop where he teaches safety training to other prisoners on the use of carpentry tools and machines.
Pornchai designs and builds handcrafted model ships, beautiful Divine Mercy keepsake boxes, and other creations in wood. Some of these are made as gifts and some are sold in a store near the prison grounds. Pornchai used the proceeds to pay for his education courses. Father Gordon later told me that Pornchai is modest about his great skill in woodworking. One of his ships is on display in Belgium where a curator posted a brass plaque indicating that it was designed and created by “Master Craftsman Pornchai Moontri, Concord, New Hampshire.”
Divine Mercy Conversion
As Pornchai’s friendship with Father Gordon deepened, and Pornchai was influenced by his patient practice of faith, he made a decision to become a Catholic. Seeing in the many comments how much Father Gordon’s posts spiritually affect BTSW readers, we talked about how becoming Catholic has helped Pornchai in prison. He received the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation on April 10, 2010. He chose “Maximilian” as his Christian name to honor St Maximilian Kolbe.
On the next day, he received his First Eucharist from Bishop John McCormack. When this was first being planned, neither Pornchai nor Father Gordon realized the date was Divine Mercy Sunday. On that day, Jesus showered Pornchai with His love and mercy and Pornchai felt it. He said that before he became a Catholic he was always feeling unloved and alone. Now he could feel that God was with him and loved him. He also spoke about his love for the Blessed Mother. As he told me this, there was a sense of peace within him.
When I asked Pornchai what he would like me to tell BTSW readers, he became very serious. He said that he and Father Gordon are deeply impacted by the support they receive and that BTSW could not exist without it. They deeply appreciate the love, prayers, and encouragement they receive from readers all over the world. He kept going back to the BTSW readers and how important they are to both of them. He spoke of how he has done nothing to earn this outpouring of love.
Pornchai spoke about the lawyer who has helped him and Chen so much, Clare Farr in Western Australia, and how she learned of him through BTSW. He spoke of Suzanne Sadler, BTSW’s Australian-based webmaster and publisher. He spoke of Father George David Byers who helps ready Father G’s posts for publishing. He spoke of Mrs. LaVern West who prints and mails him the BTSW comments.
Pornchai also said that Father Gordon corresponds with Father Andrew Pinsent, a scientist at Oxford University who has cited his science writings. I mentioned that Father Gordon’s science posts are over my head and Pornchai said with a smile, “Mine too!” In an astonishing connection that Father Gordon later told me about, Father Georges Lemaître, the priest-physicist considered in science to be “Father of The Big Bang and Modern Cosmology,” was a close family friend of Mr. Pierre Matthews in Belgium who today is Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather.
And Pornchai also spoke of Charlene Duline who helps Father G communicate with readers, and is Pornchai’s Godmother. She once sent him a letter in which she called him “precious,” and then other prisoners teased him about it, but he laughed and said that they are jealous because no one calls them precious.
Suddenly the lights in the room flashed on and off. Our visit was over, but not before we were able to have a photograph taken together. With a hug (three seconds only) we said goodbye. I was truly blessed to meet this amazing young man, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and to see Father Gordon through his eyes. I know I will visit him again.
On the coldest day of winter, I left the New Hampshire State Prison with summer in my heart.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:
I thank Claire Dion for this snapshot into our lives. In my recent post, “The Days of Our Lives,” I wrote that Pornchai Moontri and our friend, J.J. Jennings work together in the woodworking and Hobby Craft center. The photos below are of their latest project, a Jewelry Cabinet.
The design for a cabinet of this size was by J.J. Jennings, who collaborated with Pornchai Moontri for the highly skilled construction. The one on the right was made by J.J. and the one on the left by Pornchai. The woods for both are solid maple and black walnut. The drawer fronts are maple or black walnut with poplar sides and bottoms. The drawers and side cabinetry doors are lined with velour.
These beautiful pieces are 20” high, 14” width, and 8.5” depth, and are customized with wood-burned or painted designs and brass fittings. The top is hinged with a 2.5”-deep display area. Two of the drawers are for rings and the other drawers are deeper. The intricate side cabinets are for hanging jewelry such as necklaces, bracelets, and rosaries. Other photos of their work can be seen on the Pinterest Board, “Woodworking and Model Shipbuilding by Pornchai Moontri.”
Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia
The trial of Cardinal George Pell for “historic” sexual abuse claims is underway in Australia, but the state of Australian justice also has the world’s attention.
The trial of Cardinal George Pell for “historic” sexual abuse claims is underway in Australia, but the state of Australian justice also has the world’s attention.
“Why have a trial at all? Just take the man into the Outback and shoot him.”
“Trial by Media.” The ominous term has already been a part of the public record in regard to Australia’s Cardinal George Pell. I used the term myself in a post two years ago entitled, “Peter Saunders and Cardinal Pell: A Trial by Media.”
The concern for the poisoning of justice through leaks to a toxic and predatory news media is nothing new, but “Trial by Media” hangs like the burial shroud of justice itself over the trial of Cardinal Pell on 40-year-old claims of sexual abuse.
Lest anyone doubt the power of the media to both generate such claims and shape justice and due process in a case like this, consider a recent issue of The Week, a popular weekly news magazine. The Week presents itself as “The Best of the U.S. and International Media.” It selects excerpts from online media and newspapers throughout the world and presents them as the best written accounts of the week’s top stories.
In its July 21, 2017 issue, The Week chose as the best of the media from Australia a column by Barney Zwartz in The Age entitled, “The Nation’s Top Catholic in the Dock.” It should raise the alarm for anyone concerned for the media’s role in all this, and the slant it presents. Here is an excerpt:
“After decades of rumors, Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, is finally facing trial for child sexual abuse. At this point, Australians are numb to the horror, having endured years of parliamentary reports that produced damning evidence against so many priests…”
We can only hope that Australians are not so “numb” that they don’t see through this language. It is an open invitation to a lynch mob. The phrase, “after decades of rumors” should alarm everyone from the start. For any objective observer of this story, the only “damning evidence” is the accusations themselves and the fact that there has been a sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Australia.
This is the state of the evidence thus far presented against Cardinal Pell as this “Trial by Media” gets underway. To incite a community to forego due process in favor of emotion is the very foundation of all witch hunts. An “availability bias” has been built that places Catholic priests in a suspect class. I described its momentum in “How SNAP Brought McCarthyism to American Catholics.”
Conditioned by a predatory media, Australians are now invited to ignore the abyss that is empty of evidence, and weigh the claims against Cardinal Pell with nothing of substance except “decades of rumors” that left Australians “numb to the horror.” The same media-fueled moral panic swept America and spread like a virus.
Now some of those who used it for profit are themselves before the bar of justice — (See “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme”). But Mr. Zwartz and The Week present other “evidence” as well, and it is a central but unspoken feature in the indictment of Cardinal Pell:
“A combative participant in Australia’s culture wars,” the ultraconservative Pell had long been a divisive figure in Australia because of his `relentless, overbearing’ style. He was ruthless in punishing priests who deviated from doctrine by advocating changes to Mass or supporting ordination of women.”
Actual evidence of any offense from forty years ago does not exist in the Pell case, but for too many about the business of news and fake news, it need not exist. His Eminence is guilty of “other things”: fidelity to Catholic teaching, a conservative mindset, and an insistence that priests support orthodoxy. This is enough for the Trial by Media to rush to judgment.
Whether it is enough for the people of Australia remains to be seen. I think not. Even after my own experience of justice, I remain open to the hope that the better nature of thoughtful people will prevail. I know many Australians, and they are neither unjust nor “numb” as some in the news media suggest.
Where Are Your Accusers? (John 8:10)
Who are the current accusers in the trial of Cardinal Pell? It strikes me as bizarre that so many in the news media have focused this story only on the wider scandal and Cardinal Pell’s conservative mindset without much inquiry into the rest of the equation. Most in the media have said nothing about Pell’s accusers except to freely identify them as “victims,” and to insinuate that unnamed others contemplate coming forward.
There’s just enough smoke to create the impression of a raging fire Down Under. On June 30, The Media Report, an ever vigilant source of the rest of the sobering story, posted “Now This: The Media’s Cardinal Pell Disinformation Campaign.”
David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report focused on a sobering fact that most other reports have omitted or downplayed. These accusations are from forty years ago. Much of the news media will not identify the accusers because of politically correct policies to withhold the identities of sexual abuse victims, but these accusers are not children; they are men in their fifties.
They have criminal records of their own. Although that in itself does not discredit their claims, it should be sufficient enough for a closer look. The Media Report pointed out (with supportive links) that one of the accusers, Lyndon Monument, is an “admitted drug addict” who served a term in prison for criminal assault stemming from a drug debt. He also previously accused a childhood teacher of sexual abuse.
The other accuser, Damian Dignan, “has a criminal history for assault and drunk driving.” He has a history of alcohol abuse, and also previously accused a childhood teacher of assault. Both men are raising their claims against Cardinal Pell for the first time, forty years later, and only when the climate would lend itself to less scrutiny over financial settlements.
Experience tells me that both the justice system and the news media should be especially cautious in forming judgments in such a case. In 2005, during the height of the priesthood scandal in America, I wrote an article for Catalyst entitled “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud.”
The article details multiple cases of men with criminal records who concocted schemes to obtain financial settlements through fraudulent claims about Catholic priests. They took advantage of the very climate now smoldering behind the Pell case.
Then there was the story of Shamont Lyle Sapp that I exposed in “Catholic Priests and the Perversions of Predators.” Before he was investigated and exposed by a vigilant U.S. Attorney, Mr. Sapp, from his prison cell, accused several priests in multiple states using details and “evidence” gathered from Internet accounts of other accusations against priests. It was only a fluke that Sapp was investigated and caught in the scam.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The Media Report also reminded us that back in 2002, Cardinal Pell was previously accused by a “career criminal” who had been convicted of tax evasion, narcotics charges, illegal gambling operations, and organized crime with “an impressive 39 court convictions under his belt.” He accused Cardinal Pell of abusing him in 1962, but Pell was exonerated and cleared of the charge.
“Cardinal George Pell and Other Martyrs for a Nefarious Cause” raised the specter that claims like these 40-year-old charges are used by some as “weapons of mass destruction” in order to bolster other agendas. At the popular site, Whispers in the Loggia (“For the Cardinal Prefect, ‘My Day in Court’” June 29), Rocco Palmo raised the same “historical” abuse case from the 1960s in which Pell had been cleared, but he attributed its momentum, and its treatment in Rome, to other agendas:
“Two decades of revelations of abuse and cover-up have been treated as a political football among the Church’s ideological camps.”
There is no evidence or reason for treating the current forty-year-old “historical abuse” case as any different. The mere fact that charges were brought in such a case could have a lot more to do with Pell being a target for political factions that are happy to see him in the dock of justice knowing that, regardless of the outcome, Pell is permanently maligned and out of the way.
But among all the toxic press, there are many sounding the alarm that “Trial by Media” in Australia is itself facing trial. In National Review (“The Persecution of Cardinal George Pell,” June 29, 2017) author George Weigel described the campaign against Pell in Australia as…
“…a thoroughly poisonous public climate exacerbated by poorly sourced but widely disseminated allegations, no respect for elementary fairness, and a curious relationship between elements of the Australian media and the Victoria police…”
George Weigel cited comments from several Australians who have refused to become caught up in the climate of moral panic and nefarious agendas. These voices are worth hearing out. Attorney Robin Speed, President of the Australian Rule of Law Institute warned against prosecutors acting against Pell “in response to the baying of a section of the mob.”
Angela Shanahan in The Australian summarized the trajectory of the case:
“Conspiracy and rumor reign, logic and fact have gone out the window in the case of Cardinal Pell…. In all this sound and fury, the Cardinal has acted impeccably. He has said nothing except to state his innocence.”
Columnist Peter Craven, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (June 9) concluded,
“One can only hope to God that in the present climate people will be capable of realizing this is a case being mounted for a witch trial”
Voices of dissent against the blind orthodoxy of victimhood are a minority in Australia just as they are a minority in America. Some of these voices have been courageous in their defense, not only of Cardinal Pell, but of justice as an ideal that is now itself under indictment. Australian political commentator Amanda Vanstone, a former Ambassador to Italy and “no fan of organized religion,” wrote,
“George Pell’s trial by media has to stop. What we are seeing is no better than a lynch mob from the dark ages… The public arena is being used to trash a reputation and probably prevent a fair trial.”
Andrew Halphen, co-chairman of criminal law at the Law Institute of Victoria addressed the leaks to the media about Pell as a startling affront to the legal system. He expressed grave concern over whether Pell could now have a fair trial. He added that he could not think of any other case in which a charge against a public figure “finds its way to the front page of a major news publication before a person is actually charged.”
After I posted “Cardinal George Pell and Other Martyrs for a Nefarious Cause,” a first-time reader in Ballarat, Australia sent a comment that I want to post here because it speaks volumes about the climate in which Cardinal Pell faces trial. It begins with a quote from the above post:
“‘This nonsense continues because of the clamor of a few and the silence of many.’ Ahh, the irony of your comment. I am a Ballarat resident. My childhood bore witness to the culture of pedophilia that thrived here. And as an adult, the impact of the sexual abuse that happened to so many in my community continues.
“I am appalled by your lack of compassion for victims. Your want to dismiss the validity of these crimes because of the delay in victims coming forward and/or charges laid, and your implied belief that our Australian justice system is flawed.
