Are You Suffering a Great Deal?

As this blog by a priest unjustly in prison began in 2009, Fr Gordon MacRae had to write 12 brief posts to send to an editor. Here are three of these early gems.

July 19, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

A lot has been going on here this summer. Even in this place where time often seems to stand still, finding blocks of time to write has suddenly become a challenge. Nonetheless, I am enthused by a new development. Gloria.tv is an international Catholic video and news sharing venue launched in Switzerland in 2005. It is known for its high degree of fidelity. I cannot see it, of course, but on rare occasions over the years it has reported on one of my posts.

After reviewing and then reposting “Convicted for Cash,” the 44-minute video documentary about my trial by Frank X. Panico, Gloria.tv invited me to establish a page and submit selected past posts on the site. The result has been a huge increase in visits to this blog from around the world. Please visit our presence there at Gloria.tv/FrGordonJMacrae.

A flood of activity this July, along with some technical difficulties where I live, has temporarily slowed my ability to write. So this week, and again two weeks from now, we are returning to July, 2009 and the first days of this blog. As it was beginning, I was asked to quickly write and submit 12 short posts to launch it. I am told today that a few of them are “gems,” so I want to share them with you anew.

Our first entry today is “Are You Suffering a Great Deal?” It’s from a laminated card that fell into my lap from a book in 2009 just as I was beginning to write. At the time, I was in fact suffering a great deal.

Pornchai Moontri was here with me then and was very much a part of this beginning. It was Pornchai who named this blog, “These Stone Walls,” then in 2020 I renamed it “Beyond These Stone Walls” as he was returning to Thailand. Pornchai has contributed many posts to this site, some more popular than my own, but please don’t tell him I said that. So the second of our three short selections is “Bunkies: Pornchai’s Story.” Next week in these pages, we will have some exciting news about developments in Pornchai’s new life in Thailand.

My last entry this week is “Contentious Convicts.” I will let that one speak for itself. You might think it seems a little fishy.

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Are You Suffering a Great Deal?

Are you suffering a great deal? No, the question isn’t from Oprah or Dr. Phil. It is on a bookmark kept in my breviary. It was asked by Our Lady of Fatima on June 13, 1917:

“Are you suffering a great deal? Don’t lose heart. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge, and the way that will lead you to God.”

There is immense power in that promise, and for someone who has lost everything, it is like a lifeboat at sea. There is sometimes nothing else to cling to. Even when I feel that my faith dangles from a thread — which is often, in prison — I cling to that promise.

I don’t know where the bookmark came from. Like most of the things I cling to for spiritual support, it just sort of showed up one day. I like to think it was handed down to me — in the way important things are handed down by brothers — by Maximilian Kolbe whose reverence for the Immaculate Heart of Mary guided him through life, and death, at Auschwitz.

Even when my faith is so diminished and darkened by the prison around me that I believe in little, I believe that promise. Sometimes I can only believe that Maximilian believed — with the very fabric of his life.

It’s often hard to pray in prison. It’s not just the noise, the harshness, the lack of privacy, the relentless obstacles. It’s just hard to raise my mind and heart beyond these stone walls at times. In that, at least, I am not alone.

The Vietnamese Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan wrote that there were long periods during his years in a Communist prison when he was unable to pray. I guess any Catholic who ever looks inward has a dark night of the soul. If not, why would the Blessed Mother ever ask such a question in her appearance at Fatima? It’s not the usual question a mother would ask when she comes a long way for a brief visit.

Are you suffering a great deal? When Saint Maximilian’s life was finally snuffed out after days of starvation chained to the corpses of those who could not endure, he was heard gasping a hymn of praise. I wish I had his heart! I don’t, but I wish I did. I have to learn how to suffer, and I am a slow learner.

In Spe Salvi, his Encyclical on Christian Hope, our Holy Father Pope Benedict wrote the most masterful prose on suffering that I have ever read. I cling to it like I do my bookmark with Our Lady of Fatima’s Promise:

“Christ descended into ‘Hell,’ and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and well-nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen — the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering — without ceasing to be suffering — becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.”

Spe Salvi, ¶37

Brilliant! Simply brilliant! There’s something hopeful in that, and I should listen.

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Bunkies: Pornchai’s Story

In prisons all over the world, the most crucial issue for prisoners is where one has to live, and with whom. Confined to a 60 square foot cell with another human being can be a nightmare. Most of us have no say in the choice of “Bunkies,” as cell mates are called here. If a bunky is moved — even after two or three years with the same person — sometimes a total stranger is living in the cell within minutes.

Having a good roommate seems to be everyone’s goal, but I tried another approach years ago. Being a good roommate is a goal I have more control over. The result has been that in 10 years since being moved from the torturous 8-man cells in which I spent my first seven years in prison, I have never had a roommate (we prefer to call our cells “rooms”) request a move.

The downside of that is that I have had some very dysfunctional roommates who have no wish to move elsewhere. My assigned roommates here have ranged in age from 19 to 67 or so, and have included men convicted of murder, rape, armed robbery, various drug crimes, and gang-related crimes. Everyone here knows all the details of why everyone else is here. Rumor and gossip fill in what the facts leave out.

My roommate of the last two years was also a good friend for several more. It was the first time I have been assigned to live with someone I know well, so it feels more like living with a family member than a felon.

Pornchai (his name is Thai, and the “r” is silent, as in “Paunch-eye”) is 35 years old and has been in prison since the age of 18.

He is about to convert to the Catholic faith and currently he is a scholarship student in theology in the Catholic Distance University’s excellent Distance Learning Program for prisoners.

Pornchai caused a minor sensation last year when he wrote a very brief autobiographical sketch that ended up being published as “The Conversion Story of 2008” by The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I hope you will take a moment to read it.

A year after publication, Pornchai still receives occasional mail about his life story. The most recent being a personal letter from Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok, Thailand, and a note from Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Oh, and there was also a letter from the late Father Richard John Neuhaus.

Pornchai takes his new notoriety in stride, though one letter had a profound impact. It was from a young man who wrote that he turned his life around, dropped out of his gang, swore off drugs, and returned to faith after reading “Pornchai’s Story” online.

Pornchai mistakenly credits me with some small role in his extraordinary life of late. He has fallen under the power of grace and cannot escape it now even if he tried. Now, he creates. Here is a photo of one of his creations, “The Olde Baldy” (named after me) which he carved piece by piece (over 600 of them) from scratch.

Pornchai Moontri — Master Craftsman

Pornchai was designated a master craftsman in wood and model shipbuilding. One of his first ships was a circa 1800 British warship from the Napoleonic era which he named after Father MacRae. He dubbed it “The Olde Baldy,” which is now docked in the home of our friend, Bill Wendell in Stow, Ohio.

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Contentious Convicts

There was little I could do to stop the fighting. Convicts are so territorial; they do not hesitate to take on intruders twice their size. They just can’t be reasoned with. It’s even worse when the convicts are mating. What drama!

No, no, no! I’m not talking about bizarre behavior among my fellow prisoners — though they do have their moments. I’m referring to Herichthys (Archocentrus) Nigrofasciatus, a fish of the cichlidae family native to the tropical river basins of Central America. They are popularly known as convict cichlids, or just convicts because of their characteristic black stripes.

Oh, go ahead and yawn! Whenever I would recite the scientific nomenclature for the fish in my aquarium, my friends would always yawn! Aquarium buffs are used to it! The more serious among us always felt duty-bound to learn the scientific names of the residents of our aquatic neighborhoods. Hey, we don’t talk that way by choice, you know!

My 100 gallon cichlid aquarium was my spare-time-consuming hobby for most of my life as a priest until I was sent to prison at age 41. It was an oasis of life, light, and aquatic drama that kept me mesmerized for hours at the end of each day. Only one other priest in my diocese had an aquarium, and we had an instant bond of shared knowledge and interest.

I had a breeding pair of convict cichlids who shared their home — perhaps “shared” is too strong a word — with a pair of Astronotus Ocellatus, or red oscars native to the Amazon Basin. I also had a single Herichthys (Archocentrus) Octofasciatus known otherwise as a “Jack Dempsey,” and for good reason. He ended up in a smaller aquarium of his own. Couldn’t play well with others.

Convicts typically excavate a cave when preparing to breed, so an old clay flower-pot in the corner sufficed. I named my convicts Bonnie and Clyde (at the time, I had limited knowledge of suitable convict names. Today I’d go with Bubba and Bella.) The other denizens, the Oscars, were named Oscar Madison and Oscar Wilde. (I’m glad I only had two!)

The Oscars gave their testy neighbors a wide berth once eggs were laid in the cave. Oscar Madison, twice the size of the convicts, sometimes paid a price for lumbering over to eat the convicts’ food. He had the nips in his fins to remember them by.

I once tried to use a mirrored barrier to keep everyone happy, but Clyde kept launching himself furiously at his own reflection. In time, everyone learned to respect some boundaries. My current convict friends could learn a lot from that. “The Aquarium is Gone.” That’s actually a line from a poem by Robert Spence Lowell (“For the Union Dead.” 1964)

Its absence from my world is still deeply felt. It is one of the three recurring dreams I have in prison. (I’ll write of the other two later.) It haunts me a bit. I often dream that my aquarium is on the concrete shelf of my cell, and Oscar Wilde is staring at me with his bulging eyes willing me to bring food.

I miss them. There is nothing with water and life here.

“And the fish of the sea will declare to you. In His hand is the life of every living thing.”

— Job 12:8,10

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

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

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

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

Divine Mercy Reunites Pornchai Moontri and His Brother

Midway on life’s arduous path, Divine Mercy entered the lives of Pornchai Moontri and Fr. Gordon MacRae. When the road led to Thailand, Divine Mercy was there too.

April 12 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pornchai Moontri entered the Catholic faith on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. To some who knew him, it was a most unlikely conversion story but it was a transformation in his very core. This story is my story as well. The Lord asked me to be an instrument in restoring life and hope to this prisoner even while in prison myself. Though Pornchai now lives on the far side of the world from me, he is still very much a part of my life and the life of this blog. His most recent post for these pages was the very moving “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

As most readers of this blog know, Pornchai (which in Thai means “Blessing”) was my roommate for 16 years in the draconian confines of this prison. Out of both necessity and deprivation, we became each other’s family. Pornchai was not just a transient along the twists and turns of my life. I learned over time that our paths crossed for a divinely inspired reason.

With new information, I won a reprieve for Pornchai who was released after 29 years in prison. I did my best to accompany and support him through a gruesome five-month ordeal in ICE detention at the height of a global pandemic. He finally emerged free in Bangkok, Thailand on February 24, 2021 with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. The life he vaguely remembered before he was taken as a child of eleven was gone. Because of the posts I wrote about us, a small group of devout Catholics who formed Divine Mercy Thailand recruited Father John Hung Le and Khun Chalathip, a benefactor of Father John’s refugee work, to give Pornchai shelter. Mary herself chose them for this task just as she chose me.

That is not an exaggeration. It might seem strange to someone not versed in Catholic spiritual life, but at some point I became aware that through the intercession of Saint Maximilian Kolbe in both our lives, The Immaculata involved herself in a special way in Pornchai’s life and well being. Then she involved me through intricately woven threads of actual grace over time.

In 2022, in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare,” I wrote of the compelling signs of Mary’s interventions in our lives. After Pornchai’s conversion to the Catholic faith, we took part in the “33 Days to Morning Glory” retreat written by Marian Fr. Michael Gaitley who would become a friend to us. Depicted atop this post, our Consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary took place in 2013 on the Solemnity of Christ the King.

I once mistakenly believed that this path was all about me and my priesthood in exile, but the truth was confirmed for me when Marian Helper magazine published “Mary Is at Work Here” in 2014. The article by Felix Carroll includes these startling paragraphs:

“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group to be the first [invited to Marian Consecration]. The reason eventually was revealed. It turned out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. (See the Chapter entitled “Pornchai Moontri”) .

“Pornchai experienced a dramatic conversion in no small part due to a friendship formed with fellow inmate and cellmate Fr. Gordon MacRae who chronicles their lives in his celebrated website, Beyond These Stone Walls. Fr. Gordon joined Pornchai in the Consecration and called it 'a great spiritual gift.' It opened a door to the rebirth of trust during a dark time for both men. Great suffering requires great trust.”

— Marian Helper, Spring 2014

From Dante’s Inferno to Purgatorio

Many readers already know the most painful parts of this story. Pornchai and his brother, Priwan, were two and four years old respectively when they were abandoned in rural Thailand by a young mother desperate to find work to provide for them. She traveled to Bangkok where she fell under the control of an evil man. She was but a teenager. Nine years later, when her sons were ages 11 and 13 with no memory of her, they were taken from Thailand to the United States where they both became victims of sexual and physical violence.

Pornchai and Priwan became homeless adolescents fending for themselves in a foreign land in the mid-1980s, and they became separated. I and others investigated this story, wrote about it, and ultimately, with God’s grace, brought their abuser to justice. In September 2018, thirty years after his ruinous offenses, Richard Alan Bailey was convicted in Maine of 40 felony counts of child rape.

I discovered that at some point their mother learned the truth, but when she vowed to seek justice for her sons, she was murdered. This account is told in an article that may shake your faith in the justice system but strengthen your faith in Divine Providence. It is, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

In the sixteen years in which Pornchai lived in a bunk just above me in the Concord, New Hampshire prison, the first few years were a bit rough. Looking back, Pornchai today says that the rough part was all him. He never set out to harm anyone, but in a Maine prison at age 18, facing a dark future alone, Pornchai vowed to never again become someone’s victim. He kept people away with a constant state of anger. As a result, he spent the next seven years alone with his raging thoughts in the cruel madness of solitary confinement.

When Pornchai could be held in solitary no longer, the State of Maine decided to just get rid of him. He was chained up in a van and taken to another prison in another state. He could have been taken anywhere, and he had no idea where he was going, but he landed just one state away in New Hampshire. He ended up in a familiar place solitary confinement.

When he emerged months later, Pornchai could have been sent to any of three New Hampshire prisons each with multiple housing units reflecting varying levels of security. By some mysterious grace, he was moved in with me. It was providential that just before his arrival in New Hampshire,The Wall Street Journal published its first articles about my plight. Somehow, Pornchai read them.

The context for this story is essential. Understandably, Pornchai trusted no one. Just imagine his inner struggle when he learned that he was now to live in a prison cell with a Catholic priest convicted of sexual abuse. Others told me to sleep with one eye open, but it did not take long for Pornchai to learn that I was not at all like the man who destroyed his life.

When I offered Mass in my cell late at night, it was Pornchai who was sleeping with one eye open. He watched me, and later he questioned me. When I told him about the Mass he asked if he could stay awake for it. I taught him to read the Mass readings and I explained the Eucharist along with a restriction that he cannot receive the Body of Christ unless he came to believe. Did he dare to believe in anything good in this world?

Pornchai and I lived in the same cell for two years before I began writing from prison. When we spoke about an invitation I received to write for this blog, I told Pornchai that it might somehow find its way around the world to Thailand. I did not actually believe that myself, but that is exactly what happened.

Here is Pornchai’s perspective on the first year of this blog given to me in a recent phone call to Thailand:

“When I was living in the bunk above Father G he would sometimes hand some typed pages up to me. Sometimes I thought they were interesting. Sometimes they kept me awake, and sometimes they just put me to sleep. But one time — I don’t remember the post — Father G included some paragraphs from the book, Dante’s Inferno. [It’s the first part of a three-part book, The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri in 1307]. When I read the passage, I thought, “This is the story of my life!” Father G found it and here it is:

“Midway on my life’s journey, I went astray from the straight path and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was? I never saw so drear, so rank, so horrible a wilderness! Its very memory gives shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter. But since it came somehow to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God’s grace. How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered from the True Way. But at the far end of that valley of evil, whose maze had sapped my heart with fear, I found myself upon a little hill, and there I lifted up my eyes...”

— Dante, The DivineComedy: Inferno, 1307

“Living with Father G., I thought I had finally left hell and now I was in Purgatory with him. I came to trust him. He was the only person in my life who always looked out for my best interest and never put his own first. So now I turn this story back over to Father G.”

From Dante’s Purgatorio to Paradiso

Learning from this blog about what we both faced in this prison without support or family, some readers came to our aid. Thanks to their modest gifts of support, we were suddenly eating a little better and were able to purchase things that made life here a little easier. The slow and tedious passage of time in prison sped up. I made a promise to Pornchai that he would never again be abandoned and stranded in life. I can only say that I am filled with gratitude, not only to our readers, but to God and our Mother Mary, the Immaculata, under whose mantle Saint Maximilian Kolbe led us both. He ratified a covenant with us when Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. There was now meaning in all the injustice I had endured.

I began to write posts that would reach around the world to navigate a path home for Pornchai. There were small miracles of connection, one after another, and the lights of Divine Mercy began to illuminate both of our exiled souls. This story was not without setbacks and challenges, however.

In 2017, Pornchai and I became separated. It came at a most stressful time just as we learned that Pornchai must be deported to Thailand immediately upon leaving prison. I knew that the few years we had left together were crucial for his well being. What happened next was a miracle. There is no other explanation for it.

On July 17, 2017, I was summoned from my work in the prison law library. I was handed a few plastic bags and was told that I have one hour to unravel my life from the 23 years I had spent in that punitive and confining building and move to another place. I asked that Pornchai also be called from his work to help me. I was shaken, and did not want him to return that day just to find me inexplicably gone. As Pornchai helped me pack, our despondence was like a dark cloud. Prison has no knowledge of Divine Mercy and places no value on human relationships.

An hour later, we wheeled a small cart out of that building, across the long walled prison yard, up a series of ramps, and then in between some other buildings to a housing unit called Medium South. I knew about it, but I had never before seen it. A gate in the high wall opened up, and in we went.

I felt like Dorothy Gale having just crashed in the Land of Oz after a tornado uprooted our lives. After 23 years locked in with no outside at all — 13 of them with Pornchai — this new place was built around a park-like setting with outside access nearly around the clock. And there were flowers! People I knew came running down to carry my things. I was led to the top floor from where I could see over the walls into forests and hills beyond.

Then came this wonderful scene’s collision with a broken heart. From there, I watched as Pornchai passed all alone back through that gate down below, possibly never to be seen again by me again. Friendship means nothing in prison bureaucracies. We were powerless to change this and I was powerless to decline this move. On the next day after a sleepless night, I learned that Pornchai was also moved — but somewhere else. Our faith was shaken and it began to crumble.

Pornchai was moved to another unit. We both knew that no one ever returns from there. Not ever! Over the next two weeks I prayed daily asking Saint Maximilian, our Patron Saint ,to bring this before the Heart of Mary for a word to her Son. Surely, she could undo this knot. After all, it was upon her word that He changed water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana (John 2:1-10).

On the following Sunday, Pornchai was able to attend a Catholic Mass in the prison chapel. We had only a minute to speak after Mass. I asked him to trust, and to hand this over to our Mother. Pornchai just nodded in silence. Then I picked up a Missalette and saw a prayer, the Memorare. I asked Pornchai to pray with me:

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, we fly unto you, O Virgin of Virgins, our Mother. To you do we come, before you we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petition, but in your mercy, hear and answer us. Amen.”

Each day to follow was under a dark cloud. Three days later, on a Wednesday afternoon, I returned from my work in the prison law library. As the gate to Medium South slid open, another prisoner was waiting for me. I usually sit on a bench there for a few minutes before climbing up the 52 stairs to my cell, but the person standing there told me I was needed up there right away.

I arrived to find Pornchai unpacking and moving into the bunk above me where, just a few hours earlier, some other prisoner lived. The smile on Pornchai’s face told the story. “How did this happen?” I asked. Pornchai said, “I think you already know.” He had no explanation. He said he was suddenly called to an office and told to pack and move to Medium South, Pod 3-Bravo, Cell 4. He had no idea the address was mine until he got there and saw my possessions in the 60-square-foot cell.

We were able to spend the next three years becoming ready, and we were ready. Pornchai remained my roommate until September 8, 2020 when he was handed over to ICE for deportation to Thailand. There was another miracle yet to come, and I wrote of it in “For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand.”

Epilogue : A Prodigal Son and His Older Brother

It has long been my mission in life to restore the life of another person stranded in the twists and turns of this story. After an absence of 38 years, Pornchai’s brother, Priwan has been saving and hoping to travel to Thailand. For the first time since they were taken away in 1985, he will be reunited with Pornchai in Thailand. Priwan’s flight departs Boston on Divine Mercy Sunday arriving in Bangkok on the day after.

Priwan cannot remain there, but he wants to restore his Thai citizenship and the identity that was taken from him as Pornchai had already begun to do. Priwan will spend a month with Pornchai, the first time they have been together since the tragedy of their lives separated them 38 years earlier. I have promised to help, and that is my other prayer.

Mary is still at work here, and I am still in her service.

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Left: Pornchai greets his brother Priwan in the company of Khun Chalathip, his Thai tutor, upon arrival at the Bangkok International Airport. Right: Having arrived with clothing from the state of Maine, Priwan needed to find something more suitable to Thai weather. It was 113℉ that day. (Photos by Father John Hung Le, SVD)

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this Divine Mercy story. To help me in this Corporal Work of Mercy, or to support Beyond These Stone Walls, please see our “Contact and Support” page. You may also wish to read these related posts:

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Loved, Lost, Found: The Chapter on “Pornchai Moontri”

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

And you must not miss...

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

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And available until Pentecost:

A Personal Holy Week Retreat from Beyond These Stone Walls

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

St. Maximilian Kolbe was a prolific writer before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1941. He died a prisoner of Auschwitz, but true freedom was his gift to all who suffer.

“There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.”

— John 15:13

August 10, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In his wonderful book, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (Touchstone 1990), author and former Newsweek editor Kenneth L. Woodward wrote that the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe was one of the most controversial cases ever to come before the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The essential facts of Kolbe’s martyrdom are well known. After six months as a prisoner of Auschwitz in 1941, Maximilian and the other prisoners of Cell Block 14 were ordered outside to stand at attention for commandant Karl Fritzch. Someone from the block had escaped. To encourage informants, the Commandant had a policy that ten men from the cell block of any escaped prisoner would be chosen at random to die from starvation, the slowest and cruelest of deaths.

The last to be chosen was Francis Gajowniczek, a young man who collapsed in tears for the wife and children he would never see again. Another man, Prisoner No. 16670, stepped forward. “Who is this Polish swine?” the Commandant demanded. “I am a Catholic priest,” Maximilian Kolbe replied, “and I want to take the place of that man.” The Commandant was speechless, but granted the request. Maximilian and the others were marched off to a starvation bunker.

For the next 16 days, Kolbe led the others in prayer as one by one they succumbed without food or water. On August 14, only four, including Maximilian, remained alive. The impatient Commandant injected them with carbolic acid and their bodies were cremated to drift in smoke and ash in the skies above Auschwitz. It was the eve of the Solemnity of the Assumption. God was silent, but it only seemed so. I wrote about this death, its meaning, and the cell where it occurred in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

If that event summed up the whole of Maximilian’s life, it may seem sufficient to be deemed heroic virtue. Today, the name of the brutal Commandant Karl Fritsch is forgotten from history while all the world knows of Maximilian Kolbe, and for far more than his act of sacrifice for someone he barely knew. His act of Consecration to Jesus through Mary was well known long before the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. As the occupation commenced, Maximilian had a readership of over 800,000 in Poland alone for his monthly magazine, Knights of the Immaculata.

Perceived as a clear threat to the Nazi mindset, he was arrested and jailed for several months in 1939 while his publishing ability was destroyed. Upon his release, he instituted the practice of round-the-clock Eucharistic Adoration for his community decades before it became common practice in parishes.

The Nazi occupiers of Poland were the cruelest foreign rulers in history. A detailed report on conditions of the Nazi occupation compiled and smuggled out of Poland by Catholic priests was made public in Vatican City in October 1941. More than 60,000 Poles were imprisoned in concentration camps, 540,000 Polish workers were deported to forced labor camps in Germany where another 640,000 Polish prisoners of war were also held.

By the end of 1941, 112,000 Poles had been summarily executed while 30,000 more, half of those held in concentration camps, died there. Famine and other deplorable conditions caused a typhus epidemic that took many more lives. By the end of the Nazi terror, six million Jews — fully a third of European Jews — had been exterminated. There are those whose revisionist history faulted the Vatican for keeping silent, but that was not at all the truth. I wrote the real, but shocking truth of this in “Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.”

Karol Wojtyla

These were also the most formative years for a man who would one day become a priest, and then Archbishop of Krakow in which Auschwitz was located, and then Pope John Paul II. In 1939 as the Nazi occupation of his native Poland commenced, 18-year-old Karol Wojtyla found his own noble defiance. Over the next two years he worked in the mines as a quarryman, and at the Solvey chemical plant while he also took up studies as part of the clandestine underground resistance.

In the fall of 1942, Karol Wojtyla was accepted as a seminarian in a wartime underground seminary in the Archdiocese of Krakow. Two years later, a friend and fellow seminarian was shot and killed by the Gestapo. The war and occupation were a six-year trial by fire in which young Karol was exposed to a world of unspeakable cruelty giving rise to unimaginable heroism.

One of the stories that most impacted him was that of the witness and sacrifice of Father Maximilian Kolbe. He became for Karol the model of a man and priest living the sacramental condition of “alter Christus,” another Christ, by a complete emptying of the self in service to others. In scholarly papers submitted in his underground seminary studies, Karol took up the habit of writing at the top of each page, “To Jesus through Mary,” in emulation of Maximilian Kolbe.

On November 1, 1946, on the Solemnity of All Saints, Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest in the wartime underground seminary. He was the only candidate for ordination that year. Two weeks later, he boarded a train for graduate theological studies in Rome where, like Maximilian Kolbe before him, he would obtain his first of two doctoral degrees. It was the first time he had ever left Poland.

In 1963, he was named Archbishop of Krakow by a new pontiff, Pope Paul VI. It was alive in him in a deeply felt way that he was now Archbishop of the city of Sister Faustina Kowalska, the mystic of Divine Mercy who died in 1938 and whose Diary had spread throughout Poland having a deep impact on young Karol Wojtyla. And he was Archbishop of the site of Auschwitz, of the very place where the Nazi terror occurred, the place where Maximilian Kolbe offered himself to save another.

I was ten years old the year Karol Wojtyla became Archbishop of Krakow. I was 25, and in my first-year of theological studies in seminary when he became Pope John Paul II. In June of 1979, he made his first pilgrimage as pope to his native Poland. This visit marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism. During his pilgrimage, Pope John Paul visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. He knelt on the floor of Block 11, Cell 18 at the very spot in which Maximilian Kolbe died. John Paul kissed the floor where Kolbe had prayed in agony 38 years before. He left there a bouquet of red and white roses, an act with great significance that I will describe below.

When Pope John Paul emerged from his veneration in the starvation cell that June day in 1979, he embraced 78-year-old Franciszek Gajowniczek whose life Maximilian had saved by taking his place in death. I remember this visit. It was the first time I had ever heard of Maximilian Kolbe. I would next hear of him again when he was canonized in 1982, the year of my priesthood ordination. Neither event was without controversy. I recently wrote of my own in “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost.”

A Martyr in Red and White

But the controversy around the canonization of St. Maximilian Kolbe is much more interesting. It actually changed the way the Church has traditionally viewed martyrdom. Maximilian’s sacrifice of himself at Auschwitz was a story that spread far beyond Catholic circles. In his book, People in Auschwitz, Jewish historian and Auschwitz survivor, Hermann Langbein wrote:

“The best known act of resistance was that of Maximilian Rajmond Kolbe who deprived the camp administration of the power to make arbitrary decisions about life and death.”

In 1971, the beatification process for Maximilian presided over by Pope Paul VI was based solely on his heroic virtue. Two miracles had already been formally attributed to his intercession. Shortly after the beatification, Pope Paul VI received a delegation from Poland. Among them was Krakow Archbishop Karol Wojtyla. In his address to them, Pope Paul VI referred to Kolbe as a “martyr of charity.”

This rankled the Poles and even some of the German bishops who had joined the cause for Maximilian’s later canonization. They wanted him venerated as a martyr. Strictly speaking, however, it did not appear to Paul VI or to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, that Maximilian was martyred for his faith, traditionally the sole standard for declaring a saint to also be venerated as a martyr. Pope Paul VI overruled the Polish and German bishops.

The next Pope, John Paul II, had for a lifetime held Maximilian Kolbe in high regard. In order to resolve the question of martyrdom, he bypassed the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and appointed a 25-member commission with two judges to study the matter. The Commission was presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI.

In the end, on November 9, 1982, the Mass for Canonization of St. Maximilian Kolbe took place at St. Peter’s Basilica before a crowd of 250,000, the largest crowd ever in attendance for a canonization. At the Mass, Pope John Paul II proclaimed:

“And so, in virtue of my apostolic authority I have decreed that Maximilian Maria Kolbe, who after beatification was venerated as a confessor, shall henceforth also be venerated as a martyr.”

The matter was officially settled. Maximilian Kolbe became a saint canonized by a saint. But it was really settled in the mind of John Paul three years earlier on the day when he laid a bouquet of red and white roses on the floor of the Auschwitz starvation cell where Maximilian died.

It was an echo from Maximilian’s childhood. At around the age of ten in 1904, Rajmond Kolbe was an active and sometimes mischievous future saint. He was obsessed with astronomy and physics, and dreamed of designing a rocket to explore the Cosmos. He exasperated his mother, a most ironic fact given his lifelong preoccupation with the Mother of God. One day, his mother was at her wit’s end and she scolded him in Polish, “Rajmond! Whatever will become of you?”

Rajmond ran off to his parish church and asked his “other” Mother the same question. Then he had a vision — or a dream — in which Mary presented him with two crowns, one dazzling white and the other red. These came to be seen as symbols for sanctity and martyrdom, and they were the source for Pope John Paul’s gesture of leaving red and white flowers at the place where Maximilian died.

Epilogue

I witnessed firsthand a similar experience involving the conversion of my friend, Pornchai Moontri who took the name, Maximilian, as his Christian name. He may not have been aware of his mystical heart to heart dialog with the patron saint we both shared. Pornchai is a master woodworker, a skill he has not been able to utilize yet in Thailand because organizing a work place and acquiring tools is a major undertaking.

Around the time of our Consecration to Jesus through Mary, an event I wrote of in “The Doors that Have Unlocked,” Pornchai took up a project. He had perfected the art of model shipbuilding and decided to design and build a model sailing ship named in honor of his Patron Saint. He called it “The St. Maximilian.”

Pornchai chose black for the ship’s hull, but on the night before completing it he had an insight that he had to paint the hull red and white. When I asked him why, he had no explanation other than, “It just seems right.” He could not have known about Maximilian’s childhood vision of the red and white crowns or Pope John Paul’s gesture at Auschwitz.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This story is filled with irony and coincidence, none of which is really coincidence at all. It is summed up in this quote from St. Maximilian Kolbe, which was sent to me just before I wrote this post:

“For every single human being God has destined the fulfillment of a determined mission on this earth. Even from when he created the Universe, he so directed causes so that the chain of events would be unbroken, and that conditions and circumstances for the fulfillment of this mission would be the most appropriate and fitting.

“Further, every individual is born with particular talents and gifts (and flaws) that are applicable to, and in keeping with, the assigned task, and so throughout life the environment and circumstances so arrange themselves as to make possible the achievement of the goal and to facilitate its unfolding.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe

Another note from Fr. G: The above quote was found on a bulletin from the National Shrine of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Libertyville, Illinois. It was sent from an unusual source, a retired F.B.I. Special Agent was attending Adoration at the Shrine when he spotted the quote and decided to send it to me. He also sent the message below, which will serve as the first comment for this post.

“During the third week of January of this year, I attended Adoration and the Noon Mass at Marytown, Libertyville, Illinois where The National Shrine of Saint Maximilian Kolbe is located and received a copy of the Marytown Church bulletin. The Shrine is under the sponsorship of the Conventual Franciscan Friars – the religious order that St. Maximilian was a member of. St Maximilian Kolbe was put to death at Auschwitz concentration camp on August 14, 1941 and was ‘cremated’ the next day on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. He is the patron saint of various groups but perhaps most notably known for being the patron saint of prisoners. Marytown is very much involved in ministry to prisoners throughout the United States by providing Catholic material to Chaplains of prison facilities and other outreach activities.

“The day after this particular visit to Marytown, I was reading the online Catholic League newsletter and saw information about the ‘Laurie List’ and how it pertained to the trial and incarceration of Fr. Gordon MacRae.  The Laurie List was evidently a ‘secret’ list of New Hampshire police officers accessible to prosecutors, who had issues arise questioning their truthfulness and veracity. Any issue that arises as to the truthfulness of a witness particularly a police officer is supposed to be made known to the defendant and his attorney. The Keene NH detective who investigated the case against Fr. Gordon is on this list.  If ‘impeachable’ information regarding this detective was known, this information should have been made available to Fr. Gordon and his defense attorney. I have been following Fr. Gordon’s situation for a number of years and so I am aware of his devotion to St. Maximilian Kolbe.

“After reviewing rules to send mail to the prison housing Fr. Gordon in Concord, New Hampshire, I forwarded the weekly bulletin to him which usually quotes a passage from the writings of St. Maximilian. This has led to a correspondence and receiving Father’s weekly post. Those familiar with Father’s website — Beyond These Stone Walls — are aware of Pornchai Moontri, his tragic life, long period of incarceration, transfer to the NH prison in Concord, becoming the cellmate of Fr. Gordon, Pornchai’s entrance into the Catholic Church — taking a baptismal name of Maximilian — and his ultimate release from prison. I currently try to assist Fr. Gordon’s work (his web site, assistance to Pornchai, etc.) through prayer and financial support.”

One last note from Fr. G: Please visit our “Special Events” page for an update on ways that you can help sustain Beyond These Stone Walls.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts:

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Independence Day in Thailand by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost