Catholics to Fr James Altman: ‘We Are Starving Out Here!’

Fr James Altman was removed from his assignment sparking protests from the faithful in unprecedented numbers. Does this signal a growing distrust of some bishops?

I was recently informed by a reader that her parish priest launched into a tirade against her and other parishioners for their dedicated pro-life activity. He reportedly stooped pointing to the ground shouting, “Of all the issues facing the Church and country right now, abortion is way down here!” In another incident, the same priest launched a tirade at a college-student parishioner in the confessional insisting that her involvement in pro-life causes is badly misguided.

Both incidents, and others like them, resulted in letters of concern to the diocesan bishop. Weeks later, the bishop replied that he has instructed the priest to cease allowing his political views to invade his pastoral ministry. Political views?

The last time I looked, the Church’s pro-life position and activity reflect a moral mandate of grave concern and utmost importance. The pro-life centricity of Catholic moral teaching has been clearly articulated by Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.

I dread writing any criticism of Catholic bishops. In over 600 posts of the last twelve years, only a few have had such content. Pope Francis has recently spoken against clericalism in the form of careerism in the Church, and he has also spoken recently of a concern for the morale of priests. The concern is well placed, but the former very much impacts the latter. Bishops have nearly ultimate authority in their own dioceses, but bishops who aspire to more prestigious positions sometimes find themselves bending to the will of some other bishops with more clout.

Pro-Catholic, Pro-life, Pushed Out

On Friday, May 21, 2021, Father James Altman was instructed by La Crosse, Wisconsin Bishop William Patrick Callahan to resign from his parish over the Bishop’s concern that the volume and tone of his “political” rhetoric has rendered him divisive and ineffective. Father Altman — who until weeks ago had been pastor of Saint James the Lesser Catholic Church in La Crosse — has said some very challenging things in his preaching on the Gospel but nothing he has said to date contradicts Church teaching.

In his now notorious “Memo to the Bishops of the World,” Father Altman called on the U.S. Bishops to stop issuing guidance for the care of our physical health at the expense of care for our souls. He called for the bishops to present faithful and unapologetic adherence to and promotion of Church teaching.

But volume and tone may not have really been at the heart of Bishop Callahan’s expressed concerns. Though unstated, it seems that a small minority of Catholics dismissing Father Altman’s rhetoric as “dabbling in the political” clearly wanted him silenced, and it seems that his bishop obliged. It is also now widely suspected that pressure came from other bishops who were uncomfortable with Father Altman’s growing fame in his homiletic broadsides against abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender ideology, and, most recently, the shuttering of churches, first by politicians and then by some bishops, during the Covid pandemic.

I admit that I have sometimes grimaced at Father Altman’s tone in his fiery homilies, and thought he could be more effective if he lowered the volume just a bit. Nonetheless, in recent posts, I have said some of the very same things he has said. (See, “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass” and “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.” )

I have written about all of these things, but a small voice from the wilderness of prison is a lot easier to ignore than a YouTube video homily gone viral. Some of Father Altman’s more fiery prophetic witness has drawn the attention of faithful Catholics across the continent and around the world. When he announced his imminent removal during a Pentecost homily this year, there were audible gasps from his congregation. Father Altman explained to them,

“For the record, through my efforts at preaching the truth ... somehow the truth has gone viral over the past eleven months and people all over the globe — as far away as Borneo — have written over 4,000 letters and cards — even more than that in emails — all saying the same thing: ‘We are starving out here!’”

— Father James Altman

However, something far more interesting than Father Altman’s reaction to his removal has occurred. A crowd funding page was established online to assist in retaining a canon lawyer to appeal his removal to higher ecclesiastical authorities. A funding goal of $20,000 was set. In less than a week, the fund grew to $250,000. A week later, it rose to $650,000. On the day this is posted, the fund is approaching $700,000 while an online petition garnered nearly 100,000 signatures.

The Church, the Bishops, the Eucharist

Instead of silencing Father Altman, the bishops might ask themselves why so many are listening to him so intently. This is a different sort of Sensus Fidelium — the sense of the faithful — than the Church is accustomed to. The bishops would be wise to listen. The setting aside of this one priest over what has been dismissed as “political” activism may signal a far greater concern about the bishops’ collective ability to discern between moral and political issues.

It seems no mere coincidence that Father James Altman was removed from ministry just in time to accommodate those who want the rhetoric on another development lowered to a mere whisper. You likely already know what has transpired regarding a simultaneous embarrassment among our bishops, but here is the short version.

On the day this is posted, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is scheduled to meet to discuss what is turning out to be a heavily manipulated agenda. The meeting “may” include “the drafting of a formal statement on the meaning of the Eucharist in the life of the Church” and its application to pro-abortion Catholic politicians who receive the Eucharist. That any of our bishops may actually need such clarity on this is alarming in its own right.

That clarity has recently come from two sources, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco and Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix. I recently wrote of Archbishop Cordileone and his defense of religious liberty. Since then he has published, Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life.

In my post, some readers challenged me in comments stating that I overlooked the fact that this concern should have been raised by the Bishops “when it really mattered” before the 2020 presidential election. I will get back to that in a future post after the results of the USCCB meeting become public. Suffice it to say that it also really matters now.

I wrote above that clarity on the meaning of the Eucharist “may” be on the agenda because a group of 67 U.S. bishops — representing only 15-percent of the USCCB’s voting members — has lobbied USCCB President Archbishop José Luis Gomez to remove this topic from the agenda. All the bishops are careful not to say it, but this entire discussion is about the controversy of a pro-abortion activist who has presented himself as a devout Catholic and now occupies the White House.

Two of the signatories have since asked to have their names redacted from the letter saying they had not fully been informed of its purpose and were manipulated into signing it. Others have since stated that they never agreed to sign this letter and do not even know how or why their names were added.

The protest letter seems to have been spearheaded by Cardinal Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, DC, who reportedly composed the letter on his letterhead. He has gone on record to insist that he would not deny the Eucharist to pro-abortion Catholic President Joe Biden. The letter was also signed by Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston, and Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago. Cardinals Cupich and Tobin met in Rome with Cardinal Luis F. Ladaria, SJ, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, just prior to the letter being sent to the USCCB President.

As this post was being written, it was just announced that Pope Francis planned to meet or otherwise confer with President Joe Biden on the day before the U.S. Bishops’ meeting. This had raised some alarm among many faithful Catholics who support the bishops’ effort to develop a uniform policy on Communion for Catholic politicians who openly promote abortion, legislate to restrict religious freedom, and support same-sex marriage and transgender ideology. President Biden, who professes to be Catholic, has promoted all of these. He has also stated his intent to repeal the Hyde Amendment which since 1974 has protected taxpayers from forced violations of their consciences by using taxpayer funds to promote and provide abortions.

However, in the eleventh hour, there has been a new development. On June 15, the day before we publish this post, Catholic News Agency issued the following statement: “The President’s entourage had originally requested for Biden to attend Mass with the Pope early in the morning, but the proposal was nixed by the Vatican after considering the impact that Biden receiving Holy Communion from the Pope would have on the discussions the USCCB is planning to have during their meeting starting Wednesday, June 16.”

I suggest reading the rest of the brief CNA article. However, it requires a little reading between the lines. It seems that it was President Biden's Administration that requested the meeting with the Holy Father to take place after the G7 Summit while the President is still in Europe. Once the Vatican agreed to the meeting, it seems that President Biden's entourage made a subsequent request for Biden to attend Mass with the Holy Father. The timing of this leads me and many others to believe that the real objective here was for a photo-op of Biden receiving the Eucharist from the Pope on the eve of the U.S. Bishops' meeting on that very subject.

Vatican officials saw through this and declined to allow the Mass to take place. It seems that the Biden Administration then cancelled the meeting because its real objective had been negated.

The Two Father Jameses

Father Dwight Longenecker has written an intriguing post entitled, “The Tale of Two Fr. Jameses.” He contrasts the activism and public statements of Father James Altman and Father James Martin, SJ, two priests on polar ends of the Catholic theological and political spectrum. He contrasts the two priests thusly:

“Both priests have somewhat of a prophetic voice in the Church — Fr. Altman from the conservative side and Fr. Martin from the liberal. Fr. Altman castigates Catholics who voted for Joe Biden. Fr. Martin openly supports Biden. As such, the two Fr. Jameses are poster boys for the two Catholic Churches in America today. Fr. Altman for the traditional, orthodox, strict version of Catholicism. Fr. Martin for the accommodating, relativistic, and subjective version of Catholicism. Fr. Altman: doctrinal. Fr. Martin: pastoral. Fr. Altman: Rational. Fr. Martin: Sentimental.”

The article is brief, but I have a fundamental disagreement with a part of it. Father Longenecker went on to characterize Father Altman as one who “campaigns against a Catholic hierarchy that is in bed with the Democratic Party” while Father Martin, “in manipulative and disingenuous ways has used his media platform to promote the blessing of same-sex unions and to encourage homosexuality.” Father Longenecker asks an important question:

“Fr. Altman ... has fearlessly upheld the traditional Catholic faith and has never come close to preaching anything contrary to the Gospel. His sin? To be ‘divisive.’ Why, may I ask, has no one suggested that New Ways Ministry and Fr. Martin (who have scandalized thousands of Catholics) are divisive?”

Father Longenecker went on to suggest that the clash between the two churches (left and right) in America today recalls the Jansenist-Jesuit conflict in 18th Century France. As the faith came under attack by Protestantism and the Enlightenment, French Catholics lapsed into Jansenism, a kind of “Catholic Calvinism.” He suggests that Fr. Altman’s style is an example of this Catholic Calvinism. I disagree.

The reason I disagree is laid out in a post of mine entitled, “The Once and Future Catholic Church.” It makes a case for why the traditional stress on Catholic orthodoxy and fidelity is the most pastoral approach a priest can take in a society drifting rapidly toward “Cancel Culture” socialism. Father James Martin seems to not want to rest until American Catholicism breaks from Rome and becomes indistinguishable from the Episcopal church and its determination to tear the Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder.

In these pages recently, priest and canon lawyer, Father Stuart MacDonald, wrote “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” He wrote of the trajectory from the U.S. Bishops adoption of “zero tolerance” in 2002 to a policy emerging now in which bishops may discipline and remove priests for any vague cause whatsoever. And believe me, it will be the Father Altmans, and not the Father Martins, who are subjected to this policy. It is difficult to believe that Pope Francis has allowed this while at the same time speaking of his concern for the morale of priests.

This policy transforms the Holy Father into an Orwellian Big Brother and our bishops into enforcers of Orwell’s progressive GroupThink. Such a policy is beloved of “Cancel Culture” progressivism. It lends itself to the suppression of rights. It promotes witch hunts, and at its heart it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please visit our Special Events page. You may also like these related posts:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media

Our 2020 post on the origin of Covid-19 cited a Wuhan lab as a possible source for the global pandemic, but it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory — until now.

Early in the global pandemic, on May 6, 2020, I wrote a post for Beyond These Stone Walls entitled “The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19.” What readers did not know at the time was that I had a vested interest in the subject. While writing that post I was recovering from a month-long bout with Covid-19 that made me wonder toward the end whether I would actually survive. It is difficult to keep a highly contagious virus from spreading through a contained, crowded environment.

Obviously, I did survive and did so without treatment. However, the above post did not fare quite as well. It addressed with much doubt the origin of Covid-19 that had been settled upon in the official account of the Chinese Communist Party. Since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has conducted its own investigation with conclusions that conveniently matched those of China’s communist regime.

However, the cooperation of the Chinese government was sorely lacking, and some WHO investigators were not satisfied that the whole truth had been uncovered and told to the world. I am certainly no wild conspiracy theorist, but the science part of me had doubts about the reigning dogma: that a Wuhan wildlife market was the source of the virus despite evidence that the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology had been handling that same virus since its initial quiet discovery in an abandoned mine in Southwest China in 2012.

It was discovered then when six Chinese citizens entered a mine in Yunnan Province to gather samples of bat droppings. All six became quite ill within days. Three of them died. Now new evidence has emerged from a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that in November 2019, a month before the world even heard of Covid-19, three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became ill and were hospitalized. The Biden administration, which had earlier shut down any inquiry into a possible laboratory source for the virus, has now and only reluctanly called for further review. There is a lot more to this story.

I have written that there was zero evidence to support the conspiracy theory that this is a weaponized virus intentionally unleashed on the world. I can only wish that were still true. However, newly released emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci reveal that he was warned in early 2020 by immunology expert Kristian Andersen that “the virus had some unusual features hinting at manipulation in a lab setting.” Dr. Andersen stated that the virus was not compatible with evolutionary theory leading him to believe that it was manipulated in a lab. Four other experts in his team agreed with that assessment. Then suddenly it was withdrawn without explanation. From 2014 to 2019 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent $3.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology culminating with a note of thanks for sticking by the “natural origin" theory.

Evidence that something is amiss here continues to mount. In recent weeks, Kristian Andersen has deleted thousands of tweets with information related to his initial assessment of the virus. In early June Dr. Andersen deleted his Twitter account and as of this writing has declined to respond to media questions.

According to a June 4, 2021 Wall Street Journal report, the NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, “and it is likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious.” In a February 2020 email, Dr. Fauci sent his deputy a paper about this gain-of-function research. The email instructed the deputy, “Read this paper. You will have tasks today that must be done.” His deputy replied that he would “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.” Dr. Fauci has said to date that his organization did not fund gain-of-function research, but “I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab.”

Dr. Steven Quay and physics professor Richard Muller have an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2021) revealing that the gene sequence of a virus that has been subjected to gain-of-function adaptations is not typically naturally occurring. And yet it does appear in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. “The scientific evidence,” they say, “points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.” If true, the world is left to determine whether the leak was indeed an accident.

There have always been many reasons to question China’s official explanation — for which there is also zero evidence — that humans visiting a Wuhan market contracted the virus from an animal that had been bitten by a bat, and then it spread from Wuhan across the globe. Again, the science part of me concludes that there would be many other examples of a similar natural transmission of deadly viruses if this scenario were so. Given the stakes for humanity and for the future, the truth must be uncovered. However, in both China and the United States this inquiry has been suppressed for political bias having nothing to do with scientific truth.

After I and others wrote about the origin of Covid-19 in 2020, the concept of a possible laboratory leak as the source of the virus was widely and quickly dismissed. A New York Times reporter recently admitted that the Times dismissed the theory only because it was the Trump administration that first raised it. CNN dismissed it as an unhelpful conspiracy theory in 2020, but now reluctantly calls for further investigation. Also early in 2020, 27 leading scientists signed an open letter condemning conspiracy theories that suggest Covid-19 did not have a natural origin like the one officially proffered by the Chinese government. Now several of the signatories have withdrawn that position.

The People’s Republic but Not the People’s Pandemic

In early January 2020, international news media began reporting on a viral outbreak of unknown origin in Wuhan, China. On January 30, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton warned that “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately dismissed this suspicion of a laboratory involvement as “absolutely crazy.”

Much of the mainstream U.S. news media immediately took up representation of the CCP denouncement, not because Senator Cotton’s idea was not worthy of scientific inquiry, but because of an unspoken media mandate to disparage the people who proposed it: Senator Tom Cotton and President Donald Trump. The Washington Post declared, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was absolutely debunked.” The New York Times followed with the headline, “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origin.”

We should never again have a global pandemic during a U.S. presidential election year. From that point on, anyone who published any evidence for why the posssibility of a laboratory connection should be considered was labeled on CNN and MSNBC and most major news networks as “fringe” or “a conspiracy theorist.” I was hit with those same labels after my May 2020 post linked above.

On February 6, 2020, Botao Xiao, a molecular biologist and researcher at South China University of Technology, published a paper in which he concluded that the novel coronavirus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Under pressure from the CCP, he quickly withdrew that publication.

Now, over a year later, a group of 18 scientists from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities have signed an open letter in the journal, Science, calling for a more serious consideration of the theory that the virus could have been of natural origin that, after discovery in a cave, was brought back to a laboratory intentionally or by accident, and then escaped.

Now the CCP has obstructed any further investigation. The mine in Yunnan Province set up a checkpoint that bars journalists and investigators from entering. Dr. Anthony Fauci has also gone on record, now, to state that he no longer has a firm conviction that the natural origin source is the truth.

The body of evidence gathered by the World Health Organization investigation is not at all compelling and is not supported by newly emerging evidence. It is important to get to the bottom of this to prevent an outbreak like Covid-19, or something even far worse, from ever occurring again. There is now evidence that the virus has mutations, and if those mutations continue, Covid may become a serious seasonal illness like influenza, but more deadly, that will plague us for decades to come.

I invite readers to review again my initial post on this matter. Keep in mind that it was written from a place with few resources and limited freedom to find them. It was also written months before the presidential election of 2020 and reflects all the uncertainty of that time. It is linked again at the end of this post.

But its most important point is one that I must stress again. The Chinese Communist Party and government are not a reflection of the will, minds, or hearts of the Chinese people. Anti-Asian bigotry is not an acceptable response to this pandemic. The good people of China exist under an oppressive Communist regime. China is called the People’s Republic, but Covid-19 is not the people’s pandemic.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that there has been a cover-up of the true origin of Covid-19. If so, the cover-up has been the work of some of our highly partisan American news media as much as that of the Chinese Communist Party.

+ + +

Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also be interested in the following links:

The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

Catholics, Communist China, and Hope for Hong Kong by James W. Harris

RejectCCP.org (Sponsored by The Epoch Times)

It Is the Duty of a Priest to Never Lose Sight of Heaven

Marking 40 years of priesthood, 28 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to a higher truth. For those suffering in life, eternal life matters more.

“When suffering is far away, we feel that we are ready for everything. Now that we have occasion to suffer, we must take advantage of it to save souls.”

— Fr. Maximilian Kolbe writing from Auschwitz, 1941

I am indebted to my friend, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, for his remarkable and timely guest post, “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In it, he concluded that some of our bishops have acted in regard to their priests by caving into the cancel culture mob even before it was called that. “The mob can be a frightening place when we have lost sight of heaven,” he boldly wrote. I was struck by this important insight which lends itself to my title for this post: It is the duty of a priest to never lose sight of heaven.

In the weeks before I mark forty years of priesthood, I have heard from no less than three good priests who have been summarily removed from ministry without a defense. Like many others, they are banished into exile following 30-year-old claims for which there exists no credible evidence beyond the accusations themselves and demands for money.

This sad reality, imposed by our bishops in a panicked response to the Catholic abuse crisis, has been the backdrop of nearly half of my life as a priest. As Father Stuart mentioned in his post, I wrote of this a decade ago in regard to the demise of the celebrated public ministry of Father John Corapi at EWTN. Given the resurgence of priests falsely accused, I decided to update and republish that post on social media. It is “Goodbye, Good Priest! Fr. John Corapi’s Kafkaesque Catch-22.”

The point of it was not Father Corapi himself, but rather the matters of due process and fundamental justice and fairness that have suffered in regard to the treatment of accused priests. In republishing it, I was struck by how little has changed in this regard since I first wrote of Father Corapi a decade earlier.

My article presents no new information on the priesthood of Father Corapi, but lest our spiritual leaders think that interest in this story among Catholics has diminished, within 24 hours of publishing, that post was visited by over 6,500 readers and shared on social media 3,700 times. (Note: We now give it a permanent home in the “Catholic Priesthood” Category at the BTSW Library.)

The only priests who land in the news these days are those accused of sexual or financial wrongdoing and those who make their disobedience to Church authority in matters of faith and morals a media event. In regard to the latter, several priests and bishops in Germany have openly defied Pope Francis and his decision to bar priests from blessing same-sex unions.

Blessing the individuals involved would not be an issue, but, as Pope Francis put it, “The Church cannot bless sin.” The open defiance of this among some German priests brought them 15 minutes of fame in our cancel culture climate in recent weeks, but it does nothing to bring us any closer to heaven.

Appearing on The World Over with Raymond Arroyo recently, Catholic theologian and author, George Weigel, addressed the German situation plainly:

“These bishops think that they know more about marriage than Jesus, that they know more about worthiness for the Eucharist than Saint Paul. This is apostasy, and it is time to call it what it really is.”

— George Weigel

The Setting for My Priesthood

In every age, people tend to see the struggles of their current time as the worst of times. My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982. It was the only ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire that year. President Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term in office. The U.S. economy was suffering its most severe decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment was at its highest level in decades and the housing industry was on the verge of collapse.

Just over a year earlier, on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times at close range as he entered Saint Peter’s Square to mark the 64th anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. John Paul was severely wounded and so was the spirit of the global Catholic Church. He recovered, though a lesser man might not have.

One year later, three weeks before my ordination, Pope John Paul made a thanksgiving visit to Fatima on May 12, 1982. It was the day before the anniversary of both the Visions of Fatima and the attempt on his life. As the Pope walked toward the altar of the Fatima shrine, a man in clerical garb lunged at him with a bayonet, coming within inches of killing John Paul before being subdued by security guards.

The assailant was Juan Fernandez y Krohn, then age 32, a priest ordained by the suspended traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Fernandez was subsequently expelled from Lefebvre's movement. As he lunged at the Pope with his bayonet, he shouted in denouncement of the Second Vatican Council while accusing Pope John Paul of collaborating with the dark forces behind the spread of Communism.

That latter accusation was highly ironic. Over the next decade, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II collaborated to become the two major forces behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism that had held the Western World in the grip of Cold War since the end of World War II.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down by a crowd of citizens from both East and West as soldiers watched in silence. On Christmas Day, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a television address. The next day, the Soviet parliament passed its final resolution ratifying the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Within a week, all residual functions of the Soviet Communist state ceased. The USSR was no more, thanks to the strength and fidelity of a Pope and a President.

The footprints of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul on modern human history are immense. This and the chaos of the world at that time formed the backdrop against which I became a priest in 1982. I wrote of this in “Priesthood: The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times.”

The sins of the times were many. On the world stage, Pope John Paul courageously confronted the Marxist “cancel culture” movement of his time. His bold witness to the world and his fidelity are highlighted in a new and important book by George Weigel entitled Not Forgotten.

In contrast, much of the current Catholic ecclesial leadership seems bogged down in demonstrations of tolerance for dissent and the rise of socialism and Marxist ideology that again springs up anew as “cancel culture.” Some bishops cannot even decide whether open promotion of abortion should bar its adherents who are nominally Catholic from presenting themselves for the Eucharist. 

Ironically, recent polls have suggested that 66-percent of American Catholics are uncertain whether they still even believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is that exact same percentage who also believe that President Biden should be admitted to the Eucharist without question despite his open promotion of abortion as a civil right. Our Catholic crisis is not just one of fidelity. It is a crisis of identity. But as has been famously asked by another well-known priest, “Who am I to judge?”

Witnessed in a Prison Journal

Now here I stand, 39 years into my priesthood on the peripheries with 27 of those years in wrongful imprisonment for abuse claims that never took place. I could have left prison 26 years ago had the truth meant nothing to me. I have been reading the far better known story of another falsely accused priest in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press.

I find in it much solace and peace. I am strengthened in my priesthood by the great effort of Cardinal Pell to maintain his identity as a priest even in prison. I know from long experience - too long - that there is nothing in prison, absolutely nothing that sustains an identity of priesthood. It is so easy and a constant temptation to simply give up. For page after page in the Journal, I find myself thinking, “I felt that very same way,” or “I did these very same things.” Our prisons were similar, although from Cardinal Pell descriptions, Australia’s prisons seem a bit more humane.

Cardinal Pell was in prison for 400 days before his unjust convictions were recognized as such in a unanimous exoneration by Australia’s High Court. On my 39th anniversary of ordination on June 5th this year, I mark 9,750 days in wrongful imprisonment. I do not point this out to contrast my experience with that of Cardinal Pell. His ordeal, like mine, was defined by his first failed appeals after which he had every reason to believe that prison could thus define the rest of his life.

I have no known recourse because, unlike Australia, the United States courts have given greater weight to states’ rights to finality in criminal cases than to innocent defendants’ rights to a case review. When I had new witnesses and evidence, the court not only declined to hear it, but declined to allow any further appeals. We even appealed that, but to no avail.

But a distinction between justice for Cardinal Pell and for me is not the point I want to make. I felt the lacerations to his good name in every step of his Way of the Cross as news media in Australia and globally exploited the charges against him. What a trophy his wrongful conviction was for those who hate the Church!

I felt the scourging he endured as multiple false claimants tried to use his cross for financial gain. I felt his condemnation in the halls of the high priests as cowardly men of the Church denounced him, at worst, or at best stood speechless in the shadows of silence, rarely mentioning his name, and even then only in whispers.

Reading Volume One of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal has been both consoling and distressing. Consoling in that when all else was stripped away, truth and priesthood, even more than freedom, were still at the heart of this good priest’s identity. The measure of a man is not when all is going well, but when all that is dear and familiar has been stripped away. Cardinal Pell held up well. I like to think I have, too.

I have reserved a copy of Volume Two of the Prison Journal. I am told by those who know that in a few of its pages, Cardinal Pell also wrote about me. That struck me as highly ironic in that I wrote several times about his plight, the last being “From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”

And by “From Down Under,” I do not just mean Australia!

The Last Years of My Priesthood

I expect that I will die in prison. This is not a statement out of despair. No one has taken my faith in Divine Providence and Divine Mercy. There came a time in my imprisonment when I recognized a pattern of grace that began with the insinuation of Saint Maximilian Kolbe into my life as both a priest and a prisoner. This grace has been profound, and staggering in its visibility and power. Our readers — all but the most spiritually blind — have seen it.

After a lifetime of devoting himself as a priest in Consecration to Jesus through Mary, Maximilian coped with his suffering as grace rather than torment. This story culminated, as you know, in his spontaneous decision to surrender his life so that another could live. This act of sacrifice has long been heralded as an exemplar of the words of Jesus, “No greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

There came a point in my imprisonment when it was clear that all I tried to do to bring about justice was in vain. So I asked for Divine Mercy and the ability to find grace in this story. A life without grace is far worse than a life without justice. It was at that very point at which my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, arrived upon my road as a priest. He had been mercilessly beaten down in life, and robbed of all trust and hope.

I could have been the priest who saw him on that road and passed him by like the priest in the Parable of the Samaritan. But I stopped, and when I learned the whole truth of his life, I set my own hope for justice aside. It became clear to me that this was God’s action in my life and a task that He has given only to me. It became clear that Pornchai has a special connection to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and I was to be his Saint Joseph.

I wrote a post about this healing mission which I contrasted with the Book of Tobit and the mission of Saint Raphael the Archangel to be God’s instrument of healing. I wrote of this in one of my own favorite posts at Beyond These Stone Walls in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”

You should not miss that post, and if you do read it, you would do well to ponder for awhile the mysteries of grace on your own life’s path. It was well after writing and posting it that I learned something that stunned me into a better awareness of the irony of grace.

Over the course of time, the Church has devised a Lectionary that reveals all of Sacred Scripture in the readings for the Church’s liturgy spread over a three-year cycle. I discovered only while writing this post for the occasion of my 39th anniversary of priesthood ordination that the First Reading at Mass on that day — Saturday, June 5, 2021 — is the story of the Archangel Raphael sent by God to restore life and sight to Tobit and bring deliverance and healing to two souls — Tobias and Sarah — whose lives and sufferings converged upon Tobit’s at that point in time.

As I mark thirty nine years as a priest in extraordinary circumstances, the weight of imprisonment does not leave me broken. But the irony of grace leaves me hopeful — even now.

Thank you for being a part of my life as a priest. Thank you for being here with me at this turning of the tide.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We have a most important message for readers. Please visit our “Special Events” page.

+ + +

You may also like these related posts:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of Cardinal George Pell

Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Pope Francis promulgated Vos estis, a law applicable to bishops. Previously, if a bishop was accused of a canonical offense, only the Pope could bring him to task.

Recently, behind the scenes at Beyond These Stone Walls, people have been working to restore and update Father Gordon MacRae’s older posts and save them in multiple categories in the Library at BTSW. One of the categories is Catholic Priesthood where this post, I expect, will find its permanent home. One such article was “Goodbye, Good Priest!” It was an updated reflection on the story of Father John Corapi, posted anew without any notice or fanfare. Nonetheless, it received more than 6,000 visits and 3,700 shares on social media in the first 24 hours after it was posted. This happened even before Fr John Zuhlsdorf — the famous Fr Z — posted a link to another blog informing readers that Fr Corapi, thanks be to God, had reconciled with his religious order several years ago and has been living a quiet life of prayer in one of its community houses. Fr Z’s post was “If you do not forgive men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

We had not heard about Fr Corapi for many years. His, we thought, was one of the many forgotten tales about priests, guilty, or even merely accused, of horrendous sins, whose cases often were treated with little regard for human, civil or canonical rights or due process. Fr Gordon and I were commenting that, being reminded of Fr Corapi, we realize that we have not progressed very far in the last twenty years. What Fr Gordon and I see now is that Father Corapi’s case was a small seed planted in our collective psyche that has germinated, now affecting all priests.

When the sexual abuse scandal exploded in the American press in 2002, many bishops were faced with the reality that their predecessors had known about sexual abuse of minors by priests and handled it in a way that was seen as pastoral at the time but which failed to meet today’s expectations. Back then, accused priests were shuffled off for psychological treatment, reassigned on the advice of the medical professionals to new parishes for a fresh start; sometimes they reoffended, or quietly retired to live in peace with their consciences. Even though the Vatican quietly had promulgated new laws in 2001 to deal with the crime of sexual abuse of a minor among some other of the more serious offenses in the Church, in the wake of the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposé, bishops threw up their hands and said to the Vatican, “My predecessor did this; you have to help me get out of this mess!”

And so dawned the era of the Dallas Charter. In the face of unrelenting public pressure and criticism, the Church, beginning in the United States but soon almost everywhere, began to treat allegations as proven crimes, to treat priests like chattel, to put money over preaching the Gospel. The Dallas Charter ushered in an era that means one strike and you’re out, and, in fact you don’t even have to prove that it was a strike: credibly accused quickly became the operative expression. In effect, the first decade of the 21st century witnessed the Church take on the notion that the priesthood was more disposable than it ever had been before. It was a reaction of fear.

Soon after, file upon file was sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) as bishops scoured their personnel files for any priest previously accused of sexual abuse. Even though the case had been dealt with already, according to the pastoral plan mentioned above, current bishops were looking for Rome to revisit the case and, it was expected, remove the priest permanently from ministry if not the clerical state itself. The caseload became so heavy that the CDF had to notify bishops that a deadline was being set after which no historical cases could be submitted. Apparently, someone had forgotten to inform everyone involved that law, especially penal law, cannot, in justice, be applied retroactively.

So far, we have only been talking about accusation of sexual abuse of minors. Fr John Corapi was never accused of that. He was accused of sexual misconduct, perhaps even concubinage, with an adult woman among supected financial misdeeds. In the heat of the abuse scandal, his case was being treated as if the Dallas Charter applied, which it did not. Father Corapi realized that he would never be treated according to the canon law of the Church. He knew he was considered guilty; nothing was going to change that, so he walked away. It is a sad commentary on the Church that such a gifted man was driven to near despair, that Church officials could be so indifferent to basic tenets of justice and due process. But that’s where we were.

Jump forward several years. In 2019, Pope Francis promulgated Vos estis, a set of laws applicable to bishops. Prior to those laws, bishops were directly responsible to the Pope alone. If a bishop was accused of a crime, like sexual abuse of a minor, only the Pope could bring him to task. Canon law assumes that people with authority in the Church, like bishops, are not saints, but at least God-fearing men seeking virtue. In fact, canon law only really works when that’s the case. People like Theodore McCarrick, the former Cardinal and Archbishop, got away with his misconduct for so long because a lot of bishops are not God-fearing men. McCarrick was relieved of his clerical obligations in 2019 and is now a layman.

With everything the Pope has to do, he certainly does not have time to micro-manage the lives of 5,000 bishops. The problem, becoming apparent, was that not only priests were being accused. The ravenous press and hysterical crowd were not satisfied. Bishops were next on the hit list. Hence, Pope Francis set up a system whereby bishops are now accountable for their own misconduct, even historical accusations from when they were yet priests. They are accountable, as well, for how they handle, as bishops, accusations of sexual abuse of minors by priests subject to them. With Pope Francis’ new legislation, the Congregation for Bishops is authorized to investigate accusations made about bishops in much the same way that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was authorized in 2001 to do the same regarding priests. This is new territory and bishops are clearly anxious.

Guilty Merely for Being Accused?

Since the promulgation of Vos estis, several bishops have been removed from office or disciplined in some way: Bishop Richard Malone, emeritus of Buffalo; Bishop Michael Bransfield, emeritus of Wheeling-Charleston; Archbishop Henryk Gulbinowicz, emeritus of Wroclaw, Poland; Bishop Michael Hoeppner, emeritus of Crookston to name just a few. It’s a new world out there since 2019. What bishops have done to priests since 2002 is now being done to them.

“ The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

— Matthew 7:2

Pope Francis, in Vos estis, expressed his wish that bishops conferences set up confidential reporting mechanisms such that people who know of misconduct committed by a bishop could safely report it knowing that action would be taken to investigate. The Canadian bishops conference announced a few weeks ago just such a mechanism. Anyone can now call a confidential line, or submit an online report, to a third-party agency which will receive the information and, in turn, pass on a report to the appropriate bishop. That bishop, in receipt of the report, will consult the Congregation for Bishops on how to proceed. Whatever else it is, and it is many things, this move is a lot of virtue signaling. Nothing guarantees that the report will be taken seriously. The only certainty is that a secular third party is being paid to receive and pass on information.

There is no real transparency to the procedures that are used to investigate a bishop — and I’m not arguing there should be, in this or any investigation of a priest — it is not evident that such things belong to the realm of public knowledge. Instead, we must trust that what is being done is just and legal — there’s no sense having a code of law in the Church if it means nothing or is not going to be used. Unfortunately, the Church’s track record in this regard leaves us with very little trust. With these new initiatives, nothing says that the bishop reporting to Rome about his brother bishop will not convince the Vatican that the allegation is unfounded or exaggerated. And, to be fair, understand that the Vatican has to trust the bishop consulting them. If they can’t, how is the Vatican to know and what is it supposed to do? We’re back to the headline: “Needed: God-fearing men trying to live lives of virtue.”

Now that bishops are being held to the same standards, or lack thereof, they have become hypervigilant of their priests, or, rather, of their own reputations. Virtue signaling abounds: bishops are tough on clerical misconduct. Now, not only accusation of sexual abuse of a minor leads a bishop to remove a priest from ministry, but, indeed, any misconduct whatsoever. That was the seed planted by Father Corapi’s case. Anything done by a priest that is going to cause publicity, or a lawsuit, is now treated in the same way as an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor. A priest is put on so-called administrative leave, his faculties are removed, he is not allowed to perform any priestly ministry except the celebration of Mass in private, which means alone.

This is all done, they say, just like they did in the early 2000’s, pro bono ecclesiae — for the good of the Church. This is being done by bending the law to the point of breaking. What priest, especially if he is guilty of something, is going to challenge his bishop’s abuse of the law. Priests who have been accused of misconduct, not involving minors, are now being removed from ministry under the guise that they are not suitable for assignment because of their misconduct, even though that misconduct may have been adjudicated and punished already — justly or not is another question. Bishops go so far as to encourage the priest to petition for laicization. The bishop can’t force a priest out of the priesthood because whatever he is alleged to have done doesn’t warrant such a punishment. But the bishop doesn’t want to be responsible for the ‘unassignable’ priest for the rest of his life, nor does he want to continue paying the priest.

Check any “Policy for Cases of Misconduct” published by a diocese. Many of them have clauses that say a priest found guilty of misconduct will never minister in the diocese again. Of course, such clauses are not allowed by canon law. No one questions what procedures will be used to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused priest. But what looks good is the policy itself. The Church has gone tough, not just on abusing minors, but on any misdeed. Try to find a definition of misconduct, or a list of behaviors that is classified as misconduct — you won’t. Vague is good: it allows those in authority to cite the law while interpreting it as they wish. Those are the parameters we are operating within today.

Fear and panic, there’s the problem. Instead of turning to Christ, we look to the world for our sense of self-worth as a Church. Are we held to impossible standards by the world? Yes. Does the world despise us because the Gospel preaches something counter-cultural? Yes. Are they going to sue us for every penny we own? Probably. Jesus told us, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). The Church certainly has made mistakes in the last half-century or more. One of the biggest ones was turning a blind eye to immorality, especially sexual immorality among clergy and the faithful. In its zeal to be pastoral as a way of opening up to the world — a mantra of Vatican II — she failed to enforce her laws, or use her laws to bring justice and transparency to cases of crime and misconduct. The way out of this mess is not more laws, not more father turning on son and brother on brother tactics reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The answer is to read and heed the Gospel.

“For They Do Not Practice What They Preach” (Matthew 23:3)

In July 2013, Pope Francis was questioned about a Monsignor whom the Holy Father had appointed to a Vatican office. The Monsignor, according to reports, engaged in homosexual activity several times. The press wanted to know from the Pope how this person could be assigned given his past. Pope Francis came out with his now infamous line, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” The press, to this day, wildly misinterprets what the Holy Father said, namely, that someone who was seeking the Lord with good will, i.e., repenting of past sin and seeking the right path, ought not to be judged by us. The rationale behind that is nothing other than the whole Christian message: Christ died so that all of us sinners could be redeemed. The Pope was saying, in essence, that someone could be a very sinful person, but repentance is always possible. Furthermore, he was pointing out that someone’s sinful past does not necessarily disqualify one from working in the Church — to be sure, sometimes it does, but not always. How would any of the apostles survive as priests or bishops in today’s climate?

In our Lord’s day, the religious leaders were worried about the popularity of Jesus. They didn’t want the people, the mob, to turn against them. In the end, it was they who, in the midst of the mob, told Pilate that they had no King but Caesar. It was they who instigated the mob’s choice of Barabbas over Jesus. The mob can be a frightening place when we have lost sight of Heaven. Jesus Himself was confronted with a mob. When they brought to Him the woman caught in adultery, the mob was after Him, not so much the woman who had been caught flagrantly in sin. They wanted to trip Him up about the law. Jesus was uncowed by their bullying. He didn’t lash out at the mob; rather, he showed them mercy by His retort, “Let anyone who is without sin, cast the first stone.” He gave the mob room to see its error. The Gospel of John (8:3-11) points out the seemingly insignificant detail that Jesus looked down so that they could walk away while saving face.

At the same time, Jesus healed the woman, wounded by her own sinfulness and maltreated as a pawn by the mob. He sends her off, with the consolation of “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (John 8:11). Our Lord showed that the mob, the world, CAN learn the truth about sin and redemption. He showed her that compunction was enough to receive mercy and the need to learn from one’s sins. He did not tell her not to pay attention to the Pharisees — in fact, in another place Jesus warned the people, “Obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach” (Matthew 23:3). He didn’t say they were not qualified for the job as Pharisees because they were sinful. He also told her to learn from the mercy she received and to put aside her sinfulness. All of that is an important meditation for us because little mercy is being shown priests.

When I think of Father Gordon MacRae and the injustice he is enduring with such equanimity and grace, I am reminded that God’s grace is still active in this messy world. Beyond These Stone Walls is a visible sign of grace, allowing Father Gordon to preach from his pulpit, his unjust imprisonment, to make so many aware of the reality of injustice even in the Church. He and this blog are a sign of grace, a sign that such corruption is not a reason to turn against God or His Church but to work even harder to bring about a community of God-fearing men trying to live lives of virtue.

+ + +

Fr. Stuart MacDonald is a priest of the Diocese of St Catharines, Canada. Ordained in 1997, he is a graduate of McGill University, St. Augustine’s Seminary and the Pontifical Gregorian University where he earned a licentiate in Canon Law. In addition to being pastor of various parishes, he has worked as a judge and defender of the bond for the Toronto Regional Marriage Tribunal and as an official for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Holy See. He is the author of several published articles on Canon Law and the priesthood. His most recent post for BTSW was “On Our Battle-Weary Priesthood.”

You may also want to read and share these related posts:

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List

Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester

The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life

Racial justice and a dubious idea of critical race theory are now center stage in our culture, but they give no voice to the most urgent Civil Rights issue of all.

For the entire second term in the presidency of Barack Obama, Ohio Republican congressman John Boehner was Speaker of the House of Representatives. He left that office in 2015. A devout Catholic, he had been honored by the University of Notre Dame with the Laetare Medal, a distinction awarded to Catholics in public life who witness to their faith in extraordinary ways. During Speaker Boehner’s first address to the House of Representatives in 2011, he said that “America is more than a country. It’s an idea.” Like any great idea, it did not begin in its current form. The idea of America evolved with fits and starts in response to both prophets and protests — and wars, and great losses, and immense sacrifices. From my perspective, in the decade from 1963 to 1973 the very idea of America gave birth to a Civil Rights movement that was hard fought and continues to be. Milestones were reached, but the Civil Rights movement never ended. It now just takes another form.

Civil Rights as an idea is not yet a done deal. Just as the idea formed and took shape for some in America, it failed an entire class of others. Just as the idea of Civil Rights embraced our fellow Americans living lives marked by racial divisions and distinctions, it failed millions of others not yet living outside the womb.

In the decade of the 1970s, it sometimes felt like I would be in school forever. After four years studying psychology and philosophy at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school just outside Manchester, NH, I commenced another four years at Saint Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland from where I was awarded a Master of Divinity and a Pontifical degree in Sacred Theology. Saint Mary’s is the oldest Catholic seminary in the United States and, at that time at least, was the most academically demanding.

Like many seminarians then, I was chronically poor. During the rationing and long gas lines of the late 1970s, I paid $900 for a clunker of a 1969 Chevy Malibu. It had a V-8 engine that could pass everything but gas stations, and when I bought it, it burned almost as much oil as gasoline. A friend and I spent all our spare time in the summer of 1978 rebuilding its engine before I drove it off to Baltimore to begin the great adventure of faith seeking understanding. I was proud of the fact that we got the Malibu’s gas mileage up to a point where I could sit in the long gas lines with a clear conscience, though I don’t think General Motors would have still recognized its engine. I loved that car, not the least for where it took me.

Roaring around Baltimore from 1978 to 1982, I quickly learned that the great city was second only to my native Boston for the lure and lore of its history. Outside the seminary, there was a whole other field of education within 100 miles of Baltimore in any direction. So Saturdays in the seminary were devoted to field trips to the birth and growth of America; to the places where the idea first took shape. That’s when visiting history became my hobby, and an important part of my education. Much more than my loss of freedom, now, I mourn the passing of the world beyond these stone walls.

Upon the Field of Battle

One place stands out strikingly against the background of monuments and memories I visited and studied. I had some friends among the seminarians at Mount Saint Mary Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, a two+ hour drive from Baltimore. On several Saturdays, my speedy Malibu drove north to pick up my friends and head for Gettysburg, just a few miles from Emmitsburg straddling the Maryland and Pennsylvania state line.

It’s hard to describe what I felt the first time I stood surveying the very heart of America’s most terrible war. The Battle of Gettysburg was fought there over the first four days of July in 1863. President Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address was delivered on that field on November 19, 1863, just three months after the horrific four-day battle that took the lives of over 80,000 Americans.

For some reason, standing on that field of battle for the first time in 1979, I thought of John F. Kennedy and his signature cause, the Civil Rights movement which was in turn taken up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson after Kennedy’s untimely death in 1963. It came as a shock to me to realize that the defining battle of the American Civil War — that I once thought to be ancient history — was fought and then immortalized in Lincoln’s great speech just l00 years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was exactly 100 years, barely three generations in the lives of men. The Battle of Gettysburg, and all that led up to it, took place in the lifetime of my grandfather’s grandfather.

Suddenly, with that revelation, I felt linked to all that came before. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1974 historical novel, The Killer Angels relived this most decisive battle of the American Civil War, and my first visit came just after this great work of historical storytelling.

It felt strange standing for the first time upon Cemetery Hill where the Civil War pivoted toward victory for the North. But there was really no victory. It was America against itself, and the powerful imprint of death and sacrifice was still upon that battlefield as I stood there 116 years later. It was both eerie and inspiring. My friends went off to tour the museum and stare at row upon row of cannonballs and muskets, but I couldn’t leave that field. I realized standing there for the first time just what an idea can cost, and what hardship and sacrifice it can demand from those who serve it.

The Right to Life and the Cost of Liberty

By the time the Civil War was over, it demanded of America more lives of its citizens than World War I and World War II combined. Some 500,000 lost their lives fighting this nation’s war against itself. I didn’t understand then just how this happened, but standing on that Gettysburg field, I resolved to one day understand. Men and women can sacrifice their lives for an idea, or an ideal, or a principle that is far greater than themselves. They can sacrifice freedom, even, to stand firm on a ground made solid by conscience.

Many historians and legal scholars draw a direct line between the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and a single case decided before the U.S. Supreme Court four years earlier in 1857. As a causal connection, the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford enraged conscience-driven abolitionists and encouraged slave owners. It broadened the political and ideological abyss between the North and the South, and it led directly to a war of nothing less than the demands of conscience versus the realities of economic necessity and convenience.

Dred Scott was a fugitive slave. In 1848 at the age of 62, having spent decades in secret learning to read and write, he brought suit to claim his freedom on the ground that he resided in a free territory established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. This is a piece of American history that must not be overlooked or forgotten, though many would prefer not to know. Dred Scott was purchased and lived his life as a slave, but was then taken by his “master”, an Army surgeon, to a free territory rendered free by the Missouri Compromise.

In Dred Scott v. Sanford, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney wrote for the majority that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and violated the Fifth Amendment because it deprived Southerners of a right to bring their private property — i.e., slaves — wherever they wanted. The decision further ruled that Congress did not have the authority to establish free territory, and in its most alarming language, Justice Taney’s decision established that black men are not citizens of the United States and had “no rights any white man is bound to respect.”

Reflecting upon this now, five generations later, is made all the more painful by the recognition that Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney was a Catholic, though one who surely put the realities of national economics above the tenets of faith or conscience. As I wrote in “The True Story of Thanksgiving,” the Catholic Church had three centuries earlier established slavery as a moral evil, and declared it unacceptable in any Catholic country. It would take another 250 years from the founding of America for this nation to put economic interest aside and catch up with the conscience of the Catholic Church.

Justice Taney’s decision caused some in his day to conclude that there is a higher moral law than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution at any given time in history. There is a higher moral law, and it led the nation on a direct path from Dred Scott to Civil War. The war came as a result of the conscience of individuals gradually forming a consensus about slavery, racial justice and the rights of man.

Rev. Martin Luther King and Father John Crowley

One hundred years after that war was fought, its ripples continued throughout this nation. In 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated for his unwavering and prophetic public witness in a story that we all know only too well. My friend, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus (who contributed to our “About” page) wrote of the radical grace exemplified by Martin Luther King in American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. He wrote of Dr. King’s notion of “The Beloved Community” and described his movement as a new order . . .

“. . . sought by all who know love’s grief in refusing to settle for a community of less than truth and justice uncompromised.”

Think for a moment, please, about that statement. There are not many of us who escape love’s grief — unless we become so shallow as to so steel ourselves against grief that we can ignore it. What a tragedy! Those of us who know love’s grief and refuse to settle for a community — a nation, a Church — of less than truth and justice uncompromised are in for some prophetic suffering.

Three years before Martin Luther King was assassinated, Father John Crowley, a heroic Catholic priest, was nearly driven from Selma, Alabama when he took out a full-page ad in the Selma Times-Journal on February 7, 1965.

His ad contained a brilliant essay entitled “The Path to Peace in Selma.” It urged the white community to speak out against racial segregation and discrimination not for the good of the black man and woman, but for the good of ALL men and women. Like the famous Lutheran Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler on April 9, 1945, Father John Crowley called upon fellow priests and other Catholics to put aside their fears of loss and stand by the truth uncompromised. I share a date of birth with the date of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death, and I share my June 5th date of priesthood ordination with Father John Crowley. These very special men compel me to stand always by the truth uncompromised, and not to fear its cost.

Stand against the Culture of Death

Martin Luther King lost his life just five years before another divisive Supreme Court decision with grave implications for Civil Rights. There are some, and they are many, who see in the 1857 decision in Dred Scott the roots of the 1973’s Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Anthony Kennedy have both cited this connection. In 1973, after the Supreme Court handed down its divided decision in Roe v. Wade, the State of Texas joined other states in filing a petition for a rehearing before the full Court. The Texas dissent declared that the decision in Roe that an unborn child was not a human being with rights to be protected was not at all unlike the decision in Dred Scott that virtually no just person in this nation would ever stand by today.

And just as Dred Scott inspired dissidents of conscience to hear the Commandments of a Higher Authority, Roe v. Wade has inspired similar heroism, most of it barely noticed in the mainstream media, or, worse, taunted. Have you noticed that much of the loudest ridicule of the Catholic Church in America comes on the heels of legislation that chips away at the right to life and human dignity? Many a media barrage against the Catholic Church has been for the purpose of silencing its pro-life voice in the public square.

Life Site News has carried the stories of two Canadian women whose sacrifices on behalf of civil rights for the unborn had landed them in prison. Linda Gibbons, a grandmother and prisoner of conscience, spent seven years in an Ontario prison because she refused to comply with a court order demanding that she cease and desist from standing on the sidewalk near an Ontario clinic to present alternatives to abortion. In eerie echoes of the Dred Scott decision, the clinic staff and the Ontario court charged her with interfering with fair commerce by suggesting to clients another way. Linda Gibbons first went to prison at the same time I did, in September 1994.

Mary Wagner took leave from a French convent to “witness to life” as Life Site News has called her sacrifice. In Holy Week, 2010, Mary was arrested by Vancouver police and remained in jail for months for refusing to obey court orders to cease talking to abortion clinic clients about Project Rachel.

And you may have heard of the late Norma McCorvey. She’s better known as “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Norma became a Catholic in 1998 and also became a dedicated pro-life activist. She was author of the 1998 book, Won by Love. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition by Norma McCorvey to reverse Roe v. Wade. In May 2009, she was among the Catholic pro-life witnesses arrested at the University of Notre Dame during President Obama’s Commencement address.

We can deduce where Martin Luther King would stand on the pressing civil rights issues of this day. There is some annual controversy that his niece, Dr. Alveda King, endeavors to clear up. She staunchly defends Rev. King against claims that he would be a pro-choice or pro-abortion supporter today. She insists that his civil rights agenda would today include a defense of life. It’s no irony that the week that begins in honor of his martyrdom for civil rights ends with the National March for Life in Washington, DC.

Beginning in the fall of 2004, 40 Days for Life has held prayer vigils at 238 locations in the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia. The US Catholic Bishops would do well to heed the courageous voices of those who have sacrificed much for the pro-life cause while the bishops debate the sanctity of the Eucharist and the demeanor necessary to receive the Body of Christ. The great Lutheran pastor, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, went to prison for writing to his fellow Lutherans that they cannot both profess their belief in Christ and support the Third Reich and its culture of death.

Conceived in Liberty

On the Saturday after my first visit to Gettysburg in 1979, I drove an hour south from Baltimore to Washington, DC. I went first to the Lincoln Memorial where the famous Gettysburg Address is etched into the stone behind the immense man’s monumental presence. The great speech immortalized the struggle for civil rights as an ongoing struggle that must never be set aside if the idea of America is to survive.

As I read it, I thought of that awful battlefield where I stood 116 years later, and also of the civil rights battlefields of today where millions are denied the right to life, and the millions more who sacrifice to witness for them. Lincoln’s memorable words apply no less to them.

---

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger-sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from those honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

---

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: As readers know, we have restored a few older posts in the last three weeks while I have been unable to write. This post was first written in 2011. It has been substantially updated and revised so it is actually a new post. Among the several pro-life posts I have written, many readers thought this one to stand out.

The Supreme Court has announced that it will review limits on abortion which in turn could lead to a review of Roe v Wade. President Biden just announced his new commission to study packing the Court. There is too much at stake to stay on the sidelines. Please share this post.

You might also be interested in this related post:

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

The Hand of God and the Story of a Soul

In two inspiring posts, Fr Gordon MacRae wrote of Michelangelo and an ancient sculpture unearthed out of legend and a legend come true from St Therese of Lisieux.

Note to readers from Father Gordon MacRae: I recently wrote that a prison construction project has caused me and others where I live to be temporarily relocated for a few weeks to a crowded dormitory from where I am unable to write. Once the project is completed later this month, I will be moved back and will hopefully resume writing new posts.

I am currently living in a room with 23 other prisoners crowded into a small and noisy space. At first sight it reminded me of a FEMA shelter, but at least there was no disaster that preceded it. I cannot complain. Our friend Pornchai Moontri spent five full months in ICE detention in a similar space packed with 70 detainees awaiting deportation. You should not miss that nightmare and his final liberation in “ICE Finally Cracks: Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”

During my writing hiatus some relevant older posts are being restored at Beyond These Stone Walls and added to our various Library Categories. Our site developer thinks that some of these posts deserve a new audience or a second look. This week we are presenting two at a time when inspiration might be in short supply. I hope you will read and share them.

+ + +

Michelangelo and the Hand of God

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in the small Italian village of Caprese. He grew up in Florence, the artistic center of the early Renaissance, a period of artistic innovation and accomplisnhment that began at the time Michelangelo was born. In many ways, the masterpieces surrounding him in Florence were themselves his best teachers. They included ancient Greek and Roman statuary and the paintings, sculpture, and architecture of the early Renaissance masters.

As a child, Michelangelo preferred drawing to schoolwork which often earned his father’s stern disapproval. For historical context, Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492 just as thirteen year old Michelangelo was apprenticed to a sculptor in Florence. From there, he took up residence in the home of Lorenzo dé Medici, the leading art patron of Florence.

The Medici household was a gathering place for artists, poets, and philosophers. During this time, Michelangelo studied under Bertoldo di Giovanni, an aging master who had trained with Donatello, the greatest sculptor of 15th-century Florence. This exposure proved providencial when, at the age of 30, Michelangelo was on hand in Rome to help unearth and identify the excavation of a sculptural legend, The Laocoön (pronounce Low-OCK-oh-one), a massive ancient sculpture dating from the Second Century BC that had been missing for over a thousand years.

The Laocoön also had a massive influence on all future sculptures and paintings by Michelangelo that became the enduring treasures of the Catholic Church. The Laocoön stands today in the Vatican Museum. This is that story, and it is fascinating. Don’t miss:

Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican.

+ + +

A Shower of Roses

Saint Therese of Lisieux was a French Carmelite nun called “The Little Flower of Jesus.” She became one of the most beloved saints of the Catholic Church in modern times. Born at Alencon, France, with the name, Therese Martin, she was deeply pious from childhood and entered the Carmelite Convent at Lisieux at the young age of 15.

Therese exemplified what she called her “Little Way,” a devotion to God both childlike and profound. She sought holiness through the offering of small actions and humble tasks. Her goodness was so remarkable that her superiors asked her to write an account of her life and spiritual journey.

The result was “Story of a Soul” written in French in 1898 and translated into English in 1958. It is today the most widely read spiritual memoir of our time. Therese died at the young age of 24 and was canonized in 1925. She is today a Doctor of the Church.

The many miracles attributed to Saint Therese gave meaning to her cryptic promise, “After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses.” One of them, a small one, fell to me. Please read and share anew,

A Shower of Roses.

In Honor of Mom: A Corner of the Veil

The photograph above is the house where Father Gordon MacRae grew up just north of Boston. It is the home where his single-parent mother raised three sons and a daughter alone. The stone wall in the front was built by Father Gordon and his brother at ages 15 and 16. It still stands today.

Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae have met the challenge of honoring their mothers during a most difficult time in life, the latter through this moving 2009 post.

Note from Father Gordon: This post, which is dear to my heart, was first published in 2009 three years after my mother’s death. After I decided to repost it, Pornchai Moontri sent me some photos of how he has honored his mother in northern Thailand last month. For the first time in his life, Pornchai took part in the April celebrations of Songkhram, the Thai New Year, and Loy Krathong, the annual Water Festival and its ritual cleansing of the tombs of his mother and grandmother at a Buddhist temple in the village of his birth. (Note: Pornchai wants everyone to know that the shirt was a gift from one of his cousins!)

+ + +

When I was first sent to prison, my mother visited me weekly. She lived North of Boston, about a ninety minute drive from Concord, NH. She was usually brought here by my sister and her husband or by my younger brother. I was very concerned about how my imprisonment affected my mother. The mothers of most priests enjoy a sort of vicarious respect that they cherish with pride. My mother was visiting her priest-son in prison.

My mother was painfully aware that I could have left prison after only one or two years had I been willing to plead guilty to something that never took place. I knew she knew this. One day when we were alone during a visit, I took her hand and asked her if she was disappointed that I did not take a “deal” for the easy way out. She pondered this for a moment, squeezed my hand, and said,

“No, I would have been disappointed if you lived a lie. There’s no freedom in living a lie. I want you to fight for the truth.”

— Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, Father Gordon’s mother

I was very proud of my mother, for in those few simple words she, too, put herself and her pride aside for principle. A few days after our visit, my mother sent me a simple card. It was a quote from Winston Churchill, plain white text on a black background, “Never, ever, ever give up!” It was one of my treasures. The card spent several years on my cell wall, then disappeared one day, lost —as are many such things when I was moved from place to place in the prison.

In the years to follow, my mother became very ill. Her visits were fewer and further between. I witnessed the digression as she appeared in the prison visiting room one day with a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair — and then I saw her no more. Over the next two years, I could only speak with my mother by telephone. In the last year of her life, my mother and I could not speak at all.

It was a special agony to know that my mother was dying just seventy miles away. As her son and as a priest, I had lost any means to offer support for her except through prayer. I wrote to a priest-friend in Boston, Franciscan Father Raymond Mann, who graciously prepared my mother spiritually for death in my stead. I was most grateful to him, and to my sister and her family who cared for our mother every moment of her last years in this life. On November 5, 2006, my mother died.

Most of you cannot imagine being unable to see or comfort a loved one dying just seventy miles away. There is a barrier between the imprisoned and the free — almost as impenetrable as the barrier between the living and the dead. My duty as her son and as a priest would be carried out in silence in my own heart.

Redemptive Suffering

When I saw the Mel Gibson film, “The Passion of the Christ,” I was struck by the powerful, silent scenes in which Mary viewed her Son’s path to Calvary from a short distance, and yet could not touch him, could not speak to him. I felt as though I was living the reverse of those scenes, that I witnessed from the far side of an abyss the suffering and death of my mother, and could not be present.  It was as though I had died before her — already, but not yet.

I was angry. As her son and as a priest, being present to my mother in death was a sacred duty, but one denied to her and to me through the false witness of accusers and the enticement of money — an enticement that has played a far greater role in the Church’s scandal than our bishops and the plaintiff lawyers will admit. How could I not be angry?

“One of the great temptations I have had to face in prison is the impulse to keep a litany of losses. It is a naturally human response to injustice, but the resentment to ensue would be a spiritually toxic weapon of self-destruction.”

My first post on These Stone Walls was “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.” In it, I described something that occurred just six weeks after the death of my mother. I had been standing at the mirror in my cell shaving on the morning of December 23, 2006. I suddenly realized that the equation of my life had just changed, that on that very day I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else.

The sense of loss and futility was overwhelming until later that same day when I received in the mail an image of Father Maximilian Kolbe in both his Franciscan habit and his prison uniform. I have described in several posts my encounter with St. Maximilian Kolbe just at the point at which the equation changed — the point at which more of my life as a priest was spent in prison than in freedom. 

Father Kolbe’s sacrifice of his life for another made me realize the power that exists in sacrifice and especially in the sacrifice of unjust suffering.  I have come to know without doubt that suffering offered for another is redemptive of both. It’s a difficult concept for someone on the wrong end of injustice to grasp, and I struggled with it at first.  I began to offer my days in prison as a share in the suffering of Christ in the final weeks of my mother’s life.  It was all I had to give her.

Newfoundland

My mother, Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, emigrated to the United States from Newfoundland at age 22 in 1949.  The oldest of six, she was close to her three sisters and two brothers who remained in Newfoundland.  My mother was closest in age and in friendship to her sister, Frances, two years younger.

In 2003, my mother visited her childhood home for the last time. 

Even in sickness and in pending death, my mother never lost her Irish sense of humor. During the visit my mother sent me a postcard with a scene from a high cliff overlooking Saint John’s Harbour. She wrote the following message:

“Dear Gordon,

Newfoundland is simply beautiful. I am writing this while visiting Redcliff, a 200-foot sheer cliff where Newfoundlander mothers of old would take their most troublesome sons and threaten to heave them over the edge.

Wish you were here. Love, Mom”

She also sent me a terrific photograph of herself with her sister, Frances at Logy Bay, just north of St. John’s on the Avalon Peninsula where they grew up.

It was the only photo I had of my mother in her last years.  I put the photo away, and then lost it.  When my mother died, Pornchai helped me search our cell for the photo, but it was gone.  It’s difficult for prisoners to hold onto such things.  Prisoners’ cells are routinely searched — sometimes even ransacked in the process — and we have very little ability to preserve items we treasure such as photographs. The photo of my mother was lost.

In the July/August, 2009 issue of This Rock magazine (which later became Catholic Answers ), Father Dwight Longenecker has an interesting article, “Weird Things Happen.” He wrote of an experience in the Chapel of the Convent of Saint Gildard in Nevers, France as he prayed before the uncorrupted body of St. Bernadette:

“I kept silence there and noticed a beautiful fragrance of flowers. As I prayed, the fragrance grew stronger, and I felt transported by a presence that was beyond my understanding.”

Father Longenecker — who hosts the Standing on My Head blog — wrote of other phenomena that defy logical explanation in our repository of faith experience. He wrote of Padre Pio’s stigmata, apparitions of the Blessed Mother, healings in the presence of sacred relics. In a later issue of This Rock, Father Longenecker took some heat for what was wrongly interpreted as his dismissal of such experiences.

I found his article to be respectful and serious, with but one small flaw. Father Longenecker later questioned what, exactly, happened to him in that chapel before the body of St. Bernadette, and suggested that we need to be both believing and skeptical.

“Whenever a natural explanation for a seemingly supernatural event is available,” he wrote, “it is to be preferred”

But why should natural explanations preclude the miraculous? Naturally occurring events can be powerful catalysts of actual grace, and as such they seem miraculous. We have all had the experience of coincidence that is so unlikely, so personally shaking that it defies explanation. Who hasn’t picked up the telephone to call a loved one only to find that person already there calling you?

It seems a minor miracle when it happens, something inexplicable and astonishing, then the experience slowly diminishes as doubt and natural skepticism reinterpret the event for us. The task of getting on with life causes us to shrug off the experience over time. Sometimes the balance between belief and skepticism in the modern world can lean too heavily toward the latter.

I wrote of such an event in "A Shower of Roses" in October. While accompanying teenage Michelle through the last weeks of her life, I spoke of St. Therese, the Little Flower, who promised a shower of roses. Michelle, a day away from death, pointed at the ceiling where drifted a helium balloon with a vivid rose imprinted upon it. It left me stunned — for awhile, but in time the trials of life diminished the light of that event. How common are the signs and wonders that come to people of faith? Can we always see them when they arrive?

The Undiscovered Country

In Hamlet Shakespeare called death, “The Undiscovered Country.” I know many people who have suffered the death of someone they love. Think, in the midst of that suffering, of the incredible gift that it contains. Loss is not felt at all but for love, and love is a direct result of grace. It is what folds back a corner of the veil — what links the living to the dead. We have something very special to share with those whose physical life is lost to us: the grace of redemptive suffering, the hope of our prayers, the sacrifice of our trials.

Eight months after my mother’s death, I learned that her beloved sister, Frances, died in Newfoundland. She died on July 10,2007, but I did not learn of it for several days. Prisoners cannot be reached by telephone, so it was July 14th when I received my sister’s letter about the death of my aunt. The next day, July 15th, was my mother’s birthday, the first since her death the previous November. Late that night, I prepared to offer Mass in my cell for the souls of my mother and her sister. Pornchai Moontri was with me for the Mass and told me this week that he remembers this story very well.

Just as Mass began, a prisoner came to my cell to borrow a book. I was irritated. Couldn’t he wait? I had to pull a foot locker from under my bunk and rummage for the book. I found the book and handed it to him, and he left.

I turned back to the Mass, and a moment later there he was again at my door. He walked into my cell and plopped something right onto the corporal I had laid down for Mass. Pornchai and I were both stunned.  It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier — the photo we searched for in vain when my mother died. It’s the photo above. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday — at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister — their last photograph together found me

An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace.

When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side — my mother on the right — on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land.

+ + +

Please share this post in honor of Mother’s Day. You may also wish to visit the posts linked herein:

A Shower of Roses

St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror

Spring Cleaning for the Cover of Better Cells and Gardens

Inspection time means cleaning and decluttering life in sixty square feet while two men simultaneously live in it. We are decluttering Beyond These Stone Walls too.

Having used it twice in the above description for this post, it troubles me that “declutter” is not actually a word. It should be. I cannot think of another way to describe the process of making a disastrous-looking space look as though no one actually lives in it. It’s an annual process in prison called spring inspection and it takes place this week.

“Clutter,” all by itself, is an interesting word. It means “a confused or disorganized state,” or “to litter a space in a piled or disorganized manner.” It comes from the Middle English word, “cloteren” meaning “to clot or lump together, as in a pile.” I am writing a shorter than usual post this week because I must spend a few days decluttering, sanitizing, and humanizing the 60-square feet in which I live with another person.

In the sixteen years in which I lived with Pornchai Moontri, who is much missed, he happily left most of the decluttering to me. My current roommate had the idea that decluttering simply means moving most of his clutter around in the room. So I am honoring a past tradition and taking command of the process. It cannot be any other way. Two grown men cannot declutter such a space at the same time and still be speaking at the end of the day.

I am not controlling by nature, but most prisoners are packrats. I am the rare exception. So instead of having to call for a one-to-one vote on every empty plastic container that made its way into this cell for some unknown possible but improbable future use, I have assumed the task of decluttering while discerning treasure from trash.

The Clutter of a Patron Saint

The process is made worse this year due to the long periods in pandemic lockdown. We spent a lot more time trapped in this cell among our clutter. I am no paradigm of neatness either. Whereas my assigned roommate’s treasure of choice is plastic, mine is paper: newspaper, writing paper, photocopies, clippings, articles, just about everything I have come across in my ravenous reading that I thought I might someday write about.

Last year, a reader sent me a printed photo of the personal desk of St. Maximilian Kolbe just before he was taken to Auschwitz. His desk, pictured above, made me feel more accepting of my clutter. The reader wanted to know if my desk looks like this. I don’t actually have a desk so I thought it safe to ask Pornchai-Max about my neatness. “Your bed sometimes looks worse than that desk,” he said.

Pornchai was right. I pile onto my bunk everything I am working on each day. By the end of the day, I must either finish a post or pile everything somewhere else so I can sleep. When I type a post, I place a trash can next to my bunk. Then I place on top of it a large covered clear plastic storage box about the size of a 50-gallon aquarium. It holds the sum total of my life’s work. Then I place my typewriter on top of the box on top of the trash can and sit on the edge of my bunk to type. It makes for a wobbly typing desk, but so far we have avoided any catastrophes.

So before the day of reckoning arrives this week, I have two trash bags ready, one for plastic and one for paper. “I can’t watch!” said my roommate, John, as he shuddered at the coming decluttering. I know he will want to measure the results. The amount of discarded plastic had better not be greater than the amount of discarded paper. I recall the words of Jesus: “The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” (Luke 6:38)

Decluttering Beyond These Stone Walls

September 23, 2020 marked the completion of my 26th year in prison. On that same day, we posted “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.” It was to honor our other Patron Saint whose Feast Day is also the date I was sent to prison. I will never be able to forget all that was happening as I wrote that post. Two weeks earlier, on September 8th, Pornchai Moontri was taken away by ICE agents to commence what neither of us knew would be a grueling five months in ICE detention awaiting deportation during a global pandemic.

Early on that day, I stood on the walkway outside my cell high above the prison yard. After sixteen years as friends and roommates through many trials and crosses, I saw Pornchai down below in what was to be my last glimpse of him in this life. I shouted the traditional Thai greeting and farewell, “Sawasdee kup, Khun Pornchai.” It echoed off the walls as he turned and waved, and then he walked through the gate and was gone.

In that same week, I learned that something strange was happening in the background of These Stone Walls, the blog for which I had written for eleven years. Posts that were very important to me were being altered and images removed without explanation. Not long after my post on Padre Pio appeared, These Stone Walls had to be taken down.

It was some weeks before I was able to speak with Pornchai held in gruesome circumstances in ICE detention in a private, for-profit facility in Louisiana. I told him the awful news that TSW had come to an end. “It can’t end!” he insisted. This venue for reaching out to the world had become of critical importance to both of us. I wrote of all that happened next in “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

Within a day of that phone conversation with Pornchai, all had changed. I learned that a mysterious reader in New York had a premonition that caused her to copy over to her hard drive eleven years of writing and other content on These Stone Walls. The reader, who chooses to remain anonymous, contacted me with a request that I allow her to find another hosting venue to allow this blog to continue. After reviewing several website builders, she settled on one called “Squarespace.” She then meticulously built the framework for Beyond These Stone Walls.

So far, readers seem to like the new format. Most find it easier to read, and the graphics are inspiring. However, in the process, all the posts I wrote before September 2020 retained their content but lost all formatting. If you find a past post in a search on Bing or Google, chances are that it will just appear as one long narrative with no paragraphs.

So, in addition to formatting and preparing each new post for publication, the new volunteer editor has the daunting task of reformatting some 600 past posts one by one. She tells me that she has made this her new hobby, and loves the mission of Divine Mercy this has become. For me, however, the last seven months have been a nail biting series of losses and drastic changes. But each step of the way, just the right person seems to enter orbit to provide just the right assistance with just the right set of skills.

The BTSW Library Is Open

I want to invite readers to use the new Library feature at Beyond These Stone Walls. Instead of just having a long chronological list of past posts as they are being restored, they are sorted into categories such as you might find in a card catalog of a real library. We have thus far developed and labeled 28 categories. The first two are “Father Gordon MacRae Case” and “Pornchai Moontri.”

I am most grateful for the inclusion of that second category. It features posts both by and about my friend, but it also serves as a way for Pornchai to remain involved in this blog, a welcome measure that helps to keep us connected. He now heads up the Bangkok bureau of Beyond These Stone Walls.

We will be able to add new categories as needed. We have a current set into which most of the content at BTSW will be listed with links that you can click on to review a past post. To date, fourteen of the categories now have restored content. We will be adding much more as past posts are restored. Among the categories ready for perusal are Sacred Scripture, Mysteries of History, and Vatican News. We have identified and labeled fourteen additional categories that await restored posts and links. Our Library is now open, but is still a work in progress with much more content to come.

Most blogs and websites have some sort of “About” page describing what can be found there and the nature of the site. Beyond These Stone Walls has a much-expanded “About Page” with a summary of the site, links to important related articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal and a must-see ten minute video interview with her. There are additional articles by journalist Ryan A. MacDonald and some powerful and very useful content by David F. Pierre Jr. of The Media Report. There are also audio interviews on my story with Catholic League President Bill Donohue and Teresa Tomeo, and a two-hour video documentary interview with me that most readers describe as “compelling.”

That interview got our friend, Pornchai, through a very painful first night in quarantine in Bangkok. Alone and quite overwhelmed, a Samsung smart phone was left for him by our contacts there. He had never before used one, or even seen one, but he managed to somehow find his way to that interview. It eventually calmed his frayed nerves enough to put him to sleep. I can only hope it does not have the same effect on you!

Many of our older posts are being restored with inspiring new graphics. In the chaos of our partisan politics and a pandemic, Beyond These Stone Walls is a comforting place to hang out for awhile. I hope you will, and I hope you will invite others to have a look as well. I will only have a voice for as long as someone out there is listening.

May the Lord Bless you and keep you.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I have just learned that everyone living in the prison unit where I have lived for the last nearly four years will be relocated to a large dormitory on May 2 in order to accommodate a construction project in this building. We are told that we will be returning to our current housing when the project is completed about two weeks later. During this time, I will be unable to write. We are selecting two older posts for readers to revisit, and hopefully also a guest post from a prominent writer. May the Lord Bless you and keep you, Father G.

I also invite you to read and share the related posts metioned herein:

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

The Milky Way Galaxy seen over the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array west of Socorro, New Mexico. Photo by NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse

The Angel Michael Binding Satan (“He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and Shut him up”), 1805 drawing by William Blake.

The community of believers that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran awaited an apocalyptic battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.

My annual Holy Week post this year was somewhat unusual. It profiled an announcement from the government of Israel about a new archeological discovery in the general region of Qumran in modern day Jordan. The discovery includes 2,000 year-old remains of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem about 100 years after the Crucifixion of Jesus. My post was, “The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage.”

It told the story of Bar Kochba and a revolt by residents of Jerusalem against the secular suppression of their religious beliefs by Roman Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century AD. The story has many parallels with current events and especially with the growing “cancel culture” disdain for Catholics, our faith, and our public witness of that faith.

Several readers have since asked me to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls, their place in Salvation History, and their connection to Sacred Scripture. Understanding the mindset of those who created and left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls can inspire and empower our own struggle against forces in our own time seeking to eradicate and silence our religious convictions.

First, a little geography. It’s ironic that I am typing this post on my 68th birthday. In the 16 years Pornchai Moontri was here with me, he organized an annual birthday acknowledgment among prisoners I knew. Part of its ritual was the unveiling of a birthday card by a local inmate-artist. The cards were always insulting, but hilarious. One of them declared, “When Father G was born, the Dead Sea was only sick!” One of the other cards was about Latin being my first language. Hmmph!

Anyway, regarding the Dead Sea, Pornchai was not so far off the mark, but its geography is very interesting. It is the lowest inland body of water on Earth. Its surface is 1,290 feet below sea level, and it reaches a depth of 1,300 feet. It is fed by the Jordan River and several smaller streams. The Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18) have long been thought to lie under the waters of the Dead Sea’s southern end.

The term, “Dead Sea” is mentioned nowhere in Scripture. It was known as the Salt Sea in Genesis (14:3) and Deuteronomy (3:37). The Prophet Ezekiel called it the Eastern Sea. The Roman historian Josephus called it the Asphalt Sea. Owing to evaporation, its salt concentration is the highest of any body of water on Earth. Neither animal nor plant life can live in it or around it. But in Biblical times in the valley created by the Dead Sea, there were several settlements such as Qumran and Masada.

In 1947, quite by accident, scrolls were discovered in ancient jars in a cave near the Dead Sea by two nomadic Bedouin shepherds who sold them to antiquities dealers. The writings made their way to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To the amazement of the Judeo-Christian world, the scrolls contained intact Hebrew and Aramaic books of the Bible composed between 250 BC and 70 AD, the latter being the date of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple mentioned in my post linked above.

In 1956, multiple excavations in multiple caves at the site yielded some 800 manuscripts containing complete scrolls and thousands of fragments of virtually every book of the Hebrew Bible. Some ancient apocryphal and Deuterocanonical texts were also discovered and I will write more about these below. A decades-long scholarly translation of the discoveries was set in motion. One of the translators was my late uncle, Jesuit Father George W. MacRae, a renowned Biblical scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages and texts at Harvard University and the Institute Biblique in Jerusalem.

The Essenes: The Community behind the Scrolls

After decades of excavation and historical analysis, scholars have settled on the identity and origin of the group that created and preserved the scrolls. They arose in the years after the Maccabean Revolt in 167 BC. Hellenism — Greek civilization — spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Jerusalem, the center of Jewish thought, culture and religion, experienced a wave similar to the progressive “cancel culture” movement of today. The elite among the aristocracy of Jerusalem fostered a strong movement toward Hellenism, and the replacement of Judaism with Greek traditions.

The majority of the Jews in Jerusalem were conservative and resisted this movement. Most, however, did not have the voice and the influence of the left-leaning liberal elite. Signs of rebellion and civil unrest gave the newly installed king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, the excuse he needed to suppress conservative thought and practices among the Jews. He did this by demoralizing them. In 168 BC, his army plundered the Temple and its treasury. They suppressed Jewish worship and the sacred Books of the Law, the Torah.

The final straw came with the “Abomination of Desolation” as described in the Book of Daniel (9:27). Antiochus took the Temple, removed the Torah, and replaced it with an altar to the mythological Greek god, Zeus. This triggered a revolution by Judas Maccabeas and his family which became the central story of the First Book of Maccabees. In 165 BC, the Maccabees led by Judas forcefully retook the Temple, deposed the statue of Zeus, and restored the sanctuary. They held it for eight days while awaiting reinforcements. This is the origin of the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah.

The two predominant religious sects in Jerusalem at that time, the Pharisees and Sadducees, were both tolerant at best, and at worst accommodating, to the Hellenist conquerors just as they would be to Caesar nearly two centuries later. I wrote of their plot in “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’ .”

To those who have been paying attention to recent trends in our own time and culture, this should all have a ring of the familiar. Just as with the revolt of the Maccabees, resistance is not at all futile. So resist — with fidelity as your sword and Divine Mercy as your shield — the Abomination of Desolation that is being handed to us by the “woke” elite around us. Many have the spiritual depth of mud puddles.

Sorry for the editorial. By 150 BC, the accommodations of the Pharisees and Sadducees toward the wave of Hellenistic culture resulted in the emergence of a third religious identity in Israel, that of the mysterious Essenes. Jews returning from exile in Babylon heard of the successful revolt of the Maccabees and were inspired by it. Their communal reaction was to focus on fidelity to the Covenant. They came to be known by history as Essenes — Hebrew for “Pious Ones.”

The Essenes are not mentioned by name in Sacred Scripture. This was possibly due to the quiet and secret nature of their rebellion. The historian, Pliny the Elder, mentions them as having emerged as a community on the Western shore of the Dead Sea at a place that, by his description, could be none other than Khirbet Qumran. Philo and Josephus, two other historians of the period, describe the Essenes in more detail and their descriptions correspond seamlessly to what is now known of the record they left behind: the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Hosts a Living Faith

The Essenes lived as a structured community believing that over Israel’s entire history, God had prepared for this Community of the New Covenant. The Prophet Habakkuk wrote in this same period that for all those who observe the Law among the Jews, God will deliver from judgment because of their suffering and because of their faith in a Holy One. Habukkuk identifies their time as the final time, but now prolonged according to the mysterious plan of God. This was also a time when expectations of a Messiah and life beyond death became prominent themes in Israel.

In the decades after the Maccabean revolt that restored the Jerusalem Temple after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, the concept of an apocalypse spread widely throughout Judaism. The prophetic witness of the Book of Daniel, composed at about the same time the Essenes formed, was highly influential. This influence continued well into the early Christian era.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought to light the existence of the Essene sect whose way of life was heavily influenced by apocalyptic ideas as a reaction to what they saw as the secular infringement upon their Jewish, and later Jewish-Christian, faith. These ideas included an emphasis on exploration of the heavenly mysteries and a sense of participation in the angelic realm. Their commitment to fidelity and a community of faith was to prepare them for an epic final battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness — a battle that raged in both the spiritual realm and the Earthly one.

The Essenes had an influence that reflected far beyond their separatist community hidden for twenty centuries in Qumran on the Western shore of the Dead Sea. Their emphasis on apocalyptic ideas came to be widely accepted. This included a belief in resurrection from the dead and eternal life, a belief that was embraced by the Pharisees and gradually entered the mainstream of Jewish faith by the time of Jesus. The argument could be made that this development was in preparation for the time of Jesus.

It is now widely believed among scholars that the Essenes had a connection with John the Baptist. In the Dead Sea Scrolls about their own community, they described themselves in words identical to those ascribed to John the Baptist in each of the Gospels (see Luke 4:18-19). Both were citing Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

It also appears that the Essenes had an influence on the Gospel of John, the last of the four to come into written form around 90 AD. It was once believed that this Gospel was heavily influenced by Hellenistic philosophical ideas. The Dead Sea Scrolls made clear that John’s Gospel is solidly rooted in Jewish thought and traditions faithful to the Covenant, the Law and the Prophets.

The apocalyptic traditions of the Essenes were also influenced by the Book of Enoch, a Second Century BC work considered by Jewish scholars as a Deuterocanonical text. “Deuterocanonical” is a Scriptural term derived from Greek meaning “Secondary Canon.” Enoch and some other books considered to be deuterocanonical were accepted in the Jewish Canon of Scripture well into the time of Jesus until about 90 AD. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple — a cataclysmic event for Judaism and one predicted by Jesus — the apocalyptic ideas of Enoch diminished.

Michael Contends With the Devil

Other books considered to be outside the Canon of Hebrew Scripture but later accepted in the Catholic Canon were Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, First and Second Maccabees, and the Book of Tobit which was analyzed here recently in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”

The Book of Enoch is especially interesting because it had a wide influence on the Essenes — and therefore is also prominent among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Enoch also had an influence on some early Christian writings of Jude, Barnabas, and Irenaeus. Among the Christian Patriarchs, Tertullian regarded it as Scripture while Augustine and Jerome saw it as apocryphal, but influential. In the New Testament Letter of Jude (Jude 9) the Apostle refers to a story that appeared nowhere else but the apocryphal book, The Assumption of Moses, and in references in the Book of Enoch. He wrote as though this account was highly familiar to both Jews and Jewish Christians:

“When the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him [which would have been the purview only of God] but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”

— Jude 9

The Letter of Jude included a reference to this story from an apocryphal book without explanation. This implies that the story was well known among the Jews of this period. In the story, Moses died in the desert without ever entering the Promised Land. Satan tried to take the body of Moses but the Archangel Michael fought him and won. Michael then escorted the physical body of Moses to Heaven. In the Hebrew Scriptures, only one other human being was taken into Heaven for eternity. It was Elijah. It is for this very reason that Moses and Elijah could appear with Jesus in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (see Luke 9:28ff) where they represent the Law and the Prophets, the two pillars of Jewish tradition.

It is possible that the Essenes latched upon the Book of Enoch to preserve it. Though composed in their time (the Second Century BC) it is named for the Enoch of Genesis, father of Methuselah. Here is the Genesis account of Enoch: At the age of 65,

“Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years ... thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.”

— Genesis 5:22-24

Enoch appears, by adoption through the line of Joseph, in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 3:37).

It was not lost on the writers of the Book of Enoch — or on the Essenes — that the number of his years was also the number of days in a single year. The Book of Enoch explores the Genesis reference to Enoch being taken bodily into heaven for 300 years, and is filled with visions of the cosmos, of angelic tours of the heavenly realm, of the abode of the dead awaiting redemption, and of a pre-existent Son of Man. It is likely that the Essenes sought to preserve it because it was Israel’s first example of a developed apocalyptic faith and the expectation of resurrection.

All of this apocalyptic tradition — and its call to arm for battle in spiritual warfare between light and a growing darkness — entered both Judaism and Christianity as a result of elitist secular values and their infringement upon our lives of faith. The Essenes were short lived. They died out along with the Jerusalem Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. That their legacy emerged into our world by “accident” 2,000 years later is a gift to our time.

And perhaps there is more of this gift to come. The apocalyptic message of Daniel, also influential to the Essenes, hints at books that are shut up until the end of time:

“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation ... but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt ... But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end.”

— Daniel 12:1-4

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Writing from prison is difficult, and has become even more so in this time of pandemic. I rely on the postal service to mail my weekly post for scanning, and I am unable to make a photocopy so I mail the only copy I have. If there is a delay (there have been two late arrivals in the last four weeks) I have no way to inform readers.

It would help much if you would subscribe. This way, you receive a notice of a new post in your inbox even if we are a bit late in posting. We will invade your email only once per week. If you have not already done so, please click “SUBSCRIBE.”

Please also share this post, and these related posts that appear herein:

The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

and one I didn’t mention, but should have:

Apocalypse Now: Jesus and the Signs of the Times

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

In the company of Saint Raphael the Archangel and a persistent dog, Pornchai Moontri relives the Book of Tobit on a journey in Thailand to heal from a painful past.

“The young man went out and the angel went with him, and a dog came along and journeyed with them.”

— Tobit 6:1-2

Up to now, I have written about only two of the Archangels of Sacred Scripture. So as not to distract you from this one, I will link to them at the end. In a most strange way, the Archangel Raphael has just placed himself into the cast of characters at work on our behalf beyond these stone walls. It is a profound account with lots of twists and turns, but I will try to straighten the curves a bit.

This is a Part Two of sorts to an earlier post about my friend, Pornchai Moontri and his return to Thailand after an absence of 36 years. Pornchai is now 47, and is struggling to adjust to the land of the free in a country he had not seen since age eleven. Part One of this post was “For Pornchai Moontri, a Miracle Unfolds in Thailand.”

Before I continue that account, I have to comment on the photo atop this post. After the reunion with his family described in the post linked above, Pornchai left with Father John Le for the nine-hour drive back to the Bangkok area and the Society of the Divine Word home where he had been living. While there, Pornchai learned of an annual Thai custom called, in English, the “Water Festival.” It occurs in mid-April to mark the Thai New Year. It is tradition that Thai citizens honor the dead — a tribute akin to All Souls Day — by cleaning and restoring their tombs. So Pornchai decided to return there for a month to clean and honor the tombs of his Mother and Grandmother. The Water Festival is from April 12 to 16.

In the weeks before the Festival began, Pornchai has been spending his time doing yard work around the home of his Aunt, and the unfinished home of his Mother. You may recall that after her own return to Thailand, she left that home in 2000 not knowing that she was going to her own untimely death, a victim of homicide on the Island of Guam. She was the same age Pornchai is now. Being there, and coming to terms with all that transpired before, is an essential part of a most painful journey.

While in the village of Phu Wien (pronounced poo-vee-EN) Pornchai has been rebuilding his relationship with his Mother's sisters and his cousins. They were a close-knit family when Pornchai was taken from them against his will at age eleven. I cannot begin to fathom the depth of the pain behind these reunions. I have been talking with Pornchai daily during this time. I usually call him at 11 AM which is 10 PM for him. This is the hottest time of the year in Thailand, and one night when I called he was out walking on the street with his Aunt. They were surrounded by a pack of loudly barking dogs.

The connections between humans and dogs is a little different in the rural north of Thailand than in the Western World. The dogs are pets only in a loose sense of the term. They bond with someone who feeds them so they are not left to their own devices, but they otherwise roam free to rule the street. When I called Pornchai a few nights later, he told me that one of the dogs, the “Alpha” dog who seemed to be the leader of the pack, started following Pornchai every place he went. If Pornchai entered a building, the dog would sit outside and patiently wait for him. He also kept all the other dogs away from Pornchai.

The dog’s name seems to be “Hill.” No one knows where that came from. Perhaps it means something in Thai, the sole language that the dog understands. Hill attaches himself to no one, but over the last few weeks, he and Pornchai have become the best of friends. I asked for a photograph of them together, and the one atop this post appeared on my GTL tablet the next day. It broke my heart. Hill, like Pornchai, has had a very tough life. Hill exhibits all the wounds and scars of life on the outside that Pornchai bears on the inside. He has had to be a ferocious dog to survive, but in Pornchai’s presence he is as docile and gentle as a lamb.

Enter the Archangel Raphael

I’m not at all sure what prompted me to do this, but after meeting Hill from afar, I began to research the role of dogs in Sacred Scripture. There are 46 references to dogs, and all but two of them are negative. “Many dogs surround me; a pack of evil doers closes in upon me” (Psalm 22:16). But it was the two references that were positive that caught my attention. Both are in the Book of Tobit (6:1-2 and 11:4) and they refer to a single, mysterious dog who appears at the beginning and the end of Raphael’s healing mission. The dog has no part in the story other than to be there.

The name, Raphael, comes from the Hebrew for “God heals.” Raphael is a prominent figure in the ancient traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. He is identified in Judaism as an “Angel of the Presence,” one of four (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel) who surround God’s Throne and live in his eternal Presence. In the Hebrew Talmud, he was one of the three angels who visited Abraham (Genesis 18) setting in motion the birth of Salvation History. He appears in the Shema prayer before retiring: “In the name of the God of Israel, may Michael be on my right hand, Gabriel on my left hand, Uriel before me, Raphael behind me, and above my head, the Divine Presence.”

In Catholic tradition, Raphael is venerated as an angel of healing. Ancient Christian lore presents him as the head of the Guardian angels, the angel of knowledge, and an angel of science. In the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, Raphael binds the fallen angel, Azazel, and casts him into the desert darkness. In the canon of Sacred Scripture, Raphael appears in only one place, the Book of Tobit and the Bible’s most memorable healing journey. Written about two centuries before Jesus walked the Earth, The Book of Tobit reflects the commission of Raphael in the more ancient Book of Enoch:

“Tobias remembered the words of Raphael ... and made a smoke. When the demon smelled the odor, he fled to the remotest parts of Egypt where the angel bound him.”

— Tobit 8:2-3

I wrote some years ago about my bout with Azazel, this demon of the desert, but it was long before I realized that Raphael is the angel who bound him. For a glimpse of who and what Azazel is, and his role in our misery, see “To Azazel: The Fate of a Church That Wanders in the Desert.” (It is also linked at the end of this post.)

The Book of Tobit Is Pornchai’s Story

The Book of Tobit was originally written in Aramaic, the language of the Jews before the development of Hebrew and their settlement in the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. A version of the story was preserved in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures. Fragments of it were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran.

The story of Tobit is brief but complex. Though written in Aramaic, most scholars date its origin in the Second Century before Christ. Among Jewish scholars, it was seen not as a historical book, but as Wisdom Literature. Its characters may be historical persons, but its point is to convey a Scriptural truth. The story begins with Tobit, a devout and charitable Israelite who is deported into exile in Nineveh. Even there, he is an exemplary man who cares for his son, Tobias, his wife, and other captives in exile.

Then one day, due to an accident, Tobit loses his sight. About to lose everything else, he commissions his son, Tobias, to journey to far away Media to recover funds left in the care of a distant relative there. Tobit’s wife thinks Tobias is being sent to his doom so Tobit issues a desperate plea to God to protect his son and recover his fortune. Meanwhile, in Media, Sarah, the daughter of the distant relative, is plagued by the presence of a demon named Asmodeus who has murdered everyone she loves. Sarah also prays a desperate plea to God for deliverance.

God hears both their prayers, and assigns the Archangel Raphael to be the instrument of His Divine Assistance. Raphael involves himself in the Great Tapestry of God to see to it that these desperate lives converge safely upon Media and their paths cross. In the form of a stranger named Azarias, Raphael shows up in Nineveh to accompany Tobias safely to Media, a journey that will bring about the healing of both Tobit and Sarah and the rebuilding of their lives.

Strangely, as the opening lines of this post suggest, on the day Tobias and the Archangel depart on their healing journey, a dog shows up and walks with them (Tobit 6:1-2). The dog has no part in the story other than to accompany them. In the footnotes of the Scripture scholars who analyze this story in the Revised Standard Version, the dog is referred to simply as “surprising.”

In the end, the balm made by Tobias under Raphael’s instruction for the ultimate healing of Tobit’s blindness also exposes the demon haunting Sarah. The demon Asmodeus flees into Egypt where the Archangel Raphael binds him and imprisons him in the desert. Then Raphael acquires the sum of money needed by Tobit, and they all commence the long journey back to Nineveh to heal Tobit’s blindness. And for the second time, the Book of Tobit mysteriously reports, “So they went their way, and the dog went along behind them” (Tobit 11:4).

In the end, Raphael revealed himself to Tobit, Tobias and Sarah. He told Tobit that God has seen all the good he has done even in exile:

“I am Raphael, one of the Seven Holy Angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence in the Glory of the Holy One ... Do not be afraid, for I did not come on my own part, but by the will of our God.”

— Tobit 12:15ff

To Be Reborn In the Land of Your Birth

I am writing this post on Divine Mercy Sunday, the day and date that Pornchai became a Catholic in prison in 2010. In a call to him this morning, he told me that he attended Mass at Saint Joseph Church, a small Catholic parish thriving in the Buddhist enclave of Nong Bua Lamphu Province in Northern Thailand where many have gathered for the Buddhist Water Festival to honor the tombs of their loved ones.

Among them is the tomb of Wannee, Pornchai’s Mother who was also murdered by the demon, Asmodeus. You may note from the photo with Hill atop this post that Pornchai has a large tattoo on his left shoulder. It is from a portrait of his Mother, etched masterfully on his arm by an artistic prisoner just days after Pornchai learned of her death. It was at the time his only means to memorialize and to mourn her.

Pornchai feels lost right now. After 29 years in his own exile, and five months in horrible ICE detention, he has been free for, literally, only six weeks at this writing. How could he feel anything else but lost? One of our good friends, a young man whom Pornchai has helped much, said as I write this that “Pornchai’s mission right now is not to do, but simply to be.” That is a very wise young man.

Please join me in a petition to Our Father to send Raphael to accompany Pornchai on this long and arduous journey of healing from the wounds of the past. And perhaps even a prayer for Hill, a battered dog who now also walks with him. It was Hill, after all, who first set me upon this journey to write this post.

---

Saint Raphael, glorious archangel and God’s healing messenger, I call upon you to heal us in all the infirmities of body and soul and help us flee from any presence that does such harm to us and others. Deliver us on this journey of healing and continued conversion. Amen.

---

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: If you would like to assist with Pornchai’s material needs during this arduous journey, please visit our “Special Events” page for news of how to help me help my friend.

And please also visit the posts referenced in this one:

Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

St. Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from on High Came Upon Us

To Azazel: The Fate of a Church That Wanders in the Desert

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand