Jesus Wept: The Death of Father Kenneth Walker, FSSP

At a Phoenix Catholic church on June 11, 2014 Fr Kenneth Walker was murdered and Fr Joseph Terra brutally beaten by a man paroled from prison six weeks earlier.

June 11, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Note from Father Gordon: Father Kenneth Walker, FSSP was tragically murdered at his parish on June 11, 2014. He was killed by a man who had recently been released from prison. Father Kenneth was 28 years old and had recently marked his second anniversary of ordination. As a priest and a prisoner, this tragedy struck me doubly. I wanted to remember him on this date with the post I wrote about him at that time. I believe this young martyr now stands in the presence of God.

With Blessings,

Father Gordon MacRae

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“Jesus wept.” Those two words in the Gospel of Saint John (11:35) comprise the shortest sentence in all of Sacred Scripture. Upon the sudden death of their brother Lazarus, his sisters, Martha and Mary, were consoled by many in their community. When they heard Jesus was coming, Martha went out to meet him while her sister Mary remained inside.

Martha engaged Jesus in a dialogue of faith in light of her brother’s death, but Mary challenged him with another kind of statement of faith: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died” (John 11:32).  Jesus asked to be taken to Lazarus. He saw Mary weeping, along with many others who had come to console her. Then, “Jesus wept.”

I must write of the tragic death of one of my brothers, Father Kenneth Walker, a  young man I have never even met.  I must write of this because I have friends who knew him, and who know Father Joseph Terra who was seriously injured in the attack that took Father Walker’s life. Like Martha in the Gospel account, I, too, believe Jesus is the resurrection and the life. But like Mary, I, too, want to say in my grief, “Lord, if you had been there, my brother would not have died.”  But  I believe in my heart that Jesus was there, and upon this senseless scene of human brokenness and tragic loss, Jesus wept.

For some who were not there, however, this story has all the makings of dark journalism. Father Joseph Terra, age 56, who went to investigate noises in the church courtyard, was ambushed and brutally beaten with a tire iron. Father Kenneth Walker, 28 years old and ordained just two years ago, walked in on the scene and was murdered by the intruder.

The man arrested for the murder and assaults is 54-year-old Gary Michael Moran, paroled from prison just weeks earlier having been convicted in 2005 of home invasion, burglary, and assault with a deadly weapon. In that case, he had stabbed a man in the abdomen before being subdued. Four years before that, he was sentenced in another case involving weapons. Moran did not know any of his victims then or now. In 2005, he said that he was crazed on methamphetamine, and cited a long history of drug abuse and its usual desperation for money to feed itself.

And in what has suggestively become the darkest fodder for politicizing the news of this tragedy, the gun that was used to kill Father Kenneth Walker did not belong to the crazed killer. It belonged to Father Joseph Terra. As the dust settled upon this case, I had no doubt that one or both ends of a political and moral spectrum would take this up, take it out of its context, and abuse this aspect of the story ad nauseam into a cacophony of political correctness.

That would be neither fair nor just, and if this aspect of the story gathers steam into a post mortem controversy, I believe you should give it the attention it deserves — which is none whatsoever. Father Joseph Terra bears no blame whatsoever for this tragedy, and is in fact one of its victims.

The Duty of Defense

Already, the mere fact that Father Joseph Terra owned a gun is littering the online world with suggestive overtones of disdain. Columnist EJ Montini, writing June 16 for AZCentral.com, had a posting entitled: “Should Catholic priests carry guns?” Of the murder of Father Walker, Mr. Montini wrote:

“The two priests operated in a tough part of town. And priests have as much right to protect themselves as anyone else. But does it seem incongruous for a priest to have a gun? … the former altar boy in me can’t imagine any of the priests I met as a kid carrying a weapon.”

I am not advocating that priests carry handguns, and in fact there is no evidence at all that Father Joseph Terra ever did. According to the news accounts, after being brutally beaten with a tire iron, which fractured his skull among other serious injuries, he had to flee the scene to retrieve a weapon kept in a rectory nightstand.  He then returned to try to stop the intruder from intruding any further.  The crazed meth addict allegedly wrestled the weapon away from Father Terra, and then shot and killed Father Walker who had just entered the scene.

Can “the former altar boy” in EJ Montini imagine the priests he knew as a kid being beaten to death in their churches by crazed meth addicts? Until he can, he has no right to cast a shadow on the fact that a citizen who defended himself was also a Catholic priest. These men of God were not attacked for some high ideal such as their profession of faith. They were attacked — one murdered and one nearly so — for the mere contents of their wallets, and whatever plunder could be carried off.

EJ Montini equated this scene with a story of a World War II priest chaplain in a war zone who was “armed” only with his rosary. The comparison was an insult to both our intelligence and our faith. Has Catholic culture in America become so comfortable with the notion of the last two decades that its priests should be little more than expendable targets with no ability or right of self-defense?

One friend with whom I spoke of this case by telephone this week asked if my position on Father Terra’s gun seems incongruous with the case against capital punishment that I laid out in “Stay of Execution: Catholic Conscience and the Death Penalty.” It is not, and in fact the very same moral principles apply to Father Terra’s right and duty of self-defense.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2263) quotes Saint Thomas Aquinas in the morally legitimate defense defined in CCC 2264 and 2265:

“The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life, and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended; the other is not..”

— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa II-II, 64,7

“Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.”

— CCC 2264

“Legitimate defense can be not only a right, but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm.”

— CCC 2265

The Death of Father Michael Mack

This story has brought back to me the full brunt of another tragic and eerily similar death of a priest with whom I once lived and who was — and remains — my friend. It’s an account that has come back to haunt me many times in the 12 years since it occurred, and with the Father Walker and Father Terra tragedy it has come back to haunt me again. I wrote some of this in a post called “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts,” but I had left out an important factor that I have often reflected upon since. What if I had been there?

On December 7, 2002, the Vigil of the Immaculate Conception, Father Michael Mack started a letter to me in prison from his rectory room in a parish in the Gallup, New Mexico Diocese where he had been assisting for several months. In the letter, Father Mike wrote of his decision to return to his community, the Servants of the Paraclete, and indeed was leaving that moment to commence the four-hour drive. He promised to continue the letter upon his return to the home he and I once lived in while I was a guest of that community, and a member of their staff in a ministry to wounded priests.

Late that night, as I was later able to piece together, Father Michael’s letter continued. Upon his arrival at the Servants of the Paraclete residence at midnight, he wrote of his happiness at finally being home, and of his hope that he might visit me in prison, might correspond more, and might help restore my freedom.

As he finished his midnight letter, Father Michael, who would have turned 60 two weeks later, did not know that he was not alone in that house. A 33-year-old drifter named Steven Degraff had chosen that night to break in through a back door, noting that the house had been empty for weeks as he staked it out. Armed with a knife and a hammer, hiding in a closet just fifteen feet from the desk where Father Mike finished his last letter to me, Steven Degraff awaited his moment to spring upon my friend.

Father Mike took his letter outside to a mailbox to be picked up the next day, and then walked back into that house to his death.  His body was found the next day. Father Mike had been beaten to death with a hammer. The intruder then took Father Mike’s wallet and fled in Father Mike’s car.

Being in prison where no one can contact me except by mail, Father Mike’s last letter to me reached me just minutes before news of his murder. After mail call on the evening of December 12, 2002, I sat at a table outside my cell to read my friend’s letter. I can never forget this moment. As I read, someone laid the previous day’s newspaper on the table. With Father Mike’s letter still in my left hand, I turned the page to “National News Briefs” and read of his murder.

Days later, Steven Degraff was arrested in neighboring Santa Fe County for stealing yet another car, and for drug paraphernalia. He had served prison sentences in four states before killing Father Mike, a crime for which he confessed to police.

December 2002 was also the height of the nationwide explosion of claims of sexual abuse by priests, and the lurid news was not lost on Steven Degraff.  Once Degraff talked with a lawyer, and learned that his murdered victim was a priest, he changed his story.  This 33-year-old sociopath admitted that he broke into the home, but added that he killed Father Mike because the priest tried to molest him. Fortunately, even at the peak of nationwide witch hunt about priests, Steven Degraff’s story was dismissed as a blatant lie, but not before it became lurid fodder for some in the news media.

Since then, I have often thought of what I might have done had I still lived in that house and was there with Father Mike that night. These are not pleasant thoughts for a priest — for anyone. In more reflective moments, I wish I could have left in that house the means for my friend to defend his own life. I have no doubt in my mind that if I had been there, Father Michael Mack would not have died.

Blaming Father Terra ... Raising up Psychopaths

Finally, I must write of this story because I have lived for two decades with one foot in both worlds: the world of Father Kenneth Walker whose life was taken, and Father Joseph Terra beaten and scapegoated; and the world of Gary Michael Moran, the career criminal and methamphetamine addict released from prison just six weeks before these horrific Phoenix crimes. I do not, as you know, live in that latter world by choice, or even by any act of my own.

But in the two decades in which I have been forced to live in that world, I have encountered many men like Gary Michael Moran and Steven Degraff in prison. Don’t think it is lost on me for a single moment that Moran had been paroled from prison three times — and the sociopath Steven Degraff four times — during the two decades that I have been kept in prison for crimes that never took place. This story is not about me — I know that — but it is a sobering thought for anyone who still believes America’s criminal justice system is not broken and still works in real life like it does on TV’s “Law and Order.”

Far more than prison itself, however, it is the “Pollyanna” naiveté of so many Americans — both Catholics and not — that I find most demoralizing.  The notion that men would not possibly accuse Catholic priests just for money is laughed at in prison by criminals like Gary Michael Moran and Steven Degraff. I have met some in prison who have snuffed out lives for a tiny fraction of the $200-grand doled out by my diocese to anyone ready to point at any priest.

I can no longer even count the number of times the minds of criminals have wandered in my direction, exploring ways to exploit our Catholic blindness about them while priests are thrown out of ministry — and sometimes into prison, and kept there. Should my post, “Our Catholic Tabloid Frenzy About Fallen Priests” now include even those who seek to defend themselves?

Might this tragedy in Phoenix cause some soul stirring about the bigger picture it represents? We can hope, and in fact it already has. A remarkable blog post by Rebecca Hamilton, “Guns. Blaming Father Terra for Trying to Defend Himself. And Raising Up Psychopaths.” (June 20, 2014) stands out among all the suggestive undertones about who wielded the murder weapon and how. I recommend reading all of it, but here is a portion that gave me pause:

“Guns are not the problem. We are. … The problem is our unwinding society and the feral young people we are raising up inside it. ... The blame-Father-Terra crowd is part of the problem... Good, normal people are always at a disadvantage in these situations ...”

I have prayed for Steven Degraff over these twelve long years, and I will pray for Gary Michael Moran.  So will the families, friends, and parishioners of Father Joseph Terra and our tragically lost son and brother, Father Kenneth Walker. These people are not Catholic lite.  They know their duty to the Gospel, and they will do it.

And as for Father Joseph Terra, I hold you in the highest regard, and with the deepest respect.  I humbly ask for your prayers, and from prison I offer you my fraternal Blessing. May Divine Mercy reign in our hearts.

Funeral Mass for Father Kenneth Walker, FSSP

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Thank you for reading and sharing this Special Post. We will occasionally add other Special Posts to honor significant dates. You may also like these related posts:

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Origin by Dan Brown, Like The Da Vinci Code, Is Bunk

In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown debunked Scripture to discredit Christianity. In Origin, he debunked science to discredit God. It is Dan Brown who needs debunking.

June 7, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Note to readers: Back in 2018 I wrote a post entitled “The Once and Future Catholic Church.” It tells an historically true account of a well documented event from the Sixth and early Seventh Century AD that took place in the life of Muhammad, founder of Islam. In 2011, the European Union High Court upheld the conviction of a seminar presenter who recounted this true story in a public lecture. The High Court ruling was that, though the story is historically accurate, retelling it in the present can only be to disparage Muhammad and Islam, which was the basis for the charge and fine.

Now, jump ahead a few years. You may have read or heard recent news about the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team and its annual “Pride Night” celebration. The Dodgers are the leading baseball franchise in a city that is one third Catholic. Nonetheless, its managers thought it politically correct to present an award to a famously outrageous group calling itself the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” They describe themselves as a “leading-edge order of queer and trans nuns” They are most visible for their crude depictions of sacred Catholic rituals to mock the Church and its moral teachings on homosexuality and transgenderism. After some protest from the Catholic League and other voices, the Dodgers thought it best to withdraw the invitation and award. But then they caved to a louder and more demanding outcry from members of the LGBTQ+ community. The Dodgers have renewed their award to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. And there, the matter stands.

The Wall Street Journal published two editorials about this high-profile debacle. One of them was by columnist Gerard Baker entitled, “The Bigotry That Proudly Speaks Its Name” (WSJ, May 30, 2023). I published one of the more than 2000 comments on this column in the WSJ, and my comment did not spare Church leaders for the setting in which such things happen today. Here is my comment:

“It would be unimaginable today, and not at all tolerated, if a similar disparagement was aimed at Islamic traditions or Jews. Neither would put up with it and rightly so. Catholic leaders in the United States especially have set the stage for this sort of ridicule by their open embrace of “Catholic Lite” and their practice of partisan politics. There are some faithful and courageous bishops who stand by the tenets of faith no matter the political cost. Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas comes to mind. Cardinal Dolan has also had his moments in the sun. However, the US bishops as a group have let pass opportunities to stand strong against the tide of relativism in support of life and their own Catholic traditions. They handle the second Catholic President in US history by entirely overlooking his living insult to the cause of life and what it means to be a faithful Catholic. Conservative bishops and priests are silent in the current regime out of fear of being cancelled. On the advice of liberal bishops, Pope Francis has marginalized the most faithful among us. It is no wonder that pop culture treats the Catholic Church as a farce. The late Father Richard John Neuhaus proposed a radical approach to saving the face of the Church in America: ‘Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity.’”

— WSJ, Gordon J. MacRae, June 1, 2023

There are many other factors that have lent themselves to the disparagement of Christianity and especially the ridicule of Catholicism in popular culture in a time when the very concept of “truth” is distorted as malleable and subjective.

As most readers of this blog know, I work as a clerk in a prison library. Granted, it a specialized legal library but a general library is attached to it with about 25,000 volumes available for education or entertainment. Too often, those two categories are blurred by some modern authors.

That is probably most true for authors like Dan Brown, a New Hampshire resident and an author of some of the most popular fiction that has been enjoyed by many but reinterpreted as scholarship by too many. I first wrote this post as a sort of public service in 2018 to counter in some small way the blatant disinformation in Dan Brown’s books. This is one of the posts I have long wanted to restore and update, but I ended up rewriting it for posting anew. Two millennia of Christian truth should not be simply waived away by the pen of a popular writer of highly distorted fiction masked as historical scholarship.

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Etymology, the study of the origins and meanings of words, has long been a fascination for me. So before delving into the claptrap and bunk of some of Dan Brown’s most popular novels, my terminology requires a little background.

“Claptrap” is often mistakenly used to refer to faulty logic or insincere babble, but that is not its only usage. Coming from the early days of modern theater, “claptrap” refers to a line or opinion inserted into a play for the sole purpose of generating applause. Thus a “claptrap” might be something like a subtle political reference for which some in agreement might spontaneously applaud. In turn, the rest of the audience would applaud because they did not want to appear that they missed the point. Claptrap is highly manipulative prose.

A similar modern day application is the laugh track on any one of several popular television sitcoms. The laugh track is subtle and often unnoticed, but if you listen carefully you will hear pre-recorded laughter from a non-existent audience. It is your cue that it’s time to laugh. The laugh track seems manipulative and irritating. Once you hear it, you can’t NOT hear it.

I characterize some of Dan Brown’s novels as claptrap because they undermine Christian traditions and beliefs at a time when the news media and pop culture have Christianity squarely in their sights for ridicule. In 2003, the Catholic Church in America was embroiled in a credibility crisis. Dan Brown chose that time in particular to take advantage of this momentum by publishing The Da Vinci Code. I’ll get around to debunking it in a moment.

But first, “bunk” and “debunk” are the other terms I want to explain. To say that some piece of information is “bunk” is commonly used to mean that it is false or contrived. Thus to “debunk” something is to expose its falsehood. There is more to these terms, however. The word “bunk” comes from a source where inarguably lots of bunk has originated: the floor of the United States Congress. During the 16th Congressional Session from 1819 to 1821, Congressman Felix Walker represented Buncombe County, North Carolina. One day, he held a captive audience when he droned on for hours with an incomprehensible speech despite protests from his colleagues.

Congressman Walker’s district, Buncombe County, was sometimes spelled “Bunkum” County by the less literate, and it was often referred to in conversation simply as “Bunk.” So both the word and the place became associated with that one nonsensical speech. Thus, “bunk” came to refer to a drawn out, illogical display of nonsense with no real conclusion. However, the remedy for bunk was delayed for a century in North Carolina. The word, “debunk” did not appear in any official document or literature until 1923.

The Legend of the Holy Grail

The premise of Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, is that the famous 15th Century painter, Leonardo Da Vinci, embedded within his art a set of symbols for some enlightened future generation to find and interpret. It’s really Dan Brown’s Code because there is nothing in the field of art history to support it. The principal character and interpreter of the “secret” symbols in this and several other Dan Brown novels is Robert Langdon, a Harvard “Symbologist.” Brown does not make it easy to critique Langdon and his interpretations because the field of Symbology does not exist at Harvard or anywhere else.

And what these secret symbols supposedly reveal to Dan Brown’s characters is bunk. His characters uncover a conspiracy through which the Catholic Church has for centuries suppressed a truth that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and that together they gave birth to a bloodline. That bloodline, the supposed descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, became the Merovingian Dynasty of French kings. This was all known to a secret cabal called the Priory of Sion and kept covered up by a more sinister secret society called Opus Dei. It is, as I wrote earlier, pure bunk. But it is bunk that sold over 35 million copies to a generation of readers all-too-receptive to claptrap in a world poised to applaud and embrace anti-Catholic propaganda. Dan Brown’s books have sold 200 million copies worldwide. In 2005, after a year with The Da Vinci Code topping all the bestseller lists, Dan Brown was named one of the most influential writers in the world by Time Magazine.

A clever part of the allure of Dan Brown’s fiction is his use of a literary device called “verisimilitude.” Injected into his prose are true historical facts that lend credence to an otherwise fictional, even preposterous story to give it an aura of historical legitimacy. Brown begins The Da Vinci Code with a series of facts:

“The Priory of Sion” [Brown’s “secret” cabal] — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as ‘Les Dossiers Secrets’ [French for ‘The Secret Documents’ – give me a break!] identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo Da Vinci.”

One of the principal characters in The Da Vinci Code is Leigh Teabing who is presented as a multi-millionaire British Royal Historian and world-renowned expert on the Holy Grail. Of course, Teabing does not exist. He is a fictional character, and his historical conclusions from the pen of Dan Brown are also entirely fictional.

By giving the character of Leigh Teabing history credentials, however, Brown blurs the line between truth and fiction. “The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record,” says Teabing (The Da Vinci Code, p. 245). Over the next few ridiculous pages in the book, the “Royal Historian” presents his proof which boils down to nothing more than the fact that the Gospels do not directly and specifically say that Jesus was never married. They also never specifically say that Jesus was not an extraterrestrial. Hmmm… I wonder!

I wrote a post awhile back entitled “Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb.” It was faithful to both the historical and Scriptural truths about her identity and her presence in the Gospels, and the reality of how she became distorted over the centuries. But what Dan Brown does with her twists the distortions into truly bizarre and unfounded bunk.

One of these conclusions is that history and the Catholic Church have suppressed and replaced a hard and demonstrable truth that Mary Magdalene is herself the Holy Grail. The prose is laughable. Looking at Leonardo Da Vinci’s late 15th Century masterpiece, The Last Supper, (depicted atop this section) Brown’s characters spot a secret symbol hidden for centuries from less enlightened eyes:

“‘The Holy Grail is a woman,’ Sophie thought… ‘You said you have a picture of this woman who you claim is the Holy Grail. [Teabing] wheeled suddenly and pointed to the far wall. On it hung an eight-foot-long print of The Last Supper… ‘There she is.’”

— The Da Vinci Code, p. 242

The characters of The Da Vinci Code then conclude that the figure to the right of Jesus in Leonardo’s painting may be a woman, then they conclude that the figure “must” be a woman, then they conclude that she “must” be Mary Magdalene, and that she and Jesus were married. Then they conclude that the Holy Grail was in fact at the Last Supper. Then finally they conclude that the Grail must actually be Mary Magdalene and not the Chalice. “So this is the woman who singlehandedly could crumble the Church!” said Sophie. (p. 243)

Sophie and Teabing then go on to “discover” that the Apostolic tradition and the See of Peter was an enormous mistake. Christ “must” have intended that the Church be in the hands of His “wife,” Mary Magdalene.

This alternative history in The Da Vinci Code entirely overlooks the fact that the Holy Grail was not a term at all familiar to the early Church. It first appeared in literature in the late 12th Century in Chrétien de Troyes’ romance novel, Perceval. From then on the term was solely a reference to the vessel containing the blood of Christ at the Last Supper. Another medieval legend was that Joseph of Arimathea acquired it after using it to contain the blood of Christ at the crucifixion. By the early 13th Century, the Holy Grail became attached to the Arthurian legends as a symbol of holiness and perfection sought by the Knights of the Round Table. In every source from medieval times to the present, the Grail refers to the cup of Christ’s blood sacrificed at the Last Supper or sacrificed on the Cross, or both.

Dan Brown’s “claptrap” revelation that Mary Magdalene, supposed wife of Jesus, is the Holy Grail intended by Christ to found His Church was followed in the book by another one. This one unmasks the real reason why Brown chose that moment in time — 2003 — to publish his barely shrouded anti-Catholic bigotry:

“Yes [said Teabing] the clergy in Rome are blessed with potent faith, and because of this, their beliefs can weather any storm, including documents that contradict everything they hold dear. But what about the rest of the world?… Those who look at Church scandals and ask, who ARE these men who claim to speak the truth about Christ and yet lie to cover up the sexual abuse of children by their own priests?”

— The Da Vinci Code, p. 266

Dan Brown’s Origin

Dan Brown’s knack for bunk has not diminished with time. According to the official DanBrown.com website, his 2017 book, Origin, addresses the two most important questions for humankind: “Where did we come from?” and “Where are we going?” The book already topped the best-seller lists when I wrote the earlier version of this post in 2018, but reviewers did not seem as enthused as Brown’s ready-to-be-misled-again readers. Here’s how The Week magazine summarized a review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

“Dan Brown is back, along with his Vatican-flouting, code-breaking hero, for another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff. Symbologist Robert Langdon — Mickey Mouse watch still ticking — has joined a gathering where a computer genius is about to announce a discovery that will invalidate all existing religious doctrine. But before the secret is revealed, the speaker is taken out by an assassin, and with 300 pages to go, I wondered, ‘why couldn’t it have been me?’”

Janet Maslin, in a somewhat gentler review for The New York Times, referred to Brown’s “cringe-worthy prose,” but applauded his “clever use of settings” and “legitimately intriguing musings about the intersection of science and religion.” That caught my attention because the intersection between science and religion is something I have written a good deal about. In Origin, Dan Brown replaces the intersection with a collision.

The gist of Origin’s plot is that an M.I.T. physics professor named Jeremy England has “identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life.” The discovery is an earth-shattering disproof of every religious story of creation. The discovery threatens to render religion obsolete and God irrelevant. Dan Brown sets this latest bunk in motion with such blatant disregard for the bigger picture that something never before heard of in the world of literature has taken place. One of Brown’s own fictional characters has refuted him and in no less a public forum than The Wall Street Journal. This is from the real M.I.T. physics professor, Jeremy England:

“My actual research on how lifelike behaviors emerge in inanimate matter is widely available, whereas the Dan Brown character’s work is only vaguely described. There’s no real science in the book to argue over.”

— Jeremy England, “Dan Brown Can’t Cite Me to Disprove God,” WSJ.com Oct. 13, 2017

But in addition to debunking Dan Brown’s science in the book, Professor England’s op-ed reveals a wider rift that causes me to wonder whether Brown did any homework on his own character. The real M.I.T. professor Jeremy England wrote,

“I’m a scientist, but I also study and live by the Hebrew Bible. To me, the idea that physics could prove that the God of Abraham is not the creator and ruler of the world reflects a serious misunderstanding – of both the scientific method and the function of the biblical text… Disputes like this never answer the most important question: Do we need to keep learning about God? For my part, in light of everything I know, I am certain that we do.”

— Jeremy England, WSJ.com

No person of either faith or science should pick up Dan Brown’s Origin without first reading Professor England’s “Dan Brown Can’t Cite Me to Disprove God.” It made me want to stand up and cheer, not only for Dan Brown’s comeuppance but for another profound observation by the real Jeremy England:

“Encounters between God and the Hebrew prophets are often described in terms of covenants, partly to emphasize that seeing the hand of God at work starts with a conscious decision to view the world a certain way.”

Dan Brown seems to have made his conscious decision in the opposite direction and has misled millions of undecided souls along the way. The challenge for us is to make the conscious decision to see the world as Jeremy England does because real science cannot pretend to replace faith — Dan Brown’s claptrap and bunk notwithstanding.

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Please visit and share these other “bunk free” posts on the intersection of science & religion:

Father Georges Lemaître, The Priest Who Discovered Big Bang

The March for Life and the People on the Planet Next Door

The James Webb Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage and an Empty Tomb

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The March for Life and the People on the Planet Next Door

Courtesy of Damian Entwistle / CC BY-NC 2.0

The human fascination with finding extraterrestrial life has turned a blind eye to a half century of Roe v Wade. How would we explain Planned Parenthood to E.T.?

January 25, 2023 by Father Gordon MacRae

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I first wrote this post six years ago in this same week in January 2017. It was written for an older version of this blog so we would have to restore it to make it readable again. I decided instead to rewrite it and publish it anew. This post is substantially revised and updated, but we retained the 2017 comments. Please feel free to add to them.

The annual March for Life took place this past week in the nation’s capital and around the country. It capped off a momentous year in the cause for life with the long-sought overturning of Roe v. Wade.

These events also coincide with a renewed interest in the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. The frenzy is fueled once again by grainy new images of something seen moving in the skies. Whatever it is, it is entirely of human origin for reasons explained in this post.

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Working in the prison law library a few days before a long holiday weekend in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I was trying to pick out a few books that might help me write a post for Beyond These Stone Walls during the long days stuck inside. I have to be really selective about books these days. I literally have to sleep with everything I’m reading. There is simply no place to put them but on my bunk. I’ll die if I can’t read and I’ll die if I can’t sleep. So I had to find a way to do both in the 60 square feet which I will never call home.

I knew there was a science post coming. I think Liz Feuerborn knew it, too. A dear friend and long time BTSW reader in Lincoln, Nebraska, Liz recently sent me a most welcomed Christmas gift. It’s a printed list of 244 Catholic priests and religious — four of them canonized saints — who have made major contributions to science. The list includes a description of the work of each.

I was very pleased to see among them another BTSW reader and contributor, Father Andrew Pinsent, a priest and particle physicist who has been a guest writer for this blog. Father Pinsent is the Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion at England’s Oxford University. I have written about him in a few posts, one of which he co-authored with me entitled, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” The list of scientist-priests also includes Fr. Georges Lemaître, of course, a mathematician and physicist of the early 20th Century who is considered in scientific circles today to be the Father of Modern Cosmology. Ironically, he was also the godfather of Pornchai Moontri’s godfather. I am still trying to work out the astronomical odds against that.

Also on the list is Nicolaus Copernicus a priest and astronomer in the late 15th and early 16th Century who actually has a scientific revolution named after him. The Copernican Revolution knocked from the forefront of science the notion that our humble Earth is the center of our solar system. From my point of view, it has been a contribution to humankind’s capacity for humility that the Universe does not revolve around us. Alas, I am not on the list at all, but why would I be? I have no contribution to science except to be an observer. In that role, as I explain below, I have been in very good company.

But first, back to my selection of books for that long weekend stuck inside. The one that most caught my eye was the 2015 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. It contains a few pages about scientific discoveries that have radically changed how we view our place in the Cosmos. A segment that got my attention was a small tribute to Vera Rubin, an American astronomer whose work led to the discovery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and changed the way science views the Universe.

Vera Rubin earned her doctorate in astronomy at Georgetown, a Catholic university in Washington, DC. In the 1960s and 1970s, her observations of other galaxies revealed that the velocity of the movement of stars in their outermost rims is much faster than the existing dogmas of science predicted. Her conclusions demonstrated that the Universe is much stranger than we had ever known, that the matter we actually can see in other galaxies comprises only five to ten percent of the actual Universe. The other ninety-five percent came to be known as dark matter and dark energy. “Astronomers thought they were studying the Universe,” she said, “and now we learn that we are just studying the five to ten percent that is luminous.”

Back at the start of 2017 I opened a copy of The Wall Street Journal and was stunned to see her obituary. Dr. Rubin died a week earlier on Christmas day at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She was 88 years old, and one of the most accomplished astronomers of the late 20th Century. Much of what she discovered about the nature of the Universe and matter that we have been unable to see is now being demonstrated before our very eyes by a new and revolutionary telescope launched into distant orbit one million miles from Earth, a most important development that I described in 2022 in “The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble.”

Courtesy of Carnegie Institution of Washington and Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Confounding the Scientific Theorists

Dr. Vera Rubin was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 for sparking “the realization that the Universe is more complex and more mysterious than had been imagined.” She shared several things in common with Father Georges Lemaître. One of them was the harsh reality that their proven research did not catch on right away. In his case, it was because he was a Catholic priest. In her case, it was because she was a woman. Dr. Rubin was predeceased by her daughter, Judy Young — also an accomplished astronomer — who died two years earlier in 2014. Vera Rubin wrote in 1995 that her role as a scientific observer “is to confound the theorists.” She will be confounding us for years to come.

At the limit of human knowledge just a century ago, the Universe consisted of just a single galaxy, the Milky Way, and astronomer Harlow Shapley demonstrated that our solar system was not at its center, but out on the galactic fringe in one of its spiral arms.

By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered other galaxies while the Belgian priest and physicist, Fr Georges Lemaître, caused another scientific revolution with his mathematical equations, now supported by empirical science. He concluded that the Universe — all matter, space, and time — began “on a day without yesterday” from a primordial atom, later dubbed by a critic, “the Big Bang.”

Today, science reveals that there are trillions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, one of which is our sun. A recent issue of Popular Science magazine had a two-page spread that was another sort of epiphany for me. It was a depiction of a small segment of the Universe. The two page image contained 50,000 galaxies, and one tiny one was our Milky Way. From such an image, astrophysicist Mario Livio concludes, “From a purely physical perspective, we are just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things.”

In just the last decade, it has been discovered that this one, unremarkable galaxy — one of trillions — contains about a billion planets orbiting its millions of stars. On December 5, 2011, the Kepler space telescope discovered the first known “Earth-like” exoplanet orbiting a star about 600 light years from Earth. It’s a distance of about 3,500 trillion miles.

The flurry of news and scientific speculation surrounding the discovery of other Earth-like exoplanets in orbit around distant stars handed science over to the theorists again. There was a presumption that life MUST have taken hold elsewhere, and that the planets MUST be host to one of the millions of civilizations like ours that MUST exist throughout the galaxy.

And of course the inevitable media target of the speculation is that religion, and most especially Christianity, MUST be made irrelevant when the aliens are finally found, or find us. The hope is that the discovery of E.T. will render obsolete 2,000 years of Western thought about God. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Those who do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything!”

The story endured until the science media’s “next big thing”: The 2016 discovery of “Proxima B,” dubbed by the theorists to be “a potentially habitable Earth-like planet.” Orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, Proxima B is 4.2 light years away. It’s the planet next-door in galactic terms, about 25 trillion miles away. With current technology it would be a one-way journey of about 1,000 years or so.

In “If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect” I laid out a series of reasons why I believe that Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life among the planets of this galaxy. For decades, the SETI Project — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — has used radio astronomy to listen for an electronic signature of extraterrestrial technology. Millions of stars and thousands of frequencies have been scanned and analyzed for over six decades, and the result has been nothing but silence.

The SETI project got a big boost in 2015. Russian billionaire, physicist and entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, invested $200 million into answering the basic question that so intrigues us. I wrote of this in “Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

That article, published at LinkedIn, quotes a number of prominent scientists who were convinced that humanity is at the very threshold of the Earthshaking discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos. Two years into it, and the only available observation to confound the theorists is silence — nothing but silence. The hard truth is that science has produced far more empirical evidence of the spiritual benefit of talking to God — what everyone we know in the known Universe calls “prayer” — than talking to — or listening for — extraterrestrials.

Courtesy of David Daleiden

An American Horror Story

Don’t get me wrong. I have been fascinated and enthused about the science of SETI for my entire life. But until there is scientific observation with actual evidence, then there is only speculation and science fiction. Absent evidence, I have to conclude, like the astronomer and biologist John Gribben, that Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life among the billions of planets in this galaxy.

But if such a discovery is ever made, it would be monumental on every level known to humankind, and the discovery would be in two directions. If other intelligent life exists, then science must assume that E.T. is just as curious and driven to discover us as we are to learn of other life.

I wonder how we would explain the annual March for Life that takes place in Washington, DC and around the country. I wonder how we would account for the reason why tens of thousands of people of conscience — young and old alike — brave the DC winter each year to urge a reassessment of our cultural respect for human life. I wonder how we would explain why our news media virtually ignores the March for Life while hyping anything that places a Catholic or a Catholic conscience in a negative spotlight. Could we ever explain to an alien race the contradiction of our driven pursuit of life out there while we have so blindly squandered the right to life right here?

I just listened to a speech from our present “devoutly Catholic” President who spoke of his driven commitment to the rights, dignity, respect, and equality for all people while condemning the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the right to life of those not yet born. How would we explain to newly encountered intelligent life the weird enigma of our moral and scientific duplicity?

We humans are just as likely to be discovered BY other life in the Cosmos as we are to discover it. Every radio and television broadcast ever emitted on Earth is traveling at the speed of light in all directions through the vacuum of space.

This is what makes the American Horror Story of abortion without limits and its vast machine so horrible. It’s our blind duplicity.

If we keep at it, the only real evidence of intelligent life in the universe will be the fact that they wisely and silently keep their distance. If they exist at all, as so many in science seem driven to believe but with no evidence whatsoever, then this is as plausible an explanation for their silence as any other.

If E.T. gets wind of Planned Parenthood, we might well appear to be the neighbors from hell.

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Photo courtesy of Webb Space Telescope

Editor’s Note: You might like these other Prolife posts on Beyond These Stone Walls:

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect

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The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has released its 50-minute documentary film exposing “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom: How Disney Is Losing Its Way.” This film is a must-see for anyone concerned about the erosion of parental rights in the woke indoctrination of children. Watch the Catholic League documentary here.

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love

Pope Benedict XVI left the Chair of Peter amid debate about what his decision meant for the Church. Above all else, it was an act of fatherly love and sacrifice.

December 31, 2022

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: The Holy Father, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entered Eternal Life at 9:34AM Rome time (3:34AM EDT) on the last day of the Year of Our Lord 2022. I wrote the following post in February 2013 in the weeks following his decision to leave the Chair of Peter. It was a time of great confusion for the Church, and great sorrow for those who loved this Pope. Upon the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978, Archbishop Fulton Sheen said that he offered a ‘Hail Mary’ for him, and then another ‘Hail Mary’ in his honor asking for his intercession before the Divine Presence. I offer these same prayers today for Benedict XVI and in the same way.

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February 2013

We are all prisoners of our own perception. We come to just about every concern and deliberation from the perspective of our own unique limits, circumstances, and points of view. The more fair and just among us practice varying degrees of empathy which is, in part at least, the ability to place ourselves in the shoes of another.

One truth became crystal clear to me on February 11, 2013. No matter how well honed our skills for empathy might be, none of us can ever adequately imagine ourselves in one pair of shoes — the Shoes of the Fisherman.

It was that very title that helped plant and cultivate my early thoughts of priesthood when I was 15 years old in 1968 — the same year Msgr. Charles Pope once wrote of in “1968 – The Year the Church Drank from the Poison of this World.” My friend, Father Louis Antonelli took me to see The Shoes of the Fisherman, the film starring Anthony Quinn as Pope Kyril I. It was scripted from the great novel of the same title by Morris West. In the end, the fictional Pope Kyril — who as a priest spent 20 years in a Soviet prison — sacrificed his papacy to avert nuclear war looming in the Communist stranglehold on the Soviet Union and China. The long, ponderous film deeply moved me at age 15 as Pope Kyril’s acts of love and sacrifice mollified the world at the expense of the Church. I left that film resolved to pray for the Pope, who in my sudden awareness became the most important man on Earth, and the most targeted man for the world’s wolves and the powers of evil.

Priesthood did not take me to where I had hoped back then to go. Like Kyril himself, it took me to prison. So it was from the perspective of my confinement in a prison cell that I learned the heartbreaking news on Monday morning, February 11, 2013, that our beloved Pope Benedict XVI would resign the Chair of Saint Peter effective February 28. Like so many of you, I found that news to be deeply disappointing — even devastating. That day felt as though someone had cast a pall over the entire Church.

The news footage soon to follow the Holy Father’s bombshell — the scene of a bolt of lightning striking the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica — did nothing to ease the sense of oppression that day wrought. Like so many of you, I was filled with dread that the wolves had won — the very wolves the Holy Father referred to in his first homily as Pope in April 2005: “Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”

After eight years of his pontificate, I could not imagine this Pope fleeing from anything. In the ensuing weeks, I have slowly come to see his decision not only as agonizingly painful in its making — for us, but most especially for him — but also as a courageous act of sacrifice motivated by love for the Church and the 1.2 billion souls who come to Christ through Her.

Not in His Own Best Interest

By the end of the day on February 11, 2013, I asked a friend to post a comment from me on BTSW’s Facebook page. My comment focused only on the Holy Father’s brief statement and avoided much of the media spin launched within minutes of it — most of which I was unaware of anyway, and could only imagine. Pope Benedict’s own words left little room for spin, and they are worth hearing again as he abdicates:

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.

“However, in today’s world, subject to many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to steer the boat of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

My immediate reaction to these words was one of great sorrow. I believed that Pope Benedict, who would soon turn 86 years of age, was convinced by those around him not to allow age and infirmity to become the media’s face of the Church. I believed such advice to have been rooted in the last years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate as his obvious infirmity became its own news event.

And so my brief comment that February 11, though well intentioned, assumed that the Holy Father was simply convinced, as he himself stated, that his “strengths and advanced age are no longer suited to the Petrine ministry” — especially so in a world in which every papal tremble, stumble, and foible is caught on camera for instantaneous global news.

I thought the Holy Father had agonized over this and concluded simply, and understandably, that age and infirmity taking center stage in the future years of his papacy were neither in his best interest nor that of the Church. I thought wrongly.

There was absolutely nothing in this decision that the Holy Father considered to be in his own best interest. Like so many of the loving fathers I know, his own best interest never entered the equation at all. On the morning after the Pope’s announcement, The Wall Street Journal  published a superb and influential commentary by Catholic writer George Weigel that helped to give me some perspective on this development. “Catholics Need a Pope for the ‘New Evangelization‘ ” (February 13, 2013) was a service to the Church calling upon us to look forward to consider the urgent challenges to be faced by the successor of Pope Benedict. George Weigel pointed out something that the Holy Father himself was deeply aware of as “we widen the historical lens through which we view this papal transition.” Pope Benedict XVI will be the last pope to have participated in the Second Vatican Council.

By ending his papacy, he had ended an ecclesiastical era. The question George Weigel asks us to ponder is not “What wolves brought this about?” but rather “To what future has Pope Benedict led Catholicism?” I believe the answer to that question is the urgent issue of the coming conclave, and I believe the Holy Father is convinced of the necessary timing of this as the Church summons forth a Pope for the New Evangelization.

And Not without Precedent

In the Western world, and especially in the Americas, it’s difficult for some to factor the Catholic Church as an ancient structure, the sole institution in human history to have survived — to have even thrived — for 2,000 years. In “The Canonization of Pope John Paul II,” I wrote of a History Channel presentation on the papacy. Hopefully, we may see it again before the coming conclave.

With reverence and historical accuracy, the cameras took us from the tomb of Saint Peter to the tomb of Blessed John Paul II. Between them, two millennia had past — 2,000 years of war, scandal, all manner of human debacles, and countless assaults on the Church and Holy See. And yet at the tomb of Saint John Paul II the Church stood. The gates of hell had not prevailed against Her — and not for lack of trying.

That trial continues. A pope’s resignation is rare, but not unheard of. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Saint Louis University history professor Thomas F. Madden unveiled some of this history in “The Pope Joins a Fine but Rarely Seen Tradition” (Feb. 15, 2013). For the first 1,200 years in the life of the Church, Professor Madden explained, it was assumed that a pope could not resign except under extreme conditions such as being thrown into prison — a fate that befell three popes in the first millennium.

The last resignation of a pope was six centuries ago in the year 1415. Eight decades before Columbus sailed to the New World — 360 years before the United States even existed — Pope Gregory XII resigned the papacy to end the Great Schism. In so doing he was praised throughout Europe for placing the interests of the Church above his own interests and ambition.

But the real precedent was set in 1294 when Pope Celestine V, now Saint Celestine, resigned for reasons very similar to those now put forward by Pope Benedict. A conclave had been unable to arrive at a consensus for two years when Pietro del Murone was elected to resolve it. Already in his 80s when he became Pope Celestine V, he quietly established in canon law a tenet allowing for the resignation of a pope, and then applied it to himself with the support of the College of Cardinals.

The Prayer to Saint Michael

The Church canonized Saint Celestine in 1313. In the 2010 book, Light of the World (Ignatius Press), based on Peter Seewald’s extensive interviews with Pope Benedict XVI, the Holy Father cited the precedent set by Saint Celestine, and even hinted — then at age 84 — that if ever a pope’s reserves of strength no longer served the Church, that precedent could be repeated.

But there is still the matter of the wolves circling from both without and within. They have always been here. George Weigel pointed out that the Second Vatican Council’s deep reforms in the Catholic Church actually began in the previous century in 1878. According to Mr. Weigel, “Pope Leo XIII made the historic decision to quietly bury the rejectionist stand his predecessors had adopted toward cultural and political modernity.” George Weigel ended his article with a reflection about the current state of disunity in the Roman Curia, calling upon the coming conclave to elect a pope who will address the Curia’s “disastrous condition . . . so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.”

Pope Benedict XVI cited a similar concern in his Ash Wednesday homily from the pulpit of Saint Peter’s Basilica: “The face of the Church is at times disfigured by the sins against the unity of the Church and the divisions of the ecclesial body.” It is of interest that in 1888, Pope Leo XIII also cited this while composing his famous Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, only a small part of which has become the common prayer we know. In its original form, Pope Leo wrote:

“In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the pastor is struck, the sheep may be scattered.”

Pope Benedict XVI has never had to earn our deference, but earn it he did, many times over, as our Holy Father in a time of great trial for the Church. We owe him the benefit of our fidelity, unity, and prayers, and I know he has those. By abdicating at this time, and by calling the Church’s focus to what comes next at this moment in history, Pope Benedict is engaging in an act of love and sacrifice for the Church.

What remains heartbreaking is that so many of us have come not only to reverence and respect this Pope for his gifted mind and great personal holiness, but we have come to love him. Even in life, this Holy Father’s long-serving predecessor was given another title in his last years. My friend, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus and others deservedly dubbed him “John Paul the Great,” and it stuck.

Pope Benedict XVI also stands to have a new name. Springing from the hearts of millions, no matter what role he plays or what the Church comes to call him, this Holy Father will forever be for us, “Benedict the Beloved.”

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Prologue — December 31, 2023: As cited above, in 1888 when Pope Leo XIII composed the prayer to Saint Michael, he added in the original version, “In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the pastor is struck, the sheep may be scattered.”

For so many faithful Catholics the world over, history sometimes repeats itself.

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The Duty of a Priest: Father Frank Pavone and Priests for Life

In a bombshell report, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life and the most visible pro-life priest in America has been dismissed from the priesthood by Pope Francis.

December 18, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: In a bombshell report that I learned of only today it seems that Fr. Frank Pavone, Director of Priests for Life and the most visible pro-life cleric in North America has been dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis. At this juncture, the dismissal is both inconceivable and unexplained. Fr. George David Byers wrote of it with some attachments today.

I plan to postpone further comment on this troubling development for pro-life Catholics until there is further clarification from Rome, if ever. Of interest, I wrote this post about Fr. Frank Pavone and his struggles eleven years ago. Much that I described in this post has now come to pass. I have never been more sorrowful for being right. Please pray for Fr. Pavone and Priests for Life.

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For about a year now, Beyond These Stone Walls has had a link to Priests for Life, one of the strongest and most vocal pro-life organizations with oversight from the Catholic Church. So when news began to circulate that Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life since 1993, was “recalled” to his diocese — the Diocese of Amarillo — I paid attention, as did many.

Before commenting on the justice or injustice of what has occurred to date in this matter, however, I must comment on the context. It has become clear to me even from behind these stone walls that not all is as it seems. Generally, a matter such as this would generate some dialogue within the Church, perhaps even in the Catholic media, but that would be the extent of its interest. This matter between Father Frank Pavone and Amarillo Bishop Patrick Zurek, however, has also become fodder for comments in the secular media providing fuel for the speculation and controversy now surrounding Father Pavone.

What exactly is the controversy? Father Frank Pavone has been recalled to his diocese, the Diocese of Amarillo, Texas, by his bishop. Father Pavone has been neither suspended nor disciplined for any cause. A Catholic News Service account included some clarification of this by Msgr. Harold Waldow, Vicar for Clergy in the Diocese of Amarillo:

“Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, remains a priest in good standing in the Diocese of Amarillo, Texas. … Msgr. Harold Waldow told CNS that Bishop Patrick J. Zurek only suspended Father Pavone’s ministry outside of the diocese because the well-known pro-life priest is needed for work in Amarillo.”

— Catholic News Service, Sept. 14, 2011

But there remains some taint upon Father Pavone. This matter between a priest and his bishop has become a matter of public dispute, and that itself is a violation of Father Pavone’s rights under Church law. After writing a letter to the nation’s bishops describing his suspension of Father Pavone’s ministry outside his own diocese, the bishop reportedly released the letter publicly. That seems to be what sparked their differences thrusting this matter into a public forum, but without any clear allegation of wrongdoing.

Brian Fraga wrote an informative article about this in Our Sunday Visitor (“Pro-life priest ‘baffled’ by bishop’s shutdown,” OSV, October 2, 2011). He cited the broad support that has emerged for Father Pavone including from the Priests for Life Board of Directors, from the National Pro-Life Council, and other corners. Dr. Alveda King, niece of the late Rev. Martin Luther King and a staunch pro-life advocate, has released a powerfully supportive statement about Father Pavone and Priests for Life.

I have believed from the outset that the hype about all this has little to do with Father Frank Pavone and Bishop Zurek. It has to do with Priests for Life and its vocally Catholic pro-life stance. There is an agenda out there — an agenda with tentacles that have reached deeply into the arena of Catholic life — that would be encouraged by the diminishment or outright destruction of the Church’s pro-life ministry. In this entire matter, it is not only Father Pavone whose reputation is on the line. It is also the Church’s pro-life stance, consistently undermined by those who want compromise with a secular agenda in the culture war.

The demise of Priests for Life would be a great trophy for that agenda. I am no conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help notice that this story is unfolding nationally just as a Presidential Primary is taking shape, and the culture war is gearing up for battle.

Resisting Secular Sabotage

In a chapter entitled “Self-Sabotage: Catholicism” in his book, Secular Sabotage (Faith Words, 2009), Catholic League President Bill Donohue pointed out that dissent in the Church’s pro-life ministry is not as simple as some trendy left-wing Catholics promoting abortion. Very few people of even the remotest Christian persuasion actually promote abortion as a societal good. What Bill Donohue pointed out was something much more subtle. There is a growing consensus among left-wing Catholics that the Church has simply lost the battle for life and should just move on.

Please note here that I do not use the term “left-wing Catholics” in any derogatory sense. I spent much of my life and ministry squarely in that camp. So did Father Richard John Neuhaus and Cardinal Avery Dulles, two exemplary Churchmen to whose memory we have dedicated Beyond These Stone Walls. Their drift to the right is far more a story of their embracing the great adventure of orthodoxy to the Magisterial authority of the Church — an authority that took precedence for them above any trendy political ideology.

My own drift away from the left followed their same example. It marked the official end of my adolescence that the life of the Church took precedence over my own sometimes highly misinformed publicly dissenting points of view.

Part of the agenda among the more radical wing of the Catholic left has been to get about the business of removing any Magisterial authority from our faith experience. The goal is to  carve out a distinctly American Catholic church with identifiably American Catholic values that mirror the now disintegrating American wing of the Church of England, the Episcopal church. But that’s a whole other blog post for some other day — such as next week, perhaps.

It’s time for American Catholic liberals to see and admit that their own views and causes are being hijacked by this radical wing. For them, organizations like Priests for Life are seen as an anachronistic hindrance to social progress. A nice little scandal undermining Priests for Life would be most welcomed in some circles right about now, not least among them some purportedly Catholic circles.

But there isn’t a scandal. Father Frank Pavone has not been accused of anything, though I do worry about his extreme vulnerability. There are agendas at work even in our Church that would be bolstered by the destruction of Father Pavone, his career, and his reputation. That fact must be a part of the equation as Catholics evaluate this story. Father Frank Pavone first was a target long before he was a suspect.

I have a personal example of how this works right here at Beyond These Stone Walls. For over two years now, BTSW has presented the views of a priest claiming to be falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned. So much of what I have written has been in direct confrontation with the agendas and claims of victim groups like SNAP and Catholic “reform” groups like Voice of the Faithful. Some of my postings about the Catholic League report, “SNAP Exposed” have been confrontational. My three-part series, “When Priests Are Falsely Accused” made a very controversial case for why accusers should be named. Nothing flies in the face of the cult of victimhood like that particular point of view.

But very few people disagreed with me or attacked these statements and positions. At first, I wondered if these controversial posts were even noticed, but then I learned they were widely disseminated. Even the Spanish-language news network, Univision, posted links to “When Priests Are Falsely Accused” on their website, as did National Public Radio and many international secular sites. Very few people disagreed with me or attacked these posts.

The very worst attack — though a rather wimpy one — was a one-line comment from SNAP director, David Clohessy. Commenting on the Spero News version of my BTSW post, “Due Process for Accused Priests?” David Clohessy called me “a dangerous and demented man.” Maybe he didn’t read “Sticks and Stones: My Incendiary Blog Post on Catholic Civil Discourse.”

But in contrast to the lack of any real attacks on Beyond These Stone Walls was a barrage of nasty e-mail attacks when I posted a clearly pro-life article, “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life” last January. I got clobbered. Some of the messages called me all sorts of names, denounced Beyond These Stone Walls, and denigrated those who assist me as its editors. It was perfectly okay with these people if I remind Catholics that some priests are falsely accused and some Americans are wrongly imprisoned. But how dare I use a Catholic blog to post a reasoned and thoughtful defense of the Catholic Church’s pro-life position and why it should not be compromised?

So that’s it then. I can write that a lot of men and women have committed fraud by falsely accusing Catholic priests of decades-old abuses. I can write that some of our bishops have been unwittingly complicit in this fraud and have left their priests vulnerable by blindly settling virtually every claim. I can even write that some of the purported “victims” are in fact criminals who should have their names and their claims exposed before any real due process and justice can take place. Not many on the left or right had much to say in response to any of that. But when I wrote about why abortion is a basic civil rights issue, some Catholics called me a “predator priest who should be silenced by the Church.” One writer called for prison officials to confiscate my typewriter.

It all reminded me of a troubling conversation I had with a prisoner two years ago. He was a career criminal; a gangster, a thief and a thug, who came to my  door one day. “I have a question,” he said:

“Can you explain to me why all these Catholics can say they are protecting children when they scream about 30 or 40 year old claims of child abuse, but then have nothing to say about the fourteen million American babies sacrificed in abortions in just the last decade?”

It’s a hard question for which I have no answer. But I explained to him that no one in our Church will call him a gangster, a thief, or a thug unless he asks a question like that too loudly.

This was when I really came to admire Father Frank Pavone. I became aware of how visible the target on his back really is. As I wrote two weeks ago at the end of “Thy Brother’s Keeper,” I bow to Father Pavone’s faithful witness to both the truth and to his duty as a priest which is to preserve both his obligations and his rights under Church law. The bottom line is that anyone who thinks his bishop is going to protect his rights has not been paying attention in the last ten years.

Bishops as Prosecutors

I cannot speak to the internal disagreements between Father Frank Pavone and Bishop Patrick Zurek. I know none of the details. But I can speak in a broader sense of the necessity for any priest in the current climate to preserve his rights under Church law. I can only relate some of what transpired with my own bishop in a canonical proceeding to shed light on some of what may be happening behind the scenes in the Diocese of Amarillo.

Father Pavone came under recent attack in some circles because his bishop scheduled a personal meeting which Father Pavone declined to attend. There were some people — some very well intentioned — who saw in this some shades of culpability on the part of Father Pavone, using it to cast suspicion on his own transparency and desire to cooperate with his bishop.

It is likely, however, that Bishop Zurek has declined to allow a meeting to take place with Father Pavone’s Canonical Advocate present. I do not know this for certain, but I have read that Father Pavone’s Canonical Advocate has requested mediation in this matter between Father Pavone and his bishop. It was apparently on the advice of the Advocate that Father Pavone declined to meet without his Advocate or a mediator present. Both Father Pavone and his Canonical Advocate, Father David Deibel, J.D., J.C.L. have come under some public fire for this.

Church Law insists that any priest in a canonical forum has a right to advocacy. I stand by what I wrote in “Thy Brother’s Keeper’:

“I bow also to Father Pavone’s resolve to protect his rights under the higher authority of the law of the Church, for the [Dallas] Charter makes one thing clear now: Some bishops will neither protect nor respect those rights.”

I speak from experience. Throughout the last decade of attempting to defend myself before both a court of law and a court of public opinion, I have also had to simultaneously defend myself against a one-sided effort by my bishop to bring about a canonical dismissal from the priesthood with no defense whatsoever offered by me. Throughout this process, my bishop has steadfastly refused to meet or even converse with my Canonical Advocate regarding the matter of preserving my rights under Church law.

Far worse, when my bishop learned that I am seeking an opportunity to bring forward a new appeal of my conviction, my bishop hired his own lawyers to conduct a secret evaluation of my trial to present in Rome and circumvent my own efforts to defend myself. He has repeatedly refused to share with me or my Canonical Advocate the findings of that secret assessment.

My bishop has acted throughout in the role of a prosecutor, but it’s even worse than that.  In America, prosecutors are required to turn over to the defense the nature of charges and any evidence that supports them.  When I tried to assert my rights under Church law in this matter, my bishop responded with silence and has remained silent ever since.

I believe I could safely say that every organization formed on behalf of priests to assist in protecting their rights under Canon Law would now state that no priest in even a hint of an adversarial circumstance with his bishop should ever agree to a one-on-one meeting without his Canonical Advocate present. It would not only be foolish, it could be destructive. It would be akin to a prosecutor demanding to meet privately with a defendant without his lawyer present.

As the priesthood crisis became critical in 2002, Cardinal Avery Dulles gave bishops and priests a clear reminder of their rights and obligations under Church law.  His fine article, “The Rights of Accused Priests” is reprinted under “Articles” on Beyond These Stone Walls. Given these rights and obligations, I admire that Father Pavone is determined to resolve this matter in unity with his bishop. No bishop can in justice order him or any priest to set aside his rights under Church law.

Complicating my own comments on this matter is the fact that Father Frank Pavone and I have the same Canonical Advocate in the person of Father David L. Deibel, J.D., J.C.L. who has broad training and experience in both civil and Church law. He, of course, has not discussed the Father Pavone matter with me at all. He is an accomplished professional motivated by the law and an impeccable set of ethics.

But Father Deibel has come under some highly unjust fire because of his advocacy for me. Some have used this to try to impugn his reputation and undermine Father Pavone’s own canonical defense. In truth, Father David Deibel was the sole Church official to appear at my trial and sentencing over seventeen years ago. He traveled from California at his own expense to do this. At the time I was sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to 67 years in prison, Father David Deibel was one of only two people in that courtroom with the moral courage and personal integrity to speak the truth, despite knowing that there was a price to pay for it. Father David Deibel was one of the heroes in my case, and the extent to which this is true will very soon be placed into public view. There is a lot more to come in this regard, and it is indeed coming.

Meanwhile, the Church owes Father Frank Pavone the right of defense — and respect, support, and encouragement for his tireless voice on behalf of those who have been denied one. Click here for Father Frank Pavone updates.