“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful
Pope Francis is suppressing the Traditional Latin Mass at the same time the Chinese Communist Party is suppressing Tibetan Buddhism, and for the same stated reason.
Pope Francis is suppressing the Traditional Latin Mass at the same time the Chinese Communist Party is suppressing Tibetan Buddhism, and for the same stated reason.
August 4, 2021
A lot of ink is now being spilled in Catholic circles about a new Motu Proprio — an Apostolic Letter — of Pope Francis announced on Friday, July 16, 2021, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Pope Francis has placed severe restrictions on celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass.
Effective immediately, his restrictions include a mandate barring newly organized celebrations of the TLM and its celebration in any parish church. Further, newly ordained priests will need the written consent of their bishops who in turn must consult the Holy See before approval is granted to celebrate the Traditional (Extraordinary) Form of the Mass.
Pope Francis has imposed these restrictions without explanation in open contradiction of a 2014 Motu Proprio of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who permitted celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass without preconditions and without consent from a bishop. Some of the best early reaction to this new and draconian development has come from Father John Zuhlsdorf (Father Z’s Blog, “Reactions to Traditionis Custodes.”)
“Fathers ... change nothing, do nothing differently for now. It is not rational to leap around without mapping the mine field we are entering. Keep calm and carry on.
“Lay people ... be temperate. Set your faces like flint. When you are on fire, it avails you nothing to run around flapping your arms. Drop and roll and be calm.
“To those of you who have put your heart and goods and hopes into supporting and building the Traditional Latin Mass, thank you. Do not for a moment despair or wonder if what you did was worth the effort, time, cost and suffering. It was worth it. It still is.”
Father Z adds pointedly, “I am forced to remark that the vulgarity of this document is matched only by its cruelty.”
For my part, I cannot help but wonder what Pope Francis might have been thinking at Mass just two days later as he listened to the First Reading on the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Was he at all conscious that Catholics all over the world were hearing the same rebuke from the Prophet Jeremiah that he heard that Sunday?
“Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the Lord. Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, against the shepherds who shepherd my people: You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but ... I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands and bring them back to their meadow ... I will appoint shepherds for them who will shepherd them so that they need no longer fear and tremble, and none shall be missing, says the Lord.”
A Catholic Unraveling in Germany
I have been searching for a more panoramic map of the mine field Father Z says we are now entering, and I think I may have found some of its initial rumblings. While reading Volume Two of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell, I came upon his entry for 9 August 2019, the feast of Edith Stein, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I wrote about her once in "Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz."
Edith Stein was German by birth. In his book, Cardinal Pell advises readers to seek her intercession for the Church in Germany. Cardinal Pell quoted Cardinal Gerhard Muller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:
“The Catholic Church [in Germany] is going down. Leaders there are not aware of the real problems. [They are] self-centered and concerned primarily with sexual morality, celibacy, and women priests. They don’t speak about God, Jesus Christ, grace, the sacraments, and faith, hope, and love.”
It gets worse. Later in Prison Journal, in an entry dated 16 October 2019, Cardinal Pell wrote candidly about the German Catholic Church fears of the possibility of schism that have been raised there. If allowed to happen, such a break would sweep much of Europe. Cardinal Pell referred to a Catholic Culture article by Philip Lawler entitled, “Who Benefits from All This Talk of Schism?” (September 17, 2019):
“Lawler argues that the prospect of a schism is remote, but Pope Francis has spoken calmly about such a prospect, saying he is not frightened by it, something Lawler believes is frightening in itself.”
Cardinal Pell spoke of earlier confidence about the unlikelihood of a schism, but acknowledged that “the odds against it have shortened.” He added, while again citing Philip Lawler:
“Not surprisingly, the New York Times has been writing about the prospect of a schism by the John Paul and Benedict followers in the United States, the Gospel Catholics ... I believe Lawler’s diagnosis is correct when he points out that the topic of schism has been raised by the ‘busiest and most aggressive online defenders’ of Pope Francis who ‘recognize that they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving [progressives] free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.’”
It was that final sentence that caught my attention after hearing these new restrictions imposed by Pope Francis on the Traditional Latin Mass. Are we now witnessing the opening salvo of such a manipulated agenda? Is there a move under way to antagonize conservative and traditional Catholics into breaking away?
The Pope and the Chinese Communist Party
I am certain this was not by design, but on the day after this announcement by Pope Francis, the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal carried a stunning pair of articles. If you are unable to view them without a subscription, I will summarize their major points here.
The first was entitled, “Beijing Targets Tibet for Assimilation” by Liza Lin, Eva Xaio, and Jonathan Cheng. The assimilation referred to is better described as suppression, and it needs a little historical background.
Twelve centuries had passed between the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism in AD 747 and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gaining control of China in 1949. By 1950, the CCP came into increasing conflict with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is believed to be a reincarnation of the Buddha. When he dies, his soul is thought to enter the body of a newborn boy, who, after being identified by traditional tests, becomes the new Dalai Lama.
As such, the Dalai Lama is spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and the ex officio ruler of Tibet since the Eighth Century. In 1959, during the Chinese Communist oppression of Tibet, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India where he has remained since. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for leading a nonviolent opposition to continued Chinese claims to rule Tibet.
Xi Jinping, President of China and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has as his national priority the forging of a single Chinese identity centered on unity and Party loyalty. His agenda has placed new restrictions on Tibetan Buddhism and has launched an effort to replace the traditional Tibetan language with Mandarin Chinese while insisting on courses designed for indoctrination in socialism and the CCP.
The Dalai Lama, in exile in India, is now 86 years old. His eventual death is expected to trigger a clash with the Chinese government over control of Tibetan Buddhism. One of the major points of Chinese suppression is a CCP claim that it has the right to identify and choose the Dalai Lama’s “reincarnation,” and thus obtain full control over the heart of Tibetan religion and identity. In late 2020, President Xi Jinping demanded an effort to make Tibetan Buddhism “compatible with a socialist identity.”
This affront to Tibet’s religious freedom actually has a strange sort of precedent. In 2019, Pope Francis signed a concordat — the tenets of which are still secret — in which he agreed to a Chinese Communist Party demand to choose Catholic bishops in the State-approved Chinese Catholic church. This has since translated into increased harassment and suppression of the underground Catholic Church for which many have suffered for their loyalty to Rome.
Pope Francis and the Threat of Schism
A second major article, this one by Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca, appeared on the same day in The Wall Street Journal, again just two days after the announced suppression of the Latin Mass. Its title asks an ominous question: “Is Pope Francis Leading the Church to Schism?” The Pope has used some of the same reasoning and language in restricting the TLM that Xi Jinping uses while suppressing Tibetan Buddhism. Pope Francis cites “unity” as his principal reason and goal, but its effect seems the opposite.
Two years after Cardinal Pell wrote from his prison cell with dismal foreboding about the state of the Church in Germany, Francis X. Rocca quoted Cardinal Rainer Woelki, Archbishop of Cologne and leader of the conservative minority of German bishops. He warned that the current wave of dissent sweeping Germany could lead to schism and/or the formation of a German national church. Rocca reports that similar warnings have been echoed by cardinals and bishops of other European countries.
Recently, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone asked for prayers for the universal Church and the bishops of Germany “that they step back from this radical rupture.” Schism is more a threat to the Catholic Church than any other because, as Rocca points out, its “core identity [of being Catholic] is inextricably tied to its global unity under the pope.”
In my recent post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul,” I wrote briefly about the 2014 Synod on the Family and the controversial document penned by Pope Francis, “Amoris Laetitia.” During the Synod, the Catholic Bishops of Africa emerged as a bloc opposed to the liberalizing views on sexuality and divorce proposed by the Germans. In an Easter sermon this year, African Cardinal Philippe Ouedraogo urged African Christians to “rebel against the imperialism of certain lobbies and associations [in the Church] which advocate and want to impose same-sex marriage, socio-sexual debauchery, and divorce.”
Francis X. Rocca writes that Pope Francis has played down these concerns of the African bishops who, in my view, are the future of the Church’s moral integrity. For a glimpse of the mindset at work in the German church, consider this statement by Joachim Frank, a German journalist who is taking part in the synod there. He described the work of the synod:
“There was this sense of movement, of change, another spirit, another type of church after these boring and very painful years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”
In his 26-year papacy, Saint John Paul II is widely considered to have almost single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union and ended European communism. To dismiss his papacy and that of Benedict XVI as “boring and painful” is to break, not with Catholic tradition, but with reality.
The trending Catholic mindset of Germany and most of Europe should not steer the Barge of Peter and the moral authority and praxis of the Church. In Germany, before the 2019-2021 pandemic, only about nine-percent of Catholics attended Mass on a regular basis. Among African Catholics, regular Mass participation is the world’s highest. By 2050, there will be twice as many Catholics in Africa than in Europe.
Throughout Asia, Catholicism is relatively small, but growing, and even though small it has a large footprint. In Thailand, Catholics account for only about one-percent of the population, but they leave a large footprint on the culture because of their orthodox commitment to living their faith, often heroically.
Our friend, Pornchai Moontri, told me that in the five months he has lived in Thailand, he has heard Masses in Thai, Vietnamese, and even Lao, but beyond the visible familiarity of the Mass, he has understood little of what he hears. “If the Church had kept Latin,” he recently said, “this would not happen.” He pointed out rather wisely that in the mobile culture this world has become, a universal language promotes unity instead of detracting from it.
There is one hope still for proponents of the Traditional Latin Mass. It is found in Canon 87 of the Code of Canon Law:
“A diocesan bishop, whenever he judges that it contributes to their spiritual good, is able to dispense the faithful from universal and particular disciplinary laws issued for his territory on his subjects by the Supreme Authority of the Church.”
In other words, approval for continued celebrations of Mass in the Extraordinary Form now falls to individual bishops. However, I remain concerned about one major point raised by Cardinal George Pell citing Catholic Culture’ s Phil Lawler. I mentioned it above, but it must be emphasized:
“I believe Lawler’s diagnosis is correct when he points out that the topic of schism has been raised by the ‘busiest and most aggressive online defenders’ of Pope Francis who ‘’ecognize that they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving [progressives] free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.’”
Conservative and traditional Catholics must not concede to this by schism. You are the Church, and Her most faithful manifestation. It is a quandary why Pope Francis now points to you as “divisive” while remaining silent about the rampant heresies arising out of the progressive German church. I can only conclude with the last two lines of a famous poem by Dylan Thomas written in the year I was born:
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
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Please share this post. You may also like this recommended reading by Father Gordon MacRae:
The Once and Future Catholic Church
Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy
Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul
Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz
Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests
Our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests has become a scandal of its own. As we tackle it Beyond These Stone Walls, Fr. Stuart MacDonald joins our team.
Our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests has become a scandal of its own. As we tackle it Beyond These Stone Walls, Fr. Stuart MacDonald joins our team.
Wednesday July 28, 2021
Back in 2019, I wrote a post entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” I had no idea at the time that a reader in Texas sent a copy of it to Cardinal Pell who was then serving a deeply unjust sentence in an Australia prison. I also did not know at the time that he was writing a prison journal that, after his exoneration and release, would be published to become a highly celebrated masterpiece of priestly witness in a time of trial. I have been reading the Second Volume of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell published by Ignatius Press, and I was moved to see that I appear prominently therein.
Over the course of four pages in the book (57-61) Cardinal Pell, from his prison cell, recounts a summary of my own travesty of justice and then thanks me, at the end, for my support of him:
“I am grateful to Fr. MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr. Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr. Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes. I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr. MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu: ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. (1742)”
I was deeply moved because there are not many in our Church, and certainly precious few with the prominence of Cardinal Pell, who would openly cite something I wrote and commend me for it. I will return to the importance of this.
Writing my own prison journal for Beyond These Stone Walls has always been somewhat of a letdown in the summer months. I do not write for accolades or approval, but I admit that it is nice to at least be noticed. In eleven years of writing this prison journal, the months of June through August have always seen our smallest readership. Who could blame you? I, too, would rather be in the water.
Something unexpected happened this year, however. My posts for June and July 2021 generated an explosion of readers and new subscribers setting an eleven-year record. My recent post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul” topped the list of recent titles that went off the charts. That post is about a matter of Sacramental integrity, but it also speaks to the very heart of what it means to be Catholic in the public square. The “Catholicism” moderator at Reddit rejected it twice as a “political post,” but I do not think the Reddit moderator actually Reddit (pun intended!). Some in other venues who dismissed it as political or partisan changed their minds after reading it to the end. Most Catholic readers thanked me for writing it. A smaller minority of Catholics were furious with me for writing it, but they refuted none of it.
I did not at all expect the vast response that post evoked. It was most evident in the comments it generated, but it was also evident in the traffic. Readers by the thousands came to it from Washington DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and unlike most other BTSW posts, 90-percent of its readers were in the U.S. It had the highest one-day record for both visitors and new subscribers.
But I have no awareness that the people who most should read it did read it: the Catholic Bishops of the United States. So at the request of several readers, our friend and new Canon Law advisor, Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, created a printable 5-page PDF version that you could print and mail to anyone you wish, including your bishop. We have also compiled a PDF contact list of the United States Catholic Bishops organized by state. Here are the links:
PDF of Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul
Cardinal Pell being released from prison in 2020, and Father Gordon MacRae being taken to prison in 1994.
Our Catholic Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests
As recent posts here have demonstrated, this is not an easy time to be a priest in a divided and politically partisan America. It is an exponentially more difficult time to be a bishop. Please keep that in mind when writing to them. Our shared goal must be communion and solidarity, not confrontation. That should not in any way inhibit the faithful from being faithful in the clarity of our message. We should write as though the very integrity of the Catholic Church in America is at stake — because it is.
Few of us ever awaken in the morning with a decision to become an activist that day. Activism is technically defined as “a theory or doctrine of assertive action, such as a strike or public demonstration, used as a means of supporting or opposing a controversial issue, person, or event.” Having known Father Stuart MacDonald for some time, I would never have considered him to be an activist, nor would I have ever applied that term to myself.
In recent years, as a number of my posts suggest, the need for Catholic action in support of priests and the priesthood has become evident. The newly formed “Coalition for Canceled Priests” is a good first step in that direction. I cannot speak for this coalition, but one facet of its activism has become clear to me. A minority of more “progressive” and powerful bishops of the United States has tried to steer the narrative, not only about the priesthood, but also about the hierarchy of concerns of Catholics. My post, “Biden and the Bishops” lays out the fault lines of this effort. (More recently, we have seen the influence of this progressive suppression in the Motu Proprio of Pope Francis on the Traditional Latin Mass. This will be our topic on BTSW next week.)
But there is something else that must happen before Catholics engage their bishops about the treatment of priests. We must put an end — in our own hearts and beyond — to our Catholic tabloid frenzy about fallen priests. Satan has never felt more fulfilled than in seeing priests fall at the hands of their own bishops.
Many priests have fallen morally to the point of the total collapse of their priesthood. Why should this be a surprise to any of us? Is there anyone, in the spiritual battlefield of our time, with a bigger satanic target on his back than a Catholic priest in the trenches? In our current climate of fear and loathing, the Church does nothing to catch them on their way down as they fall, nor is anything done to stem the tide of their descent. We just let them fall, and then discard them at the bottom. We as a Church make it very clear that there is to be no redemption for a fallen priest, no path upon which to step back into the light. Should this be the practice of a body of faith in a Church built upon the Blood of Christ? I must repeat, as I have done a few times in these pages, how my friend and mentor, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, described our bishops’ collective response to their fallen priests in the pages of First Things:
“Zero Tolerance. One strike. Boot them out of ministry. Of course, the victim advocates are still not satisfied, and sadly may never be satisfied. But the bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and un-Catholic approach to sin and grace ... They end up adopting a policy that is sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost anything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
The trends that allowed this to happen in the U.S. Church and then spread throughout the world now lend themselves toward the demise of any priest for any cause that displeases his bishop — or even a more influential bishop in the diocese next door. Catholic League President Bill Donohue boldly addressed this in a quote on our “About” page: “There is no segment of the U.S. population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic Priest.”
Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL
There is a reason why false witness is included among the Ten Commandments. Its presence there is clear in Sacred Scripture: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). The Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 19, lays out the conditions under which this Commandment is to be observed: “A single witness shall not prevail against a man.” (Dt. 19:15). False witness is destructive, not only of the person who falls prey to it, but also to the entire community of believers and the justice system of an entire people.
Sometimes false witness takes the form of gross exaggeration of what otherwise might just be a slip in judgment. This is how public stoning, as a means of execution, is done today. It is not a person’s body that is stoned to death now, but a person’s good name. I fell prey to this. Standing by the truth sent me to life in prison while a simple lie would have released me a quarter century ago. And it was my own bishop (at that time) who first told the bigger lie when he declared me guilty in a press release even before jury selection in my trial.
My activism now takes the form of standing by other priests falsely accused or accused with great exaggeration which always has a specific goal: a swifter, more lucrative monetary award from a bishop anxious to settle, or some animus against the Catholic Church. Cardinal George Pell was very much an innocent victim of the latter.
Sometimes the animus comes from Catholics who blindly use The Scandal to further some agenda of their own. Father Stuart MacDonald also became a victim of grossly exaggerated false witness. It involved only an exchange of words for which he was entirely cleared of wrongdoing by the Holy See and fully restored to ministry. That should be enough for any of us, but it sadly never is for those wanting only to demean the priesthood.
As a witness in support of Father Stuart and his priesthood, I have invited him to assist Beyond These Stone Walls with his expertise in Canon Law. We have also established a Category under his name at the BTSW Public Library. Father Stuart has written several excellent posts for BTSW which are now being restored for addition to the Library. First up will be his superb and timely post, “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” You may not recall this name, but last month, Raymond J. Donovan died. He was a member of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet who resigned forty years ago after being charged with a crime. When he was exonerated by a New York City jury, he famously asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”
No priest should have to ask that question in a community of believers who have been offered Divine Mercy. No priest should have to claw his way back to redemption or just disappear into the night. What have we done?
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Important announcement from Father Gordon MacRae: Just days before this is posted, the Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester and my bishop has been accused of sexual abuse in the State of New York. The accusations against him are alleged to have occurred in 1983, the same year in which claims against me were also alleged to have occurred. Bishop Libasci has stated his innocence as did I. I know painfully well the great difficulty in defending against claims that are so old and brought forward with financial expectations but zero evidence or corroboration. Despite Bishop Libasci denying these accusations they may still result in his removal from ministry. Please pray for him and for a just and truthful outcome.
Please read and share these relevant posts.
Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo
In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald
Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood by Ryan A. MacDonald
Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction by Fr. Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL
The Reliquary Heart of St. John Vianney, Patron of Priests
Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri
Brought to America as a child victim of human trafficking, Pornchai Moontri was deported to Thailand 36 years later. This is his progress in a life starting over.
Brought to America as a child victim of human trafficking, Pornchai Moontri was deported to Thailand 36 years later. This is his progress in a life starting over.
July 21, 2021
In the photo above, Pornchai Moontri, Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, and Pornchai's Thai language teacher, Mea Thim Chalathip, escape the heat after a day of recollection with the Bangkok Oblates of Mary Immaculate community.
Editor’s Note: This is Pornchai Moontri’s second post since his arrival in Thailand in February, 2021. His most recent was “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!” These are no longer “guest posts.” Beyond These Stone Walls is now Pornchai’s home away from home.
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To all my friends Beyond These Stone Walls, Sawasdee Kup! That is the traditional Thai greeting. I am writing to you from just a few kilometers north of the City of Bangkok, Thailand. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krung Thep meaning, “City of Angels.” (I’m not kidding! It was called that even before I got here!)
Father Gordon MacRae and I have been talking about another post from me. It is not easy for me to write because there is too much to say to fit in one post. I will send this to Father G first so he can fix it up a little. I am struggling right now between multiple confusing languages, but I will tell you more about that in a minute.
What someone wrote about Beyond These Stone Walls being sort of my “home away from home” makes me smile. It is a long time since I had a home. I told Father G once that the only place I remember feeling “at home” was in a prison cell with him for 15 years. A lot has happened since the day I said that. I left Concord, New Hampshire where I last saw Father G on September 8, 2020. The five months after that were spent in ICE detention while waiting for deportation. That was really awful and I will tell you more about it. In the five months since my arrival here, I have mostly just felt overwhelmed.
Father G wrote about the day I left in a very moving post, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.” It tells the story of how, through my Godfather, the late Pierre Matthews, Padre Pio became one of our two patron saints. I will never forget the morning I left that Father G wrote about in that post. When I arrived in Thailand, I read in tears about the rest of Father Gordon’s first day without me.
I want to tell you about all the challenges I face now. Just like the local news, I will start with the weather. Thailand is south of the Tropic of Cancer and stretches down the Malay Peninsula almost to the Equator. After 36 years of my life a lot farther north on the far side of the world in Maine and New Hampshire, the tropical heat of Thailand is at the top of my list of things that take some getting used to.
On the day I am writing this in July it is 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and very humid. Converting to Celsius has not been easy. I am used to the other scale, so I never know what the temperature is. The choices are hot, very hot, and sizzling. The air conditioner where I live broke down a few weeks ago so I have been making do with a fan. While trying to write this, I shivered when I got my bill for a new air conditioner — 26,000 Thai baht — which thankfully turned out to be only $800. Whew!
Handling money has been another challenge. For 29 years in prison in America, I never even saw money. There is not much in the way of practical living skills that are taught to prisoners, most of whom end up with no idea of what things cost. In Thailand, that adjustment has been doubled. The Thai unit of money is the "baht," and the rate of exchange varies from week to week. Right now one U.S. dollar equals about 32 Thai baht. I was shocked once when dinner in a Thai restaurant cost 256 baht, but turned out to be only $8.00.
Technologically Challenged
Another big adjustment has been the metric system. As most of you know, I was taken from Thailand sort of traumatically at age eleven. A long and winding road brought me back at age 47 with only shadowy memories of Thailand and the people left behind here, and no memory at all of the metric system.
Father G once wrote about an episode of Family Guy in which Stuey went back to school as an adult. When the teacher handed out a math test, the students reached into their desks for calculators. But Stuey pulled out an Asian boy and poked him with his pencil saying, “Do Math. Do Math.” I am naturally good at math so whenever someone asked for help, Father G would poke me with a pencil saying, “Do math!” I was proud of the fact that I usually had the answers even before Father G could turn on his calculator.
But now the constant conversions are a way bigger math test. I walk around with calculations blazing through my mind to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and the English system to metric. This is second on my “big adjustment” list. There are no longer inches or feet or miles, no ounces or quarts or gallons, not even pounds or tons. I lost a lot of weight in my five months in ICE. I started off at 195 pounds. Now I weigh 80 kilograms. When I work out I used to bench press 360 pounds. Now I can only manage 165 kilos.
With help, I have been learning to drive here which is also a double adjustment. I never drove a car, of course, in the 29 years I was in a U.S. prison (15 of them with Father G). Learning to drive now means learning it in reverse of what I had known. Thailand drives on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. I have had a lot of help with this so far, and for that I am thankful.
But nothing is as big a challenge as technology. Father G used to joke that we will be like techno-cavemen when we leave prison. After 36 years away from my homeland and 29 years in prison, everything I do or touch is new to me. When I arrived, I had to spend 14 days in a Bangkok Holiday Inn, a period of Covid-19 quarantine required by the Thai government. Our friends here left me a really cool Samsung smart phone so I could communicate with Father G and others. I had never in my life used or even seen a smart phone.
Father G marveled at how fast I learned how to use the phone, but it was a matter of survival. I felt so alone and stranded that I spent my first night in Thailand in the hotel room finding and exploring Beyond These Stone Walls for the first time. I watched the two-hour Video Documentary Interview with Father G. It was wonderful and comforting to see and hear my friend and spiritual father again.
Father G is still behind those stone walls, and that makes me sad, but we talk for about a half hour every day by telephone. He calls me at 9:00 PM which is 8:00 AM the next morning for me. That also takes some getting used to. I am up before 6:00 AM each day which is 7:00 PM the night before for Father G. I spend the first two hours of each day working out. I have found this to be very important for my physical, mental and even spiritual well-being. So my first investment in Thailand was a weight set, mats and power bench. Father G helped me to purchase it. He calls each day right at the end of my workout.
Using the phone app on his GTL tablet, he calls me from the cell where we once both lived, and where he lives still. GTL allows internet-based calls from prison to Thailand at a cost of about 96 Thai baht for thirty minutes. That is about three U.S. dollars. It is not a big expense. Even after ten months since I left Concord, this is still an important part of my day and Father G’s.
I sometimes get impatient with myself, but Father G reminds me that I “just got here.” I feel as though I should be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I do anything or go anywhere. The name, Thailand, means “Land of the Free,” but even that became part of my adjustment. I often have to remind myself that I am free. Few of the people around me understand this. The list of adjustments goes on and on but I guess I am the last to notice my progress.
The late Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, was a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Faustina. He interviewed Pornchai and Fr. Gordon in prison.
Suffering and Divine Providence
As most readers know, I became a Catholic in 2010 due to living with an extreme example of what that means. My journey to the Catholic faith was centered around Father G and Divine Mercy. I learned about Divine Mercy thanks to him and to my friendship with Father Michael Gaitley, Felix Carroll, and Eric Mahl. The Catholic League president, Dr. Bill Donohue, also had a hand in this.
Father Gaitley invited me to become a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. Felix Carroll drew me into the Association of Marian Helpers, and wrote about me in a chapter in his book, Loved, Lost, Found. Bill Donohue gave me honorary membership in the Catholic League, and also wrote about me several times. Father G and I joined St. Maximilian’s Militia of the Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross. It is a lot to take in, and all of it very much influenced my faith journey. Divine Providence was another matter. I never understood it until I found myself face to face with it.
Father G says it is hard to believe that I have been gone for ten months. I have actually been in Thailand for only five months. The other five were spent in ICE which he has written about. (See “ICE Finally Cracks! Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”) The five long months awaiting deportation in ICE detention were a terrible ordeal, but for me and Father G it turned into a story of Divine Providence. I did not understand that at all until Father G and I had a phone conversation about it. Here is what I learned.
When a person has been deprived of good things in life, like parents, family, safety, a home, acceptance, love, freedom, even at times food and shelter, then the bad things in life become normal. When I was handed over to ICE and became buried in another overcrowded prison with total strangers in Jenna, Louisiana, all I could think of was all the good things I once had. I began to feel that I lost them all. Trust was the first thing I lost.
Father G saw to it that I had numbers to call no matter where I was. It took time for him to find me and be able to speak to me. Thanks to Claire Dion in Maine, a way was devised for us to speak each day even for a few minutes. The promised ICE flight to Thailand was delayed again and again for weeks and then months. I began to despair because of the awful circumstances in which I was living. I could not have made it through this if not for Father G.
By the fifth month of my detention, my call to Father G became routine. I was bitterly thinking that the delays will never end and he would say to me the same thing every day: “The day will come when you will walk out of there to a new life.” At first I was clinging to that, and then I started to no longer believing it. Each day, we both prayed deeply for an end to this suffering. Father G challenged me to try to help others. I did try.
Over the last eleven years since my conversion, Father G and I worked hard to come up with a plan for my future survival once we knew that I would one day be sent back to Thailand. In my mind, it was all like a big black hole. All I knew was America, and all I really knew about America was its prisons. The promise of Heaven for someone who has only known Hell can feel empty and too far beyond reach. I blocked out any expectation of good things because of my past experiences of bitter disappointment.
Then one day, in my daily call from ICE, Father G dropped a bomb with great reluctance. He told me that our plan for housing and support that we had spent years building suddenly fell apart. The founder of Divine Mercy Thailand, the man who was to take me in and give me a home, fell critically ill and was hospitalized. I prayed daily for him, but he passed away. In my mind, this was a crushing blow.
Father G did not want any surprises so he told me all of this. He said he did not want me to hear of this from anyone else. For me, it seemed as though all hope had gone out of the world. Then Yela, our Bangkok friend from the Divine Mercy apostolate, told Father G in an email that Father John Hung Le from the Missionary Society of the Divine Word had been reading about us and offered his home to me. My strongest feeling was that I did not want to be a burden for anyone, but my choices were gone.
Father G said that when everything we hope for feels gone, the only task left is trust. Father John turned out to be a very good priest and a very great friend. He is also a carpenter so we have a lot in common. He has become a good friend to Father G as well.
Some of Father John’s community and friends rallied around me when I arrived. Mea Thim, a retired Thai language teacher, began to tutor me daily in Thai language studies and has been very patient with me. She is also teaching me to drive and to acclimate to Thailand. Not having even heard Thai spoken in 36 years, and having never learned to read or write Thai, my progress feels slow but others say I am improving right on track.
Thailand is now in the middle of another strict shutdown due to a new Covid variant outbreak from India. Father G just told me that the Wall Street Journal has reported that the Thai government has lost confidence in Sinovac, a vaccine from China and the only one available in Thailand. All gatherings have been prohibited and a stay-in-place order is enforced. My required national Thai ID has been delayed for months so I cannot yet work, open a bank account, obtain medical care or a vaccine, or even board a train. Father John and I help each other, and I am busier than ever.
Strangely — Divine Providence again — the Thai headquarters for Father John’s Order are in Nong Bua Lamphu Province, nine hours drive north near the very village I was taken from 36 years ago. We have traveled up there three times for Father John’s missionary work with Vietnamese refugees, seminarians and migrant workers. We stay at the house my mother began to build before her death in 2000. My Aunt and cousins are there and I have reunited with them. After 36 years, they are now my family again. I have two families now, at opposite ends of the Kingdom of Thailand that I now call home.
And Father G, the man who showed me the Path to God, is still with me every day. He has told me that if our prayers were answered, if I had not suffered those five months in ICE, if God had given in to our pleas for my deliverance, then all would now be different and none of what I have just described in this post would be my reality.
This, he says, is the work of Divine Providence and I am astonished by it. On the day I left Father G, I said to him, “Thank you for giving me a future.” I had no idea how promising it would be.
The odds against all of this coming together are mathematically astronomical. When I come face to face with God, I want to poke Him with my pencil and say, “Do Math! Do Math!”
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A Postscript to readers from Pornchai:
I want to express my very deep gratitude to all of those who have assisted me over these months of transition. Your gifts for food, shelter, and the expense of starting life over have moved me profoundly. Please accept my apology for being unable to write to each one of you personally. You know who you are, and so do I. I pray for you every day.
With love and gratitude, Pornchai Moontri
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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. The Wall Street Journal has been reporting about recent events in Thailand. A new variation of Covid is creating havoc for the country, its economy and especially the well-being of its people. If you wish to help our friends, please also visit our “Special Events” page.
And you may also like these important related posts:
Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri
After Mass at the OMI Center near Bangkok. (Pornchai Moontri and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, are third and fourth from the right. On the far right is Pornchai’s Thai teacher Mea Thim Chalathip.)
A Sex Abuse Cover-up in Boston Haunts the White House
With The Boston Globe Spotlight focused only on Catholic priests, sex abuse by a top Boston police union official was covered up all the way to the 2021 White House.
When The Boston Globe Spotlight focused only on Catholic priests, sex abuse by a top Boston police union official was covered up all the way to the 2021 White House.
Our Canadian guest writer, Father Stuart MacDonald, posted a thoughtful comment on my recent post, “Cardinal Sins in the Summer of Media Madness.” He pointed out a sobering fact. Former police officer Derek Chauvin, who now stands convicted in the murder of George Floyd, was sentenced to exactly one-third of the sentence I am serving for crimes that never took place. Father Stuart’s insightful comment was followed by one from another frequent guest writer, Ryan A. MacDonald, no relation to Father Stuart.
Their comments are very much worth a return visit to that post. The tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of Derek Chauvin in sight of three other officers launched a movement across America to defunct police. It also led to all of the events described in the post cited above.
You might think that in my current location, a movement like #DefundPolice would find lots of sympathy and even some vocal support. The truth is just the opposite. No one understands the need for police in our society more than a prisoner. As one friend here, an African American, put it: “Knowing the truth about some of the guys around me, the last thing I want to see is them and my family living in the same place without police.”
I reflected that same sentiment, and others like it, in my own response to the #DefundPolice movement that was spawned by the death of George Floyd. It was a post written in the heat of that awful riotous summer of 2020. It was “Don’t Defund Police! Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption.”
As that post revealed, former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin had multiple excessive force complaints in his personnel file. Thanks to the so-called “Blue Wall” and the misguided advocacy of the local public sector police union, none of the prior complaints ever became public. Had they been known, George Floyd may be alive today and Derek Chauvin may not be facing prison.
Others among my friends have advised me not to overlook the fact that Mr. Floyd was alleged to have committed a crime that day — an attempt to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Even if true, this is not relevant. Americans do not face death over a fake $20 bill. The George Floyd story unmasked racial prejudice in the way policing is sometimes done on the streets of America. We will be a stronger and better people for the hard soul-searching and policy building needed to address this.
I write all of the above to stress that I am not in any way against police. Like my friend mentioned above, knowing some of the men with whom I now live deepens my appreciation for the many dedicated police officers who serve and protect our communities.
The account I am about to present should not be understood as just another “dirty cop” story. It is better seen as a cautionary tale of public corruption that extends beyond police to infiltrate and compromise many of the once-respected institutions on which our culture is built. The corruption you will read about here is as much that of partisan politics and the news media as it is about police. It is a Boston story. It took place in my own home town.
While the Spotlight Was on Catholic Scandal
This account is unrelated to the sordid stories of Catholic scandal in which we have been immersed for two decades, but it must begin there with a July, 2010 post, “The Exile of Fr. Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”
I highly recommend that post for the back story of what was happening to many Catholic priests as the age of cancel culture was just taking shape. The story might infuriate you. It should. In 2010, Father Dominic Menna was a much beloved 80-year-old Boston priest who was suddenly accused of molesting a minor 51 years earlier when he was 29 years old in 1959. Like every accused priest since The Scandal first gripped Boston and spread from there across the land, the elderly Father Menna was put out into the street.
You could not tell from reading The Boston Globe accounts of the case that none of this story took place in the present. The Globe had a subtle way of presenting every decades-old claim as though it happened in the here and now. Father Menna just disappeared into the night with no recourse to protect himself or his priesthood. There were no groups forming such as “Stand with Father James Parker” or “Stand with Canceled Priests” when the stench of injustice was in any way related to suspicions of sexual abuse.
Even some Catholic entities have thanked The Boston Globe and its pernicious Spotlight Team for doggedly pursuing the files of priests accused and for publishing every lurid detail, true or not. The Globe helped create a mantra that impacted the civil rights of all priests who, since the Bishops’ Dallas Charter of 2002, have been considered “guilty for being accused.” The trajectory lent itself in 2010 to “The Exile of Fr. Dominic Menna” with few questions asked. The details in that post are staggering for any Catholic who still cares about justice. One of the truths exposed in that post is about all that is left in darkness when a spotlight is used on a topic that requires a floodlight. It is about something that was happening off-the-radar in Boston while The Boston Globe and its Spotlight Team celebrated an Academy Award for Best Picture in the category of Public Service.
If not for the Globe’s hammering away at priests, the people of Boston might have been shocked in the summer of 2020 when Patrick Rose, a Boston police officer and former president of the Boston police union, was charged with 33 counts of molesting children. Bostonians might have been further shocked to learn that the behaviors which led to his arrest extended all the way back to 1995 and were known by officials in the Boston police, their public sector union, and others who helped to keep it all secret.
In 1995, just months after I was on trial in nearby New Hampshire, Patrick Rose was arrested and charged with child sexual abuse. He was placed on administrative leave by the Boston Police Department. The Boston Globe today reports that the charges were dropped in 1996 when the accuser recanted her account under pressure from Rose. Later in 1996, however, a Boston Police Internal Affairs investigation reported that the charge “was sustained” and relayed to supervisors.
Despite this, Patrick Rose remained on the police force. In 1997, an attorney for the police union wrote a letter to the police commissioner complaining that Rose had been kept on administrative duty for two years and demanding his full reinstatement. Rose was then reinstated. Prosecutors today allege that he went on to molest five additional child victims, including some after Rose himself became union president from 2014 to 2017.
White House Labor Secretary Marty Walsh
In the May 14, 2021 print edition of The Wall Street Journal, the Editorial Board published “A Police Union Coverup in Boston.” The WSJ reported that The Boston Globe filed requests for the Internal Affairs file on Patrick Rose. The administration of then Boston Mayor Marty Walsh denied the request citing that the record could not be released in a way that would satisfy privacy concerns.
Imagine the outcry if the late Cardinal Bernard Law said this when The Boston Globe demanded a file on any foreknowledge of sexual abuse by Father Dominic Menna. It turned out in that case that there was no such file because the 80-year-old priest had never previously been accused. The Boston Globe repeatedly dragged the Archdiocese of Boston into court in 2002 to demand public release of scores of files on Catholic priests and never rested until every detail — corroborated or not — ended up in newsprint.
It is hard to imagine today that The Globe would simply settle for the excuse Mayor Marty Walsh provided. It is hard to imagine that the “Blue Wall of Silence” was any real obstacle for The Boston Globe which, perhaps to cover for its own inaction, reported that it was “astonishing [the] lengths to which the [Boston Police] Department and the now departed Walsh administration went to keep those files under wraps.”
The file remained “under wraps” until after Senate confirmation hearings that vetted Mayor Walsh and confirmed him (68 to 29) for a Biden Administration cabinet position as Secretary of Labor in 2021. Walsh signed a contract with the Boston Police Union in 2017 while Patrick Rose was still union president. It remains unclear what Marty Walsh knew and when he knew it.
A Massachusetts state supervisor of public records refuted the Mayor’s reasoning for keeping the file secret. He called upon (then) Mayor Walsh to provide a better reason for denying the Internal Affairs file on Patrick Rose. Walsh ignored this for two months until his mayoral successor, Kim Janey, released a redacted version of the file after the Senate confirmation hearing approved Mr. Walsh as Secretary of Labor. The Wall Street Journal reported:
“Mr. Biden picked Mr. Walsh because he is a union man. He was president of a Laborers’ Union local, as well as head of the Boston Building Trades, until he ran for mayor in 2013. As mayor, he showered unions with taxpayer money, including a contract with Mr. Rose’s police union in 2017 that resulted in a pay increase of 16-percent over four years. City employees in unions donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign. The Rose Coverup is relevant to Mr. Walsh’s duties at the Labor department.”
An Epilogue
Just as I was preparing to print and mail this post, someone sent me the July 2021 copy of Newsmax magazine containing an article by journalist Merisa Herman on this same story entitled, "Police Union Cover-Up Haunts Top Biden Official." [I chose my title long before seeing this]. Ms. Herman concluded:
“Rose had been given a pass from the media for what could be construed as a cover-up ... Someone in Congress might ask Mr. Walsh why Americans should believe he’ll fight union corruption when his city may have helped protect a union chief with a history of alleged predation against children.”
It is difficult to measure this story against what happened in 2010 to 80-year-old Father Dominic Menna whose life and priesthood were utterly obliterated by The Boston Globe spotlight for a half century-old claim that could never be corroborated.
It is difficult to measure this story against what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis when a history of previous excessive force complaints in a police file were kept under wraps until someone paid with his life.
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Notes from Father Gordon MacRae:
Many thousands of readers have been circulating last week’s post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.” Thousands in Washington, Chicago, New York and Boston have read that post. If you wish to send a printed copy to your bishop or anyone else, we have created a five-page pdf version that is printable.
We have also created a pdf with the name and address of every U.S. Catholic Bishop.
Learn more about The Boston Globe’ s Spotlight coverage of the Catholic Church and the Best Picture Academy Award for the film, Spotlight. You may never watch the Oscars again after reading “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” by a courageous journalist, Joann Wypijewski, former Editor of The Nation. (It also sheds some much needed media light on my own travesty of justice.)
Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul
Some bishops fear political fallout if they draft a policy on the Eucharist and pro-abortion politicians but they overlook the most fundamental duty of the Church.
Some bishops fear political fallout if they draft a policy on the Eucharist and pro-abortion politicians but they overlook the most fundamental duty of the Church.
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
There is a lot of misdirected anger toward the Church and its leaders in our culture. For some it is the anger of adolescents who think that shedding the moral authority of parents is in their best interest. Some parents forget that it is not. For others, it is the anger of those who have lived in fidelity to the moral authority of the Church only to see it weakened at every turn in this age of moral relativism and cancel culture. For others still, it is the anger born of seeing too many of the Church’s shepherds in the role sheep, diminishing the Church’s prophetic witness to accommodate the self-serving politics of our time.
In 2018, I wrote a controversial post for the fifth anniversary of the pontificate of Pope Francis entitled, “Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.” Lots of conservative Catholics were drawn to it because of its title. Many assumed that I was accusing Pope Francis of heresy. Within weeks, that post was shared 25,000 times on Facebook. Then someone actually read it only to find nothing really scandalous. Interest in it just quietly evaporated.
I did not accuse the pope of heresy though the heresy implied therein was in fact his. It was political heresy, however, and not theological. In a series of challenges earlier in his pontificate, Pope Francis was confronted with wayward bishops and priests in various parts of the world. In one notorious case when a bishop was accused of sexual misconduct in Chile, Pope Francis spontaneously said, “Show me some evidence.”
I think the true heart of this pope was laid bare in that spontaneous remark, but he had to walk it back a few days later. It was political heresy. One of his immediate critics was Cardinal Sean O’Malley appointed to oversee the Vatican’s response to sexual abuse. The “woke” among us simply cannot abide any questions that might diminish a claim of victimhood.
The most prevalent heresy in my post cited above, however, was committed by conservative and traditional Catholics, the very people with whom I feel most aligned as a Catholic and as a priest. You may recall all the controversy surrounding the 2018 Synod on the Family and the document, “Amoris Laetitiae” by Pope Francis. They both explored, in part, a question about whether otherwise faithful Catholics in a state of divorce and civil remarriage should be allowed to receive the Eucharist.
The mere question, which never became reality, raised in the Church a loud alarm and protest about weakening the sacramental bond of marriage and the sacramental coherence of Communion. I agreed with these concerns, but I asked some challenging questions which to date no one has attempted to answer.
Where was this concern among the faithful over the last twenty years when “zero tolerance” became the operative agenda and the sacramental bond of Holy Orders was summarily discarded by bishops when priests were accused — merely accused — with little or no due process? Just asking this question is political heresy. Since then, an ongoing stream of concern for politics and political fallout has been allowed to creep into the life of the Church in our time.
President Joe Biden and Communion
Now comes the latest counter-cultural Catholic controversy. Our bishops are wrangling over the potential for political fallout if they move forward with the majority’s intent on drafting a pastoral document on the meaning of the Eucharist and the conditions under which a Catholic would be in communion with Jesus and the Church.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, has gone on record to state that he would not deny Communion to President Joe Biden. Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, warned that this discussion could have the effect of aligning the Church to one political party over another. Both prelates signed an unsuccessful petition to remove this whole topic from the agenda of the Bishops’ Conference. In the end, 75 percent of the bishops voted to proceed.
Though this discussion is not about one person, everyone knows that its focal point is President Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Both are Democrats who describe themselves as devout Catholics. Both have also been proponents of unconditional access to abortion, same-sex marriage, limits on religious liberty, and transgender ideology.
In the current controversy over receiving Communion, President Biden has said that he does not believe the bishops will address this because “it is a private matter.” On several levels, he is wrong about that. He is by no means a private person who would not cause scandal by living a duplicitous life of faith.
He is also wrong for the same reason that all the concern for Communion for Catholics living in an illicit marriage became a public controversy. Marriage is a public state in life and not just a private one. Joe Biden’s longstanding and ever-expanding promotion of abortion is a highly public aspect of his agenda. His living a contrary expression of faith is a very public matter.
President Biden is now described by some media commentators as being singled out by conservatives for his support of “a woman’s right to choose.” The reality is far beyond that. He has also lobbied to expand abortion and to remove it from reconsideration by the Supreme Court by promising to encode in federal law an absolute right to abortion. He has vowed to repeal the Hyde Amendment which for decades has protected conscientious objectors among taxpayers from being forced to fund abortions. He has advocated “packing” the U.S. Supreme Court to diminish the influence of pro-life justices.
This is a dilemma for the Church and the U.S. Bishops Conference. A policy statement which truly reflects the Church’s discipline on worthiness to receive Holy Communion could directly preclude such a publicly known abortion advocate from the Sacrament without signs of repentance. Putting forth that policy statement may, and likely would, also be seen on the practical level as a repudiation of at least some of this president’s political agenda and that of some in his political party who also profess to be Catholic.
This is a painful and difficult position for the bishops to be in, and it is not going to go away. The first and foremost concern of the bishops, however, should not be a fear of political fallout, or of losing the Church’s tax exempt status (which is also highly doubtful). The foremost concern should be something that no one else seems to be raising. It is not concern for Joe Biden’s agenda that should impact our bishops, but concern for Joe Biden’s soul.
Politicians Are Not a Privileged Class of Catholics
The Church’s teaching in this matter is based in part on Sacred Scripture. Among several clear examples is this one from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:
“Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the Body and Blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses this with a clarity that needs no interpretation:
“Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.”
“Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. ‘A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae’ (Canon 1398). The Church does not, thereby, intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.”
An argument can be made that a politician who promotes legislation that provides the means for abortion may not incur the same penalty as someone who "procures a completed abortion," but this is also splitting hairs. Both the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith define the moral obligation to promote legislation that protects life:
“The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation.”
“The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority ... The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil authority ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen ... the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined. As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be assured for the unborn child ... the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child’s rights.”
For any Catholic, the reception of Communion is not just a private matter. It is both a private and public witness to being in communion with both Christ and His Church. Some of the most beautiful and clear commentary on this has come from Bishop Thomas Olmstead of the Diocese of Phoenix who developed an apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist and what it means to be “in Communion”:
“Holy Communion is reserved for those who, with God’s grace, make a sincere effort to live this union with Christ and His Church by adhering to all that the Catholic Church believes and proclaims to be revealed by God.
“For this reason, the Church requires Catholic leaders who have publicly supported gravely immoral laws such as abortion and euthanasia to refrain from receiving Holy Communion until they publicly repent and receive the Sacrament of Penance.”
Bishop Olmstead described the great harm to the soul of a Catholic who receives the Sacrament after allowing belief in the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist to diminish. A person who truly believes in this Sacrament for the Life of the World could not possibly also embrace and promote a culture of death. Such an unworthy reception of Holy Communion transforms the Sacrament into a sacrilege that continues the betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot at the first Institution of the Eucharist.
You may remember an important Holy Week post of mine entitled “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.” It recalls Saint John's account of the Institution of the Eucharist. Satan had entered into Judas who received the bread from Christ with betrayal in his heart. The final words of Saint John’s Gospel account of the scene speak volumes about the state of the soul of the betrayer:
“After receiving the piece of bread, Satan entered into him ... Judas immediately went out. And it was night.”
Avoiding a clear statement on Eucharistic coherence now can do far more damage to the faith and moral sanctity of Catholics than the appearance of taking a political side. It is cheap and easy for those who live to not take a long, hard look at how we may promote, by commission or omission, a denial of the right to life.
How could our bishops possibly expect otherwise faithful Catholics in unrecognized second marriages to accept in good faith the discipline of refraining from Communion while the most pro-abortion Catholic politician in history is given a pass. The path of rightousness in this will not be easy for our bishops. As Father Michael Orsi wrote in a recently published letter to the Wall Street Journal : “This will take courage, but it will separate the shepherds from the hired hands.”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post to raise awareness about an important moment for the Church in the modern world. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life
Cry Freedom! Saint Paul and a Prisoner of the Apocalypse
Two prior posts from Beyond These Stone Wa11s revisit the idea1 of freedom, what it means to find it, what it costs to keep it, what it takes to give it to another.
Two prior posts from Beyond These Stone Walls revisit the ideal of freedom, what it means to find it, what it costs to keep it, what it takes to give it to another.
Some readers who are aware of my day to day life as a guest of the state have heard that I was held in a high security quarantine dormitory setting for the entire month of May and part of June in 2021. I did write briefly of this just before it happened, but it seems that what I wrote was too cryptic. I just received a letter from a reader who wanted to launch a petition over my continued heightened confinement. Please don’t show up here with picket signs. I am now liberated from my dungeon.
I was not technically in quarantine. Due to a planned construction project where I was living, I and 23 others were moved to an unused dormitory space that had been previously set up as a Covid-19 triage and quarantine area. It commenced on May 1 and was supposed to last for just ten days at which time, it was promised, we would all move back to our housing assignments.
The construction ran into obstacles, however, and the predicted ten days ultimately turned into forty. During that time, I was pretty much locked into a crowded, noisy room with 23 other disgruntled prisoners. I had no access to my typewriter while there so writing was extremely difficult. Somehow, I still managed to write three posts, but with great difficulty. One of them was for my 39th anniversary of priesthood entitled, “It Is the Duty of a Priest to Never Lose Sight of Heaven.”
I wrote that post “by fits and starts,” a term meaning “haphazardly” that has gone out of style in writing. I wrote that post only in my mind. I was still able to work, as needed but with greatly reduced hours, in the prison law library where I am the sole legal clerk. There is an old manual typewriter there, so I managed to type that post over two hours one afternoon. I mailed it just at the final deadline to have it posted on time. I hope its troubled creation was not so evident.
I could not bring myself to complain about the forty-day confinement. I was constantly aware that our friend, Pornchai Moontri, spent five full months in ICE detention awaiting deportation in a room of the same size, but housing 60 to 70 detainees at any one time. That story should become another BTSW classic post on freedom. The gripping story is told in “ICE Finally Cracks: Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”
More importantly, it was also impossible for me to offer Mass during my stay in what I can only describe as “a FEMA shelter without the disaster.” I had hoped to offer Mass on June 6, the Solemnity of Corpus Christi this year and the anniversary of my First Mass on the day after my priesthood ordination on June 5, 1982. But it was not meant to be. After forty days, we were all finally liberated and returned to the place in which I have lived since July of 2017.
It is difficult for me to believe that it was four years ago this month that Pornchai and I were finally moved to that better housing. For the previous 23 years — 12 for Pornchai — we were prisoners in a building housing 504 prisoners but built for half that number. There was little to no access to the outside. It contained all the trouble and chaos that such constant confinement brings.
But we are now free from that. Even in a state of unjust imprisonment, I can thank God for the freedoms I have. I am free to write to the world beyond these stone walls which means more to me than you may know.
As I pondered Independence Day in America this year, I realized that it falls on the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. This time is anything but ordinary for me and Pornchai. When I looked at the Mass readings for that day, I noted that I wrote of those same readings for Independence Day six years ago. So I want to invite you to visit that post anew. It is the story of Saint Paul and his plea to be free of his famous but cryptic “thorn in the flesh.”
The second post I want to present anew is a memorable one you also may have previously read. It is brief, but you should not miss it.
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Independence Day: St Paul and His Thorn in the Flesh
A Mass Reading from Second Corinthians on the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time conveys Saint Paul’s thorny lesson about freedom and power. Our world has it all wrong.
It is not by design, but the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time falls on Independence Day in the United States in 2021. The Mass readings assigned to that day (Lectionary 101 – Year B) have an important lesson about the nature of freedom and the source of true power. The lesson’s focal point, as in every Mass, is the Gospel (Mark 6:1-6). Jesus concludes that the people in his own “native place” would not hear Him, but “only took offense at Him.” I certainly know the feeling.
These were his own people. The Gospel mentions that they knew Joseph. They knew Mary. They knew some of the Apostles, but Jesus “was amazed by their lack of faith.” He concluded famously that “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). It is having confronted that reality that the Mission of Christ Universal begins to unfold.
As I read this Gospel passage, I thought of a letter sent to me two years ago by Cardinal Raymond Burke. In it, he expressed his concern for my plight and asked for my prayers for him and for the Church. His words suggesting that I offer some of what I endure for a greater good — “pro bono Ecclesiae,” a phrase taught to us recently in Father Stuart MacDonald’s provocative post, “Last Rights: Canon Law in a Mirror of Justice Cracked.”
Cardinal Burke’s request that I suffer for something greater than suffering was an honor without measure. I wrote of this in a Christmas post last year. Here is an excerpt from my post, “Silent Night and the Dawn of Redeeming Grace.”
This letter is among the best Christmas gifts I have received out here among the Church’s debris, and it came as a source of grace, a sort of awakening. What follows may be the most important sentence in this post: There is no greater service to those who suffer than to give meaning to what they suffer.
A few months after my receipt of Cardinal Burke’s letter, a bishop came to this prison to offer Mass on Divine Mercy Sunday. Our friend, Pornchai Moontri and I were among the fifty Catholic prisoners gathered in the prison chapel for Mass. You know Divine Mercy Sunday is a special day for us.
After the Mass, as we filed out, the Bishop grasped my hand and said something very strange to me. He had obviously been reading These Stone Walls. As he took my hand, he bent forward a bit and said quietly but forcefully, “You are a prophet! YOU are a prophet.” There was no further exchange.
As we descended down the long flights of stairs outside, my friend, Pornchai said, “Wow! That was weird. What do you think it means?” I responded sarcastically, “If the Church is consistent, it means my head is about to be lopped off!”
Our prophets do not fare very well. In Scripture, some were thrown into prison. The Prophet Jeremiah was stoned to death. According to legend, the Prophet Isaiah was sawed in half. The Prophet Jonah was thrown overboard. John the Baptist was beheaded. Saint Paul was shipwrecked, beaten, imprisoned, and finally martyred.
As the great Saint Teresa of Avila once said to God in prayer, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few!”
The Gospel is, of course, the centerpiece of the Liturgy of the Word, but on the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time it is the Second Reading that really leaps off the page in my quest for my own Independence Day. It is Saint Paul’s famous account from the Second Letter to the Corinthians (12:7-10) about his thorn in the flesh:
“… A thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ ”
Scripture scholars — both real and imagined — have pondered for centuries to decipher what this cryptic thorn in the flesh could mean. Some have interpreted it to mean a physical ailment or disability of some sort that rendered Paul weak and challenged. His phrase, “my power is made perfect in weakness” lends itself to that theory when you consider the vast influence he has had on the growth of Christianity.
THE AGENT OF SATAN
Others have suggested that his thorn in the flesh was the manifestation of some mental illness which, in Saint Paul’s time, was often described in Jewish tradition as a manifestation of Satan or some other demonic attack. His words, “to beat me, to keep me from being too elated” suggest a sense of personal diminishment that could support a theory about some mental condition such as bouts of chronic depression or anxiety.
In more modern times, some have suggested with a straight face that the thorn in the flesh could be an allusion to some morally compromising sexual proclivity over which Paul experienced little self-control. I believe that all three of these theories are incorrect, and the third one is far more descriptive of the preoccupations of our own time than Saint Paul’s.
I have formed my own conclusions about Paul’s mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” and they come from a more panoramic understanding not just of what he wrote, but also of who he was — and is. I believe his “thorn in the flesh” is a person, someone who stood in hostile opposition to Paul and his missionary activities.
Saint Paul, formerly Saul, was a Jew born in the town of Tarsus in the Roman Province of Celicia. In his Letter to the Romans (11:1) he revealed that he was from the Tribe of Benjamin. He was also a Roman citizen which gave him certain rights and privileges. In Acts of the Apostles (22:25-29) Paul was about to be scourged by a Roman tribune. When it was learned that he was a Roman citizen by birth, the punishment was halted.
Paul was also a zealous member of the Pharisees (Acts 26:5). This meant that in Jewish circles, he was highly educated in the law and Jewish Scripture and traditions. His writing has to be seen in this context, and the phrases he used have to be weighed against the Hebrew Scriptures with which he was thoroughly familiar.
In those Scriptures, the word, “thorns” is often symbolically used to refer to enemies. The context for its use by Paul in the excerpt from Second Corinthians cited above was not that the “thorn in my flesh” was placed there by Satan, but rather is described as “an agent of Satan.” This presents an impression that this thorn is a person in hostile opposition to Paul.
As a Pharisee, Paul would have been thoroughly familiar with the Torah, the Books of Moses held to be especially sacred. The Book of Numbers, which is a re-telling of the Exodus story and the arrival of the Israelites in the Promised Land, contains an allusion with which Paul would have been very familiar:
“But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your side.”
Saint Paul’s description of this “thorn” as a “servant” or “angel” (messenger) of Satan suggests that Paul was faced with a growing personal hostility and oppression from someone within his own community. By “his own community,” I mean his Jewish community and not the community of believers in “The Way.” It was more likely someone in the Jewish community who oppressed Paul because his allusion to the thorn as depicting an enemy is a purely Old Testament Jewish symbolism.
So the only remaining mystery is not “what” the thorn in his flesh was but rather who. It was during Paul’s Second Missionary Journey commencing in 50 A.D. that he established the Church in Corinth, a city in Greece on the Isthmus of Corinth. Paul remained there for over a year, but before departing he was viciously attacked by an unnamed enemy (2 Corinthians 11:13).
The unnamed enemy may well be the thorn in Saint Paul’s flesh. Paul was a Pharisee who had previously persecuted Christians, capturing them and handing them over for stoning. He was deeply committed to the Pharisaic tradition of maintaining legal and ritual purity for the Jews. Now Paul was promoting this new faith, and not only promoting it, but actively welcoming gentiles to its ranks.
It was during his Third Missionary Journey to Macedonia that he wrote the Second Letter to the Corinthians in 53 A.D. He wrote it from Philippi in Macedonia. Then, proceeding to Corinth, he wrote his Letter to the Romans. At the time he wrote both Second Corinthians and Romans, he began to speak of his impending imprisonment and martyrdom.
Saint Paul’s allusion that “Three times I begged the Lord” about the thorn in his flesh, i.e., the hostility he encountered — likely refers to a leader in the Jewish community. Using the past tense, “begged,” infers that he has stopped begging, and has accepted the answer that came to him:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power [the power of God] is made perfect in [your] weakness.”
The power Paul encounters is manifested in his acceptance of weakness, meaning his acceptance that it is not his own gifts and talents that are driving the bus on this mission:
“I will rather boast: most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Independence Day thus dawned for the Apostle Paul.
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Left Behind: In Prison for the Apocalypse
This medium security prison has a library where I have been a prisoner-clerk for the last ten years. Its shelves are stocked with 21,000 volumes. With an average of 1,000 visits, and some 3,000 books checked out each month, the library is a literary hub intersecting virtually every facet of prison life. But there is a lot more going on than books flying off the shelves.
There are few proud moments in prison, but one of mine came in the form of a second-hand message from my friend Skooter, now free. Two months after Skooter ascended through the corrections system to finally hit the streets, another friend of his was sent back to prison for a parole violation.
That friend came to the library one day, and standing at my desk, said, “You’re the guy who broke Skooter out of prison!” The man explained that he lived near Skooter in a seedy urban rooming house while both were unemployed and barely surviving in their first few months on parole. He said that Skooter had been unable to land a job, working in temp jobs for minimum wage and at times faced with a choice between food and rent.
It is an all-too-familiar account for young men struggling to emerge not just from a prison, but from a past. Skooter came very close to giving up, the friend said, but often spoke of his “wanting very much not to disappoint you” by coming back to prison. “So he stayed the course,” said the friend, “and now he’s gotten his life together.”
I first met Skooter several years earlier, one of the scores of aimless, rootless, fatherless, uneducated young men for whom prison can become a warehouse, a place in which thousands of “Skooters” store their aimless, hopeless futures. One day as we slowly ascended the multiple flights of stairs to be checked in at the Education Floor where the prison library is located, Skooter told me with a sense of shame that, at age 24, he had never learned to read or write.
Having resisted all the concerted efforts to recruit him into any number of prison gangs that would only foster his ignorance and exploit it, Skooter became a regular fixture in the prison library. For an hour a day there, I and other prisoners worked with Skooter to teach him to read and write.
My friend, Pornchai Moontri tutored him in math, Skooter’s most feared academic nemesis. We made sure he didn’t starve, and in return, he struggled relentlessly toward earning his high school diploma in prison, a steep ascent in a place that by its very nature fosters humiliation and shuns personal empowerment.
One day, shortly before his high school graduation in May 2011, Skooter came charging into the library looking defeated. He plopped before me the previous day’s copy of USA Today, opened to a full-page ad by some self-proclaimed Prophet-of-the-End-Time announcing that the world is to end on May 21, 2011, a week before Graduation Day.
“It’s just my luck’” lamented Skooter. “I do all this work and the world’s gonna end just before I graduate.” “It’s not true,” I said calmly. “It MUST be true,” Skooter shot back. “They wouldn’t put it in the paper if it wasn’t true!” Like many prisoners, and far too many others, Skooter believed that all truth was carefully vetted before ending up in newsprint.
Apocalyptic predictions sometimes play out strangely in prison. I told Skooter that back in 1999, a prisoner I knew became convinced of dire consequences from a looming technological Armageddon called “Y2K.” ‘That prisoner deduced somehow that prison officials would release toxic gas at the turn of the millennium so he spent the night of December 31 sewing his lips and eyes shut. Skooter wanted to know how the guy managed to sew that second eyelid, a small tribute to his deductive reasoning.
I pointed out to Skooter in the USA Today ad’s smaller print that this newest End-Time prediction was actually a revision of the author’s previous one set in 1994. I strongly urged Skooter not to put off studying for final exams because of this. Skooter stayed the course.
Since then, a subsequent prison policy barred all prisoners from teaching and tutoring other prisoners, a decision that effectively eliminated all of the positive influence, and none of the negative influence, that takes place in prison, driving the former underground.
Still, that graduation was Skooter’s finest moment, and one of my own as well. It was a direct result of a prison library subculture that grants every prisoner a few hours a week out of prison into an arena of books, a world of ideas, a release of huddled neurons yearning to be free.
A week after graduation, Skooter showed up in the library with a copy of The Wall Street Journal opened to an article by science writer, Matt Ridley. The article explored evidence that the Earth’s magnetic core shifts polarity every few hundred thousand years, and pointed out with dismal foreboding that it is 780,000 years overdue. Mr. Ridley stressed that no one knows its potential impact on our global technological infrastructure.
“It’s just my luck!” lamented Skooter as he plopped the article on my desk. “Just when I was thinkin’ about college!”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please visit our “Special Events” page.
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Cardinal Sins in the Summer of Media Madness
Cardinal Wilton Gregory was among the outraged when President Trump ordered Capitol Police to forcefully remove demonstrators for a photo op, but was it even true?
Cardinal Wilton Gregory was among the outraged when President Trump ordered Capitol Police to forcefully remove demonstrators for a photo op, but was it even true?
A few weeks ago in these pages I wrote a post entitled, “Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media.” It made the point — now well documented — that the primary reason why some in the partisan news media rejected even the idea that the virus causing Covid-19 may have been leaked from a Wuhan laboratory is because it was President Trump and Senator Tom Cotton who first suggested it. I was warned to stay out of that minefield, but here I am again.
Those who assist me in publishing this blog share these posts on social media accounts which I have never seen and likely never will. We have all struggled with the advisability of wading into the social media swamp, but it is where people are. Placing before them a fair, just, and truthful idea seems to me to be a good thing. We have a presence in about thirty Catholic platforms on Facebook alone with a combined membership of hundreds of thousands. For the most part, what I write is well received there.
I was really smacked down, however, when we ventured into Reddit. The Catholicism Forum there rejected my recent post on the origin of Covid saying that it was off topic and of no interest to Catholics. Is there something about Catholics that makes them immune to Covid? I’m Catholic and I had it. It was awful. Trust me, we are not immune.
So after the Reddit Catholicism moderator’s terse rejection, we found a home for that post on Reddit’s News Media Forum. It felt as though I had stepped into one of the riots of 2020. Some people thanked me for writing it, but most openly condemned it — and me — for mentioning Donald Trump in something other than the required disparaging and condemning tone. “The author of this article is a convicted Catholic priest,” one commenter wrote. “So keep that in mind when judging his credibility.”
Several others reacted in fury, but no one disputed any of the facts I presented in that post. One person came to my defense, suggesting that who and where I am does not in any way alter the facts I presented in that post. Thankfully, another person challenged the commenter’s condemnation by telling him to do some homework. She wrote that The Wall Street Journal published a three-part series which determined the case against me to be a monstrous fraud, and many others concur with that assessment.
Most of the rest of the comments were the typical tribal insults accusing Catholic priests of sticking their noses into politics where, they insist, we do not belong. They actually made my point for me. Determining the origin of Covid-19 is about finding the scientific truth. It is not about Trump, or partisan politics , or any other realm into which our partisan news media let it descend.
Can anyone explain to me the dynamic in which the mere mention of Donald Trump in a benign, factual, but non-derogatory manner sends some people into a frenzy unleashing a diatribe of “woke” suspicion?
It’s like Deja Vu All over Again!
It seems that I have not learned my lesson, however, for I am about to walk into that media minefield again. One year ago this week, I wrote a post entitled, “The State of Our Freedom, The Content of Our Character.” It was about a series of events that unfolded in Washington, DC during the summer of 2020. My post was not a defense of Donald Trump. I do not have a defense of Donald Trump. It was merely about truth, and having the good character to tell it.
Before I go into what I mean by that, I want to refer you to Catholic League President Bill Donohue and his recent press release entitled, “The Bishops Are Not Partisans.” He made the point that our bishops, acting as a whole, do not support any political party, nor do they speak toward a political goal. If they speak on politics at all, it is to clarify the Church’s teaching on a matter of faith or morals.
I agree entirely that this is what should happen when bishops speak as representatives of the Church. It is not always what does happen, however, but Dr. Donohue’s statement lends further clarity to what went wrong in Washington in June of 2020. I wrote extensively in the above cited post about these events.
What prompts me to write of this again is a recent statement summarizing a year-long investigation by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, who recently testified at a Senate hearing in words quite similar to those of Bill Donohue in reference to Catholic bishops:
“The job of the Justice Department in making decisions of law is not to back any administration or impose one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans.”
I much respect Attorney General Merrick Garland for the content of his character. The context for that statement immediately preceded the release of the Inspector General’s report about events in Washington, DC in early June 2020. The most egregious of these was a widely disseminated media condemnation of Donald Trump for using the Office of the President to order Capitol Police to forcibly clear Lafayette Square adjacent to the White House to make way for the President’s “photo op” holding a Bible in front of Saint John’s Episcopal Church. He supposedly had the police use gas to disperse the crowd.
But it is not true, and it was never true. The Inspector General’s Report — released to a mostly disinterested partisan news media — concluded that the dispersement of the crowd took place several hours before Trump’s spontaneous decision to go stand in front of that church. The two events, the IG Report states, were not at all related. And the crowd dispersed earlier that day was not at all a “peaceful protest” as characterized in the media. The decision to use force to disperse the crowd came after 49 officers were injured trying to stop the mob from destroying property.
In “The State of Our Freedom, The Content of Our Character” written one year ago this month, I wrote that Trump’s decision to go stand in front of that church was not to force the mob out. As the IG report states, they were removed four hours earlier. I wrote that Trump went there to force the news media to cover the extensive damage inflicted upon the facade of that church. Even then, after calling the riots “peaceful demonstrations,” CNN and most (but not all) news venues zoomed in on the President holding the Bible and thus keeping from public view the damage done to the church. This is not a defense of Trump. It is a defense of truth.
Cardinal Sins
Some of the untrue rhetoric and misplaced public condemnation of the President that day came from a surprising and alarming source. At a time when the nation was in a state of violent chaos in the early days of June, 2020, Washington, DC Archbishop Wilton Gregory stepped far afield of the call for a pastoral and non-partisan demeanor called for by Dr. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League.
On June 1, 2020, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visited the St. John Paul II Shrine in Washington to commemorate Pope John Paul’s papal visit to his native Poland on that same day in 1979. That event is widely hailed today as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and European Communism. After the President and First Lady prayed at the Shrine, they proceeded to the White House where the President signed an Executive Order in support of International Religious Freedom.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board hailed that Order and visit to the Shrine as a remarkable message to the world that religious liberty must be affirmed. On the next day, however, Archbishop Wilton Gregory condemned these events in a statement given center stage in The Washington Post and America magazine:
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and in a fashion that violates our religious principles.”
Archbishop Gregory stated at the time that he had no prior awareness of a plan for the President to visit the Shrine, nor was he consulted in advance. In contrast, the White House stated that the Archbishop was invited to be present but declined the invitation to appear with the President due to “a prior commitment.” A shocking irony of the Archbishop’s statement above is that it could truthfully apply to the current President if you just substitute the words, “Catholic facility” with “Catholic Sacrament”:
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that a Catholic Sacrament would be so egregiously misused and in a fashion that violates our religious principles”
Later on June 2, 2020, President Trump made a highly controversial appearance holding a Bible in front of St. John Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square. The immediate media narrative was that he had Attorney General Bill Barr order Capitol Police to forcibly clear the park using tear gas to accommodate his “photo op.” That narrative took on the force of unquestioned Biblical truth. Democratic Presidential contender Senator Elizabeth Warren immediately called for an investigation into the “sickening and appalling measures to clear the park for a photo op.”
Senator Warren got the investigation that she called for. Earlier this month, the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of the Interior dismissed the story as entirely untrue. The report states, as described above, that the park was cleared of demonstrators hours earlier to protect both property and the Park police, many of whom were injured. This is the report of the current Inspector General and Attorney General in the Biden Administration.
It was an election year, and no one really expects partisan politicians to pass up a chance to distort the truth in favor of political points without checking the facts. That should not apply, however, to the Catholic Archbishop of Washington who issued a statement that day that was widely disseminated by The Washington Post and other venues:
“Pope John Paul II was a defender of the dignity of humans who would certainly not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter, or intimidate them for a photo op in front of a place of worship and peace.”
On the next day, the Archbishop’s office issued a group email to all priests of the Archdiocese of Washington summoning them to appear with protest placards while wearing cassocks or other clerical garb to join protesters in a staged demonstration in front of the White House that week. It is unclear how many, if any, of the priests obliged. Several said that this expectation was a violation of existing policy about engaging in partisan politics. It was also a violation of policy about pandemic social distancing. Others were alarmed that this placed priests in harm’s way.
After the Inspector General’s Report discredited the false media narrative about these events, The Washington Post issued a retraction of its earlier presentation. It also retracted its 2020 dismissal of the Wuhan laboratory Covid source theory as conspiracy theory. It is not easy for a major news outlet to issue a retraction of such explosive news coverage. However, there is to date no sign of a retraction, explanation, apology, or clarification from the Archbishop of Washington.
Four months after the events described in this post, Pope Francis announced his decision to elevate Archbishop Wilton Gregory to the College of Cardinals, an honor also bestowed on his two immediate predecessors, Cardinal Donald Wuerl and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please visit our “Special Events” page. You may also want to read and share these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.
The State of Our Freedom and the Content of Our Character
Catholics to Fr James Altman: ‘We Are Starving Out Here!’
Fr James Altman was removed from his assignment sparking appeals from the faithful in unprecedented numbers. Does this signal a growing distrust of our bishops?
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!’”
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.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please visit our Special Events page. You may also like these related posts:
The Once and Future Catholic Church
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.
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.
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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 39 years of priesthood, 27 of them unjustly in prison, this priest guides readers to higher truths. For those who suffer in life, eternal life matters more.
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.”
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.”
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.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: We have a most important message for readers. Please visit our “Special Events” page.
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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