“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
What Belongs to Caesar and What Belongs to God
Pharisees set a trap for Jesus with a query about paying tax to Caesar. Like much in the Gospel, this has a story on its surface and a far greater one in its depths.
Pharisees set a trap for Jesus with a query about paying tax to Caesar. Like much in the Gospel, this has a story on its surface and a far greater one in its depths.
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: One of the most frequent religious questions in the Google database of searches is also the Gospel at Mass for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time. With that question, the Pharisees laid out a trap for Jesus.
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Prisoners often come to my door with questions. Sometimes they simply don’t have the ability to search through the library for answers and sometimes they just assume that a guy my age must know at least something about almost everything. My friend, Pornchai Moontri, when he was here with me, used to sometimes chime in with answers of his own.
One day a prisoner asked me, “Do you know any Latin? Pornchai shot back, “Of course he does. Latin was his first language!” The implied meaning was that I am old enough to remember when Latin was spoken on the streets of the Roman Empire. The prisoner didn’t get the joke so he didn’t laugh. I got it, and I still look forward to my quid pro quo moment.
But Pornchai may not have been entirely wrong. I went to a public high school as a teen growing up on the North Shore of Massachusetts in the 1960s. (Yes, locals still call it the “Noath Shoah”). I graduated from Lynn English High School when I was only one month seventeen in 1970, and what I most remember about those years is Latin. At Lynn English I studied basic, intermediate, and advanced Classical Latin with Miss Ruggiero who also moderated the “Latin Club” of which I was a charter member.
Latin was not my first language, but I became proficient in my first language, English, only because I studied Latin. I owe a great debt to Miss Ruggiero because she was never satisfied with our merely learning the discipline of Latin declinations and conjugations. We also had to study in depth the setting in which it was spoken: the vast Roman Empire that had spread throughout the known world.
The Roman Empire
The Roman Empire lasted for only five centuries. One of them, the one we now call the First Century A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “the Year of the Lord”) includes the Roman occupation of Judea during the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the life of the Early Church.
The Empire began to spread from the city of Rome to the rest of Italy and neighboring regions to become the Roman Republic about 500 years before the birth of Jesus. In 49 B.C., Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman military strategist and politician, prevailed in a civil war and became dictator of the Republic. He ruled for only five years when he was assassinated on the Ides of March (March 15). The month of July was named in his honor. Caesar’s longtime military deputy, Mark Antony, and Caesar’s grandnephew, Gaius Octavius, defeated Caesar’s assassins and rivals. Then they turned on each other. At the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Octavius prevailed over a plot by Roman governor Mark Antony and the Egyptian princess, Cleopatra, Caesar’s former mistress who took up with Mark Antony. It’s one of the great soap operas of history.
In 27 B.C. the Roman Senate proclaimed Octavius to be the Roman Republic’s supreme leader giving him the title, “Augustus,” meaning “exalted or holy one.” Most historians cite 27 B.C. as the date the Roman Empire was born. Its first Emperor took his title and added “Caesar” in honor of his great-uncle, Julius.
Caesar Augustus thus meant, “Caesar the Exalted Holy Roman Emperor.” It was a title and not a name. Augustus was also given the titles, “Pontifex Maximus,” supreme head of the state religion, and “Pater Patriae,” Father of the Fatherland.
The month of August was named in the ancient Roman Calendar in honor of Caesar Augustus. It’s easy to see the Roman influence not only in the Latin language of the Church but in the religious titles later assigned by tradition to the papacy. It’s a crime against history to allow Latin to fade from Catholic Tradition, for Christianity transformed it from the language of Earthly powers to the language of the Church. I once wrote of the meaning of this loss in the life of the Church in “A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass.”
From 27 B.C. forward, “Caesar” became the title for a string of Roman rulers. Three are mentioned by name in our New Testament: Augustus, who reigned at the time of the birth of Jesus (see Luke 2:1); Tiberius, in whose fifteenth year as Emperor Jesus was baptized by John at the Jordan (Luke 3:1); and Claudius (Acts 18:2), who commanded that all Jews leave the city of Rome. Others, such as Caligula and Nero, are not mentioned by name but had a profound effect on early Christianity.
By the birth of Jesus, Augustus centralized power by turning to the Equestrian Order, Roman citizens with wealth, power, and property, and sustained their loyalty by appointing them governors over the various regions of Roman occupation. When Jesus was about 14 years of age, Tiberius succeeded Augustus as Emperor, and later appointed one of the Equestrian Order, Pontius Pilate, as governor of Judea.
In some ways in the early years of the advance of Rome into Palestine, the Jews saw it to their advantage. It was a chance to free themselves from the oppression of the Seleucids, the Greek dynasty under Antiochus IV Epiphanies who overtook the Jerusalem Temple in 167 B.C. and replaced the Torah in the Sanctuary with the cult of Zeus.
This is a story of great imperial oppression and Jewish resistance that is laid out in the First Book of Maccabees (1 Macc 8:1-6) which spoke positively of the advancing Romans and an alliance with the Jews to expel the Greek oppressors. It is the story of the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah. A century before the birth of Jesus, Rome became the dominant force in the Mediterranean region, having replaced the Hellenistic Greek influence that sought to destroy the Hebrew language and expression of faith.
Caesar and Christ
So when I came to the Gospel reading for the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I was struck by the answer Jesus gave to the religious scholars of his day, the Pharisees, who had set out to entrap him. Armed with a thorough knowledge of Hebrew Law, they asked Jesus if it is permissible for Jews to pay the census tax to Caesar.
The brief story that the Gospel tells in Matthew 22: 15-22 is a good story on its face, but if you are willing to venture a little deeper under into its depths, the result is fascinating. So sometime before or after you hear the Gospel for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, invest a little of your own ordinary time for a careful reading of the rest of this post.
It is impossible to fully understand the dynamic in this account between Jesus and a group of Pharisees without some exploration of its setting. First, the story on the surface:
“The Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech. They sent their disciples to him, with the Herodians, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone’s opinion, for you do not regard a person’s status. Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?’” The trap is set.
“Knowing their malice, Jesus said, ‘Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax.’ Then they gave him the Roman coin. He said to them, ‘Whose image is this and whose inscription?’ They replied, ‘Caesar’s.’ At that he said to them, ‘Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.’ When they heard it, they marveled; and then they left him and went away.”
— Matthew 22: 15-22
Why were the Pharisees plotting against Jesus at all? It began in an earlier chapter of the Gospel, Matthew 12. The Pharisees challenged Jesus over his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry. The chapter then culminates in his Sabbath Day healing of a man with a withered hand. Using the Pharisees’ own expertise in Hebrew Law and the Prophets, Jesus challenged them to consider the prophetic meaning of “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (quoting from the Prophet Hosea 6:6). Stymied by the challenge, “the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him on how to destroy him.” (Matthew 12:14).
The next encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees is the account of their question about whether the Hebrew Law permits Jews to pay a census tax to Caesar. When Jesus asked to see the coin that would be used, and then asks whose image is on this coin, he cut to the heart of their trap with one of his own.
The coin was a denarius stamped with the profile of the Emperor, Tiberius Caesar. The tax was deeply offensive to the Pharisees because of a law set forth in the Book of Exodus:
“You shall not make for yourself a graven image whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath… You shall not bow down to them, or worship them.”
— Exodus 20:4-5
To pay a tax to Caesar using the coin of the realm, one engraved with Caesar’s image, was considered a direct affront to the Hebrew Law, and yet the Roman occupation required it and it was the price Jews paid for freedom from the oppression of the Greeks who committed a far more serious abomination: total desecration of their Temple. So paying it was an accommodation that the Jews begrudgingly obliged despite the Mosaic Law.
But what these Pharisees wanted to know from Jesus was not whether or not to pay the tax, but his opinion on whether it was in accord with the Law of Moses. The trap was set no matter how he answered. If his opinion was that it was lawful to pay, then it would be a public insult against the Law of Moses which could be used to discredit him. If he said it was not lawful to pay, then it would have been a public insult against Rome which could be used to accuse him of insurrection.
But in the end, Jesus trapped the entrappers by saying something that caused them first to marvel, and then to simply go away in silence. His trap had multiple tiers. The first was to play upon the word, “image.” The coin bore the image and likeness of Tiberius Caesar. Therefore, for Jesus, it belonged to him.
To pay the tax is simply to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. It would be a clearer violation of the law against graven images for a Jew to keep the coin. But the Pharisees would also see in this a subtle reference to a passage in Genesis with great authority:
“So God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him.”
— Genesis 1.27
Hence the second part of Jesus’ challenge: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
This meant not just their obedience to the Law, but their very selves. The gist of the implication is even stronger. This higher duty, for Jesus, is incumbent not only upon these Pharisees, but even upon Caesar himself, and that was a revolutionary thought that put the Pharisee’s in a stupor.
For the Pharisees to challenge him in any way after this would have required their affirmation that Caesar is an ultimate authority that surpasses even the will of God. So they were left to marvel, and then they just left. This places an entirely new meaning on the accommodations to Caesar made by religious authorities of Jesus’ time — and perhaps even our own.
Somehow, between this scene in the Gospel of Matthew that is proclaimed at a Sunday Mass, and the Gospel of John that we will hear in Holy Week, came the final descent of faith and the cost of believing culminating in the scene before Pilate that became one of my most read Holy Week posts, “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar.’”
It was the ultimate accommodation to Caesar from which there is no return. As for the vast Roman Empire that tried to make its Emperor god, the successor of Peter remains in Rome to this day. The successor of Caesar is but a footnote on history.
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The dotted line in the map above marks the perimeter of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus.
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You might want to pay a visit this week to our new feature on the Home Page, “Special Report,” to read my post, “Synodality Blues.”
For more forays into the deeper wells of Scripture visit these posts on Beyond These Stone Walls:
Saint Luke the Evangelist, Dear and Glorious Physician
The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy
On February 28, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world as the first pope in over 700 years to resign. The time of Pope Francis has been a tempest of controversy.
On February 28, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world as the first pope in over 700 years to resign. The time of Pope Francis has been a tempest of controversy.
What faithful Catholic could forget the events of February and March, 2013? The story first broke on February 11 that year. It was a Monday. Pope Benedict XVI had summoned a minor consistory of the cardinal-residents of Rome. The official reason was the announcement of three new saints.
The names of the three beati were read by Cardinal Angelo Amati. Then Pope Benedict, looking tired and worn, stunned the world as he spoke in Latin from a prepared text:
“Ingravescente aetate non iam aptas esse ad munus Petrinum aeque administrandum …”
“I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”
I had just returned that afternoon from a meeting when a friend knocked on my door. “Can a pope quit?” he asked. “No,” came my tired reply. “Well,” he said, “I think this one just did.” I quickly turned on FOX News, and like so many of you, my heart was stabbed with sorrow. Even in exile, I pondered what could have brought Pope Benedict XVI to this point, and what it would mean for the Church.
If you spent any time at all with the rabid round-the-clock television news media back then, it seemed that the haters of the Catholic Church had won as Benedict collapsed under a relentless assault. If the gates of hell had not yet prevailed against the Church, they were certainly giving it their all.
In hindsight, there were foreshadows of Benedict’s thoughts, but only the most observant Vatican watchers might have noticed, and for the most part, they remained in silent denial. In 2010, Pope Benedict was extensively interviewed by journalist Peter Seewald for a book entitled Light of the World (Ignatius 2010). Readers of the book might have noted this statement of Benedict:
“If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances an obligation, to resign.”
— Pope Benedict XVI
The last pope to have done so was Pope Saint Celestine V in the year 1294. In 2009, a year before publication of Light of the World, Pope Benedict visited the Cathedral in L’Aquila, Italy. While there, he placed a white stole on Pope Celestine’s glass coffin, a gesture given new meaning four years later when Benedict followed Celestine to become only the second pope in over 700 years to resign.
When in Rome, Don’t Do as the Romans Do
The media coverage was an absolute circus. Over successive weeks I felt an obligation to use my small voice at Beyond These Stone Walls to address this story in saner terms. In the five weeks leading up to the Conclave of 2013 and the earliest days of the papacy of Pope Francis, I wrote many posts. The first of these was “Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”
Writing them with limited resources and no Internet access at all made them more like editorials than blow-by-blow accounts of what was happening in Rome. This was all unfolding during Lent in 2013, and we were facing a daily media onslaught of wild speculation and agenda-driven reporting.
I had no idea when I wrote the above post that so many readers would later thank me for bringing sanity and clarity to a dark, tumultuous time of uncertainty and doubt. Since then, I have written several posts about the almost hidden Pope Emeritus and the pontificate of Pope Francis. One of the most recent of these was “Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful.”
Some readers who vehemently disagree with some of the actions and positions of Francis have chided me for defending him. But I don’t think I have defended him. He doesn’t need my defense and wouldn’t even notice if I had one. Instead, I have defended the truth of what was actually happening in the Church at the time Benedict stepped down, and of how a reformer like Francis came to the Chair of Peter. That does not mean that I agree, or even see his reforms as reforms.
Some in the media speculated that a Wikileaks scandal was the ultimate cause of Benedict’s decision. It resulted when Pope Benedict’s butler stole and released confidential documents but, in the end, this had little to do with his resignation. It was, as I described it then, a result of “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”
The Winds of Change
In his eye-opening book, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (Henry Holt 2014) British religious affairs expert and journalist, Austen Ivereigh got to the heart of why Pope Benedict really stepped down. It was an event that occurred one year earlier in March of 2012, and my heart went out to Benedict when I read it:
“…at the end of a fleeting trip to Mexico and Cuba, [Benedict] realized that he could not go on. He had stumbled on the steps of the cathedral of Leon in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and that night he hit his head on the sink as he fumbled his way to the bathroom in his hotel in the city. The cut was not deep, and few knew because his skullcap covered it, but, as often happens to old people after such falls, it brought a sudden cognizance of his frailty.”
— The Great Reformer, p 344
And as Austen Ivereigh also points out, “the Vatican was at this time imploding.” Headlines were full of the “Vatileaks” scandal described above. The public airing of confidential documents pilfered from the elderly Pope’s private desk conveyed an image of “an ineffectual pope sitting powerlessly atop a Vatican riven by Borgia-style factionalism and rivalry” (Ivereigh, p 343).
The Vatican was under siege by factions within its ranks. The documents were stolen by Pope Benedict’s otherwise faithful butler, Paolo Gabriele, and leaked for the same stated reason for which he stole them — a desperate action moved ultimately by fidelity to the Church. A lot of people in Rome shared his frustration with the stifled need for reform blocked by endless powerful factions in Rome — especially in the financial scandals in the Vatican bank. Austen Ivereigh characterized the time:
“Looking back, it is hard not to see in [Benedict’s] decision an exhausted European Church standing back to allow the vigorous Church of Latin America to step forward.”
— The Great Reformer, p 344
I’m not so sure that I agree that the above quote was what Pope Benedict had in mind when he made what had to be the most momentous decision of his life. But I do know that the local sensus fidelium — the mind of the truly faithful in Rome — had some sympathy for the desperate act of the Pope’s butler. Who knows? Centuries from now, his actions may be seen as inspired by the Holy Spirit.
I know that sounds unlikely, but judging this point in Church history is impossible in a Church that sees its place in history in terms of millennia. A while back, I wrote a post entitled “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican.” Its point was that one of the most corrupt and tumultuous periods in the history of the Church — the Renaissance papacy of the 15th and 16th Centuries — was a time in the Church, says historian Barbara Tuchman, “when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter.”
From our vantage point in history, the corruption and scandal of that time also produced much of the art and architecture that we today treasure with reverence as the centerpieces of our expression of faith — including Saint Peter’s Basilica itself. Wherever you stand on the directions and decisions of Pope Francis, history supports the truth that the Holy Spirit has at times used our flawed human nature for the same ends in which He has used our gifts.
The Conclave of 2013 was carried out in an unprecedented intrusion of minute-by-minute media coverage and coverage by social media. The pressure for a reformer was great. Like many of you, I have misgivings and distrust about some of the direction in which this Pope seems to be taking the Church. I think most readers know that I share a deep respect for Tradition. Most readers would conclude, and rightly so, that I have felt thoroughly betrayed by liberal factions in both Church and State. My reasons for that sense of betrayal are many and complex. Both I and others have written about them.
But there has been a betrayal from the voices of Tradition as well. It’s a point that I know may alienate some readers, but it must be said. Among some conservative voices in the Church, there has been a huge controversy about the Pope’s pastoral exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. The concern is that its pastoral approach to reception of the Eucharist for some divorced and remarried Catholics undermines the Sacramental bond of Matrimony and the meaning of Communion. I share this concern for the integrity of the Sacraments and the integrity of the Church’s mandate to teach and personify the ideal — even when human nature doesn’t always live up to ideals. When has it ever?
The “Heresy” of Pope Francis
But for me, the Traditionalist voices may be choosing these battles selectively. They remained largely silent over the last twenty-one years since the grave public priesthood scandal of 2002. Using scandal as a means to an end, factional agendas in the Church have demanded broad changes in the way the Church perceives priests. These agendas have greatly undermined and reinterpreted the Sacrament of Holy Orders and all but destroyed the paternal bond between bishops and priests. Catholic writer Ryan A. MacDonald addressed this in his article, “Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood.”
Where were these voices of Sacramental concern when all due process for accused priests was thrown out the window to pacify lawyers and insurance companies and a corrupt, scandal-hungry news media? None of them are ever pacified. Where were the voices of Sacramental concern when it was the Sacrament of Holy Orders that was being discredited, undermined and cheapened? Where were the defenders of the Sacramental bond when priests were being described as self-employed contractors as some bishops did to fend off insurance liability in 2002?
Where have these defenders of Sacramentals bonds been while bishops dismissed priests from the clerical state with no corroboration, no defense, little due process, and no appeal, and often based on mere accusations that were sometimes 30, 40, 50 years old, and sometimes based on no accusation at all?
The Sacrament of Holy Orders suddenly became dispensable in response to the current orthodoxy of political correctness which demands that no one must ever question a claim of victimhood. I must tell you that this attitude toward accused priests has invaded every aspect of American Catholic life, and like all things American, it is spreading throughout the world.
Sometimes, even with the most practiced politicians, it is a spontaneous reaction rather than one filtered through handlers that most clearly reflects justice in the human heart. I believe I saw justice, wisdom, and courage in the heart of Pope Francis when he let loose a spontaneous reply to a question for which he was later dressed down by his own team. It happened during a visit to Chile amid the controversy of a bishop widely condemned for tolerating, even witnessing, acts of sexual abuse. When asked why he had not removed that bishop, Pope Francis spontaneously replied, “Show me some evidence.”
For the victim culture that fuels the #MeToo movement, the Pope had committed cultural heresy. The next day, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a close advisor to Pope Francis on the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, issued a rare public rebuke, clarifying that the Church must not question any claim of victimhood. Within a day, the Pope’s spontaneous words were filtered through the new orthodoxy of political correctness and Pope Francis then fell into line with its doctrinal infallibility.
Not long after, the Our Sunday Visitor newspaper published an article by Brian Fraga entitled, “Abuse Survivors and the Value of Belief” (OSV Feb. 25-Mar. 3, 2018). Both the article and the subject were seriously marred, however, by an agenda-driven quote from Mary Jane Doerr, Director of the Archdiocese of Chicago Office for the Protection of Children and Young People:
“Doerr said that, generally, less than four percent of allegations are not true. ‘Children lie to get out of trouble, not into trouble…’ She added an insight she once heard from a mental health professional: ‘Children lie every day about sexual abuse. They lie to protect the abuser.’”
Mary Jane Doerr, and, I hope, Brian Fraga, should know that this in no way characterizes the story of Catholic priests accused of abuse. More than seventy percent of the accusations have come, not from children, but from adults who stand to gain huge financial settlements for making such claims. That in itself should be cause for caution and investigation. Finding the truth does not re-victimize real victims, only the fraudulent ones.
My accuser is not a child. At the time of my trial, he was a 27-year-old man with a criminal history of fraud, forgery, assault, and drug charges. He and his three adult brothers all conjured their memories of abuse in the same week. They together amassed $650,000 in unquestioned settlements, and bragged to friends who have since gone on record that they “got one over on the Catholic Church!”
In my 2005 article for Catalyst, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud,” I quoted noted Boston Civil Rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate who wrote in 2004 that the Church should not capitulate to significant numbers of claims brought only after it became clear that the Church would settle financially, and with no corroboration. This characterizes more than seventy percent of the total number of such claims.
The initial, spontaneous reaction of Pope Francis to the matter of Bishop Barros in Chile was the only just one, and the only truly Catholic one. It is heresy, today, to even suggest the notion of due process and a presumption of innocence when a man stands accused of abuse. By no means do I want to compare Pope Francis with former President Donald Trump, but both committed the same spontaneous heresy against political correctness at roughly the same time.
After a media flurry about dismissing a White House staff member accused of domestic abuse, the former American President also had one of these lucid moments of spontaneous justice not yet filtered by handlers concerned for its political correctness. In one of his famous, sometimes too blunt tweets, President Donald Trump expressed a truth that I hope Pope Francis will keep in mind:
“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused. Life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as due process?”
— President Donald Trump, Feb. 10, 2018
This erosion of the priestly Sacramental bond in the Church now threatens the Church’s mandate to be a Mirror of Justice to the world. When asked just a few years ago about priests blessing same-sex unions, Pope Francis spontaneously responded, “The Church cannot bless sin.” Now in response to demands of the woke in the Synod on Synodality, he has dabbled in talk about leaving this up to the conscience of individual priesst instead of the conscience of the Church. That is heresy.
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Editor’s Note: Father Gordon MacRae is a priest of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire who has just begun his 30th year in prison for crimes that never took place. He is the subject of a multi-part analysis in The Wall Street Journal and a video documentary entitled, “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam.”
The New Hampshire YDC Scandal and the Trial of Father MacRae
A victim of abuse is one among 1,300 plaintiffs in a New Hampshire Youth Detention scandal covered up by State officials even as they investigated Catholic priests.
A victim of abuse is one among 1,300 plaintiffs in a New Hampshire Youth Detention scandal covered up by State officials even as they investigated Catholic priests.
October 4, 2023 by Ryan A. MacDonald and Claire Best
On September 23, 2023, Father Gordon MacRae began a thirtieth year in the New Hampshire State Prison for crimes that never took place. He was sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to 67 years in prison after refusing a plea deal offer to serve one to two years. He was sentenced solely for the claims of Thomas Grover, claims that have since been undermined by members of his family and an investigation by former FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott. His post-trial affidavit is now posted on this site along with several witness statements that NH judges have declined to hear.
More recently, Claire Best, a Los Angeles-based documentary researcher and astute investigator, took up this matter with a stunning article entitled “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”
That corruption runs deeper than any of us thought. Claire Best has also recently published on another scandalous abuse and cover-up unfolding in New Hampshire just as the eyes of the nation are on its upcoming celebrated First-in-the-Nation Presidential Primary. Her latest on that story has a tentacle that reaches into the MacRae trial. Published at other venues, it is “New Hampshire’s Youth Detention Center Scandal.”
When the spotlight was on the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester in 2002, the Office of the New Hampshire Attorney General convened a grand jury to investigate. Despite no indictments or charges filed, the State published a report profiling every lurid claim bolstering multi-million dollar settlements with little to no evidence. When the spotlight fell upon the prestigious St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH another grand jury investigation commenced. In the case of the State Youth Detention Center, with its 1,300 open cases and the State’s procurement of a $100 million settlement fund, no grand jury investigation is taking place. This is curious, and is seen by many as an extension of the past cover-up.
Claire Best’s account laying out her case for corruption behind all this should be required reading for New Hampshire politicians and officials of the State’s Department of Justice as well as the US DOJ. One revelation in her most recent account seriously impacts the credibility of Thomas Grover’s accusations against Father MacRae that have kept him in prison for three decades since his 1994 trial.
Claire Best on New Hampshire’s Youth Detention Center Scandal
The Youth Detention Center Scandal Gets Bigger: NH Supreme Court Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald and US Attorney Jane Young should be under investigation.
On August 25, 2023, a group of approximately 100 gathered in Concord, New Hampshire to demand a federal investigation into the cover-ups of abuse at the Youth Detention Center. They blamed Attorneys General and others for the cover-ups. They are right. The State of New Hampshire has ignored thousands of complaints over the years about corruption, ignored reports from the Office of Inspector General and carried on with a complete lack of accountability.
Former residents of New Hampshire youth center demand federal investigation into abuse claims
The Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, previously called the Youth Development Center, has been under criminal …
www.nhpr.org
YDC abuse is decades old, as is state cover-up, master lawsuit alleges
Lawmakers, juvenile advocates have long wanted to close the center
www.nhbr.com
The current messaging requesting a much needed federal investigation involves someone with a connection to the case against Father Gordon MacRae. Charles Glenn is one of the plaintiffs alleging abuse and criminal assault by State employees at the New Hampshire Youth Development Center.
Charles Glenn is also the former stepson of Thomas Grover. Thomas Grover was adopted by Patricia Grover of NH-DCYF. He was a drug addict who was offered money (substantiated in statements) to accuse Father Gordon MacRae who was framed by Police Detective James F McLaughlin whose name was hidden on the Laurie List. The Laurie List is a once secret list of New Hampshire police officers whose credibility has been compromised by official misconduct. Keene Detective James F McLaughlin was on that list and likely one of the principal reasons why Attorney General Gordon MacDonald argued to keep the list secret.
Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest - Beyond These Stone Walls
Keene New Hampshire sex crimes detective James McLaughlin developed claims against a Catholic priest while suppressing …
beyondthesestonewalls.com
Reportedly, (and I understand that the AG’s office has been aware of this since 2012) Charles Glenn once approached Father Gordon MacRae in Concord men’s prison library where MacRae was clerk (around 2008 or so). He allegedly said to MacRae “You know the case against you was bogus, right?”. MacRae allegedly told him that he did know this but wanted to know how Charles Glenn knew it. Charles Glenn told him that his mother, Trina Ghedoni, was married to Thomas Grover during the years that Charles Glenn was in the Youth Detention Center. Later, Charles Glenn allegedly approached a friend of Father Gordon MacRae’s — Edward Silva (deceased). Silva relayed that Charles Glenn had information that could undo the case against Father Gordon MacRae but that he wanted money to provide that information. To clarify, the overture of an expectation of money for the information came only from Edward Silva and not Charles Glenn. MacRae told Silva that this would render the information useless and so it went no further.
Jim Abbott — a former FBI special agent — who was investigating the case against Gordon MacRae interviewed Trina Ghedoni (Charles’ mother) five times. She told him that she and Thomas Grover were visiting Charles Glenn at the YDC. The case against Father Gordon MacRae had exploded in the local media by then so Charles Glenn was well aware that Thomas Grover was his primary accuser. During a later visit with Thomas Grover alone at YDC, Grover allegedly told Charles Glenn that Father Gordon MacRae had never actually touched him but that he was about to “get a lot of money for this story”.
Trina Ghedoni told former FBI investigator Jim Abbott that she learned of those conversations between Thomas Grover and her son only after she divorced Thomas Grover. She also told Jim Abbott that Police Detective James F McLaughlin and therapist Pauline Goupil (who motioned for Thomas Grover to cry during his testimony from the back of the court room — observed by witnesses who wrote to the judge about it but were ignored) were Thomas Grover’s primary coaches as he developed this scam.
Trina Ghedoni told Jim Abbott that she would ask her son, Charles Glenn, to cooperate. By that time her son was in the NH State Prison. Apparently Charles Glenn was in constant trouble at the prison and not long after his first conversations with Father Gordon MacRae ended up in punitive segregation. Jim Abbott visited him at least three times and was able to elicit a signed statement that Thomas Grover — his former stepfather — admitted on numerous occasions that his charges against MacRae were “a total fraud for money”.
This became the basis for the “new evidence” that put Father Gordon MacRae’s habeas corpus petition into state and federal courts in 2012. But both New Hampshire State and Federal judges declined any hearing. Charles Glenn’s and Trina Ghedoni’s statements, among others, were attached to the habeas corpus. The documents are here:
While Charles Glenn languished in and out of punitive segregation, he allegedly tried to talk to Father Gordon MacRae but the latter stopped him advising him that it could be seen as witness tampering. When he ended up in segregation again he was reportedly angry with his mother for some unknown reason. He wrote a letter to the NH AG (Michael Delaney or Joseph Foster at the time) in which he accused Jim Abbott of having an affair with his mother (baseless, I understand). He wanted to get out of segregation and start over somewhere else. He was later moved to a Connecticut prison after revoking his exculpatory statement in support of Father Gordon MacRae. Charles Glenn is now back in New Hampshire’s state prison and told Father Gordon MacRae recently that he was cooperating in the effort to get a federal investigation of the New Hampshire YDC.
On August 30, 2018, AG Gordon MacDonald was noted in the Concord Monitor to have argued against the release of the Laurie List which had James F McLaughlin’s name added to it in June 2018 for crimes dating back to 1985. These most likely were known of by AG Gordon MacDonald due to his work representing the Diocese of Manchester along with his partner at Nixon Peabody and their partner, disgraced “monsignor” Edward Arsenault.
N.H. AG: List of officers with credibility issues should stay private
The New Hampshire attorney general's office says a list of police officers with potential credibility problems…
www.concordmonitor.com
The investigation into James F McLaughlin is being dragged out. He is currently working in DA Chris McLaughlin’s (no relation) office which raises questions as to why a DA would hire a dishonest police officer at all unless it is to be complicit in going through and deleting more files.
Grafton County Investigation into Laurie List Ex-Cop McLaughlin Ongoing
The investigation into former Keene Police Lt. James McLaughlin's testimony that put a Vermont man in prison for the…
indepthnh.org
Please see the entire article by Claire Best:
New Hampshire’s Youth Detention Center Scandal: Gordon MacDonald & Jane Young should be under investigation.
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Statement of Charles Glenn
Introduction:
Charles Glenn’s mother, Trina Ghedoni, was married to Thomas Grover in the time period leading up to, during, and after the 1994 trial of Fr. Gordon MacRae. During some of this time period, from ages 13 to 16, Charles Glenn, was a resident of YDC, the State of New Hampshire’s “Youth Development Center,” a State run juvenile detention facility in Manchester, NH. Charles Glenn signed the forgoing Statement for former FBI investigator James Abbott in 2008, but later withdrew it. Mr. Glenn is one of 1,300 plaintiffs in a civil case alleging sexual and physical abuse by State employees at YDC. He explains that after this experience he was no longer motivated to speak in defense of someone accused of abuse and this caused him to withdraw his statement in 2008. In 2023, after reading reports of fraud in the trial of Father MacRae, Mr. Glenn reinstated his 2008 Statement and asked that it be published.
My name is Charles Glenn and my birth date is July 15, 1981. I am the son of Trina Ghedoni who married Thomas Grover in 1994 in the State of New Hampshire.
I am giving this signed Statement to James Abbott who is a private investigator working on behalf of Gordon MacRae, an ex-priest who was convicted of the sexual abuse of Tom Grover at a 1994 trial. Mr. Abbott has previously interviewed me on April 22, 2008 and this Statement is based on that interview as well as this interview.
From 1993 to 1997 I was assigned to the Youth Development Center in Manchester, New Hampshire. During this period, my mother Trina Ghedoni was dating and later married to Thomas Grover. Almost every week my mother would visit me with Thomas Grover and on numerous weekends I would receive a furlough and be allowed to go to my home at 410 Prescott St. in Manchester where my mother and Thomas Grover lived.
During these visits, and over a number of months and years, Thomas Grover discussed the sex abuse allegations against Gordon MacRae with me. Grover often stated to me that he was going to set MacRae and the church up to gain money for sexual abuse. Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church.
On several occasions Thomas Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae. Grover stated to me that there were other allegations made by other people against MacRae and Grover jumped on and piggybacked onto these allegations for the money.
Grover, on several occasions, called his civil case attorneys for money or cash advances on his expected cash award and Grover told me that his attorneys directed him to go for psychiatric and drug therapy to gain jury appeal in his court case. The attorneys would give cash advances to Grover when he asked for them. Grover stated the counseling would help convince the jury that his problems were the result of his molestation by MacRae. Grover told me his attorneys directed him to go to the Manchester Mental Health Unit and act crazy as this would be helpful in the trial.
After the civil award was settled, Grover and my family visited me [at YDC] and showed me $30,000 in cash, and pictures were taken by my family at this time. Grover again was bragging of his putting it over on the church. He then went out and bought a couple of cars.
Grover was never embarrassed about the publicity, but would laugh at it.
Grover’s statements to me were made before, during, and after the criminal trial and never once did he say over this four year period that he was abused by MacRae. Grover never changed his statements that he set up Gordon MacRae and the church.
I have read and understood the above Statement and it is a true and accurate account of statements made to me by Thomas Grover over the period of 1993 to 1997.
Signed: Charles Glenn May 21, 2008
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Excerpts of Investigator Interview with Trina Ghedoni
Introduction:
Trina Ghedoni is the former wife of Thomas Grover. The following are excerpts of statements to former FBI investigator James Abbott collected during his 2008 to 2011 investigation of the case against Fr. Gordon MacRae:
Trina Ghedoni met Thomas Grover a few years before the 1994 trial of Gordon MacRae. They married in 1994. During her marriage to Grover, and as a result of the 1994 trial, she became increasingly aware of issues and problems with his trial testimony and perjury. This became a factor in her ultimate decision to divorce Thomas Grover.
During her four-year marriage to Grover while living in Prescott, Arizona, Ghedoni thought Grover “made up” the whole thing. His attitude and demeanor after the trial and his sexual obsession with pre-teen and teenage girls led Ghedoni to question Grover’s truthfulness. Grover would leave home sometimes for days at a time and go to a motel to view pornography all day. He was caught by Ghedoni on two occasions having sex with his biological sisters on the Arizona Indian reservation where they relocated after Grover received his settlement. She stated that Grover had a hole in a sheetrock wall where he hid pornography. Ghedoni relates that Grover was a sexual addict.
Trina Ghedoni advised that her son, Charles Glenn, moved to Arizona with Trina and Tom in August of 1997. Charles would “pump” Tom about his life. Ghedoni stated that Charles at age 15-16 would not give her specifics but after the trial told her that Tom had “Bs’d” the whole thing “and everyone would be surprised to know what other things Tom did.”
Ghedoni stated that around 1988 Grover was interviewed by Detective McLaughlin but made no allegation that resulted in a charge. In 1989 or 1990, when Grover was 22 or 23 and living in Manchester before accusing MacRae, he met a Dominic Martin and they became close friends and drinking buddies. Martin had a girlfriend whose name Ghedoni could not recall. Martin talked with Grover about setting up priests for money. Of note, Dominic Martin was later convicted for extortion against a priest in neighboring Massachusetts in 2002.
Ghedoni advised that a therapist named Pauline Goupil consulted with Tom Grover every day of MacRae’s 1994 trial. All Tom’s testimony or proposed testimony passed through Pauline Goupil who also tracked Tom’s medications during the trial. Ghedoni advised that, pre-trial, Detective James McLaughlin would converse with Pauline Goupil who in turn would talk to Tom. Ghedoni felt that Ms. Goupil was preparing and directing Tom at all times.
Trina Ghedoni described Thomas Grover as a “compulsive liar,” a “manipulator,” and a “drama queen,” who “molded stories to fit his needs [and] lied to get what he wanted.” He is someone who can also “tell a lie and stick to it ’til its end.”
In 1994, Grover asked Ghedoni to marry him “because it would look better and, more importantly, he needed the security of a wife for the trial.” During the entire time he and Ghedoni were together before this trial, “never once did Grover say he was abused by MacRae.”
Ghedoni stated that Thomas Grover was never abused, and that he stated several times that he was going to “get the church” for money. She stated that Grover lied at trial about the presence of a chess set in MacRae’s office during abuse. Grover reportedly admitted that this was perjury, but said “it was what they wanted.” “They,” according to Ms. Ghedoni, referred to Detective James McLaughlin and Pauline Goupil.
Detective McLaughlin referred Tom Grover to his civil attorney, Robert Upton who provided Grover with multiple cash advances. Grover claimed his lawsuit was necessary to get money for therapy, but once he received his cash in 1996, he never sought therapy again. Ms. Ghedoni described Det. McLaughlin as “gung ho,” “very aggressive,” and compared him to the TV personality John Walsh.
Ghedoni reported that Pauline Goupil’s son had been convicted in 1989 as the notorious “West Side Rapist,” and went to prison but she learned this only after Grover had been in therapy with Ms. Goupil.
Ms. Ghedoni added that Grover could never give a consistent account of his claimed abuse. Before the trial Grover befriended Dean Clay and they smoked “weed” together for long periods. Dean Clay later attempted to testify for the defense but was denied by the judge.
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Related Notes
After Thomas Grover’s initial testimony at MacRae’s 1994 trial, Dean Clay read of it in a local newspaper. The next day, Dean Clay showed up in the courtroom. Before the trial resumed, he told MacRae’s defense counsel that he knew Tom Grover and had been told by Mr. Grover that he was involved in an insurance scheme or scam for which he will get a lot of money. Mr. Clay believed that the scam Grover referred to was this trial. After strenuous objection by prosecutors, Judge Brennan declined to allow the jury to hear testimony from Dean Clay.
Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna Martin, were arrested in Boston in 2003. They pled guilty and were convicted of the extortion of a priest with false claims of sexual misconduct. Dominic Martin had changed his name. He was formerly Todd Biltcliff, a Keene, New Hampshire resident who in 1992 received an undisclosed settlement after accusing a New Hampshire priest, Fr. Stephen Scruton, of molesting him in a hot tub at the YMCA. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of that account in “Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest.”
During Former FBI Agent James Abbott’s investigation, Thomas Grover and his brothers refused to be interviewed or answer any questions pertaining to this matter. They received combined settlements in excess of $600,000.
Ms. Pauline Goupil also declined to be interviewed or answer any questions. Pauline Goupil is the subject of a recent article by Ryan A. MacDonald, “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”
In a post-trial Writ of Habeas Corpus petition, New Hampshire State and Federal judges declined to hear or consider any testimony from any of the witnesses who offered the Statements and evidence contained herein.
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The following links have been added to “Investigator Affidavit and Witness Statements” :
Sworn Affidavit of Investigator James Abbott
Excerpts of Investigator Interview with Trina Ghedoni
Statement of Steven Wollschlager
“The truth will set you free,” but to date no State or Federal judge in New Hampshire has allowed any of the above witnesses to testify under oath.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Our Salvation
In Judeo-Christian tradition the scales of Saint Michael the Archangel measure souls for eternity, weighing not only justice and mercy for us but also from us.
In Judeo-Christian tradition the scales of Saint Michael the Archangel measure souls for eternity, weighing not only justice and mercy for us but also from us.
September 27, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae
In September 2010, when this blog was but a year old, I wrote a post that was to become one of the most-read posts of the last decade. I had no idea at the time that it would find readers year after year on six of the seven continents. (Is there no one reading BTSW in Antarctica?) The post was “Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”
The last word of its title, “Hesed,” is a Hebrew term associated with two central tenets of salvation: Mercy and Righteousness. The story that post tells began within these stone walls and brought about a resurgence of interest in this Patron Saint of Justice. Over time, his Angelic Presence — his name means “who is like God” — has developed a seemingly mystical connection with this imprisonment.
This connection began with a simple gesture from a devout young man named Alberto Ramos. Sent to prison at age 14 for murder — a back-alley drug deal gone horribly wrong — Alberto was a psychology student of mine at age 18 in a prison program for college credit. Alberto also lived in the same prison unit as me and Pornchai Moontri. His painfully amazing story was told at Beyond These Stone Walls in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” We will link to that post again at the end of this one, and if you click on it you will see a wonderful photo of Alberto and Pornchai as they are graduating from high school.
A startling thing happened after I wrote it. The mother of the young man who died in that Manchester, NH alley that night read it. Then she agonized over it. Then she had a conversion of heart, something she says she would not have thought possible after years of entrenched bitter resentment toward Alberto. She forgave him, and wrote of her forgiveness in a moving comment on that post. She also decided to try to help him.
Mere words cannot capture the meaning of “Hesed” relative to the Scales of Saint Michael and the weighing of souls, but the mother of that murdered boy attained it as much as any human being can. A conversion of heart that sets aside bitterness to give way to mercy made her righteous in the eyes of the Lord.
Some of the images of Saint Michael with his scales depict Satan, even while subdued under his feet, reaching to tip the scales by stifling our ongoing conversion. The battleground of spiritual warfare is our very soul, and the battle is real. One day Alberto walked into my cell carrying a card with a painting on it. He silently climbed up onto a concrete counter and taped the image above my door. “You need this here,” he said, “and you should never take it down.” It was a startling image depicting this scene from the Apocalypse:
“War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, the ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to Earth and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, ‘Now have salvation and power come, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Anointed One, for the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who night and day accused them before God.’”
— Revelation 12:7-10
At the center of the painting was St. Michael the Archangel, sword in one hand and scales in the other, subduing Satan after a fierce battle. I asked Alberto why he thinks I need this. “Because you were falsely accused,” he said, “And you need his protection so you won’t be bitter and never trust anyone again.” Now, almost 14 years later, that image is still above the door of my cell.
Guardian of the Covenant
Sometime later, Alberto was moved to another prison in another state, but I have for years pondered what he said. I did not include his warning about bitterness when I first wrote in “Angelic Justice” of his placing that image above my door. I am not certain why I left it out. But I have come to see that false witness is a powerful tipping of the scales in the measure of souls, and so is succumbing to bitterness. We are far more spiritually vulnerable than most of us realize. It took a long time, but I was finally able to convince both Pornchai and Alberto of a tough lesson I was slow in learning myself. Bitterness is like a toxic brew that we mix for our enemies just to end up drinking it ourselves.
In Jewish tradition, Saint Michael is one of the four angels who stand in the Presence of God. The Book of Daniel (12:1) also identifies Michael as “One who stands beside the sons of your people,” an allusion that he is the guardian of God’s chosen people. His name is mentioned in the Shema, a prayer from Hebrew tradition:
“In the Name of the Lord God of Israel, on my right hand stands Michael, on my left, Gabriel, before me, Uriel, behind me, Raphael, and above me, the Divine Presence of Yahweh.”
Every mention of Michael in the Hebrew Scriptures identifies him as an advocate for Israel and therefore an advocate for the Covenant relationship with God. Advocate in that sense is used in the same manner that someone falsely accused of a crime might describe his defense attorney. And Satan is presented as prosecutor. It is fascinating that in the Book of Revelation, the scene of Satan’s expulsion from heaven by Michael and his angels ends with a declaration: “The accuser of our brethren is cast out.” The offense for which Satan accuses us is something he himself is denied: a hope for salvation. In ancient traditions, Michael defends the righteous in the presence of Yahweh in our final judgment.
Like much of what I write at Beyond These Stone Walls my post, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?”appeared on the professional social media site, Linkedln where it had hundreds of views. I rather like Linkedln even though I have never actually seen it. It’s a little tamer than some other social media platforms where the give and take can become overbearing. And on LinkedIn, you will never have to look at pictures of other people’s cats.
So I was a little surprised when even at the venerable LinkedIn, my rational and factual defense of Cardinal Pell ran into some pointed opposition. One writer who identified himself as “a practicing Catholic” wrote that Cardinal Pell is in prison where he belongs for “abusing children.” Several readers responded that the evidence does not support that claim. In my response, I wrote that his practice of Catholicism needs more practice. And as you know, Cardinal Pell was ultimately exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s highest court.
The abuse crisis in the priesthood is a two-edged sword in seemingly equal measure. It is a story of clerical corruption, but it is by same measure a story of false witness. Clerical corruption has had ample play in the news media, and social media has been no exception. False witness, however, is grossly under-reported.
Also under-reported are the wonderful expressions of Catholic faith by people of real fidelity undaunted by the arena in which scandal plays out on the front page. Father George David Byers sent me a link to a short video of the Eucharistic Congress Procession in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina. Wonderful!
The Origin of the Eighth Commandment
From the first signs of Satan’s pursuit of the hearts and souls of humankind, the Covenant conscripts us into Saint Michael’s battle against evil. The separation of light from darkness in the human relationship with God portrays Saint Michael as a warrior tasked with the protection and defense of human souls, and the preservation of the covenant.
Written contracts did not exist in the Hebrew society of our Old Testament. In their place, the spoken word had the authority of a signed contract. A blessing or curse was understood to follow the person to whom it was directed for all of his or her life. Spoken words were thus carefully considered. The parties of a covenant were bound by mutual agreement with serious repercussions for those who violated its terms. God’s covenant with Abraham was seen in Jewish culture as the foundation of our relationship with Yahweh. For that story, see “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek.”
However, the covenant with Israel itself, the covenant that made Israel a people of Yahweh, was the Sinai Covenant in the Book of Exodus (19:1-ff). It made them a people because it set down ethical standards for being a people. The Covenant was set down in the stone tablets of the law, and had the authority of God’s Presence housed in the Ark of the Covenant.
One of these sacred tenets, the Eighth Commandment — “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” — is thought by both Jewish and legal scholars to have an unusual origin: Genesis, Chapter 39. When Joseph was betrayed by his brothers and taken down to Egypt, he was purchased as a slave by Potiphar, a high ranking officer of Pharaoh. In the account in Genesis (39:6-21), Potiphar’s wife repeatedly pursued Joseph but he would not consent. In one episode, she tried to grab his garment, but he fled, tearing off a section of his garment in her hand. She later accused him of sexual assault using the garment as evidence against him.
For this, Joseph was unjustly imprisoned. Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish scholar and Emeritus Professor of Law at Harvard, addressed this in his book, Genesis of Justice (Warner Books, 2000):
“The Ninth Commandment [Eighth in the Christian texts] — “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” — derives directly from Potiphar’s wife bearing false witness against Joseph and Joseph then bearing false witness — even as a pretense — against his brothers. [His brother] Yehuda’s desperate question, ‘How can we clear ourselves?’ is answered by this prohibition and the subsequent procedural safeguards that rest upon this Commandment.”
— Genesis of Justice, p 250
The subsequent procedural safeguards were laid out in the Books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. The accusation of a single witness, without evidence or corroboration, could not result in a conviction. The testimony of a witness who had a financial stake in the outcome of a juridical trial could not be admitted as evidence against the accused. Today’s juridical proceedings have fallen far from these safeguards.
In both its active and passive forms, false witness was seen in the Covenant as a slayer of souls. Safeguards against it were implemented from the earliest days of Salvation History. In its active form, false witness was any testimony not based on absolute truth. In its passive form, it spreads through rumor, innuendo, and judgments based on bias and agendas instead of facts.
The Necessity of Allies in Spiritual Warfare
It is because of the great danger to the soul that false witness poses that Saint Michael the Archangel took up his cosmic role, as described in the passage from the Book of Revelation above, to cast out the false accuser who no longer has a place in heaven.
Hebrew Scripture and tradition was not unique in this concept. Egyptian mythology depicts a rite in the underworld in which the heart of the deceased was weighed on a set of scales against a “truth feather.” If the heart was heavy with falsehood and false witness, it could not pass on to paradise.
The grave effect of false witness on the person accused, on the souls of accusers, and on the Covenant with God is reflected throughout Sacred Scripture as evidenced in just this partial sampling of passages:
Exodus 20:16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Exodus 23 1-2 “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness. You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing to bear witness in a lawsuit.”
Exodus 23:6-7 “You shall not pervert justice. Keep far from a false charge. Do not kill the innocent or those in the right for I will not acquit the guilty.”
Deuteronomy 5:20 “Neither will you bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Deuteronomy 19:18 “If the witness is a false witness, having testified falsely against another, then [the judge] shall do to that witness what he intended to do to the other. So shall you purge the evil from your midst.”
Psalm 27:12 [This is one many priests could plea to their bishops] “Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen up against me.”
Proverbs 6:16-19 “There are six things that the Lord abhors: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, a hand that sheds innocent blood, a heart that plots wicked plans, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.”
Proverbs 19:20 “A false witness will not go unpunished.”
Proverbs 25:18 “Like a war club, a sword, or a sharp arrow is one who bears false witness against a neighbor.”
This list of excerpts from the Word of the Lord could go on for pages. We live in an age of falsehood, a time when the rule of law is collapsing under the weight of political correctness, identity politics, expediency, and moral relativism. These will spell the ruin of both souls and society.
This is why we have allies in spiritual warfare behind and beyond these stone walls, and we are more than willing to share them with you. They include Mary, Mother of God, whose heart was wounded by seven swords; Saint Maximilian Kolbe, wrongly imprisoned under an evil regime, who gave his life for another; Saint Padre Pio, falsely accused, suspended from priestly ministry, even while openly bearing the wounds of Christ.
And Saint Michael the Archangel who prevailed when “the accuser of our brothers was cast out who night and day accused them before God.” (Revelation 12:10) False witness, sans repentance, is a path to spiritual ruin for eternity.
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do you, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, cast into hell Satan, and all evil spirits who prowl about this world seeking the ruin of souls.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also like these related posts :
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POSTSCRIPT
As indicated in this post, my friend Alberto Ramos was sent to another prison about six years ago. While I was writing this post he was returned to the New Hampshire prison to prepare for his coming release after 30 years “inside.” At his earliest opportunity, he came to the prison law library where I am the clerk. His smile was visible in Heaven. As he took my hand in his firm grip he asked three rapid-fire questions: “How are you?, Where is Pornchai? Is Saint Michael still above your door?”
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case
A researcher unravels a trail of financial corruption behind the cases of Father Gordon MacRae in the Diocese of Manchester and Owen Labrie at St. Paul’s School.
A researcher unravels a trail of financial corruption behind the cases of Father Gordon MacRae in the Diocese of Manchester and Owen Labrie at St. Paul’s School.
September 6, 2023: An Op-Ed by Claire Best
For the last 29 years, Father Gordon MacRae has been denied justice, relegated to Concord Men’s Prison in New Hampshire. Despite an ex-FBI agent’s 3-year investigation, a Pulitzer prize-winning Wall Street Journalist’s multi-part exposé, even a current investigation into the police officer who framed him, nothing has thus far moved the needle — except perhaps in the court of public opinion.
Finally in 2023, the pieces of this puzzle have come together to explain why this might be: The New Hampshire Department for Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), some New Hampshire Police, local attorneys, the “compliance officer” for the Diocese of Manchester, and the Attorney General’s office have been involved in a racket. For Father Gordon MacRae to get justice, they would all risk being exposed in an organized crime to frame him in order to extort the insurance for the Diocese and trigger an expansion of business that spreads to the Catholic Medical Center, schools, nursing homes, day care centers, clinics, addiction recovery centers, banks, insurance companies and media. This is an enterprise worth billions that stretches far beyond the borders of New Hampshire across the US and internationally.
While Father Gordon MacRae has been incarcerated, New Hampshire has covered up horrific child sex abuse by its very own employees at the State’s Youth Detention Center. The NH DCYF has failed multiple audits by the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (DHHS OIG). It has downplayed Medicaid fraud. Opioids and fentanyl overdoses have skyrocketed. Children and young adults have died or disappeared, drugs have been trafficked, arms have been trafficked, money has been laundered, billions have been made and a monopoly without accountability has blossomed. That monopoly is tied to the interests of the US Government and its three letter agencies. Framing Father Gordon MacRae to get inside the Diocese of Manchester looks like it was a strategic plan that has had catastrophic consequences not just for MacRae but for anyone who has become a tool for, or victim of, the Government infiltration of Catholic organizations.
Father Gordon MacRae was prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned in 1994, the year the Clinton Crime Bill (authored by Joe Biden) was enacted. It is also the year that the Violence Against Women Act was passed enabling $9 billion in grants from the Department of Justice to police, prosecutors and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). Creating crimes that didn’t exist (while hiding those of state employees or friends of law enforcement and the courts) in order to access grants has undermined the integrity of the justice system in the State of New Hampshire and across the land.
“Justice for the Victim” has been a rallying cry in New Hampshire which has deliberately and consistently failed to ascertain the validity of claims of domestic and sexual assault, while pre-determining victims and predators without doing anything that could remotely be called due process.
Lots of people are denied justice each year and decades later a few of them go free after prosecutorial and police misconduct, or other flaws in the original investigations and trials, are exposed. Some years ago in Pennsylvania, a “Kids for Cash” scheme was unravelled. It involved police, prosecutors, judges and private attorneys. In California, a local journalist came across a series of gatherings in which judges, prosecutors, private attorneys and the media conspired to rig cases in civil, family and criminal courts. What has transpired in New Hampshire bears all the same markings as these. A few breadcrumbs here and there have provided clues to an epic scandal that has been carefully hidden from the public for decades — in large part due to a small “club” who are vested in the profits from it. That club comprises law enforcement, non-profits, local councils, attorneys general, elected representatives, justices, other members of the New Hampshire Bar and certain media outlets. They figured out that by controlling the news, they could control the narrative. And by controlling the narrative they could leverage the outcomes of criminal trials and civil lawsuits. Father Gordon MacRae is a victim of this corruption which even includes local “investigative” reporters who have no critical thinking skills but are determined to reinforce the court corruption in their coverage — presumably due to the sponsorship of their media outlets.
In 1995, a prosecutor in New Hampshire failed to let the defense know that a police officer who arrested a man on trial for murder had a dishonest track record. The state dropped the case. The defendant’s name was Carl Laurie, for whom the “Laurie List” is named. A 1963 US Supreme Court case, Brady v Maryland, requires the prosecution to provide any and all exculpatory evidence to the defense in a timely manner before any criminal trial. Somehow New Hampshire ignored this rule, and for decades judges and prosecutors have been OK with that. This is most likely because there isn’t really a division between police, prosecutors, judges and media in New Hampshire. So a lie that works for one finds its way up the ladder to work for all. Elected DAs who have challenged the ethics of this have been voted out of office (Robin Davis, DA of Merrimack County) or have been undermined by the Attorney General taking over their prosecutions (Michael Conley, DA of Hillsborough County). It is easier in New Hampshire to promote a lie than it is to defend the truth because there is a waterfall of money to be made in the lie — federal grants, civil settlements, contracts, promotions, rewards.
Detective James F. McLaughlin
In June 2018 the police detective who began investigating Father Gordon MacRae in the late 1980s was added to the Attorney General’s secret list of corrupt police officers — the “Laurie List” — also known as the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule for a charge of “Falsification of Records.” James F. McLaughlin, New Hampshire’s top child sex crimes detective, was brought out of retirement in 2017 to work on a Grand Jury Criminal Investigation of St Paul’s School following the framing of scholarship student, 18-year-old Owen Labrie, by Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin. Attorney General Gordon MacDonald brought McLaughlin into the investigation to supervise Detective Julie Curtin and Lieutenant Sean Ford. The report into the school and alleged cover-ups of sex abuse from 2009 to 2017 was completed in August 2018 and a settlement agreement was reached between the Attorney General and the school administration in September 2018. The agreement required a “compliance officer” and a contract with victims advocacy organization the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (NHCADSV).
The agreement mirrored one that had been entered into in 2002 after James F. McLaughlin’s investigation into Father Gordon MacRae triggered the circumstances for a Grand Jury criminal investigation, a “compliance officer” and settlement with the Diocese of Manchester. The NHCADSV had brought on board Brian Harlow of SNAP (the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) in 2012. Though Harlow had no connection to the MacRae case, he had been one of the original “victims” to come forward for the Diocese of Manchester investigation in 2002. NHCADSV wanted him to help them expand their business and they had a contract with the Department of Defense as well as with the University of New Hampshire which had a strategic agreement with the (Obama) White House 2014 “Not Alone” task force to combat sexual assault on campuses. The Chair of the University System in New Hampshire is Alex Walker. He just so happens to also now be the CEO of Catholic Medical Center in the Diocese of Manchester. As published in a Catholic Medical Center statement:
“Alex has been actively involved in the community for many years. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the University System of New Hampshire and on the New Hampshire Business Committee for the Arts. In 2019 and 2020 he co-chaired the Bishop’s Charitable Assistance Fund with his wife, Lisa. He was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Palace Theatre, and past Chairman of the Board of Directors of Granite United Way. He has also served on the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Board of Governors, the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission, the Board of Directors of City Year New Hampshire, the Board of Directors for the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire, and the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors where he served as Chairman of the Board in 2011.”
Alex Walker provided counsel to the Diocese alongside the Nixon Peabody law firm which was formed in 1999 in Boston and Manchester. Gordon MacDonald, an attorney at Nixon Peabody became Attorney General and is the current New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice. Before he took office as AG, he successfully managed to block an audit of his client Purdue Pharma. New Hampshire’s opioid crisis has been one of the worst in the country. Catholic Medical Center was fined $3.8 million recently for a kick back scheme. The Boston Globe has exposed cover-ups of medical malpractice by CMC’s administrators headed by Alex Walker. Curiously however, the Boston Globe Spotlight team which covered the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal in 2002-2003 is only interested in exposing a portion of the story that benefits ambulance chasing civil attorneys. The Globe is guilty of removing comments under articles which smacks of the newspaper’s own compromised position preventing its journalists from seeking the real truth as opposed to the monied subjective “his/her/their truth”.
With the addition of Detective James F. McLaughlin on the police misconduct “Laurie List,” AG Gordon MacDonald was suddenly compromised. He had hired McLaughlin because of his history with the Diocese and now he had to hide the fact that he knew McLaughlin was dishonest in the middle of the investigation into St Paul’s School which he had ordered. Instead of coming clean, Gordon MacDonald kept McLaughlin’s dishonesty secret because he was part of the club that had profiteered from McLaughlin’s misconduct. His success as an attorney is deeply tied to his representation of the Diocese of Manchester.
The “compliance officer” in the Diocese was Father Edward Arsenault who became a Monsignor before being defrocked by the Pope after he pled guilty to defrauding the diocese, a dead priest’s estate, and Catholic Medical Center in 2014. Among the expenses Edward Arsenault had clocked up using church funds were the purchase of cell phones, computer equipment, trips to Boston, meals out and work with journalists as well as travel expenditures for himself and his young adult lover.
Recent articles in the last few weeks have revealed that the FBI had planned to infiltrate and undermine the Catholic Church. Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, has tried to toss this off. But the case of Father Gordon MacRae and those of police officer, James F. McLaughlin and Monsignor Edward Arsenault should force a wider inquiry into the Government’s involvement in Catholic institutions going back to the 1980s when Sylvia Gale made up a false rumor about MacRae and shared it with McLaughlin launching his investigation of MacRae.
I have long suspected that Edward Arsenault was never really a priest but actually an FBI operative who got inside the Diocese of Manchester to increase the business of The National Catholic Risk Retention Group and Catholic Charities in such a way that they would become intertwined with Maximus Inc — a for-profit enterprise acting on behalf of the Government. His background is in accounting and finance and he also seems to be heavily involved in big pharma-adjacent enterprises: health/mental health non-profits.
Around the same time (1975) that the US Senate “Church Committee” Inquiry revealed the CIA’s work with 186 educational institutions and non-profits for MK Ultra experiments, Maximus Inc was founded by David Mastran, a Vietnam vet involved with DARPA. Since then Maximus has grown to become the most enormous outsource company for the Governments of the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Its tentacles have reached into pretty much any Government program you can think of from the IRS to Medicaid, from student loans to Title IV funds, from Department of Defense contracts to Covid vaccination tracking. For all intents and purposes, Maximus has taken over where the CIA and FBI left off when their clandestine and abhorrent human experiments were exposed by the US Senate Church Committee. It would be hard to imagine that the CIA just stopped its experiments in its tracks with so many organizations involved.
In the 1980s in Keene New Hampshire, Sylvia Gale, an employee with State Child Protective Services and DCYF, created a false rumor about Father Gordon MacRae. In an official DCYF letter in 1988, she told Keene Police Detective James F. McLaughlin that MacRae had been involved in a serious crime: the sexual abuse and murder of a child in Florida. Sylvia Gale cited that the source of the fake Florida murder molestation that became McLaughlin’s “probable cause” was Msgr. John Quinn who was at the time Director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Manchester.
The crime did not exist and Father Gordon MacRae had never even been in Florida. McLaughlin was known in 1985 for dishonesty but for some reason it took until June 2018 for his name to appear on a State list kept in secret by the Attorney General. In December 2021 Detective McLaughlin’s name appeared publicly on the “Laurie List” of corrupt police for just a few hours before it was removed by Attorney General Gordon MacDonald. Whether Sylvia Gale knew of McLaughlin’s dishonesty when she spread her rumor will forever be an unanswered question but since there were rewards being bandied about by McLaughlin, I believe she probably did know and that money was involved as a reward to her as a “witness” for creating the rumor. Sylvia Gale was a DCYF supervisor of Patricia Grover, the mother of Father MacRae’s accuser at his 1994 trial.
In the time frame from 1985-2018, James F. McLaughlin rose to be New Hampshire’s most celebrated child and internet sex crimes investigator who instructed others in his tactics which included making false statements, procuring and coercion of “victims,” deleting exculpatory evidence, working with media to “shape the message,” federal entrapment (sending unsolicited images of minors), working with civil attorneys and non-profits/victims rights advocates in kick-back schemes. He was given a lifetime achievement award in 2016. At the same ceremony, Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin, was given an award for her work in investigating St. Paul’s school, singling out and framing 18-year-old Owen Labrie. She worked with domestic and international agencies to censor social media for the “victim” who had been recruited in June 2014 for the latest sick experiment. She was carrying the McLaughlin torch forward while he was supposed to retire.
James F. McLaughlin’s crooked enterprise yielded millions in grants, increases in police budgets, non-profit budgets and grants for DCYF, the University of New Hampshire and other affiliated agencies. Why did it matter if a few people had to be framed when so much money could be extorted and former federal prosecutors working at Nixon Peabody are on their side? The law firm’s business grew, turning it into a giant in representation for the health care industry. Particularly that tied to Catholic healthcare institutions — where Monsignor Edward Arsenault was tasked with increasing profits — and the opioid industry. Nixon Peabody represented Purdue Pharma when it was sued by the State of New Hampshire. Creating sex offenders, extorting Catholic establishments, creating drug addicts and claiming Medicaid for medical treatments and facilities has been a sustainable business in New Hampshire for over two decades.
James F. McLaughlin’s enterprise is reminiscent of that of Tom Coleman, aka “T.J. Dawson,” a police officer in Tulia, Arizona who built a business, with accolades all along the way, framing members of the black community for drug offenses they did not commit. Drugs would be planted on unsuspecting targets. Instead of drugs, for Keene Detective James F. McLaughlin, it was sex crimes that were planted. He would fabricate whatever story he could pull off to get plea deals and convictions. In New Hampshire it was easy because the statutes for sex crimes require no corroborating witnesses or evidence. Add qualified immunity for police officers to that, and sovereign immunity for prosecutors, judges and non-profits tied to the courts such as CASA, NHCADSV and agencies like DCYF. They had the perfect racket: collect the federal grants, fabricate the crimes, hide the exculpatory evidence, train the witnesses, use media to garner public outrage to leverage civil settlements with attorneys at the ready to profiteer, and non-profits to train victims and write impact statements. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The National Catholic Risk Retention Group
Attorney General Gordon MacDonald went on to become New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Chief Justice without ever having served as a judge in any capacity. He has a lot to thank James McLaughlin for. MacDonald joined the Nixon Peabody law firm to represent the Diocese of Manchester in the early 2000s. Together with his partner David Vicinanzo, a former federal prosecutor for Massachusetts who had spent time working in the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, they settled dozens, if not hundreds, of claims against the Diocese of Manchester. Monsignor Edward Arsenault was the appointed compliance officer — nominally. Actually he was in charge of all financial affairs of the Diocese and increasing its reach. He had a business to run; a business to grow. In Monsignor Arsenault’s once-published resume, since removed from view, he boasted of having personally negotiated multi-million dollars settlements in 250 sexual abuse claims against the Diocese of Manchester with a select few personal injury lawyers.
Meanwhile, James F. McLaughlin’s father had been a member of the Concord City Council for 25 years. The Council approves the budget for police investigations including the payments of witnesses for Grand Juries. Although Concord only has 43,000 residents, it is the capital of New Hampshire and is home to the 2nd largest legislative body in the United States after the US Congress in Washington, DC, and the 4th largest in the world. There are 400 elected representatives in New Hampshire. It is an important first stop for any presidential candidate making it a magnet for dark money and a perfect place for three letter agencies involved in clandestine operations to experiment.
The Concord Police Department is not accredited. The current police chief, Bradley Osgood, stated that his department did not have the time or resources to get accredited. The cost is under $20,000. Bradley Osgood was trained in Virginia by the FBI. His predecessor, Timothy O’Malley, left the job to join Vanguard Securities in the fraud department. Dartmouth College and other institutions have accounts with Vanguard Securities. These institutions also have accounts tied to the “Pandora Papers” as does Maximus.
In 1996 Maximus went public. It was the same year that Father Gordon MacRae was denied his first appeals. Bill Clinton was President. He and Hillary were friends with Jeanne and Bill Shaheen. Attorney General Philip McLaughlin, who ordered the investigation into the Diocese in 2002, had been appointed by Governor Jeanne Shaheen who achieved her position with the help of the Clintons. John Sununu, the father of current Governor Chris Sununu, was close to George Bush senior and worked in his administration as White House Chief of Staff. The State of New Hampshire renamed its “Youth Development Center” the “Sununu Youth Development Center” after Governor John Sununu. It is now exposed that youths in the detention center were subjected to sexual, physical, and mental abuse, a scandal that exploded in secret in the early 2000s while the State was investigating the Catholic Church. There are currently over 1,330 pending lawsuits alleging sexual and physical abuse by State employees. The State has hidden millions of documents pertaining to this abuse. Curiously, unlike in the cases of the Diocese of Manchester and St. Paul’s School, no grand jury has been convened to investigate the State and create a report. Maximus and DCYF are front and center in this, but local news organizations have not scrutinized this relationship or that of Catholic Charities and New Hampshire’s police.
In 1999, Nixon Peabody formed in Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, bringing together a law firm comprising 450 lawyers across New England. The Diocese of Manchester was their client and Maximus was a generous donor to Catholic Charities while starting to get contracts with Catholic institutions. But Maximus was a for-profit wing of the federal government that was effectively now wheedling its way into the vast array of businesses that fall under Catholic Charities. Disgraced Monsignor Edward Arsenault was Chairman of the Board of the Catholic insurance wing for these, The National Catholic Risk Retention Group. David Vicinanzo had been a federal prosecutor who joined Nixon Peabody. Vicinanzo and Nixon Peabody were thus connected to the FBI and so, by association at least, was Edward Arsenault and the Diocese of Manchester, Catholic Charities and their insurance.
The Diocese today refers children to the Children’s Trust Fund for claims of child sex abuse. Children’s Trust Fund shares the same address (10 Ferry Street) as Maximus and Virtus LLC founded in 1999 by Edward Arsenault. Virtus is owned by The National Catholic Risk Retention Group. Also located at 10 Ferry Street is Policy Studies Inc which Kathleen Kerr (on the board of Maximus) joined after she received a letter from US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) regarding failures of NH DCYF in 1999. She was legal counsel for DCYF and was there 12 years before she segued into Policy Studies Inc and Maximus which bought it after it was taken over by Veritas. She would have been working with DCYF when the MacRae case took place involving staff members of the DCYF and their families.
Coincidentally, Sylvia Gale, who created the first untrue rumor about Father Gordon MacRae back in 1988, successfully appealed a complaint against her for conflicts of interests that arose between her work for the Nashua DCYF and other non-profits. Sylvia Gale died in 2020 and left behind a legacy for her work in children’s advocacy, but judging by reports on New Hampshire’s Youth Detention Center scandal, the State’s Foster Care System, failures of the DCYF, and the drugging of children in State care, I am not sure it is a legacy to be proud of. It was Sylvia Gale’s colleague, Patricia Grover whose son Thomas Grover became a drug addict before he was convinced by James F. McLaughlin that he could make substantial money by being a witness/victim of Father Gordon MacRae. The Diocese of Manchester coughed up $200,000. Years later, Grover admitted to family members that he was bribed and that the case was a fraud. A therapist sat at the back of the courtroom motioning for him to cry during his testimony against the priest, a story exposed in “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”
The Diocese of Manchester and St. Paul’s School
The Catholic links of Maximus go all the way to the Vatican. Disgraced Monsignor Edward Arsenault appears to have been a conduit between the Diocese, the FBI and the Vatican. When Arsenault went to jail for multiple felony counts of embezzlement in 2014, Assistant Attorney General Jane Young (now the US Attorney for New Hampshire) shook his hand. She even allowed him to continue consulting from behind bars. He was sentenced to prison for four to twenty years, but released on home confinement. Ultimately he had the remainder of his sentence vacated and his restitution of nearly $300,000 was paid in full by unknown third parties during his confinement. Then he appeared with a new name: Edward Bolognini. This time, he claimed he was married — to Francesco Bolognini-Arsenault. They own a Sicilian ceramics import shop together, a luxury condo and Edward Bolognini works for ReServe a non-profit with a $10 million contract from the City of New York despite his financial crimes. Edward Bolognini’s current boss does not seem remotely bothered that he had been convicted of defrauding another non-profit before joining ReServe. Is he just FBI infiltrating/controlling another business related to the Government? Does his sales pitch include promises to increase profits and provide access to Catholic Charities databases in return for immunity for his own crimes?
In September 2018, Laura L. Dunn, an advisor to the White House “Not Alone” Task Force which was partnered with the University of New Hampshire and the NHCADSV, tweeted a congratulations on the settlement agreement reached by Attorney General Gordon MacDonald (David Vicinanzo’s ex-partner from Nixon Peabody) with St Paul’s School following a grand jury criminal investigation. She had actually been introduced to the trial of NH v Owen Labrie by James F. McLaughlin’s protegé, Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin sometime between June 2014 and March 2015, five months before the high profile high school sexual assault trial. Laura Dunn had lied about her own case on NHPR in 2010 but the White House, (then) Vice President Joe Biden, the DOJ and DOE do not mind. She was a useful tool. She helped plant the Rolling Stone UVA “A Rape on Campus” fake story by Sabrina Rubin Erdeley who previously wrote a story about a Catholic priest’s sexual abuse — which also turned out to be untrue. Ironically, Father Gordon MacRae exposed that story from prison in an article entitled, “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”
The Attorney General’s settlement agreement with St. Paul’s School was identical to the one arranged for the Diocese of Manchester in 2002. In the case of St. Paul’s School, however, Nixon Peabody Attorney David Vicinanzo commended the Judge for keeping the St. Paul’s School Grand Jury Report private. Vicinanzo’s client, the NHCADSV, got a contract out of it and Attorney General Gordon MacDonald, Vicinanzo’s former partner at Nixon Peabody, got to install a “compliance officer” (an ex-police officer) at the school’s expense. News about this arrangement was lauded by the NHCADSV and others. Allowing the Government to get inside a private Episcopal School was praiseworthy and novel. It would set the example for other private schools around the nation. The compliance officer implemented a behavior reporting software called maxient.com which has been criticized by many as being something the Stasi would have approved of. AG Gordon MacDonald knew that James F. McLaughlin was on the dishonest police officer list when he was carrying out the grand jury criminal investigation into the school but he never revealed that knowledge to the public. Instead he released the settlement agreement just hours after Owen Labrie’s first NH Supreme Court appeal was argued and then later denied. In September 2019, the same month Judge Richard McNamara ruled that the St. Paul’s School Grand Jury Report should remain private, the NHCADSV published a report which asserted that Gordon MacDonald wanted to increase the number of prosecutions for sexual assault.
Before becoming Attorney General, Gordon MacDonald also knew about a thriving false accusations industry for lawyers in New Hampshire because, according to Father Gordon MacRae and a 2005 article in The Wall Street Journal, MacDonald asked the priest to admit to the sexual assault of males he had never met nor even heard of just so Nixon Peabody could reach a quick settlement.
In November 2019, I ran into S. Daniel Carter who had been a partner with Laura L. Dunn in her non-profit SurvJustice tied to the White House “Not Alone” Task Force. He admitted to me that the real interest in NH v Owen Labrie was in St. Paul’s School as opposed to the framed scholarship student himself. The real interest was in the Diocese of Manchester, not Father Gordon MacRae. Both cases were about power, money, control and politics. This explains why Father MacRae was originally offered a lenient plea deal to serve one to three years. Because he would not go along with the lie, he was sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to up to 67 years.
On reflection, with recent news regarding the FBI’s memo about its plans within the Catholic Church, I believe that the real goal behind NH v Gordon MacRae and NH v Owen Labrie was a Government goal to get inside Catholic and Episcopal institutions to undermine their religious principles and force them to be subjected to corrupt and greedy Government operatives hiding behind NGOs or Maximus, for-profit enterprises. In contrast, police did not bother going after State employees at the Youth Detention Center leaving it covered up even as they went after the Catholic Church. They also did not bother going after sex abusers in local public schools. There was no money in those and they were already under Government control whereas the private institutions were not. But Government-tied extortionists wanted a piece of those pies.
The FBI in Bedford, New Hampshire and Boston, Massachusetts seem none too bothered by the extortion rackets of these institutions. Why would they be? Their members might even be complicit in them. Robert Mueller was head of the FBI in 2014 when St. Paul’s School was targeted and Owen Labrie framed. He had expanded the definition of rape in 2011. He also happened to be an alum of St Paul’s School in the same class as Senator John Kerry.
Neither the Diocese of Manchester nor St. Paul’s School seem to have benefitted from the fake “independent” compliance officers who are actually spies. Donald Sullivan, the current compliance officer at St. Paul’s School, wrote in a recent report that the information from maxient.com on student conduct is now entering the “analysis phase.” The information is shared with RAINN which has a contract with the Department of Defense as does the NHCADSV. It is also shared with the Attorney General’s office. Data on kids in private religious schools — not exactly what anybody might be interested in except the FBI, the DOD and the DOJ.
Are the Government’s MK Ultra programs still alive and thriving behind Maximus, Virtus, maxient.com and “compliance officer” police state spies? Thomas Grover was offered financial rewards to accuse Father Gordon MacRae. He was a drug addict and he was the son of a DCYF social worker supervisor. Chessy Prout was offered financial rewards to accuse Owen Labrie. She had taken “health” leave for downing nail polish remover in an attempt at self-harm. Like Thomas Grover, she was coached in the courtroom. Useful and malleable tools to frame disposable assets to get at the money and control of Catholic and Episcopal institutions.
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Claire Best is the founder and CEO of Claire Best & Associates — an international film and television agency based in Los Angeles. Her clients include Oscar and Emmy Award winners. Her background is in documentaries.
Suspicious of the over-sensationalism surrounding the high-profile criminal sexual assault trial of St. Paul’s School (Concord, New Hampshire) scholarship student Owen Labrie in August 2015 she started to investigate. In the fall of 2019 she came across Beyond These Stone Walls and Father Gordon’s post comparing the settlement agreement and players involved in the St. Paul’s School and Diocese of Manchester cases. This led her to follow the money to find out what was really going on and why there was such a desire to quash inquiry. Although New Hampshire is the 5th smallest state in the US, it is “First In the Nation” for primary presidential elections. It has a global significance in the financial affairs of Catholic Charities, Maximus and three letter agencies.
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SOURCES
DCYF:
Joe Biden and the Crime Bill
Violence Against Women Act
VAWA $9 billion in grants
Kids for Cash Scandal
California Bench, Bar, Media Scandal
Article mentioning the “club” in New Hampshire’s Bar/judiciary from 1999
Controlling the Narrative: “Pretrial Publicity Friend or Foe: Advice from the Experts Amanda Grady Sexton (NHCADSV, City of Concord Council member) and Steve Kelly Esq (lead attorney in multiple Does v St. Paul’s School suits, and Rappuano and Does v Dartmouth which yielded $14 million of which the NHCADSV was a financial beneficiary to the tune of $2.865 million)
Laurie List
Father Gordon MacRae
Brady v Maryland / Brady Rule
Robin Davis
Michael Conley
James McLaughlin caught in lies
Diocese of Manchester and St. Paul’s School Agreement mirror each other
White House strategic partnership with UNH for “Not Alone” task force
Alex Walker tapped as Chair of New Hampshire University System
Gordon MacDonald defended Purdue Pharma
Catholic Medical Center Kick-back scheme $3.8 million fine
Boston Globe exposes Catholic Medical Center cover-ups for medical malpractice
FBI targeted Catholic Church and Christopher Wray lied about it
Maximus, Inc
Edward Arsenault — defrocked former priest
Senate Church Committee
MKUltra
James F. McLaughlin
Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin receives award
Tulia Drug Bust Revisited
Diocese of Manchester pays for dozens of claims
Dark Money in NH Politics
AG Phil McLaughlin, mentor to Jeanne Shaheen
YDC Abuse Lawsuits survive State’s attempt to dismiss
Attorney who represented church abuse victims (Chuck Douglas) defends State’s YDC settlement plan
10 Ferry Street
Pandora Papers
US DHHS OIG complaint sent in 1999 to Kathleen Kerr at NH DCYF
Maximus links to the Catholic Church
Laura L. Dunn
NH v Owen Labrie
maxient.com Stasi like
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/20/as-colleges-become-more-stasi-like-students-live-i/
Virtus LLC
David Vicinanzo: WASHINGTON (June 5) — Attorney General Janet Reno announced Friday career federal prosecutor David Vicinanzo of New Hampshire will head the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force.
“Who is David Vicinanzo?”
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
The United Nations High Commissioner of Hypocrisy
In 2014, a U.N. Commission accused the Vatican under Benedict XVI of a past sex abuse cover-up. Then the U.N. was exposed for a present sex abuse cover-up.
In 2014 a United Nations Commission accused the Vatican under Benedict XVI of a past sex abuse cover-up. Then the U.N. was exposed for a present sex abuse cover-up.
July 12, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
I sometimes come across an older post I have written about events in the news, and am struck by how much what I wrote ends up coming true. I just re-read a post I wrote on July 7, 2010. I read it anew with far more invested in the topic today than when I originally wrote it. That post is “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”
It raised an important point about an issue that has simmered in the background of this blog since its inception in 2009. That issue is the Catholic clergy sex abuse story, and how much the story has itself been abused in the news media to further certain agendas. On Easter Sunday 2010, for example, The Boston Globe hyped this story about a popular Massachusetts senior priest, Father Dominic Menna, who under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ “Dallas Charter,” was removed from ministry due to a claim of sexual abuse.
In reporting the story, the Globe neglected to mention that the uncorroborated single claim that destroyed this priest’s life was alleged to have occurred over a half century ago in 1971. And it was no accident that the story was reserved for the Globe’s Easter Sunday edition.
What the Globe omitted from the Easter Sunday 2010 story was the fact that the adult bringing that claim — a man in his late fifties — stood to gain a substantial financial settlement just for making the claim while proving nothing.
The contingency lawyers and their enablers in the media are counting on you to have no frame of reference to put any of the claims of priestly abuse into context. I do have a frame of reference, and I can tell you that the distortion created by lawyers and the news media is deeply unjust — not only to Catholics and their priests, but to millions of adult victims of abuse whose suffering has been trivialized and cheapened by the distortion that only victims of Catholic priests are worth hearing and compensating.
Since I wrote the above post, The Boston Globe was sold by its parent company, The New York Times, for less than ten cents on the dollar, compared to what the Times paid to purchase it. Some like to think that in the end the Globe pretty much reaped what it had sown at the expense of truth and justice.
The eventual result of the symphony created by contingency lawyers and biased news media was an arena in which the Church would become dislodged as a global source of moral truth. I wrote of some of the fallout for other innocent victims in my post, “Benedict Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.”
The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church
In 2014, an explosive 16-page report issued by the United Nations High Commissioner on the Rights of the Child indicted and convicted the Catholic Church without investigation, without evidence, without a formal defense, and without any trial of the facts. I know the feeling!
This public shaming of the Holy See came as a result of the emergence into public view of hundreds of claims of sexual abuse by priests dating back thirty, forty, fifty years or more. These were claims often brought forward by contingency lawyers who — once the mass settlement process had been established as status quo — flooded Church institutions with demands for “out-of-court” settlements with no effort at corroboration. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said N.H. contingency lawyer, Peter Hutchins when handed a $5.2 million check from the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire.
The various bishops and dioceses caved in to these demands, and then a hapless U.N. committee took that to be proof enough that the claims were all true. In a courageous article in First Things, “Rolling Stone, Alan Dershowitz, and Catholic Priests” (May 21, 2015) Father Thomas Guarino described the cost of this abandonment of rights for the priests accused when bishops got the monkey off their backs by throwing money at it:
“This Episcopal peace comes at a heavy price…. The problem is that, in many cases, no contrary evidence can come forward because an accusation is decades old. What convincing evidence could possibly be adduced to clear a man’s name? Even if a charge could be true, is lifetime suspension a proportionate penalty for a mere possibility? Should bishops be held hostage by forces dividing them from their own priests?”
— Fr Thomas Guarino, First Things
The United Nations had no such interest in basic civil rights like the presumption of innocence. Claudia Rosett, who led the Investigative Reporting Project for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, also reacted to the U.N. Commission report on the Vatican with a similarly titled column in The Wall Street Journal (“The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church,” WSJ, February 10, 2014). Ms. Rosett described the report:
“A Report on the Holy See — released by a U.N. Committee last week to much media fanfare — alleged that tens of thousands of children have been abused by Catholic clerics and that the Vatican has helped cover it up.”
Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, described that U.N. report as “one of the most ambitious power grab efforts ever undertaken by a U.N. committee.” The report was, of course, a lie, simply repeating a media mantra. But in the process of describing this in The Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett exposed another big lie, one belonging to the United Nations itself.
Now Hiring: A U.N. High Commissioner of Hypocrisy
Between 2007 and 2013, United Nations peacekeeper forces have been repeatedly implicated in the sexual abuse of children they were tasked to protect, and the U.N. has now been implicated in a cover-up of that fact. But the most disturbing part of this story is the extent to which it has been ignored — another form of cover-up — by the American news media. In fact, Ms. Rosett’s above column in the WSJ was likely the first hint of the scandal at the U.N. that appeared in mainstream U.S. news.
Since then, other media outlets have taken this up, but few of them in the United States. Sandra Laville, in The Guardian (U.K.) covered a report leaked to her newspaper alleging that the U.N.’s own investigation revealed “the rape and sodomy of starving and homeless boys” by French U.N. peacekeeper forces operating in the Central African Republic.
As sickening as that charge is, it gets much worse. French president Francois Hollande promised that France would prosecute those soldiers. The story came to light only because of a whistleblower. According to Matheiu Delahouse in the French paper, Le Nouvel Observateur, the U.N. marked its report on this matter “secret” and filed it away.
This is a story worth telling. The French government was not even informed of the claims against its soldiers until a man named Anders Kompass, a Swedish citizen working for the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees, “broke protocol and gave a copy of the report to the French government,” according to The Week:
“Naturally, the French investigators asked if they could speak to the U.N. investigator who wrote the report, but the U.N…refused to allow that. Meanwhile, Kompass, the whistleblower, has been punished and may lose his job. Saying he leaked a confidential document, the self-interested bureaucrats at the U.N. have suspended this 30-year veteran of humanitarian work for intervening on behalf of children.”
— The Week, “United Nations: Riding sexual abuse by peacekeepers,” May 15, 2015
Rosa Freedman, writing at TheConversation.com from Australia, charged that the U.N. has “a long and sordid history of covering up sexual abuse by peacekeepers.” Simon Allison, writing from South Africa for The Daily Maverick observed about the U.N., “Who can trust an institution that covers up the sexual abuse of minors?”
The very fact that such a question is now asked of the United Nations itself after it dragged the Catholic Church through a round of public mudslinging is symptomatic of an institution in crisis. The situation is more hypocritical than it appears.
I have also written of the hubris and hypocrisy of the U.N.’s finger pointing on this issue. I have described evidence that even while the U.N. was pointing fingers at the Vatican for decades-old and unproven claims of abuse, the U.N. was itself being sued. In 2014, the United Nations employed any and every legal means to fight off a lawsuit from the beleaguered people of Haiti after its unscreened peacekeeper forces caused the deaths of innumerable children by bringing a cholera outbreak to their earthquake stricken country. One of its defenses was to blame the people of Haiti for the cholera, a plague that killed hundreds of Haitian children.
The saddest part of this story is that the Holy See sent emissaries to the U.N. Commission on the Rights of the Child to assure the U.N. that many hundreds of priests have been cast out after being accused in these decades-old claims of abuse. In “The U.N. Assault on the Catholic Church,” (WSJ, February 10, 2014), Claudia Rosett proposed a more fitting response from the Church to the U.N.:
“Pope Francis might want to consider that it is precisely to avoid gross intrusion by U.N. ‘experts’ that the United States signed, but never ratified, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty has less to do with children than with political power plays, and a fitting reform of the Vatican would be to walk away from it.”
Would that such advice was followed before hundreds of accused priests were thrown under the bus and out of the priesthood. Would that such advice was followed before the extent of United Nations hypocrisy was bared for all to see. Is reform of the U.N. on the horizon? The evidence does not indicate that it is. The United Nations now needs a High Commissioner of Hypocrisy.
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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: You would serve the cause of justice and truth by sharing this post. You may also like these related posts:
Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam
Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition
Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic
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.”
For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars
An MIT astrophysicist trying to reconcile science with a quest for spiritual truth wrote upon the death of his parents, “I wish I believed.” I believe he just might.
First deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl
An MIT astrophysicist trying to reconcile science with a quest for spiritual truth wrote upon the death of his parents, “I wish I believed.” I believe he just might.
July 5, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: The image atop this post is the first of many images transmitted by the James Webb Space Telescope parked one million miles from Earth in 2022 to survey the Cosmos. I first wrote this post in 2018 for an older version of this blog. It needed to be restored for our readers, but I ended up completely rewriting it. My goal was to highlight a bridge between science and faith, but some say it also highlights a bridge between life and death.
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When Beyond These Stone Walls was just a few months old back in 2009, I wrote a post about the death of my mother. It told a story about an event that occurred on her birthday a year after she died. At first glance it seemed an ordinary event, the sort of thing usually chalked up to coincidence. But its meaning and timing and how it unfolded made it an extraordinary grace beyond comprehension. It required that I set aside the mathematical odds against such a thing and see it foremost in the light of faith.
It remains to this day a pivotal moment, a wondrous event that shook my faith out of the closet of doubt where I tend to store it when times get rough — which is often. The story told in that post may shake you, too, if it hasn’t already. By that, I do not mean that it will challenge your faith. It’s just the opposite. My story lifted for me a corner of the veil between doubt and belief. So the title I gave it was “A Corner of the Veil.”
My friend, Pornchai Moontri was with me that night when the event occurred while I offered Mass in our prison cell. I asked Pornchai if he remembers it. “How could I forget it?” he said. He described it as an “ordinary miracle,” the kind he says he has seen a lot of since his eyes were opened.
I could repeat the whole story here, but it will take too long and I have written it once already. It is but a mere click away. I will link to it again after this post. You can decide for yourself whether the story it tells is mere coincidence or something more. My analytic brain tends toward coincidence, but sometimes that just doesn’t add up. This was one of those times.
I then came upon a strange little book of fiction by Laurence Cossé first published in French as Le Coin du Voile, and in English, A Corner of the Veil (Scribner 1999). It strangely fell at my feet from a library shelf after my post with the same title.
Laurence Cossé was a journalist for Radio France when she wrote this book described by Notre Dame theologian Ralph McInerney as “a theological thriller that makes a mystery out of the absence of mystery.” It is a spellbinding account of what happens to the people and institutions of Church and State when a manuscript surfaces that irrefutably proves the existence of God.
Science, religion, and politics all transform as their experts ponder its meaning and their own continued relevancy. The reader is left to wonder whether the discovery will spark a new era of harmony or launch the final battle of the apocalypse.
“Six pages further, Father Bertrand was trembling. The proof was neither arithmetical nor physical nor esthetical nor astronomical, it was irrefutable. Proof of God’s existence had been achieved. Bertrand was tempted, for a second, to toss the bundle into the wastebasket.” (p 15)
As it does for people who awaken to faith on a personal level, the discovery immediately altered the way its readers face both life and death. The transformation was astonishing. Death came to be seen, not as an entity unto itself, but as it really is a chapter in the continuity of life, of me, of the person I call "myself," integrated into the Great Tapestry of God.
I happen to know a lot of people whose experience of living is suddenly overshadowed by the prospect of dying. They have come to know that death is drawing nearer day by day. Some of them struggle. What does death mean, and why do we wage such war against it? The age of individualism and relativism distorts death into a fearsome enemy. As Dylan Thomas wrote,
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”
Carina Nebula image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl
If That’s All There Is, Then Let’s Keep Dancing!
While writing this post, I received a letter from a reader in Ohio who asked me to write a note of encouragement to a friend whose death is drawing near. After a lifetime of faith, he wrote, the friend is having grave doubts and fears about the end of life and the finality of death. He is asking the age-old question put to song: “Is that all there is?”
But that is our problem. We speak in terms of “finality” as though when faced with death, all that we once believed with hope takes on the trappings of a mere children’s fantasy. I know too many people who are dying, and many of us treat it as the silent elephant in the room because we know that sooner or later we will join them just as our parents did before us. It is part of the flow of life, but we ward it off as a terror in the night. In the face of death, science alone comes up empty.
When you think of it, death is best seen as an act of love. Imagine the inherent selfishness of a humanity without death. Those we love the most in this world — those who fulfill our very purpose for being in this world — would be left out of existence if this life were ours alone to keep. But facing death with no life of faith casts both life and death into a formless, meaningless void.
I recently came across a review of a book by noted MIT physicist and astronomer Alan Lightman entitled Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (Pantheon 2018). It was reviewed by UMass physics professor Alan Hirshfeld in “A Longing for Truth and Meaning” in The Wall Street Journal April 7-8, 2018).
In some previous science posts here at Beyond These Stone Walls, I have cited both writers for other books and articles they have written. Mr. Lightman’s book, and Mr. Hirshfeld’s review of it, both raise provocative questions about “the core mysteries of human life” and the way science explores the Universe:
“Why are we here? What, if anything, is the meaning of existence? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Whence consciousness?”
I am very happy to see science ponder these questions, but they can never be answered by science alone. It comes up short when the task moves beyond the mere physics and chemistry of life to its meaning and purpose. Consider this explanation of the self, of who and what you are as a conscious being, offered by Mr. Lightman:
“Self is the name we give to the mental sensation of certain electrical and chemical flows in our neurons.”
It is too tempting for science to reduce us to fundamental biology and chemistry, but the mere mechanics of what I am do not at all define who I am. If science is the only contribution to the meaning of life and death, then it becomes obvious why so many spend significant time in denial or in dread of death.
In his new book reflecting on the Cosmos, MIT astrophysicist Alan Lightman takes up these questions and more. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is a view of the world through a scientist’s lens which requires the scientist to see in it, as Alan Hirshfeld describes,
“Tangible bits of matter and energy, all governed by a set of fundamental physical laws … In keeping with his ‘Central Doctrine of Science,’ he eschews unprovable hypotheses, most significantly the existence of God and the afterlife.”
But these hypotheses are only unprovable from the point of view of science which concerns itself, as it concerns astrophysicist Alan Lightman, with matter and energy and fundamental laws. But Professor Lightman has acquired the wisdom not to stop there. His reflection on the death of his parents brings him to the “impossible truth” that they no longer exist, and he will one day follow them into this nonexistence.
Is that all there is? “I wish I believed,” he wrote. But “a precipice looms for each of us, an eventual plunge into nonexistence.” As Alan Hirshfeld described it:
“A depressing prospect, for sure, yet the inevitable judgment of those for whom religious or spiritual alternatives carry no resonance.”
Pictured: Fr. Georges Lemaître, Albert Einstein and Fr. Andrew Pinsent
Threads of the Tapestry of God
I have written numerous articles about the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, the origins and mechanics of the Universe. But these are not the only tools with which to explore the universe and measure life and death. The conclusions of science and faith are not as inseparable as science might have you believe.
I have raised this analogy before, but consider these two passages from two sources that have become meaningful to me. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 296) expresses a fundamental truth of faith God created the Universe and life “out of nothing.”
Among the many contributions of science that I hold in high regard, this is one by the mathematician Robyn Arianrhod whose book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University 2005) draws the same conclusion. Don’t let the scientific language dissuade you from understanding this phenomenal bridge between science and faith:
“The Belgian priest and astrophysicist, Georges Lemaitre began to develop expanding cosmological models out of Einstein’s equations … In 1931, Lemaitre formally sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory [which] showed that Einstein’s equations predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional spacetime … Before this point, about 13 billion years ago, there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter. Nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.”
— Arianrhod, pp 185-187
Reflecting on the death of his parents, Alan Lightman wrote that he wished he believed in the continuity of life after death. It could be at least a starting point that sometimes science and faith share some of the same language and conclusions about the origin of life. Faith, to have any real depth, is not simply an emotional experience to assuage our fears, but rather one arrived at also through reason. Catholicism presents 2,000+ years of faith seeking understanding, of belief built upon reason.
And sometimes reason just cannot explain away our intuition that life has an Author, and when we die, the book is still not finished. I am intrigued by Professor Hirshfeld’s use of the term, “resonance” for I have also used it in some recent posts. I have described it as a sort of echo that finds its way among the “threads of the Tapestry of God” in ways that give life meaning and purpose, in ways that connect us. One way spiritual resonance manifests itself is by giving meaning to suffering.
Consider this stunning action of spiritual resonance that was described in a post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” That post was co-authored by me and Father Andrew Pinsent, PhD, a priest, physicist and Director of the Institute for Science and Religion at Oxford University.
When my friend Pornchai Moontri came into the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, one of our readers, the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium, inquired rather urgently asking to stand as Pornchai’s Godfather. They visited several times. However, it was only after I wrote about Father George Lemaitre that Pierre contacted me with the staggering revelation that the Godfather of Pornchai Moontri is the Godson of Father George Lemaitre. The mathematical odds against such a “mere coincidence” are ... well … astronomical!
It is a long time since I have viewed with awe the expanse of our galaxy spanning the night sky in all its brilliance, but like Alan Lightman, I have done so, and find it unforgettable. He is on the right track, and may one day come to see that the awe it instills in him is not the awe of science alone. “I wish I believed,” he wrote. I believe he just may.
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ANNOUNCEMENT: Fr. Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls are now featured on Gloria.tv, an international Catholic social network and a video and news sharing platform. We are honored by this invitation, and by the Catholic fidelity demonstrated by Gloria.tv. We invite our readers to support this venue by visiting and sharing our page and other content there.
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Fr. Georges Lemaître
Editor’s Note: Continue this great adventure of science and faith with these related posts:
The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead
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.”
For the Soul of a Nation: In Defense of Religious Liberty
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the present U.S. Supreme Court are all that stand in the way of the gradual annihilation of religious liberty.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the present U.S. Supreme Court are all that stand in the way of the gradual annihilation of religious liberty.
April 19, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Early in 2023, a global Internet tracking service reported that there are more than two billion active websites, 600 million of which are blogs publishing over 2.5 billion posts per year — including this one. Back in 2010 when this blog was in its infancy with a much smaller readership, a site called The Crescat reviewed a variety of blogs it categorized as Catholic blogs.
A moderator divided them into further categories and asked for reader input to sort them out. Somehow, this blog showed up on The Crescat’s radar, but it defied easy description. I wrote about everything. So in the end we were given the dubious distinction of “Best Under-Appreciated Catholic Blog.”
I do not look for recognition in writing, but that may not seem evident when publishing a single weekly post that competes for readers with about 50 million other weekly posts. I also never called this blog a “Catholic blog.” It has no Imprimatur, no Nihil Obstat, and no official recognition from any official Catholic institution, but neither do any other Catholic blogs.
As a writer, I have to earn Catholic “street cred” the hard way. “Street cred” is a term I hear a lot in my present environment. It refers to “street credibility.” In prison it is considered a standard of personal integrity, a sort of consistency of being. Having pulled oneself up from the school of hard knocks translates into a badge of honor for some and a cause for disdain for others. The Catholic Writers Guild invited this blog’s participation while the Catholic Media Association rather bluntly refused it.
“The School of Hard Knocks” is a literary term defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as, “the practical experiences of life, including hardships and disappointments that temper and educate a person.” It isn’t easy for a priest — even one in prison — to claim such a thing, but in recent years some priests could be considered for this distinction. For a Catholic priest, being falsely accused and unjustly in prison is like the postgraduate level of the school of hard knocks.
This blog has always struggled against tidal forces to survive. So you might understand my surprise a few years back when readers of Our Sunday Visitor cited Beyond These Stone Walls as “The Best of the Catholic Web” in the area of Spirituality. Then Catholic Culture gave it highest marks for content, excellence, and fidelity. Then About.com awarded it second place in the category of Best Catholic Blogs. Being where I am, I did not even know about some of this. Do they not know from whence I write?
But for me, the “street cred” with the most impact has come from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the largest, most influential, and most visible organization dedicated to the defense and preservation of religious liberty. Catholic League President Bill Donohue has repeatedly recognized this blog as a source of credible Catholic witness in dark times. And Bill Donohue himself has recently been cited by the Catholic Herald in the U.K. as one of the top religious leaders in the U.S.
On a dozen occasions recently, Bill Donohue and the Catholic League have cited and promoted posts from Beyond These Stone Walls sending tens of thousands of readers to this site. Each cited post covered some aspect of religious liberty or controversial currents in the Church that impact religious freedom. These posts are now collected on the page, “Cited by the Catholic League.”
Image Credit: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
A Growing Culture of Hostility to Religion
On July 21,2022, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke at the University of Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit in Rome. This excerpt of his address, published in The Wall Street Journal (August 4, 2022) exemplifies the dire importance of our attention to the state of religious freedom. From Justice Samuel Alito:
“I am reminded of an experience I had in a museum in Berlin. One of the exhibits was a rustic wooden cross. A woman and young boy were looking at this exhibit. The young boy turned to the woman, presumably his mother, and said, ‘Who is that man?’ The memory has stuck in my mind as a harbinger of what may lie ahead for our culture. The problem that looms is not just indifference to religion; it is not just ignorance about religion. There is also growing hostility to religion.
“A dominant view among legal academics is that religion does not merit special protection. A liberal society, they say, should be value-neutral, and therefore it should treat religion just like any other passionate personal attachment — like rooting for a favorite sports team, pursuing a hobby, or following a popular artist or group. Now I think we would all agree that in a free society, people should be free to pursue those avocations. But do they really merit the same protection as the exercise of religion?”
— Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, July 21, 2022
In a different recent address, Vice President Kamala Harris cited the Declaration of Independence. She emphasized that the document “guarantees all Americans the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But there was an intentional glaring omission. The Vice President conspicuously left out the most fundamental of inalienable rights, the Right to Life. It is a right rooted in religious liberty, recognizing both life and religious freedom as rights given by God and not simply by the whim of government.
I have strong reason to now believe that the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the current United States Supreme Court are all that stand in the way of the annihilation of the Right to Life and Religious Liberty in America. A Catholic League annual membership fee is a small price to pay for lending your name in defense of the most basic of our unalienable rights, the right to practice and profess your faith even in a secular world.
I admit to having a vested interest in this. More than any other voice, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has treated me with open-minded justice and fairness. The Catholic League has also advocated for my friend, Pornchai Moontri as he languished in ICE detention for five grueling months during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. To great effect, Bill Donohue and the Catholic League petitioned the White House to move Pornchai’s case forward from the bureaucracy in which it was stalled.
A Movement Defending Parental Rights
The Catholic League has also recently distinguished itself as a staunch defender of parental rights. One of my posts cited and recommended this year was “Disney’s Disenchanted Kingdom versus Parental Rights.” That post was about the production of a documentary sponsored by the Catholic League entitled, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” which has received wide acclaim.
In a recent news release, Catholic League President Bill Donohue described some of its accolades. The film was just one entry among films from 22 nations in the L.A. International Short Film Festival. “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” was nominated for six categories and won in four of them awarding it Best Documentary, Best Editing, Best Sound Design, and an Honorable Mention for Best Trailer. The latter three awards were in a broader field than just the documentaries alone. They were judged the best of all films presented to the International Film Festival. “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” is now also nominated for Best Documentary and Best Poster Design at The Prisma Film Festival in Rome, Italy.
Some on the political left have remained stubbornly tone deaf to the assault on parental rights that the Disney franchise has recently embraced. Parental demands to be heard have upended the political spectrum in Virginia and Florida and are now spreading across the playing field of U.S. politics. To suggest that religion does not belong in that arena may be a fair assessment, but Religious Liberty as an unalienable right certainly does belong in the political sphere, and so does parental rights.
More recent examples of the tone deaf politics arising out of the debate over Parental Rights in Education have come from two prominent New York House Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) characterized the Parental Rights in Education bill in Congress thusly: “Extreme MAGA Republicans don’t want your child to learn about the LGBTQ+ experience.” He deserves our thanks for making our point so succinctly. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) described the Parental Bill of Rights as “fascism,” adding, “Our children need urgent and aggressive educational solutions. When we talk about progressive values, I can say what my progressive value is: It is freedom over fascism.”
There is not much left to say after that. They have made our point for us. Please consider lending your voice to the Catholic League efforts to preserve and protect our freedoms. You may become a member or subscribe for free email news releases at: www.catholicleague.org.
Bill Donohue’s new book, War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class Is Killing the American Dream, was published yesterday and is available on Amazon and Sophia Institute Press.
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A Message to Our Readers from Fr. Gordon MacRae
In recent months, a number of readers have suggested that I compile some of our past posts into a series of published books. I think the popularity of the Prison Journal by George Cardinal Pell raised this idea among some of our readers. I have been moved beyond words that I had a substantial presence in the late Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal Volume Two.
I am also moved by the Journal itself and the many similarities in our respective prison experiences. The late Cardinal Pell and I responded to prison in much the same way, boldly facing the absence of anything that supports our faith or our priesthood. It is amazing how important something becomes when you can no longer have it. Cardinal Pell's Prison Journal is a legacy for the whole Church. So is his final message which was one of our posts recommended by the Catholic League: “The Vatican Today: Cardinal Pell’s Last Gift to the Church.”
The exoneration of Cardinal Pell was the answer to a prayer. At the time of his exoneration by Australia’s highest court, he had spent just over 400 days in unjust imprisonment. At the time I was storming Heaven for his freedom, I marked 10,000 days and nights in prison. Australia’s justice system is not the same as in the United States. A release based on wrongful conviction here is very hard won. An effort to review my case and restore my freedom is still underway. My faith and my priesthood are also still intact, and they inform and empower my survival.
Compiling past posts into my own version of a Prison Journal like Cardinal Pell’s is not possible, however. I have no access at all to the online world or to income, and that has been so for a much longer period of time. I cannot even see and have never seen this blog. I have no access to almost 14 years of writing published at this site. With severe restrictions on space, I have no access to printed copies of past writings. I have only a list of titles and I reference them only on memory.
But perhaps we have done the next best thing. When These Stone Walls, the prior version of this blog, evolved into Beyond These Stone Walls in 2020, we added the BTSW Public Library with multiple categories. We have slowly been restoring past posts to add them to the respective categories. Some of our categories have considerably more posts than others. This is because I pay more attention to some category subjects than others. Because I have abiding interest in Sacred Scripture, for example, I have written many posts about it.
The BTSW Public Library is set up like an ordinary library’s card catalog except that it is digital. Each category has a title and top image. Once you tap or click on either one, you will enter that category to scroll through a list of images and titles for each post. When you find a post that interests you, just tap or click on the image. When you close it, you will remain in the same category to peruse it further if you wish.
Abuse of the Abuse Crisis
The newest Category in our Library is “Abuse of the Abuse Crisis.” This is an important Category for me because it contains posts about how others have magnified and exploited the abuse crisis in the priesthood for their own ends and agendas. There has been no shortage of people who — out of vindictiveness or greed or just anti-Catholic bias — have used our crisis to tear down the priesthood and your faith. The posts in Abuse of the Abuse Crisis tell a riveting story about the costs of such abuse not only to the Church’s financial future, but to our lives as priests and your lives as Catholics. Real abuse has made us all ashamed, but the amount of fraud and bias is an outrage.
My interest in developing this special Library Category came from an experience with watching CNN a few years ago. A CNN commentator told the world that During a protest at the Vatican, 100,000 victims of sex abuse by priests were refused an audience with the Pope.” I was alerted to this story from several readers so, to the extent I was able, I looked more closely under the hood.
It turned out that SNAP, the Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests, did in fact stage a “victims’ protest” near the Vatican. The number of people present was about 40 — of which more than half were media people invited in advance to the photo op. The actual protesters were very few, and actual victims fewer still. By the time the story reached CNN, 40 became 100,000. I sent this story to Bill Donohue at the Catholic League and he followed it with a protest of his own. CNN apologized and promised to be more vigilant with its facts.
We must not accept such distortions blindly just because they appear in the news media. A post at this new category, second from the top, also addressed this same story. The SNAP-sponsored trip to Rome later became part of an employee lawsuit against SNAP in which the organization was exposed for fraud, a lawyer kickback scheme, and misused donor funds — some of which paid for a high end junket at first class hotels for this protest in Rome. I expect 100,000 people will now visit my Abuse of the Abuse Crisis page. Well ... maybe it will be closer to 40, but you might understand how such numbers are easily confused.
There are other important additions. You may have noticed the “Documents” feature in the menu at Beyond These Stone Walls. You will find there some important documents in the case against me and also a section with documents on the Pornchai Moontri story. Both sets of documents have been equally visited and l consider both to be of great importance to the cause of justice. Over 16 years of listening to the constant tap-tap-tap of my typewriter, Pornchai more than earned an honored place at this blog.
We have recently added a new item atop the documents section in my own case. It was recently prepared for a legal review through a new set of eyes. The document is entitled “Synopsis of the Case.”
Finally, for those who want to help me personally, and/or contribute to maintaining this blog or aiding me in support of Pornchai Moontri and Fr. John Hung Le, we have added access to a Zelle Account in addition to our existing PayPal Account. Zelle is easier and less expensive to use, but presently only available in the United States. Please visit our “Contact and Support” page or “Special Events” for further information.
Thank you for coming here. May the Lord Bless you and keep you.
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.”
Truth Seekers Are the Prophets of Every Troubled Time
In a time of darkness, lies and death cling to Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Do not let go. Let Him shine His Light within you and on the world through you.
St. Dionysius the Areopagite | George E. Koronaios
In a time of darkness, lies and death cling to Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Do not let go. Let Him shine His Light within you and on the world through you.
By Dionysius the Areopagite
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Dionysius the Areopagite came to believe in the truth of the Resurrection (Acts 17:34) while others only mocked. The author of this post is recently retired from a distinguished career as a scientist in U.S. government service.
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In “The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence,” Ryan A. MacDonald recounts an exchange he had with a prominent Catholic author, whom he does not identify. He had asked the author to take a look at the trial and imprisonment of Father Gordon MacRae. The man told him: “I don’t share your belief in Father MacRae’s innocence. I just don’t believe a judge and jury would sentence a priest to life in prison with anything less than clear and compelling evidence.” This reminds me of the principle Adolf Hitler presented in Mein Kampf
“The great masses of the people ... more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one.”
— Adolf Hitler
This author might accept that the justice system sometimes gets it wrong in small ways, that there might be a little corruption. Had Father MacRae been sentenced to a few years in prison, he might have considered looking into the case. But we live in America, the greatest nation in the world, with the best justice system in the world, he surely thinks. There can be no big corruption in the justice system, no horrific corruption. He blindly trusts the system.
Father MacRae lost his freedom because the truth of the case was totally suppressed. Instead of truth there was the fabrication of Detective James F. McLaughlin. There was the testimony of the accuser, Thomas Grover. He testified that on five weekly counseling sessions Father MacRae violently sexually abused him. When asked why he kept going back he replied that he repressed the memory of it all while having a weekly “out-of-body experience.” The accuser cried under much of the cross examination, which the judge quickly deflected protecting the accuser whom he had predetermined was a victim. There was also the dismissal of inconsistencies in the accuser’s testimony. Judge Arthur Brennan told the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in Mr. Grover’s testimony.”
But there was no testimony of the accused, Fr. MacRae. Then there were two appeals, which were summarily dismissed. The last one precluded any further appeal. The publication of the “Laurie List,” a list of police officers with founded credibility problems, included Detective James F. McLaughlin due to “falsification of records” in a case prior to Fr. MacRae’s trial. The required disclosure of this to the defense never happened. At no time in the trial nor in the appeals was there any minimal attempt to search for the truth.
We know about the truth of this case because there were people who cared about the truth and investigated the case following the facts to wherever they led: Dorothy Rabinowitz, Harvey Silverglate, Ryan A. MacDonald, former FBI Special Agent James Abbott, journalist Joann Wypijewski, Catholic League President Bill Donohue, The Media Report’s David F. Pierre, Jr. and others. These Truth Seekers all concluded that the Fr. MacRae case was a gross miscarriage of justice.
I have sketched the case of Fr. MacRae to point out that it was total suppression of the truth, and complete fabrication of the case that led to the preposterous outcome of sentencing an innocent priest to life in prison. It is a big lie. And “the great masses of people more easily fall victim to a big lie” (in this case believing Fr. MacRae is a criminal) “than to a little one,” according to that great master liar of the 20th Century, Adolf Hitler. It is ironic, but no coincidence, that in his closing argument before the jury in the Fr. MacRae trial, prosecutor Bruce Elliot Reynolds compared Fr. MacRae to Adolf Hitler. This is what happens when a case is brought before a court with no supporting evidence. The void must be filled with outrageous rhetoric.
In the 29 years since then Truth Seekers have shined light on the truth and on how evil this case was. Our unnamed writer is among the great masses, not to be counted among the Truth Seekers. Any rational, fair person who reads all the evidence of wrongdoing in suppressing the truth is convinced of the innocence of Fr. MacRae. The unnamed writer’s blindness to the truth probably had no effect on his job, or his health, or his life. (God knows the effect on his soul.) Blindness to the truth in other matters has grave consequences to the blind one.
Christ Healing the Blind by El Greco | Metropolitan Museum of Art
I Want to See — Mark 10:51
Big lies perpetrate great evil. The last three years since Covid have been dreadful — loss of life, loss of health, loss of jobs, loss of freedom, confusion, pain, much suffering. We want it to stop. We see evil all around — and we see goodness. But is what we see real or fabricated?
In the case of Father MacRae the fabricated evil is that he is a criminal who deserves to lose his freedom for the rest of his life. Instead, Truth Seekers revealed the total disregard of the justice system for truth and justice. The system criminally railroaded Fr. MacRae, and attacked the freedom of every citizen, of the Church, of Priesthood. This was the real evil in this case. Should we question what we see? Or should we blindly trust some authorities?
Test everything; hold fast what is good.
— 1 Thessalonians 5:21
Before Covid many had chanted, “My body, my choice.” Then came the Covid mandates, and some were chanting, “My body, my choice.” But the earlier chanters did not approve. As Judge Arthur Brennan would say, Disregard the inconsistencies. After the horror of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Code set principles for the practice of human experimentation. Chief among them is that consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The so-called vaccines and boosters are experimental; they fall under the Nuremberg code. Yet the mandates completely obliterate this code. Has the door been opened to new atrocities?
When this global pandemic began the logical thing would have been to gather the very best physicians and scientists to work out how to proceed. Instead, they were cancelled. Sacrificing much they have worked feverishly to save lives, and they have seen how all the actions the government has taken contradict fundamental medical principles. They are Truth Seekers at a time when there is an overwhelming effort to suppress truth. [24, 11, 13, 16]
As the Covid pandemic has unfolded more people have realized that there is a real evil that is different from the uncensored, fabricated evil. Jews have often taken great offense when the word Holocaust is used to describe other atrocities. Holocaust survivors, who have faced great evil before, now recognize what is going on as a Holocaust. They are among the Truth Seekers of today. [31, 3, 22, 14]
I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.
— Psalm 34:4
The past three years have been awful. Fear has been used to lock down, to control, to censor, to divide. As we listen to the Truth Seekers we find that the real evil is much worse than we thought. We can become even more fearful. But like never before this is a time to cling to Jesus. “Fear is useless, what is needed is trust.” Luke 8:50
In the uncensored, fabricated evil, it seems that the worse is almost over. The lockdowns are gone. Most people are not wearing masks anymore. It seems that normalcy may be coming back. Could reality be different? In Nazi times many people were saved. They escaped before being taken to concentration camps. But most of those taken to camps died. Are there concentration camps now?
Violating the Nuremberg code and with much coercion people were injected, outside physical concentration camps. Most people did not die soon after. Some did. Now people are dying in unprecedented numbers — people of all ages, many young healthy people, healthy athletes, many suddenly. And many people are getting very sick. The official story, the corporate story, is that this has nothing to do with the injections. [8, 2, 1, 25, 16]
I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
— John 14:6
Does truth matter? Consider the case of Father MacRae again. It can be described by two contrasting views: the ‘criminal’ view of the justice system, and the ‘victim’ view of the Truth Seekers. Looking at these two views, the author with whom Ryan A. MacDonald tried to discuss Father MacRae’s case, did not seek the truth. He choose the ‘criminal’ view because he blindly trusts the system promoting this view. Other than his spiritual life, the choice did not affect him.
Does truth matter in this other case? Two views describe the time in which we live. The ‘protection with loss of freedom’ is the view that the authorities are protecting us during a pandemic that started three years ago, and this requires the loss of some freedoms. The contrasting view is the ‘genocide’ view; plans began much earlier than three years ago, and the loss of freedoms is a way of implementing a depopulation plan.
In this case, if after considering the evidence for both views, you decide that the real view is ‘protection with loss of freedom,’ you learn to live with less freedom accepting that it is the only way you can be protected at this time. If, however, you decide that the ‘genocide’ is the real view, you might not want to cooperate with a system that is trying to kill you. You are not a casual observer. Your life and your freedom depend on being able to see which is the real view. [20, 23, 25, 26, 13, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 3, 7, 9]
Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
— Mark 10:51
Photo | Wilf’s Wine Press
Without Me You Can Do Nothing — John 15:5
Many of us see much evil around us. Evil is attacking so many things, at so many levels, at different scales. Does it make any difference which evil we confront first? Or is there a more global, more fundamental, more horrifically diabolical evil than the rest? One that if not stopped the others would not matter any more. The references below are a sampler of the work of Truth Seekers who are working tirelessly to save the world, to open the eyes of the rest of us.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness!
— Isaiah 5:20
Critically examine the evidence these Truth Seekers present. Ask Jesus to help you see what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil. The sacredness of life has been attacked for a long time. The combination of technology and loss of freedom gives rise to an unprecedented evil in which our resources, our bodies, even our consciousness will be controlled by others. What is at stake is our national sovereignty and our individual sovereignty. [21, 4, 14, 33]
In Nazi times people were saved before being taken to concentration camps. Once in a camp most did not survive. In these times, if we fail to resist this monstrous, evil attack we will all succumb to it. The time is late, but there is still something we can do. If we remain casual observers unwilling to discern the true evil that is encompassing us, we do not have a chance.
The Truth Seekers of our time suggest some actions we may take to protect ourselves, and resist the evil that is upon us.
Treatments: The best doctors in America, in collaboration with others around the world, developed treatments to prevent and deal with the aftermath of Covid. If you have taken any injections, do not take any more. There are protocols for Covid (prevention, early treatment, long Covid, hospital treatment, post-vaccine recovery), and RSV and the flu. [12]
Cash vs Digital Ids: There is a rush to implement Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). If this succeeds, each of us will have a digital identity, and we will be living in a digital concentration camp. To try to resist this, use cash as much as possible. [4]
One World Totalitarian Government / WHO “Treaty:” The World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a global pandemic treaty. The Administration is committed to the accord. Though it would be a treaty Congress will not be consulted. Many have looked at the details and see the end of national and individual autonomy. [6, 5, 21, 19, 27, 28, 29, 33] James Roguski has emerged as the foremost expert on the two proposals being pushed by the WHO, which he discusses in [32]
We are in Lent, a time of prayer and fasting:
“Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke?”
— Isaiah 58:6
But how can we break any yoke if we do not see it? And how can we see it if we pray not constantly?
Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.
— John 15:5
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Three years ago, early in 2020, I wrote a post about the burgeoning pandemic of Covid 19. My post rejected the Chinese Communist Government’s explanation of its origin. The CCG claimed, and still claims, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by natural means through an animal sold at the Wuhan, China open market. I laid out a case for why this is likely not so, and why it is much more likely that the virus escaped from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research and other experimentation was being conducted since 2013. This week, a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress concluded, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a Wuhan laboratory.
If the Chinese Communist Government had been transparent from the beginning, the world may have had a better response to this pandemic. But please remember: China is by force the People’s Republic, but Covid is by no means the people’s pandemic. The good people of China had nothing to do with this.
Please revisit my post, which lays out in stark prose all the dangers described by our guest writer in this week’s post when a system of government adopts the protection of itself over the protection of its people. Please read “The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19.”
Bibliography
Balmakov, Roman, “ ‘Massive’ Blood Clots,”, 12/15/2022, Facts Matter with Roman Balmakov.
Berenson, Alex, “The funeral business is booming. And not because of Covid,” 11/22/2022, Unreported Truths.
Breggin, Peter R., Ginger Ross Breggin, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, Ithaca, NY, Lake Edge Press, 2021.
“#CashEveryDay,” 07/02/2021, The Solari Report.
Corbett, James, “The Global Pandemic Treaty: What You Need to Know,” 04/27/2022, The Corbett Report.
Corbett, James, “What is the WHO? — Questions for Corbett,” 08/21/2020, The Corbett Report.
Davison, Scott, “Insurance deaths up 40% people 18-64 Davison OneAmerica Indiana,” 01/23/2022.
Fitts, Catherine Austin, Carolyn Betts, “I Want to Stop CBDCs — What Can I Do?,” 02/01/2023, The Solari Report.
FLCCC Alliance, “Treatment Protocols.”
Fleming, Richard, “Exclusive With Dr. Richard Fleming,” 05/14/2022, CHD.TV.
Fuellmich, Reiner, “PCR Tests, AIDS + More,” 05/09/2022, CHD.TV.
Iverson, Kim, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “How The Powerful Captured The Public During The Pandemic With RFK, Jr.,” 02/06/2023, The Kim Iverson Show, CHD.TV.
“Journalism in a Post-Truth World,” EWTN News and Franciscan University.
Kennedy, Jr., Robert F., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children's Health Defense), New York, NY, Skyhorse Publishing, 2021.
Kennedy, Jr., Robert F., Eric Clapton, “Stand and Deliver,” 11/02/2021, CHD.TV.
Knightly, Kit, “WHO moving forward on GLOBAL vaccine passport program,” 03/01/2022, Off Guardian
Latypova, Sasha, “Intent To Harm,” 12/22/2022, Doctors for Covid Ethics Symposium.
Lynn, Corey, “22 Ways to Stop Vaccine ID Passports in 2022 and Why We Must!,” 01/04/2022, The Solari Report.
Malhotra, Aseem, “Exclusive with Aseem Malhotra, M.D.,” 09/28/2022, CHD.TV.
McCullough, Peter, “Dr. McCullough on Real America: Failure of Masks and Vaccines, Epidemic of Sudden Death,” 02/26/2023.
McCullough, Peter, “Del Bigtree Hosts Dr. Peter McCullough: Pandemic Era Sudden Death and Crushing Physician Reprisal,” 11/16/2022.
McCullough, Peter, “Dr. McCullough US Senate Dec 7, 2022 More Pandemic Deaths after Vaccines Rolled Out,” 12/07/2022.
McCullough, Peter, “Bradford Hill Criteria for Causation Met: COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Death by Dr. McCullough,” 12/22.
Mercola, Joseph, “WHO Pandemic Treaty: What It Is, Why It matters and How to Stop It,” 05/10/2022, The Defender.
Nass, Meryl, James Corbett, “WHO Sneak Attack,” 01/15/2023, CHD.TV.
Nevradakis, Michael, “Exclusive: WHO Proposals Could Strip Nations of Their Sovereignty, Create Worldwide Totalitarian State, Expert Warns,” 01/13/2023, The Defender.
“Pfizer — Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History,” 09/02/2009, United States Department of Justice.
Sharav, Vera, “Never Again is Now Global,” 02/03/2023, CHD.TV.
“Urgent WHO Discussion w/ Special Guest James Roguski, hosted by Maze Love,” 11/11/23. [audio begins about two minutes into the recording]
Wood, Patrick M., “Exclusive with Patrick M. Wood,” 05/16/2022, CHD.TV.
Yeadon, Michael, “Former Pfizer VP Calls For Accountability From Ex-Big Pharma Colleagues,” 11/03/2022, CHD.TV.
Yeadon, Michael, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Former Pfizer Vice President Dr. Mike Yeadon Speaks Out,” 05/25/2021, CHD.TV
From the Editor: After reading this post, a reader sent us a link to a 10-minute video by Law Professor Francis Boyle related to the content of this post: Francis Boyle: The WHO’s Plan to Be a Global Dictator.
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.”
Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love
Pope Benedict XVI left the Chair of Peter amid debate about what his decision meant for the Church. Above all else, it was an act of fatherly love and sacrifice.
Pope Benedict XVI left the Chair of Peter amid debate about what his decision meant for the Church. Above all else, it was an act of fatherly love and sacrifice.
December 31, 2022
Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: The Holy Father, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entered Eternal Life at 9:34AM Rome time (3:34AM EDT) on the last day of the Year of Our Lord 2022. I wrote the following post in February 2013 in the weeks following his decision to leave the Chair of Peter. It was a time of great confusion for the Church, and great sorrow for those who loved this Pope. Upon the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978, Archbishop Fulton Sheen said that he offered a ‘Hail Mary’ for him, and then another ‘Hail Mary’ in his honor asking for his intercession before the Divine Presence. I offer these same prayers today for Benedict XVI and in the same way.
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February 2013
We are all prisoners of our own perception. We come to just about every concern and deliberation from the perspective of our own unique limits, circumstances, and points of view. The more fair and just among us practice varying degrees of empathy which is, in part at least, the ability to place ourselves in the shoes of another.
One truth became crystal clear to me on February 11, 2013. No matter how well honed our skills for empathy might be, none of us can ever adequately imagine ourselves in one pair of shoes — the Shoes of the Fisherman.
It was that very title that helped plant and cultivate my early thoughts of priesthood when I was 15 years old in 1968 — the same year Msgr. Charles Pope once wrote of in “1968 – The Year the Church Drank from the Poison of this World.” My friend, Father Louis Antonelli took me to see The Shoes of the Fisherman, the film starring Anthony Quinn as Pope Kyril I. It was scripted from the great novel of the same title by Morris West. In the end, the fictional Pope Kyril — who as a priest spent 20 years in a Soviet prison — sacrificed his papacy to avert nuclear war looming in the Communist stranglehold on the Soviet Union and China. The long, ponderous film deeply moved me at age 15 as Pope Kyril’s acts of love and sacrifice mollified the world at the expense of the Church. I left that film resolved to pray for the Pope, who in my sudden awareness became the most important man on Earth, and the most targeted man for the world’s wolves and the powers of evil.
Priesthood did not take me to where I had hoped back then to go. Like Kyril himself, it took me to prison. So it was from the perspective of my confinement in a prison cell that I learned the heartbreaking news on Monday morning, February 11, 2013, that our beloved Pope Benedict XVI would resign the Chair of Saint Peter effective February 28. Like so many of you, I found that news to be deeply disappointing — even devastating. That day felt as though someone had cast a pall over the entire Church.
The news footage soon to follow the Holy Father’s bombshell — the scene of a bolt of lightning striking the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica — did nothing to ease the sense of oppression that day wrought. Like so many of you, I was filled with dread that the wolves had won — the very wolves the Holy Father referred to in his first homily as Pope in April 2005: “Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”
After eight years of his pontificate, I could not imagine this Pope fleeing from anything. In the ensuing weeks, I have slowly come to see his decision not only as agonizingly painful in its making — for us, but most especially for him — but also as a courageous act of sacrifice motivated by love for the Church and the 1.2 billion souls who come to Christ through Her.
Not in His Own Best Interest
By the end of the day on February 11, 2013, I asked a friend to post a comment from me on BTSW’s Facebook page. My comment focused only on the Holy Father’s brief statement and avoided much of the media spin launched within minutes of it — most of which I was unaware of anyway, and could only imagine. Pope Benedict’s own words left little room for spin, and they are worth hearing again as he abdicates:
“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.
“However, in today’s world, subject to many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to steer the boat of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
My immediate reaction to these words was one of great sorrow. I believed that Pope Benedict, who would soon turn 86 years of age, was convinced by those around him not to allow age and infirmity to become the media’s face of the Church. I believed such advice to have been rooted in the last years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate as his obvious infirmity became its own news event.
And so my brief comment that February 11, though well intentioned, assumed that the Holy Father was simply convinced, as he himself stated, that his “strengths and advanced age are no longer suited to the Petrine ministry” — especially so in a world in which every papal tremble, stumble, and foible is caught on camera for instantaneous global news.
I thought the Holy Father had agonized over this and concluded simply, and understandably, that age and infirmity taking center stage in the future years of his papacy were neither in his best interest nor that of the Church. I thought wrongly.
There was absolutely nothing in this decision that the Holy Father considered to be in his own best interest. Like so many of the loving fathers I know, his own best interest never entered the equation at all. On the morning after the Pope’s announcement, The Wall Street Journal published a superb and influential commentary by Catholic writer George Weigel that helped to give me some perspective on this development. “Catholics Need a Pope for the ‘New Evangelization‘ ” (February 13, 2013) was a service to the Church calling upon us to look forward to consider the urgent challenges to be faced by the successor of Pope Benedict. George Weigel pointed out something that the Holy Father himself was deeply aware of as “we widen the historical lens through which we view this papal transition.” Pope Benedict XVI will be the last pope to have participated in the Second Vatican Council.
By ending his papacy, he had ended an ecclesiastical era. The question George Weigel asks us to ponder is not “What wolves brought this about?” but rather “To what future has Pope Benedict led Catholicism?” I believe the answer to that question is the urgent issue of the coming conclave, and I believe the Holy Father is convinced of the necessary timing of this as the Church summons forth a Pope for the New Evangelization.
And Not without Precedent
In the Western world, and especially in the Americas, it’s difficult for some to factor the Catholic Church as an ancient structure, the sole institution in human history to have survived — to have even thrived — for 2,000 years. In “The Canonization of Pope John Paul II,” I wrote of a History Channel presentation on the papacy. Hopefully, we may see it again before the coming conclave.
With reverence and historical accuracy, the cameras took us from the tomb of Saint Peter to the tomb of Blessed John Paul II. Between them, two millennia had past — 2,000 years of war, scandal, all manner of human debacles, and countless assaults on the Church and Holy See. And yet at the tomb of Saint John Paul II the Church stood. The gates of hell had not prevailed against Her — and not for lack of trying.
That trial continues. A pope’s resignation is rare, but not unheard of. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Saint Louis University history professor Thomas F. Madden unveiled some of this history in “The Pope Joins a Fine but Rarely Seen Tradition” (Feb. 15, 2013). For the first 1,200 years in the life of the Church, Professor Madden explained, it was assumed that a pope could not resign except under extreme conditions such as being thrown into prison — a fate that befell three popes in the first millennium.
The last resignation of a pope was six centuries ago in the year 1415. Eight decades before Columbus sailed to the New World — 360 years before the United States even existed — Pope Gregory XII resigned the papacy to end the Great Schism. In so doing he was praised throughout Europe for placing the interests of the Church above his own interests and ambition.
But the real precedent was set in 1294 when Pope Celestine V, now Saint Celestine, resigned for reasons very similar to those now put forward by Pope Benedict. A conclave had been unable to arrive at a consensus for two years when Pietro del Murone was elected to resolve it. Already in his 80s when he became Pope Celestine V, he quietly established in canon law a tenet allowing for the resignation of a pope, and then applied it to himself with the support of the College of Cardinals.
The Prayer to Saint Michael
The Church canonized Saint Celestine in 1313. In the 2010 book, Light of the World (Ignatius Press), based on Peter Seewald’s extensive interviews with Pope Benedict XVI, the Holy Father cited the precedent set by Saint Celestine, and even hinted — then at age 84 — that if ever a pope’s reserves of strength no longer served the Church, that precedent could be repeated.
But there is still the matter of the wolves circling from both without and within. They have always been here. George Weigel pointed out that the Second Vatican Council’s deep reforms in the Catholic Church actually began in the previous century in 1878. According to Mr. Weigel, “Pope Leo XIII made the historic decision to quietly bury the rejectionist stand his predecessors had adopted toward cultural and political modernity.” George Weigel ended his article with a reflection about the current state of disunity in the Roman Curia, calling upon the coming conclave to elect a pope who will address the Curia’s “disastrous condition . . . so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.”
Pope Benedict XVI cited a similar concern in his Ash Wednesday homily from the pulpit of Saint Peter’s Basilica: “The face of the Church is at times disfigured by the sins against the unity of the Church and the divisions of the ecclesial body.” It is of interest that in 1888, Pope Leo XIII also cited this while composing his famous Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, only a small part of which has become the common prayer we know. In its original form, Pope Leo wrote:
“In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the pastor is struck, the sheep may be scattered.”
Pope Benedict XVI has never had to earn our deference, but earn it he did, many times over, as our Holy Father in a time of great trial for the Church. We owe him the benefit of our fidelity, unity, and prayers, and I know he has those. By abdicating at this time, and by calling the Church’s focus to what comes next at this moment in history, Pope Benedict is engaging in an act of love and sacrifice for the Church.
What remains heartbreaking is that so many of us have come not only to reverence and respect this Pope for his gifted mind and great personal holiness, but we have come to love him. Even in life, this Holy Father’s long-serving predecessor was given another title in his last years. My friend, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus and others deservedly dubbed him “John Paul the Great,” and it stuck.
Pope Benedict XVI also stands to have a new name. Springing from the hearts of millions, no matter what role he plays or what the Church comes to call him, this Holy Father will forever be for us, “Benedict the Beloved.”
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Prologue — December 31, 2023: As cited above, in 1888 when Pope Leo XIII composed the prayer to Saint Michael, he added in the original version, “In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the pastor is struck, the sheep may be scattered.”
For so many faithful Catholics the world over, history sometimes repeats itself.
