The United Nations High Commissioner of Hypocrisy

In 2014 a United Nations Commission accused the Vatican under Benedict XVI of a past sex abuse cover-up. Then the U.N. was exposed for a present sex abuse cover-up.

July 12, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I sometimes come across an older post I have written about events in the news, and am struck by how much what I wrote ends up coming true. I just re-read a post I wrote on July 7, 2010. I read it anew with far more invested in the topic today than when I originally wrote it. That post is “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”

It raised an important point about an issue that has simmered in the background of this blog since its inception in 2009. That issue is the Catholic clergy sex abuse story, and how much the story has itself been abused in the news media to further certain agendas. On Easter Sunday 2010, for example, The Boston Globe hyped this story about a popular Massachusetts senior priest, Father Dominic Menna, who under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ “Dallas Charter,” was removed from ministry due to a claim of sexual abuse.

In reporting the story, the Globe neglected to mention that the uncorroborated single claim that destroyed this priest’s life was alleged to have occurred over a half century ago in 1971. And it was no accident that the story was reserved for the Globe’s Easter Sunday edition.

What the Globe omitted from the Easter Sunday 2010 story was the fact that the adult bringing that claim — a man in his late fifties — stood to gain a substantial financial settlement just for making the claim while proving nothing.

The contingency lawyers and their enablers in the media are counting on you to have no frame of reference to put any of the claims of priestly abuse into context. I do have a frame of reference, and I can tell you that the distortion created by lawyers and the news media is deeply unjust — not only to Catholics and their priests, but to millions of adult victims of abuse whose suffering has been trivialized and cheapened by the distortion that only victims of Catholic priests are worth hearing and compensating.

Since I wrote the above post, The Boston Globe was sold by its parent company, The New York Times, for less than ten cents on the dollar, compared to what the Times paid to purchase it. Some like to think that in the end the Globe pretty much reaped what it had sown at the expense of truth and justice.

The eventual result of the symphony created by contingency lawyers and biased news media was an arena in which the Church would become dislodged as a global source of moral truth. I wrote of some of the fallout for other innocent victims in my post, “Benedict Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.”

The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church

In 2014, an explosive 16-page report issued by the United Nations High Commissioner on the Rights of the Child indicted and convicted the Catholic Church without investigation, without evidence, without a formal defense, and without any trial of the facts. I know the feeling!

This public shaming of the Holy See came as a result of the emergence into public view of hundreds of claims of sexual abuse by priests dating back thirty, forty, fifty years or more. These were claims often brought forward by contingency lawyers who — once the mass settlement process had been established as status quo — flooded Church institutions with demands for “out-of-court” settlements with no effort at corroboration. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said N.H. contingency lawyer, Peter Hutchins when handed a $5.2 million check from the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire.

The various bishops and dioceses caved in to these demands, and then a hapless U.N. committee took that to be proof enough that the claims were all true. In a courageous article in First Things, “Rolling Stone, Alan Dershowitz, and Catholic Priests” (May 21, 2015) Father Thomas Guarino described the cost of this abandonment of rights for the priests accused when bishops got the monkey off their backs by throwing money at it:

“This Episcopal peace comes at a heavy price…. The problem is that, in many cases, no contrary evidence can come forward because an accusation is decades old. What convincing evidence could possibly be adduced to clear a man’s name? Even if a charge could be true, is lifetime suspension a proportionate penalty for a mere possibility? Should bishops be held hostage by forces dividing them from their own priests?”

— Fr Thomas Guarino, First Things

The United Nations had no such interest in basic civil rights like the presumption of innocence. Claudia Rosett, who led the Investigative Reporting Project for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, also reacted to the U.N. Commission report on the Vatican with a similarly titled column in The Wall Street Journal (“The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church,” WSJ, February 10, 2014). Ms. Rosett described the report:

“A Report on the Holy See — released by a U.N. Committee last week to much media fanfare — alleged that tens of thousands of children have been abused by Catholic clerics and that the Vatican has helped cover it up.”

Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, described that U.N. report as “one of the most ambitious power grab efforts ever undertaken by a U.N. committee.” The report was, of course, a lie, simply repeating a media mantra. But in the process of describing this in The Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett exposed another big lie, one belonging to the United Nations itself.

Now Hiring: A U.N. High Commissioner of Hypocrisy

Between 2007 and 2013, United Nations peacekeeper forces have been repeatedly implicated in the sexual abuse of children they were tasked to protect, and the U.N. has now been implicated in a cover-up of that fact. But the most disturbing part of this story is the extent to which it has been ignored — another form of cover-up — by the American news media. In fact, Ms. Rosett’s above column in the WSJ was likely the first hint of the scandal at the U.N. that appeared in mainstream U.S. news.

Since then, other media outlets have taken this up, but few of them in the United States. Sandra Laville, in The Guardian (U.K.) covered a report leaked to her newspaper alleging that the U.N.’s own investigation revealed “the rape and sodomy of starving and homeless boys” by French U.N. peacekeeper forces operating in the Central African Republic.

As sickening as that charge is, it gets much worse. French president Francois Hollande promised that France would prosecute those soldiers. The story came to light only because of a whistleblower. According to Matheiu Delahouse in the French paper, Le Nouvel Observateur, the U.N. marked its report on this matter “secret” and filed it away.

This is a story worth telling. The French government was not even informed of the claims against its soldiers until a man named Anders Kompass, a Swedish citizen working for the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees, “broke protocol and gave a copy of the report to the French government,” according to The Week:

“Naturally, the French investigators asked if they could speak to the U.N. investigator who wrote the report, but the U.N…refused to allow that. Meanwhile, Kompass, the whistleblower, has been punished and may lose his job. Saying he leaked a confidential document, the self-interested bureaucrats at the U.N. have suspended this 30-year veteran of humanitarian work for intervening on behalf of children.”

— The Week, “United Nations: Riding sexual abuse by peacekeepers,” May 15, 2015

Rosa Freedman, writing at TheConversation.com from Australia, charged that the U.N. has “a long and sordid history of covering up sexual abuse by peacekeepers.” Simon Allison, writing from South Africa for The Daily Maverick observed about the U.N., “Who can trust an institution that covers up the sexual abuse of minors?”

The very fact that such a question is now asked of the United Nations itself after it dragged the Catholic Church through a round of public mudslinging is symptomatic of an institution in crisis. The situation is more hypocritical than it appears.

I have also written of the hubris and hypocrisy of the U.N.’s finger pointing on this issue. I have described evidence that even while the U.N. was pointing fingers at the Vatican for decades-old and unproven claims of abuse, the U.N. was itself being sued. In 2014, the United Nations employed any and every legal means to fight off a lawsuit from the beleaguered people of Haiti after its unscreened peacekeeper forces caused the deaths of innumerable children by bringing a cholera outbreak to their earthquake stricken country. One of its defenses was to blame the people of Haiti for the cholera, a plague that killed hundreds of Haitian children.

The saddest part of this story is that the Holy See sent emissaries to the U.N. Commission on the Rights of the Child to assure the U.N. that many hundreds of priests have been cast out after being accused in these decades-old claims of abuse. In “The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church,” (WSJ, February 10, 2014), Claudia Rosett proposed a more fitting response from the Church to the U.N.:

“Pope Francis might want to consider that it is precisely to avoid gross intrusion by U.N. ‘experts’ that the United States signed, but never ratified, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty has less to do with children than with political power plays, and a fitting reform of the Vatican would be to walk away from it.”

Would that such advice was followed before hundreds of accused priests were thrown under the bus and out of the priesthood. Would that such advice was followed before the extent of United Nations hypocrisy was bared for all to see. Is reform of the U.N. on the horizon? The evidence does not indicate that it is. The United Nations now needs a High Commissioner of Hypocrisy.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: You would serve the cause of justice and truth by sharing this post. You may also like these related posts:

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition

Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic

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.”

For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars

First deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl

An MIT astrophysicist trying to reconcile science with a quest for spiritual truth wrote upon the death of his parents, “I wish I believed.” I believe he just might.

July 5, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: The image atop this post is the first of many images transmitted by the James Webb Space Telescope parked one million miles from Earth in 2022 to survey the Cosmos. I first wrote this post in 2018 for an older version of this blog. It needed to be restored for our readers, but I ended up completely rewriting it. My goal was to highlight a bridge between science and faith, but some say it also highlights a bridge between life and death.

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When Beyond These Stone Walls was just a few months old back in 2009, I wrote a post about the death of my mother. It told a story about an event that occurred on her birthday a year after she died. At first glance it seemed an ordinary event, the sort of thing usually chalked up to coincidence. But its meaning and timing and how it unfolded made it an extraordinary grace beyond comprehension. It required that I set aside the mathematical odds against such a thing and see it foremost in the light of faith.

It remains to this day a pivotal moment, a wondrous event that shook my faith out of the closet of doubt where I tend to store it when times get rough — which is often. The story told in that post may shake you, too, if it hasn’t already. By that, I do not mean that it will challenge your faith. It’s just the opposite. My story lifted for me a corner of the veil between doubt and belief. So the title I gave it was “A Corner of the Veil.”

My friend, Pornchai Moontri was with me that night when the event occurred while I offered Mass in our prison cell. I asked Pornchai if he remembers it. “How could I forget it?” he said. He described it as an “ordinary miracle,” the kind he says he has seen a lot of since his eyes were opened.

I could repeat the whole story here, but it will take too long and I have written it once already. It is but a mere click away. I will link to it again after this post. You can decide for yourself whether the story it tells is mere coincidence or something more. My analytic brain tends toward coincidence, but sometimes that just doesn’t add up. This was one of those times.

I then came upon a strange little book of fiction by Laurence Cossé first published in French as Le Coin du Voile, and in English, A Corner of the Veil (Scribner 1999). It strangely fell at my feet from a library shelf after my post with the same title.

Laurence Cossé was a journalist for Radio France when she wrote this book described by Notre Dame theologian Ralph McInerney as “a theological thriller that makes a mystery out of the absence of mystery.” It is a spellbinding account of what happens to the people and institutions of Church and State when a manuscript surfaces that irrefutably proves the existence of God.

Science, religion, and politics all transform as their experts ponder its meaning and their own continued relevancy. The reader is left to wonder whether the discovery will spark a new era of harmony or launch the final battle of the apocalypse.

“Six pages further, Father Bertrand was trembling. The proof was neither arithmetical nor physical nor esthetical nor astronomical, it was irrefutable. Proof of God’s existence had been achieved. Bertrand was tempted, for a second, to toss the bundle into the wastebasket.” (p 15)

As it does for people who awaken to faith on a personal level, the discovery immediately altered the way its readers face both life and death. The transformation was astonishing. Death came to be seen, not as an entity unto itself, but as it really is a chapter in the continuity of life, of me, of the person I call "myself," integrated into the Great Tapestry of God.

I happen to know a lot of people whose experience of living is suddenly overshadowed by the prospect of dying. They have come to know that death is drawing nearer day by day. Some of them struggle. What does death mean, and why do we wage such war against it? The age of individualism and relativism distorts death into a fearsome enemy. As Dylan Thomas wrote,

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”

Carina Nebula image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl

If That’s All There Is, Then Let’s Keep Dancing!

While writing this post, I received a letter from a reader in Ohio who asked me to write a note of encouragement to a friend whose death is drawing near. After a lifetime of faith, he wrote, the friend is having grave doubts and fears about the end of life and the finality of death. He is asking the age-old question put to song: “Is that all there is?”

But that is our problem. We speak in terms of “finality” as though when faced with death, all that we once believed with hope takes on the trappings of a mere children’s fantasy. I know too many people who are dying, and many of us treat it as the silent elephant in the room because we know that sooner or later we will join them just as our parents did before us. It is part of the flow of life, but we ward it off as a terror in the night. In the face of death, science alone comes up empty.

When you think of it, death is best seen as an act of love. Imagine the inherent selfishness of a humanity without death. Those we love the most in this world — those who fulfill our very purpose for being in this world — would be left out of existence if this life were ours alone to keep. But facing death with no life of faith casts both life and death into a formless, meaningless void.

I recently came across a review of a book by noted MIT physicist and astronomer Alan Lightman entitled Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (Pantheon 2018). It was reviewed by UMass physics professor Alan Hirshfeld in “A Longing for Truth and Meaning” in The Wall Street Journal April 7-8, 2018).

In some previous science posts here at Beyond These Stone Walls, I have cited both writers for other books and articles they have written. Mr. Lightman’s book, and Mr. Hirshfeld’s review of it, both raise provocative questions about “the core mysteries of human life” and the way science explores the Universe:

“Why are we here? What, if anything, is the meaning of existence? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Whence consciousness?”

I am very happy to see science ponder these questions, but they can never be answered by science alone. It comes up short when the task moves beyond the mere physics and chemistry of life to its meaning and purpose. Consider this explanation of the self, of who and what you are as a conscious being, offered by Mr. Lightman:

“Self is the name we give to the mental sensation of certain electrical and chemical flows in our neurons.”

It is too tempting for science to reduce us to fundamental biology and chemistry, but the mere mechanics of what I am do not at all define who I am. If science is the only contribution to the meaning of life and death, then it becomes obvious why so many spend significant time in denial or in dread of death.

In his new book reflecting on the Cosmos, MIT astrophysicist Alan Lightman takes up these questions and more. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is a view of the world through a scientist’s lens which requires the scientist to see in it, as Alan Hirshfeld describes,

“Tangible bits of matter and energy, all governed by a set of fundamental physical laws … In keeping with his ‘Central Doctrine of Science,’ he eschews unprovable hypotheses, most significantly the existence of God and the afterlife.”

But these hypotheses are only unprovable from the point of view of science which concerns itself, as it concerns astrophysicist Alan Lightman, with matter and energy and fundamental laws. But Professor Lightman has acquired the wisdom not to stop there. His reflection on the death of his parents brings him to the “impossible truth” that they no longer exist, and he will one day follow them into this nonexistence.

Is that all there is? “I wish I believed,” he wrote. But “a precipice looms for each of us, an eventual plunge into nonexistence.” As Alan Hirshfeld described it:

“A depressing prospect, for sure, yet the inevitable judgment of those for whom religious or spiritual alternatives carry no resonance.”

Pictured: Fr. Georges Lemaître, Albert Einstein and Fr. Andrew Pinsent

Threads of the Tapestry of God

I have written numerous articles about the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, the origins and mechanics of the Universe. But these are not the only tools with which to explore the universe and measure life and death. The conclusions of science and faith are not as inseparable as science might have you believe.

I have raised this analogy before, but consider these two passages from two sources that have become meaningful to me. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 296) expresses a fundamental truth of faith God created the Universe and life “out of nothing.”

Among the many contributions of science that I hold in high regard, this is one by the mathematician Robyn Arianrhod whose book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University 2005) draws the same conclusion. Don’t let the scientific language dissuade you from understanding this phenomenal bridge between science and faith:

“The Belgian priest and astrophysicist, Georges Lemaitre began to develop expanding cosmological models out of Einstein’s equations … In 1931, Lemaitre formally sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory [which] showed that Einstein’s equations predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional spacetime … Before this point, about 13 billion years ago, there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter. Nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.”

— Arianrhod, pp 185-187

Reflecting on the death of his parents, Alan Lightman wrote that he wished he believed in the continuity of life after death. It could be at least a starting point that sometimes science and faith share some of the same language and conclusions about the origin of life. Faith, to have any real depth, is not simply an emotional experience to assuage our fears, but rather one arrived at also through reason. Catholicism presents 2,000+ years of faith seeking understanding, of belief built upon reason.

And sometimes reason just cannot explain away our intuition that life has an Author, and when we die, the book is still not finished. I am intrigued by Professor Hirshfeld’s use of the term, “resonance” for I have also used it in some recent posts. I have described it as a sort of echo that finds its way among the “threads of the Tapestry of God” in ways that give life meaning and purpose, in ways that connect us. One way spiritual resonance manifests itself is by giving meaning to suffering.

Consider this stunning action of spiritual resonance that was described in a post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” That post was co-authored by me and Father Andrew Pinsent, PhD, a priest, physicist and Director of the Institute for Science and Religion at Oxford University.

When my friend Pornchai Moontri came into the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, one of our readers, the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium, inquired rather urgently asking to stand as Pornchai’s Godfather. They visited several times. However, it was only after I wrote about Father George Lemaitre that Pierre contacted me with the staggering revelation that the Godfather of Pornchai Moontri is the Godson of Father George Lemaitre. The mathematical odds against such a “mere coincidence” are ... well … astronomical!

It is a long time since I have viewed with awe the expanse of our galaxy spanning the night sky in all its brilliance, but like Alan Lightman, I have done so, and find it unforgettable. He is on the right track, and may one day come to see that the awe it instills in him is not the awe of science alone. “I wish I believed,” he wrote. I believe he just may.

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Fr. Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls are now featured on Gloria.tv, an international Catholic social network and a video and news sharing platform. We are honored by this invitation, and by the Catholic fidelity demonstrated by Gloria.tv. We invite our readers to support this venue by visiting and sharing our page and other content there.

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Fr. Georges Lemaître

Editor’s Note: Continue this great adventure of science and faith with these related posts:

A Corner of the Veil

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

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.”

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.”