The March for Life and the People on the Planet Next Door

Courtesy of Damian Entwistle / CC BY-NC 2.0

The human fascination with finding extraterrestrial life has turned a blind eye to a half century of Roe v Wade. How would we explain Planned Parenthood to E.T.?

January 25, 2023 by Father Gordon MacRae

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I first wrote this post six years ago in this same week in January 2017. It was written for an older version of this blog so we would have to restore it to make it readable again. I decided instead to rewrite it and publish it anew. This post is substantially revised and updated, but we retained the 2017 comments. Please feel free to add to them.

The annual March for Life took place this past week in the nation’s capital and around the country. It capped off a momentous year in the cause for life with the long-sought overturning of Roe v. Wade.

These events also coincide with a renewed interest in the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. The frenzy is fueled once again by grainy new images of something seen moving in the skies. Whatever it is, it is entirely of human origin for reasons explained in this post.

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Working in the prison law library a few days before a long holiday weekend in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I was trying to pick out a few books that might help me write a post for Beyond These Stone Walls during the long days stuck inside. I have to be really selective about books these days. I literally have to sleep with everything I’m reading. There is simply no place to put them but on my bunk. I’ll die if I can’t read and I’ll die if I can’t sleep. So I had to find a way to do both in the 60 square feet which I will never call home.

I knew there was a science post coming. I think Liz Feuerborn knew it, too. A dear friend and long time BTSW reader in Lincoln, Nebraska, Liz recently sent me a most welcomed Christmas gift. It’s a printed list of 244 Catholic priests and religious — four of them canonized saints — who have made major contributions to science. The list includes a description of the work of each.

I was very pleased to see among them another BTSW reader and contributor, Father Andrew Pinsent, a priest and particle physicist who has been a guest writer for this blog. Father Pinsent is the Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion at England’s Oxford University. I have written about him in a few posts, one of which he co-authored with me entitled, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” The list of scientist-priests also includes Fr. Georges Lemaître, of course, a mathematician and physicist of the early 20th Century who is considered in scientific circles today to be the Father of Modern Cosmology. Ironically, he was also the godfather of Pornchai Moontri’s godfather. I am still trying to work out the astronomical odds against that.

Also on the list is Nicolaus Copernicus a priest and astronomer in the late 15th and early 16th Century who actually has a scientific revolution named after him. The Copernican Revolution knocked from the forefront of science the notion that our humble Earth is the center of our solar system. From my point of view, it has been a contribution to humankind’s capacity for humility that the Universe does not revolve around us. Alas, I am not on the list at all, but why would I be? I have no contribution to science except to be an observer. In that role, as I explain below, I have been in very good company.

But first, back to my selection of books for that long weekend stuck inside. The one that most caught my eye was the 2015 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. It contains a few pages about scientific discoveries that have radically changed how we view our place in the Cosmos. A segment that got my attention was a small tribute to Vera Rubin, an American astronomer whose work led to the discovery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and changed the way science views the Universe.

Vera Rubin earned her doctorate in astronomy at Georgetown, a Catholic university in Washington, DC. In the 1960s and 1970s, her observations of other galaxies revealed that the velocity of the movement of stars in their outermost rims is much faster than the existing dogmas of science predicted. Her conclusions demonstrated that the Universe is much stranger than we had ever known, that the matter we actually can see in other galaxies comprises only five to ten percent of the actual Universe. The other ninety-five percent came to be known as dark matter and dark energy. “Astronomers thought they were studying the Universe,” she said, “and now we learn that we are just studying the five to ten percent that is luminous.”

Back at the start of 2017 I opened a copy of The Wall Street Journal and was stunned to see her obituary. Dr. Rubin died a week earlier on Christmas day at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She was 88 years old, and one of the most accomplished astronomers of the late 20th Century. Much of what she discovered about the nature of the Universe and matter that we have been unable to see is now being demonstrated before our very eyes by a new and revolutionary telescope launched into distant orbit one million miles from Earth, a most important development that I described in 2022 in “The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble.”

Courtesy of Carnegie Institution of Washington and Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Confounding the Scientific Theorists

Dr. Vera Rubin was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 for sparking “the realization that the Universe is more complex and more mysterious than had been imagined.” She shared several things in common with Father Georges Lemaître. One of them was the harsh reality that their proven research did not catch on right away. In his case, it was because he was a Catholic priest. In her case, it was because she was a woman. Dr. Rubin was predeceased by her daughter, Judy Young — also an accomplished astronomer — who died two years earlier in 2014. Vera Rubin wrote in 1995 that her role as a scientific observer “is to confound the theorists.” She will be confounding us for years to come.

At the limit of human knowledge just a century ago, the Universe consisted of just a single galaxy, the Milky Way, and astronomer Harlow Shapley demonstrated that our solar system was not at its center, but out on the galactic fringe in one of its spiral arms.

By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered other galaxies while the Belgian priest and physicist, Fr Georges Lemaître, caused another scientific revolution with his mathematical equations, now supported by empirical science. He concluded that the Universe — all matter, space, and time — began “on a day without yesterday” from a primordial atom, later dubbed by a critic, “the Big Bang.”

Today, science reveals that there are trillions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, one of which is our sun. A recent issue of Popular Science magazine had a two-page spread that was another sort of epiphany for me. It was a depiction of a small segment of the Universe. The two page image contained 50,000 galaxies, and one tiny one was our Milky Way. From such an image, astrophysicist Mario Livio concludes, “From a purely physical perspective, we are just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things.”

In just the last decade, it has been discovered that this one, unremarkable galaxy — one of trillions — contains about a billion planets orbiting its millions of stars. On December 5, 2011, the Kepler space telescope discovered the first known “Earth-like” exoplanet orbiting a star about 600 light years from Earth. It’s a distance of about 3,500 trillion miles.

The flurry of news and scientific speculation surrounding the discovery of other Earth-like exoplanets in orbit around distant stars handed science over to the theorists again. There was a presumption that life MUST have taken hold elsewhere, and that the planets MUST be host to one of the millions of civilizations like ours that MUST exist throughout the galaxy.

And of course the inevitable media target of the speculation is that religion, and most especially Christianity, MUST be made irrelevant when the aliens are finally found, or find us. The hope is that the discovery of E.T. will render obsolete 2,000 years of Western thought about God. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Those who do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything!”

The story endured until the science media’s “next big thing”: The 2016 discovery of “Proxima B,” dubbed by the theorists to be “a potentially habitable Earth-like planet.” Orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, Proxima B is 4.2 light years away. It’s the planet next-door in galactic terms, about 25 trillion miles away. With current technology it would be a one-way journey of about 1,000 years or so.

In “If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect” I laid out a series of reasons why I believe that Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life among the planets of this galaxy. For decades, the SETI Project — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — has used radio astronomy to listen for an electronic signature of extraterrestrial technology. Millions of stars and thousands of frequencies have been scanned and analyzed for over six decades, and the result has been nothing but silence.

The SETI project got a big boost in 2015. Russian billionaire, physicist and entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, invested $200 million into answering the basic question that so intrigues us. I wrote of this in “Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

That article, published at LinkedIn, quotes a number of prominent scientists who were convinced that humanity is at the very threshold of the Earthshaking discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos. Two years into it, and the only available observation to confound the theorists is silence — nothing but silence. The hard truth is that science has produced far more empirical evidence of the spiritual benefit of talking to God — what everyone we know in the known Universe calls “prayer” — than talking to — or listening for — extraterrestrials.

Courtesy of David Daleiden

An American Horror Story

Don’t get me wrong. I have been fascinated and enthused about the science of SETI for my entire life. But until there is scientific observation with actual evidence, then there is only speculation and science fiction. Absent evidence, I have to conclude, like the astronomer and biologist John Gribben, that Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life among the billions of planets in this galaxy.

But if such a discovery is ever made, it would be monumental on every level known to humankind, and the discovery would be in two directions. If other intelligent life exists, then science must assume that E.T. is just as curious and driven to discover us as we are to learn of other life.

I wonder how we would explain the annual March for Life that takes place in Washington, DC and around the country. I wonder how we would account for the reason why tens of thousands of people of conscience — young and old alike — brave the DC winter each year to urge a reassessment of our cultural respect for human life. I wonder how we would explain why our news media virtually ignores the March for Life while hyping anything that places a Catholic or a Catholic conscience in a negative spotlight. Could we ever explain to an alien race the contradiction of our driven pursuit of life out there while we have so blindly squandered the right to life right here?

I just listened to a speech from our present “devoutly Catholic” President who spoke of his driven commitment to the rights, dignity, respect, and equality for all people while condemning the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the right to life of those not yet born. How would we explain to newly encountered intelligent life the weird enigma of our moral and scientific duplicity?

We humans are just as likely to be discovered BY other life in the Cosmos as we are to discover it. Every radio and television broadcast ever emitted on Earth is traveling at the speed of light in all directions through the vacuum of space.

This is what makes the American Horror Story of abortion without limits and its vast machine so horrible. It’s our blind duplicity.

If we keep at it, the only real evidence of intelligent life in the universe will be the fact that they wisely and silently keep their distance. If they exist at all, as so many in science seem driven to believe but with no evidence whatsoever, then this is as plausible an explanation for their silence as any other.

If E.T. gets wind of Planned Parenthood, we might well appear to be the neighbors from hell.

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Photo courtesy of Webb Space Telescope

Editor’s Note: You might like these other Prolife posts on Beyond These Stone Walls:

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect

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The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has released its 50-minute documentary film exposing “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom: How Disney Is Losing Its Way.” This film is a must-see for anyone concerned about the erosion of parental rights in the woke indoctrination of children. Watch the Catholic League documentary here.

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

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

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes

For Catholics, the month of November honors our beloved dead, and is a time to reinforce our civil liberties especially the one most endangered: Religious Freedom.

November 2, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of attention has been paid to a recent post by Pornchai Moontri. Writing in my stead from Thailand, his post was “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.” Many readers were able to put a terrible tragedy into spiritual perspective. Writer Dorothy R. Stein commented on it: “The Kingdom of Thailand weeps for its children. Only a wounded healer like Mr. Pornchai Moontri could tell such a devastating story and yet leave readers feeling inspired and hopeful. This is indeed a gift. I have read many accounts of this tragedy, but none told with such elegant grace.”

A few years ago I wrote of the sting of death, and the story of how one particular friend’s tragic death stung very deeply. But there is far more to the death of loved ones than its sting. A decade ago at this time I wrote a post that helped some readers explore a dimension of death they had not considered. It focused not only on the sense of loss that accompanies the deaths of those we love, but also on the link we still share with them. It gave meaning to that “Holy Longing” that extends beyond death — for them and for us — and suggested a way to live in a continuity of relationship with those who have died. The All Souls Day Commemoration in the Roman Missal also describes this relationship:

“The Church, after celebrating the Feast of All Saints, prays for all who in the purifying suffering of purgatory await the day when they will join in their company. The celebration of the Mass, which re-enacts the sacrifice of Calvary, has always been the principal means by which the Church fulfills the great commandment of charity toward the dead. Even after death, our relationship with our beloved dead is not broken.”

That waiting, and our sometimes excruciatingly painful experience of loss, is “The Holy Longing.” The people we have loved and lost are not really lost. They are still our family, our friends, and our fellow travelers, and we shouldn’t travel with them in silence. The month of November is a time to restore our spiritual connection with departed loved ones. If you know others who have suffered the deaths of family and friends, please share with them a link to “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.”

The Communion of Saints

I’ve written many times about the saints who inspire us on this arduous path. The posts that come most immediately to mind are “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II,” and more recently, “With Padre Pio When the Worst that Could Happen Happens.” Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio inspire me not because I have so much in common with them, but because I have so little. I am not at all like them, but I came to know them because I was drawn to the ways they faced and coped with adversity in their lives on Earth.

Patron saints really are advocates in Heaven, but the story is bigger than that. To have patron saints means something deeper than just hoping to share in the graces for which they suffered. It means to be in a relationship with them as role models for our inevitable encounter with human trials and suffering. They can advocate not only for us, but for the souls of those we entrust to their intercession. In the Presence of God, they are more like a lens for us, and not dispensers of grace in their own right. The Protestant critique that Catholics “pray to saints” has it all wrong.

To be in a relationship with patron saints means much more than just waiting for their help in times of need. I have learned a few humbling things this year about the dynamics of a relationship with Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio. I have tried to consciously cope with painful things the way they did, and over time they opened my eyes about what it means to have their advocacy. It’s an advocacy I would not need if I were even remotely like them. It’s an advocacy I need very much, and can no longer live without.

I don’t think we choose the saints who will be our patrons and advocates in Heaven. I think they choose us. In ways both subtle and profound, they interject their presence in our lives. I came into my unjust imprisonment over 28 years ago knowing little to nothing of Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio. But in multiple posts at Beyond These Stone Walls I’ve written of how they made their presence here known. And in that process, I’ve learned a lot about why they’re now in my life. It is not because they look upon me and see their own paths. It’s because they look upon me and see how much and how easily I stray from their paths.

I recently discovered something about the intervention of these saints that is at the same time humbling and deeply consoling. It’s consoling because it affirms for me that these modern saints have made themselves a part of what I must bear each day. It’s humbling because that fact requires shedding all my notions that their intercession means a rescue from the crosses I’d just as soon not carry.

Over the last few years, I’ve had to live with something that’s very painful — physically very painful — and sometimes so intensely so that I could focus on little else. In prison, there are not many ways to escape from pain. I can purchase some over-the-counter ibuprophen in the prison commissary, but that’s sort of like fighting a raging forest fire with bottled water. It’s not very effective. At times, the relentless pain flared up and got the better of me, and I became depressed. There aren’t many ways to escape depression in prison either. The combination of nagging pain and depression began to interfere with everything I was doing, and others started to notice. The daily barrage of foul language and constantly loud prison noise that I’ve heard non-stop for over 28 years suddenly had the effect of a rough rasp being dragged across the surface of my brain. Many of you know exactly what I mean.

So one night, I asked Saint Padre Pio to intercede that I might be delivered from this awful nagging pain. I fell off to sleep actually feeling a little hopeful, but it was not to be. The next morning I awoke to discover my cross of pain even heavier than the night before. Then suddenly I became aware that I had just asked Padre Pio — a soul who in life bore the penetrating pain of the wounds of Christ without relief for fifty years — to nudge the Lord to free me from my pain. What was I thinking?! That awareness was a spiritually more humbling moment than any physical pain I have ever had to bear.

So for now, at least, I’ll have to live with this pain, but I’m no longer depressed about it. Situational depression, I have learned, comes when you expect an outcome other than the one you have. I no longer expect Padre Pio to rescue me from my pain, so I’m no longer depressed. I now see that my relationship with him isn’t going to be based upon being pain free. It’s going to be what it was initially, and what I had allowed to lapse. It’s the example of how he coped with suffering by turning himself over to grace, and by making an offering of what he suffered.

A rescue would sure be nice, but his example is, in the long run, a lot more effective. I know myself. If I awake tomorrow and this pain is gone forever, I will thank Saint Padre Pio. Then just as soon as my next cross comes my way — as I once described in “A Shower of Roses” — I will begin to doubt that the saint had anything to do with my release.

His example, on the other hand, is something I can learn from, and emulate. The truth is that few, if any, of the saints we revere were themselves rescued from what they suffered and endured in this life. We do not seek their intercession because they were rescued. We seek their intercession because they bore all for Christ. They bore their own suffering as though it were a shield of honor and they are going to show us how we can bear our own.

For Greater Glory

Back in 2010 when my friend Pornchai Moontri was preparing to be received into the Church, he asked one of his “upside down” questions. I called them “upside down” questions because as I lay in the bunk in our prison cell reading late at night, his head would pop down from the upper bunk so he appeared upside down to me as he asked a question. “When people pray to saints do they really expect a miracle?” I asked for an example, and he said, “Should you or I ask Saint Maximilian Kolbe for a happy ending when he didn’t have one himself?”

I wonder if Pornchai knew how incredibly irritating it was when he stumbled spontaneously upon a spiritual truth that I had spent months working out in my own soul. Pornchai’s insight was true, but an inconvenient truth — inconvenient by Earthly hopes, anyway. The truth about Auschwitz, and even a very long prison sentence, was that all hope for rescue was the first hope to die among any of its occupants. As Maximilian Kolbe lay in that Auschwitz bunker chained to, but outliving, his fellow prisoners being slowly starved to death, did he expect to be rescued?

All available evidence says otherwise. Father Maximilian Kolbe led his fellow sufferers into and through a death that robbed their Nazi persecutors of the power and meaning they intended for that obscene gesture. How ironic would it be for me to now place my hope for rescue from an unjust and uncomfortable imprisonment at the feet of Saint Maximilian Kolbe? Just having such an expectation is more humiliating than prison itself. Devotion to Saint Maximilian Kolbe helped us face prison bravely. It does not deliver us from prison walls, but rather from their power to stifle our souls.

I know exactly what brought about Pornchai’s question. Each weekend when there were no programs and few activities in prison, DVD films were broadcast on a closed circuit in-house television channel. Thanks to a reader, a DVD of the soul-stirring film, “For Greater Glory” was donated to the prison. That evening we were able to watch the great film. It was an hour or two after viewing this film that Pornchai asked his “upside-down” question.

“For Greater Glory” is one of the most stunning and compelling films of recent decades. You must not miss it. It’s the historically accurate story of the Cristero War in Mexico in 1926. Academy Award nominee Andy Garcia portrays General Enrique Gorostieta Delarde in a riveting performance as the leader of Mexico’s citizen rebellion against the efforts of a socialist regime to diminish and then eradicate religious liberty and public expressions of Christianity, especially Catholic faith.

If you haven’t seen “For Greater Glory,” I urge you to do so. Its message is especially important before drawing any conclusions about the importance of the issue of religious liberty now facing Americans and all of Western Culture. As readers in the United States know well, in a matter of days we face a most important election for the future direction of Congress and the Senate.

“For Greater Glory” is an entirely true account, and portrays well the slippery slope from a government that tramples upon religious freedom to the actual persecution, suppression and cancelation of priests and expressions of Catholic faith and witness. If you think it couldn’t happen here, think again. It couldn’t happen in Mexico either, but it did. We may not see our priests publicly executed, but we are already seeing them in prison without just cause, and even silenced by their own bishops, sometimes just for boldly speaking the truth of the Gospel. You have seen the practice of your faith diminished as “non-essential” by government dictate during a pandemic.

The real star of this film — and I warn you, it will break your heart — is the heroic soul of young José Luis Sánchez del Río, a teen whose commitment to Christ and his faith results in horrible torment and torture. If this film were solely the creation of Hollywood, there would have been a happy ending. José would have been rescued to live happily ever after. It isn’t Hollywood, however; it’s real. José’s final tortured scream of “Viva Cristo Rey!” is something I will remember forever.

I cried, finally, at the end as I read in the film’s postscript that José Luis Sánchez del Río was beatified as a martyr by Pope Benedict XVI after his elevation to the papacy in 2005. Saint José was canonized October 16, 2016 by Pope Francis, a new Patron Saint of Religious Liberty. His Feast Day is February 10. José’s final “Viva Cristo Rey!” echoes across the century, across all of North America, across the globe, to empower a quest for freedom that can be found only where young José found it.

“Viva Cristo Rey!”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Our Faith is a matter of life and death, and it diminishes to our spiritual peril. Please share this post. You may also like these related posts to honor our beloved dead in the month of November.

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

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

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

A Not-so-Subtle Wake-Up Call from Christ the King

To assist your friends from Beyond These Stone Walls, please visit our Special Events page.

For this Prodigal Son, Homecoming Is a Work in Progress

Pornchai Moontri’s return to Thailand after 36 years has been that of a Prodigal Son traversing some dark rivers of the heart, but with help from an unexpected navigator.

September 7, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“Sawasdee Kup, my friends. This is Pornchai writing from Bangkok, Thailand. I am very happy to see this post by Father G about my other spiritual father and patron saint, Maximilian Kolbe. He has been so much a part of my life in too many ways for me to describe. I think Father G summed it up well when he introduced this post today on Linkedin and Facebook. Here is how he described it:

"#Resistance This post reveals a little known mystical connection between St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Pope John Paul II. Resistance to evil is never futile."

My birthday is coming up. (That is not a hint!) Some of my friends got me my first computer as an early birthday present. Remember that I was "down" for the entire computer age. So this is like an alien device to me. Yesterday I saw Beyond These Stone Walls here in Thailand on a full size computer screen for the very first time. It is awesome! And so are all of you.

With love and my prayers,

Pornchai Maximilian Moontri”

After I posted “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II” a few weeks ago, the comment above was posted by our friend Pornchai Moontri writing from Bangkok, Thailand. A few readers subsequently sent messages asking for an update about Pornchai and his life there. I had already intended to write about this because his birthday is September 10, just a few days after this is posted. Pornchail will be 49 years old and is still struggling to regain the sense of home that was lost when he left Thailand 37 years ago in 1985.

This post will be followed in a week by one that has been a long time coming. I have been working on it for months, and I believe it is the most important post I have ever written. There are some who do not want me to write it, but, for reasons that may seem apparent here next week, I must. It is an Earth-shattering account for which Satan himself has lodged many obstacles in the path of its telling. They have mostly been overcome. I ask for your prayers as I complete that most important post this week.

By coincidence, I learned only after beginning today’s post that the Gospel for the Sunday Mass following its publication is the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). The word, “Prodigal” does not mean what some readers think it means. Its origin is in the Middle English “prodigalite” which comes from the Latin, “prodigere,” the original meaning of which is to drive away or squander. From the famous parable that Jesus told, it has also come to mean “reckless” or “wasteful,” neither of which I could ascribe to my own Prodigal Son, Pornchai Moontri.

But there was time in Pornchai’s life — a long time — when he felt compelled to drive away anyone and everyone who cared enough to enter it. This is the plight of so many who have been spiritually and emotionally wounded from a traumatic past. Pornchai tried to drive me away, too, but God had other plans and we both ended up following them. That story was told in this very same week one year ago, so I invite you to revisit it. If next week’s post is my most important, this one remains my own favorite. It is “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

Mary Calls in Reinforcements

I do not know whether I have the writing skills to adequately convey what Pornchai has been up against over the last 18 months. I have known and helped other prisoners who have faced deportation as adults to a home and country they had not seen since early childhood. Many simply do not survive. I had long been determined that Pornchai would not be one of those. Over time, by some mysterious grace, my writing made its way around the Globe to Thailand where people noticed and some support developed to assist Pornchai’s plight. He had no contact for 36 years with any of the extended family left behind when he was taken away at age eleven. He had only vague memories.

While he was still trapped in that grueling five months of post-prison ICE detention, my heart sank when I learned that the housing and support plan we had for him just fell apart in the eleventh hour due to illness. It was just weeks before Pornchai was to board a flight and I had no backup plan. Trying to put such things together from inside a prison cell half a world away is a daunting challenge.

I kept no secrets from Pornchai in this regard so I painfully remember hearing his own heart sink at the other end of the phone when I told him that the plan we had in place for him fell apart.

I remember trying to put the best spin I could on it. I asked him to trust. I said that often in my experience, such disappointments can become opportunities. Did I really believe that? I’m not sure, but I was sure of one thing: Pornchai would not believe it unless I did. So I did! In prayer, I turned this over to Mary, Undoer of Knots, my favorite from of Marian devotion and the most powerful. I asked her in an act of surrender to undo the knots of faithless distrust that held us bound.

Just two days later, in our daily ten-minute phone call while Pornchai was stranded in ICE waiting out a pandemic, I told him we had better news. I told him that Fr. John Hung Le, a Society of the Divine Word missionary priest from Vietnam, had been reading about us on Beyond These Stone Walls and sent me a message that he wants to help and would provide housing for Pornchai until we could find a better plan. Pornchai was dubious. “I don’t want to be a burden for anyone,” he said.

After Pornchai’s initial stay in required pandemic quarantine at a Bangkok hotel in February, 2021, Father John showed up with our Divine Mercy Thailand friend, Yela, and with Chalathip, Father John’s neighbor and a benefactor of his refugee project. Chalathip learned about Pornchai’s life from Yela and Fr. John, and she received an interior summons from Mary herself.

A retired teacher, Chalathip took on the task of helping Pornchai to assimilate in Thailand, a most difficult task after an absence consisting of his entire adult life since age eleven. Pornchai had to be tutored in conversational Thai, and quickly, but Chalathip knew this could not happen while Pornchai was living with four Vietnamese priests, none of whom spoke Thai.

So Chalathip spoke with Father John and decided to offer Pornchai a small apartment on the upper floor of her home just a few doors down the street from Father John’s. They spoke to me about this, but I was not going to second guess those with boots on the ground.

Chalathip owns several properties in Thailand, so in return Pornchai offered to help her manage them. Having become proficient in woodworking, Pornchai found that these skills translated easily into home repair. He dug up stumps, did landscaping, fixed leaky roofs, painted walls, sanded and restored furniture. Chalathip had two daughters. One had tragically died from an illness several years earlier and the other lived in the U.K. It did not take long for a strong maternal bond to form between her and Pornchai. This was literally divinely inspired. Chalathip never had a son, and Pornchai lost his Mother at a very early age.

Honor Thy Mother

Over recent months, Pornchai had enormous decisions to make. Chalathip had accompanied him and Father John on Pornchai’s first visit to the home and family from where he was taken at age eleven. It was in the village of Phuviang in Khon Kaen Province in the far northeast of Thailand — a nine-hour drive from Bangkok. I wrote about this hauntingly mysterious visit in “For Pornchai Moontri, a Miracle Unfolds in Thailand.”

In recent weeks, Pornchai had to return there to face a difficult decision. The half-completed home that his mother was building at the time of death in 2000, and the small amount of farmland around it, would have been taken from him unless he could come up with 80,000 Thai Baht in fees that had accumulated so he could effect a transfer of the house and land to his own name. Pornchai was frozen in place unable to decide what to do.

The amount seemed impossible for Pornchai, but in U.S. dollars, 80,000 is the equivalent of about $2,400. It just so happened that I had saved that amount in a just-in-case savings account. I did not want Pornchai to lose his mother’s home and land because it would have been gone forever. So I sent him what I had and he was able to complete the transfer. But the real Guardian Angel in this story was Chalathip. She went there with him, acting as a translator and trusted advisor pointing out options as Pornchai discerned under pressure what to do.

A kind reader has since returned my small investment to me. I am profoundly thankful, but most of all I am thankful for Chalathip. At every step of Pornchai’s long journey home, she has been a much needed teacher, guide, chauffeur and parent. She is near the age Pornchai’s Mother would be today had she lived, and I believe strongly that Chalathip, like me, was destined for this connection with Pornchai.

She returned with him to Phuviang four times in an effort to help him obtain his Thai ID for full citizenship. At some point I learned that after all my prayers to Mary Undoer of Knots, Chalathip was right there untangling all the complications that Pornchai faced in order to make Thailand his home again.

Father John and Chalathip have joined Pornchai in prayers at his Mother’s tomb at the Buddhist Temple cemetery nearby. Thailand is 99-percent Buddhist but there are many Catholic converts there and Catholicism has left a large footprint in Thailand. Chalathip, so very rare in Thailand, is Catholic since birth. Her deeply felt faith and fidelity to our Lord has bridged the chasm between hope and despair for Pornchai. He and I still speak every day, and I have recently detected that hope and some evidence of actual happiness in his voice knowing that he is not alone in his plight.

I detect it in my own voice as well of late. Night is often long and dark, but with the dawn comes — if not rejoicing, then at least a modicum of peace. It is what Jesus said would happen if we remain faithful. “Peace be with you.”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please join me here next week for the most important post I have ever written. It’s a matter of life and death!

And thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please “SUBSCRIBE” if you haven’t already. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

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Another note from Father Gordon: Our friends from Divine Mercy Thailand who sponsored Pornchai’s homecoming will be gathering with Father John’s community this week for a birthday celebration for Pornchai.

Also, Pornchai was recruited to teach an ocassional physical fitness class by the owner of MI Fitness in Pak Chong, Thailand. Mr. Mi (pronounced Mee) saw him working out at his gym and corralled him to teach a class. Mr. Mi and his wife created the poster below for their Facebook page and a short video of Pornchai’s first class. Just click on the poster to see the video.

Falsely Accused by Facebook: Like Déjà vu All Over Again

Wrongly accused of violating Facebook Community Standards my page was restored on appeal with an apology. Then Facebook warned me to never again do what I never did.

June 29, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Some time ago, I wrote an article for LinkedIn Pulse entitled, “Gene Roddenberry and Captain Kirk’s Star Trek Epiphany.” It was an odd blend of science fiction and faith. LinkedIn users loved it — even some who were never Star Trek fans. It told the story of my childhood affinity for Star Trek which first entered our collective consciousness when I was 13 years old in 1966.

Actor Wil Wheaton caught my attention recently when he had a terrific essay published in the “Gears & Gadgets” section of The Wall Street Journal. A self-described geek, Mr. Wheaton played a somewhat cooler geek as Ensign Wesley Crusher in the 1980s Star Trek revival series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” My own geekness survived into adulthood so I saw every episode twice.

Since then, several additions to the Star Trek franchise have come and gone. My all-time favorite is the current one, Star Trek Discovery, a streaming series now in its third season.

But I’m off topic already. Wil Wheaton’s WSJ essay was “When Did We Lose the Internet?” (WSJ June 4-5, 2022). It was about how the Internet has evolved from his days as a young blogger in the early 1990s on Greymatter created by and named for Noah Grey. Wheaton wrote of Mr. Grey’s habit of personally assisting users:

“Can you imagine emailing Mark Zuckerberg any time you had a problem with Facebook? Now imagine him immediately fixing it.”

I have actually tried to imagine that. Facebook today boasts of having two billion users worldwide. I am one of them, but a reluctant and atypical one. I have never actually seen Facebook, but there is a page there for me and Beyond These Stone Walls that was created and maintained by our editor. I do not have a cat so readers will never see photos of my cat, but by some miracle my page has thousands of followers.

My entire Facebook experience involves simply posting my weekly post with help from our editor. My posts are then shared to a number of Catholic and prolife Facebook groups around the world. By posting to groups like CatholicismRocks and Catholic News Agency this humble blog reaches tens of thousands of readers.

Beyond These Stone Walls is not at all dependent on Facebook for readers, however. Those who come to the site from Facebook each week constitute less than ten percent of the readers of this blog. The vast majority come with “no referring link,” meaning that they subscribe directly (which is free and something I hope everyone will do).

In early March, 2022, I received an ominous message from Facebook that my account has been suspended and I am henceforth banned from posting, sharing, or commenting due to “violations of Facebook’s Community Standards.” I had no idea how this happened. So again with help, I reviewed the Community Standards and could not find any that I had ever violated.

From there, the story gets a little comical. At least, it would be comical if it were not also so frustrating. It was my first experience of pleading my case before an algorithm instead of a human person. I first wrote of this in another LinkedIn article, “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

The Facebook Oversight Board

It turned out that the offending post was one that I had written a decade earlier. Facebook had no issue with it then. But when it was linked in another, newer post, it seriously riled Facebook’s Orwellian algorithm. The link was to a true story of anti-Catholic oppression that I had written back in 2011. It has been hiding in plain sight ever since. You may judge it for yourself. My banishment was because of “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

That post was an entirely true and fully documented account of false witness in 1939 Germany. Angered over an anti-Nazi document bravely published by Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, falsely accused over 300 German Catholic priests of sexual abuse and arrested them all. It was a demonic effort to silence the Church. In the end, all but three were acquitted and exonerated because the German courts had not yet fallen into lockstep with the Nazi regime. The post opened with a quote from Hitler himself: “The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

Somehow, Facebook’s algorithm immediately detected this mention of Hitler and his quote, and determined it — and me — to be socially and culturally dangerous. So Facebook froze my account. We appealed that decision in a lengthy process that rivaled any state or federal appeal I have encountered before or since.

Anyone who has ever taken the time to endure a Facebook Oversight Board appeal knows firsthand what I was up against. The aura of suspicion and prejudice was a reminder of all I have witnessed in state or federal courts. With help, I completed a multitude of forms and answered page after page of probing questions such as “What was your motivation in writing this offending material?”

Finally, I was asked what community purpose the questioned post served. I explained that the Catholic Church has been rocked by allegations of often decades-old abuse in multiple countries, and reviewing all aspects of this phenomenon is in the best interests of the Catholic community. I then asked the Oversight Board to simply read the post instead of reacting to the algorithm’s rejection of it. Apparently someone did read it. We received this reply from the Facebook Oversight Board a week later:

“Sorry that we did not get this right. Our review of your post indicates that you did not violate Facebook Community Standards. Your post has been restored. Thank you for taking the time to appeal this matter and assist us in our continuing efforts to assure the safety of the Facebook forum.”

There were no angels singing the Alleluia Chorus. I actually did not care at all what Facebook concluded from my posts. My concern was for the Catholic groups that choose that forum to communicate with other members. I estimate that our posts reach about 200,000 people in those groups, and I was not keen on abandoning them to the usual Facebook fare.

But it wasn’t over. The Oversight Board restored the post within 12 days of discovering it. But Facebook did not restore my account. For the next 30 days it remained visible, but inactive meaning that we could not post or comment. Then for another ninety days Facebook censured all our posts by preventing them from being shared on the newsfeed for each of the Catholic and pro-life groups we had joined. The Facebook fiasco finally ended on June 5, 2022 which also just happened to be the Solemnity of Pentecost and my 40th anniversary of priesthood ordination. So my last post to be suppressed was “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost.”

Metaverse Madness and Independence Day

One week later, when our editor checked our Facebook account status, the following message popped up: “Your account has been fully restored. If you violate Facebook’s Community standards again your account will risk being permanently suspended.” Facebook is now ever ready to penalize me for again doing what I never did in the first place.

At the same time, we received an email message from some unknown, even darker entity claiming to represent Facebook. It informed us that our account is “almost fully restored, but we need your account information and passwords to complete the restoration.” This was, of course, a fraud. A previous message also informed us that Facebook needs our debit card number and $50 to complete the restoration of the account.

We ignored and deleted both messages. It is troubling that Facebook’s algorithm can readily detect and react to anything suspected of violating “woke” sensitivities, but cannot detect attempts at fraud carried out in Facebook’s name. Facebook has enslaved itself to woke culture and for the same reasons MSNBC and, to a slightly lesser extent, CNN and network news outlets have. Advertisers require keeping a level of viewership, and viewers require content they agree with.

At Facebook, advertising dollars reign supreme. Facebook’s most valuable demographic is young people, but that age group’s mass migration to Tik Tok and other venues is underway. In 2022, quarterly revenue dropped significantly because Facebook’s advertising empire depends on keeping that demographic online and satisfied. Anything deemed offensive or disagreeable to that demographic is edged out of Facebook’s daily discourse — the First Amendment and free speech be damned.

Two weeks ago in these pages, we posted “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing.” In that post, I cited the grim reality of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people in our culture, an alarming problem that exists today at a level never before seen. Something has gone terribly wrong. Over the last two years, daily users of Facebook rose exponentially because schools were closed and young men and women were learning remotely.

A lot of extra time was spent on Facebook in those two years, but the mental health crisis we are seeing demonstrates that Facebook just isn’t enough. Real, meaningful, human contact is essential to the development of the young. A computer just doesn’t cut it. We may never break free of social media, but we must break free of its addictive qualities. Independence Day 2022 is upon us, and it’s a good time to start with a Facebook-free day.

In the future world envisioned by Star Trek, no one ever even mentions Facebook or any anticipation of the accumulation of “likes.” Maybe our future might see Facebook as ancient history. Once you come face to face with a Klingon, no one wants to be his Facebook friend anyway.

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Actor Wil Wheaton in “The Game,” a classic episode of Star Trek the Next Generation in which he had to be liberated from enslavement to a mind-altering computer game.

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Next week at Beyond These Stone Walls, I will present a post about the stunning news that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade.

Please visit our newest addition to our Voices from Beyond page and please Subscribe if you haven’t already. You may also like these other titles that celebrate our hard-won freedoms this Independence Day:

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Prison Journal: Jesus and Those People with Stones

For readers beyond these stone walls, stories from prison can be depressing. With an open heart some can also be inspiring, and inspiration is a necessity of hope.

March 30, 2022 by Father Gordon MacRae

Readers may recall the great prison film, The Shawshank Redemption starring Tim Robbins as wrongly convicted prisoner, Andy Dufresne, and his friend, Red, a role for which actor Morgan Freeman received an Academy Award nomination. The film was released in theatres on the same day I was sent to prison in 1994 so it was some time before I got to see it.

Readers of this site found many parallels between those two characters and the conditions of my imprisonment with my friend, Pornchai Moontri. For the film's anniversary of release, I wrote a review of it for Linkedin Pulse entitled, “The Shawshank Redemption and its Real World Revision.”

My review draws a parallel between the fictional prison that sprang from the mind of Stephen King and the prison in which I am writing this. One of the elements in my movie review was a surprising revelation. At the time Stephen King was writing The Shawshank Redemption, 12-year-old Pornchai Moontri, newly arrived from Thailand to America, had a job delivering the Bangor Daily News to his home.

One aspect of my review was about our respective first seven years in prison. I spent those years confined in a place that housed eight men per cell. I described the experience: “Imagine walking alone in an unknown city. Approach the first seven strangers you meet and invite them to come home with you. Now lock yourself in your bathroom with them and face the fact that this is what your life will be like for the unforeseen future.”

Pornchai spent those same seven years in prison in the neighboring state of Maine commencing at age 18. Those years for him were the polar opposite of what they were for me. He spent them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement. Years later, Pornchai was transferred to New Hampshire and I had been relocated to a saner, safer place with but two men per cell. We landed in the same place, but came to it with polar opposite prison anxieties: Pornchai had to recover from years of forced solitude while I was recovering from years of never, ever, ever being alone.

We survived together with a camaraderie that mirrored the one between Andy and Red that sprang from the mind of Stephen King. So you might understand why, in all the years of my unjust imprisonment, the year 2016 was personally one of the most difficult. After 11 years together in a cell in that saner place, Pornchai and I were caught up in a mass move against our will that sent us back to the dungeon-like place with eight men to a cell. We were told that it would be for only a few weeks. One year later, we were still there.

However, others suffered in that environment far more than we did. It was two years after we had engaged in the spiritual surrender of consecration “To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” We had inner tools for coping with loss and discomfort while others here had far less. Pornchai and I were well aware that many of the men with whom we had been living in that other, kinder place were also relocated. I was impressed to witness, in our first night there, Pornchai going from one eight-man cell to another to make sure our friends were safe and that the strangers now among them were civil. Pornchai had a knack for inspiring civility.

The Cast of This Prison Journal

After just three days there, one of the strangers assigned to our crowded cell with us decided he would ask to move because, as he put it to one of his friends, “Living with MacRae and Moontri was like living with my parents.” This was solely because I told him that he is not going to sell drugs out our cell window. His move came at just the right time. We were able to request that our friend, Chen, move to the now empty bunk in our cell. Speaking very little English, Chen had been thrown in with strangers. On the day I went to his cell to tell him to pack and come with us, it was as though he had been liberated from some other Stephen King horror story.

I live with an odd and often polarized mix of people. Among prisoners, about half become entirely engrossed in the affairs of this world, consuming news — especially bad news — with insatiable interest. The other half seem to live in various degrees of ignorant bliss about all that is going on in the world. They never watch news, read a newspaper, or discuss current events. They play Dungeons and Dragons, poker, and video games. While I was hunched over my typewriter typing “Beyond Ukraine” a few weeks ago, my current roommate had no idea anything at all was going on there.

Just as in the world, there are many evil things that happen in prison. People here cope with them by either blindly accepting evil as a part of the cost of living or they just never even acknowledge evil’s existence at all. These are not good options, nor are they good coping mechanisms. Acknowledging evil while also resisting it with all our might is the first line of defense in spiritual warfare. Many of the men in prison with me never actually embraced evil. They just didn’t see it coming.

Many readers have told me that they shed some tears while reading “Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.” Pornchai has often told me of how his appearances in these pages have changed his life. This was summed up in one sentence in his magnificent post: “I began to realize that nearly everyone I meet in Thailand in the coming days will already know about me.”

All the fears that Pornchai had built up for years over his deportation to Thailand 36 years after being taken from there just evaporated because of his presence in Beyond These Stone Walls. I once told him that he must now live like an open book. Exposing the truth of his life to the world could be freeing or binding. The truth of his life in this prison could be a horror story, a bad war movie, or an inspirational drama that people the world over could tune into each week, and what they will see would be entirely up to him. I do not have to tell you that his life became an inspiration for many, including many he left behind here. The evil that was once inflicted on him was gone, and only its traumatic echoes remain.

A few years ago, I began to write about some of the other people who populate this world. Some of their stories became very important, and not least to their subjects. Prisoners who had little hope suddenly responded to the notion that others will read about them, and what they read will be up to them. Some of these stories are beyond inspiring. They are the firsthand accounts of the existence of evil that once permeated their lives, and of actual grace when they chose to confront and resist that evil and turn from it. Their stories are the hard evidence of something Saint Paul wrote:

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”

— Romans 6:1.

Getting Stoned in Prison

My subtitle above does not mean what you might think it means. There is indeed an illicit drug problem in just about every prison, including this one. As long as there is money to be had, risks will be taken and human life will be placed in jeopardy. I recently read that the small state of New Hampshire has the nation’s highest rate of overdose deaths among people ages 15 to 50. This is driven largely by the influx of illegal drugs, especially lethal fentanyl.

But in the headline above, I mean something entirely different. The Gospel for Sunday Mass on April 3rd, the Sunday before Holy Week this year, is the story of the woman caught in adultery and her encounter with Jesus before a crowd standing in judgment and about to stone her (John 8:1-11). You already know that some prisoners are not guilty of the crimes attributed to them, but most are, and most of those have stood where that woman stood before Jesus. When prisoners serve their prison sentence, the judgment of the courts comes to an end, but the judgment of the rest of humanity can go on and on mercilessly.

It should not be this way. Our nation’s expensive, bloated, one-size-fits-all prison system leaves too many men and women beyond the margins of social acceptance. The first two readings this Sunday lend themselves to the mercy of deliverance from the past, not only for ourselves, but for others too.

“Thus says the Lord, who opens a way in the sea and a path through the muddy waters ... Remember not the events of the past; the things of long ago consider not. See, I am doing something new! Do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way; in the wasteland rivers.”

— Isaiah 43:16-21

“Just one thing: Forgetting what lies behind, but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling in Jesus Christ.”

— Philippians 3:14

When this blog had to transition from its older format to Beyond These Stone Walls in November 2020, we learned that most of our older posts still exist, but must be restored and reformatted. In our “Beyond These Stone Walls Public Library” is a Category entitled, “Prison Journal.” In coming weeks, we will restore and add there some of the posts I have written about the inspiring stories of other prisoners.

But before that happens, I want to add my voice to that of Jesus. Please read our stories armed with mercy and not with stones. That is the Gospel for this week’s Sunday Mass, and it is filled with surprises. We are restoring it so that you may enter Holy Week with hearts open. Please read and share:

“Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote on the Ground”

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Two important invitations from Father Gordon MacRae:

Please join us Beyond These Stone Walls for a Holy Week retreat. The details are at our Special Events page.

Also, thank you for participating with us in the Consecration of Ukraine and Russia on March 25, the Solemnity of the Annunciation. We have given the beautifully written Act of Consecration a permanent home in our Library Category, “Behold Your Mother.”

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You may also like these relevant posts:

The Measure By Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past

Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being

Cry Freedom! Saint Paul and a Prisoner of the Apocalypse

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, A Year in Freedom

Pornchai Moontri marks one year since his return to Thailand after 36 years away, and one year in freedom after 29 years in prison. Divine Mercy has won this day!

February 23, 2022 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Sawasdee Kup, my friends. The photo that you see below is my first moment in freedom in Thailand after a 36-year absence and 29 years in prison since age 18. As many of you know, the last 16 of those years were in the company of Fr. Gordon MacRae. Without him, none of the rest of this post would ever have taken place.

In the photo, that’s me on the left. It was the 24th day of February in 2021. I think I was the only person in Thailand to wear a pair of western jeans that day. It was all I had, and it was a very hot 40-degrees Celsius which is about 104-degrees Fahrenheit and extremely humid. The three people with me are (L to R): Khun Chalathip, a supporter and benefactor of the Divine Word Missionary work in Thailand; Yela Smit, co-founder of Divine Mercy Thailand and the person who worked with Fr. Gordon to prepare for my return; and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD who you already know well. Father G is not in the picture, of course, but he was still very much present.

There are many others who made this picture possible. Because of Beyond These Stone Walls, an international effort formed to move a mountain. This included Yela Smit and Father John Le in Thailand, my legal advocate Clare Farr in Australia, Viktor Weyand in Michigan, Dilia E. Rodríguez in New York, Fr. George David Byers in North Carolina, Charlene Duline in Indiana, Bill Wendell in Ohio, Claire Dion, Carol Slade, Judith Freda, and Samantha McLaughlin in Maine, and Mr. Narongchai at the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington. All made a mighty effort to bring me home. Many of you contributed to my support in the great challenge of starting life over. I do not have adequate words to thank you all.

After the above photo was taken, I had my first meal in a Thai restaurant, and then we went shopping for clothes. Father John took me to the biggest, busiest shopping mall in Bangkok where I had to fight off a panic attack. It was a very long time since I was in the presence of so many people, and in a city as huge as Bangkok. It felt overwhelming.

Father G and I had talked a lot about what my first moments of freedom might be like, but living them was another matter. So many competing feelings rushed through my mind: excitement, terror, gratitude, terror, happiness, terror. It is not easy to describe how freedom feels after spending 60-percent of my life in a U.S. prison. Did I mention terror?

Samsung to the Rescue

The photo above was my first “selfie.” It was taken when I figured out how to use the camera on a smart phone. There is a little rosary and cross hanging from the mirror. That was made for me out of foil candy wrappers by a 19-year-old Honduran young man who I helped during five awful months in ICE detention. From the moment I arrived in Thailand, everything I did, saw, or touched that day and the days to follow was completely new to me. I feared that I will never be able to fit in. During these 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room alone for the first time in 29 years, Father G called me every day. For the rest of my life I will always remember that first phone call. It was the morning after my arrival.

We spoke about my first anxious night in that room. It was small, but still about three times bigger than the 60-squarefeet where I lived with Father G. I could not see anyone during my two weeks in quarantine, but our friend, Yela, left a Samsung Galaxy smart phone in the hotel for me. I looked at it like it was left behind by space aliens. It took me a while to figure it out, but I somehow managed to find Beyond These Stone Walls.

I wish you could have felt my heart thumping with excitement. This blog that had been so much a part of our lives, reaching out from a tiny prison cell to the whole world, was now right in front of me. I realized with deep emotion that I am now seeing it while Father G never has. It struck me that almost everyone I will meet in Thailand in coming days will already know about me. Then I found Father G’s Documentary Interview and listened for the next two hours as he talked while I fell asleep. “Just like old times,” I thought, but don’t tell him I said that.

One year ago, on February 24, 2021, Father G wrote about that first night in Thailand and my embarrassing encounter with a 21st Century toilet. It was “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” I remember thinking that this Samsung smart phone that now connects me to the world is a miracle, and that BTSW was an even greater miracle. I felt for the first time that I am not among strangers. I am home, and Father G came with me.

Pictures of Freedom

Father G and I still speak by telephone each day. He calls me with his GTL tablet from the same prison cell where we both lived. Sometimes it is for just ten minutes and sometimes longer. Every time I tell him about what is going on in my life now, he says the same thing: “Send me photos! We need photos.” Now I can see the reason for that. He suggested that the best way to tell the story of my first year in freedom is with photographs and links to what he and I have both written. So here goes!

Free at Last Thanks to God and You

I wrote this post just a few weeks after my arrival. I was living then in the Divine Word Community House with Fr. John Le and some members of his Order in Nontha Buri. Father G and Father John spoke often. It is with deep gratitude that I thank both of them. No one knows how difficult it is to re-enter society after almost thirty years in isolation. On the day I arrived at Father John’s home, he and Yela had a photo taken with me in the presence of the One most responsible for bringing me there. So that photo is posted above.

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

Just a week later, Father Gordon wrote this amazing post after talking with me. It turned out that the headquarters for Father John’s Community in Thailand were located in the Province of Nong Bua Lamphu in the Northeast of Thailand, about a nine hour drive from Bangkok. That was the place of my birth and the place from where I was taken at age eleven. Just a few kilometers from a special home and clinic operated by Father John’s Order for Thai children, the Aunt and cousins I lived with as a child were still there. It was a most painful but also joyful reunion.

I spent my first night there in the unfinished home my mother was building before she was killed on the Island of Guam in 2000. All her things were still there. The next morning, I visited and prayed at her tomb for the first time. I was so thankful that Father John was with me. Though most of Thailand practices Buddhism, and so did I as a child, I am now a Catholic, and I asked Father John to bless my mother’s tomb. I will be going there again in April for Chakri, the annual Buddhist Water Festival when family members clean and honor the tombs of their loved ones.

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

Father Gordon has told me many times that this was his favorite post of my first year in freedom. He told my story combined with the story of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael from the Book of Tobit. There is a mysterious dog in the Tobit story, and during this same journey my dog, Hill, adopted me. This was a very special post. Hill and I have had similar lives in which we both got battered around a bit. He started following me as soon as I first arrived in the village of Phu Wiang (Poo-vee-ANG) just as a dog followed Tobias in the company of Raphael in the Book of Tobit. Whenever I return there, Hill comes running and howling as I give him a special treat. Then he never leaves my side.

Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand

Father G helped me to write this post which describes my long and difficult adjustment. In the photo above, Father John and Khun Chalathip, who took on the task of helping me to learn Thai again, brought me to a day of prayer at an Oblate retreat in Bangkok. Much of this post was written while I was there. Back at the New Hampshire State Prison, the Lieutenant of the unit where I lived saw it and had it posted on the wall outside his office. He asked the 300 prisoners there to all read it and he included it in a prison newsletter. Father G says that they especially liked this last paragraph and wanted other prisoners to read it:

“Sometimes I get impatient with myself. I wish I could be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I go anywhere or do anything. After 29 years “inside” I am now out of prison but I still have to get prison out of me. The name, Thailand, after all, means ‘Land of the Free’.”

Pornchai Moontri: Citizen of the Kingdom of Thailand

Every Thai citizen is presented with a Thai National ID at the age of 16. But I was not in Thailand then and never received it. So returning at age 48 with my citizenship not yet fully established was a burden for me. There have been times in my life when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I made multiple trips up to the village of my birth to visit with my family and my dog, Hill. Each time, I applied for my Thai ID and each time I was told that it is still pending.

In late October, much to my relief and Father G’s as well, I was summoned to Phu Wiang. I told Father G that I was buying a new dress shirt for the ID photo. Surely they could not turn me away with this beautiful new yellow shirt. Father G scoffed, but I had faith. (Now that’s a twist!) But this time I was successful and I wanted all of you to see my Thai ID. So Father G had my ID number blocked out and posted it.

This was my birthday reunion with my cousin and his family. He was eight years old and I was eleven when we lived as brothers. Now he is an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. While being with him and his family at the Gulf of Thailand, the struggles of the past just evaporated for a time.

A Year in Photos

One of the things that I looked forward to was swimming. I had not been immersed in water for thirty years. I lived with my cousins as a child, but 36 years had passed before I saw them again. On my first visit with them, they took me to a lake. I was not sure I even still knew how to swim so they put some little flotation devices on me. I did not even know how to get into the water the first time. When Father G saw the picture of me floating he wrote, “This is what freedom looks like.”

Visiting with my Aunt and cousins during the rice harvest was humbling for me. I am no stranger to hard work, but they feared I would be too unaccustomed to the relentless Thai heat so they gave me the easy job of collecting bundles. It was a great blessing to be with them during this most important time.

When Father G wrote about our Advent project with Father Tim Moyle and Saint Anne’s Parish in Mattawa, Ontario, and Father John Le here in Thailand, I got to experience first hand what it means to take part in a Corporal Work of Mercy. Visiting the Vietnamese refugee families with Father John and helping to distribute food is an unforgettable experience for which I am most thankful. I greatly admire Father John’s ministry in Thailand, which Father G has described at our Special Events page.

Here in Thailand, far beyond those stone walls, my heart aches that Father G is still behind them. I thank you for continuing to visit him in prison by reading these posts. I will always be indebted to you all for your acceptance of me, your kindnesses toward me, and the support of your prayers. I know that I would not have experienced this year in freedom without you. Father G will always be a part of my life and so will this wonderful blog.

May God bless you. With love to you all from me and Father G and from Hill too!

Pornchai Maximilian Moontri with his dog Hill. The tattoo on his arm is from a portrait of his Mother etched on his arm by an artistic prisoner after Pornchai learned of her death. It was his only means to memorialize and mourn her.

A Struggling Parish Built an Advent Bridge to Thailand

Fr. Tim Moyle and the people of St. Anne Parish in Mattawa, Ontario took up an Advent sacrifice to support the refugee mission of Fr. John Hung Le, SVD in Thailand.

(Clockwise from upper left in the photos above: Saint Anne Church in Mattawa Ontario, Father Tim Moyle in Mattawa, Father Gordon MacRae in Concord NH, and Father John Hung Le SVD in Bangkok. All collaborating this season for an Advent of the Heart.)

December 1, 2021

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: In twelve years of writing behind these prison walls, this is our first co-authored post. Fr. Tim Moyle joins me here this week from the Diocese of Pembroke in Ontario, Canada with an Advent mission of sacrifice and hope.

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First Up, Fr. G: As 2021 began, I wrote “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers,” a sort of review of 2020 from which we were all recovering and still are. In 2021, I thought our culture wars and politics could not get worse, but the long, slow descent of our culture seemed to have a will of its own. As Advent approached this year, I hoped for a more positive message to help us focus on the Birth of the Messiah instead of the demise of an opposing party.

Then, from out of the blue, came a message from Fr. Tim Moyle. Father Tim and I have never actually met, but we have a long acquaintance through our mutual, much-missed friend, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder and former editor of First Things magazine. Fr. Richard was a prominent Lutheran pastor and writer when he crossed the Tiber to the Catholic faith. After the death of Fr. Neuhaus, Fr. Tim Moyle wrote in First Things of their first meeting at table with Father Tim’s bishop in “Canadian Summers” (April 2009). Here’s an excerpt:

“It soon became evident that Fr. Richard had not left his self-confidence back in New York. Bishop Windell offered, in compliment, his opinion that Richard’s entry into full communion and ministry within the Roman Church could well be the most significant conversion since John Henry Newman. Richard drew heavily on his ever-present cigar, then agreed that some people might be justified in holding such an opinion.

“I almost gagged. ‘How American,’ I thought to myself. His smug self-assurance rankled my Canadian sense of propriety. Then with a glint in his eye, a tilt of his head, he let out his breath with a hearty self-mocking laugh and a warm slap on my shoulder. I decided then that I wanted to get to know this American brother priest, as he was clearly a more complicated character than I had thought.

“As fate would have it, I did not have to wait long, for we discovered the next summer that we each inhabited the same island as cottage owners in the Ottawa Valley, a discovery that led to many evenings spent on each other’s front deck and Richard’s 19th Street home in New York. There I met luminaries such as Avery Cardinal Dulles, leaders in the fight for the cause of life.”

That was written in early 2009 just after the deaths of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Cardinal Avery Dulles. I both laughed and cried when I read Father Tim’s tribute back then. Not long after in 2009, Father Tim wrote to me. In one or two of those deck conversations, my name had come up. Father Tim wanted me to know that my loss of the support of both Father Richard and Cardinal Dulles was only an illusion. Three months later, in July 2009, These Stone Walls began.

An Advent of the Heart in Mattawa

From Father Tim: One of the greatest gifts I received at the start of my priesthood was the opportunity to meet a brother priest from the Archdiocese of New York who vacationed each summer in a parish where I was stationed. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus became my mentor, confidante and close friend. He was also joined by Avery Cardinal Dulles in encouraging Fr. Gordon MacRae to take up the challenge of using unjust imprisonment as an opportunity to do God’s work.

Suffice it to say that if I have been even partly as successful as Father Richard and Father Gordon in ministering God’s mercy and love, I will stand proudly before Christ as my Lord and Savior come that day when I will have to give Him an accounting for the successes and failures of my own priestly ministry.

I now serve St. Anne Catholic Church in Mattawa, Ontario, a rural parish in the Diocese of Pembroke in one of the most idyllic and yet impoverished corners of Canada. Both the Diocese and the town of Mattawa stand astride the Ottawa River serving the Catholic communities on both the Quebec and Ontario sides of the valley.

In generations past, the Ottawa valley was one of the more prosperous areas of Central Canada due to the harvesting of timber from massive first-growth forests that covered the entire region. Alas, generations of unsustainable forestry practices ultimately resulted in that economic engine dying along with the disappearance of most of the wealth, jobs and prospects for those who remained.

Nonetheless, I have come to learn that one of the most important things that I can do as a pastor is to engender an understanding of our parish’s role as a small part of a global enterprise of faith, an understanding which illuminates the necessary vision that, while we may be poor by the standards of other Canadian communities, we are quite rich when compared to faith communities in some other parts of the world.

I strive to connect any parish I serve to a Third-World ministry. Before we call on the generosity of God and neighbors to support our repair projects, we demonstrate our willingness to be generous with others whose needs are far greater than our own. My previous parishes were thus connected with parishes and Catholic missions in Peru, India, and Costa Rica. We made a difference there before launching our building and repair projects.

People often ask me how it is that I find and choose these foreign priests and projects to help support. The only answer I can give is that it is entirely through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Through chance encounters, I become aware, online or through a third party, of a Catholic/Christian initiative in dire need. It takes only a bit of time and research to ascertain the authenticity of the ministry and need before presenting it to the people I serve.

More from Father Tim: The Catholic Community at St. Anne’s Parish met this newest Advent project with heartfelt enthusiasm. We have decided to adopt the apostolate of Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, a priest of the Missionary Society of the Divine Word. Fr. John is assigned by his Order to assist Vietnamese refugees in Thailand.

Fr. John’s name should ring a bell for any regular reader of the writings of Fr. Gordon MacRae at Beyond These Stone Walls. It was Fr. John who first took in and sponsored Pornchai Moontri when he was deported to Thailand after a long ordeal in prison and ICE detention. It was from Fr. Gordon’s posts about the generosity and kindness to Pornchai during a most difficult adjustment that I was inspired to explore further this good priest’s ministry among Third World refugees, some of the poorest souls on the planet.

The people of St. Anne’s parish immediately recognized the goodness and necessity of this outreach that they have adopted. Various groups within the parish began to organize their own projects. The local French Catholic Secondary School also decided to adopt Father John and his ministry and have begun a bottle drive to raise funds. Other parishioners organized a series of small raffles and auctions of items purchased or donated by local merchants.

The parish council decided to also take up a special collection during each weekend of Advent for this important project. The very fact that all these initiatives sprang up spontaneously among not only our parish but also the good people of Mattawa is evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit to move hearts.

This project is galvanizing not only our parish community, but some of the wider community as well. These local acts of generosity are arising despite our own need would not have sprung into existence if not for the incredible ministry of Divine Mercy written about and exercised by Fr. Gordon MacRae behind those prison walls. His inspiring posts about Pornchai Moontri’s life and conversion have inspired us all. This has been a work of the Holy Spirit if ever I encountered one.

The Vietnamese Refugees of Thailand

From Father G again: In recent messages, Fr. John Hung Le, SVD has told us of how he has been very touched by the kind hearts, prayers and generous spirits of Fr. Tim Moyle and the people of St. Anne Parish in Mattawa in support of his ministry with the Vietnamese refugees. Father John knows well the plight of a refugee in a foreign land.

After the 1975 fall of Saigon, conditions for many South Vietnamese became dire. A young Vietnamese teen — the young man who would later become Fr. John Hung Le — was among those forced to flee. Tens of thousands a month took to the open sea in decrepit, overcrowded boats, seeking refuge in other Asian countries while hoping for resettlement in the West. On the world stage, the Communist regime was accused of trafficking in the lives of these desperate people, at times extorting hundreds or even thousands of dollars for allowing them to escape oppression and death.

With refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia filled to overflowing, several countries announced they would close their shores to the “boat people.” Some nations forced thousands back out to sea. This tragic situation brought forth calls for an international effort to alleviate the humanitarian crisis. A United Nations conference on the plight of refugees was held in Geneva in July, 1979.

Most of those entering Thailand from Vietnam today are migrant workers, however their lives and livelihood are once again threatened over the last two years by the global pandemic from which we have all felt pain. After his arrival in Thailand early in 2021, Pornchai told me that Fr. John needed to address a dental problem but he did not have the funds. I begged and borrowed a few hundred dollars to send him, but Pornchai later told me that Fr. John used it instead to buy rice for some families in far more desperate need. His Refugee Assistance Foundation struggles to support the basic needs of hundreds if not thousands of refugee migrant worker families put out of work in this pandemic.

I don’t think I have ever felt more pride and concern for a brother priest who sacrifices so much for others. From that point on, I have tried to set aside a third of any gift I receive to help support Fr. John who buys and delivers food and medical supplies. I send another third to Pornchai who lives under the daunting task of rebuilding his life after 36 years as a refugee of another sort. Here is a recent message to Father Tim and me received from Father John:

“I escaped Vietnam in 1979 and made it to a refugee camp in the Philippines where I spent three years. Thank God that I got through this journey. Today, I understand the life of the refugees here in Thailand, now made so much more complicated by the global pandemic. After my priestly ordination in 2004, I was sent to Papua New Guinea where I ministered to St. Anne parish in Dirma, Kundiawa Diocese for ten years. In 2014, I was sent to Thailand and was assigned to help Vietnamese refugees in Bangkok.

“I do not have a parish. I and another Society of the Divine Word priest rent a house [where Pornchai stayed for several months upon his arrival in Thailand]. I travel weekly to several villages and provinces where I borrow a church for Mass for the Vietnamese. Most are migrant workers who, for the last almost two years, have had little or no income due to pandemic lockdowns. I have recruited a few volunteers who help me beg, buy, collect, and deliver dried foods for migrant families to survive this long storm. When funds are available, we also provide needed medical supplies and small amounts of money for medical care. Thanks to Fr. Gordon and some of his friends who have sent funds, many struggling migrant families have been helped.”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: I am humbled and inspired in the presence of Fr. Tim Moyle and Fr. John Hung Le. Father Tim was born in a small Northern Ontario mining community where he obtained his first university degree as a licensed clinical social worker. After working for several years in the fields of child welfare and children’s mental health, he took a leave to explore the insane idea that God may be calling him to priesthood. Though raised in a Catholic family, he had long since left his Catholic faith behind.

To his great surprise during and after seminary training, he discovered for the first time in his life a sense of being whole and complete. He put aside plans for a career in politics to live the priesthood of Jesus Christ and bring the Gospel to others.

Father Tim Moyle blogs at Where the Rubber Hits the Road.

The website for Father John’s Refugee Assistance Foundation has a Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/tuongtrotinan

Please consult our “Special Events” page for information on how to help me support the work of Father John Hung Le, SVD and our other work of mercy: helping Pornchai Moontri reclaim his life.

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“O Come, O Come Emmanuel,

And ransom captive Israel,

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice, Rejoice, O Israel,

To thee shall come Emmanuel.”

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Please share this post. You may also like these related posts:

BTSW  Special Events Page

A Not-So-Subtle Wakeup Call from Christ the King

Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

Brought to America as a child victim of human trafficking, Pornchai Moontri was deported to Thailand 36 years later. This is his progress in a life starting over.

July 21, 2021

In the photo above, Pornchai Moontri, Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, and Pornchai's Thai language teacher, Mea Thim Chalathip, escape the heat after a day of recollection with the Bangkok Oblates of Mary Immaculate community.

Editor’s Note: This is Pornchai Moontri’s second post since his arrival in Thailand in February, 2021. His most recent was “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!” These are no longer “guest posts.” Beyond These Stone Walls is now Pornchai’s home away from home.

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To all my friends Beyond These Stone Walls, Sawasdee Kup! That is the traditional Thai greeting. I am writing to you from just a few kilometers north of the City of Bangkok, Thailand. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krung Thep meaning, “City of Angels.” (I’m not kidding! It was called that even before I got here!)

Father Gordon MacRae and I have been talking about another post from me. It is not easy for me to write because there is too much to say to fit in one post. I will send this to Father G first so he can fix it up a little. I am struggling right now between multiple confusing languages, but I will tell you more about that in a minute.

What someone wrote about Beyond These Stone Walls being sort of my “home away from home” makes me smile. It is a long time since I had a home. I told Father G once that the only place I remember feeling “at home” was in a prison cell with him for 15 years. A lot has happened since the day I said that. I left Concord, New Hampshire where I last saw Father G on September 8, 2020. The five months after that were spent in ICE detention while waiting for deportation. That was really awful and I will tell you more about it. In the five months since my arrival here, I have mostly just felt overwhelmed.

Father G wrote about the day I left in a very moving post, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.” It tells the story of how, through my Godfather, the late Pierre Matthews, Padre Pio became one of our two patron saints. I will never forget the morning I left that Father G wrote about in that post. When I arrived in Thailand, I read in tears about the rest of Father Gordon’s first day without me.

I want to tell you about all the challenges I face now. Just like the local news, I will start with the weather. Thailand is south of the Tropic of Cancer and stretches down the Malay Peninsula almost to the Equator. After 36 years of my life a lot farther north on the far side of the world in Maine and New Hampshire, the tropical heat of Thailand is at the top of my list of things that take some getting used to.

On the day I am writing this in July it is 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and very humid. Converting to Celsius has not been easy. I am used to the other scale, so I never know what the temperature is. The choices are hot, very hot, and sizzling. The air conditioner where I live broke down a few weeks ago so I have been making do with a fan. While trying to write this, I shivered when I got my bill for a new air conditioner — 26,000 Thai baht — which thankfully turned out to be only $800. Whew!

Handling money has been another challenge. For 29 years in prison in America, I never even saw money. There is not much in the way of practical living skills that are taught to prisoners, most of whom end up with no idea of what things cost. In Thailand, that adjustment has been doubled. The Thai unit of money is the "baht," and the rate of exchange varies from week to week. Right now one U.S. dollar equals about 32 Thai baht. I was shocked once when dinner in a Thai restaurant cost 256 baht, but turned out to be only $8.00.

Technologically Challenged

Another big adjustment has been the metric system. As most of you know, I was taken from Thailand sort of traumatically at age eleven. A long and winding road brought me back at age 47 with only shadowy memories of Thailand and the people left behind here, and no memory at all of the metric system.

Father G once wrote about an episode of Family Guy in which Stuey went back to school as an adult. When the teacher handed out a math test, the students reached into their desks for calculators. But Stuey pulled out an Asian boy and poked him with his pencil saying, “Do Math. Do Math.” I am naturally good at math so whenever someone asked for help, Father G would poke me with a pencil saying, “Do math!” I was proud of the fact that I usually had the answers even before Father G could turn on his calculator.

But now the constant conversions are a way bigger math test. I walk around with calculations blazing through my mind to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and the English system to metric. This is second on my “big adjustment” list. There are no longer inches or feet or miles, no ounces or quarts or gallons, not even pounds or tons. I lost a lot of weight in my five months in ICE. I started off at 195 pounds. Now I weigh 80 kilograms. When I work out I used to bench press 360 pounds. Now I can only manage 165 kilos.

With help, I have been learning to drive here which is also a double adjustment. I never drove a car, of course, in the 29 years I was in a U.S. prison (15 of them with Father G). Learning to drive now means learning it in reverse of what I had known. Thailand drives on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. I have had a lot of help with this so far, and for that I am thankful.

But nothing is as big a challenge as technology. Father G used to joke that we will be like techno-cavemen when we leave prison. After 36 years away from my homeland and 29 years in prison, everything I do or touch is new to me. When I arrived, I had to spend 14 days in a Bangkok Holiday Inn, a period of Covid-19 quarantine required by the Thai government. Our friends here left me a really cool Samsung smart phone so I could communicate with Father G and others. I had never in my life used or even seen a smart phone.

Father G marveled at how fast I learned how to use the phone, but it was a matter of survival. I felt so alone and stranded that I spent my first night in Thailand in the hotel room finding and exploring Beyond These Stone Walls for the first time. I watched the two-hour Video Documentary Interview with Father G. It was wonderful and comforting to see and hear my friend and spiritual father again.

Father G is still behind those stone walls, and that makes me sad, but we talk for about a half hour every day by telephone. He calls me at 9:00 PM which is 8:00 AM the next morning for me. That also takes some getting used to. I am up before 6:00 AM each day which is 7:00 PM the night before for Father G. I spend the first two hours of each day working out. I have found this to be very important for my physical, mental and even spiritual well-being. So my first investment in Thailand was a weight set, mats and power bench. Father G helped me to purchase it. He calls each day right at the end of my workout.

Using the phone app on his GTL tablet, he calls me from the cell where we once both lived, and where he lives still. GTL allows internet-based calls from prison to Thailand at a cost of about 96 Thai baht for thirty minutes. That is about three U.S. dollars. It is not a big expense. Even after ten months since I left Concord, this is still an important part of my day and Father G’s.

I sometimes get impatient with myself, but Father G reminds me that I “just got here.” I feel as though I should be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I do anything or go anywhere. The name, Thailand, means “Land of the Free,” but even that became part of my adjustment. I often have to remind myself that I am free. Few of the people around me understand this. The list of adjustments goes on and on but I guess I am the last to notice my progress.

The late Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, was a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Faustina. He interviewed Pornchai and Fr. Gordon in prison.

Suffering and Divine Providence

As most readers know, I became a Catholic in 2010 due to living with an extreme example of what that means. My journey to the Catholic faith was centered around Father G and Divine Mercy. I learned about Divine Mercy thanks to him and to my friendship with Father Michael Gaitley, Felix Carroll, and Eric Mahl. The Catholic League president, Dr. Bill Donohue, also had a hand in this.

Father Gaitley invited me to become a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. Felix Carroll drew me into the Association of Marian Helpers, and wrote about me in a chapter in his book, Loved, Lost, Found. Bill Donohue gave me honorary membership in the Catholic League, and also wrote about me several times. Father G and I joined St. Maximilian’s Militia of the Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross. It is a lot to take in, and all of it very much influenced my faith journey. Divine Providence was another matter. I never understood it until I found myself face to face with it.

Father G says it is hard to believe that I have been gone for ten months. I have actually been in Thailand for only five months. The other five were spent in ICE which he has written about. (See “ICE Finally Cracks! Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”) The five long months awaiting deportation in ICE detention were a terrible ordeal, but for me and Father G it turned into a story of Divine Providence. I did not understand that at all until Father G and I had a phone conversation about it. Here is what I learned.

When a person has been deprived of good things in life, like parents, family, safety, a home, acceptance, love, freedom, even at times food and shelter, then the bad things in life become normal. When I was handed over to ICE and became buried in another overcrowded prison with total strangers in Jenna, Louisiana, all I could think of was all the good things I once had. I began to feel that I lost them all. Trust was the first thing I lost.

Father G saw to it that I had numbers to call no matter where I was. It took time for him to find me and be able to speak to me. Thanks to Claire Dion in Maine, a way was devised for us to speak each day even for a few minutes. The promised ICE flight to Thailand was delayed again and again for weeks and then months. I began to despair because of the awful circumstances in which I was living. I could not have made it through this if not for Father G.

By the fifth month of my detention, my call to Father G became routine. I was bitterly thinking that the delays will never end and he would say to me the same thing every day: “The day will come when you will walk out of there to a new life.” At first I was clinging to that, and then I started to no longer believing it. Each day, we both prayed deeply for an end to this suffering. Father G challenged me to try to help others. I did try.

Over the last eleven years since my conversion, Father G and I worked hard to come up with a plan for my future survival once we knew that I would one day be sent back to Thailand. In my mind, it was all like a big black hole. All I knew was America, and all I really knew about America was its prisons. The promise of Heaven for someone who has only known Hell can feel empty and too far beyond reach. I blocked out any expectation of good things because of my past experiences of bitter disappointment.

Then one day, in my daily call from ICE, Father G dropped a bomb with great reluctance. He told me that our plan for housing and support that we had spent years building suddenly fell apart. The founder of Divine Mercy Thailand, the man who was to take me in and give me a home, fell critically ill and was hospitalized. I prayed daily for him, but he passed away. In my mind, this was a crushing blow.

Father G did not want any surprises so he told me all of this. He said he did not want me to hear of this from anyone else. For me, it seemed as though all hope had gone out of the world. Then Yela, our Bangkok friend from the Divine Mercy apostolate, told Father G in an email that Father John Hung Le from the Missionary Society of the Divine Word had been reading about us and offered his home to me. My strongest feeling was that I did not want to be a burden for anyone, but my choices were gone.

Father G said that when everything we hope for feels gone, the only task left is trust. Father John turned out to be a very good priest and a very great friend. He is also a carpenter so we have a lot in common. He has become a good friend to Father G as well.

Some of Father John’s community and friends rallied around me when I arrived. Mea Thim, a retired Thai language teacher, began to tutor me daily in Thai language studies and has been very patient with me. She is also teaching me to drive and to acclimate to Thailand. Not having even heard Thai spoken in 36 years, and having never learned to read or write Thai, my progress feels slow but others say I am improving right on track.

Thailand is now in the middle of another strict shutdown due to a new Covid variant outbreak from India. Father G just told me that the Wall Street Journal has reported that the Thai government has lost confidence in Sinovac, a vaccine from China and the only one available in Thailand. All gatherings have been prohibited and a stay-in-place order is enforced. My required national Thai ID has been delayed for months so I cannot yet work, open a bank account, obtain medical care or a vaccine, or even board a train. Father John and I help each other, and I am busier than ever.

Strangely — Divine Providence again — the Thai headquarters for Father John’s Order are in Nong Bua Lamphu Province, nine hours drive north near the very village I was taken from 36 years ago. We have traveled up there three times for Father John’s missionary work with Vietnamese refugees, seminarians and migrant workers. We stay at the house my mother began to build before her death in 2000. My Aunt and cousins are there and I have reunited with them. After 36 years, they are now my family again. I have two families now, at opposite ends of the Kingdom of Thailand that I now call home.

And Father G, the man who showed me the Path to God, is still with me every day. He has told me that if our prayers were answered, if I had not suffered those five months in ICE, if God had given in to our pleas for my deliverance, then all would now be different and none of what I have just described in this post would be my reality.

This, he says, is the work of Divine Providence and I am astonished by it. On the day I left Father G, I said to him, “Thank you for giving me a future.” I had no idea how promising it would be.

The odds against all of this coming together are mathematically astronomical. When I come face to face with God, I want to poke Him with my pencil and say, “Do Math! Do Math!”

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A Postscript to readers from Pornchai:

I want to express my very deep gratitude to all of those who have assisted me over these months of transition. Your gifts for food, shelter, and the expense of starting life over have moved me profoundly. Please accept my apology for being unable to write to each one of you personally. You know who you are, and so do I. I pray for you every day.

With love and gratitude, Pornchai Moontri

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. The Wall Street Journal has been reporting about recent events in Thailand. A new variation of Covid is creating havoc for the country, its economy and especially the well-being of its people. If you wish to help our friends, please also visit our “Special Events” page.

And you may also like these important related posts:

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

After Mass at the OMI Center near Bangkok. (Pornchai Moontri and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, are third and fourth from the right. On the far right is Pornchai’s Thai teacher Mea Thim Chalathip.)

Spring Cleaning for the Cover of Better Cells and Gardens

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

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

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

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

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

The Clutter of a Patron Saint

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

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

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

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

Decluttering Beyond These Stone Walls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The BTSW Library Is Open

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

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

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

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

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

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

May the Lord Bless you and keep you.

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

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

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

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

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Left to right: Pornchai Moontri, Yela Smit, Father John Le, SVD, and behind them the one who brought them together.

The following is our first guest post by Pornchai Moontri in Thailand with a message of thanks and hope for our readers Beyond These Stone Walls.

Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae : I will be forever in debt to our readers who have opened their minds and hearts to the plight of my friend, Pornchai Max Moontri. The task now ahead of him is immense. It was an ordeal getting Pornchai out of prison. Now we face the task of getting prison out of Pornchai. He needs the help and prayers of all of us to conquer this adjustment.

If you have read Pornchai's traumatic history best captured in “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri” — then you know that the last real home he knew was at age 11 before he was removed from Thailand. Fleeing from a nightmare existence in Bangor, Maine, he became a homeless teenager and then, at age 18, a prisoner.

For the last 29 years, his entire world consisted of a prison cell and a 300-yard walk to a woodshop where he became a proficient craftsman. Now he is dropped into the middle of Bangkok, Thailand. The adjustment ahead is immense.

Sensing his anxiety in a recent telephone conversation, I asked Pornchai what he is feeling and experiencing. What he said in response nearly brought me to tears. He said, “People have to understand that the only home I have ever had was in a prison cell with you.”

I choked on those words. In one sense, it is a testament to grace. Only Divine Mercy could make a prison cell feel like a home. But now Pornchai has the daunting challenge of leaving the traumas and trials of the past behind and living life in the light of Divine Mercy, a light that has captured him — has captured us both — in the great adventure of faith and hope.

I asked Pornchai to write candidly about this turning of the tide in his life. These are his words:

A Letter from Pornchai

To My Dear Friends Beyond These Stone Walls: I am at a loss for words, but I will try my best to tell you about where I am right now, and how I got here. A couple weeks ago, my friend, Father G, wrote about my return to Thailand after being away for 36 years. His Post was “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” It made me laugh in parts, and it also made me cry.

Father G left something out. This is something that I told him about in a phone call right after my first night in hotel quarantine solitary confinement. I have to first say that it was a lot nicer than my last stay in solitary confinement which lasted seven long years. Then I was sent to another prison where I ended up in a cell with Father G.

Sixteen years have passed since then. The story of all that happened in those years is filled, as Father G says, with pain and suffering but also with triumph. He says that he feels sad about my leaving, but more than anything, he says he feels “triumphant.” I feel that too, but I also feel deep gratitude. Both of those are sort of new to me.

I told Father G last week that as I lay on my bed in my first night in Bangkok on February 9 after 30 years in prison and a 25-hour flight to Bangkok, I was exhausted in every way you could think of, but I could not sleep. I was overwhelmed with many emotions. All I could think about was where I would be right now if I never met Father G.

There were so many “what-ifs” raging through my mind that night. What if Father G had never been sent to prison? What if he took the easy way out with the plea deal they tried to con him into 27 years ago? We would have never met. What if I was sent to some other state besides New Hampshire? What if Father G and I never ended up in the same place? What if he never started writing to the world Beyond These Stone Walls? What if all of you never even heard of me? What if Father G had been a weaker man? What if he moved away after all my efforts to block anyone from ever entering my life? If any one of those things happened, I know today, I would be lost forever.

Every one of these questions, and many more were answered in advance by God. My head was spinning that night as I thought of all the times in the last 16 years when I was turning down one road only to find Father G pointing me toward another. Prison also brought many low points in our story that could fill these pages and depress anyone reading them. That is the nature of prison, and 30 years of it means 30 years of low points.

Prison is a humiliating, empty, meaningless existence, but Father G and I changed that. As I lay sleepless in bed pondering my freedom in my first night in Bangkok, only the high points filled my mind. There are so many of them, too many to tell you about in a single post. You already know about many of them, but I will try to tell you again about the ones that changed my life the most.

The Sacrifice of Fatherhood

I will always remember the first time I walked into Father G’s cell before we became roommates. The first thing I saw was the mirror. There was a strange card with a balding man dressed half as a priest and half as a prisoner. I asked Father G, “Is this you?” That’s when I was introduced to Saint Maximilian Kolbe who became the source of how we lived as prisoners.

When Father G and I became roommates, I was not able to trust anyone. My life’s experiences imposed that on me. I would always be in my upper bunk so I could see anyone coming in and could get to them before they got to me. Life in homelessness on the streets followed by life in prison does this to you.

Once a week, late on Sunday nights after all the prisoner counts and the lights went out, Father G had this weird ritual. I would pretend to be asleep and would watch with one eye open. What on Earth is this strange guy doing? In a corner of the concrete countertop in our cell, he would set up a little book light, some books, and put something around his neck. Then he would take a round piece of bread and a few drops of something and hold them up before eating them.

So one day I asked him about this and he said he was offering Mass. Why? I asked him. He said that it is the one time and place where Heaven touches us. I asked him if I could also do it and he said, “Only if you agree to be the lector.” So Father G told me all about the Mass and I would from then on stay awake to join him. I would do the Mass readings as well. Without my knowing it, profound changes began to take shape inside of me.

Also in 2007, I was visited by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement who told me that I would be having a court hearing that could end with my deportation to Thailand. I was summoned to a place where video hearings are held in the prison. A Judge Shapiro told me that I am ordered deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence. I had nothing in Thailand, and no one. As Father G once wrote, I had no future, no hope, and no God. There was only Father G who never wavered.

Beyond These Stone Walls

And there were times when we became separated. Prison is set up to always demonstrate that we are powerless over our lives. We were sometimes pawns in what Father G described as “spiritual warfare.” Sometimes the agendas of others were imposed on us. One time, some unknown prison official added a note to Father G’s file saying that he has a history of violence. It was not at all true, but the note sat there for six years before some official spotted it and decided I should be moved away from him.

Such things are never reversed in prison, but he asked me to trust in God. I was forced to live with a transgender man while some gangster with a real history of violence was moved in with Father G. I prayed. Within 24 hours, it was exposed as a big mistake and I was moved back with Father G. Every time this sort of thing happened, and we were separated, it was reversed in just a few days. I began to feel that we had an invisible shield around us. Father G told me that our Patron Saints are our allies in spiritual warfare. I went from doubting this to very much believing it. I saw this with my own eyes.

When I was told that I must be deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence, it was hard for me to find any hope. I told Father G that in my own mind I had what I called “Plan B.” I thought my only option was to make sure that I never left prison. It was all I knew and I could not imagine another existence. Father G asked me to set “Plan B” aside because another plan will come along to take its place. He said, “We will just have to build a bridge to Thailand.” “Yeah, Right!” I thought. How are we going to do this from inside a prison cell? “Get real!”

Then one day in summer of 2009, Father G came into our cell after talking with someone on the telephone. He told me that someone asked him to write on a weekly basis for a blog from prison. I was sent to prison in 1992 and Father G in 1994. Neither of us knew what a blog was. He said it would be a sort of prison journal and people around the world would read it.

Father G found a British poem that he liked called “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make.” He said we need a name for this blog so I suggested “These Stone Walls” so that’s what we called it until I left in September. Then it became “Beyond These Stone Walls.” Father G would sit at his typewriter on a Saturday morning with no idea what to write, then he would type all afternoon and mail his posts to Father George David Byers for scanning.

We could never see the site, but we got a monthly report which was a total mystery to us. In the first month we had 40 readers. In the next month, four times that, then month after month it turned into many thousands in many countries. We could not figure this out. In my writing class, I wrote a poem about his constant “tap-tap-tap” in our cell every Saturday. Here it is:

---

“My roommate is a rabid writer.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He types until my mind winds tighter.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He never has an unpublished thought.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He types and types til my nerves are naught.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

My roommate’s also a real good friend,
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
And stays that way to the bitter end.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
And we all like the result, you see,
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
Cuz some of what he types is ’bout me!”
TAP, tap. Tap, TAP, tap. Tap, TAP.”

---

Our Summons to Divine Mercy

From here on, my life began to change with what I once thought was just my own hard work. Not so. Today I see a powerful grace at work in that cell. I did not have a name for it then, but I do now. It’s called Divine Mercy. I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

In the time to follow, I earned my high school diploma with top honors. Then I earned two continuing education diplomas from the Stratford Career Institute in psychology and social work, and excelled in theology courses from Catholic Distance University. I became proficient in woodworking and model shipbuilding. You can see some of my work at “Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood.”

I never had much in life to brag about except maybe for one thing. Despite all the darkness, when I finally saw some light I walked toward it. I decided to become Catholic. Father G never even mentioned this to me. It was just the sheer force of grace. To honor him, I chose his birthday (April 9) as the date for my conversion, but the prison chaplain, a Catholic deacon, asked me to postpone it until the next day. It was Divine Mercy Sunday, something that would become the very center of my life.

Everything changed. Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll read our blog (yes, it’s now “our” blog!) and he contacted me for an interview. He included my conversion story in his now famous book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. You can read the chapter about me at “Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Behind Those Stone Walls.”

The book made its way to Thailand, and now, so have I. The bridge that I once thought was impossible was built right before my very eyes. I thank you, my friends, for I would not be here without you. It was your reading and sharing these writings around the world that made this story possible. You have been the instruments of a miracle.

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A Post Script from Father Gordon MacRae: I have been able to talk with Pornchai daily since his arrival in Thailand. This has helped much to ease him into this new chapter in his story. It is an immense task to go from 30 years in prison to a foreign land.

I have deeply felt gratitude to Yela Smit, Co-Chair of Divine Mercy Thailand, and Father John Le, SVD, from the Society of the Divine Word. Father John and his community have offered sanctuary to Pornchai to help in this transition. It is a great gift to which I have pledged some monthly support. Want to help? See how at our SPECIAL EVENTS page.

You may also want to read and share the posts referenced herein:

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

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