“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
A Priest and Prisoner in the Light of Divine Mercy
Fr Seraphim Michalenko, Fr Michael Gaitley, Fr Gordon MacRae, Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll and Pornchai Moontri share the stage in a wondrous Divine Mercy drama.
Fr Seraphim Michalenko, Fr Michael Gaitley, Fr Richard Drabik, Fr Gordon MacRae, Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll and Pornchai Moontri in a wondrous Divine Mercy drama.
As a young man, I depended far too much on my own resources. I recognize today in the humility of hindsight that they were never quite up to the task. But back then, I knew everything. What a dumbass I have since become! I now know nothing, and cannot write a single word except in the light of Divine Mercy. My life’s path recalls the words of Dante Alighieri as he opened his epic literary masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. His story begins in a dark forest on Good Friday in the year 1300:
“When I had journeyed midway upon our life’s path, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the way that does not stray. How can I say what wood that was, that savage forest which even now in recall renews my fear? So bitter death is hardly more severe! But to tell the good I found there, I will also tell of the other things I saw.”
In my post two weeks ago, “Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct,” I told of some of the other things I saw — a forest of dark things like corruption and deep injustice surrounded me once. Like Dante, I cannot tell of these — though they must be told — without the light of a profoundly wonderful grace I discovered amid all that suffering.
In many posts over time, I have told snippets of the story of Divine Mercy, of how it entered midway upon my life’s journey, and of how it dramatically transcended my prison walls. I have never before put it all together in a post, and I cannot pretend to do so now because it would fill a book. Perhaps one day, if I have the tools to do so, this story will become a book. For now, however, all I have is this humble blog.
What prompted this retelling of my Divine Mercy journey is the death of Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, who on this Earth became a driving force in the beatification and canonization of St. Maria Faustina and the promotion of her famous Diary. My friend, Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll, published a moving eulogy which included this paragraph:
“Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, the world-renowned expert on the life and spirituality of St. Faustina — the man who smuggled photographic images of the pages of St. Faustina’s Diary out of Communist-occupied Poland in the 1970s and later documented her beatification and canonization miracles — died Thursday, February 11, 2021, from illness related to Covid 19. ... Side by side with Blessed Michael Sopocko, Pope St. John Paul II, and St. Faustina herself, Fr. Seraphim stands as a central figure who helped make the Divine Mercy message and devotion the greatest grassroots movement in the history of the Church.”
A few years ago, well into his eighties, Father Seraphim ventured from his home at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for a drive of several hours to Concord, New Hampshire. He came to offer Mass in prison, and to interview Pornchai Moontri and me about the substance and source of our Divine Mercy journeys as we passed through the dark wood of prison.
My story, which I have told before, begins in 1988. Father Richard Drabik, MIC was Provincial Superior of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, a post from which he wrote the Preface for Divine Mercy in My Soul, also known as the Diary of Saint Faustina. You will find his Preface at the beginning of every copy of this mysterious book.
A few years later when he concluded his term as Provincial, Father Drabik was recruited to be a spiritual director for the Servants of the Paraclete Renewal Center for priests in New Mexico where I once served as Director of Admissions. Father Richard became my spiritual director for several years, and the finest one I ever had as a priest.
Grace Follows Even the Darkest Night
I will never forget the moment Father Richard stopped by my office one night early in April, 1993 to tell me that he would be leaving that week for Rome to take part in the Beatification of Sister Maria Faustina by Pope John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday. Father Richard invited me to write a private intention to be placed on the altar for the Mass of Beatification. Then I promptly forgot all about it.
Saint Faustina was later canonized by Pope John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2000, a saint canonized by a saint. Now that I think of it, the saints who have had the most influence on my life as a priest and as a prisoner, and ultimately also on Pornchai Moontri’s life, were canonized by Pope John Paul II. Besides Saint Faustina they include Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Padre Pio, and the Beatification of Mother Teresa.
I know the latter two do not retain their Earthly titles, but I cannot imagine calling them anything else. These influencers now also include Saint John Paul II himself who left a giant footprint on both the Church and my life as a priest.
I knew nothing of Saint Faustina when Father Richard made his request, and if he ever spoke of Divine Mercy in our sessions, I retained none of it. If memory serves, I did most of the talking in spiritual direction. I hope I have since learned to listen as well. Father Richard, like many at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, is still in contact with me. I hope he might be reading this.
A week or so after inviting me to write my intention for the Mass of Beatification in Rome, I had forgotten all about it. Father Richard stopped by my office again on the night before his departure and reminded me of it. I was especially busy with God only knows what. I told him I would bring it to him in ten minutes. I then grabbed a piece of note paper and quickly wrote this spontaneous prayer:
“I ask Blessed Faustina’s intercession that I may have the strength and courage to be the priest God wants me to be.”
I sealed my intention in a small envelope and brought it to Father Richard. I watched him tuck it into a pocket of his jacket, and thought no more of it. The Beatification of Saint Faustina was presided over by Pope John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, but it was not yet called that. It was on the day of St. Faustina's Mass of Canonization, on April 30, 2000 during the Great Jubilee Year that Pope John Paul II declared in his homily that from hereon the Second Sunday of Easter will be the day of Divine Mercy.
But none of this meant anything to me. Today, it means everything to me. By the time Father Richard returned from Rome after the Mass of Beatification in 1993, I had been arrested on false charges from the distant past, and taken away. In 1994, after refusing multiple “plea deal” offers to plead guilty and serve one year in prison, I was sentenced to a term of sixty-seven years. That story is conveyed in the post cited above.
I spent the next twelve years in the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno. I heard from no one. I communicated with few. In all that time, I somehow retained an identity as a priest. Because I maintained my innocence, I spent all that time in punitive prison housing with eight men sharing each cell. An officer in that unit saw that I had a typewriter so he asked me to volunteer to type some inventory forms for him each week. After a few weeks he asked me if I wanted something in return. He meant extra food. I asked for the use of an empty storage room for one hour on Sunday nights to offer private Mass.
A Summons to Divine Mercy
It was not what this Sergeant expected to hear. He said he would have to present the unusual request to his own supervisor. Holy Week was coming up, and I hoped I might have an approval by Easter. It came a week too late. My first Mass in prison was offered in a storage closet on April 30, 2000, which I only later learned was the first official Divine Mercy Sunday and the day Saint Faustina was canonized.
That was year six, midway in my twelve years in darkness. Six years later, I was visited in prison by Father James McCurry, who is today the Minister Provincial of the Franciscan Friars Conventual of the Our Lady of the Angels Province. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he had also been a vice-postulator for the cause of sainthood for Saint Maximilian Kolbe who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. Father McCurry learned of me from some other priest. He was in the area and thought he would arrange a visit.
His first words in the visiting room, after introducing himself, were, “What do you know about St. Maximilian Kolbe?” I knew little beyond the fact that he offered his life to save that of another prisoner in the horror of Auschwitz. We talked about that but our visit was brief. He had to catch a plane. He said he would be sending me something. A week later, a small biography of Saint Maximilian arrived along with a card depicting him in both his Franciscan habit and his Auschwitz uniform.
By that time, I had been moved to slightly better prison quarters, perhaps thanks to the Sergeant who was impressed that I asked for a place to offer Mass instead of extra food. I put the image of Saint Maximilian on the battered steel mirror in my cell. Through tears, I realized that on that same day I was a priest in prison a day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. The darkness I felt was overwhelming. I would eventually write multiple posts about the impact this Saint has had on our lives, most notably “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”
Shortly after Saint Maximilian arrived on the mirror in my cell, Pornchai Moontri was sent here after fourteen grueling years lost in and out of solitary confinement in a Maine prison. I was bitter and he was broken. All hope had virtually died in our lives. Providence moved Pornchai from one place to another here, and then he ended up living with me. In his moving recent guest post, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You,” he recounted the day he first walked into my cell and saw the image of Saint Maximilian on the mirror. “Is this you?” he asked.
From that moment on, we were caught up in the grasp of Divine Mercy. As you know, Pornchai became a devout Catholic and was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. Knowing the importance of this conversion for him, I was compelled to set aside all the bitterness of false witness and wrongful imprisonment that I carried like a crushing cross in my own Calvary. Confronting the brokeness of Pornchai meant also confronting my own in the light of Divine Mercy, and it salvaged my life as a priest.
Pornchai Moontri was featured, as you know, in a profoundly wonderful book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions, by Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll. Father Seraphim Michalenko brought the book to Thailand where he presented a retreat to Divine Mercy Thailand. He read them the chapter about Pornchai, and a future, long since thought to be hopeless, was born for him.
We were also invited to take part in a series of 33-Day retreats in Father Michael Gaitley’s “Hearts Afire” program beginning with “33 Days to Morning Glory.” As a result, dozens of other prisoners followed us on this path and many were converted. I will link to the most moving of their stories at the end of this post.
And Divine Mercy has not let up — not even for a moment. I just learned that in 1994, the year I was sent to prison, Relevant Radio host, Drew Mariani, produced a film along with the Marians entitled, “Time for Mercy.” Late last month, some 26 years later, Drew Mariani interviewed me in prison. The interview is available at our “Special Events” page.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please continue to celebrate Divine Mercy this year through these additional posts with inspiring true accounts of how Divine Mercy has impacted our lives:
Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind by Michael Ciresi
I Come to the Catholic Church for Healing and Hope by Pornchai Moontri
It’s Lent. It’s Late. It’s Time to Find Our Way Home
Like no other time in history, forces in our culture are driving us toward a rapid retreat from God and the tenets of faith. Lent is our time to decide who we are.
Editor’s Note: In the photo above, Cardinal Timothy Dolan presides over Palm Sunday Mass in an empty Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
Like no other time in history, forces in our culture are driving us toward a rapid retreat from God and the tenets of faith. Lent is our time to decide who we are.
Writing the "Blessed Among Us" column for the February 2021 issue of This Day: Dai1y Prayer for Today's Catho1ic, Robert Ellsworth penned the story of Maryknoll priest, Servant of God Francis X. Ford. I was looking for the Mass readings for the First Sunday of Lent when I came upon Father Ford's story. One sentence caught my eye: He died in prison on February 21, 1952.
That was one year before I was born. Francis Ford was one of the first Americans to join the newly founded Maryknoll missionary society just out of high school in Brooklyn, New York in 1912. After priesthood ordination in 1920, he joined the first group of four Maryknoll priests on a missionary journey to China. It was there that he died, 32 years later, in a Chinese prison.
Father Ford spent many years in Kaying, in southern China. During that time he witnessed the Chinese Catholic population there rise to over 20,000. He chose to remain there during World War II, but after the war, during China’s Communist Revolution, he was imprisoned for suspected espionage. He was never tried, but during his imprisonment he was starved, beaten, and paraded before mocking crowds anxious to please the Communist regime.
During that time, the Chinese Communist government confiscated farm lands and equipment of the Church and at all American-supported missions, including Fu Jen University at Peking.
Priests in the areas most affected by Marxism were working under extensive restrictions. Some restrictions were self-imposed by the priests to avert Communist persecution of their people.
Wholesale arrests took place beginning in December 1950 when the American bishop of Wuchow and 21 Maryknoll missionaries were imprisoned. The usual charge was suspicion of espionage. Throughout this persecution, Father Ford never wavered from his faith. He wrote from prison:
“Grant us, Lord, to be the doorstep by which the multitudes may come to Thee, and if ... we are ground underfoot and spat upon and worn out, at least we shall become the King’s Highway to pathless China.”
My first reaction to the story of Father Ford was to wonder what he may today think of the secret concordat signed by Pope Francis, and recently renewed, surrendering to the Chinese Communist government the authority to appoint Catholic bishops in effective abandonment of the Underground Church to which Father Ford gave his life.
But more on that in a future post. This one is about Lent and not politics. Well ... at the moment I actually have a hard time separating the two. Lent really is about politics, but only in the sense that conversion of the heart means putting — and keeping — our politics in their proper place. Politics are a means to an end — the end hopefully being a fair and just society functioning in defense of unalienable human rights.
But Lent is also about the End itself; our end. It asks some fundamental questions of us: Who are we? Where does our treasure lie? Where are we going spiritually? Are any of our recent struggles — to which we have given so much of ourselves and our attention “paving the King’s Highway” through a pathless humanity? Are the affairs that embroil us leading us and others to Christ?
Lost in a Lenten Wilderness
Since this post began with the story of an American priest who, though innocent, died in a Chinese prison, I am faced with the possibility that I, too, though innocent, may die in an American one. As the clock ticks into another Lent — my 27th in prison that feels more probable than possible. I am not sure what I am supposed to do with that probability. It is easy for us, as a society, to point to human rights abuses in China while the plank in our own eye blinds us to ourselves.
Stumbling into the story of Father Francis X. Ford was a gift to me. Just as in his Chinese prison, I, too, was beaten, starved, and paraded before humiliating mobs. None of that has happened lately. It was all long ago, but like Father Ford, it left me at a crossroads. I had to come, as he did, to accept my Cross as “pavement on the King’s Highway” for another. Like all of us, I ultimately came into this world from dust, and to dust I shall ultimately return. In the time and space in between, I have been assigned a task. As Saint John Henry Newman prayed, “I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.”
I confess that I was bitter for a time. I wanted revenge even more than I wanted justice. I consumed it, and then it consumed me until the great mystery of Divine Providence placed my friend, Pornchai Moontri in my path. He never did or said anything to make me think this, but he was like an immovable roadblock that would not let me pass. His life events of abandonment, being used, and then discarded into years of solitary confinement left him alone in the fires of Gehenna, that ancient place of human sacrifice to a false god (2 Kings 23:10).
It was there that we met, and I came to see that my bitterness would be just the right ingredient that would push him over the edge, lost in the abyss forever. I cannot adequately describe this today, but I was mysteriously driven by grace into something that I once ascribed to Pope Benedict XVI as he left the papacy: I had to devote myself to “The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”
Fatherhood is waning in our culture, and the culture has a festering wound because of it. This absence is in no place more evident than in prison where eighty percent of the young men who land here grew up in fatherless homes. In Pornchai’s life, this wound was deeply felt. Abandoned by his first father, he was sacrificed to the fires of Gehenna by someone who exploited and abused him horribly, and then discarded him. Pornchai told me one day that I am the only person in his life to always act in his best interest.
I felt duty bound to make the sacrifices for Pornchai that others should have made, but did not. This became complicated. I had to all at once be his friend, his father, his priest, and a mirror of the Church that I had come to resent because it discarded me. I discovered that to accomplish what I was called to do, there could be no more “me.” In the process of sacrifice for another, my identity as a man and as a priest was restored. I cannot explain exactly how, but I never before in my life felt more like a father and a priest than the day Pornchai told me:
“I woke up today with a future when up to now all I ever had was a past.”
It was not long after this that Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. He chose, as you know, the name Maximilian as his Christian name. He chose it in honor of my Patron Saint, Maximilian Kolbe, whose apostolic witness, and undaunted devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was based on one immutable truth: “Love alone creates.”
You might recall that I began this post with the story of Father Francis X. Ford whose life I encountered as I searched for the Mass readings for the First Sunday of Lent. The Second Reading is from the First Letter of Saint Peter (3:18-22):
“Christ suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God. Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit. In it he also went to preach to the spirits in prison ...”
The Great and Terrible Adventure of Sacrificial Love
As much as we dislike suffering in any form, I have found that the mystery of Divine Providence sometimes causes suffering to make a surprising turn back onto itself. I wrote a post some time ago entitled, “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.” The account of Saint Maximilian’s gruesome death in an Auschwitz starvation chamber is painful. At the very same time, it is also hopeful.
Without the spontaneous sacrifice Maximilian made to exchange his life for a young, condemned prisoner, that man would never again have known freedom. His children, grandchildren and great grandchildren would never have been born. On a wider scale, the thousands of others suffering in Auschwitz who heard of this story were themselves inspired to respond to evil and suffering with their own noble defiance. And wider still, the world would have been deprived of this powerful account of the sacrifice of a father’s love that has inspired millions.
My friend Pornchai was not drawn to the Catholic faith because of anything he heard or read. It was because of something he witnessed, something that never wavered. Shortly after he was received into the Church, Pornchai asked one of his notorious “upside down” questions. His head would pop down from his upper bunk in the dark of our prison cell so that he appeared upside down as he asked, “Should we ask God for a happy ending when Father Maximilian never had one?”
I was left to ponder that question for days before I could answer that “You, Pornchai are his happy ending.” I do not know if it was adequate, and I ponder it still, but in the mystery of suffering, immense good has come from this saint. It leaves me in a terrible spiritual quandary that I have written before. I despise prison. I still, after 27 years, feel pangs of bitterness for being falsely accused, and waves of resentment for, as Father Richard John Neuhaus once described, “a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”
But I shudder to think of who and where Pornchai might be today had I not been here. God did not send me to prison. That was the work of greedy, lying men and corrupt officials. But then God did something with it that I could never have imagined. People write to me now, expressing concern that I must be heartbroken by my friend’s absence. I am not. I miss him, but behind that is an inexplicable sense of peace that the task given to me by God — a task that could be given to none other — has been fulfilled by the great gift of something that I did not even know was within me: the sacrifices of a father’s love.
I still hate prison, false witness, and corruption — perhaps now more than ever — but I cannot second guess this magnificent work of Divine Mercy. Our Church, like the world in which it lives, is permeated with the influence of evil. It is also filled with the sacrifices of its heroes like Father Francis X. Ford, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and the enduring presence of selfless sacrifice extended back over 2,000 years.
It’s Lent. It’s late. It’s time to find our way home. As Saint Peter once asked of Christ — putting all politics aside — “to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life.”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, died on February 11, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, at age 90 from Covid-19 complications. Father Seraphim was a priest of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception from the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was also Vice-Postulator for the cause of sainthood for Saint Maria Faustina. He heroically smuggled her Diary out of Communist occupied Poland where it had been supressed. He then translated the Diary into English. Along with Saint John Paul II, Father Seraphim was globally considered to be one of the premier experts on Divine Mercy.
Father Seraphim was also a good friend to Pornchai Moontri and me. He came to this prison to interview both of us in 2014 during a retreat workshop on Father Michael Gaitley’s book Consoling the Heart of Jesus.
Pornchai and I invite you to help us honor Father Seraphim by reading and sharing this post written shortly after his visit with us: "Father Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy."