“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
The United Nations High Commissioner of Hypocrisy
In 2014, a U.N. 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.
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
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.
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:
The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead
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.
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 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
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 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
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.?
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.
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.
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.
Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah
Saint Joseph is silent in the Gospel account of the Birth of the Messiah, but his actions reveal him as a paradigm of spiritual fatherhood and sacrificial love.
Saint Joseph is silent in the Gospel account of the Birth of the Messiah, but his actions reveal him as a paradigm of spiritual fatherhood and sacrificial love.
At Christmas by Fr. Gordon MacRae
I wrote a post similar to this one during Advent in 2016. At the time I wrote it, I had been living in dire straits with eight prisoners to a cell. Daily life there was chaotic and draconian. The word “draconian” refers to a set of punishing conditions notorious for their severity and heavy-handed oppression. The word was derived from Draco, a Seventh Century B.C. politician who codified the laws of Athens to severely oppress the rights and liberties of its citizens.
Pornchai Moontri was living in that same setting with me, though neither of us had said or done anything to bring it about. It was simply a bureaucratic development that we were told would last for only a few weeks. One year later, we were both still there. Later in 2017 we were finally moved to a saner, safer place, but that Advent and Christmas in 2016 are etched in my mind as a painful trial, with but one bright exception.
Many of our friends were also thrust into that same situation, living eight to a cell in a block of 96 men seemingly always on the verge of rage. I was recently talking with a friend who was there with us then. He said that what he recalls most from the experience was how Pornchai and I went from cell to cell on our first night there to be sure our friends were okay. And what he recalled most about Christmas Eve in that awful setting was Pornchai setting up a makeshift workspace in our cell to make Thai wraps for all the other prisoners on the block.
Over the previous week in visits to the commissary, I stocked up extra tortilla wraps and ingredients. Our friends helped with distribution as Pornchai undertook his first-ever fast food job. The hardcore “lifers” around us were amazed. Nothing like this had ever happened here before. Just weeks earlier, Donald Trump was elected President. He announced a policy that foreign migrants seeking to stay in the United States would first be sent to Mexico to await processing. While the entire cellblock was eating Thai wraps, Pornchai announced to loud cheers that they are henceforth to be called “Thai Burritos.”
It was in that inhumane setting that I first wrote the story of Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah described in the Gospel according to St. Matthew (1:18-24). It was the Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent in 2016. When I went back to look at my 2016 post on that Gospel passage about Joseph’s dream, I thought it reflected too much the conditions in which it was written. So instead of restoring it, I decided to write it anew.
The People Who Walked in Darkness
The Gospel of Matthew begins with “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1). Many have pointed out some differences between the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s account and that found in the Gospel of Luke (3:23-38). They are remarkably similar in the generations from Abraham to King David, but from David to Jesus they diverge. This is because Matthew traces the genealogy of Jesus forward from Abraham through King David to Jesus in the line of Joseph who connects to Jesus by adoption, the same manner in which we now call God “Our Father.”
The genealogy in Luke, on the other hand, begins with Mary and runs backward through David to Abraham and then to Adam. It is a fine point that I have made in several reflections on Sacred Scripture that we today find ourselves in a unique time in Salvation History. Abraham first encountered God in the 21st Century before the Birth of Christ. We encounter God in the 21st Century after. At the center of all things stands Jesus whose Cross shattered a barrier to “To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate.”
That both genealogies pass through David is highly significant. This is expressed in the first reading from Isaiah (9:1-6) in the Vigil Mass for the Nativity of the Lord on Christmas Eve:
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom, a light has shone. You have brought them abundant joy and great rejoicing... For the yoke that burdened them, the pole on their shoulder, and the rod of their taskmaster you have smashed as on the day of Midian.... For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They call him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father Forever, Prince of Peace. His dominion is vast and ever peaceful from David’s throne and over his kingdom which he confirms and sustains by judgment and justice now and forever.”
— Isaiah 9:1-6
The differences in the genealogy accounts are a testament to their authenticity. Matthew stresses the Davidic kingship of Jesus over Israel by adoption through Joseph mirroring our adoption as heirs to the Kingdom. Luke, by tracing the ancestry of Jesus through Mary all the way back to Adam, stresses a theological rather than historical truth: the Lordship of Jesus over sin and grace and our redemption from the Fall of Man — a Savior born to us through Mary.
The Birth of the Messiah
What initially struck me in Saint Matthew’s account of the Birth of Jesus is its language inferring the sanctity of life. Having just passed though a disappointing national election in America in which the right to life was center stage, we heard a lot of talk about fetal heartbeats, viability, and reproductive rights. Our culture’s turning away from life is also a turning away from God. The fact that many nominally Catholic politicians lend their voices and votes to that turning away is a betrayal of Biblical proportions. In the Story of God and human beings, we have been here before. Planned Parenthood is our culture’s Temple to Baal.
The Gospel passages about the Birth of the Messiah clearly establish a framework for the value Sacred Scripture places on human life. Mary is never described as simply pregnant, or in a pre-natal state, or carrying a fetus. She is, without exception from the moment of the Annunciation, declared to be “with child.” But it was not all without politics, obstacles, and suspicions, and fears of finger-pointing to discredit her fidelity. The story begins with Matthew 1:18-19 and Joseph pondering how best to protect Mary from the scandal that was surely to come.
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. Her husband, Joseph, being a just man unwilling to expose her to disgrace, resolved to send her away quietly.”
— Matthew 1:18-19
I am struck by the fact that in the Gospel, Mary never attempted to explain any of this to Joseph. What would she have said? “An angel appeared to me, said some very strange things, and when he left I was with child?” Would Joseph have just accepted that without question? Would you? The story’s authenticity is in its human response: “Joseph being a just man unwilling to expose her to disgrace, resolved to send her away quietly.” (Matthew 1:19)
It is important to understand the nuance here. What made Joseph and any Jewish man, a “just” man in the eyes of the Jews — and in the eyes of the Jewish-Christian Evangelist, Matthew — is his obedience to the Law of Moses which required a quiet divorce. Early Church traditions proposed three theories about why Joseph became resolved to send Mary away quietly.
The first is the “suspicion” theory, the weakest argument of the three but one held by no less than Saint Augustine himself in the early Fourth Century. The theory presents that Joseph, like what most men of his time (or any time) might do, initially suspected Mary of being unfaithful in their betrothal, and thus felt compelled to invoke the law of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 to impose a bill of divorce because he had found something objectionable about her.
In that theory, Joseph clings to his decision until an Angel of the Lord sets him straight in a dream. However the theory entirely overlooks the first motive ascribed to Joseph in the Gospel: that of being a just man “unwilling to expose her to disgrace.” (Matthew 1:19)
The second theory is the “perplexity” theory proposed by Saint Jerome also in the early Fourth Century. In this, Joseph could not bring himself to suspect Mary of infidelity so the matter left him in perplexity. He thus decided to quietly send her away to protect her. According to this theory, his dream from the Angel of the Lord redirected his path with confirmation of what he might already have suspected. This theory was widely held in medieval times.
The third is the “reverence” theory. It proposed that Joseph knew all along of the divine origin of the child in Mary’s womb, but considered himself to be unworthy of her and of having any role in the life of this child. He thus decided to send her away to protect the divine secret from any exposure to the letter of the law. This theory was held by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century.
But I have a fourth theory of my own. It is called Love. Sacrificial Love. But first, back to Joseph’s dream.
The Angel of the Lord
“As [Joseph] considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called, Emmanuel (which means ‘God with us’). When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him. He took Mary as his wife, but he knew her not until she had borne a son, and he called his name Jesus.”
— Matthew 1:18-24
There is a lot to be unpacked from this passage. This account represents the first of three dreams experienced by Joseph in which he was instructed by an “Angel of the Lord” to undertake specific action relative to his pivotal role in the lives of Mary and Jesus. The method of delivery for each message is not just some rank and file angel — though that would certainly have sufficed — but rather an “Angel of the Lord.” The title appears only a rare few times in the Hebrew Scriptures and only four times in the New Testament: Once in Acts of the Apostles and three times in the Gospel of Matthew, and only in reference to Joseph’s dreams about the Birth of the Messiah.
There are 126 references to dreams among the characters of Sacred Scripture. Some of the pivotal moments in Salvation History were set in motion through dreams. In the original Greek of St. Matthew’s Gospel, the term used for Joseph’s three dreams about the birth of Jesus is ‘onar,’ and it is used nowhere else in Sacred Scripture but here. It refers not just to a dream, but to a divine intervention in human affairs.
Coupled with the fact that the dream is induced by an “Angel of the Lord,” the scene takes on a sense of great urgency when compared with other angelic messages. The urgency is related to Joseph’s pondering about what is best for Mary, a pondering that could unintentionally thwart God’s redemptive plan for the souls of all humankind.
There are many parallels in this account with events in the life of the Old Testament Joseph. Both had the same name. Both were essential to Salvation History. Both were in the line of King David — one looking forward and the other backward. Both were the sons of a father named Jacob. Both brought their families to safety in a flight to Egypt. God spoke to both through dreams.
The task of the Angel of the Lord is to redirect Joseph’s decision regardless of what motivated it. The divine urgency is to preserve the symbolic value of King David’s lineage being passed on to Jesus by Joseph’s adoption. The symbolism is immensely powerful. This adoption, and the establishment of kingship in the line of David in the human realm, also reflects the establishment of God’s adoption of us in the spiritual realm.
Remember that the title, “King of the Jews” is one of the charges for which Jesus faced the rejection of Israel and the merciless justice of Rome. There is great irony in this. Through the Cross, Jesus ratifies the adoption between God and us. Mocked as “King of the Jews,” He becomes for all eternity Christ the King and we become the adopted heirs of His Kingdom. It is difficult to imagine the Child born in Bethlehem impaled upon the Cross at Golgotha, but He left this world as innocent as when he entered it. His crucified innocence won for us an inheritance beyond measure.
And Saint Joseph won for us an eternal model for the sacrificial love of fatherhood.
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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: This was Part 1 of a special two-part Christmas post based on Sacred Scripture. Part 2 is:
Joseph’s Second Dream: The Slaughter of the Innocents.
Thank you for reading and sharing this post which is now added to our Library Category, Sacred Scripture.
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Christmas in the Land of Nod, East of Eden
Book of Genesis, Cain was banished to wander for his crime in the Land of Nod, East of Eden. The Star of Bethlehem was the only way back to a State of Grace.
In the Book of Genesis, Cain was banished to wander for his crime in the Land of Nod, East of Eden. The Star of Bethlehem was the only way back to a State of Grace.
Christmas by Fr. Gordon MacRae
At Thanksgiving this year, we recommended a post entitled “The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope.” It was more of a history lesson than a typical blog post, but it got a lot of notice. It is said that history is written by the victors, not the vanquished, so my take on Thanksgiving was unusual. It was told from the point of view of Squanto, the man I credit with the survival of the Puritan Pilgrims who — for better or worse — were the spiritual and cultural beginning of the first colonies in the New World.
Please indulge me in another brief foray into history — this time, Biblical history. I just can’t help myself. We can’t understand where we are until we discover where we’ve been. In the Genesis account of the fall of man, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden as both a punishment and a deterrent. They disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. So God cast them out of Eden “lest [Adam] put out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever.”
They were cast out of Eden to the east (Genesis 3:24). God then placed a Cherubim with a flaming sword to the east of Eden to bar Man’s return, and to guard the way to the Tree of Life. Whether this is history, metaphor, myth, or allegory matters not. The inspired Word of God in the Genesis account tells us something essential about ourselves in relationship with God.
A generation later, after the murder of his brother Abel, Cain too “went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16). The “land of Nod” has no other reference in Scripture. It represents no known geographical name or place. The name seems to derive from the Hebrew, “nad,” which means “to wander.” Cain himself described his fate in just that way: “from thy face I shall be hidden; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14).
The Aggadah — a collection of Rabbinic commentary, legend, and anecdotes accumulated over a thousand years — expanded on the Biblical account. The “mark of Cain” imposed by God was a pair of horns. According to the Aggadah legend, Cain’s great-grandson, Lamech, had poor eyesight and shot Cain with an arrow believing him to be a beast. There was a sense of “what goes around comes around” in the Aggadah version.
In Genesis, Cain’s descendant, Lamech, became sort of a counter-cultural anti-hero seen as the epitome of the moral degradation of blood revenge. Lamech killed a man for wounding him. “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Genesis 4:24). Cain’s murder of his brother, and his banishment East of Eden, set in motion a ripple effect of epic proportion.
I have long wondered if the banishment of Adam and Cain “east of Eden” is a divinely inspired metaphor for man’s fall from grace, a state of being, more than a place. Jumping ahead way ahead — the Magi of Matthew’s Gospel came to Christ from the east (Matthew 2:1). They “saw his star in the east” and followed it out of the east — out of what is now likely modern day Iran, a story I told in “Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear.”
I envision the Star of Bethlehem to be a sort of beacon leading the way out of the darkness of the east, the darkness of man’s past, out of the spiritual wanderlust set into motion by Adam and Cain. In the Tanakh translation of the Jewish Scripture — our “Old” Testament — Psalm 113:3 is translated, “From the east to the west the Name of the Lord will be praised.”
Family Values and Woke Politics
Some of the prisoners I see each day are aware that I write weekly for Beyond These Stone Walls. Those who had a recipe published in “Looking for Lunch in All the Wrong Places” invited their families to read that post. Several others asked to read a printed copy of “The True Story of Thanksgiving” and it’s been circulating here a bit. Just a few days ago, a prisoner I do not know asked me if the “Squanto story” is true. Squanto’s plight in my Thanksgiving account caused an interesting reaction, and seemed to inspire discussion about how to best cope with shattered dreams and hopes, with loss and the fall from grace, with life in the land of Nod. The prevailing thought has been that Squanto responded to his bitterness and loss with sacrifice. The irony of what Squanto did is not lost on prisoners.
Captured by a British ship and nearly sold into slavery — his life in ruins and everyone he loved destroyed — Squanto chose to come to the aid of the only people worse off than Squanto himself: the hapless pilgrims who stepped off the Mayflower in winter, 1620. Some prisoners conclude that they need to be more like Squanto. Many of the men around me have lives that spun out of control through drug addiction, poverty, selfishness, rage, or greed. A lot of people imagine that prisoners are just evil, brutal men incapable of considering anyone but themselves. The media’s portrayal of prisoners as brutal, manipulative and self-involved accurately describes only a very small minority.
Evil men do exist, and prisons everywhere contain them, but they are not typical of men in prison. Most men and women in prison simply got caught up in something, made mistakes — some very grave — but are no more evil than your friends and neighbors. Some would give anything to atone for their crimes, to take back the wrongs they have done. Some were victims before they were victimizers. Most are guilty of crimes, but some are not.
Many of the younger prisoners are just lost. There’s a clear correlation between their presence here and the systemic breakdown of family — especially fatherhood — in our culture. There is an alarming number of young prisoners here who have had either abusive fathers or none at all. There is a direct and demonstrable correlation between the breakdown of family and the marked increase in prisoners in our society. For the evidence for this, see the most-read post ever at Beyond These Stone Walls, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”
Puritans and Empty Pews
Recently, the Pew Research Center published the results of a study that identified the most and least religious areas of the United States. The study based its conclusions on surveys with parameters such as professed belief in God, participation in worship, the importance of religion in daily lives, and the practice of personal prayer. Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas were the most religious states with mostly Southern states rounding out the top ten. In contrast, the six New England states were at the very bottom of the fifty states in religious identity and practice. It’s ironic that the Puritans settled New England in 1620 desiring to build a religiously based society free from Catholic influence. The Puritans wanted religion, but not a church. They wanted religion free of Sacraments and symbols, free of any magisterial teaching authority, a religion of the elect. Over 400 years later, the community they established has now been identified as the least religiously influenced region of the country.
In the Pew study, New Hampshire placed at the very bottom — 50th out of 50 states — with a population professing any sort of religious belief, practice, or a religiously informed value system. In inverse proportion to the influence of religion on its population, New Hampshire now leads the nation in the growth of its prison population in ratio to its citizen population. Almost predictably, it also currently leads the nation in drug overdose deaths among people ages 16 to 54.
In 1980, New Hampshire had 326 prisoners. By 2005, the prison population swelled to 2,500. Between 1980 and 2005, the New Hampshire state population grew 34 percent while its prison population grew nearly 600 percent in the same period, and without any commensurate increase in crime rate. Anyone who is not alarmed by this statistic doesn’t understand the relationship between religious values, family life, crime, and the abandonment of young people to wander east of Eden. Among young men now in the New Hampshire prison system, the recidivism rate is a staggering 57 percent.
There’s a compelling argument here for the preservation of family and the restoration of religion in the American public square. There are far better ways for our society to invest the billions of dollars it now sinks into new prisons. The population in the land of Nod east of Eden is growing fast.
Christmas Gifts
It’s not all gloom and doom. In New Hampshire, at least, there is an emphasis on programs and rehabilitation that present an avenue toward redemption. In the journey out of the east, there are some prisoners who stand out, and their journey is most clearly expressed in their art.
On the eastern end of the Concord prison complex is a workshop known as HobbyCraft. There, prisoner-volunteers make some 1,000 toys per year for the U.S. Marine Corp’s “Toys-for-Tots” program. Several prisoners gifted in woodworking take part in the Toys-for-Tots project each Christmas. They donate their time, their talent and their own materials to create high quality toys and other wood creations for this project.
Among the prisoner-artisans is Mike, a 55-year-old man who has been in prison for over thirty years. Mike has donated his prodigious skill in woodworking for the Toys-for-Tots program. Here are two of his most popular creations:
If there has ever been anyone in your life for whom you have lost hope for redemption, then take some time to read the story of Pornchai Moontri told in “Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.” Pornchai’s story is a great example of the connection between conversion to a life of faith and rehabilitation.
Before Pornchai left prison for Thailand in late 2020, he spent his time studying theology through a scholarship program at Catholic Distance University. His creations in the HobbyCraft center have become legendary. Pornchai has mastered the art of model shipbuilding, and was designated a Master Craftsman in basic woodworking. Here are some of his most popular creations:
Two of the magnificent ships he designed and built last year were donated after being featured at the annual Newport Arts Festival. One of Pornchai’s creations was a replica of the U.S.S. Constitution. He carved and fitted each of its over 600 parts, and spent some 2,000 hours on the design, construction and rigging.
One of the first edicts in the Puritan’s Charter for their settlement in New England was to prohibit any observance of Christmas. As these and other prisoners have demonstrated on their journey out of the east of Eden, Christmas became very real after their Advent of the heart.
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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. December 8, the Solemnity of the Assumption honors the Immaculate Conception, and four days later on December 12 is a most important Feast Day for the Church of the Americas. Honor our Mother by reading and sharing,
A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe
You may also like these related posts linked in the post above:
The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope
Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear
For Fr. John Tabor, the Path to Priesthood Was War
Jaffrey, New Hampshire native Father John Tabor was called by God from the U.S. Navy at the Fall of Saigon to a half century of priesthood in Vietnam and Thailand.
Jaffrey, New Hampshire native Father John Tabor was called by God from the U.S. Navy at the Fall of Saigon to a half century of priesthood in Vietnam and Thailand.
November 30, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Some time ago, I introduced a post by citing a famous 1990s play and movie by John Guare entitled, Six Degrees of Separation. In the film version, actor Will Smith played the central character, a young man who insinuated himself into the lives of a wealthy Manhattan couple by pretending to be the son of American actor, Sidney Poitier. The hoodwinked couple were so enthralled by what they thought was a fortuitous connection to a Hollywood star that they invited their wealthy friends to witness the new relationship. It was a con man’s dream.
The play and film introduced a theory that many came to believe was a valid sociological principle. It was the notion that the paths of all human beings are somehow connected by no more than six degrees of separation from each other. As the world grew smaller in the Internet age, the idea took on an aura of universal truth. It might even be true, for all I know, but it started off not as science, but as faith.
I have written of two examples. The path of my friend, Pornchai Moontri, my roommate of 16 years here, is separated from that of Saint Padre Pio by just two degrees. Pornchai’s Godfather, the late Pierre Matthews from Belgium, met and was blessed by Padre Pio at age 16. I wrote of their strange encounter in “With Padre Pio When the Worst that Could Happen Happens.”
Perhaps more profound and surprising, just after I wrote a popular science post about the origins of the Cosmos some years ago I learned that Pornchai is also separated by only two degrees from the famous mathematician-physicist, Fr. Georges Lemaitre, who discovered the Big Bang origin of the Universe. Father Lemaitre was a close friend of Pornchai’s Godfather’s parents who sent us several photos of them together. I wrote of the astronomical odds against such a development in “Fr. Georges Lemaitre: The Priest who Discovered the Big Bang.”
According to the theory, these two accounts left me also with only two degrees of separation from both Padre Pio and Father Lemaitre, two famous figures about whom I had been writing. It was mind-boggling, but it was never a legitimate scientific theory at all. For most people, threads of connection between people are mere coincidence. For others, they are the subtle threads of what I have called the Great Tapestry of God.
I subscribe to the latter view, but we should not try to reduce these threads to the limits of science. They are instead, for many, evidence of actual grace — perhaps more connected to a Scriptural mystery: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1). People of true faith find meaning in these connections that science overlooks.
Priesthood in a Time of War
One of these unusual threads of connection just manifested itself in my life. The November/December 2022 issue of Parable magazine, a news publication from my diocese, had as its cover story a tribute to Father John Tabor entitled, “Soldier to Servant.” My path has crossed with that of Father Tabor several times in life, but we have never actually met.
Several years older than me, John Tabor graduated from Conant High School in Jaffrey, New Hampshire in 1964. I graduated at age 16 from a Boston area high school in 1970. His path took him to the U.S. Navy and to war in Vietnam. Mine did not. I was too young at graduation to go to war, and by the time I could, the war was over.
Father Tabor’s priestly vocation was shaped by a war in which he survived several near death encounters. One of them involved a military jeep he was driving in a war zone in Da Nang. It broke down right in front of a small Catholic church where he sought the help of a local priest to repair it. A short distance down the same road on the same day, a land mine exploded that would have killed him, but John missed it because he and the priest were slow making the needed repair. It was then that John gave serious thought to something that passed only fleetingly through his mind back in high school.
In the late 18th Century, France colonized Vietnam and remained in power as an occupying force until 1954. The long French occupation of Vietnam had the unintended effect of introducing Catholicism to the Vietnamese. As a result, many Vietnamese today practice Catholic faith with great reverence. A quarter century after the French departed from Vietnam, Father John Tabor was deeply moved by the depth of Catholic faith among the people of this war-torn country.
When the war was over, and his tour of duty in the Navy ended, John Tabor wrote to his family in New Hampshire to tell them of his decision to remain in Vietnam to study for the priesthood. He immersed himself in the Vietnamese language and became fluent. Father Tabor was ordained for the Diocese of Da Nang in 1974.
In that same year half a world away, my own path to priesthood had just begun. Five years later in 1979, during theological studies at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, my closest friend was Tran, a Vietnamese seminarian who had been a student during the war in the seminary in Da Nang. I tutored Tran in English so he could complete his studies. Like Father Tabor, Tran, had been forced to flee Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon under the post-war oppression of the communist North Vietnamese in 1975. He brought years of war trauma with him.
Tran had been one of hundreds of thousands forced to flee Vietnam among the famous “Boat People” whose struggle for freedom and survival captured the world’s attention. During seminary studies in Baltimore, Tran often spoke to me about Father John Tabor the American priest who taught English to Vietnamese seminarians at the seminary in Da Nang where Father Tabor first ministered.
Also among the Boat People fleeing communist Vietnam was a young high school student named John Hung Le. He is known to our readers today as a heroic priest in the Missionary Society of the Divine Word and the founder of the Vietnamese Refugee Project of Thailand. He is also the priest who helped to sponsor Pornchai Moontri upon his arrival in Thailand in 2021 and continues to support his repatriation today.
The Fall of Saigon, the surrender of the South Vietnamese to Northern Communist Vietnam took place on April 30, 1975. The Viet Cong tanks and troops soon began pouring into downtown Saigon — now called Ho Chi Minh City — and spread toward Da Nang. I vividly recall news footage of waves of U.S. Marine and Air Force helicopters. They flew 6,400 military and civilian evacuees from Saigon to a 40-vessel armada waiting 15 miles off the coast of South Vietnam.
American helicopters swept into Saigon just after dawn to retrieve 30 marines from the U.S. Embassy rooftop completing the final evacuation of about 900 Americans and more than 5,000 Vietnamese. Four American marines died during the final hours of the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Two were killed in a heavy morning bombardment of Tan Son Nhut Air Base when a rocket hit the compound of the U.S. defense attache’s office where they were on guard. The other two died during the evacuation when their helicopter plunged into the South China Sea.
Several Americans, including some brave newsmen, decided to stay. Hundreds of desperate Vietnamese civilians swarmed into the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon and onto the roof after the marines had left. The roof of a nearby building also served as an emergency helipad where several hundred South Vietnamese civilians waited in hopes that there would be more helicopters to rescue them away from the coming communist oppression. They waited in vain.
Udon Thani, Thailand
Also left behind, by his own choice, was Father John Tabor who had been ordained for the Diocese of Da Nang just ten months earlier in 1974. Though now fluent in spoken and written Vietnamese, he nonetheless knew that as an American he must leave Vietnam quickly. It would not be by sea. He made his way across a border into Laos, then north to the Capital, Vientiane. From there he crossed the border into Thailand where he was canonically received into the northern Thai Diocese of Udon Thani in 1975.
For historical context for our readers, at the time Father Tabor arrived in Udon Thani, just a short distance to the south in Non Bhua Lamphu, Thailand, two-year-old Pornchai Moontri had become an orphan. That complex story was told to wide acclaim in “Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”
Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Communist government of Vietnam were not restored until 1995. Father Tabor ministered in Udon Thani, Thailand for the next 47 years. After seeing him last month on the cover of Parable in my diocese, I had a friend help me send an email message to Father John Hung Le in Thailand. I told him what I had read of the story of Father Tabor and of how he had come to New Hampshire to visit his twin brother after an absence of fifty years. I asked Father John if his path had ever crossed with that of Father Tabor who was originally from New Hampshire.
The message that came back the next day contained attachments which our editor then sent to the GTL tablet in my cell. The first was a photo of Pornchai who had been helping Father John to distribute food to Vietnamese refugee families that day. The second was the photo above of Fathers John Le and John Tabor. “We had lunch together today,” said Father John. By coincidence they met in Bangkok that very morning when Father Tabor had a required checkup upon his return to Thailand from New Hampshire.
It turned out that they are old friends whose respective paths had taken them from the terrors of war into the priesthood of Jesus Christ on the frontier of Catholic missionary service in Southeast Asia. Father John Le’s community, the Society of the Divine Word, has long had a base in Udon Thani, the most northern region of Thailand along the border with Laos very near Pornchai’s childhood home. These are heroic priests whose selfless lives have been on the front lines of service to the Lord among the poorest of the poor for decades. I am humbled to know them.
In his recent message, Father John Le told me that he and my friend, Pornchai had met that evening with Father John’s Provincial Superior on his annual visitation from the Society of the Divine Word. The connectedness of our interwoven paths is staggering. I can only make sense of it through a single line in a prayer. It is the prayer of St. John Henry Newman that I wrote about some months ago in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare.” The prayer is entitled, “Some Definite Service”:
“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.”
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Father John Tabor’s route from Da Nang, Vietnam through Laos to Udon Thani, Thailand
Note from Father Gordon MacRae:
Please keep Father John Tabor, Father John Hung Le, SVD, and Pornchai Moontri in your prayers. Over several months, readers have generously sent me gifts to be applied to Father John’s Refugee Project and the support of Pornchai’s repatriation to Thailand after 36 years. I have saved your recent gifts in support of Father John’s ministry until they amounted to $1,000 U.S.D. We just sent this amount to Father John who expressed his deeply felt gratitude (as do I!). That amount is equal to 30,000 Thai Baht which greatly assists him in bulk food and medical supply purchases for the Vietnamese refugee children and families of Thailand. During this time of global inflation, your sacrifices have made a difference. Thank you.
To assist in this project, please scroll through our SPECIAL EVENTS page for information.
Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like the related links cited in this post:
Washington and the Vatican Strengthen Ties with Vietnam — National Catholic Register, October 8, 2023