“Peter Lives in Rome Again”

In March, 2010 when Beyond These Stone Walls was a newborn blog, a post about Vatican scandal went viral. Fifteen years later it is still widely read and spread.

May 14, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

We have already published a post this week, though four days earlier than our usual. It has a rather blunt title, but if you missed it, you should at least indulge me. That post was, “Pope Leo XIV Is Certainly No Clone of Pope Francis.”

If you search in any search engine the term “scandal at the Vatican,” using quotes, you will immediately come across a post that technically gave birth to this blog. It was written in March, 2010 when Beyond These Stone Walls was literally nine months along. Its title is “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican.” I had no idea when I wrote it that “Scandal at the Vatican” would become one of the most common searches on the Internet in regard to Catholic affairs thus making my post top the charts at various points along the way.

Vatican scandal was not at all what I had in mind when I wrote that post. It tells a fascinating story about overlapping layers of art history and we will link to it again at the end of this post.

Just days ago, worldwide attention was focused on the Sistine Chapel, the site at which Pope Leo XIV was recently elected. My post from fifteen years ago was focused upon that very same place but for different reasons. I am always a bit nervous when that post surfaces widely into view again as it did during and after the recent conclave. My post was about art, and Michelangelo, and a little-known event of art history. Rome is home to some of the world's most accomplished artists and art historians. I sometimes worry about whether and how something I wrote might measure up to their scrutiny. But the post in question has been making waves on the Internet for at least the last fifteen years. No one has yet complained or challenged my artistic interpretation. I won’t repeat that entire story here. You may read it for yourself linked again at the end of this post. Despite the fact that I wrote it, it is indeed an amazing story.

Landmarks

Among the vast media sources of published commentary about the results of the recent Vatican papal conclave, some have stood out far above the rest. One of these was published in The Wall Street Journal by Canadian priest and author of some reknown, Father Raymond de Souza entitled “Catholics Welcome an American Pope” (WSJ, May 9, 2025). I found a few of its paragraphs to be especially fascinating and moving. They gave me my title for this post:

“Twenty years ago, at the election of Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s and was caught staring off into the distance. He confessed later that he was marveling that the Church had elected yet another man to succeed Peter, while the great imperial Rome, the caput mundi, which put Peter to death on the Vatican hill, was no longer. Only ruins remained.

“In 1586, Pope Sixtus V had moved one of these ruins, a 350-ton granite obelisk, to the center of St. Peter’s Square, where it stands to this day. That obelisk could have been among the last landmarks St. Peter looked upon as he was crucified. It is the first thing a new pope sees when he lookes out over the assembled masses in the square below.

“On the top of that obelisk is a bronze cross, and place therein is a relic of the true Cross of Christ. There is in the Catholic calendar a feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It falls on September 14 — the new Pope Leo XIV’s birthday.”

“Peter lives in Rome again.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post, and our post about Pope Leo XIV for whom we hold high hopes which, if you saw the faces of the immense crowd in St. Peter’s Square last week, seemed to be contagious.

Please also read and share these related posts cited herein:

Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican

Conclave: Amid the Wind and the Waves, a Successor of Peter

Pope Leo XIV is No Clone of Pope Francis

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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.”

Conclave: Amid the Wind and the Waves, a Successor of Peter

In the Sistine Chapel, under the gaze of Christ in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, cardinal-electors discern the successor of Peter the Holy Spirit has already chosen.

May, 7 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.”

— Luke 22:31-32

“Jesus said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water, but when he saw the wind and the waves he was afraid and began to sink, calling out, ‘Lord, save me.’”

— Matthew 14:29-30

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It has been written, by me and by others, that 1968 was the year we drank from the poison of this world. I was fifteen years old then. The war in Vietnam was raging. Battles for racial equality engulfed the American South. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on his way to the presidency. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated on his way to civil rights. Riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Violent partisan politics spread across the land like a pandemic setting a tone for decades to come.

Nineteen Sixty-Eight was also the year Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae, a papal encyclical asserting a moral framework for sexual ethics and human reproduction. From Catholics of every stripe, including some bishops and theologians, it subjected Pope Paul to tidal waves of global resentment and dissent. A notable exception, which was published in these pages, was “Padre Pio’s Letter to Pope Paul VI on Humanae Vitae.” The letter was written two weeks before Padre Pio’s death on September 23, 1968.

After witnessing all the above in 1968, I sat mesmerized in a Boston movie theater at age fifteen on a Sunday afternoon for the debut screening of “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” a film about the election of a pope based on a 1963 novel of the same name by Australian writer, Morris West. Like the book, the movie was long and ponderous, short on action, long on dialogue. At least it seemed that way to the mind of a fifteen year old.

But it told an amazing story. Archbishop Kyril Lakota, a courageous Soviet dissident was elevated to the papacy after spending seventeen years in a Soviet prison. Had I been able to see three or four decades into my own future in 1968, I might have cheered the result of that conclave.

Beyond my baptism, of which I had no recollection, and my first communion at age seven — which I remember mostly for the hot cocoa I spilled on my borrowed white suit in a diner where my mother took me afterward — I had little to no knowledge of the Catholic faith in 1968.

So, largely ignorant of our faith, I devoured The Shoes of the Fisherman — first the movie and then later the book. The film won a Golden Globe Award for Best Musical Score, which rose up to transcend any music I had ever heard up to that point in my life.

Emerging from All Our Prisons

Keeping his original name, Pope Kyril faced the greatest political and moral crisis ever seen in the 2000-year life of the Church. The world was at the brink of nuclear war. The people of China were starving while the Soviet Empire exploited other world powers which became islands unto themselves. Pope Kyril was tasked with mediating an end to hostilities and the looming threat of full-scale nuclear war which could destroy the planet and everyone on it. So after much prayer, Pope Kyril did the unthinkable. He sacrificed the patrimony of the Church. He sought to avert hunger and war by liquidating and surrendering all property and other assets held by the global Catholic Church.

Critics of the communists chafed. Critics of the movie choked, while critics of the Church cheered. They dismissively held that the Church would not have survived a nuclear war anyway. But faith would survive and Pope Kyril was boldly going to put that to the test. I left the theater resolved to take a serious look at the Church the adolescent me had set aside as irrelevant.

I watched this film and read this book fifty-seven years ago. I am amazed today to recall how much of its details became imprinted upon me. At the conclave in The Shoes of the Fisherman, Kyril Lakota was a startling figure. The book describes him:

“For seventeen years he had been in prison or in the labor camps. Only once in all that time had he been able to offer Mass, with a thimbleful of wine and a crust of white bread. All that he could cling to of doctrine and prayer and sacrament formulae was locked in his own mind. All that he had tried to spend of strength and compassion upon his fellow prisoners he had to dredge up out of himself and out of the well of Divine Mercy.”

— The Shoes of the Fisherman, p 20

During his Soviet imprisonment, Kyril had become a cardinal in pectore (in secret). Released just before the death of the pope, he was entirely unknown while facing the conclave ahead. After the opening Mass, the cardinal camerlengo was to choose someone to read a homily in Latin. Expecting to be bored, most of the electorate settled in for a long, boring treatise. Instead, the carmerlengo walked to the far end of the stalls in the Sistine Chapel and led to the pulpit the former prisoner, Kyril, portrayed in the film by the great Anthony Quinn:

“My name is Kyril Lakota, and I am come the latest and the least into this Sacred College. I speak to you today by the invitation of our brother the Cardinal Camerlengo. To most of you I am a stranger because my people are scattered and I have spent the last seventeen years in prison. If I have any rights among you, any credits at all, let this be the foundation of them — that I speak for the lost ones, for those who walked in darkness and in the valley of the shadow of death. It is for them and not for ourselves that we are entering into conclave. It is for them and not for our selves that we must elect a pontiff.

“The first man who held this office was one who walked with Christ, and was crucified like the Master. Those who have best served the Church and the faithful are those who have been closest to Christ and to the people who are the image of Christ. We have power in our hands, my brothers, but we shall put even greater power into the hands of the one we elect. We must use that power as servants and not as masters …

“It is not asked of us that we shall agree on what is best for the Church, but only that we shall deliberate in charity and humility and in the end give our obedience to the one who shall be chosen by the majority. We are asked to act swiftly so that the Church may not be left without a head. In all this we must be what, in the end, our Pontiff shall proclaim himself to be — servants of the servants of God.”

— The Shoes of the Fisherman, p 17

The Conclave of 2025

My authority for the following reflections on the current conclave now underway are largely from one whom I have come to respect as a fair and balanced observer unfettered by personal bias. Most of what I here present is summarized from a fine article by George Weigel in The Wall Street Journal (“The High Stakes in Choosing the next Pope,” WSJ, April 26-27, 2025).

Of the 252 current members of the College of Cardinals, 135 are eligible to vote in the Conclave underway in the Sistine Chapel under the stern gaze of Christ in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. The Conclave’s mystery, pagentry and secrecy have long provided fodder for movies, novels, and conspiracy theories run amok.

Among the conclave myths is one that has recently proliferated in the media with a concern for the direction in which Pope Francis took the Church during his twelve-year reign. There is widespread concern that, because his papacy elevated a high percentage of the current cardinal-electors, some two thirds of them to be exact, Francis may have already determined his own successor, or at least the ideological mindset of his successor.

To the great relief of many, George Weigel points out that history does not support that notion. He cites several examples:

IN 1878, every cardinal-elector had been appointed by either Gregory XVI, an unabashed reactionary, or Pius IX, a fierce critic of modernity. That electorate chose a pope, Leo XIII, who took Catholicism in a different direction for 23 years, seeking to engage cultural, social, and political modernity rather than merely condemning it.

Leo XIII appointed 61 of the 62 electors who then chose his successor in 1903. They chose Pius X who firmly applied the brakes to his predecessor’s reform initiatives.

And just over a decade ago, cardinals chosen by John Paul II and Benedict XVI elected as a successor Pope Francis whose pontificate has included senior figures determined to dismantle the legacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Shocking events have also played a role in the selection of a pope. In October, 1978, cardinal-electors were stunned to be recalled to Rome for a conclave after the 33-day pontificate of Pope John Paul I, whom they had just elected in a swift conclave. That shock created the conditions for doing what previously seemed unthinkable. The electors broke the succession of Italian popes electing the first non-Italian in 455 years, Poland’s Karol Wojtyla, who became John Paul II.

Another shocker soon followed after the 25-year papacy of John Paul II. The succession of Josef Ratzinger who became Benedict XVI and faithfully continued the legacy of John Paul II ended in another unexpected shock. In 2013 Benedict XVI became the first pope to step down since the year 1415. Like in the fictional story of The Shoes of the Fisherman, a consensus formed among the electors that they had to resolve the election quickly to demonstrate the Church’s unity. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, who like Kyril Lakota in The Shoes of the Fisherman had given a moving reflection on the person of Christ during the pre-conclave session, was quickly chosen becoming Pope Francis.

The conditions under which the current conclave is taking place have no precedent in Church history. No one can predict the outcome. The electorate in this conclave will be the largest and most diverse in history. When Pius XII was elected in 1939 there were 62 cardinal-electors of whom 37, or 60 percent, were Italian. The current electorate is over twice that size with 135 cardinal-electors and only 28, or 21 percent, are Italian. Today 13 percent of the electors are from sub-Saharan Africa, which George Weigel points out is the Church’s greatest area of growth. In other regions, 17 percent are from Asia, another 17 percent are from Latin America and the Caribbean, 10 percent are from North America, and 39 percent are from across Europe excluding Italy. Some of the more powerful European electors, such as those from Germany, represent a nation of Catholics for whom participation in the Mass and the Eucharist hovers around two percent, compared to over 70 percent in Africa. For the first time there are cardinal-electors from Singapore, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Myanmar, South Sudan, Mongolia, Sweden, Serbia, Ruwanda, Burkina Faso, Paraguay, Laos, Morocco, Cape Verde and Haiti. Traditional Catholic centers such as Dublin, Paris, Milan, Venice and Los Angeles will have no one in the conclave.

I must give the last word in this post to His Eminence Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who has composed a beautiful and timely Novena Prayer for Catholics to participate in the Conclave by seeking the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who has been known to be in the company of the Holy Spirit:

Cardinal Burke’s Novena for the Election of the Next Pope

I kneel before you, O Virgin Mother of God, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the compassionate mother of all who love you, cry to you, seek you, and trust in you. I plead for the Church at a time of great trial and danger for her. As you came to the rescue of the Church at Tepeyac in 1531, please intercede for the Sacred College of Cardinals gathered in Rome to elect the Successor of Saint Peter, Vicar of Christ, Shepherd of the Universal Church.

At this tumultuous time for the Church and for the world, plead with your Divine Son that the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, His Mystical Body, will humbly obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Through your intercession, may they choose the most worthy man to be Christ’s Vicar on earth. With you, I place all my trust in Him Who alone is our help and salvation. Amen.

Heart of Jesus, salvation of those who trust in Thee, have mercy upon us!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Virgin Mother of God and Mother of Divine Grace, pray for us!

Raymond Leo Cardinal BURKE
April 24, 2025

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post with others during this most critical time for the life of the Church. I also invite you to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

A Vision on Mount Tabor: The Transfiguration of Christ

The Vatican Today: Cardinal George Pell’s Last Gift to the Church

Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy

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Follow Beyond These Stone Walls on X.

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.”

Pope Francis Had a Challenge for the Prodigal Son’s Older Brother

During his papacy, Pope Francis called upon the Church to evangelize with a moral compass instead of a moral hammer, and to do so in the language of angels.


April 21, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Note from Father MacRae: Our Holy Father Pope Francis visited a prison on Holy Thursday, he met with Vice President JD Vance on Easter Sunday, and then he left this life at age 88 early in the morning on the day after Easter 2025. I admit that I was somewhat irked by his leadership, especially in his suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass, which seemed to alienate some of the more faithful among us. However, I have never walked a single step in his shoes. I write here about what I most admired and most want to remember about Pope Francis.

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There are those among us who would break the compass with the hammer, but this Pope knew that what the world needs from us and our faith is a compass, not a hammer. This post started off as a reflection on the Church’s belief in angels in light of Pope Francis’ consecration of Vatican City to St Michael the Archangel, but Pope Francis himself hijacked my topic. This is a strange way to begin a story of angels, but it is the beginning that came to me.

A well known Gospel reading, Saint Luke’s account of the Parable of the Prodigal Son has been emphasized throughout the Pontificate of Pope Francis. I think it should better be called, “The Challenge to the Son Who Never Left.” The father in the well-known parable is, of course, terribly disappointed with the choices of his younger son who left his father’s side to go squander his life and his inheritance on “dissolute living.” Losing all, reduced to life as a servant of the swine, he finally comes to his senses. He decides to venture home to save himself by striking a deal with his father: “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” He will return a servant and not a son. He plans to negotiate a plea deal but they are seldom just. I know all about the lure of plea deals.

His father is not having it, however. Overjoyed at the sight of his broken son, he ignores the well-rehearsed plea deal and restores his son to his home and his patronage with great celebration. Pope Francis spoke of this prodigal parable during the Angelus in Saint Peter’s Square saying, “Here is the entire Gospel! Here!”

Meanwhile, the older son — the one who never left and was always faithful — was not so keen about his father’s embrace of his brother home from wandering “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden.” It is an attitude his father felt obliged to challenge, and in the parable, the greater challenge is the one issued to this son. Note the powerful symbolism: this son is standing outside his father’s house as he issues his protest against mercy toward his brother. This is an important parable for the story of Divine Mercy, and it is reflected throughout the story of God that encompasses our Sacred Scripture.

“A Piece of Life’s Puzzle That Doesn’t Fit”

But first I must tell you how much I thought of my friend, Michael as I read the parable of The Prodigal Son and his Older Brother. At age 21, Michael is starting his third year in prison, and it seems a self-fulfilling prophesy for him. His father is in prison in some other state and they lost contact years ago. Prison is like the gift that keeps on giving. The sons of prisoners are 85 percent more likely than anyone else to one day go to prison, a reality I wrote of in a post about fathers and sons, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

Michael has also not seen or heard from his mother in over a decade. He was virtually homeless when he graduated from high school — an amazing accomplishment — but most of the rest of his young life has been squandered in dissolute living. I am not sure there was a point at which he actually chose that. There was just no one to stop him.

A year or so ago, Michael shattered a collarbone in several places, and it was never treated. The bone fragments have left him contorted, deformed, and in pain. He is on a waiting list for surgery to repair that mess, but there is no line to stand in to repair a shattered life. Michael’s life is in ruins, and he has little hope for anything so out of his reach as redemption.

Meanwhile, some of my other friends are not so keen on me associating with someone like Michael. This seems especially so of some of my devoutly Catholic friends. They would prefer that I be more like the priest and Levite of another famous Gospel parable and simply step over Michael left beaten by life on the side of the road. The fact that Michael reaches out to me and not one of the many street gangs that proliferate in prison says something important about him — something to which my friends should listen.

With a little help from Pornchai Moontri, while he was here with me, I managed to put a halt to the verbal harassment and disdain Michael endured in prison. Someone always has to be everyone else’s scapegoat in a place like this, and it is usually the most spiritually wounded among us. Now Michael is left alone, and is grateful for that. When asked about God, he says he started life as a Catholic, but it did not last long. “I’m just a piece of that puzzle that doesn’t fit,” he said. I am just not ready to hand Michael over to the darkness.

Pope Francis and That Older Brother

What is the point of saving only the already saved? Pope Francis has recently asked this and some other very hard questions. He seems determined that we are not to be a self-referential Church, a Church that sees membership not as food for the journey, but as the reward for arriving. The news media was all abuzz again recently over comments by Pope Francis about the face of Catholicism presented to a world on the sidelines of redemption.

Some time ago, Pope Francis spoke over 12,000 words reduced to less than 50 in the news media. What Pope Francis said comes down to this: The Catholic Church and the faith we present to the world must not be reduced to a litany of what we oppose — or are supposed to oppose. In the New Evangelization with which this Pope is tasked, the Church must stand as a moral compass and guide, and not a moral hammer. His task is to challenge his spiritual sons and daughters who are alienated from faith, but his more daunting challenge is to the rest of us.

FOX News commentator, Jonathan Morris called the Pope’s words “a new emphasis on mercy, kindness, justice, and truth,” and it is an emphasis that does not change or redefine any moral truths for which the Church stands fast. This faith has behind it a magisterial, two-millennia-old compendium of salvific truths that must not be shrunk in our public voice simply to a list of what we are not, a judgment on the ills we perceive in the world that is not us. For Pope Francis, if that is the face of our Catholic faith that we present to a dying world then our faith may die with it.

It did not take long for a few Catholic bloggers to raise the alarm when Pope Francis suggested that we not limit our Catholic voice to our opposition to abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage. One Catholic blogger who probably should have taken that day off posted in response, “We Don’t Need a Conformist Church.” I think that Pope Francis — who no one would ever characterize as being a conformist Pope — sees that a line can be crossed in our counter-cultural positions that risks making Catholicism appear exclusive. This same tendency has shattered the mainstream Protestant denominations, fosters anti-Catholic sentiment, and leaves many spiritually wounded souls on the other side of a line drawn in the sand. For Pope Francis, it is the Mission of the Church to lead those souls home, not to leave them homeless and adrift.

Pope Francis has not diluted or set aside one sentence of the Church’s moral teaching. Most of the mainstream media — even much of the Catholic press — failed to report on his comments made just one day after his call to reflect a positive and merciful Church. On September 20, 2013 the Vatican Information Service blog published the following:

“Today the Pope met with members of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations and Catholic Gynecologists. Francis spoke of the ‘throw-away culture that leads to the elimination of human beings, especially those who are physically and socially weakest. Our response to this mentality is a “yes” to life, decisive and without hesitation. The first right of the human person is his life. He has other goods and some are precious, but this one fundamental right is the condition for all others….’

“Reiterating that in recent times, human life in its entirety has become a priority for the Magisterium of the Church, the Pope… asked those present to ‘bear witness to and disseminate a culture of life…and not only as a matter of faith but as a matter of reason and science, there is no human life more sacred than another; there is no human life qualitatively more meaningful than another.’”

— Pope Francis, September 20, 2013

To Speak with the Tongues of Men and of Angels

In a reflection of mine when Pope Francis consecrated Vatican City to Saint Michael the Archangel, I mentioned some media taunts that this Pope sometimes seems “obsessed with Satan and the demonic.” It is nonsense, of course. If you listen to him, he really emphasizes far more the human capacity for good, and how that good must respond to a suffering humanity by carrying for the world not only truth, but both truth and light. When I began to reflect while writing a post about angelic witness, I was faced with a very surprising mathematical equation that lends authority to the Church Pope Francis wants to present to the world.

In the entire canon of Jewish and Christian Sacred Scripture — our Old and New Testament — there are 117 references to the words “devil” (35), “demon” (28), and the name of Satan (54). In the same canon of Scripture, there are exactly four times that many — 468 — references to the words “angel” or “angels” (326), the angelic orders such as archangel, cherubim, seraphim (114), and the named angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael (28). The math alone tells a simple story. The ratio of angels to demons in the Story of God upon which our faith is built is exactly four to one. These are not bad odds for a Pope called upon to rebuild the face of the Church in the spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi.

In regard to those odds, Satan is referenced 54 times in the canon of Scripture while God vastly overshadows him by being named 4,773 times. There is no question of whose story is being told. It is a story of a people called out of darkness, delivered from slavery to sin, and redeemed at a very great price.

In its telling, this Holy Father, like the angelic witnesses to the deeds of God before him, wants to proclaim a salvific truth at the heart of the Gospel, a truth that the Prodigal Son’s Older Brother needed to hear: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

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Related reading:

Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy (Relax! The heresy is not at all what you might think.)

A sobering reflection on the pontificate of Pope Francis by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

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.”

Vatican Bans Publishing Lists of ‘Credibly’ Accused Priests

The Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts, two other Vatican Dicasteries, and Pope Francis himself have banned publishing lists of priests ‘credibly’ accused.

April 2, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae and William A. Donohue, PhD

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This post may not move hearts, but it should move minds and consciences. It is of utmost importance to me, to the priesthood and to the whole Church. So we should not be silent in the face of injustice. So please share this post.

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On February 22, 2025, the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, the Vatican office responsible for issuing authoritative legal interpretations and directives for the universal Church, published online a long awaited guidance to bishops impacting the due process rights of “credibly accused” Catholic priests.

The announcement underscores the Dicastery’s decision that bishops considering publication of lists of priests deemed credibly accused of sexual abuse are prohibited under Canon Law from doing so. This guidance is for a multitude of reasons connected to long established civil and canonical rights of due process. I will describe below some examples of how these rights have been impacted.

From the point of view of official Church positions, the problem is, and has always been, the bishops’ collective interpretation and use of the term “credible” in their response to the crisis. It is a standard applied nowhere else in the world of civil or criminal jurisprudence. It means only that a claim of abuse cannot be immediately dismissed on its face. If a claimant alleges abuse in a specific community 30 or 40 years ago, for example, and the named priest had once been assigned there, the claim is “credible” unless and until it is disproven.

There is no court in America that admits such a standard of evidence but it is routinely applied now to accused Catholic priests. Courts have long recognized that older memories are highly malleable, and misidentification of the accused is a frequent risk.

Before delving further into this, I want to present a reaction to the Vatican news from William A. Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who has consistently defended the due process rights of priests.

From Catholic League President Bill Donohue

Vatican Finally Does Right by Accused Priests

Six years after Pope Francis rejected the practice of publishing the names of accused priests, the Vatican has finally codified his plea. Henceforth, dioceses are discouraged from publishing such a list. Among the reasons cited was the inability of deceased accused priests to defend themselves.

This should never have been an issue in the first place. But in the panic that ensued following the 2002 series in The Boston Globe detailing clergy sexual abuse, the bishops convened in Dallas in 2004 to adopt a charter that listed comprehensive reforms, some of which substantially weakened the rights of the accused.

At the time, I was highly critical of the way some bishops allowed a gay subculture to flourish, one that resulted in a massive cover-up of the sexual abuse of minors (homosexual priests — not pedophiles — were responsible for 8 in 10 cases of abuse). But I also said of the Dallas reforms, “There is a problem regarding the rights of the accused. It appears that the charter may short-circuit some due process rights.”

One of the problems was the desire to publish the names of accused priests. Egging the bishops on was Judge Anne Burke, the first person to head the National Review Board commissioned by the bishops to deal with the problem.

She made it clear that priests — and only priests — should be denied their constitutionally prescribed right to due process. “We understand that it is a violation of the priest’s due process rights — you’re innocent until proven guilty — but we’re talking about the most vulnerable people in our society and those are children,” she said. Such thinking allowed the bishops to make public the names of accused priests.

In an interview I had in my office with a female reporter from CNN, she became quite critical of the Church for not posting the names of accused priests on its diocesan websites. I picked up the phone and, holding it in my hand, asked her for the name and phone number of her boss. When she asked why, I said I was going to accuse her of sexual harassment. I added that I wanted to see if CNN would post her name on its website. She said, “I get it.” I put the phone down. (For more on this see my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse).

No organization in the United States, religious or secular, publishes the names of accused employees. That there should be an exception for priests is obscene.

The rights of accused priests need to be safeguarded, and the penalties for those found guilty need to be severe. The Church failed on the latter, which is why the scandal took place, and it failed on the former, which is why Pope Francis, and now the entire Church, had to act.

The sexual abuse of minors in the Church in America has long been checked — almost all the cases in the media are about old cases, and most of the bad guys are dead or out of ministry. Now that the rights of the accused have been given a much needed shot in the arm, we can say with confidence that the problem has been ameliorated.

Now back to Father MacRae............

But My Diocese Employs “Trauma-Informed” Consultants

On July 31, 2019, Bishop Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire proactively published a list of the names and assignment histories of 73 priests in his diocese who had been “credibly” accused of sexual abuse of minors and removed from ministry. Most of the claims deemed “credible” are decades old. The majority of the priests on Bishop Libasci’s list are long deceased. In most cases, the sole condition making the claims “credible” was the fact that money — lots of it — changed hands.

Bishop Libasci’s stated goal for publishing his list was “transparency.” In 2024, long after Pope Francis discouraged bishops from doing so, Bishop Libasci republished the list with the names of additional accused but deceased priests.

Weeks after Bishop Libasci’s original list was publicized in 2019, Ryan A. MacDonald penned and published a contentious objection: “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.” It was contentious because it represented well my disagreement with this action of the bishop of my diocese, something I otherwise hoped to avoid. Plaintiff attorneys and activist groups like SNAP pressured bishops to publish such lists for the purpose of “assuring victims they are not alone and that they are heard.”

The real reason for pushing for published lists, however, was to provide a forum and online database for false “copycat” claims, a lucrative business for contingency lawyers and claimants alike with little or no court oversight. In May 2024, Ryan A. MacDonald published a report on how and why this happens in “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.” Here is an excerpt from an official statement of my Diocese:

“The Diocese of Manchester provides financial assistance to those who have been harmed, regardless of when abuse occurred, through a process utilizing independent trauma-informed consultants.”

A basic problem with handling the matter of due process for the accused and outcomes for the Diocese by abdicating judgment to “trauma-informed consultants” is that the term is widely noted and critiqued by professionals as highly biased. It has a documented negative impact on judicial fairness and due process of law in claims of sexual abuse and assault.

The Center for Prosecutor Integrity (CPI ) is an organization that seeks to strengthen prosecutorial ethics, promote due process, and end wrongful convictions. Victim-centered investigations, also known in the sex abuse contingency lawyer industry as “trauma-informed,” presume the guilt of all accused and lead to wrongful convictions.

According to the Center’s website, “The most destructive types of victim-centered investigations are known as “Start by Believing,” and “Trauma-Informed.” The Center exhibits a professional bibliography documenting the “junk science” behind such investigations creating an epidemic of false witness and police and prosecutorial misconduct. Given the well-founded caution about false claims and financial scammers, it was alarming to read the following in a recent news article, “Diocese of Manchester Settles Sexual Abuse Claims from the 1970s.” Here’s an excerpt:

“No lawsuit was filed because the alleged abuse happened outside the statute of limitations, but the attorney representing the ‘John Doe’ who was involved said it’s important for survivors to come forward as part of the healing process, … thus announcing a six-figure settlement outside the Diocese of Manchester office.”

Has it never dawned on anyone in Church leadership that there are those in our midst who would find a “six-figure settlement” an enticement for false accusations? This is especially so when there is no court oversight for such claims. The process has been made very simple. A lawyer writes a letter and a bishop writes a check.

In addition to these trauma-informed consultants retained by the Diocese of Manchester and other dioceses,”it seems that civil lawyers and risk managers, not bishops, are often running the show.” So wrote prominent canon lawyer, Michael Mazza, JD, JCD, in a recent First Things article (February 24, 2025): “Who’s Really Calling the Shots at U.S. Diocesan Chanceries?” Mazza concludes:

“ln the wake of the clerical abuse crisis, church leaders may have surrendered too much authority to risk managers focused on eliminating every threat. Seasoned entrepreneurs understand that the moment lawyers run the show, adopting a zero-risk strategy as the business model, the company grinds to a halt. While the surest way for a car company to avoid getting sued is to stop making cars, that strategy is not an option for an institution that has received a divine call to preach the Gospel to all nations. Bishops must recognize this truth and seize the helm with the resolve their office demands.”

The Perspective of a Not-So-Credibly Convicted Priest

My name was on Bishop Libasci’s published list under the unique category, “convicted,” but that was not at all my point of contention with his list. Unlike most of the priests named on that ongoing list, I at least had public charges in a public forum — a 1994 criminal trial — no matter how jaded and unjust it was. The details of those charges and that trial have emerged over time and are also now in public view. They have raised awareness about the absence of truth and the aura of injustice in the forum in which I was condemned and sentenced.

As Ryan A. MacDonald’s article, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List” points out, Bishop Libasci’s predecessor, the late Bishop John B. McCormack, went on record in an unpublished media interview in the aftermath of my trial stating his informed belief that I was falsely accused, wrongly convicted, and should not be in prison. He insisted, however, that this information should never leave his office. These details were exposed in a 2021 post, “Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded.”

Going back even further in this history of neglected due process, Bishop McCormack’s predecessor, the late Bishop Leo O’Neil, chose not to wait for the outcome of a trial. Before my trial commenced, he published an official diocesan press release declaring that I victimized not only my accusers but the entire Catholic Church. After that, a trial seemed just a formality.

The most visible post-trial analysis of due process in the case, however, was that of Dorothy Rabinowitz, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her courageous exposure of “accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our time.” Her series of articles in The Wall Street Journal culminated in “The Trials of Father MacRae” in 2013, six years before Bishop Libasci published his list.

In a compelling five-minute video interview produced by The Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz saw through all the smoke and mirrors and got to the heart of the matter. It is a brief but bold exposé of unassailable truth that ties the two-decade outbreak of clergy abuse claims to the very unquestioned settlements money promised by my Diocese in its statements above.

I give the last word to “A Video Interview with Dorothy Rabinowitz.”

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Note from Father Gordon Mac Rae: I thank Catholic League President Bill Donohue for his contribution to this post. His outstanding book on this subject is The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse (2021) published by Ignatius Press.

I also thank Michael J. Mazza, JD, JCD for letting us reprint a segment of an article that I highly recommend: Who’s Really Calling the Shots at U.S. Diocesan Chanceries? First Things, February 24, 2025.

During Lent this year I created a list of our Scriptural posts and published them together under the title “From Ashes to Easter.” We shared the list on several Facebook Catholic groups. In response, Facebook dismissed it as “SPAM,” and then froze our account. (Again!) So we cannot share this post on Facebook, but you can. Thank you for doing so.

You may also like these related and eye-opening posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List

To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded

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.”

How Our Lady of Guadalupe Came to Us in Prison

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the setting for a profound story of how Mother Mary sought out two sons in darkness and led them to the light of Divine Mercy.

December 11, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri.”

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

This story describes a most unlikely series of events in a most unlikely place. Some of it has been told in these pages before, but putting theses threads together in one place creates an inspiring tapestry of Divine Mercy. I first began writing about this several years ago at the conclusion of a six-week retreat program in the New Hampshire State Prison.

Over the summer of 2019, Pornchai Moontri and I were asked to take part, for a second time, in the Divine Mercy retreat, 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Fr Michael Gaitley. It was offered here in the summer months amid lots of competing activities. The organizers needed 15 participants to host the retreat, but only 13 signed up. So Pornchai and I were to be “the filler.”

We ended up benefitting greatly from the ‘retreat,’ and I think we also contributed much to the other participants. At the end of it, one of the retreat facilitators, Andy Bashelor turned to Pornchai and said “I want you to know that I saw your conversion story. It is the most powerful story I have ever read.” I wrote of this in “Eric Mahl and Pornchai Moontri: A Lesson in Freedom.”

But before returning to that story, I want to revisit something that happened several months before it was posted. Late in the afternoon of December 11, 2018, I was at my desk in the prison Law Library where I use two computer systems side by side. Neither can be used for my own work. I still write posts on an old typewriter.

One computer at my work desk connects directly to Lexis Nexus, a legal database that all law libraries have. The other connects to the prison library system database. As I was shutting down the computers before leaving for the day, I decided to change the background screen on that second computer. For the previous several years it was a graphic image of our Galaxy with a little “You Are Here” arrow pointing to a tiny dot in the cosmos that depicted our solar system. It made me feel somewhat insignificant.

I had but moments left before rushing out the door at 3:00 PM. I called up a list of background screens which displayed only hundreds of numbered graphic files with no way to view them. So I decided to just pick a number — there were pages of them — and get what I get. Then I shut down the system without seeing it.

The next morning, December 12, I arrived at my desk and booted up the computer for work. The image that filled my screen is the one you see here. It’s a magnificent mural in Mexico City. I was not yet even conscious of the date. On the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, blindly chosen from a thousand random numbers, she appeared on my screen and has been there ever since.

I was not always conscious of any spiritual connection with Mary. Her sphere of influence in my life was first directed to Pornchai Moontri. The segment from Marian Helper magazine atop this post attests to that. I wrote of it in “Fr Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.”

A Mystery in Her Eyes

But back, for a moment, to Our Lady of Guadalupe which became my favorite among all the Marian images I have come to reverence. Its origin is fascinating. Nearly five centuries ago, on the morning of December 12, 1531, young Juan Diego, an early Aztec convert to Catholicism in the New World, was walking at the foot of Tepayac Hill outside Mexico City.

Days earlier in the same location, Juan Diego heard the beautiful voice of a lady, but saw no one. On this day, she appeared. She instructed Juan Diego to build a church on that spot. She then told him to gather up in his tilma — a shawl that was commonly worn at the time — a bunch of Castillian roses that appeared nearby. Castillian roses were never in bloom in December, but there they were. He was told to bring these to the local bishop.

When Juan Diego removed his tilma in the presence of the bishop and a group of people with him, he and they were surprised to see the roses. But they were stunned to also see imprinted in the tilma an amazing image of a beautiful young woman surrounded by the rays of the Sun with the crescent moon under her feet, surrounded by roses and with angels attending her. The woman had asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop that she is “Coatloxopeuh,” which in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, means “The One Who Crushes the Serpent.”

Juan Diego’s tilma, a garment of the poor, was made of coarse fiber completely unsuitable for painting. Since 1666, the tilma image has been studied by artists and scientists who have been unable to explain how the image became incorporated into the very fibers of the tilma. The shawl is the only one of its kind still in existence after nearly 500 years. It is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

Hundreds of years later, in 1929, a photographer revealed that when he enlarged photographs of the Lady’s face on the tilma, other images appeared to be in her eyes. In 1979, scientist and engineer, Dr. Jose Aste Tousman, studied the tilma using more sophisticated imaging equipment enlarging her eyes 2,500 times.

After filtering and processing the images using computers, it was discovered that the Lady’s two eyes contain another imprint — the image of the bishop and several other people staring at the tilma apparently at the moment Juan Diego presented it in 1531. It was a permanent imprint equally appearing upon the retinas of both eyes in stereoscopic vision. It appeared to be what Our Lady of Guadalupe saw when Juan Diego first presented his mysterious tilma to the bishop.

On January 26, 1979, Pope John Paul II offered Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe before an overflow crowd of 300,000. Years later, St. Juan Diego was canonized by him. Now, seemingly by random “accident,” that image is enshrined on the computer screen in the place where I work each day in prison. The mathematical odds against this happening are as astronomical as the odds against the image itself.

Her Summons to Pornchai Moontri

The icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now also on the wall of my cell. It has been widely accepted by many as a representation of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Moon Under Her Feet” as described in the Book of Revelation (12:1). In the Mystical City of God, Venerable Mary of Agreda discerned that evil greatly fears this image, and flees from it.

Both Sacred Scripture and Catholic Tradition are filled with accounts of good men and women who suffer terrible ordeals only to be transformed into great men and women. I told the devastating story of how Pornchai Moontri came into my life in 2005 and all that he endured before and after in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

Seemingly by some mysteriously Guiding Hand, the events of both our lives steered us toward the point of our being in the same place at the same time and meeting. After all that Pornchai had suffered in life, he would never have trusted me, an accused Catholic priest, if not for a series of articles that Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Pornchai read them and was moved that he has met a friend whose life had been unjustly shattered in almost equal measure to his own. It was then that he made a decision to do something he had never done before, to trust.

In 2007, the next catastrophe in his life took place. After fifteen years in prison, many of them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement, Pornchai was ordered by a U.S. Immigration Judge to be deported to his native Thailand upon completion of his sentence. Pornchai despaired about the prospect of one day being left alone in a country of only vague memories, a country from which he was taken against his will as a young abandoned child.

I told Pornchai in 2007 that we will have to build a bridge to Thailand. He scoffed at this, saying that it was impossible to do from a prison. Then the first sections of the bridge began to be laid out. This was two years before this blog began in 2009. First, Mrs. LaVern West, a retired librarian in Cincinnati, Ohio also read those WSJ articles and began corresponding with me.

In a return letter, I mentioned my friendship with Pornchai and the challenges we faced. LaVern began researching and printing rudimentary lessons of Thai language and culture and sending them to Pornchai who began to study them. One of the lessons mentioned a Thai language series produced by Paiboon Publishers, a Thai language bookseller in California. So I wrote to them. Pornchai had not heard Thai spoken since before he became a homeless 13 year old lost in America.

Paiboon Publishers donated a set of Thai language DVDs to the prison library for the exclusive use of Pornchai to study Thai several hours per week. He quickly became proficient in the spoken language of his early childhood. Reading and writing in Thai, however, were simply beyond his grasp. Mine too.

We both gave learning the Thai writing system a serious effort, but it seems just a complex series of squiggles beyond the capacity of most Western adult minds to assimilate. Pornchai reads and writes fluently in English, however, which in Thailand is an asset.

In 2008, the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights published “Pornchai’s Story” as the conversion story of 2008. In 2009, Beyond These Stone Walls began, and I also began a quest to make our presence known in Thailand. Dilia E. Rodriguez, PhD told the story of the development of this blog in “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It conveys how this blog impacted both my life and Pornchai’s in prison, and of how it reached a global readership including throughout Asia.

Also across the globe in Australia, attorney Clare Farr read of us and began an investigation into the life of Pornchai in both Thailand and the State of Maine.

My efforts to reach out to Thailand at first seemed to no avail. Everything written and mailed from prison bears a disclaimer stamped on our envelopes declaring that the contents were written and mailed from prison. With only a few exceptions, my letters to anyone I thought might help us were met with silence. Meanwhile, Pornchai was brought into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. This resulted in several articles and a chapter in the book, Loved, Lost, Found, by Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll. That chapter is reprinted here with permission entitled Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls.

The book was especially powerful, and it made its way to Bangkok where it was read by a prominent group of Catholics who founded a Divine Mercy mission and ministry there.

My Surrender to Her Fiat

I gradually became aware that what I once thought and hoped was a Great Tapestry of God designed to rescue me was really designed to rescue Pornchai Moontri, and I was but an instrument in a Divinely inspired Script. It became increasingly clear to me why Mary sent another of her spiritual sons, St Maximilian Kolbe, into our lives.

I came to understand in my heart and soul that I am to emulate what he did. I am to offer my life — or at least my freedom — for the salvation of another prisoner upon whom Mary has placed the safety of her mantle. I wrote of this recently in “The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe.” This is how we got to where we are.

Pornchai’s survival has taken on a life of its own as a result of our growing years of trust in Divine Mercy. The Divine Mercy Thailand group conveyed its readiness to help me prepare Pornchai for his eventual reassimilation to Thailand. They were on the other end of what seemed to us just a black hole up to that point. They embraced Pornchai and provided him with housing and support upon his arrival after a 36 year absence from Thailand. Our Lady lifted from us both an enormous burden of hopelessness.

Late on the night of November 22, 2019, I watched on EWTN as Pope Francis was greeted in Thailand in a beautiful ceremony as Thai Catholics in a predominantly Buddhist culture sang for him like an angelic choir. I realized I will be handing Pornchai over to them in a matter of months, and I could not contain my emotions any longer. As Pornchai was fast asleep late at night in the prison bunk above, as I watched Pope Francis being received in Thailand, I began to cry.

I do not know where our long road turns next, but what started as tears of loss and sorrow that night were also tears of triumph. They were the tears of St. Joseph, summoned to a Fatherhood he never envisioned but from which he would never retreat. Through grace, and the gifts of powerful advocates in Heaven and on Earth, we did all this from inside a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire. At every turn I heard Mary’s Fiat to Divine Providence: “Be it done to me according to Thy Word.”

The beautiful and miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was placed on our cell wall for Pornchai. Now it remains there still, for me.

O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Note: We posted a companion to this post at our Voices from Beyond Page on the day before this post is published: “Thomas Merton and Pornchai Moontri Meet in the City of Angels.”

For more on the mysterious presence of Mary in our lives, please visit “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

And for the future Mary promised: “Thailand’s Once-Lost Son was Flag Bearer at the Asian Apostolic Congress on Mercy.”

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When God Deployed a Sinner to Save a Nation: The Biblical Precedent

Would God call a known sinner to save a nation? If so, it would not be for the first time if Religious Freedom is at stake. There is a striking Biblical precedent.

Over fifteen years of writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I have tried to steer clear of politics. It hasn’t been easy because politics by its very nature has tentacles reaching into every aspect of existence in the human community. The word comes from the Latin, politicus which came from Greek, politikos, meaning “citizen of the city.” To be human is to practice politikos.

But as you know from the daily news, practice does not make perfect. I had a little practice of my own in my highly politically sensitive post, “The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade.” For some, just using the current President’s name in a sentence is to lend to him some sort of tacit endorsement or approval.

Listening to the news, some commentators refuse to call him “President” Trump. He is, for them, simply “Trump,” uttered with a hint of audible disdain that would have been widely condemned during previous administrations. At MSNBC, he appears to be the only politician in America.

Recently, I passed by a group of twenty-something young adults in a heated argument about Mr. Trump’s fitness for office. I tried to stay out of it, but as I passed I was asked whether I think he should be elected. I responded politically: “Well,” I said, “that is a matter for all the voters to decide, and not just the pundits from the ruling class.”

Because I qualified my answer, the “Not My President” crowd was horrified. “So, you actually LIKE Trump?!” they shot back incredulously — as though I were wearing a MAGA hat and a red tie of my own. My response was not a matter of like or dislike, but rather one of truth and its various distortions that today pass as journalism and broadcast news.

There is a vast difference in the politics of today and those of decades past. There are few Americans in America. We are now mostly Republicans and Democrats.

Should Christianity Today Trump the President?

I have long admired the work of Eric Metaxas, author of over thirty books including, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. In 2020, I was very pleased to see a provocative op-ed from him in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Christian Case for Trump” (Jan. 8, 2020).

Before the 2020 election, much of the news media had hyped an editorial in the venerable Evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, founded by the late Billy Graham. On the heels of the impeachment vote in Congress, the editors of Christianity Today endorsed the removal of President Trump from office citing that his behavior has been “profoundly immoral,” his character “grossly” so, and the “facts” of his guilt “unambiguous.”

I also cringed when I first read the response by Eric Metaxas because I knew that I might feel compelled to write about it. That means wading into a national partisan battle of words and attitudes with little connection to truth. I know some readers cannot see the Metaxas article without a WSJ subscription, so I will summarize its major points.

Mr. Metaxas clarified the politics behind the flap. In the 1990s, the editors of Christianity Today publicly endorsed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton citing that his moral failings made him unfit for office. As you may recall, President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the Senate.

Some of Mr. Trump’s detractors cited the Evangelical magazine’s position in the Clinton case while accusing Evangelicals of hypocrisy if they did not apply the same standards to Mr. Trump. As with President Clinton, Mr. Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate. But Mr. Metaxas asks whether the comparison makes sense. “Aren’t the political realities different two decades later?” I will get back to that, but the heart of the point made by Metaxas is theological, and it is a point with which I strongly agree:

“But these subjective pronouncements promote a perversion of Christian doctrine, [a doctrine] which holds that all are depraved and equally in need of God’s grace. For Christianity Today to advance this misunderstanding is shocking. It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but rather faith in what Jesus has done.”

Christianity Today got this embarrassingly wrong. The political reality of the last two decades has seen orchestrated efforts to park Christianity outside the public square. Jesus may be seen as irrelevant by the growing secularism in America, but this must not be so for people of faith. Metaxas described the magazine’s editorial as evidence not of its noble truths, or its roots in the Biblical witness of Reverend Billy Graham, but rather of its “Slough of Despond populated by liberal elites.”

In light of a prior post at this blog — “March for Life: A New Great Awakening” — I am conscious that this self-righteous culture may be seeing a moral splinter in this President’s eye while ignoring the immensity of the moral lumber in its own. I was encouraged and affirmed in the above post by this brilliant but deeply unsettling presentation by Eric Metaxas of the truth about our moral compromises:

“In the 1990s, some Democrats were antiabortion. Neither party could exclusively claim the high ground on this deepest of moral issues. Mr. Clinton spoke of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” No longer. Democrats endorse abortion with near unanimity often beyond viability and until birth. If slavery was rightly considered… both a moral and political issue, how can this macabre practice be anything else? How can Christians pretend this isn’t the principal moral issue of our time as slavery was in 1860? Can’t these issues of historic significance outweigh whatever the President’s moral failings might be?”

Prolife Catholics and Evangelicals were also affirmed when President Trump became the first sitting U.S. President to appear in person and address the March for Life. Evangelical Americans formed a wide cross section of President Donald Trump’s support in the 2016 presidential election, though it is widely believed that at least some of their enthusiasm was not so much for Trump as it was against the alternative. That is the same case in play in 2024. Pope Francis, who never injects himself into U.S. politics, has urged American Catholics to vote for the candidate and party that inflicts the least moral harm. He clarified, without names, that one candidate rejects migrants while the other “kills children.”

The choice of president in 2016 also presented one, and perhaps two, opportunities to nominate lifetime appointments to fill likely vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. As you know, it turned out to be three vacancies which led directly to overturning Roe v. Wade and therefore returning the judgment to voters in each state. For many who found themselves weighing the lesser of evils in 2016, consideration of who sits on the Supreme Court for life actually (and morally) outweighed who occupied the White House for the next four years.

Two Decades of Christianity’s Cultural Decline

As I have written elsewhere, the first Great Awakening in America was a religious revival in the Colonies by Presbyterian preachers who inspired a sense of national identity that led to the Revolutionary War of 1776. In the United States today, self-described Wiccans outnumber Presbyterians.

This is not the same country that it was just a decade ago. Topics like religion and Religious Liberty have been under increasing assault. We have every reason to believe the trend toward secularism will continue. The need to protect Religious Liberty has never been more urgent. In 2010, seventy-six percent of Americans identified as Christians. By 2020 that figure had diminished to sixty-five percent.

In 2010, fifty-one percent of Americans identified as Protestant. By 2020, the figure had dropped to forty-three percent. The missing eight percent did not convert to some other religion. They abandoned religion to join the “Nones,” people who profess no faith in anything but secularism. In 2010, seventeen percent of Americans did not identify with any organized religion. In 2020, that figure now exceeds twenty-six percent.

The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination and a conservative political force, lost 1.5 million members over the last decade. The second and third largest Protestant denominations, Episcopalians and Methodists, had major schisms, dividing over LGBTQ issues along political fault lines.

Among American millennials — identified as those born between 1981 and 1996 — forty percent claim no religious affiliation at all beyond their embrace of secularism. For this age group, this represents an increase of thirteen percentage points in just the last decade.

In the same decade — despite media hype of sex scandals, financial scandals, and battles between Traditionalists and progressives — those calling themselves Catholic declined by only three percent. Lest Catholics take too much pride in that, a WSJ/NBC news poll in 2000 revealed that Americans, including Catholics, who attend religious services at least once per week stood at forty-one percent. By 2020, the figure had declined to twenty-nine percent.

All of these statistics create a snapshot of religion in America before Covid. During the Covid crisis under the Biden Administration, government mandates at the state and federal levels across the land shuttered churches as “nonessential” gathering places. Liquor stores and casinos remained open while most Christians were barred from congregrating in any way but remotely. I wrote of the catastrophic effect this has had on the Catholic Church in American when too many of our bishops placidly went along with these government restrictions. That post was “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.” Christianity in America has not recovered from Covid.

The decline has merely continued and we have no reason to believe it will stop. If the next president is not someone who is sensitive and supportive of Religious Freedom, regardless of whether he or she practices any religion of their own, then religion in America is doomed.

My Country ’Twas of Thee

History sometimes repeats itself. In “President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform,” I wrote of another possible basis for seeing a flawed character in a more Biblical light.

In 722 B.C., Israel fell to the Assyrians and was sent into exile. In 605 B.C., the Kingdom of Israel divided between north and south. The southern Kingdom of Judah fell into Babylonian captivity. In 587 B.C., Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. This was the time of the apocalyptic Prophets — Daniel, Ezekiel and Baruch. A century earlier, Isaiah actually prophesied the name of the man who would one day restore Israel to its rightful path and preserve its heritage:

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed: To Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”

— Isaiah 45:1

Between 559 and 530 B.C., a man named Cyrus the Great united the Medes and Persians [in present day Iran] to form the great Persian Empire. Fifty years after Israel was invaded, cast into exile, and suffered the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, Cyrus and his armies conquered Babylon.

However no one but Isaiah could have predicted that, for the Jews in exile, Cyrus would turn out to be more of a liberator than a conqueror. He practiced no religious faith that the Jews could recognize. He lived a lifestyle with values deplorable to them. But this disruptor of no faith at all turned out to develop deep respect for theirs.

Cyrus restored the Kingdom of Israel, ordered his armies to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, declared an end to slavery and oppression, and established a charter to protect Religious Liberty. The Book of the Prophet Ezra contains the entire Decree of Cyrus guaranteeing Religious Liberty for the Jews and protecting it throughout the Persian Empire. But Cyrus himself never changed.

The Prophet Isaiah certainly never envisioned anyone like Donald Trump leading an America in rapid religious decline. He is notorious for living in a manner understandably anathema to Evangelical Christians, and yet he has also come to be seen as a Cyrus-like defender of Religious Liberty. No president in modern times has done more to protect and defend Religious Freedom.

So let me repeat myself, please. If the “Not My President” crowd is horrified as though I wrote this post wearing a MAGA hat and a “Not My Impeachment” T-shirt, this is not a matter of like or dislike. It is a matter of truth and its various distortions that today pass as journalism and broadcast news, and I am not willing to hand my Truth over to them.

A little perspective is always a good thing. This candidate’s moral past, his former overused Twitter account, and his novel approach to both foreign policy and the swamp of contemporary politics pale next to the moral decline of a nation that has terminated the lives of sixty-two million future citizens.
Some were appalled, but not nearly appalled enough, when 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, a member of the current White House Cabinet, distorted our Sacred Scripture to defend the mass extermination of human life:

“There’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath… the kind of cosmic question of where life begins. It ought to be up to the woman making the decision.”

We were not nearly appalled enough when former candidate Beto O’Rourke called for an end to Religious Rights and Freedom for any institution that fails to fall in line with same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ political narratives. We were not nearly appalled enough when the remaining Democratic candidates offered no rebuttal, not even an audible gasp.

But to quote Eric Metaxas one more time, “It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but rather faith in what Jesus has done.” That may include faith in the notion that God can choose a sinner like King Cyrus as an instrument of good in the bigger picture of human history, and maybe even one like Donald Trump.

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Editor’s Note: Father MacRae emphasizes that this post is not an endorsement of a political candidate. It is an endorsement of a solid Catholic tradition that redemption is open to all who seek it.

Please share this post and ponder these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls

Donald Trump Has a Prayer by Father Raymond de Souza

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

One Nation Under God: The Future of the U.S. Supreme Court

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

President Trump and Melania Trump pray at the Shrine of Saint John Paul II in Washington, DC

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.”

Kamala Harris Has a Catholic Problem

Kamala Harris is the first Democrat presidential nominee in 40 years to refuse an invitation to the traditional Al Smith dinner hosted by the Archbishop of New York.

October 9, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae and Bill Donohue, PhD

[In the image above, the 2016 Al Smith Dinner featuring nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump making peace with Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Credit: Evan Vucci/AP]

Pope Francis recently described the looming 2024 Presidential Election in the United States as a choice between two morally objectionable major candidates. He has urged U.S. Catholics to vote with a well-informed conscience for the candidate and party that represents “the lesser of evils.” The Holy Father did not indicate which of the major candidates he considers to be the least morally compromised and that is as it should be.

However, he did address the matter with news reporters on a flight to Singapore, and he did give a hint. He said that one nominee has an un-Christian position on illegal immigration. Pope Francis added that “not welcoming the migrant is a sin.” Pope Francis thenbadded bluntly that the other nominee “kills children,” which he characterized as an “assassination.” The Catholic Church regards the latter position to be “intrinsically evil.” He then reiterated his advice that Catholics should use their own conscience as their guide when voting.

I am also informed in this matter by a fellow priest, writer and highly respected theologian, The Reverend Peter M.J. Stravinskas of the Priestly Society of St. John Henry Newman. Fr Stravinskas is also Publisher of the fine Catholic theological and pastoral quarterly, The Catholic Response which I highly recommend. In the September/October 2024 edition, he addresses the subject of clergy having a voice in political matters. I cite him here:

“A cleric is never to engage in partisan politics. He is, however, to assist his people in bringing Gospel values to bear on the formation of public policy. In fact, failure to do so would be a gross abdication of his priestly office... . For the moment, I shall deal with only the most pressings issues. Although the GOP platform no longer calls for a constitutional ban on abortion, it does proclaim, ‘We proudly stand for families and life. We believe that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without due process, and that the States are free to pass laws protecting those rights.’ ”

The GOP Pro-Life platform continues: “After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose late term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to birth control, and IVF.”

Father Stravinskas states that those last two examples are what he earlier referred to as unfortunate, unnecessary compromises by the GOP, but ... “On the other hand, the [2024] Democrat platform is the most radical in history at every level. Most distressing is its commitment to press for a constitutional amendment to revive Roe v. Wade and enshrine it in perpetuity.” [And] “On a matter promoted by the Church for over a century, the Republican program supports parental freedom of choice in education, as well as religious freedom rights, while the Democrat goal calls for the suppression of both, as has been their consistent policy for decades.”

Father Stravinskas defers to St. John Paul II and his encyclical Evangelium Vitae in which he noted that when neither political party is ideal, one can vote for the one which inflicts the lesser harm. That position is echoed in the U.S. bishops’ 1998 document, Living the Gospel of Life. While no Catholic can support in good conscience the Democrat proposal for abortion on demand at any stage, one could, in good conscience, support the Republican platform which at least opposes late-term abortion and supports the right of a State to legislate in this matter.

The bishops of the United States have been unwavering in their support of the sanctity of life, the dignity of the family, parental rights in education, and the centrality of religious freedom. These are topics we also championed here at Beyond These Stone Walls, most especially in “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.”

Kamala’s Catholic Conundrum

A few of my recent postings have raised questions about past anti-Catholic remarks and public positions of one of the two nominees for president representing the two major parties. Given that nearly thirty-percent of the U.S. voting public identifies as Catholic, a significant number of voters are potentially disenfranchised from their democracy in such a situation, forced to set aside their morally informed conscience to adhere to the demands of a secular platform. The post in which I raised this matter was “Kamala Harris, Knights of Columbus and Anti-Catholicism.”

There is much more to be said on the subject, but the latest manifestation of Kamala’s Catholic problem is a traditional political event hosted by the Archbishop of New York called, simply, the Al Smith Dinner. Al Smith was a native New Yorker and statesman who was prominent in both New York and national politics as a Democrat in the l920’s.

He served four terms as Governor of New York State from 1919 to 1929, and was noted for his strong advocacy for social reform, for equal pay for men and women in public school positions, and for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which provided for women’s suffrage.

Al Smith was highly influential in the U.S. Democratic Party when he ran unsuccessfully for President in 1920 and again in 1928, but won the electoral vote in only eight states. Analysts attributed his poor showing in the voting polls to the fact that he was openly committed to both Democratic ideals and his Roman Catholic Faith. It would be another four decades before the United States would elect its first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy in 1960.

To honor Al Smith’s steadfast dedication to his country, his party, and his faith, the Archdiocese of New York established and hosts an annual event in his honor. The Al Smith Dinner, as it came to be called, has been for decades one of the most prominent and popular political events in this nation. It is a “roast” in the sense that other speakers get to present the two major party nominees in a more positive light than the usual political fare. All enmity is set aside for this one black-tie event hosted by the Archbishop of New York in deference to Al Smith’s faith. Its entire proceeds go to support social welfare programs for women and children under the auspices of Catholic Charities.

The Al Smith dinner has been recently described as the most important and sought out political event of the presidential election cycle. The last nominee to decline its invitation was former Vice President Walter Mondale who became the Democrat nominee in 1984, losing in a landslide vote to Ronald Reagan. The 2024 event is slated to be held in New York City on October 17, and will be the 39th event in this tradition, a tradition that began in 1960 when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon called for unity as Americans despite their political differences.

But without explanation or discussion, Kamala Harris is now the first nominee in forty years to decline to attend the Al Smith Dinner. This has been described by other politicians as a near terminal political mistake. It was described by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, as “a slap in the face of American Catholics.”

In 2020, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were present for this event and both observed the tradition of unity of purpose. Despite the intensity of their respective campaigns, neither spoke a negative word about the other. The last Presidential nominee to address the Al Smith Dinner alone was Ronald Reagan in 1984. This year, as it now stands, GOP Nominee Donald Trump will do the same.

Others have made “off the record” remarks connecting Ms. Harris’s refusal to participate in this Al Smith event with her apparent disdain for “on the record” interviews to explain her policy positions. At worst, it was suggested “off the record” that she simply does not want to appear “before a room full of prolife Catholics.”

Credit: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Bill Donohue: Harris Is Blowing It with Catholics

Vice President Kamala Harris wants to be president, but her utter lack of engagement with the media has led even her biggest supporters to criticize her public invisibility. This explains why she went on “60 Minutes.” That was a mistake — she could not answer pointed questions. She is better suited to attending what are really TV parties, which is why she is scheduled to go on “The View” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Today she will do an interview with Howard Stern on his radio show.  This is another mistake.  In doing so, she is granting legitimacy to a foul-mouthed anti-Catholic bigot.

We have been tracking Stern for decades.  He has a long history of mocking Jesus, bashing popes, slandering priests and attacking nuns.  Make no mistake, if the object of Stern’s “comedy” were blacks or Asians (Harris’ ancestry), it’s a sure bet she wouldn’t do his show.

A recent Pew Research Center survey has Harris losing to Trump among Catholics by a margin of 52-47.  Moreover, she blew off an invitation to the Al Smith Dinner, the big Catholic event held weeks before the election.  Now she is going on with the obscene Catholic basher, Howard Stern.

What is really strange about this is that Catholics and Independents are the two swing demographics who will decide the election.

Makes us wonder — does Harris realize what she is doing?  We know her boss has checked out, but now it seems she is doing the same, if only for different reasons.

Catholic League Press Release, October 8, 2024

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Here Kamala Harris single-handedly carved the Right to Life out of the Declaration of Independence.

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Note From Father Gordon MacRae: Beyond These Stone Walls has had an ever-increasing presence in the work of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. In the July/August, 2024, issue of Catalyst the “In the News” feature included two commendations for Bill Donohue and the Catholic League “for standing by Father Gordon MacRae when many others in the Church abandoned him.” In the September 2024 issue of Catalyst, Catholic League President Bill Donohue and the organization itself are cited by numerous media venues. Two of these citations were, surprisingly, for “the Catholic League’s role in helping Pornchai Moontri be released from ICE custody and returned to his home country of Thailand.” Our readers were deeply moved by these citations.

Also in the September issue of Catalyst Bill Donohue published an editorial which I have invited him to repeat here and he was very much in agreement. It is part two of this week’s post and is published at our Voices from Beyond entitled

“Catholic Assessment of Kamala Harris.”

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.”

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and the Gift of Life

There was once a Little Flower who became a spiritual giant. The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux inspired many souls. This is the story of just a few.

Back in September, 2013, I happened upon a FOX News interview of Megan Kelly with Miriam Ibrahim. You may remember her as the young Sudanese woman who was cast into a Sudan prison with a death sentence. Miriam’s “crime” was two-fold. She married a Catholic, and then refused to renounce her Christian faith and convert to Islam. In chilling words, she spoke of having to give birth to her second child with her ankles chained in that prison cell. Her story received worldwide attention.

The courage of Miriam Ibrahim is inspiring. Her being a Christian and marrying a Catholic were both crimes punishable by death in her Islamic country, and she was given three days to recant. The world responded, and many intervened, including Pope Francis. Miriam Ibrahim is an extraordinary woman of immense courage and faith. My heart leapt at this exchange:

Megan Kelly: “But why not just say what they wanted to hear to save your life?”

Miriam: “If I did that it would mean I gave up. It’s not possible because it’s not true. I have committed no crime.”

I wonder today about the story that will be told to her child whose life began with a death sentence in that Sudanese prison. The story makes me wonder about the gift of life, about how Miriam’s Islamic captors would so casually extinguish it in the name of Sharia law and justice. It makes me wonder about what Western Culture could learn from such courage rooted in the sanctity of life and freedom. It makes me wonder about the raw courage of Miriam’s “fiat” to suffer not for its own sake, but for the sake of a message to the world.

I did have an ironic laugh, however, at the conclusion of the interview. Miriam Ibrahim now lives about twenty miles away from the prison in which I write. Megan Kelly asked her what her life is like now living in New Hampshire. Miriam paused thoughtfully and said, “Well, it’s better than a Sudanese prison!”

On that note, I sometimes wonder what draws so many people to visit me in prison from beyond these stone walls week after week. I have never once dropped a completed post in the prison mailbox and walked away thinking it might inspire anyone. I don’t think it’s a result of false humility, or the power of prisons everywhere to stifle any evidence of self-respect. I just don’t think that what I write is particularly noteworthy. I guess a part of that comes from reading a lot. I read so much from writers I admire that I never feel that anything I write could ever measure up to them.

All of which makes me wonder why it is that so many others write about what I write. Father James Valladares, PhD in Australia wrote a book a decade ago entitled Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, about a third of the book references my writing at Beyond These Stone Walls. Then Dr. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League did the same in “Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae” at the same time. Both of them generated lots of responses from around the globe.

One of the memorable responses appeared at Freedom Through Truth, the blog of Michael Brandon writing from Canada. His post “From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love” is a reflection on Bill Donohue’s guest post that rivals anything I write in depth and understanding. Then a few days later Mr. Brandon posted “The Parable of the Prisoner,” a post about Pornchai Maximilian and me. I had to wait for that one to arrive by mail because the person who tried to read it to me by telephone sobbed all the way through it.

I was so inspired by what Michael Brandon wrote that I forgot it was about me! I am always struck by the number of people, like the talented Catholic writer behind Freedom Through Truth who read Beyond These Stone Walls and tell me they felt as though I were writing directly to them. I am also struck by the many letters, comments, and posts by other writers all expressing the thought that, had I not been in such straits in prison, they would not have been drawn to what I write.

Thorns Before a Rose

As I try to wrap my mind around that, don’t think for a moment that I actually know what I’m doing when I write. I do not. I just plod along casting outposts like messages in a bottle cast into the sea. I am not gifted with the insight into the meaning of suffering that God has given to those I admire, those whose writings I write about, such as Saint Padre Pio, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and this week, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

In “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor”, Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD described the nuts and bolts of this blog (Pornchai Max might say “more nuts than bolts”) and how she became its editor. When this blog first began in 2009, my first posts were brief, and handwritten because at the time I had nothing more in this prison cell to write with than a Bic pen and some lined paper. There are few posts from back then that are still read today. But one that is, and that remains one of my most read and most shared posts today, is about an ordinary encounter with an extraordinary young woman. That post is “A Shower of Roses,” and since this post appears on BTSW on the day after the Feast Day of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, I want to mention it again.

Readers may recall that back in 2013 my friend Pornchai Moontri and I took part in an “in-house” retreat based on the book 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Father Michael Gaitley. We recently featured an article about this from Felix Carroll in Marian Helper magazine, “‘Mary Is at Work Here’.” One evening during that retreat, our esteemed coordinator, Nate Chapman, mentioned that he had been awaiting a wonderful new book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God’s Holy Ones, by Scott Hahn (Image Books, 2014). I didn’t tell Nate that I had ordered that same book and it arrived just days before. One of its chapters is about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and Scott Hahn approached writing of her with the same trepidation I experienced:

“Her prodigy was her littleness – and, paradoxically, her littleness is so large that it can be frightening. For no other chapter in this book have I been so intimidated. For no other chapter have I stared so long at a blank page”

— Saints and Angels, p. 155

I know the feeling, Dr. Hahn! When I set out to write of Saint Thérèse, I was thoroughly intimidated as though my soul were but a tabula rasa — a blank slate — in the presence of pages that spoke volumes, Story of a Soul, in the Presence of God. I could not write of Saint Thérèse. I had no frame of reference with which to relate to someone whose footprint in this world was so small, yet one whose spiritual impact was so immense that Saint John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, one of the 33 spiritual giants of Church history.

I could not really write about Saint Thérèse at all. I could only write about a chance encounter between us, a moment in my own life that somehow intersected with Saint Thérèse. It’s a snapshot in my life as a priest that changed the way I view faith, hope, and suffering, the way I live life toward dying.

“A Shower of Roses” is the story of Michelle, a suffering and dying teenage girl. With fear and trembling as a young priest, I took the hand of this girl as she surrendered her life. As I look back across 42 years of a priesthood mired in suffering, I keep going back to that moment, for it is filled with meaning and with mysteries yet to be unraveled.

There was a moment in which Saint Thérèse took that girl’s hand from mine, and in doing so, left an impression of how her suffering was a conduit between the soul and God. Consider these words of Saint Thérèse in Story of a Soul, the diary of a young woman leaving this life:

“My heart was fired with an ardent desire of suffering… Suffering became my attraction; in it I found charms that entranced me —Suffering has held out its arms to me from my very entrance to Carmel, and lovingly have I embraced it… For one pain endured with joy… we shall love the good God more forever — Suffering united to love is the only thing that appears to me desirable in this Vale of Tears.”

Unlike Saint Thérèse, but like most of the rest of us, I have spent a lot of time and effort struggling against suffering in many forms. I am daunted and intimidated by this little saint and her Story of a Soul, the story of her simple acquiescence to God’s will that turns every moment of suffering into an instrument of grace. It is the story of extraordinary grace reaching into souls through ordinary things, and it still shakes the earth beneath my feet.

Sometime in this month that opens with the Feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, read anew and share with someone else “A Shower of Roses.”

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A Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Don’t stop here, Dear Readers. With all the is going on in the world, and going wrong with the world, it is not easy to keep a focus on all that really matters. So sometime today, this week, or this month come back here and read or reread a few gems, three of which were written by others, about the transformation of sacrificial suffering into glory:

A Shower of Roses by Fr Gordon MacRae

From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love by Michael Brandon

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor by Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD

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.”

Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

In 1989, Pope John Paul II added a new title to honor Saint Joseph. As “Guardian of the Redeemer” Joseph’s dream set us on a path from spiritual exile to Divine Mercy.

Out of my sometimes inflated separation anxiety, you may have read in these pages an oft-mentioned thought. From behind these walls, I write from the Oort Cloud, that orbiting field of our Solar System’s cast-off debris 1.5 light years from Earth out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It was named for its discoverer, the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrick Oort (1900-1992).

There are disadvantages to being way out here cast off from the life of the Church. I am among the last to receive news and the last to be heard, if at all. But there is also one distinct advantage. From out here, while dodging the occasional asteroid, I tend to have a more panoramic view of things, and find myself reflecting longer and reacting less when I find news to be painful.

It’s difficult to believe, but it was just eleven years ago, March 13, 2013 that Pope Francis was elected to the Chair of Peter. In the previous month we had news from Rome that, for many, felt like one of those asteroids had struck at the very heart of the Church. I wrote a series of posts about this in the last week of February and the first few weeks of March 2013. The first was “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”

Like most of you, I miss the fatherly Pope Benedict, I miss his brilliant mind, his steady reason, his unwavering aura of fidelity. I miss the rudder with which he stayed the course, steering the Barque of Peter through wind and waves instead of causing them.

But then they became hurricane winds and tidal waves. Amid all the conspiracy theories and “fake news” about Pope Benedict’s decision to abdicate the papacy, I suggested an “alternative fact” that proved to be true. His decision was a father’s act of love, and his intent was to do the one thing by which all good fathers are measured. His decision was an act of sacrifice, and the extent to which that is true was made clear in a post I wrote several years later, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.” Benedict was firm that he was guided by the Holy Spirit.

For some, the end result was a Holy Father who emerged from the conclave of 2013 while silently in the background remained our here-but-not-here “Holier Father.” Such a comparison has always been unjust. Some years ago a reader sent me a review by Father James Schall, S.J., in Crisis Magazine. “On Pope Benedict’s Final Insights and Recollections” is a review of a published interview by Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: Last Testament.

The word, “final” in Father Schall’s title delivers a sting of regret. It hearkens back to that awful March of 2013 when the news media pounced on Pope Benedict’s papacy and delivered news with a tone of contempt too familiar to Catholics today. The secular news media is getting its comeuppance now, and perhaps even finding a little humility in the process. Even the late ever fatherly Benedict XVI took an honest poke at its distortions:

“The bishops (at Vatican II) wanted to renew the faith, to deepen it. However, other forces were working with increasing strength, particularly journalists, who interpreted many things in a completely new way. Eventually people asked, yes, if the bishops are able to change everything, why can’t we all do that? The liturgy began to crumble, and slip into personal preferences.”

— Benedict XVI, Last Testament, 2016

Benedict the Beloved also wrote back then from the Oort Cloud, but it is one that he cast himself into. I have always hoped I might run into him out here one day and I might have. His testament ended with these final, surprising words:

“It has become increasingly clear to me that God is not, let’s say, a ruling power, a distant force, rather He is love, and loves me, and as such, life should be guided by Him, by this power called love.”

Carnage in the Absence of Fathers

In the winter of a life so devoted to a dialogue with the deep theological mysteries of our faith, it seemed surprising that Benedict XVI would choose this as the final message he wants to convey to the Church and the world. My own interpretation is that he chose not the words of a theologian, but those of a father, an equal partner in the ultimate vocation for the preservation of life and the sake of humanity: parenthood.

Fathers who live out the sacrifices required of them are an endangered species in our emerging culture of relativism and self-indulgence. In his inaugural address to the nation, President Donald Trump spoke of the “carnage” that our society has failed to face, and he was widely ridiculed for it. If he was wrong about anything else, he was right about that. I see evidence of that carnage every day in the world I am forced to live in here, and I would be a negligent father if I did not write about it.

So, I did write about it, and it struck a nerve. “In the Absence of Fathers A Story of Elephants and Men” has been shared over 30,000 times on social media and reposted in hundreds of venues. It seemed to awaken readers to the wreckage left behind as fathers and fatherhood are devalued into absence in our society. I am a daily witness to the shortsighted devastation of young lives that are cast off into prisons in a country that can no longer call itself their fatherland.

We breed errant youth in the absence of fathers, and those who stray too far are inevitably abandoned into prisons where they are housed, and fed, and punished, but rarely ever challenged to compensate for the great loss that sets their lives askew. Prison is an expensive, but very poor replacement for a caring and committed father

I saw this carnage in a young man I once wrote about, but to whom I never returned because I wanted to shelter readers from the truth of what befell him. A light-hearted post several years ago — “Prison Journal: Looking for Lunch in All the Wrong Places” — included some of the culinary creations of other prisoners who greatly delighted in seeing them in print. One of them was a young man named Joey who made us all laugh with his recipe for a concoction called “mafungo” and his weird instructions for making it.

Joey descended into prison at age 17 as the result of a simple high school fight with another student who was injured. While in prison, he discovered the plague of opiates that is fast consuming a nation in denial. The extent to which drugs have consumed life in this prison was back then the subject of a Concord Monitor article “As drugs surge, inmate privileges nixed” (Michael Casey, Associated Press, Feb 27, 2017).

Joey reached out to me repeatedly throughout the ordeal of his imprisonment. As a member of a small group of prisoners tasked with negotiating over prison conditions, I argued for treatment over punishment when Joey’s addiction kept disrupting his life. The interventions were simply too little too late. At age 23, after six years here, Joey left prison with a serious problem that he did not come in with. Just two months after his release, Joey fatally overdosed on the street drug, fentanyl. He became a statistic, one of hundreds of overdose deaths of young adults in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire which, according to reports, led the entire nation in the rate of young adults opioid overdose deaths. If this is what President Trump meant then by “carnage,” we must face the reality that we are tightly in its grip, and the absence of fathers has been a devastating risk factor.

Now Comes Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer

I do not think it is mere coincidence that in the midst of this cultural crisis of fatherhood and sacrifice, our Church and faith are experiencing a resurgence in devotion to Saint Joseph, Spouse of Mary. His Feast Day on March 19th was honored by “sensus fidelium” over twelve centuries ago. He was declared Patron of the Universal Church by Pope Pius IX in 1870. In 1989, he was given a new title, “Guardian of the Redeemer,” by Saint John Paul II. This title beckons fathers everywhere to live their call to sacrifice and love so essential to fatherhood.

I had barely given Saint Joseph a passing thought for all the years of my priesthood, but in the last two years he surfaces in my psyche and soul repeatedly with great spiritual power. It haunts me that he shares his name with my young friend, Joey, who personified a life in the absence of a father, sacrificed to some south-of-the-border cartel and the carnage of our culture of death.

And it is not lost on me that he shares his name with the late Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, who in life and death personified for the Church a summons to Divine Mercy. The winter of Benedict’s own life spent in silent but loving witness to the Church reflects the life of Saint Joseph in the Infancy Narratives of the Gospel, silent but still so very present. I suddenly hear from readers constantly with a growing interest in Saint Joseph. Last Christmas, I wrote what I consider to be a most important post for our time, and a prequel to this summons to Divine Mercy. It was “Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah.”

Ii was a post about love, fidelity, and sacrifice, the hallmarks of fatherhood and the foundations of Divine Mercy. And I wrote a sequel to that post which contains a painful but vital story. It was “Joseph’s Second Dream: The Slaughter of the Innocents.”

These biblical stories were lived by one who remains utterly silent in the pages of the Gospel, but whose life and actions as Guardian of the Redeemer were like a trumpet call to fatherhood and sacrifice. I am hereby bestowing upon him another title. He is, Saint Joseph, “Guardian of Fatherhood Redeemed.”

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Note Number 1 from Father Gordon MacRae: On occasion the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, stewards of The National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, send me a book from their own publishing house that they would like to see reviewed at Beyond These Stone Walls. We have featured several of them over time, but the last one they sent is a real treasure, and here it is: Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father, by Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC.

Please also note that the beautiful top graphic for this post is “Saint Joseph and the Christ Child” by Jacob Zumo (2019). It was commissioned by Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC for inclusion in Consecration to Saint Joseph. This and other wondrous works of art are available at Art By JZumo.

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Note Number 2 from Father Gordon MacRae: Some years ago his Eminence Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke wrote to me in prison. It was a personal letter which in many ways was a gift of Divine Mercy and Divine Compassion. Now he has invited me to take part in a worldwide call to prayer, Return to Our Lady through devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a nine-month novena. Here is Cardinal Burke’s invitation to us. I have subscribed for the good of our Church, and I hope you will join me.

Tap or click the image.

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.”

If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!

There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.

February 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Back in the summer of 2011 in Massachusetts, Independence Day brought dismal news for devoted Catholics already bent under the millstone of scandal. On that morning I turned on New England Cable News to learn that a forty-two year old Massachusetts priest ordained only six years, had taken his own life. It was heartbreaking, and I know his family must have been devastated. However, I feared that far too many in his other family — the Catholic Church — had so steeled themselves against the relentless tide of painful news that such a tragedy was just part of another news day. That was an even greater tragedy. If you have never read my article, “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” about the suicide of a priest I knew, please do. I wish this priest, and his diocesan family had read it. It may have helped him to seek another way to deal with whatever immense pain brought him to this horrific act. I have been where he was in the final moments of his life. I wrote about surviving that painful day in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

I do not know the particular anguish of that young priest in 2011. He died sometime the previous Saturday night after celebrating Mass and then ministering to a family in a hospital emergency room where he was a chaplain.  When he did not show up for his Mass that Sunday morning, someone went in search of him. In between was the darkest night of his own priestly soul. Please, please pray for him. Though this was a major news story in 2011, I am sparing his family from reliving this again in 2024.

Some thirty American Catholic priests have taken their own lives since priests became a favorite target of the news media, of S.N.A.P., and of Satan himself. I have personally known eight of them, and three others who were murdered. A psychiatrist friend who has been conducting research on the priesthood told me that it is extraordinary that I have known 11 priests who were either murdered or died by their own hand. He said that I have been hanging out with the wrong crowd — or, if you read the Gospel, the right one.

I do know this: simply casting off the most wounded among our priests has been the sin of the Church, and it is a sin that would not happen in our own families. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote of this in one of his last letters to me before his death in December 2008:

“Thank you for keeping me informed about the great scandal of the failure of the Church to support her priests in their time of need.  Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform.  I am sure that in the plans of Divine Providence your ministry of suffering is part of your priestly vocation.”

No corporate bottom line would dictate whether we care for our fathers, our grandfathers, our brothers, or our sons, but lately in the Church in America, it does, and it has compounded The Scandal. Christ came into the world to call forth a community’s soul, not a corporate sole. One bishop I know wrote in a whining missive to Rome that if he helped one accused priest in his diocese he would fear an uproar. At least the bishop was honest. His response toward a brother left beaten on the side of the road was moved by fear.

The problem was strictly American back then. But it has since spread to other parts of the world where the same draconian and terminal measures have been imposed upon priests who are merely accused without due process leading to their being simply discarded — sometimes on the streets with no place to go. I fear sometimes that the Catholic Church in America is becoming far more American than Catholic. America is a disposable culture that does not abide problems, and the Church has come to reflect this ugly side of America. Not long ago, Pope Francis derided our “cancel culture,” then he proceeded to cancel the careers of many priests and bishops who did not fall immediately into his ideological plan. The stewards of our faith have capitulated to cancel culture.

For full article tap image.

Disposable Priests in a Disposable Culture

There are priests who, for various reasons, are not assigned to ministry. Under a tenet of Canon Law (Canon 1722) a bishop, with just cause, may forbid a priest from the exercise of public ministry for a period of time, but he remains a priest. For seven years before I was accused and faced trial in 1994, I was not assigned by my bishop and diocese.  For the first two years, I was director of a drug and alcoholism treatment center, and vice-president of the New Hampshire Association of Chemical Dependency Service Providers.  But I was still very much a priest living under obedience to the authority of my bishop.  I celebrated Mass and other sacraments. For the following five years I served in ministry to other priests as Director of Admissions in a residential psychological and spiritual renewal center for Catholic priests and religious.

Even now, in my 30th year in prison for a crime that I insist never took place, I witness to the Gospel and to the Mission of the Church every day in conditions that most priests cannot imagine.  That is not a boast.  Who would boast of such a thing?  I celebrate the sacraments, as you know, and I am still a priest.

A priest may also petition the Holy See for voluntary removal from the clerical state, known popularly as “laicization.” Some years ago this blog had a comment from a man who left ministry as a priest to marry. As far as the Church was concerned, he remained a priest and entered into a civil, but invalid marriage. He reported that he was only recently granted his petition for laicization so that he may now have his marriage blessed by the Church. For reasons that are both sound and prudent, the Church has never been in any hurry to return a priest to the lay state.

One of the most destructive fallouts of the sex abuse scandal in the American Church has been the reality of involuntary laicization. When enacting the 2002 Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the US Bishops quoted a statement of Pope John Paul II in his address to American cardinals on April 23, 2002: “There is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.” Some American bishops have used that statement to seek forced laicization of accused priests under Canon 290, by judicial sentence or by a special act of the Pope. Prior to the Dallas Charter, such a permanent and unappealable removal from the priesthood was exceedingly rare. After the Charter, there was a wave of involuntary laicizations, and some believe they have done irreparable harm to the very Catholic theology of priesthood.

From a practical standpoint, forced laicization — popularly but erroneously called “defrocking” in the media — might satisfy some vindictive urges in certain victim groups, but it does nothing to prevent any possible victimization. It merely discards a priest with problems, or an innocent one falsely accused, upon the dung heap of Job with no support, no supervision, and no  accountability because of claims that are decades old and often unsubstantiated. Families do not discard their fathers, sons, or brothers, and the Church should not discard her priests.

A Puritan Response to Sin

The Bishops’ Charter failed to add a qualifying statement of Pope John Paul II to the American cardinals summoned to Rome in 2002:

“At the same time . . . we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depth of a person’s soul and can work extraordinary change.”

By omitting the most important part of the Pope’s statement, the U.S. Bishops adopted a punishment with no allowance for repentance. In an essay for Homiletic & Pastoral Review (“Sex Abuse and Anti-Catholicism“) Ryan A. MacDonald wrote:

“The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood now underway in Western Culture, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”

In a landmark article in America magazine, “The Rights of Accused Priests” (June 21, 2004), the late Cardinal Avery Dulles issued a stinging rebuke of the bishops. What follows are some excerpts:

“The United States bishops have taken positions at odds with [their own] high principles.”

“Under intense pressure from various survivors’ networks, they hastily adopted, after less than two days of debate, the so-called Dallas Charter . . . ”

“In their effort to . . . restore public confidence in the Church as an institution and to protect the Church from liability suits, the bishops opted for an extreme response.”

“The dominant principle of the Charter was ‘zero tolerance’ . . . Having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgement in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid having to make any judgements in these cases.”

Cardinal Dulles went on to address the often near impossibility of judging the truth of allegations against priests without investigation, and the inherent injustice of taking actions that brand a priest as guilty before such investigation. He then outlined the rights of priests under Canon Law, and how the Charter and current policies ignore or even destroy those rights. I urge every priest and every Catholic to read Cardinal Dulles’ article.

I am not a canon lawyer, and I have only limited training in Church Law. What I have learned has been from experience, and my own experience has been a crash course in fending off what I believe is a seriously flawed and unjust process faced by many accused priests who simply did not commit the crimes.

To highlight how flawed this process is, I would like to reproduce a letter I received in 2002 from a prominent priest, canon lawyer, and professor of Canon Law at a leading Catholic University. I am printing the entire letter, but without his name since I have not asked his permission to print his name. I will let his letter speak for itself:

“Dear Father MacRae:

Don’t ever discount the real spiritual good accomplished by your words at Beyond These Stone Walls. You make people like me, with consciences dulled by repetitious prevalence of procedural abuses, face our responsibilities to protest and to act. You make it personal and compelling.

I want to pass along some bad news. You may already be aware of it, since you seem very well informed, but, if not, at least it will give you occasion to reflect. It seems that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has turned to ‘penal dismissals from the clerical state’ as a routine solution to the cases being sent by American bishops after preliminary investigations. The decrees of dismissal are not subject to appeal or review.

The procedural injustice of this practice is obvious.

In the preliminary investigation process, the accused priest has no opportunity to defend himself. The cases are sent by bishops to CDF sometimes with an expectation that they will instruct the diocese to proceed with a canonical trial for dismissal or allow the accused priest to remain [in the priesthood] in a penitential state but removed from public ministry. Instead, the CDF seems to be taking this drastic and terminal action based solely on the information provided by a bishop in the preliminary investigation — often when the priest is accused of abuse alleged to have occurred thirty years ago or more.

I don’t want to discourage you or any petitions to the Holy See on your behalf. Quite the contrary, I would urge any and all possible interventions.

Think about the implications if this shameful result should fall on you. It is really an empty juridical gesture with no practical consequences. You remain a priest. No one can take that away. You can pray, and you can celebrate the Holy Eucharist validly, absolve or anoint in emergencies, and, I presume, you  could continue your very valuable ministry of consciousness raising. What I am trying to say is please do not be discouraged or lose hope if this awful expedient is aimed at you.”

Ganging Up on the Already Down

To date, at least, that final chapter of my nightmare has not taken place. But the Church must be made aware — you must be made aware — of the inherent injustice of “piling on” that occurs when most priests are accused.

When I faced trial in 1994, I was entirely on my own against an assault on three simultaneous fronts. First, I faced a criminal trial, a highly sensationalized and problematic one that Ryan A. MacDonald recently described in these pages in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Very few priests earn a salary or have access to funds that would assure a fair trial. I certainly did not, but my diocese issued a letter to my attorneys instructing them: “To the extent he is without funds, he should contact the public defenders’ office.” The cost of my defense would have been but a tiny fraction of the cost of mediated settlements.

Secondly, simultaneous to a criminal defense and preparing for trial, I also faced civil lawsuits naming both me and my diocese as defendants. The accusers were represented by their contingency lawyers, and both they and their lawyers had a clear financial stake in the outcome. My diocese was represented by a high profile law firm seeking, from day one, the quietest path to settlement that would generate the least publicity. With my meager assets dissolved in only partial funding of a criminal defense, I was not represented at all against the civil claims. When I protested the possibility of a settlement without substantiation, my accusers and their lawyers simply dropped me as a defendant so that I would no longer have any standing in the matter.

Lastly, from the moment I was accused, I faced a trial-by-media that set an impossible boundary between me and justice. The accusers had contingency lawyers who were relentless spokespersons for their feigned “victimization.” My diocese had a spokesperson who advocated for the distance the diocese was motivated to obtain from me. As I faced trial in 1994, knowing that I maintained my innocence, and knowing that I was not represented at all as settlement negotiations ensued in the background, my bishop and diocese issued a press release stating:

“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

— Press Release of the Diocese of Manchester, September 6, 1993

My attorneys protested this to deafened ears. With that public statement came the end of my civil rights to a presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Throughout the trial, the local news media cited that statement. The jurors in my trial read the statement. To pretend that this scenario represents justice requires far more skill in the art of pretense than I have ever been capable of.

And it’s even worse still, today.

The Bishop Accountability website publishes every sordid detail about every money-driven claim taking no responsibility whatsoever for whether their information is true or corroborated. The site administrators publish the names and lurid details claimed of every accused priest while removing the names of all accusers. In some instances, this amounts to aiding and abetting them in the commission of the crimes of fraud and larceny.

And now, as is clear from the canonist’s dismal letter above, if the accused priest cares anything at all about preserving his priesthood then he must also hire a canon lawyer to defend himself against yet another tier of simultaneous judicial processes: the possibility of canonical dismissal from the priesthood.

If night befalls your father, you don’t discard him! You just don’t!

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. Please consider these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood

When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked

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.”