“Our community knows its truths. The Catholic Church cannot conceal this truth as it once did. Your comments are just “clamor.” Hurtful clamor. Pell and the rest of “your fellow sufferers” [quoted from Cardinal Avery Dulles on TSW’s “About” page] cannot demand the silence of so many impacted because it doesn’t fit your narrative.”
— a resident of Ballarat, Australia
The defense rests its case. My heart goes out to Australians who have suffered the unspeakable, but the above comment makes the case for me. If what other priests did to other victims is now sufficient “evidence” to indict and convict Cardinal Pell then why have a trial at all? If it is too late to salvage justice from vengeance, then just take the man into the Outback and shoot him.
How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis
The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.
The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.
Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: In “Mary and the Fatima Century,” a recent post at Beyond These Stone Walls, I wrote of the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima that began on May 13, 1917. They continued on the 13th of each of several months to follow.
Before posting it, I received a message from journalist and historian Craig Turner writing from Virginia. He sent along the outline of a CD he produced for Lighthouse Catholic Media entitled “The Rise and Fall of Communism: How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a world in Crisis.” He described his historical analysis as “How Mary intervened during a time of great crisis in the Church and the world, to save us from a great evil.”
As I read through the outline, I discovered that Mr. Turner’s description was the understatement of the year. His historical summation of world events parallel to the apparitions at Fatima is fascinating: So I invited him to submit his outline as a guest post. It is a privilege to present this riveting overview of the Fatima Century by Craig Turner.
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Tours, France
In 1847 a young Carmelite nun made the astonishing claim that Jesus had begun appearing to her. Upon telling her superior, the claim was met with skepticism. In 1846, Jesus warned her of an approaching storm: “the malice of revolutionary men.” The following year, on March 14, he appeared again to her, stating that a society known as the “Communists” was working to spread…
On March 30, 1848, Jesus appeared to her for the last time telling her that she had completed her earthly mission and would soon die. Though she was in good health, she accepted this revelation with peace. She suddenly developed pulmonary tuberculosis and died on July 8, 1848, at the young age of 33.
Brussels, Belgium
At the same time Jesus appeared to the nun in Tours, France in 1847, an unknown political theorist living in exile in Brussels wrote his social contract called The Communist Manifesto. His name was Karl Marx. His financier and fellow author was Frederick Engels. Shortly after the work was published, a wave of unexplainable revolutions broke out in Europe.
The Manifesto presented what it claimed to be an answer to class struggle, and was quickly published in other languages. In France, socialists set up a government after the fall of Napoleon, but their government was overthrown and many of its members executed.
In Germany, the German Socialist-democratic party was created in 1875 but it was deemed a threat to the country and outlawed by the German government led by Otto von Bismarck. In 1890 it was once again legalized and fully adopted Marxist principles. In 1893, Karl Marx died in poverty, but The Communist Manifesto continued to attract adherents. Standing over his grave, Engels declared him to be the greatest thinker of their age.
Vatican City
On October 13, 1884, Pope Leo XIII had an extraordinary vision: He had just finished offering Mass at the Vatican when he was knocked to the floor of his chapel by a supernatural force and heard the voices of Jesus and the devil in conversation.
The devil declared in a raspy and guttural voice that he can conquer the world and boasts he will have ultimate victory, but needs time and power “to those who have given themselves over to my service.” [It was at this time that Pope Leo XIII composed the well-known Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel.]
Russia
By 1905, three competing parties evolved in Russia. The Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party advocated for a complete revolution. Social upheaval erupted in Russia and Europe. Though Karl Marx stated that Russia was an unlikely candidate for communism, it proceeded slowly along this path.
Western Europe
Other parts of Europe experienced socialist leanings and anti-religious fervor. The conflicts centered around two factions: those wanting to retain their personal liberties vs. the new forms of socialist governments and a conflict between the Catholic Church and atheist communism. [How history repeats!]
At this time, religious persecution broke out in Portugal. Between 1911 and 1916, 1,700 priests and religious were murdered. Religious property was confiscated and a law passed forbidding public religious ceremonies. Alfonso Costa, the head of state, publicly declared that “Thanks to this law, Portugal within two generations will have succeeded in completely eliminating Catholicism.”
On May 12, 1914, two weeks before the outbreak of World War I, 22 people mowing fields in Hrushiv, Ukraine saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told them, “There will be a war; Russia will become a Godless country, and their country will suffer terribly for 80 years, and will have to live through the world wars [spoken in the plural] but afterward will be free.”
Two weeks later, World War I broke out across Europe. Coupled with a global epidemic of tuberculosis, the war claimed tens of millions of lives. By 1917, more than 1.3 million Russian men had been killed in battle, 4.2 million were wounded, and another 2.4 million were captured. In the midst of this desperate struggle, Pope Benedict XV issued a public letter with an urgent plea to Mary to help bring peace to the world.
Fatima, Portugal
On May 13, 1917, eight days after the Pope made his plea, three shepherd children in a remote region of Portugal experienced the vision of a magnificently beautiful woman who descended from the sky surrounded by a supernatural light. She stood suspended at the top of a large tree. They asked where she was from, and she said, “I am from Heaven.” She asked that the children return on the 13th of each month for five more months. During the following months, great crowds began to assemble.
On the third visit, July 13, 1917, the “Beautiful Lady,” as the three children called her, declared that war is going to end, but that if the people do not cease offending God, a worse war will break out “When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign” of the impending future war, she said, as well as persecutions of the Church.
She promised to return to ask for the consecration of Russia to her, a form of entrustment or dedication. She did this in a future visit to one of the visionaries in 1929. Russia, she continued at Fatima, will soon become Communist.
On October 13,1917, the final apparition, more than 70,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. For 12 minutes, they saw the sun spin and “dance” in the sky but their eyes were not harmed. It was exactly 33 years to the day since Pope Leo XIII had seen his vision in the Vatican chapel.
Moscow, Russia
In the same hour in which the Miracle of the Sun took place at Fatima, Vladimir Lenin entered Russia with a plan to establish a Communist state. At that same time, Bolsheviks in Moscow seized control of the great cathedral of the city, built by the Czars, and destroyed it. The miraculous and prized icon of Kazan housed in the cathedral was swiftly taken to safety outside Russia. Less than one month later, all of Russia fell to communism.
Lenin, the leader of Communist Russia, declared that religion is the “opiate of the masses,” and worked to stamp out religious belief. In 1918 he dissolved democracy and began remodeling the country upon Marxist principles by nationalizing industries and confiscating land. In 1922, he formally founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Lenin was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who would ultimately be responsible for 20 million deaths. He believed that religion must be removed in order for the ideal Communist society to be constructed. As a result, the government promoted atheism as the state belief system and carried out a campaign of terror against religious adherents.
In the 1930s, it became dangerous to be openly religious in Russia as churches were destroyed or confiscated and religion was violently persecuted. In 1917, there were 54,000 Russian Orthodox parishes in Russia. By 1939, they numbered only in the hundreds, and tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns had been persecuted or killed. Approximately 100,000 people were shot during the religious purge of 1937-1938.
In Spain, Catholics fared no better than the Orthodox in Russia. During the Spanish Civil War, 11,000 priests and nuns were killed by communist loyalists, and more than 20,000 churches, convents, and Catholic schools were desecrated or destroyed.
Berlin, Germany
On the evening of January 25, 1938, an enormous light appeared in the sky across the globe, attributed later to be the greatest aurora borealis since 1709. The New York Times headline the following day was “Aurora Borealis Startles Europe.” Though usually seen in northern climates, the lights were seen as far south as southern Australia and knocked out radio transmissions.
Ten days later, Adolf Hitler took command of the armed forces of Germany. The following month he began his plan of world conquest by marching troops into Austria. The war that followed was devastating and catastrophic as disparate countries were pulled into the conflict. Several nations were ravaged by war, fulfilling the prophecy of the “Beautiful Lady” at Fatima.
By 1945 the tide had turned and World War II in Europe was nearly over, but with a staggering cost: 50 million dead. The most viciously persecuted were the Jews. Catholics fared only a little better. Of the 20,000 Catholic priests in Germany when Hitler came to power, 14,364 were killed, imprisoned, or exiled.
Seeing that his failure was imminent, Hitler dictated his will, blaming the Jews for World War II, and justifying their extermination. The following day he swallowed a cyanide capsule and died.
Japan was also at war with the United States and her allies in the Pacific. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It leveled every building within one mile of the center of the blast with the exception of one structure: a parish house, eight blocks from the epicenter where eight Jesuits were living and had prayed the rosary daily.
Included in their prayers each day was a plea given at Fatima, “save us from the fires of hell.” They were the only people within a four-mile radius to have survived.
Eastern Europe
In an ironic twist of fate, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the patroness of the United States. On the day of the feast itself, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan was forced to surrender and accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary (also the name of the church in Hiroshima where the eight Jesuits survived).
On May 13, 1955, the 38th anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima, the Soviets began to withdraw their troops from Austria after a massive prayer campaign. In 1950, 66 years after Pope Leo XIII had his vision, Pope Pius XII defined as dogma the Assumption of Mary.
Meanwhile, communism had spread from the countries of Eastern Europe to China. In 1949, Mao Zedong established The People’s Republic of China as a communist nation. That same year, Western nations for NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — aligned as a defense against the spread of communism. In 1955 the Warsaw Pact formed among the communist nations. In 1961, construction of the Berlin Wall began, a symbol of the Cold War.
Pope John Paul II after being shot multiple times at point-blank range in Saint Peter’s Square.
Vatican City
In 1978, a little-known cardinal from Communist Poland was elected pope. He subsequently condemned both communism and “unbridled capitalism.” The following year, a trade union at the Gdansk, Poland shipyard went on strike demanding freedom and democracy. The new pope managed to keep communist Polish authorities from succeeding in suppressing the strikers.
On May 13, 1981, the 64th anniversary of the first appearance of Mary at Fatima, Pope John Paul II was shot and nearly killed in Saint Peter’s Square by a man with ties to Bulgarian Communism. The following year, Pope John Paul visited Fatima and stated that Mary “guided the bullet” saving his life.
The surgeon who removed the bullet affirmed that its trajectory should have passed directly through the main arteries of his heart, but somehow moved around the organ sparing the Pope’s life.
Seeing the connection between these events, Pope John Paul II asked for the documents pertaining to Fatima in the Vatican Archives. He read them, concluding that the consecration of Russia to Mary, in union with the bishops of the world, would fulfill Mary’s request and end Russian Communism.
One hundred years after Pope Leo XIII had his vision of satanic influence, Pope John Paul II consecrated Russia to Mary in a ceremony in Saint Peter’s Square. The following year, an obscure communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, became leader of the USSR. Pope John Paul, in a letter to the last surviving Fatima visionary, asked if the consecration was done correctly. She responded, “Our Lady will keep her promises.”
On April 27, 1987, there were reports of the Virgin Mary appearing again in Hrushiv, Ukraine to a 12-year-old above a small church. Other reports followed in the ensuing months. Suddenly, and almost without warning, the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989 and citizens passed freely between the East and the West. That same year, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania became independent states followed by the Ukraine in 1991.
Later in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared for a news conference on Russian television and announced that he is dissolving the Soviet Union and ending Russian Communism. The date was December 25, 1991, Christmas Day.
Craig Turner is a columnist and business owner in Washington, DC. He began his career in journalism in the 1980s covering Capitol Hill for Government Information Services. He has worked in both communications and public relations. His articles have been published in both print and online media including MSNBC, Business Week, and Reuters.
The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’
The Passion of the Christ has historical meaning on its face, but a far deeper story lies beneath where the threads of faith and history connect to awaken the soul.
The Passion of the Christ has historical meaning on its face, but a far deeper story lies beneath where the threads of faith and history connect to awaken the soul.
There are few things in life that a priest could hear with greater impact than what was revealed to me in a recent letter from a reader of These Stone Walls. After stumbling upon TSW several months ago, the writer began to read these pages with growing interest. Since then, she has joined many to begin the great adventure of the two most powerful spiritual movements of our time: Marian Consecration and Divine Mercy. In a recent letter she wrote, “I have been a lazy Catholic, just going through the motions, but your writing has awakened me to a greater understanding of the depths of our faith.”
I don’t think I actually have much to do with such awakenings. My writing doesn’t really awaken anyone. In fact, after typing last week’s post, I asked my friend, Pornchai Moontri to read it. He was snoring by the end of page two. I think it is more likely the subject matter that enlightens. The reader’s letter reminded me of the reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians read by Pornchai a few weeks ago, quoted in “De Profundis: Pornchai Moontri and the Raising of Lazarus”:
“Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
I may never understand exactly what These Stone Walls means to readers and how they respond. That post generated fewer comments than most, but within just hours of being posted, it was shared more than 1,000 times on Facebook and other social media.
Of 380 posts published thus far on These Stone Walls, only about ten have generated such a response in a single day. Five of them were written in just the last few months in a crucible described in “Hebrews 13:3 Writing Just This Side of the Gates of Hell.” I write in the dark. Only Christ brings light.
Saint Paul and I have only two things in common — we have both been shipwrecked, and we both wrote from prison. And it seems neither of us had any clue that what we wrote from prison would ever see the light of day, let alone the light of Christ. There is beneath every story another story that brings more light to what is on the surface. There is another story beneath my post, “De Profundis.” That title is Latin for “Out of the Depths,” the first words of Psalm 130. When I wrote it, I had no idea that Psalm 130 was the Responsorial Psalm for Mass before the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus:
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Lord hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication…
”I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and I hope in his word;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn,
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.”
Notice that the psalmist repeats that last line. Anyone who has ever spent a night lying awake in the oppression of fear or dark depression knows the high anxiety that accompanies a long lonely wait for the first glimmer of dawn. I keep praying that Psalm — I have prayed it for years — and yet Jesus has not seen fit to fix my problems the way I want them fixed. Like Saint Paul, in the dawn’s early light I still find myself falsely accused, shipwrecked, and unjustly in prison.
Jesus also prayed the Psalms. In a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic, he cries out from the Cross, “Eli, Eli làma sabach-thàni?” It is not an accusation about the abandonment of God. It is Psalm 22, a prayer against misery and mockery, against those who view the cross we bear as evidence of God’s abandonment. It is a prayer against the use of our own suffering to mock God. It’s a Psalm of David, of whom Jesus is a descendant by adoption through Joseph:
“Eli, Eli làma sabach-thàni?
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are You so far from my plea,
from the words of my cry? …
… All who see me mock at me;
they curse me with parted lips,
they wag their heads …
Indeed many dogs surround me,
a pack of evildoers closes in upon me;
they have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones …
They divide my garments among them;
for my clothes they cast lots.”
So maybe, like so many in this world who suffer unjustly, we have to wait in hope simply for Christ to be our light. And what comes with the light? Suffering does not always change, but its meaning does. Take it from someone who has suffered unjustly. What suffering longs for most is meaning. People of faith have to trust that there is meaning to suffering even when we cannot detect it, even as we sit and wait to hear, “Upon the Dung Heap of Job: God’s Answer to Suffering.”
The Passion of the Christ
Last year during Holy Week, two Catholic prisoners had been arguing about why the date of Easter changes from year to year. They both came up with bizarre theories, so one of them came to ask me. I explained that in the Roman Church, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (equinox is from the Latin, “equi noctis,” for “equal night”). The prisoner was astonished by my ignorance and said, “What BS! Easter is forty days after Ash Wednesday!”
Getting to the story beneath the one on the surface is important to understand something as profound as the events of the Passion of the Christ. You may remember from my post, “De Profundis,” that Jesus said something perplexing when he learned of the illness of Lazarus:
“This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it”
The irony of this is clearer when you see that it was the raising of Lazarus that condemned Jesus to death. The High Priests were deeply offended, and the insult was an irony of Biblical proportions (no pun intended). Immediately following upon the raising of Lazarus, “the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council” (the Sanhedrin). They were in a panic over the signs performed by Jesus. “If he goes on like this,” they complained, “the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place (the Jerusalem Temple) and our nation” (John 11 47-48).
The two major religious schools of thought in Judaism in the time of Jesus were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Both arose in Judaism in the Second Century B.C. and faded from history in the First Century A.D. At the time of Jesus, there were about 6,000 Pharisees. The name, “Pharisees” — Hebrew for “Separated Ones” — came as a result of their strict observance of ritual piety, and their determination to keep Judaism from being contaminated by foreign religious practices. Their hostile reaction to the raising of Lazarus had nothing to do with the raising of Lazarus, but rather with the fact that it occurred on the Sabbath which was considered a crime.
Jesus actually had some common ground with the Pharisees. They believed in angels and demons. They believed in the human soul and upheld the doctrine of resurrection from the dead and future life. Theologically, they were hostile to the Sadducees, an aristocratic priestly class that denied resurrection, the soul, angels, and any authority beyond the Torah.
Both groups appear to have their origin in a leadership vacuum that occurred in Jerusalem between the time of the Maccabees and their revolt against the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanies who desecrated the Temple in 167 B.C. It’s a story that began Lent on These Stone Walls in “Semper Fi! Forty Days of Lent Giving Up Giving Up.”
The Pharisees and Sadducees had no common ground at all except a fear that the Roman Empire would swallow up their faith and their nation. And so they came together in the Sanhedrin, the religious high court that formed in the same time period the Pharisees and Sadducees themselves had formed, in the vacuum left by the revolt that expelled Greek invaders and their desecration of the Temple in 165 B.C.
The Sanhedrin was originally composed of Sadducees, the priestly class, but as common enemies grew, the body came to include Scribes (lawyers) and Pharisees. The Pharisees and Sadducees also found common ground in their disdain for the signs and wonders of Jesus and the growth in numbers of those who came to believe in him and see him as Messiah.
The high profile raising of Lazarus became a crisis for both, but not for the same reasons. The Pharisees feared drawing the attention of Rome, but the Sadducees felt personally threatened. They denied any resurrection from the dead, and could not maintain religious influence if Jesus was going around doing just that. So Caiaphas, the High Priest, took charge at the post-Lazarus meeting of the Sanhedrin, and he challenged the Pharisees whose sole concern was for any imperial interference from the Roman Empire. Caiaphas said,
“You know nothing at all. You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, so that the whole nation should not perish”
The Gospel of John went on to explain that Caiaphas, being High Priest, “did not say this of his own accord, but to prophesy” that Jesus was to die for the nation, “and not for the nation only, but, to gather into one the children of God” (John 11: 41-52). From that moment on, with Caiaphas being the first to raise it, the Sanhedrin sought a means to put Jesus to death.
Caiaphas presided over the Sanhedrin at the time of the arrest of Jesus. In the Sanhedrin’s legal system, as in our’s today, the benefit of doubt was supposed to rest with the accused, but … well … you know how that goes. The decision was made to find a reason to put Jesus to death before any legal means were devised to actually bring that about.
Behold the Man!
The case found its way before Pontius Pilate, the Roman Prefect of Judea from 25 to 36 A.D. Pilate had a reputation for both cruelty and indecision in legal cases before him. He had previously antagonized Jewish leaders by setting up Roman standards bearing the image of Caesar in Jerusalem, a clear violation of the Mosaic law barring graven images.
All four Evangelists emphasize that, despite his indecision about the case of Jesus, Pilate considered Jesus to be innocent. This is a scene I have written about in a prior Holy Week post, “Behold the Man as Pilate washes His Hands.”
On the pretext that Jesus was from Galilee, thus technically a subject of Herod Antipas, Pilate sent Jesus to Herod in an effort to free himself from having to handle the trial. When Jesus did not answer Herod’s questions (Luke 23: 7-15) Herod sent him back to Pilate. Herod and Pilate had previously been indifferent, at best, and sometimes even antagonistic to each other, but over the trial of Jesus, they became friends. It was one of history’s most dangerous liaisons.
The trial before Pilate in the Gospel of John is described in seven distinct scenes, but the most unexpected twist occurs in the seventh. Unable to get around Pilate’s indecision about the guilt of Jesus in the crime of blasphemy, Jewish leaders of the Sanhedrin resorted to another tactic. Their charge against Jesus evolved into a charge against Pilate himself: “If you release him, you are no friend of Caesar” (John 19:12).
This stopped Pilate in his tracks. “Friend of Caesar” was a political honorific title bestowed by the Roman Empire. Equivalent examples today would be the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed upon a philanthropist, or a bishop bestowing the Saint Thomas More Medal upon a judge. Coins of the realm depicting Herod the Great bore the Greek insignia “Philokaisar” meaning “Friend of Caesar.” The title was politically a very big deal.
In order to bring about the execution of Jesus, the religious authorities had to shift away from presenting Jesus as guilty of blasphemy to a political charge that he is a self-described king and therefore a threat to the authority of Caesar. The charge implied that Pilate, if he lets Jesus go free, will also suffer a political fallout.
So then the unthinkable happens. Pilate gives clemency a final effort, and the shift of the Sadducees from blasphemy to blackmail becomes the final word, and in pronouncing it, the Chief Priests commit a far greater blasphemy than the one they accuse Jesus of:
“Shall I crucify your king? The Chief Priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.”
Then Pilate handed him over to be crucified.
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De Profundis: Pornchai Moontri and the Raising of Lazarus
The raising of Lazarus, the sixth of seven signs in the Gospel of St. John, is told “so that you may believe.” The raising of Pornchai Moontri is that story retold.
The raising of Lazarus, the sixth of seven signs in the Gospel of St. John, is told “so that you may believe.” The raising of Pornchai Moontri is that story retold.
Some very important things occurred on the day before I sat down to type this post. The day began for me at about 5:00 AM. I was alone in the dark, walking in silent solitude through the dew laden grass of the New Hampshire State Prison Ballfield. There was not another soul in sight. The day’s first light was but a hint of gray barely visible above the walls and razor wire. A few birds were stirring with the dawn’s early light, their song one of hope and serenity. I could smell the grass and the early morning air. All was beautiful. Succumbing to the hypnotic scene, I lay down in the beckoning grass and fell into a deep sleep.
And then I suddenly awoke from that dream to the harsh reality that ushers in my real day. The soft grass instantly transformed into cold concrete, the melody of songbirds into the snores of grown men, the smell of grass and the morning air into the stale and crowded confinement of what sometimes feels like a tomb.
I longed to drift back into my dream, but it was a luxury I could not afford that day. So I rolled over to the edge of my bunk, reached down to the floor, and plugged in a pot of water for coffee. Then I lay in the dark and placed before the Lord the important things of the day that lay before us.
A few minutes later, Pornchai-Max Moontri jumped down from his upper bunk and silently poured hot water into two cups of instant coffee. The other six denizens of our cell still slept as we prepared for a momentous day in prison. At 6:00 AM, Pornchai walked from our cell to a small bank of three telephones to place a long awaited call. For the first time since he was taken from his home and country at age 11 — 32 years ago — Pornchai placed a call to someone in Thailand. And it was not just ANY someone.
It was 6:00 PM in Thailand, and his first call to his homeland was to Yela Smit, a founding member of “Divine Mercy Thailand,” a group that reached across the world to embrace Pornchai with something he had once given up all hope for: a life beyond this long sleep of death in prison. This moment had its origin in one of the most compelling accounts of faith written at These Stone Walls, “Knock and the Door Will Open: Divine Mercy in Bangkok, Thailand.” Just how miraculous is that gift might be clearer below, but first, the story of Lazarus.
“I Have Come To Believe!”
Pornchai himself seemed to provide a prelude to the story of Lazarus. At Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, he stood at the lectern to proclaim the Second Reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians. I found it difficult to distinguish the words from the life’s reality of the man proclaiming them:
“You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth. Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness, rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret, but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.’”
It amazes me how much those very words proclaimed by Pornchai-Max at Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Lent are both a summation of his life and a prelude to the raising of Lazarus in John 11:1-45. Pay special attention to this Gospel passage for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Before we tell more, it needs a little background.
It was Winter in Jerusalem, and the Feast of the Dedication, the event known to us as Hanukkah. We began Lent at These Stone Walls this year with the background story of this Feast in “Semper Fi! Forty Days of Lent Giving Up Giving Up.” When Jesus went to the Temple at the time of this Feast (described in John 10:22-42), He was walking in the Portico of Solomon on the eastern side of the Temple mentioned in Acts of the Apostles 3:11.
Some of the Jews surrounded him, and challenged him about a circulating rumor that he is the Christ. They wanted him to claim it plainly, and they had taken up stones to execute him for blasphemy if he did. Storm clouds were gathering, and rumbling calls for his death were growing in Jerusalem.
Some Pharisees had been investigating his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath. They first thought the man had been faking his blindness, but witnesses attested that he had been blind from birth. They questioned the formerly blind man about the “sinner” who had healed him, but the man shot back, “Would God listen to a sinner?”
Now, at the Portico of Solomon in the Temple, Jesus spoke of his sheep hearing his voice. He challenged the Pharisees’ spiritual blindness, “If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me.” They took up stones and tried to arrest him, “but he escaped from their hands” (John 10:39). “The Hour of the Son of God” (the Seventh sign) had not yet come.
But then Jesus received word that Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany, was ill. When Jesus heard this, he said, “This illness is not unto death; it is for the greater glory of God, so that the Son of Man may be glorified because of it.” Then he simply took his time, inexplicably letting two more days pass before departing to complete this sixth of seven signs in the Fourth Gospel’s “Book of Signs,” the raising of Lazarus from his tomb, the Gospel for the Fifth Sunday of Lent.
But first, what does the Fourth Gospel mean by its “Book of Signs?” Written in Greek, Saint John’s Gospel uses an interchangeable term – Sêmeion – for both “signs” and “miracles.” The Greek word is used sixty times through the New Testament, seventeen of them in the Fourth Gospel. Since the first six of the Gospel’s seven signs are found in Chapters one through twelve, this part of the Gospel is called “The Book of Signs.”
For this Evangelist, the signs of Jesus are mighty works, but they are also miracles told for a specific purpose. They are “signs” that lift a corner of the veil to point the readers’ gaze to the glory of God working through Christ. The signs of Jesus echo the signs of Moses during the Exodus from Egypt:
“And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and wonders… and for all the mighty wonder and all the great and terrible deeds which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel.”
The Sixth Sign, the raising of Lazarus, concludes the Book of Signs, and makes way for the rest of the Gospel and the Seventh Sign, the final and climactic sign — the Resurrection of Jesus — which Jesus elsewhere calls “The Sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:39).
It is for this reason that the Church permanently chooses the Passion account from the Gospel According to Saint John for the proclamation of the Gospel on Good Friday. It is very different from the other three Gospel accounts. Here, the death of Christ is not just sacrifice and the path to redemption. It is also the moment of the enthronement of Christ the King upon the Cross. As the Seventh Sign, it is the fulfillment of the purpose of all the signs, in just the way that the Evangelist has Jesus presenting the illness of Lazarus: “To bring glory to God.” Martha, the sister of Lazarus, bridges the Sixth and Seventh signs in a dialogue with Jesus about the death of her brother:
“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whoever believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.’”
The Raising of Lazarus
Almost inexplicably in this Gospel account, once Jesus learns of the illness of Lazarus, he “stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (11:7). The account takes great pains to present that by the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus is not asleep or in a coma, but is dead, wrapped and bound in a burial shroud, and sealed in a tomb for four days. There can be no doubt.
The disciples are incredulous that Jesus would even think of going to Bethany in Judea where many of the Jews who had been in Jerusalem have now also gone. “Rabbi, the Jews were but now seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” (John 11:8) The disciples totally misunderstand his reply — “If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble.” Throughout the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is aware that until his “hour” comes, he can walk through all of Judea in safety. (We mined the depths of this “hour” in the Fourth Gospel in a Holy Week post, “Now Comes the Hour of the Son of God.”)
I found the response of Martha (above) to be perplexing at first: “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.” What could Martha mean by “coming into the world?” Jesus is already in the world. It’s a sort of presage of the events to come. Upon the cross, in sight of His mother and the Beloved Disciple, Jesus Himself becomes the Gate of Heaven. The raising of Lazarus is a preface to that event, and with the entire scene set, it is told in the simplest terms:
“‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”
With those few words, the Fourth Gospel ends the Sixth Sign by ascribing to Jesus what was once for Israel the sole purview of Yahweh: the power over death, and life. From this point on in the Gospel of John, the Seventh Sign commences as the plot to put Jesus to death gets underway.
Another Chapter in Pornchai’s Story
There were chapters after this one awaiting in the future of Lazarus, but we will never know what they are. But this account echoes across the centuries, and still reverberates in countless lives of those called from death to life. Though Lazarus was physically dead, there is a parallel for those summoned forth from the tombs of spiritual death. One of them is our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and his story is also told to unveil the glory of God.
I cannot tell all of it yet for some important chapters are still being written. But I can tell you this: the full account, when told, will be one of the most important Divine Mercy stories of our time. In the coming months, we hope to tell more of it, for the odds against any of it unfolding as they did are astronomical.
Pornchai’s recent telephone call to Thailand was but the latest step out of darkness into the light, and like Lazarus it leads only to his unbinding and new life. In 2009 when These Stone Walls began, we did not see this as even possible. Somehow, while buried in a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire, we managed to tell a tale that circled the world, and when it came back around to us, it carried with it a multitude of good will and bonds of connection. For Pornchai, this tapestry of grace is still being woven, replacing the threads of only vague dreams and little hope with the powerful weaving of Divine Mercy. All has changed.
Among the instruments of that change is Viktor Weyand who is pictured in the photograph below with Pornchai Moontri. Viktor, an Austrian living in the United States, is a member of Divine Mercy Thailand and a founder of Divine Mercy School in Bangkok. During one of his many visits to Bangkok three years ago, he was asked to investigate the story of a young Thai man in an American prison in New Hampshire. That story drifted around the world from These Stone Walls. As happens among the hidden threads behind every tapestry of grace, Divine Mercy created bonds of connection that gathered strength and then rolled back the stone of Pornchai’s spiritual tomb. And as he put it, “I woke up one day with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past.”
The story of this other Lazarus is coming, and like the first, it will knock your socks off! For, now I can only give you once again the very words from Saint Paul that Pornchai read at Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Lent to open our hearts to the story of Lazarus:
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead. Christ will be your light.”
Editor’s Note: You might like these other journeys into the deeper threads of the Tapestry of God in Sacred Scripture from These Stone Walls:
Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah
A Transfiguration Before Our Very Eyes
Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand
On the Road to Jericho: A Parable for the Year of Mercy
Upon the Dung Heap of Job: God’s Answer to Suffering
St Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
Angelic Justice: St Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone
A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.
A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.
At some point before or after reading this post, pay a visit to Ralph Cipriano’s “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case” in Newsweek Magazine, published in February, 2016. My post about it is one of the most widely read and shared posts on Beyond These Stone Walls. Some readers found it infuriating. Others enlightening. But nearly all readers were shocked to learn of this story from only one humble little “new media” blog while all the once trustworthy “old media” (with the striking exception of Newsweek) blatantly ignored it.
I’ll explain why they ignored it in a moment, but I warn you in advance, the answer isn’t pretty. I reveal this true account only on a “need to know” basis — as in, “You need to know.” Before you spend another dime on a news media subscription under the guise of being kept informed, you need to know.
In an article for Newsmax magazine (“Trump Taps Into Mass Distrust,” April 22, 2016), Catholic League President Bill Donohue cited a new poll by the Media Insight Project. It was a joint effort by the Associated Press and the American Press Institute, and the results did not go well for the political and media elite.
Respondents in the survey were asked to comment on how much confidence they have in various sectors of society. I found the results fascinating. The top five sources of public trust in America are the military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion, and financial institutions.
At rock bottom on the barometer of public trust were the very news media platforms that launched the survey. Only six percent of Americans responded that they had a great deal of confidence in the press. Members of Congress followed close behind with an embarrassing four percent.
Bill Donohue, whose academic background includes a doctorate in sociology, reported that the two most common reasons cited for widespread public mistrust of the news media are inaccurate reporting and media bias. Donohue also cited other sources that give perspective to the media survey results. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll found that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to “get the facts straight.” By 2011, that figure dropped by more than half to only 25 percent. In the 1985 Pew survey, 45 percent of Americans judged the media to be biased. In 2011, that figure jumped to 63 percent.
The Crocodile Tears of a Predatory Media
One of the clearest examples of why the media is no longer trusted can be found in an important story that became buried under all the recent election coverage. A few weeks before the election, Journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, testified under oath as a defendant in a $7.5 million lawsuit charging her with actual malice, and Rolling Stone with defamation. The lawsuit was filed by University of Virginia Administrator Nicole Eramo.
Two years earlier, Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone defamed Ms. Eramo and U-VA in “A Rape on Campus,” a notorious November, 2014, story. It was the shocking account of “Jackie” who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a U-VA fraternity in 2012. The story helped launch a national debate about sexual assault on college campuses across the nation, and contributed to an atmosphere of moral panic. Draconian measures to limit the due process rights of any student so accused were set in place in response to the high profile account.
Erdely’s Rolling Stone account depicted U-VA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of Jackie and, by extension, other victims of sexual assault. But when Erdely’s rolling stones gathered up their dirt and the dust settled on this story, a major problem slowly came to light.
Jackie’s story turned out to be a massive lie, and Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. Erdely did no fact checking of her own. She just ran with the lurid and sensational account with no attempt at corroboration. In the defamation trial, Erdely drew upon the same script used by contingency lawyers against Catholic priests and bishops for two decades.
“It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” said Erdely in dismissal of her callous disregard for the journalistic skepticism so many in the media have abandoned in favor of political correctness. It is the same necessary skepticism that journalist Joan Wypijewski described in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”
I am haunted by the familiar ring of this story’s aftermath. Reading about Ms. Erdely’s agenda masked as journalism brought a loud and clear echo from my own trial as Judge Arthur Brennan instructed jurors to “disregard inconsistencies” in accuser Thomas Grover’s testimony.
And it recalled Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin’s shady and unexplained coaching of accusers. [In 2022 McLaughlin was exposed on a New Hampshire Attorney General’s previously secret list of dishonest police. McLaughlin’s offense was the fabrication of records and evidence.] In a 1994 police report, he described his response to my accusers’ inconsistencies and multiple versions of the story: “I gave them a copy of MacRae’s resume to help them with their dates.” Dates that repeatedly changed, and were off by years, not days or weeks or months.
“It’s not unusual,” Erdely explained when confronted on the witness stand about her response to the ever changing details and versions of Jackie’s account detailed in the Rolling Stone lawsuit. When Jackie changed aspects of her story, Erdely never questioned her credibility, never confronted her about the discrepancies. With streaming tears, the story and the wreckage left in its wake were all Jackie’s fault. “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”
The jury saw this differently. Rolling Stone was found to be liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice. The bar for proving defamation and malice against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for the truth. It was only after a multi-million dollar judgment was rendered against Rolling Stone that Erdely was removed from its Contributing Editors listing in the December 2016 issue.
Former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely; the late Fr. Charles Engelhardt, who died in prison; newly minted millionaire Daniel Gallagher, aka “Billy Doe.”
A Media Double Standard: When Erdely’s Jackie Was Billy
One can easily detect between the lines the rest of the news media’s discomfort with this story. Moriah Balingit took it on for The Washington Post in “Rolling Stone reporter says ‘Jackie deceived her about U-VA gang rape’” (October 20, 2016).
I commend Ms. Balingit for her truthful treatment of the story, but it’s a truth reported with carefully drawn limits. My strong suspicion is that the limits on truth were not those of the writer, but of The Washington Post. The focus of the account was on this one story, and not the standards and ethics of Sabrina Rubin Erdely. There is no reason to conclude that her compromised journalistic standards began with Jackie at U-VA.
A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of an agenda would look at Ms. Erdely’s past work as well, but they won’t. They won’t because doing so would require delving into another Rolling Stone debacle by Ms. Erdely. It’s a story that I have suggested at the top of this post: “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case.”
In that story, Ms. Erdely applied her “reckless disregard for truth” to the wildly inconsistent account of “Billy Doe” told in Rolling Stone on September 15, 2011 with the title, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It was a clear example of a writer’s preference for shock value over truth.
This time Ms. Erdely’s disregard for journalistic standards cost Father Charles Engelhardt — a good man and good priest — his life. He died chained to a bed in the hospital wing of a Pennsylvania prison because the news media failed in its once honored pursuit of truth. There is an explanation for why most in the news business cower from revisiting this story to look under the rolling stones cast by Ms. Erdely. The Wall Street Journal’ s Dorothy Rabinowitz, a rare and courageous “old media” voice of journalistic integrity, explained why:
“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children… [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle… It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators … Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”
Dorothy Rabinowitz, No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18
“The Story Was Killed Higher Up”
And it’s not just the press. Broadcast news is driven by the same agendas. Last year I was contacted by a correspondent for a popular cable news venue. This is a news figure with obvious integrity whose positions I trusted and still do. She had been reading Beyond These Stone Walls and invested some time in researching the story described on our “About” page. The news correspondent wrote to me asking if I would agree to an on-camera interview for what was described to me as “a few hard questions.”
I agreed, and then waited. And waited. And waited… But the hard questions were never asked. They were never asked because someone did not want them publicly answered. An acquaintance of the news correspondent told me of her disappointment that “the story was killed higher up.”
The story was killed for the same reasons The Washington Post or The New York Times will not look into Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s prior work for Rolling Stone. Hard questions will be asked, and it would be a politically incorrect affront to the media’s progressive agenda if those hard questions were answered. This would require a legitimate inquiry into the story of Daniel Gallagher — Erdely’s “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It would require some integrity reborn in an “old media” venue such as The Washington Post. For too many in the news business a progressive agenda requires the suppression of truth. As I wrote earlier, you need to know.
You need to know this too. The presiding judge in the case profiled by Ms. Erdely in Rolling Stone in 2011 was by no means immune from the bias Erdely helped to shape. During the process of vetting jurors for the trial of two priests accused in that case, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina objected to a question posed to prospective jurors saying,
“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”
Survivors and Liars
A recent issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture has an article by Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins entitled “Survivors and Liars” (August 2016). It’s an analysis of the story of Lauren Stratford. Her shocking tale of childhood sexual abuse and Satanic Ritual Abuse became a fixture of 1980s tabloid journalism “including a legendary Geraldo Rivera special broadcast near Halloween in 1988” in a “Geraldo” installment called “Satanic Breeders.” The story helped launch a moral panic giving unquestioned credence to the claims of adult “survivors” of sexual and Satanic Ritual Abuse that emerge without evidence, often with claims of “repressed and recovered” memory.
Just two weeks later, Geraldo Rivera helped launch the birth pangs of another moral panic with the November 1988 airing of “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It featured the early wave of contingency lawyers and the nascent voices of SNAP eager to harness the news media’s developing scent for Catholic scandal.
Ryan MacDonald found a transcript of that 1988 Geraldo Show among the first documents obtained by Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin to help defraud the Church out of a lot of money. Ryan produced a rather shocking report of his own about how that Geraldo Rivera show influenced the case against me in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”
As for Geraldo’s Lauren Stratford story, it was later exposed as a fraud thanks to a report of Bob and Gretchen Passantino entitled “Satan’s Sideshow” — described by Philip Jenkins as “a superb piece of investigative journalism.” Lauren Stratford’s shocking tale hyped on “Geraldo” was just a massive lie told by a delusional narcissist. In its wake, Philip Jenkins asks,
“Might other adult ‘survivors’ of child abuse be telling the literal truth? Certainly. But the case of Lauren Stratford should be a ringing reminder that, absent evidence, to the contrary, any one of them could be making up every word.”
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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
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 Wall Street Journal on the Case of Fr Gordon MacRae
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
Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester