South Park’s Bill Donohue Disgrace Was This Convert’s Amazing Grace

If ever there is an award for a Catholic who heroically goes above and beyond for others, Pornchai Moontri’s Nominee would be Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

April 30, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Earlier in April 2025, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York City sent out the following Media Alert to all Catholic League members:

“April 10, 2025
South Park's "Fantastic Easter Special," featuring the animated character of Bill Donohue, will air Friday morning, April 11, on Comedy Central at 4:00 a.m. ET. It can also be streamed on HBO's streaming service for those who have a subscription.”

I had the Alert sent by email to our friend Max Moontri in Pak Chong, Thailand. For those who are newer readers to this blog, Pornchai Max Moontri was my roommate for almost 16 years. His story, amazing in its own righ, was told in these pages just a week ago on Relevant Radio in an interview with The Drew Mariani Show.

Upon receipt of Bill Donohue’s Media Alert about South Park, Max wrote to me immediately to tell me that the date of the Catholic League Media Alert was also the anniversary of Max being received into the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. It is difficult to hear this entire story and still cling to any doubt about the truth and power of Divine Mercy. Pornchai Max filled in a lot of blanks so I will now turn this story over to him.

“I was a teenager when I went to prison [in 1992]. Over the next 13 years, I was sent to solitary confinement over and over, for up to three-and-a-half years at a time, because I was so hostile. The longer I was there each time, the more inhuman I felt and became. Living for years on end in solitary confinement joined with the guilt I felt for the life I took during a struggle when I was 18 years old.

“So I just gave up on myself as a human being. I sank to the very bottom of the prison I was in, and stayed there. Then, in the spring of 2005, after almost fourteen years in and out of solitary confinement in Maine’s Supermax Prison, I was told that I was to be shipped to another prison in another state. I sat for months alone in my cell wondering about whatever hell was coming next. Then one day, guards in riot gear came and chained me up….”

[Editor: You can see the solitary confinement unit that held Pornchai in PBS FRONTLINE “Solitary Nation.” If you have not seen this, you cannot begin to know what Pornchai has been through.]

While I was writing the above, I had already lived in a prison cell with Father Gordon MacRae (“Father G”) for almost five years. I shudder when I think of my life before then. It is hard to put together this series of events that seem to be disconnected from each other. It only seems that way. Going from years in brutal solitary confinement to life in a cell with a Catholic priest is something I never imagined.

When I look back, and see all the small steps in which our Blessed Mother inserted herself into my life leading me to Jesus, it seems miraculous to me. If someone else told me this story twenty years ago, I would not believe it. But there is a lot more to my story.

Most people I knew in my earlier prison were afraid of me. Most expected me to erupt in violence any minute. I liked having that reputation then. I could not see it at the time, but it protected me from ever again feeling the terror I felt from the time I was taken from Thailand at age 11 to the time I ended up a homeless teenager living alone on the streets of Bangor, Maine at age 14.

A Black Hole from Which No Light Could Escape

What happened in those three years upon my arrival in America was like a black hole from which no light could escape without Divine assistance. I kept it bottled up within me for many years in a seething rage of trauma and hurt. It became my prison within a prison. But it served a purpose. It kept everyone else away, everyone except Father G.

I have read a little about exorcism since I became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. I understand it to be the spiritual casting out of evil. My exorcism at the hands of Jesus through His priest took a long time. It had to begin with my long, slow awakening to the fact that the evil within me was not planted there by me and it was not mine to keep. It was placed in my heart and soul by someone else.

On September 12, 2018, the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary, Richard Alan Bailey, the man who violently raped and tortured me more than forty times when I was taken to America, was brought to justice. It was Father G and Beyond These Stone Walls that ultimately accomplished this. Father G wrote some articles about what happened to me. They circled the globe and eventually they found the right persons who would be instrumental in my redemption. One of those persons was Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights of which I am now a member.

Backing up a little, in Fall, 2005, I was shackled, chained, thrown into a prison van, and driven from solitary confinement in Maine to Concord, New Hampshire. I was handled like a dangerous animal, and thrown into a familiar place: another stint in solitary confinement. But it was brief. It was also in 2005 that The Wall Street Journal wrote its first articles about the injustices that happened to Father G. Not long after I first met him by “chance” one day, I read those articles.

Later in 2006, Father G and I landed in the same place. Our cells were two doors apart. I remember the first time I walked into his cell. I saw a photo on a card attached to a battered mirror on the cell wall, and the man on the card looked sort of like Father G. So I said, “Is this you?” This turned out to be the most important question of my life. Father G then told me about St. Maximilian Kolbe, about what he did in prison at Auschwitz, and about how this card came to be on his mirror. Father G wrote this story in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

Then one day came dreaded news. A U.S. Immigration Court ruled that I would be deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence. I never wanted to leave Thailand as a child. I was forcibly brought to America, and all I really knew in America was its prisons. In the meantime, my Mother — my only connection to Thailand — was murdered on the Island of Guam after she was brought there by Richard Alan Bailey. Her death remains classified there as a “cold case unsolved homicide.” It is not “unsolved” in the minds of either me or Father G.

When news of my eventual deportation came, I sank into deep depression. I knew that I had no future in Thailand. I had no future anywhere. Father G helped me appeal the deportation order, but like most such appeals, it was denied. So I just gave up again, and settled in my mind on my own “Plan B,” my eventual self-destruction. Father G confronted this setback with his own optimism that provided no hope or comfort at all. He said, “We are just going to have to build a bridge from here to Thailand.”

Who could take him seriously? I sure didn’t. We were in a prison cell thousands of miles away! All the things Father G tried to instill in me about hope and trust and surrender just felt empty again. But I had nothing else to hang onto. No hope at all. So I hung onto his.

Catholic League President Bill Donohue [l] and Pornchai Moontri at age 12 [r] just as he arrived in America and before the troubling events in this story took place.

Pornchai’s Story

Soon after this rejection from the Immigration Court, Father G came into our cell one day and told me that we have to get a summary of my life story on paper… So we talked for a long time. He asked me lots of questions and took notes. Then he helped me put it together in a four-page document. I could not see the point of it. I tried to type it on his typewriter, but my heart was not in it at all. Father G became impatient with my one-word-per-minute typing speed. So Father G took over and he typed it while I waited. He was not patient with my typing speed, but he was patient with me and my attitude of hopelessness and defeat.

After the story was typed, Father G said that he wanted my permission to send the short life story we typed to a few contacts in the outside world. He said that these were all people who had connections, and that he believed one of them would find connections for me in Thailand.

I thought this was hopeless, of course. No one is going to be interested in me. But I hate arguing so I just told him to go ahead. I believed it would come to nothing.

Dr Bill Donohue on South Park

I wrote that story with Father G’s help in 2007. When Father G said he wanted to send it out to others, I answered with a sarcastic “Whatever!” It was that word for which every parent of every adolescent wants to smack him for saying it. Father G sent my story to several people and he told me that it will come to good. Then I said it again, “Whatever!”

In coming weeks — to my shock and awe — I started receiving letters of support and encouragement. One was from Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok, Thailand. I nearly fell over when I saw the envelope with his return address and Thai stamps. Another came from Honorable Mary Ann Glendon, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. Another was from Father Richard John Neuhaus, Editor of First Things magazine. They encouraged me to cling to hope even when I saw none. And then finally one came from Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Dr. Donohue shocked me. He asked my permission for the Catholic League to publish my story.

At first, I was excited. Then the inevitable gloom within me crept back in. I did not dare to hope. Hope is not for the beaten down. It is just too painful. I told Father G I did not want others to know that I was victimized in America. I also was consumed with shame. I told Father G that I did not want to publish the story. But this gets really strange from here on.

I used to sometimes come across a horrible cartoon called South Park on the Comedy Central TV channel. South Park spared no one. They would often take famous people and create a cartoon satire to ridicule them. On April 5, 2007, I was watching an episode of South Park. It was their Easter Special. Suddenly, there on my screen was a cartoon version of Dr. Bill Donohue.

I stuck my head down from my top bunk and told Father G to turn it on. The cartoon was very disrespectful, but my first reaction was to shout, “WOW! DR DONOHUE IS REALLY FAMOUS!”

I thought he must be really good because only good people are ridiculed on South Park. Dr. Donohue was ridiculed along with Jesus and Pope Benedict in the same episode. At one point, Jesus punched Dr. Donohue. I was horrified! But this is also what changed my mind. I thought that if Dr. Donohue is brave enough to endure this ridicule, I can be too. So I asked Father G to help me write to Dr. Donohue with permission for the Catholic League to publish my story. It was because of South Park!

Two years later, in 2009, Beyond These Stone Walls began our long adventure in what Father G calls “The Great Tapestry of God.” He told me that in this life, we live only in the back of the tapestry, unable to see what all our tangled threads are producing.

Over the next decade, we together confronted evil. It was not all at once. It was in slow steps because at points along the way whenever I felt overwhelmed, I would retreat and then give up and quit. But Father G never quit. He stayed the course, patiently waiting for a better day to pull me back onto what he called “our road to Emmaus.” And staying the course meant writing about me. What he wrote started to become noticed.

Strange things began to happen. Just weeks after I was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, I read that South Park editors cancelled an episode that ridiculed Mohammed after freely ridiculing Jesus, Pope Benedict and Dr. Bill Donohue. I never watched South Park again.

But there are stranger things still. Because of what was being written about me, Clare and Malcolm Farr — husband and wife attorneys in Southwest Australia — offered to assist me pro bono. They are today among my dearest friends, but we have never actually even met in person. They performed miracles with contacts in Thailand, with an attempt to reopen the case of the murder of my Mother in Guam, and with helping Father G to bring my abuser to justice.

Then Father G received a letter from a group called Divine Mercy Thailand. The letter revealed that Marian Father Seraphim Michalenko had been in Thailand and he carried with him a copy of “Pornchai’s Story,” which he read from the Catholic League’s site to the Divine Mercy Thailand group. I learned only later from Father G that Father Seraphim Michalenko was the Vatican’s vicepostulator for the cause of sainthood of Maria Faustina Kowalska. It was Father Seraphim who smuggled Saint Faustina’s diary out of Communist Poland and assisted in its English translation. Father G wrote about this when Father Seraphim came to this prison to interview both of us. Father G’s post was “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare.”

Father Seraphim’s interest, triggered by Dr. Bill Donohue, then inspired Felix Carroll, who was then Editor of Marian Helper magazine, to contact Father G. Felix Carroll said that he posted my story from the Catholic League’s site and “it lit up our website like never before.” Felix asked that we allow him to include a chapter about me in his book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.

The miracles continued. I was visited in prison by a representative of the Royal Thai Consulate in New York who offered help in restoring my Thai citizenship and preparing me for repatriation. Then one day I was called to the prison library. The library had received a donated set of Thai language CDs which were set up on a computer for me to study. Then Divine Mercy Thailand wrote again and offered me a home. The bridge to Thailand Father G had once promised was built and I was utterly amazed. Then, in 2020, just before the pandemic took hold, Father G filed a petition on my behalf revealing all that had happened that never made its way into my trial in 1992. I was to be set free within the coming months.

I will never say “Whatever!” to Father G again. He and Bill Donohue, and even the disgraceful South Park, became the keys to the locks that held me bound. If there is ever a book called Divine Mercy Miracles, I expect to find this story in it. I am free!

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Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your Dearly Beloved Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: If you are not a member of the Catholic League, please consider lending your voice to this nation’s largest endeavor in protection of Religious Liberty: Catholic League Membership Subscription. Your membership fee also includes a one-year subscription to the Catholic League Journal Catalyst.

We also recommend these related posts:

Pornchai’s Story: The Catholic League Conversion Story for 2008

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Thailand’s Once-Lost Son Was Flag Bearer for the Asian Apostolic Congress

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Unjustly in Prison for 30 Years: A Collision of Fury and Faith

From opposite ends of the world Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae share thoughts on a dark milestone: Thirty years wrongly in prison on the Day of Padre Pio.

September 18, 2024 by Pornchai ‘Max’ Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae

HERE’S MAX

On September 8, 2020, I left my best friend, Father-G, inside the walls of New Hampshire State Prison where we spent the previous 15 years as cell mates. The term, “cell mates” might seem foreign to you. Having to share a space of about 60 square feet around the clock with another human being can be like torture. The daily drama of cell mates thrown together but never able to live together was the all-day every-day prime time drama of our prison.

I was an angry young man with a very short fuse which caused me to spend most of my prior years in prison in solitary confinement beginning at age 18. I was not very sociable. I trusted no one, and least of all could I trust a priest convicted of the very crimes that tormented my life and set me on a road to destruction. We went through a lot in those years, and over time I came to know with total certainty that this priest was a victim of false witness and a Catholic witch hunt. He became my best friend and the person I trust most in this world. We became each other’s family.

I know in my heart that I would not be free today — physically, mentally, or spiritually — if Father-G had not been present in my life. I wake up each day now on the other side of those stone walls of prison and on the other side of the world from where Father-G lives in captivity still. I now live in Thailand, a land I was taken from at age 11 for someone else’s dark agenda. It is a land I thought I would never see again. I am here today, and free, only because of God and His servant, Father-G.

The day this little introduction appears with Father-G’s post is September 18. It anticipates the September 23rd date on which he was sent to prison thirty years ago in 1994. There was no truth or justice in it. None at all! That is also the date that one of our Patron Saints was freed from another kind of bondage — a bondage that has been a grace for millions of souls. Father-G once described the heroic virtue of the life Padre Pio lived ...

“A half century bearing the wounds of Jesus — all of them, including false witness, rejection, ridicule, public shaming, and the crucifixion of his body and his priesthood, sometimes even by the very Church he served.”

With some help from Dilia, our Editor, I wrote a whole post about this day, about Father-G, and about the sacrifices he made that restored my life and freedom, and saved my soul. I would trade them back to restore his freedom, but he will have none of that. He said that sacrifice is sacred and it is not refundable. I hope you will read my post for it is very important to me. It is my tribute to hope from a time when all mine was stolen from me so Father-G sacrificed his. It is “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Now here, from our prison cell thousands of miles away from where I wake up each day in freedom, is Father-G:

Parallax Views and Inflection Points

On the night before starting my part of this post, I called my friend, Pornchai-Max in Thailand. He asked me how I feel about approaching a 30th year in prison for crimes that never took place. I spent much of that night rehearsing in my mind a long angry rant. How could intense anger not be part of the equation of how I face the injustice, corruption, a cover-up by police and prosecutors and lawyers and judges who heard and ruled on their corruption in secret? How could I feel anything but fury for the people who profited from it all? In the fictitious case against me alone, a million dollars changed hands.

If you have been following publications by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Claire Best, Ryan MacDonald, and a few others over recent years then you are already familiar with all this and there is no need for me to waste your time ranting about it. It would indeed be a waste of my time and yours.

I thank my friend, Max, for his part in this post, and in this story. He and our editor, Dilia E. Rodríguez, have conspired to point me toward a parallax view. That’s a scientific term for what happens when an event or series of events is observed from a new position or angle with insights that were limited or unavailable before. In his introduction, Max mentioned a post he wrote with Dilia’s help just after his return to Thailand in 2020. It is linked at the very end of his Introduction and again at the end of this post. It is very important, and it is my parallax view.

And in recent weeks in these pages, Dilia E. Rodríguez wrote “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It, too, presents a parallax view, a summary of these 30 painful years in this abomination of unjust imprisonment. Dilia’s conclusion was in part about the mystical connections between me and Max now living on opposite sides of the planet, and the introductions of two Patron Saints into our world. Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe are inflection points in both our lives in and beyond these stone walls.

In science and history, an inflection point is a point at which, usually only in hindsight, an event becomes pivotal, and, once experienced, all perceptions about it change. When I could bring myself, through grace, to look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment, our Patron Saints became inflection points and the powers that bind us. Even my language describing this needs a background explanation. To “look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment” recalls vividly another “inflection point” that occurred in a dream.

I know I risk sounding a little pretentious here, but in that dream I was instructed by a nighttime visitor on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, to “look beyond the prison lights,” and when I did, my eyes were opened. I hope to return to this in a week or so in these pages when I write about the Great Patron of Justice, Saint Michael the Archangel.

Prison is not a good place. Let me put that differently. Prison is not a place where much good happens. But what good DOES happen in prison is often spectacular and it accomplishes spectacular things. One could easily dismiss those things as mere coincidence. I did just that for a long time. But a steady stream of graceful events in a place where grace seems otherwise to be entirely absent brings us back to seeing the ordinary as extraordinary. Saint Paul described such a place permeated by the light of faith: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Romans 5:20)

Convergence : St Maximilian Kolbe Lets Himself In

In my twelfth year of priesthood, I was convicted in a sham trial after refusing multiple plea deals to serve only a year or two in prison. My refusals were met with fury by Judge Arthur Brennan who ridiculed and mocked me before imposing on me a sentence that would live longer than I would live.

The numbers are important. In my twelfth year of priesthood I went to prison, and in my twelfth year in prison, I came as close as I ever had or ever will to despair. The year was 2006. The series of “accidents” leading up to this point are, in hindsight, astonishing. From seemingly out of nowhere, I was contacted by a priest who arranged with this prison’s Catholic chaplain, a deacon, to visit me, though I never understood why. In the previous 12 years, not a single priest had ventured behind these prison walls. Father James McCurry is a Conventual Franciscan priest who said only vaguely that he heard or read about me somewhere and felt compelled to reach out (or in) to me.

In the prison visiting room, his first words after shaking my hand were, “Have you ever heard of St. Maximilian Kolbe?” Fr McCurry told me that he had been the Vice Postulator for the cause of sainthood leading up to St. Maximilian’s canonization in Rome in 1982, the year I was ordained. On the twelfth anniversary of that canonization, and my ordination, Father McCurry felt compelled to visit me. The visit had to be brief.

The year was 2006. One week later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry along with something that I should not have received. It was a laminated holy card depicting Maximilian in both his prison garb from Auschwitz and his Franciscan habit. I should not have received it because laminated cards had been strictly banned for security reasons then. This one, however, mysteriously made its way from the prison mail room to my cell. I was mesmerized by the image on the card. On the backside was “A Prisoner’s Prayer to St. Maximilian Kolbe.” It was about despair.

I taped the card to the top of the battered steel mirror in my cell. It was December 23, 2006. Then I realized with near despair that on that very day, I was a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. I was losing myself. There is nothing here that supports in any way an identity of priesthood. The image on the mirror impacted me greatly, and painfully. It was three years before Beyond These Stone Walls would begin with my first post, “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.”

Months earlier, unknown to me at that time, another prisoner was dragged in chains out of years in solitary confinement in a Maine prison and shipped against his will to New Hampshire. After several weeks in “the hole” in high security housing, he arrived on the pod where I live. Walking around the pod to stake out his new turf, a very tough-looking Thai fighter stuck his head in my cell door. Upon seeing the image of Maximilian on my mirror, he stared at it for a time, and then he stared at me asking, “Is this you?”

This man had been through a lot, and was a little rough around the edges. The only part of that he might disagree with today is “a little.” He wore the wounds life had inflicted on him like a shield of armor to keep everyone else away. Everything about him spoke “dangerous,” and indeed he was at times. He had a short fuse, and that kept everyone else at a safe distance — except me.

We somehow became friends. He paid rapturous attention to the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life and especially how his earthly life ended as he gave it over to the Nazis, his false accusers, to spare the life of a despairing young man. My inflection point with Saint Maximilian was this: The image on my mirror was not about all that I had lost. It was about all that I was called to become. Like Maximilian, I could not change my prison. Not one bit. I could only place it in service to my priesthood.

Saint Maximilian, in turn, led both Max and me to the Immaculata. Through his Divine Mercy Sunday conversion and his consecration to the Lord through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pornchai Moontri took the name Maximilian. Like many in Sacred Scripture, a new name also came with a new life.

Over at our Voices from Beyond section this week, we are featuring “Mary is at Work Here” by Felix Carroll first published in Marian Helper magazine (Spring 2014). It tells the story of Mary, Maximilian, Pornchai-Max, and me, and the wonder of Divine Mercy we embraced as it also embraced us.

Out of Time and Space, Padre Pio

Our second inflection point — the point at which our spiritual fortunes changed — was Saint Padre Pio who is venerated in the Church calendar on the same date on which I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. It is also the date Padre Pio died. This was briefly alluded to by Max in his part of this post, but I would like to expand on it a bit because I know that Max will be reading this from half a world away.

Because of the connection between Padre Pio and the date of my imprisonment, I decided to write a post about this mysterious saint. Padre Pio died in 1968 when I was fifteen years old and had just begun my return to a long neglected Catholic identity. I today cannot articulate what exactly called me to that change in such a tumultuous time as 1968. I wrote a story about the calumny and false witness Padre Pio suffered in his priesthood. It was that which I could initially most connect with. The post was titled, “Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial.” It was published in the early days of this blog.

After I wrote it, I received a rather frantic letter from the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium. Pierre learned about me from a lengthy 2005 article by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. He and I exchanged several letters back in the few years after those articles first appeared in 2005. Pierre was alarmed about my Padre Pio post. He urgently wanted me to know that he had a personal encounter with Padre Pio when he was 15 years old.

Like many in Europe at that time, Pierre’s father had sent him to a boarding school. The school was sponsoring a train trip to a few points in Italy. When Pierre’s father learned of this, he sent Pierre a letter instructing him to take a train to a place called San Giovanni Rotondo, and go to a Capuchin Friary. Pierre was instructed to ask for a blessing from Padre Pio.

Pierre was skeptical, but did as his father asked. He took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo, and rang the bell. A friar answered the door and led young, nervous Pierre to a foyer. Pierre asked to see Padre Pio. “Impossibile!” the friar snapped back. He gave Pierre a prayer card and started to usher him back toward the door.

Just then, from a wide staircase leading to the foyer, a bearded Capuchin with bandaged hands came slowly down the stairs with eyes focused on Pierre. Padre Pio approached him while the astonished friar at the door whispered in Italian, “Do not touch his hands.” Padre Pio then placed his bandaged hands on Pierre’s head and spoke a blessing, making the Sign of the Cross.

Sixty years later, when Pierre read at Beyond These Stone Walls that Pornchai Moontri had decided to become Catholic and would enter the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, Pierre pleaded with me to ask Pornchai to allow him to act as Godfather to sponsor his reception into the Church. Then, again, things that should not have happened did happen. Pierre could not attend a Baptism in the prison chapel so I acted as proxy. But he could arrange to visit either me or Max in the prison visiting room a few days before. Under the rules, he could be on the visiting list of only one of us. That rule was impenetrable, firmly embedded in stone.

“The worst they can say is no,” Pornchai said. So I wrote to the prison warden and explained the details. The request came back miraculously just in time. It was approved that Mr. Matthews could visit with both of us on the same day, but separately. This was, and still is, unheard of. Pierre told us both the story I told above — the story of his strange encounter with Padre Pio many years earlier.

In his visit with me, Pierre bowed his head and asked for my blessing. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I placed my hand upon Pierre knowing that the spiritual imprint of Padre Pio’s blessing was still in and upon this man, and I was overwhelmed to share in it.

I do not fully understand the mystery of what happened to the angry priest who pondered prison and the fate of his priesthood, or the angry young man who pondered the deep wounds life had inflicted upon his body, mind and spirit. We are both still here, and on opposite sides of the planet now, but we are both also changed. As I am typing this, a friend sent me a letter with a brief prayer at the top. It is a parody of the Serenity Prayer, and it could now be the prayer of my priesthood:

“God, grant me
Serenity to accept the people
I cannot change,
Courage to change
the only one I can, and the
Wisdom to know
that it’s me!”

Thank you for reading these stories of our lives. May the Lord Bless you always, and keep you.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free, and we will usually haunt your Inbox only once per week. You might also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ — a Marian Helper presentation

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Pornchai Moontri: A New Year of Hope Begins in Thailand

Pornchai Moontri arrived in Thailand in early 2021 during a global pandemic and after a 36-year absence. Life has been a daily struggle, but hope is on the horizon.

January 3, 2024 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Editor’s Note: Pornchai Moontri is now the Asia Correspondent for Beyond These Stone Walls. The image atop this post depicts the route for a high-speed passenger and cargo rail that will have a depot in Pak Chong, Thailand where Pornchai is now living. His most recent post, which we will link to again at the end of this one, was the very moving “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

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Sawasdee Kup, my friends. When Fr Gordon MacRae asked me to write the first post of 2024 at Beyond These Stone Walls, I was excited. But when I asked him what I should write about he said “Just write whatever comes to mind.” Now I am just totally nervous! This was during a phone call to Thailand from the little barred room where we once both lived in Concord, New Hampshire. Being there was supposed to be a punishment, and in many ways it lived up to that expectation. But in spite of it, there were also very special things that happened there. I learned the ways of Divine Mercy there, and was touched by it. We conversed with St. Maximilian Kolbe and our Blessed Mother there, and they answered us.

It was from there that Father G helped to win my freedom and from there that he walked with me every day through the daily torment of ICE detention and deportation. Every day for 150 days trapped in crowded ICE custody during a pandemic, I would wake up and ask the Lord if this might be the day I will be free. Then at night I would go to bed asking for the grace to cope with yet another day. Father G reminded me that this is how we live now — in union with the Suffering of Christ.

After 29 years in prison and over five months in ICE detention, I finally arrived in Thailand on February 9, 2021. I thought I would burst with excitement, but in reality, I was filled with fear. Because it was in the middle of the Covid pandemic, the Thai government required me to stay alone, with no human contact at all, in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Bangkok for fifteen days. I have to say it was a lot nicer than all my other stays in solitary confinement.

Back in 2005, after several years in the prison version of solitary confinement, I was moved to an over-crowded prison in New Hampshire and many years of never, ever being alone. After that, the sudden aloneness of a Holiday Inn hotel room felt scary. But in a daily phone call, Father G walked with me through that trial as well. His contacts here arranged to have a Samsung Galaxy smart phone placed in the room before I arrived. You would laugh if you saw me trying to figure it out. I had never before seen one. It was like an alien device to me.

At the Home Page on the little screen, I typed in “Beyond These Stone Walls.” I did not expect anything to happen, but suddenly there it was! For eleven years I could only imagine what this magical blog looked like. I remember the Psalm, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” I think people on the Space Station could have seen my smile when Father G appeared on my screen and I heard him speaking.

I had stumbled upon a video documentary interview that he once told me about. But now I was seeing and hearing it. It was 2:00 AM and I was exhausted from jet lag and the 24-hour flight to Bangkok, but I wanted to hear it all. Just like old times, however, Father G put me to sleep! That was the end of day one in Thailand. You can read the rest if you want in one of the first posts I wrote from here: “Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand.”

Photo by Diana Robinson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)

The Lion Kings

Then came the hard adventure of adjusting and thriving as opposed to just living. That was the challenge Father G gave me. “I don’t want you to just survive. I want you to thrive.” Well, that has been a harder challenge, easier said than done, but I haven't given up on it. Neither has Father G.

Sometimes I felt like Simba in The Lion King. Banished from the kingdom and trying to find his way in a strange land separated from all he knew, Simba could only imagine his father’s voice. For a time after my arrival in Thailand, I was living with Father John Le, SVD and some members of the Missionary Society of the Divine Word. Father John, who is now the local superior for the Thailand province of his Order, became a very good friend to both me and Father Gordon.

Father John manages a Vietnamese Refugee Project in Thailand. On my last day in hotel solitary, he showed up to pick me up. People being deported can take nothing but the clothes they are wearing, and mine were meant for Concord, New Hampshire, not Thailand where the temperature was about 114 degrees Fahrenheit and super humid.

Father G and our friend Viktor Weyand had some U.S. funds sent for me ahead of time, so Father John took me shopping for clothing more suitable to Thailand. He took me to the biggest and busiest shopping mall in Bangkok where I had a panic attack from being around so many people. I heard of this happening to other former prisoners. One day a few months later, Father G challenged me to go back to that mall. I could walk to it from Father John’s SVD house where I was living then. It was a sort of personal triumph that I went back there and just walked around for a couple of hours.

I did not buy anything, but it helped me not to panic so much around crowds of people. Language was also a problem. I look Thai and have a Thai name, but no one could understand me or why I looked so confused when they spoke to me. It was embarrassing and I could not explain the long traumatic story that led up to this moment.

Over the next few months, I had the great honor of helping Father John with food distribution when visiting the Vietnamese refugee communities he serves in Thailand. One of these visits took me to the far Northeast of Thailand about nine hours drive with Father John to the place where I was born and where my mother’s little house still stands unoccupied. I lived there with my aunt and cousins until I was eleven and was taken from Thailand. My mother was later murdered. Father G told that awful story in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” I cannot bring myself to read it, but I lived it.

On one of the refugee visit trips north, Father John and I ended up staying at that house. There were lots of memories, many of them painful. Some of my mother’s things were still in the house which was left unoccupied for over 20 years. I have traveled back there a few times to work on my mother’s house and make it habitable, but it became clearer to me that I cannot live there. I had been gone for too long. The family I thought I remembered no longer remembered me. With help from Father G and Father John, I had to accept that I no longer have the family I thought I had in Thailand.

Father G and Father John are my family now, and Chalathip, a retired teacher and benefactor of Father John’s refugee work. She also took me in. She convinced Father G that I must relearn Thai, and cannot do so while living with four priests who spoke only Vietnamese. Chalathip lived just a short walk away on the same street as Father John’s SVD Community house and she offered me an empty apartment on her second floor.

Father John and Father G speak often and Father G still calls me every morning. He calls at 6:00 PM which is at 6:00 AM for me. I never imagined that someone’s guidance would become so important to me. For much of my life, the only voice I listened to was my own. That did not always go so well. I have learned that family is not always just the blood that runs though our veins. It is where our heart is. I am blessed with the example and fatherhood of two priests who live selfless lives and work tirelessly for others. They are, to me, The Lion Kings.

Independence Day Delayed

Back in 2006 or so, at just about the time Father G and I met, I was told by two immigration officials that I would have to be deported back to Thailand when my sentence was over. I worried about this for months back then, and I could see only doomsday scenarios in my future. I settled in my mind on my imagined “Plan B.” It was built on hopelessness. My “Plan B” was to wait until my sentence was almost over, and then in the last days of it, I would destroy myself. I saw no other way and I did not know how to ask for help and, really, I believed that there was no one I could ask. God? Who’s he? I was proud then even though I had nothing in my life to be proud about.

Father G knew about my eventual deportation, and he kept wanting to help me prepare for it. I had not heard Thai spoken since I was eleven in 1985 so by twenty years later my Thai was all but gone. Through a Thai language publisher in San Francisco, Father G got some Thai instruction books and CDs donated to the prison library and he arranged with the librarian for me to go there twice a week to study Thai. I had the added handicap of never having learned to read and write Thai as a child.

People who have no hope don’t usually prepare for the future. I did not believe I had a future. I only had a past. But Father G was relentless. He began to poke around in my past and the dark corners of my mind where I never let anyone look. He managed to get the whole story of my life out of me. Then he convinced me to let him write about it. He told me that people in Thailand would see it, and someone there would reach out to help me. I told him that I did not need anyone's help. I did not want anyone's help. Father G saw right through that lie.

He saw other things as well. He became the only person who ever looked out for my best interest, so I surrendered control of my life to him, but he told me to surrender only to God. I tried that, and ended up becoming a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. I could not believe the whole Divine Mercy thing at first but I believed that Father G believed it so I gave it a try. My mother was murdered by the evil man who took me from Thailand, but Father Gordon told me that the Mother of Jesus would be my Mother as well. She put me into the Hands of the Living God.

Then everything changed. All my problems were still there, my doubts, my mood swings, my painful past. And I was plagued with nightmares. But now there was a spark of something new. One day, Gordon sat me down and challenged me that if I want to let God in, I had to abandon all thoughts of “Plan B,” so I did.

The largest religious belief in most Southeast Asian countries is Theravada Buddhism. It began in India around the Sixth Century BC and arrived in Thailand and Cambodia in the first century AD as the primary religion and philosophy of life. Like most abandoned children in Thailand, I was handed over to a Buddhist monastery for a time as a young child. When I was taken from Thailand at age eleven, all that happened before then was forgotten. So I came to God as an empty vessel.

The Train to Singapore

After a year or so in super-hot, super-crowded Bangkok, Father John and Chalathip and Father G talked about bringing me to a property Chalathip owns in the city of Pak Chong in the mountain region of central Thailand. I have lived there since. I attend Mass at St. Nicholas Catholic Church, one of three Catholic churches right here in Pak Chong, a city of about 225,000.

There are two homes on the large property. I live in the smaller one. The picture above this section is the view from my bedroom window. Pak Chong is much cooler than Bangkok, and I see Father John often because he stops here and stays with me on his way to and from his Order’s headquarters in Nong Bua Lamphu where I was born. My greatest wish and prayer is that Father G will be free, and be able to come here and stay.

Father G recently wrote about “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” He explained how some 30,000 young Thai men applied for work in Israel because there are few job opportunities in Thailand since the pandemic. I have to work — even if it is without income which has been the case since I arrived in Thailand. So I landscaped the entire property in Pak Chong and now it is a sort of oasis. Chalathip decided to start a small business here and rent the large house out as a vacation rental that I can manage while living in the smaller house.

Pak Chong is just a few kilometers from the Khao Yai National Park, Thailand’s oldest and largest park and game preserve. It still has tigers and elephants in the wild. No one ever sees the tigers. They do not want to be seen. l repair the larger house as needed and as funds permit to make it ready for vacation rentals. In December 2023 I had our first guests, a small group that came here for an overnight to explore Khao Yai National Park. There is a lot still to be done before this small business is ready to run.

The economy here is only slowly opening up. The largest industry in Thailand is tourism, and that had been shut down for three years. Father G has been studying a promising development that will very much impact Pak Chong and the rest of Thailand. China, to our north, leads the world in shipping and transportation by high-speed railway, a technology developed in China and Japan. China recently signed a treaty with Laos — which is between Thailand and China — to construct a high-speed railway from the City of Kunming in the South Chinese Province of Yunnam running all the way to Vientiane, the Capital of Laos on the Laos-Thailand border.

Thailand did not want China to build and operate its railway system, so the Chinese agreed to provide the high-speed rail technology while Thailand builds it. It will stretch from Vientiane in Laos in the north all the way to Bangkok in the south. The hopeful news is that a major depot on the trade route and passenger rail is being built right here in Pak Chong. Father G had me take the photos of its construction above.

It is a 2.5-hour drive from Pak Chong to Bangkok, but the high-speed railway traveling at 240 kilometers per hour will reduce the travel time to just under one hour.This is promising news for Pak Chong which is situated right on that route, and for the Thai economy and its major industry, tourism.

Father G created a map of the route which is expected to be completed in Pak Chong in 2026. Once it reaches Bangkok, the Thai Capital, China plans to pick up completion of the railway again and extend it all the way down the Malay Peninsula. When complete, the high-speed rail will extend from Kunming, China through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia, and finally connect with Singapore. Father G said that a major depot on the route will exist right where I have settled in Pak Chong, and that may be an act of Divine Providence. I hope so.

Umm, did I just mention “Hope?”

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We found this June 2023 article “Phase 1 of high-speed rail ready ‘by 2026’” in the Bangkok Post.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae :

Our Tool Fund Project for Pornchai and Father John Le’s Refugee Program are still active at our “Special Events” page. Pornchai, Father John and I are deeply grateful to donors who contributed this past year.

You may also like these related posts by Pornchai Moontri:

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

Father John and I caught this giant Mekong River catfish one day. I had to hold it down before it could swallow Father Jonah ... Umm, I mean Father John. We put it back in the river where it swam away after giving me a rather nasty look. I will never swim in that river again.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Eternal Life Matters: Spiritual Survival in Trying Times

#EternalLifeMatters because God is a God of the living, not of the dead. As political and cultural chaos descends all around us, it is our end game that matters most.

October 25, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

One of my favorite political columnists is Gerald F. Seib. He is retired now, but still writing occasional feature articles. For several years, he wrote The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Capital Journal” column. He always managed to open my eyes to a more panoramic view of what is going on in America and throughout Western Culture. On October 6, 2020, his title was, “Turning-Point Year Heads to Parts Unknown.”

My immediate concern was what he meant by “turning point” and “parts unknown.” You may not be able to see this landmark column without a WSJ subscription, but I don’t think Mr. Seib will mind if I summarize his main points. There have been times in the history of this nation when one shocking event after another became an “inflection point” that turns the culture in a new direction and ushers in a new era with a radical redirection of the future. For example, in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Civil War broke out which in historical hindsight turned out to be a major inflection point for this nation. In 1932, the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal which was not nearly as radical as the left’s proposed “Green New Deal,” but nonetheless was an inflection point for life in America.

By the standard of shocking points that become “inflection points,” the year 2020 appears to be one of these moments in history. A global pandemic, four years of a highly contentious and divided political climate, a major party turning decisively left while the party in power turns the Supreme Court decisively right. The Covid pandemic has changed everything about us in just three years. It has altered how we live, interact, work, and recreate. It has also greatly altered our politics. It has become very important to sift through the politics of Covid lest we repeat them to our detriment. For example, potential courses of treatment became shunned, not for medical reasons but for political ones. The shuttering of schools and churches while liquor stores and casinos remained open had the effect of shattering rational dialogue about what is good for America and Americans. The origins of Covid, necessary to identify, were defined based on politics and not science. I wrote of this to much criticism from the left in “Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media.”

Polls have been little help as predictors of what comes next for either our politics or our culture. Our lives as individuals also experience a kind of “inflection point” tendency in the face of crisis. A radical change of direction within ourselves is usually associated with some sort of event or a series of events. Here is a small example. You likely recall that our friend, Pornchai Moontri, stepped onto my path after spending several years in a solitary confinement prison. For a view of how life-changing and destructive that was, see the riveting PBS Frontline documentary “Locked Up in America — Solitary Nation,” a production that depicts the very prison and cell that held my friend for fourteen years, seven in one long grueling stretch.

Just before writing this post, I received a lengthy message from John C., a young man who was in that same prison with Pornchai and knew him well. They helped each other to survive. John wrote to me after coming across posts about Pornchai’s current life at Beyond These Stone Walls. He was deeply impacted not only by the revelations about all that Pornchai suffered in life, but by the story of his Divine Mercy conversion. John wrote that he was brought up Catholic as a child, but became an atheist in prison.

When Pornchai told me sixteen years ago that he does not believe in God, I told him that I, too, lost all faith as a young man. I said that I awoke one morning uttering the words, “God, I do not believe in you.” What I heard simultaneously in my head and in my heart was, “Just be glad it isn’t mutual!” That was one of the inflection points in my life at age 16, and hearing about it became one of Pornchai’s as well. Perhaps that may also become true for John. The mere fact that he is now reading this blog of all things is a signpost of its own.

As for Pornchai, I do not think he could have coped with all that he endured if he had not become a person of faith. After leaving prison in September 2020, he spent the next five months imprisoned not only in an ICE deportation warehouse in Louisiana, but by Covid which left all international travel frozen in place. He was packed into a room with seventy ICE detainees — most from Central America, where the noise was unbearable and the blazing lights were kept on 24/7. He was sleep-deprived and suffered terribly. However, he also reached out to help several others who suffered much more. He protected and helped a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese refugee who spent a year in that place before we were able to help hasten his return to his mother and family in Vietnam. Pornchai recruited me to find others to assist “Tri.” In Vietnam he is still in touch with Pornchai and me. He does not understand the Catholic use of the word “Father.” So in his messages he refers to me as “Dad Gordon.”

A conversation between Father G and Pornchai Max, “breaking through ICE.”

Bearing the Cross of My Neighbor

With the help of BTSW reader Claire Dion, who put two cellphones together enabling us to communicate for about ten minutes each day, Pornchai and I were able to talk by phone during his five months in ICE detention. Pornchai himself wrote of the impact of this time, and his survival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

I wrote recently in these pages a post entitled “The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God.” I wrote it because each week when I sit down to write a post, I look at the Mass readings for the Sunday that will follow it. That is often, besides the depressing news, my first source for something to write about. In the post I just cited, the Prophet Isaiah’s unintended connection to current events was striking. The connections in this post with the next Sunday’s Gospel (from Matthew 22:34-40) are much more subtle, but they are in there and I hope to pull them out. The connections of the First Reading (from Exodus 22:20-26) are much more clear:

“Thus says the Lord: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”

It is one thing to require that an alien observe the laws on entering and remaining in a country legally. It is quite another to treat him as something less than a human being.

In Sunday’s First Reading from the Book of Exodus (22:20-26), if the oppressed alien in your midst cries out to me, “I will surely hear him, for I am compassionate.” That compassion is an attribute of God that is supposed to be a life-changing inflection point for us.

The Gospel, from Matthew 22:34-40, is much more subtle. It opens with an account that the Pharisees gathered when they learned that Jesus had somehow managed “to silence the Sadducees.” How Jesus did that requires a little background. The Sadducees make a brief, but important appearance in the Gospels. Their approach to Jesus is consistently hostile. They are a caste of priestly aristocrats who manage the affairs of the Jerusalem Temple. But their management is primarily political.

The Sadducees reject the Hebrew Prophets and all Scripture except the Pentateuch, the first five books that comprise the Torah, also called the Books of Moses. That is their sole source of religious consideration. They arose in the Second Century BC as a political interest group whose most important goal is to remain in good stead with whatever occupying force has swallowed up Jerusalem. In the case of the Gospel, it is the Roman Empire. The Sadducees are well represented in my post reflecting on John 19:15: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”

The Sadducees also reject the existence of angels, an afterlife, and resurrection from the dead. They took their name from the High Priest, Zadok, who served the Temple under King Solomon centuries earlier. They were political and doctrinal enemies of the Pharisees who took great interest in the fact that Jesus silenced them. He did so, as he is prone to do with the Pharisees as well, by trapping them in the hypocrisy of their own words.

To discredit the words of Jesus about resurrection, they concocted a story based on a fragment of law from the Book of Deuteronomy (25:5-6) holding that if a man dies childless, his brother is to take his wife and fulfill his duty to bear a son to continue his deceased brother’s name. The Sadducees presented Jesus with a query about a woman who lost seven husbands, taking in marriage each of the surviving brothers in turn. “In the resurrection,” they asked, “which of the seven will she be wife?” Jesus could have cited the Prophets on the hope of resurrection, but he knew the Sadducees rejected them. So he cited the only Scripture to which they gave credence:

“Have you not read what was said to you by God? ‘I Am the God of your Fathers, of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

By declaring the Patriarchs of Israel — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — to be alive and in the Presence of God, Jesus amazed the crowd and silenced the Sadducees who had no response.

The Pharisees and Saduccees Come to Tempt Jesus by James Tissot (cropped)

The Greatest Commandment

Having satisfied themselves that Jesus is right and the Sadducees most certainly wrong about resurrection, the Pharisees in this Gospel account (Matthew 22:34-40) went on to test Jesus further. One of them, “a lawyer” set up a question. The Greek word this Gospel account used for “lawyer” is “νομικός,” found only once in Matthew’s Gospel, but six times in Luke’s. The word is synonymous with “Scribe,” and therefore denotes a man very well versed in both the Law and the Prophets. The question posed is this “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Laws?”

Jesus answers, as he did previously with the Sadducees, by a quote from the Torah in the Book of Deuteronomy (6:4-5) laid out in the chapter following the Ten Commandments given to Moses:

“Hear, O Israel, The Lord your God is One Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

But then Jesus shocks the Pharisees by finding in their Torah a necessary addendum to their Great Commandment. He quotes from another Book of Moses, the Book of Leviticus (19:18) to lay out the fulfillment of the first part, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“On these two Commandments,” says Jesus, “depend all the Law and the Prophets.” In another Gospel passage, the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37), another lawyer stood up to put him to the test with a question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer is “Keep the Commandments,” and the Commandments referred to are those cited from the Torah – not the Ten, but the Two. The Love of God is rendered empty and false without its logical manifestation: love of neighbor and the bearing of his cross.

In the end, the Scribes and Pharisees employ even their theological enemies, the Sadducees, to stack the court when they haul Jesus before Pilate. The Way of the Cross and the rejection of God in the flesh was a mirror image of today’s effort to deny our true destiny: Life! and not just this one! Eternal Life Matters!

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

As the Church prepares to honor our beloved dead on the Solemnity of All Souls, you can silence any lingering doubts of Sadducees with “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.”

Writing from Thailand as I began a 30th year of unjust imprisonment, Pornchai Moontri wrote “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

And lastly, if you have been concerned by news out of Rome and Germany about fears of a schismatic synod, you might like my post “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.”

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo

Actor Robert De Niro has been cast as a Catholic priest in three films : True Confessions, The Mission, and Sleepers. The latter tells a spellbinding true story.

June 14, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I began this post in May, 2019, but a lot has happened since then that caused me to want to start over. This is an important story about a topic still front and center in the world of Catholic affairs: the Catholic sex abuse crisis. If you’re just plain sick of it, well, frankly, so am I. Both mainstream and Catholic media are still saturated with it. I last wrote of it in April, 2023 in “Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report.”

Fans of Robert De Niro the actor are not necessarily also fans of Robert De Niro the person. Whatever the reasons for that distinction, I want to write of his outstanding roles as a Catholic priest in three controversial films: True Confessions (1981), The Mission (1989) and Sleepers (1996). In each, his character became embroiled in an unforgettable moral quagmire.

The term, “quagmire” first appeared in British literature in 1570. It combines two older British terms, “quag,” with its origin in the word, “quake,” and “mire,” which means to find oneself bogged down in something. A quagmire was first used to refer to becoming trapped in a bog which looks solid enough to walk upon, but then entraps a person in the unseen muck. Today it is used to refer to a situation that seems innocent enough on its surface, but entraps a person in a moral dilemma.

In each of the films above, Robert De Niro portrayed a priest caught up in such a quagmire. I have written before of one of them. In True Confessions, based on a novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne, De Niro was cast in the role of Monsignor Desmond Spellacy. Groomed to become Archbishop of Los Angeles, Spellacy becomes marginally implicated in the murder of a prostitute, a crime being investigated by his L.A. homicide detective brother portrayed by Robert Duvall.

The moral quagmire of True Confessions is that the priest is entirely innocent of the crime, but is he innocent of any knowledge of it? If he knows, how does he know? The title of the film and book gives a hint to the nature of the moral quagmire, a nightmare scenario for many Catholic priests.

But the De Niro role that I want to focus on for this post is that of “Father Bobby” Carillo in Sleepers, a 1996 film based on a book of the same title by Lorenzo Carcaterra published in 1995 but written in 1994, the year of my imprisonment. The story reads like a novel, but it is actually a biographical account in which Carcaterra has changed the names of his characters to protect the innocent.

The book and film unfold in the Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan in 1966 when I was in high school. Hell’s Kitchen was then a poor bastion of mostly Irish Catholics in a tough neighborhood — a term used here with an emphasis more on “hood” than “neighbor.”

In Sleepers, Robert De Niro’s character, Father Bobby, is in stark contrast to much of the media portrayal of Catholic priests since then. He is a priest as tough as the neighborhood in which he lives. Father Bobby meets a group of adolescent boys who hang out in the neighborhood. All have absent fathers or abusive fathers, or both, and over time Father Bobby comes to fulfill a role that today would land him squarely in the crosshairs of societal and media suspicion.

Father Carillo’s Moral Quagmire

Father Bobby does not indoctrinate these street kids into faith. That is something he walks more than talks. I hope you catch the meaning of that because it is central to fatherhood. Father Bobby does not drag them into church. Instead, he protects them, cares for them, challenges them, and becomes a father to them and the sole person on Earth that any of them trust. His lack of Catholic indoctrination might not be the witness some of us might hope for, but it is clearly the witness that these boys most need. One of the saddest aspects of the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis of suspicion in the Church is that such a scenario could never happen again.

But even in 1966, as the story unfolds, Father Carillo is keenly aware of appearances and the necessity of professional distance. As an indirect result of keeping his emotional connection to these young men in check, he is one day not present to them when trouble finds them. Several of them commit a petty crime that escalates. A corrupt judge and court system sentences them to time in “juvey” a New York juvenile detention facility. While there, four of them “earn” a stint in solitary confinement. Sleepers is the slang term for juvenile delinquents serving more than six months in solitary confinement.

While there, they are demoralized and dehumanized beyond description. They are beaten by guards and several of them are repeatedly and brutally raped. To make the awful story shorter, they survive and are restored to freedom but could never be “free” again. They emerged from their nightmare destroyed as men, but they hide the truth. They make a pact to never reveal any of this to Father Bobby — first and foremost because they are ashamed.

Twenty years pass. The 14-year-old boys are now 34-year-old men. One became a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office. Most of the others became street thugs having dropped out of school and all engagement with the human race as a result of what they endured at the hands of the State. All of them occasionally still see Father Bobby, and to a man, they still trust and revere him.

I have to remind readers at this point that this is not some seedy fictional story. It is a true account. In the early 1990s when Lorenzo Carcaterra wrote it, the mainstream media had no interest in the story because the priest in the account is not the perpetrator of sexual abuse, but rather the savior of its victims. And lest you choose to believe that such abuse could not happen in a state run juvenile justice facility, I have firsthand knowledge to the contrary.

At the time Sleepers was written in 1994, my friend Pornchai Moontri was in the solitary confinement unit of the Maine State Prison for nearly seven years. The news venue, PBS Frontline produced a segment on that very same place filmed just months after Pornchai was transferred from there to the New Hampshire State Prison. If you have never viewed PBS Frontline’s Solitary Nation [part1, part2] , be brave and consider doing so. The abuse by guards is all masked because they were on camera and knew it, but the true nature of such a place remains clear.

The Reckoning

Back to Sleepers. One day, some twenty years after Father Bobby’s friends emerged from solitary confinement, two of them ventured into a dark neighborhood bar. Seated alone in a booth was “Nokes,” the most monstrous and sadistic of the guards who sexually assaulted and dehumanized them twenty years earlier. By the end of the day, his victims exacted the justice denied.

In the aftermath, Father Carillo learned the entire truth of what happened to these men in juvenile detention. He then had to wrestle with the deepest, most perplexing moral quagmire of his life as a man and as a priest. He was told by their lawyer that he alone could save them with an alibi defense. All of this painfully reminded me of another story told in my post, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

Most who have read that story agree that all the media hype about the supposed crimes of Catholic priests — some sadly true but many not at all — pale in comparison to the crimes committed against Pornchai and his mother. And yet, the survivor in that story, like the survivors in Sleepers, fled not from the Catholic Church but to it. Pornchai himself confirmed this in a post written upon his arrival in Thailand, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai and I had another friend, TJ, who was released from prison only to find himself back here at age 26 with a new petty offense. Just after Pornchai left in 2020, TJ was moved from solitary confinement to a crowded cellblock. He unpacked his few possessions and obtained a pass to come to see me in the prison Law Library. With his head bowed in silent shame for his failure to live uprightly in freedom, he told me only that life was hard and he “did something stupid.” I don’t know the details.

What I do know, and it is well documented, is that for much of his young life until he was old enough to escape, TJ was a victim of unspeakable sexual and physical violence. The pairing of sex and violence is especially psychologically destructive. Like the young men in Sleepers, TJ and Pornchai both carried in their hearts a devastating devaluation of their lives. With every day in “fight or flight” mode, freedom was stolen from them long before prison.

As an accused Catholic priest, one would think that I would be the last person TJ would want anything to do with, but Pornchai and I taught him that he need not be forever defined by the sins of others. We did not allow his past to excuse his present and neither should he, but we also placed his offenses into the totality of his life. We saw through his façade and challenged him too grieve his past without letting it rule his present.

So I, too, was in a quagmire here — with Pornchai and TJ and others. I was left with the irony of sheltering them not only from what happened to them, but also from what happened to me. When leaders of the Church built upon God’s Truth, God’s Justice and God’s Mercy reflected none of these, I covered for them in the presence of Pornchai and TJ. They looked to the Church for healing and hope, and I could never deprive them of that. Neither could Father Bobby Carillo.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: This post ends in another glaring irony. At the time my diocese was besieged by a grand jury report from the State of New Hampshire in 2003, the State was itself hiding an enormous sexual abuse scandal brought by former residents of its Youth Detention Center. Over the last year, that story had come to light.

The Diocese of Manchester paid $30 million in unquestioned mediated settlements over the last 30 years, while state officials raked the Church over the coals. Now the State of New Hampshire has earmarked $100 million to settle in excess of 1,300 pending lawsuits against the state. One attorney described this as “the largest child abuse case in U.S. history.” Unlike its treatment of the Catholic Church, however, the State has not convened a grand jury to investigate and create a grand jury report as has happened to Catholic institutions across the land. Apparently, for the State some things are best left in the dark.

You may also be interested in these related links:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

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

Judge Clears Way for Hundreds of YDC Child Abuse Lawsuits

Judge Questions AG’s Conflict at Heart of YDC Cases

Courtesy of NH Business Review

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”