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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upon the Field of Battle

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

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

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

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

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

The Right to Life and the Cost of Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev. Martin Luther King and Father John Crowley

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

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

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

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

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

Stand against the Culture of Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conceived in Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might also be interested in this related post:

Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life

An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump

In his 2020 State of the Union Address, President Trump showed mercy on some who had tragically fallen. This is a plea for mercy and justice for Pornchai Moontri.

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December 2, 2020

Dear Mr. President: 

I write on behalf of many Catholic followers of Divine Mercy with an urgent but simple appeal. Putting the politics of this nation's polarization aside, I join many American Catholics and people of other faiths who have been moved by your consistent agenda to promote both law and order and much needed reform of the criminal justice system. I wrote for publication about your landmark effort in "President Donald Trump's First Step Act for Prison Reform."

It is a basic tenet of your First Step Act that when a prison term has been fully served, it should not continue in other forms such as joblessness, job discrimination, and society's ongoing pointed finger of shame. Your First Step Act is a second chance for many to rise above the past and embrace a future of hope. This will be a part of your legacy for years to come. 

I am writing to request the assistance of your Administration in what should be a simple matter. As a teenager at age eighteen, Pornchai Moontri committed a crime out of desperation. He has served every day of his sentence and was released  at age forty-seven on September 11, 2020 to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation to his native Thailand. 

Mr. President, it is important to note that neither Mr. Moontri nor his many advocates and friends who have become his family in America are seeking commutation of his removal order. However, that could also be a just and merciful outcome. In lieu of that, what he and we seek is his rapid repatriation to his native Thailand, a nation from which, as you will read below, he was removed at age eleven as a victim of human trafficking. Since having fully served his prison sentence, Mr. Moontri has experienced an unjust and merciless three-month extension of that sentence with no end in sight. 

Taxpayers already have spent far more for Mr. Moontri's detention than would have been spent for his removal. We, his advocates, are more than willing to purchase his airfare to Thailand if permitted. We have built a future for him there with good people who anxiously await his return. This could be remedied easily by your office with a simple phone call.

There is much more to this story which should become part of your discernment on the right course of action. Pornchai Moontri was a child victim of human trafficking. He was abandoned by his mother at age two in Thailand. She fell under the influence and control of an American, Richard Alan Bailey, who brought her to the U.S.  After a passage of nine years, Bailey sent her to retrieve Pornchai at age eleven and bring him to this country. 

Pornchai was imprisoned by Bailey who repeatedly raped and beat him. At age thirteen he escaped but was returned by local police who did not understand his Thai protests. At age fourteen he escaped again and became a homeless adolescent living on the streets of a foreign country. At age eighteen, intoxicated and broken, he took a man's life during a struggle. 

While awaiting trial at age eighteen in 1992, Pornchai was visited by his mother who told him that Richard Bailey would harm her if Pornchai divulged any of what had happened to him. In fear for his mother’s life, Pornchai thus remained silent throughout his trial, refusing to participate in his own defense. In 2000, while attempting to leave Richard Bailey, Pornchai's mother was murdered on the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam while in Bailey's company. She was beaten to death. This matter remains an unsolved “cold case” homicide despite new evidence pointing to an obvious suspect who has never answered for this crime.

In 2018, after becoming fully aware of this story, from articles I had written and published, Pornchai's advocates brought Richard Bailey to justice. On September 12, 2018 Bailey was convicted in Penobscot (Maine) Superior Court on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai Moontri. 

A simple Google search of "Pornchai Moontri" will reveal much documentation of the above. It will also reveal the talented, gifted, intelligent man that Pornchai has become. Pornchai became a devout Catholic convert and a celebrated member of the Divine Mercy movement in the Catholic Church. He has been the subject of numerous published articles and a book, Loved, Lost, Found by Marian Press editor and author, Felix Carroll. 

As I mentioned above, it would be both justice and mercy if Pornchai's deportation order could be commuted, but he would nonetheless leave the United States for Thailand of his own accord. A life and future have been built for him there as a valued member of Divine Mercy Thailand. Regardless of what you decide in this matter, Mr. President, we implore you to help us get him out of ICE custody to commence rapid repatriation to his native land. Pornchai has suffered more than enough for one lifetime. 

Respectfully Yours, 

Father Gordon J. MacRae

BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com

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Editor’s Note: Please also read and share these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls: 

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

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Help Pornchai

Please help us seek the assistance of President Trump by adding your voice to this petition. Please copy and paste the statement below to: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ in the section WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY?

Re: Pornchai Moontri ICE detention A-039064244

Pornchai went to prison at age eighteen for a crime of desperation. Having served his prison sentence in full, he was released at age forty-seven to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation to his native Thailand.

Pornchai was taken from Thailand at age eleven as a victim of human trafficking by an American who has recently been convicted of forty felony counts of sexual assault against Pornchai as a child.

With the help from a Catholic priest in prison, Pornchai sought counseling for severe PTSD, became educated graduating with highest honors, completed numerous programs in restorative justice and mental health, and is today a celebrated Catholic convert and member of the Divine Mercy movement in the Catholic Church. He has been the subject of numerous published articles and a book.

Now he is an ICE detainee held far beyond his sentence at an overcrowded for-profit ICE facility in Jena, LA. His ninety day travel documents issued by his embassy were allowed to expire with no action on his removal.

If you Google "Pornchai Moontri" you will be hard pressed to find a "criminal alien" in the results. As a person who has followed the story of Pornchai Moontri, I implore our government to secure the immediate repatriation of this remarkable man and survivor.

For further info, contact: maxmoontri (at) gmail (dot) com

Thank you!

The Once and Future Catholic Church

The Book of Daniel and the Gospel of Mark warn of a great tribulation to come. Its early signs are already upon us and require invoking the Patron Saint of Justice.

A strange case has been simmering in the courts of the European Union for several years, and it came to an even stranger close at the end of October 2018. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld a 2011 Austrian court verdict against a seminar presenter, a woman, for “disparaging religious doctrines.” In a 2009 seminar sponsored by the conservative Freedom Party in Austria, the woman recounted an event in the life of Muhammad ibn Abd Allah whose 7th Century proclamations of the Qur’an gave birth to Islam. The event is well documented.

In 620 AD, at the age of 56, soon after the death of his first wife, Muhammad married a young girl named A’isha. At the time of their marriage, A’isha was six years old. Muhammad described her as “very attractive and of a lively mind.” Many of the revelations resulting in the Qur’an occurred while he was in her company.

One day, when she was left behind during one of Muhammad’s expeditions, she returned to the group accompanied by a young man. This set off a monstrous scandal that threw the girl’s marital fidelity into doubt. Muhammad then dictated what he described as a divine revelation that assured him of her innocence. This story is recounted in the Qur’an (24:11-20).

In 2009, in an Austrian seminar entitled “Basic Information about Islam,” the seminar presenter described the story of the marriage of Muhammad and A’isha, concluding, “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old?… What do we call it if not pedophilia?” In 2011, the Austrian court convicted the woman, imposing a fine for statements that constitute “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam.”

The woman appealed the verdict to the European Court of Human Rights. In later 2018, the verdict was unanimously upheld by an ECHR panel of seven judges including judges from Ireland, Germany, and France. The ECHR judges reasoned that the marriage between Muhammad and six-year-old A’isha lasted until Muhammad’s death when A’isha was 18-years-old. Thus, according to the court, “the marriage need not be motivated by pedophilia.”

The ECHR further reasoned that the convicted woman’s observations about the marriage could “stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace” and “could only be understood as having been aimed at demonstrating that Muhammad was not worthy of worship.” The ECHR arrived at this conclusion after having “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.”

I could go into a long protracted analysis of a double standard in what constitutes “stirring up prejudice and threatening religious peace” — and how political correctness influences it — but I think you may already get the point. If you contrast the above story with the treatment the Catholic Church has been receiving in the news media and power centers of Western Culture, the duplicity is not at all subtle.

Sometimes you have to stand back a little from scandal in the Catholic Church to see a more panoramic view. The scandals feel less personal then, but also seem more ominous. A view from a little distance will leave you with a sense that there have been, and still are, some nefarious agendas behind the scenes of the Catholic abuse story.

The truth is that the world in which we live is retreating from all the institutions that once gave us meaning and purpose, and, most important of all, identity. “Losing my religion” is not just a 1991 pop culture hit by R.E.M. It is a cultural calamity.

The State of the Union

Without doubt, trust in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has been strained in recent years. There is no denying it, and some of that distrust is justified by inconvenient truths that too many have tried to keep hidden. But look around you. Where DO you place your trust? Our politics are at the brink of civil war. Our news media once respected as the “Fourth Estate,” has hit rock bottom in public trust. Among polls of Americans, Congress is the second lowest source of trust among all institutions and the news media lower even than that.

Fatherhood has retreated into the forests. Families are falling apart. Gender has become confused, and a product of the will instead of the heart of one’s identity. In the Western world, the psyches of the young have become fragile. Universities pamper screaming mobs of students who block points of view that challenge them. Conservatives make them feel “unsafe.”

Colleges hire grief counselors to help 20-something year-old men and women cope with a C-level grade, or the trauma of being exposed to ideals, or of seeing a mouse in their dorm room. The resilience of young people — though still with some courageous exceptions — is under siege.

Politically, we are at each others’ throats in a game of one-upmanship and gotcha. It seemed to reach its most hurtful and horrifying peak in the public spectacle to which we were subjected in the Senate confirmation hearings for “Justice Brett Kavanaugh, guilty for being accused.” That was the point at which I realized that we have reached a new low, and cannot descend much further without dissolving our union in hate.

In October 2018, a middle-aged man in Florida mailed pipe bombs to a long list of political figures with whom he disagrees. Then a middle-aged man in Pittsburgh, a Holocaust denier on social media, killed eleven worshippers in a Synagogue after posting a rant about Jews and President Trump. Much of the news media played down the fact that the man despised Trump. Politics, that once honorable favorite pastime of America, has become dangerous.

Our Once and Future Faith

The same is true or is fast becoming true, in our Church. Canadian Catholic blogger, Michael Brandon wrote in response to a post on this blog  a while back: “The Catholic Church has become the safest place in the world for children, and the most dangerous place in the world for Catholic priests.” I wrote of the origin for that conclusion in a controversial post that was shared 25,000 times on social media: “Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.”

The news media would have us all believing that the now forty-year-old sexual abuse scandal “could bring down the Catholic Church.” This is nonsense. The Church will survive this, but there is a far more pernicious threat that the news media makes it a point not to cover. I found a scary analysis of it in “The Catholic Crisis,” a fine article in Commentary (May 2018), by Sohrab Ahmari who also has a panoramic view of why Catholicism stands at a precipice and, surprise, the sexual abuse story is but a symptom of it, not the cause.

Sohrab Ahmari was the London editor of The Wall Street Journal.  A senior writer at Commentary, he is currently an editor for the New York Post and author of From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith. His article, “The Catholic Crisis” is a review of a new book by The New York Times’ columnist, Ross Douthat, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.

Both Ahmari and Douthat note that “the principal duty of a Catholic” is not to the pope, but to “the truth the papacy exists to preach, to preserve, and to defend.” Mr. Ahmari wrote:

“There is a reason to worry that lately a spirit of relativism has entered the Roman Church that threatens to undermine its unity and catholicity. That should concern Catholics and non-Catholics because the Church is the living bedrock of the West and one of the last bastions of the principal that moral truth is moral truth yesterday, today, a thousand years from now.”

In Pope Francis, both writers see a papacy that “thrives in ambiguity.” Their evidence is found among a list of perplexing notions including recent comments by Pope Francis calling into question the existence of hell. Defenders of the Pope excused the incident as a misreading of the Pope’s remarks by leftist, atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari. However, as Ahmari points out, this particular faux pas was the fifth  interview Pope Francis has granted to this journalist.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis has remained unresponsive to a request for dialogue and clarification on some controversial points in Amoris laetitia. American Cardinal Raymond Burke and other conservative cardinals posed a series of “Dubia” asking whether the prohibition on authorizing communion for those divorced and remarried in a civil, but not sacramental, union still stands. The pope, according to Ahmari, “first ignored, and then ridiculed them.”

Mr. Ahmari also reports on Ross Douthat’s “fascinating speculation” on the future of Catholicism, and it is one in which conservatives should find cause for hope. As I have written in previous posts, the Church and faith will survive this current age of doubt. In the meantime, fidelity is our only effective response to it. But Ross Douthat offers a more sobering source of hope summarized by Ahmari:

“The liberals simply don’t have the numbers… theological liberalism is in demographic decline, and liberal orders struggle to attract vocations. Church coffers may be full, but the pews are empty. The leading lights of theological liberalism are octogenarians, and there are no successors in the wings.

“Conservatives and traditionalists, meanwhile, have the numbers, the intellects, the energy. Orders that prize tradition and orthodoxy are thriving worldwide. In population terms, Africa is a beacon of hope for conservatives, a continent where weekly Mass attendance averages 70 percent (compared with just 20 percent in Europe) and where the Church wins nine million new believers each year.”

Quite by accident in the last few weeks, I came across a much more local summation of the state of the Church in North America, and it seems bleak. At least, it did for me until I got to the last few stunning paragraphs.

In a climate in which I thought the faithful had abandoned the notion of the Church as a mirror of justice, a faithful Catholic, a lawyer no less, concluded his stunning take on the state of the Church by profiling what the witch hunt has meant for one wrongly imprisoned priest. Don’t miss “Priests, Good and Bad” by Frank Friday published at American Thinker (October 27, 2018).

The Patron Saint of Justice

Some extraordinary things can be found in Ordinary Time. It is by no human design that readings assigned long ago for the Sunday liturgy arose just weeks ago at a time of tribulation for the Catholic Church. The readings for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time were anything but ordinary. Their timing seems a divinely inspired gift.

But before I proceed down this path through the labyrinthine ways of Sacred Scripture, I want to share with you a message from a very good priest and a friend, Father Stuart MacDonald. Writing from Ontario, Father Stuart is a canon lawyer and author of the TSW  guest post, “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

This is a time of great tribulation for faithful Catholics, and especially so for priests who feel their loyalties torn and their allegiance under clouds of doubt. I am not shielded behind These Stone Walls from the doubt and pain experienced by so many priests right now.

A few weeks ago, Father Stuart sent a series of messages to me containing Archbishop Viganò’s published response to Cardinal Ouellet. Archbishop Viganò has challenged Pope Francis for his handling of the Cardinal McCarrick affair and other matters. I wrote about this in a series of posts I will link at the end of this one.

Just days before sitting down to type this post, wondering what on earth I could write about without taking a side on the vortex of information and misinformation, Father Stuart sent me this message:

“I have been so shaken by all this that a few weeks ago, I informed my small congregation that henceforth all weekday masses would be ad orientem because the time has come to focus on Christ and not the cult of the priest and his performance. I pray the canon in Latin sotto voce now and we pray the Prayer to St. Michael at the end of every mass. Call me foolish if you want, but it is the only way I am going to survive.”

The world might call him foolish, but I could only call him faithful. And like me, he perhaps had no idea when he wrote that message that the Mass readings for the following Sunday, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, provided a solid basis in Scripture for what he has undertaken. The Book of Daniel (12:1-3) calls upon Michael, the Great Prince, and Guardian of the Faithful of God, while the Gospel of Mark (13:24-32) warns of a time of great tribulation. For many, that time has come. I can only add to Father Stuart’s resolve the words of Saint Peter, Bishop of Rome:

“Stay sober and alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, knowing that the same suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world.”

— 1 Peter 5:8-9

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. You may also like this related post from Father Gordon MacRae at These Stone Walls:

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix

Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy

What do John Wayne and Pornchai Moontri Have In Common?

As Advent begins in the midst of some long-awaited changes and revisions in the Catholic Mass, I have been doing some thinking about the nature of change.

In “February Tales,” an early post at Beyond These Stone Walls, I described growing up on the Massachusetts North Shore — the stretch of seacoast just north of Boston. My family had a long tradition of being “Sacrament Catholics.”

I once heard my father joke that he would enter a church only twice in his lifetime, and would be carried both times. I was seven years old, squirming into a hand-me-down white suit for my First Communion when I first heard that excuse for staying home. I didn’t catch on right away that my father was referring to his Baptism and his funeral. I pictured him, a very large man, slung over my mother’s shoulder on his way into church for Sunday Mass, and I laughed.

We were the most nominal of Catholics. Prior to my First Communion at age seven, I was last in a Catholic church at age five for the priesthood ordination of my uncle, the late Father George W. MacRae, a Jesuit and renowned Scripture scholar. My father and “Uncle Winsor,” as we called him, were brothers — just two years apart in age but light years apart in their experience of faith. I was often bewildered, as a boy, at this vast difference between the two brothers.

But my father’s blustering about his abstention from faith eventually collapsed under the weight of his own cross. It was a cross that was partly borne by me as well, and carried in equal measure by every member of my family. By the time I was ten — at the very start of that decade of social upheaval, life in our home had disintegrated. My father’s alcoholism raged beyond control, nearly destroying him and the very bonds of our family. We became children of the city streets as home and family faded away.

I have no doubt that many readers can relate to the story of a home torn asunder by alcoholism, and some day soon I plan to write much more about this cross. But for now I want to write about conversion, so I’ll skip ahead.

The Long and Winding Road Home

As a young teenager, I had a friend whose family attended a small Methodist church. I stayed with them from time to time. They knew I was estranged from my Catholic faith and Church, so one Sunday morning they invited me to theirs. As I sat through the Methodist service, I just felt empty inside. There was something crucial missing. So a week later, I attended Catholic Mass — secretly and alone — with a sense that I was making up for some vague betrayal. At some point sitting in this Mass alone at age 15, I discovered that I was home.

My father wasn’t far behind me. Two years later, when just about everyone we knew had given up any hope for him, my father underwent a radical conversion that changed his very core. He admitted himself to a treatment program, climbed the steep and arduous mountain of recovery, and became our father again after a long, turbulent absence. A high school dropout and machine shop laborer, my father’s transformation was miraculous. He went back to school, completed a college degree, earned his masters degree in social work, and became instrumental in transforming the lives of many other broken men. He also embraced his Catholic faith with love and devotion, and it embraced him in return. That, of course, is all a much longer story for another day.

My father died suddenly at the age of 52 just a few months after my ordination to priesthood in 1982. I remember laying on the floor during the Litany of the Saints at my ordination as I described in “Going My Way,” a Lenten post last year. I was conscious that my father stood on the aisle just a few feet away, and I was struck by the nature of the man whose impact on my life had so miraculously changed. Underneath the millstones of addiction and despair that once plagued him was a singular power that trumped all. It was the sheer courage necessary to be open to the grace of conversion and radical change. The most formative years of my young adulthood and priesthood were spent as a witness to the immensity of that courage. In time, I grew far less scarred by my father’s road to perdition, and far more inspired by his arduous and dogged pursuit of the road back. I have seen other such miracles, and learned long ago to never give up hope for another human being.

The Conversion of the Duke

A year ago this very week, I wrote “Holidays in the Hoosegow: Thanksgiving With Some Not-So-Just Desserts.” In that post, I mentioned that John Wayne is one of my life-long movie heroes and a man I have long admired. But all that I really ever knew of him was through the roles he played in great westerns like “The Searchers,” “The Comancheros,” “Rio Bravo,” and my all-time favorite historical war epic, “The Longest Day.”

In his lifetime, John Wayne was awarded three Oscars and the Congressional Gold Medal. After his death from cancer in 1979, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But, for me, the most monumental and courageous of all of John Wayne’s achievements was his 1978 conversion to the Catholic faith.

Not many in Hollywood escape the life it promotes, and John Wayne was no exception. The best part of this story is that it was first told by Father Matthew Muñoz, a priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and John Wayne’s grandson.

Early in his film career in 1933, John Wayne married Josephine Saenz, a devout Catholic who had an enormous influence on his life. They gave birth to four children, the youngest of whom,  Melinda, was the mother of Father Matthew Muñoz. John Wayne and Josephine Saenz civilly divorced in 1945 as Hollywood absorbed more and more of the life and values of its denizens.

But Josephine never ceased to pray for John Wayne and his conversion, and she never married again until after his death. In 1978, a year before John Wayne died, her prayer was answered and he was received into the Catholic Church. His conversion came late in his life, but John Wayne stood before Hollywood and declared that the secular Hollywood portrayal of the Catholic Church and faith is a lie, and the truth is to be found in conversion.

That conversion had many repercussions. Not least among them was the depth to which it inspired John Wayne’s 14-year old grandson, Matthew, who today presents the story of his grandfather’s conversion as one of the proudest events of his life and the beginning of his vocation as a priest.

If John Wayne had lived to see what his conversion inspired, I imagine that he, too, would have stood on the aisle, a monument to the courage of conversion, as Matthew lay prostrate on the Cathedral floor praying the Litany of the Saints at priesthood ordination. The courage of conversion is John Wayne’s most enduring legacy.

Pornchai Moontri Takes a Road Less Traveled

The Japanese Catholic novelist, Shusaku Endo, wrote a novel entitled Silence (Monumenta Nipponica, 1969), a devastating historical account of the cost of discipleship. It’s a story of 17th Century Catholic priests who faced torture and torment for spreading the Gospel in Japan. The great Catholic writer, Graham Greene, wrote that Silence is “in my opinion, one of the finest novels of our time.”

Silence is the story of Father Sebastian Rodriguez, one of those priests, and the story is told through a series of his letters. Perhaps the most troubling part of the book was the courage of Father Rodriguez, a courage difficult to relate to in our world. Because of the fear of capture and torture, and the martyrdom of every priest who went before him, Father Rodriguez had to arrive in Japan for the first time by rowing a small boat alone in the pitch blackness of night from the comfort and safety of a Spanish ship to an isolated Japanese beach in 1638 — just 18 years after the Puritan Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Squanto’s Pawtuxet, half a world away as I describe in “The True Story of Thanksgiving.”

In Japan, however, Father Rodriguez was a pilgrim alone. Choosing to be left on a Japanese beach in the middle of the night, he had no idea where he was, where he would go, or how he would survive. He had only the clothes on his back, and a small traveler’s pouch containing food for a day. I cannot fathom such courage. I don’t know that I could match it if it came down to it.

But I witness it  every single day. Most of our readers are very familiar with “Pornchai’s Story,” and with his conversion to Catholicism on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. Most know the struggles and special challenges he has faced as I wrote in “Pornchai Moontri, Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

But the greatest challenge of Pornchai’s life is yet to come. In two years he will have served twenty-two years in prison — more than half his life, and half the original sentence of forty-five years imposed when he was 18 years old. In two years time, if many elements fall into place and he can find legal counsel, Pornchai will have an opportunity to seek some commutation of his remaining sentence based on rehabilitation and other factors.

It is a sort of Catch-22, however. Pornchai could then see freedom at the age of forty for the first time since he was a teen, but it will require entering a world entirely foreign to him. On the day Pornchai leaves prison — whether it is in two years or ten or twenty — he will be immediately taken into custody under the authority of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, flown to Bangkok, Thailand, and left there alone. It is a daunting, sometimes very frightening future, and I am a witness to the anxiety it evokes.

For every long term prisoner, there comes a point in which prison itself is the known world and freedom is a foreign land. Pornchai has spent more than half his life in prison.

Even I, after seventeen years here, sometimes find myself at the tipping point, that precipice in which a prisoner cannot readily define which feels more like the undiscovered country — remaining in prison or trying to be free. I had a dream one night in which I had won my freedom, but entered a hostile world and Church in which I was a pariah, living alone and homeless in a rented room in hiding, pursued by mobs of angry Catholics.  I know well the anxious fears of all the prisons of men.

Pornchai was brought to the United States against his will at the age of eleven. That story is told in deeply moving prose by Pornchai himself in “Pornchai’s Story.” I think we became friends because by the strangeness of grace I knew only too well the experience of having the very foundations of life and family and all security fall out from under me. Pornchai spoke a language that I understood clearly. The transformation of pain and sorrow into the experience of grace is the realm of God, and enduring it to one day lead another out of darkness is a great gift. In the end, who can ever say what is good and what is bad? It is not suffering that is our problem, but rather what we do with it when it finds us.

But what Pornchai faces in the future is daunting. With no opportunity for schooling as an abandoned child in Thailand, he never learned to read and write in Thai and hasn’t heard the Thai language spoken since he was eleven. He remembers little of Thai culture, has no prospects to support himself, no home there, no contacts, and no solace at all. Like Father Rodriguez in Silence, Pornchai will be dropped off in a foreign country, and left to fend for himself with no preparation at all beyond what he can scrape up from behind prison walls in another continent. Welcome to the new America!

Pornchai’s options are limited. He can try to bring about this trauma sooner by seeking commutation of his sentence at an age at which he may still somehow build a life in Thailand. Or he can remain quietly in prison another decade or more, postponing this transition until he is much older, with fewer chances for employment, but perhaps can find connections in Thailand.

These are not great choices. “Pornchai’s Story” got the attention of the Thai government and the Cardinal Archbishop of Bangkok two years ago, but the Thai government has been in chaos since, and the Archbishop has retired. All overtures to both since 2009 have been met by silence.

So in the midst of all this dismal foreboding, and in the face of a future entirely unknown, and perhaps even bleak, Pornchai Moontri became a Catholic. He embraced a faith practiced by less than one percent of the people who will one day be his countrymen again, and in so doing, he piled alienation upon alienation.

And yet this man who has no earthly reason to trust anything to fate, trusts faith itself. I have never met a man more determined to live the faith he has professed than Pornchai Moontri. In the darkness and aloneness of a prison cell night after night for the last two of his twenty years in prison, Pornchai stares down the anxiety of uncertainty, struggles for reasons to believe, and finds them.

I am at a loss for more concrete sources of hope for Pornchai. But like Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, whom I have quoted so often, I believe that “I am a link in a chain; a bond of connection between persons.”

Someone out there holds good news for Pornchai — something he can cling to in hope. I await it with as much patience as I can summon. Pornchai awaits it with a singular courage — the courage of conversion that seeks the spring of hope in the winter of despair.

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The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts

The concept of Purgatory is repugnant to those who do not understand Scripture, and a source of fear for many who do, but beyond the Cross, it is a source of hope.

All Souls Day

Twenty-four hours after this is posted, it will no longer be All Souls Day. I risk losing everyone’s interest as we all move on to the daily grind of living. But I am not at all concerned. We’re also in the daily grind of dying. Death is all around us — it’s all around me, at least — and never far from conscious concern. Death was part of the daily prayer of Saint Padre Pio as well:

“Stay with me, Lord, for it is getting late; the days are coming to a close and life is passing. Death, judgment and eternity are drawing near.”

— From “Stay with me, Lord,” a prayer after Communion by Padre Pio

I have never feared death. At least, I have never feared the idea of dying. It’s just the inconvenience of it that bothers me most, not knowing when or how. The very notion of leaving this world with my affairs undone or half done is appalling to me. The thought that Someone knows of that moment but won’t share this news with me makes me squirm. “You know not the day nor the hour” (Matthew 24:36) is, for me, one of the most ominous verses in all of Scripture.

But even when a lot younger, I never thought I would have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of this life and into the next one. I think it’s because I have always had a strong belief in Purgatory. It’s one of the most wonderful and hopeful tenets of the Catholic faith that salvation isn’t necessarily a black and white affair driven solely by the peaks and valleys of this life. I have never been so arrogant as to believe that my salvation is a done deal. I have also never been so self-deprecating as to believe that God waits for the extinction of both our lives and our souls.

It is the mystery of “Hesed,” the balance of justice with mercy that I wrote of in “Angelic Justice,” that is the foundation of Purgatory. In God’s great Love for us, and in His Divine Mission to preserve that part of us that is in His image and likeness — something this world cannot possibly do — God has left a loophole in the law.  It’s a way for sinners who love and trust Him, and seek to know Him, to come to Him through Christ to be redeemed. The very notion of Purgatory fills me with hope, and I’m hoping for it. It’s largely because of Purgatory that I do not fear death.

All Souls Day was first observed in the Catholic Church in the monastery of Cluny in France in the year 988. It was originally about Purgatory, and not just death. The monks at Cluny set aside the day after the Feast of All Saints — which began two centuries earlier — to devote a day of prayer and giving alms to assist the souls of our loved ones in Purgatory. In the Second Book of Maccabees (12:46) Judas Maccabeus “made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sin.”

Purgatory itself has, since the earliest Christian traditions, been a tenet of faith in which the souls of those who have left this world in God’s friendship are purified and made ready for the Presence of God. The Eastern and Latin churches agree that it is a place of intense suffering, and I’m looking forward to my stint.

Okay, I’ll admit that sounds a little weird. It isn’t as though thirty years in prison has conditioned me for ever more punishment. I do not find punishment to be addictive at all, especially when I did not commit the crime. The punishment of Purgatory, however, is something I know I cannot evade.  The intense suffering of Purgatory is entirely a spiritual suffering, and it begins with our experience of death right here. The longing with which we sometimes agonize over the loss of those we love is but a shadow of something spiritual we have yet to share with them: The Holy Longing they must endure as they await being in the Presence of God. That Holy Longing is Purgatory. It is the delay of the beatific vision for which we were created, and that delay and its longing is a suffering greater than we can imagine.

Death, Drawing Near

Years ago, an old friend came to me after having lost his wife of sixty years. I could only imagine what this was like for him. After her funeral and burial all his relatives finally went home, and he was alone in his grief. When we met, he told me of the intensity of his suffering. My heart was broken for him, but something in his grief struck me. I asked him not to waste this suffering, but rather to see it as a part of the longing his dear wife now has as she awaits her place in the fullness of God’s Presence. I suggested that his longing for her was but a shadow of her intense longing for God and perhaps they could go through this together. I asked him to offer his daily experience of grief for the soul of his wife.

He later told me that this advice sparked something in him that made him embrace both his grief and his loss by seeing it in a new light. Every moment in those first days and weeks and months without her was an agony that he found himself offering for her and on her behalf. He said this didn’t make any of his suffering go away, but it filled him with hope and a renewed sense of purpose. It gave meaning to his suffering which would otherwise have seemed empty.

Though I could not possibly relate to his loss, I know only too well the experience of being stranded by the deaths of others. In early Advent one year, I wrote “And Death’s Dark Shadow Put to Flight.” The title was a line from the hauntingly beautiful Advent hymn, “0 Come, 0 Come Emmanuel” that we will all be hearing in a few weeks.

That post, however, was about the death of Father Michael Mack, a Servant of the Paraclete, a co-worker, and a dear friend who was murdered in the first week of Advent. It took place on December 7th. It was a senseless death — by our standards, anyway — brought upon this 60-year-old priest and good friend by Stephen A. Degraff, a young man who took Father Mike’s life for the contents of his wallet. A part of my share in his Purgatory was to pray not only for Michael Mack, but for Stephen Degraff as well.

On the evening of December 7, 2001, Father Michael Mack returned to his home after some time helping out in a remote New Mexico diocese. Saint Paul wrote that “the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). For Father Michael, it did just that. But for me in prison 2,000 miles away, awareness of this loss took time. No one can telephone me in prison, and I can usually only be reached by mail. It turned out that Father Michael sat at a desk in his home and wrote a letter to me on the night he died — all the while oblivious to the danger lurking in a closet in that same room. Father Mike took the letter outside to his mailbox and then walked back inside and into the moment of his death.

Three days later, after prison mail call, I sat at a small table outside my cell with the letter from Father Mike in my hands. I was so glad to hear from him. As I sat there reading the letter with a smile on my face, another prisoner asked if I wanted to see the previous day’s Boston Globe. With Father Mike’s letter in my left hand, I absentmindedly turned to page two of the Globe to see a tiny headline under National News: “New Mexico priest murdered.” Father Michael Mack’s name jumped from the page, and a part of me died just there.

All the Catholic rituals through which we bid farewell and accept the reality of death in hope are denied to a prisoner. I had only that last letter describing all Father Mike’s hopes and dreams and renewed energy for a priestly ministry to other wounded priests. Then after he signed it and scribbled in a PS — “Looking forward to hearing from you” — he walked right into his death.

This wasn’t the last time such a thing happened. This is the 30th time I mark All Souls Day in prison, and the list of souls I once knew in this life — and still know — has grown longer. In “A Corner of the Veil,” I wrote of the death of my mother — imprisoned herself during three years of grueling sickness just seventy miles from this prison, but I could not see her, speak with her, or assure her in any way except through letters that could not be answered. She died November 5, 2006. Last week, I received a letter from BTSW readers Tom and JoAnn Glenn which included a beautiful photograph of my mother imprinted on a prayer card.  They found the photograph on line.  I had never seen it, and was so grateful that they sent this to me.

No news of death has ever come to me with more devastation than that of my friend, Father Clyde Landry. Father Mike Mack, Father Clyde, and I were co-workers and good friends, sharing office space in the years we worked in ministry to wounded priests at the Servants of the Paraclete Center in New Mexico. I was Director of Admissions and Father Clyde was Director of Aftercare. A priest of the Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Father Clyde had a Cajun accent reminiscent of that famous Cajun television chef, Justin Wilson — “I Gar-on-TEE!”

The Dark Night of the Soul

On that night of Gethsemane when I was falsely accused and arrested, it was Father Clyde who first came to my aid, and stood by me throughout. When I was sent to prison, Father Clyde became my lifeline to the outside world. I called him every Saturday. It became a part of my routine, like clockwork. It was through Father Clyde that once a week I reached out to the outside world for news of friends and news of freedom. He held a small account for me to help with expenses such as telephone costs, food and clothing, small things that make a prisoner’s life more bearable. Most important of all, Father Clyde volunteered to be the keeper of everything of value that I owned.

By “everything of value,” I do not mean riches. I never had any. He kept the Chalice that was given to me at priesthood ordination. He kept the stoles that were made for me, and the small things that were dear to my life and priesthood.

He kept the irreplaceable photos of my parents — both gone now — and all the things that were a lifetime’s proof of my own existence. Everything that I left behind for prison hoping to one day see again was in the possession of Father Clyde.

A year after Father Michael Mack’s tragic death, I received a joyous letter from Father Clyde. He had a new life in ministry as administrator of a very busy retreat center in New Mexico, and he was looking forward to starting. He had also purchased a small home near the center in a beautiful part of Albuquerque. It was the first time in his 52 years that he had owned any home. It was a sign of the stability that he longed for, and a sign of his great love for the retreat ministry he was undertaking.

Father Clyde’s letter was very careful to include me in this transition. He had packed all my possessions and would place them in his spare room which he promised would be available to me whenever I was released from my nightmare. His letter was the last he wrote from his vacant apartment, all his boxes stacked just next to him. He wanted me to know that by the time I received his letter he would be moved and settled and ready for my call the following Saturday.

I received Father Clyde’s letter on a Friday evening, and tried to call his new number the next day. I got only a recorded message that the number was disconnected. In prison, no one can call me and I am unable to leave messages on any answering machine or voice mail. So I called another friend to ask if he would please send an e-mail message for me. My friend fired up his computer and asked, “Where’s it going?” I gave him the e-mail address and started my message.

“Hello Clyde,” I said. “I hope you are getting settled.” Instead of hearing the clicks of my friend’s keyboard, however, I heard only silence. He wasn’t typing. I asked him what was wrong, and knew instantly from his hesitation that something was very wrong.

“Oh, My God!” he said. “You don’t know!” He then told me that my friend, Father Clyde, never made it to his new home. When he did not show up for the signing appointment with his realtor, a search was underway. Father Clyde was found in his apartment on the floor next to the last box he had packed. At age 52, he had suffered a fatal heart attack.

Father Clyde had been gone three days by the time I learned this. No one could reach me. With Father Clyde’s letter in my left hand, I was stunned as my friend described all he knew of Father Clyde’s death, which wasn’t much. It would be many days before I could learn anything more.

In the weeks and months to follow, I was stranded in a way that I had never experienced before. I was not just alone in my grief. I was alone in prison, 2,000 miles from the world I knew and the only contacts I had, and my sole connection with the outside world was gone. It would be another seven years before the idea of this blog  emerged, and I would once again reach out from prison to the outside world.

But for those seven years, I was stranded. On the Saturday after I learned of Fr. Clyde’s death, I recall sitting in my cell from where I could see the bank of prisoner telephones along one wall out in the dayroom, and I cried for the first time in many, many years. In the months to follow, everything that I once hoped one day to see again was lost. I do not know what became of any of Father Clyde’s things, or my own. I have come to know that this happens to many prisoners. Cut off from the world outside, our losses can be catastrophic.

But I came to know that grief is a gift, and I have offered it not only for the souls of Fathers Clyde, Mike, and Moe — and for my dear mother — but for the souls of all who touched my life, and in that offering I had something to share with them — a Holy Longing.

When I wrote “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” it was about Purgatory. It was about my continued hope for the soul of Father Richard Lower, a brother priest driven to take his own life in a dark night all alone when all trust was broken and hope seemed but a distant dream. I have been where he was, and my response to his death was “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

At the end of “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” I included a portion of the “Prayer of Gerontius” by Saint John Henry Newman. It’s a beautiful verse about Purgatory that calls forth the abiding hope we have for our loved ones who have died, and also recalls that one thing we have left to share with them — a Holy Longing for their presence, and, in their company, for the Presence of God:

Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

And carefully, I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the Earth and prayers in Heaven,
Shall aid thee at the throne of the most Highest.

Farewell, but not forever! Brother dear;
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.

— John Henry Cardinal Newman, Conclusion, “The Prayer of Gerontius”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading. Please share this post so that it may come before someone who is grieving. You may also wish to read these related posts linked herein:

A Corner of the Veil

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

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead