Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Paul Haring | CNS

In strange ways, injustices I have known as a prisoner and a priest intersected the lives of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell who died just ten days apart.

February 8 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pope Benedict XVI passed from this life at age 95 on the final day of 2022. Ten days later, Cardinal George Pell died of cardiac arrest at age 81 while recovering from routine surgery at a hospital in Rome. Both of these men were giants in the Church as the many tributes to them from around the world make clear. They were also targets for much vitriol and injustice. It was in this targeted injustice that my path crossed with that of both men.

In “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae,” a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by famed Boston criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, he cited a ground-breaking book by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board entitled, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness, and Other, Terrors of Our Time. Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of writings about unjust sex abuse prosecutions that generated a spate of wrongful convictions of innocent people in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of her subjects in the book and subsequent writings spent decades in prison. I am one of them.

One of the tragically misguided prosecutions cited in the book is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels, then a 24-year-old nursery school teacher in New Jersey. Charged with multiple counts of child molestation in a witch hunt atmosphere, Kelly was innocent of the heinous crimes, none of which actually took place. The charges were fantastical and false, but the child abuse terror of the time resulted in easy convictions with no valid evidence.

The nature of the evidence in Kelly’s case was chilling. The prosecution’s child psych expert — who had no real expertise at all — fashioned a theory that young children who say that no sexual abuse happened actually mean the opposite. A vigilante jury bought that theory and convicted Kelly Michaels. At age 24, she was sentenced to 47 years in prison.

After failed appeals having nothing whatsoever to do with truth or justice, Kelly’s fate seemed sealed in wrongful imprisonment until Dorothy Rabinowitz began writing about it. Then New York civil rights attorney Morton Stavis came out of retirement to take the case pro bono. In her book, Ms. Rabinowitz revealed that Mr. Stavis sought the aid of a New York-based left-leaning legal think tank, the Center for Constitutional Rights that he himself founded. The CCR wanted nothing to do with this case. As Ms. Rabinowitz explained:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the politically progressive views held by many at the center. In the 1980s, as today, there was a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse was to undermine the battle against child abuse. It was to betray children and other victims of sexual predators.”

No Crueler Tyrannies, 17-18

The charges against me stem from the same time period, filtered through the same progressive political opinions, and hyped by the same prosecutorial mindset that to be accused of such things is to be guilty. It is the cruelest of tyrannies that even our Catholic bishops have cowed in fear under that progressive steamroller as priests so accused are discarded without defense. This was articulated in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

The heroic attorney Morton Stavis was not defeated by the progressive disdain for his effort from his own tribe at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He did not live to see his victory in this case, but he had put together a small team of righteous defenders who eventually prevailed by exposing the truth and winning Kelly’s freedom. One of these defenders was Robert Rosenthal whose prior legal briefs on my behalf are still on display at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

Kelly Michaels went on in life to marry a judge. She eventually recovered — to the extent one can — from the tyranny of wrongful imprisonment. She has corresponded with me in freedom, imparting as much hope for justice as she can by urging me to never give up. I haven’t, but I will be 70 on my next birthday and like Job, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25).

Vincenzo Pinto | AFP

Benedict’s “Crimes against Humanity”

However, reading Dorothy’s book was unfortunately not my final encounter with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Clinging to the progressive view that to be accused of sexual abuse is to be guilty, the Center for Constitutional Rights allowed itself to be duped and used by SNAP, the activist group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. I wrote a post some time ago that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of this organization's campaign to destroy any due process for Catholic priests. The post was, “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

Prior to writing that post, David Clohessy and SNAP manipulated the Center for Constitutional Rights into bringing a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was a shameless publicity stunt that had no hope of success, but was filed only to shame Pope Benedict and bring attention to SNAP.

Though I was aware of the charge, it was only after the International Criminal Court dismissed it that I learned that I was an unwitting pawn in this debacle. Journalist Joann Wypijewski, a reporter of courage and high integrity, wrote of it in her blistering review of the movie “Spotlight,” a film about The Boston Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the sexual abuse scandal. The following is an excerpt of her bold article, “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“The film’s advertisement for SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, faithfully represents the Globe’s affiliation. It elides SNAP’s belief that wrongful prosecutions are a minor price to pay in pursuit of its larger mission, something [The Boston Globe] did not much concern itself with either as it collected its Pulitzer for service in the public interest; something even the Center for Constitutional Rights disregarded in 2011 when it joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

“Liberals who cheer this sort of thing ought to ponder whether they have any principles at all ... . The CCR brief failed ... but to CCR’s shame, Father MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief, with respect to allegations of videotape (that is, child porn), which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

I was frozen in place by grief upon first learning of this. I knew that the charge had no substance. I also knew that in her WSJ investigation, Dorothy Rabinowitz confronted NH Detective James McLaughlin who first contrived the charge. Cornered, he finally admitted, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

This did not stop SNAP and CCR from including it in a falsified brief before the International Criminal Court. There was no repercussion for the attempt at fraud upon the court. Even now, as recently as a few months ago, biased NH reporter Damien Fisher— whose wife Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher has ties to my diocese — repeated the pornography allegation without even mentioning that it had been widely discredited, including by the dishonest detective who first raised it.

All the claims that Pope Benedict XVI enabled accused priests and failed to protect victims are of a kind with the above story. In the end, it was never any of this that really made him a target. It was his orthodoxy, his fidelity, his clear-minded exposure of Catholic truths. None of this could ever successfully be assailed, so instead they smeared him with a weapon straight from hell: false witness. Let that sink in.

The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

In the same manner that Kelly Michaels reached out to me upon her exoneration, it was because I had been so falsely accused that I reached out to Cardinal George Pell during his 400 days of unjust imprisonment. Having come to recognize signposts of dishonesty in such a case, I was certain that Cardinal Pell had been falsely accused. But because of prison rules barring direct contact with other prisoners, I could not contact in prison directly.

A friend, Sheryl Collmer, a Tyler, Texas writer for Crisis Magazine and other venues, was my intermediary. I know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this case it was perhaps a bit less deadly. There have been few really proud moments during my imprisonment, but my ability to detect and expose the truth in support of Cardinal Pell was one of them.

As a result, I found this excerpt in his published Prison Journal Volume 2 (Ignatius Press 2021). It was written from his prison cell:

“Friday, 2 August 2019: By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl Collmer, a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, ‘Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?’

“Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australia media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday, your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windshuttle, editor of the quality journal Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ (See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell,’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019).

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama's White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men.

“As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in 2015] . Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from the BTSW About Page], ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice]’”

Addendum

You may see — from Cardinal Pell’s last citation above — where Dorothy Rabinowitz got the inspiration for the title of her book, No Crueler Tyrannies. Once free from his wrongful prison sentence, Cardinal Pell was restored to his rightful position in Rome. From there, he reached out to me again in ways that I only learned about posthumously. He wrote to a mutual friend that he plans to refer to my situation in talks he is slated to present in Rome and Australia. He never got to present them.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Cardinal George Pell Faced Down a Hostile World” (January 13, 2023), Fr Raymond de Souza wrote that “His faith even during wrongful detention, was the crown of an inspiring Catholic life.” Reading his Prison Journal, I have no doubt been so inspired.

It is my prayer, and perhaps not even a necessary one, that Pope Benedict and Cardinal Pell both now stand in the Presence of God where they behold the fruition of all the graces bestowed upon them, and hopefully now upon us through them. We have not heard the last of them.

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Note from Fr. Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

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Francesco Sforza | Osservatore Romano | AFP

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

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

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

A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae

Ignoring exculpatory evidence and more honest media coverage, a writer’s selective reporting undermines the defense of a priest wrongly imprisoned for 28 years.

October 5, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The image above depicts Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin whose investigation of an early 1980s sexual assault case resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of Fr. Gordon MacRae. The following is a guest article by contributing writer, Ryan A. MacDonald. His most recent post in these pages was “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

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Writing for InDepthNH, a New Hampshire online news venue, reporter Damien Fisher presented a negligent and entirely biased overview of the case against Fr. Gordon MacRae. On the one hand, it represented well that Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin, who orchestrated the case against MacRae, is now exposed for falsifying records, tampering with evidence, and other misconduct which contributed to wrongful convictions.

On the other hand, a recent article by Damien Fisher obfuscates any future defense of MacRae with content that has already been debunked by more balanced investigations in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. (See our page on The Wall Street Journal.) Fisher’s article includes only the one-sided claims of a 2003 Grand Jury Report that a New Hampshire judge has already determined to have been published without merit or justice. Here is what Judge Richard McNamara wrote regarding the content of that report:

“[The 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester] fulfilled none of the traditional purposes of the common law grand jury. Rather than investigation of crime, the report is a post hoc summary of information the grand jury considered but did not indict on. A grand jury report that does not result in an indictment but references supposed misconduct results in a quasi-official accusation of wrongdoing drawn from secret ex parte proceedings in which there is no opportunity available or presented for a formal defense. ... Such a grand jury report is not far removed from, and no less repugnant to traditions of fair play than lynch law.”

— NH Judge Richard McNamara, August 12, 2019, In re: Grand Jury, No. 217-2017-CV-00382

Much of the content of the 2003 Grand Jury Report was generated in one-sided claims for settlement money and handed over to the State by Diocese of Manchester official Reverend Edward J. Arsenault. While settling without due process some 250 abuse claims against priests of the New Hampshire Diocese dating back 30 to 50 years, Arsenault was later charged and convicted of financial crimes in the amount of nearly $300,000 used to secretly support a relationship with a young gay musician. Now dismissed from the priesthood, he has a new name, Edward J. Bolognini. For some reason, he has been given a pass in Damien Fisher’s account.

The U.S. Department of Justice has recently disclosed an ongoing investigation into over $45 billion in fraudulent claims to reap benefits related to the Covid 19 pandemic. After the massive Gulf oil spill several years ago Exxon Oil Company had to establish a fraud task force to separate valid claims of damages from the billions of dollars in fraudulent ones. What makes anyone think that the Catholic abuse story has been spared such fraud?

This all requires a response. Today and over the next few weeks in these pages, David F. Pierre, Jr. of The Media Report.com, Catholic League President Bill Donohue and I will continue this rebuttal of that one-sided material. I hope readers of this blog will share this information widely to give this truthful side of the MacRae story the attention it deserves. Anything less is to contribute to what Dr. Bill Donohue called “a travesty of justice.”

Conflicts of Interest

In reporting on the MacRae case, however, Damien Fisher also has a conflict of interest. His wife is a columnist for Parable magazine, the official publication of the Diocese of Manchester, Father MacRae’s estranged diocese.

The Parable Managing Editor is Kathryn Marchocki, formerly a reporter for the statewide newspaper, New Hampshire Union Leader. In that capacity, Ms. Marchocki covered the 1994 MacRae trial and the 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester.

In early 2003, just before the New Hampshire Grand Jury Report was released to the public, Kathryn Marchocki met with Fr. MacRae at the New Hampshire State Prison. He presented her with a large amount of documentation that challenged the hyped contents and accusations in that one-sided report. Ms. Marchocki reportedly told the priest that his information is compelling, “but New Hampshire news media and my paper in particular are so anti-Catholic my editor will never let me write about this.”

Nonetheless, she asked MacRae — then in his ninth year in prison — to send her everything he had. He did, but never heard from Ms. Marchocki again. Now she is the editor of the Diocese of Manchester news magazine in which Damien Fisher’s wife is a columnist appearing in the monthly publication just opposite the musings of Father MacRae’s bishop, Most Reverend Peter A. Libasci, who himself now stands accused in a sexual abuse civil lawsuit in the State of New York. (See “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”)

Readers are likely aware of developments in the matter of former Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin and his brief appearance on the Attorney General’s “Laurie List,” also called the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. When the first rumblings about rampant dishonesty on the part of Detective McLaughlin began to appear in 2021, I personally reached out to Damien Fisher with a concern that the Father MacRae case had not been properly investigated and did not receive a fair trial.

Mr. Fisher shot back immediately with a verbal attack. He declared MacRae to be guilty based solely on untried rumor, innuendo, and uncorroborated claims for monetary settlement, such as those brought without trial in the discredited 2003 Grand Jury Report. He offered nothing that could be interpreted as evidence. I offered to send Mr. Fisher some compelling documentation that challenged his narrative, but I received this final message in reply: “Stop! I do not want to see anything you send. My mind is made up!” So much for journalistic integrity and objectivity.

Father MacRae in 1983, the time of the alleged charges (Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal)

A Pornographic Priest?

Much of Mr. Fisher’s current media coverage of MacRae centers on a claim that the priest produced pornographic photographs and videos of his accusers. The truth about this is in plain sight right at Mr. Fisher’s fingertips, but he omitted it. The accusation of creating pornography was first lodged by Detective McLaughlin himself in 1988. He had no evidence for it beyond a claim that he choreographed and promoted for a civil lawsuit involving an individual named Jon Plankey described in McLaughlin’s report as his “employee in a family-owned business.”

The first accusation elicited by McLaughlin was that MacRae had attempted to verbally solicit the teen. It was only after some evolution that a more substantial — and more lucrative — claim emerged that MacRae took photographs of the youth. McLaughlin actually wrote in his report that these claims will be the basis for a civil lawsuit against the Catholic Church. The lawsuit was settled without question by MacRae’s diocese over his strenuous objections.

The pornography accusation later weighed heavily in Father MacRae’s 1994 trial and sentencing in an unrelated case, that brought by accuser Thomas Grover. When sentencing the priest to life in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan cited MacRae’s “aggressive denials of wrongdoing [and] the evidence of child pornography is clear and compelling.”

But none of it ever happened. In 2005, Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal investigated this entire case for her extensive report, “A Priest’s Story,” which served as a factual refutation of much of the content appearing in the 2003 Grand Jury Report. The accuser in the pornography matter, then in his 20s, declined to answer any questions, but Ms. Rabinowitz questioned Detective McLaughlin about the “clear and compelling” evidence of child pornography. The detective was cornered, and admitted,

“There was never any evidence of pornography.”

— Detective James McLaughlin

This information was available to Damien Fisher, but if he found it he could not continue the pornography victimization narrative, so he apparently never bothered to look.

There is a lot more to that story. In 1988, McLaughlin interviewed MacRae about Plankey’s claims for four hours on tape. McLaughlin, as was his practice, wrote reports claiming several admissions by MacRae that the priest says today were never made. MacRae insists that those claims could not possibly be on the tape. Later, when MacRae faced trial in 1994, the judge ordered all tape recordings turned over to his defense. Neither MacRae nor his lawyer ever received a single one. McLaughlin claimed, under oath in sworn Interrogatories, that the tapes in question were accidentally taped over for another case and the transcripts he cited were never made due to “clerical error.”

Eleven years later in 2005, McLaughlin apparently forgot his earlier perjury and sent that tape to The Wall Street Journal : Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of how McLaughlin badgered MacRae again and again to plea to a misdemeanor of attempting to endanger a minor, but without legal representation. Here is her 2005 report about the tape:

“Fr. MacRae, summoned to meet with Detective McLaughlin, was informed that there was much more evidence against him, that the police had an affidavit for an arrest, and that it would be in everybody’s best interest for him to sign a confession. On the police tape, an otherwise bewildered-sounding Fr. MacRae is consistently clear about one thing — that he in no way solicited the Plankey boy for sex or anything else. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says more than once, his tone that of a man who feels that there must, indeed, be something for him to understand about these charges that eludes him.

“He listens as the police assure him that he can save all the bad publicity. ‘Our concern is, let’s get it taken care of, let’s not blow it out of proportion... . You know what the media does,’ they warned. He could avoid all the stories, protect the Church, let it all go away quietly.”

— The Wall Street Journal, “A Priest’s Story”

From here on the recording was shut off. MacRae says the badgering went on for another three hours. The priest had never before been in such a situation. When he asked if he should consult a lawyer, the detective reportedly said, and today denies saying it, doing so “will only muddy the waters.” In the end, MacRae signed the paper without legal counsel just to end this. In concluding the matter, McLaughlin wrote a press release: “Though no sexual acts were committed by MacRae,” it noted, “there are often varied levels of victimization.” Indeed there are!

In his police report on this matter, Detective McLaughlin wrote that Plankey worked for him in a family-owned business. Plankey’s mother was also an employee of the Keene Police Department. Before MacRae even knew about the claims, The Wall Street Journal reported, MacRae’s diocese received a call from Mrs. Plankey informing officials there that MacRae was being investigated on solicitation charges and a quick out-of-court settlement would “avoid a lawsuit and lawyers.”

Ah, but there’s more! This was not Detective McLaughlin’s first use of Jon Plankey to bring down a target. Plankey made an identical set of claims against Timothy Smith, a Keene Congregational church choir director with whom he struck up a relationship. That case was prosecuted by McLaughlin and ended in a similar misdemeanor plea deal. And Plankey accused a local Job Corp supervisor of soliciting him. That was another misdemeanor case pursued by McLaughlin. Then he accused a man who picked him up hitchhiking of soliciting him.

It was only after the above interview that the claim of producing photographs was made. The priest was never charged with this because that would require producing some evidence. Instead, McLaughlin capitalized on it for a civil settlement for Plankey despite later revealing to The Wall Street Journal that the story was contrived and there was never any evidence of pornography. The story nonetheless had a long shelf life. It was used by Judge Arthur Brennan to enhance MacRae’s sentence after trial in 1994.

And it was used by David Clohessy at SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to bolster a Crimes Against Humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI in the International Criminal Court at The Hague. This aspect of McLaughlin’s handiwork was explored by journalist, Joann Wypijewski in “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

The Plankey case was among the files investigated by former FBI Special Agent Supervisor Jim Abbott, a specialist in counter-terrorism. Like most claimants, Jon Plankey took his money from the Diocese and disappeared. When Agent Abbott found him, Plankey refused to answer any questions without a lawyer. I had been writing about this matter and received an email message from Jon Plankey’s brother. Agent Abbott went to interview him and was told that the claims were a scam for settlement money. The brother said there is more to tell, but he, too, wanted money.

The Plea Deal Injustice

Damien Fisher relentlessly referenced Father MacRae’s post-trial acquiescence to a plea deal coerced by circumstances, presenting it as his sole evidence to bolster his implications that MacRae must be guilty. I do not want to belabor this point for I have written about it extensively already. When MacRae was convicted at trial — after Judge Arthur Brennan instructed the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in [accuser] Thomas Grover’s testimony” — he still faced additional “pile-on” charges from Grover’s brothers and two others who had climbed aboard for the inevitable monetary settlements.

When one of the newer accusers learned that MacRae was not likely to take any deal, he left the country to avoid testifying in a trial and he never filed his civil claim. Another accuser groomed by McLaughlin, Keene native Steven Wollschlager, received a summons to appear before a grand jury to indict the priest on a new charge.

Steven later went on to describe that he was solicited by McLaughlin to join other accusers in fabricating claims against MacRae. The enticement was a $50 bill and an assurance that a lot more money could be obtained in a civil lawsuit against the Church. When Steven balked, McLaughlin allegedly pointed out the girlfriend and child Steven had and said that life could be so much easier for them with a lot of money. Steven pondered this, and then agreed. He later described these meetings with McLaughlin:

“It was all about the lawsuits and the money. I was led to believe that all I had to do was make up a story about MacRae like others had done and I could obtain a lot of money. I was using drugs at the time and could have been influenced into saying anything they wanted for money.”

On the way to the court, Steven explained, he found his moral center and could not go through with it. He said that he knew MacRae as a teen and that the priest only tried to help him. He was told by an unnamed court official, “We won’t be needing anything further from you.”

When the trial was over, MacRae was penniless, abandoned by his Bishop and Diocese. He was placed in jail in custody until sentencing and had nowhere to turn. His lawyer resigned, exasperated at the three-ring circus in the trial and the lack of being allowed to put on an adequate defense. McLaughlin and prosecutors then offered MacRae another deal: a concurrent one-year sentence ending all remaining charges to be served simultanously with the sentence yet to be handed down in the Thomas Grover case.

MacRae’s trial lawyer, who left the trial before it was over, told MacRae in a telephone call from jail that he had no choice but to accept the deal. His bishop and Diocese, anxious to provide settlements and be rid of this, had issued a pre-trial press release declaring that the entire Catholic Church was victimized by MacRae. Everyone around him told him he had no choice. He went to the Court men’s room and vomited after entering his negotiated lie. I wrote extensively of this in “The Post-Trial Extortion of Fr. Gordon MacRae.”

All of this — my articles, the extensive coverage by The Wall Street Journal, the investigation by FBI Special Agent Jim Abbott, the polygraph examinations that Fr. MacRae passed conclusively, the findings of the National Center for Reason and Justice now sponsoring MacRae’s defense — has been in plain sight, readily available to Damien Fisher. He opted instead to spread another narrative, and God alone knows why.

There is more still, and it is coming. Perhaps the most egregious “evidence” cited by Damien Fisher came from supposed psychological evaluations of the accused priest. This will be the topic of a follow-up post next week in these pages.

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“In my three-year investigation of this matter, I have found no evidence that Gordon MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes.”

— Sworn Affidavit of former FBI Special Agent James Abbott

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Editor’s Note: Ryan A. MacDonald has written extensively on the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church. You may also be interested in these related posts.

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

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Some of Sigmund Freud’s map of the human psyche has been debunked in modern psychology, but Freud also knew well that some moral crusaders doth protesteth too much.

I have debated this post in my mind for days, arguing with myself whether I really wanted to write it. I have always dreaded offending people, and there’s just no way I’m going to be able to write this without someone feeling offended. But I also believe that simply not ever offending anyone is not a worthy goal for either a writer or a priest. I once asked a priest why he decided not to preach on the sanctity of life on “Respect Life Sunday.” He responded that he just doesn’t like offending anyone and someone is always offended when he preaches a pro-life homily. Sometimes, not offending anyone means avoiding ever speaking the truth.

It takes a degree of courage to point out the truth to ears that would rather not hear it. One newer reader of this blog has a recent example. Chris Tressa discovered Beyond These Stone Walls because Spero News reprints some of my posts. Spero News is sort of the online frontier. Like many sites, civil discourse takes a back seat to free flowing reader opinion. So Spero News  posts pretty much anything anyone wants to say.

We can’t really fault Spero News for this when standards for civil discourse don’t apply on many Catholic sites as well. Some of the comments posted on just about any subject in the Catholic Church by readers of the National Catholic Reporter  demonstrate the steep decline in online Catholic civility.

Spero News seems to have a lot of readers, but not a lot of comments. The relatively rare comments on my articles there are often printed and mailed to me. Some are very positive, but some are just outright attacks. I’m never offended, however. Invariably, the attacks are turned around by other readers and often backfire on their authors — who never identify themselves, by the way.

Sometimes this is even humorous. One writer identifying herself as an unnamed SNAP leader wrote in a comment that she finds it “despicable and deplorable” that an accused and convicted Catholic priest is given a voice online at a site called Beyond These Stone Walls. The sole comment posted in response made me laugh out loud:

“I clicked on that link and just spent several hours reading Beyond These Stone Walls. I found it to be riveting and uplifting. Thank you for telling us of this wonderful site.”

I don’t think that’s the response the SNAP writer hoped for, but Chris Tressa learned of BTSW in just that way. A man who leaves negative comments about priests throughout the Catholic online world posted a really toxic one on the Spero News reprint of one of my recent posts there. It was obvious that he didn’t actually read that post before spouting off, because he demonstrated in graphic prose the very points I set out to make. What was really of interest to me, however, was Chris Tressa’s comment in response:

“In one brief comment, the writer above used the term ‘pedophile priest’ five times, along with multiple variations of ‘child rape’ — all in just a few sentences of text. Who does that? To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘The man doth protesteth too much, me thinks!’ This sounds to me like classic reaction formation. Is it time to visit the shrink?”

From an analysis of typical comments in Catholic media, it might appear that a lot of people have ongoing and extremely negative views about Catholic priests. That may not be the case. What’s really going on is that a relatively small number of crusaders are “seeding” the Internet with their comments. If you take the time — and have the stomach for it — to track comments throughout the Catholic online world, and at mainstream media articles about Catholic scandal, you’ll see the same few screen names over and over.

They seem to be everywhere, and Chris Tressa ran into one of them. They are on a very personal crusade, but what makes this so personal for them? As Chris Tressa asked, “Who does that?” Is it because they are victims of sexual abuse? Perhaps so, but I know MANY adult victims of sexual abuse who are not crusaders. This prison and prisons everywhere are filled with men who were seriously victimized as children. A number of the readers and supporters of Beyond These Stone Walls  are survivors of childhood sexual abuse who resent the venom being spewed in their names.

But it’s also a fact that many of the most vocal crusaders at SNAP, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and Bishop-Accountability are not victims of sexual abuse. So what’s behind the nasty crusade of vilification and suspicion?

SNAP leaders offered to provide protesters with fake “Holy Childhood photos” to hold up for news cameras.

Classic Defense Mechanisms

We got a hint of the answer in the case of Dr. Steve Taylor, a Louisiana psychiatrist and member of SNAP who has been one of the more vocal advocates for an end to all civil rights for accused priests. Dr. Taylor has argued loudly for an end to any state respect for the seal of the Catholic confessional. Dr. Taylor was also the founder of a local chapter of SNAP. “We have faces now,” he bitterly exclaimed to legislators and news cameras while SNAP members held up the contrived “Holy Childhood photos” described in “SNAP Exposed” by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

Over the last three years, Dr. Steve Taylor has lost his medical license to practice psychiatry. He is now serving a sentence in a federal prison convicted on multiple charges of possessing child pornography.

Before he was sentenced to prison, SNAP founder Barbara Blaine and anti-Catholic author Jason Berry both pleaded for leniency for Dr. Taylor citing that his “problem” does not undo or overshadow all the good he has done. I had this solidly in mind when SNAP leaders vilified Bishop Robert Finn, charged with a misdemeanor for not reporting a priest fast enough when the priest was allegedly discovered with child pornography.

The crusade against accused priests that Dr. Steve Taylor was on has many of the elements of classic reaction formation, a concept first proposed by the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. His descriptions of human ego defense mechanisms and hysteria included this entirely unconscious phenomenon which he described as an attempt to cover up something unacceptable in oneself by adopting a stance in opposition to it. It is the formation of a reaction to an encounter with self. When something disdained is discovered there, defense mechanisms like reaction formation can develop into an elaborate ruse in which the thing feared in oneself becomes the thing attacked in others.

There are many modern examples. Congressman Mark Foley railed in Congress for bills targeting those who would sexually exploit young people. In 2006, Congressman Foley resigned after he was confronted with sending sexually explicit e-mail and text messages to teenage male pages working for the U.S. House of Representatives.

The televangelist scandals of the 1980’s involving famed TV preachers Jimmy Swaggart, PTL’s Jim Baker, and others also come to mind. Week after week, they railed against the licentiousness of the modern era while caught in their own sexual and financial scandals. Former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer mercilessly prosecuted officials caught in prostitution and other crimes before he was himself arrested in a prostitution sting. In the 1970’s, Covenant House Founder, Father Bruce Ritter testified before Congress to expose what he called the rampant exploitation of homeless youth on America’s streets only to leave the country when several of the very young people he claimed to be saving accused him of sexual abuse.

Debbie Nathan on “Sybil” and Hysteria

Much of what Sigmund Freud brought to the field of psychology and its understanding of hysteria has been debunked. One of the latest debunkings — and one of the finest — is a book by Debbie Nathan entitled Sybil Exposed (Free Press, 2011). Debbie Nathan serves on the advisory board of the National Center for Reason and Justice. (For full disclosure, I should tell you that this heroic organization endorses Beyond These Stone Walls and assists in sponsorship of my own defense).

Debbie Nathan is also the author (with Michael Snedeker) of an earlier landmark book, Satan’s Silence, which exposed the great fraud behind the ritual sex abuse stories of the 1980’s. Debbie Nathan continues this theme in Sybil Exposed, a riveting account of the fraud perpetrated in the story of Shirley Mason, known to the world as “Sybil.”  Debbie Nathan here exposes the truth behind the world’s most famous case of multiple personality ever brought to print and the silver screen.

Sybil, aided by an ambitious psychiatrist, claimed to have sixteen separate personalities brought on by a childhood traumatized by sexual and physical abuse. But Debbie Nathan exposed that it was all an elaborate hoax, a hoax that sold six million copies of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s 1973 book, Sybil. It turns out that neither the abuse nor the multiple personalities were real. In Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan has performed a great service to victims of the “hysteria prosecution” craze.

The story of Sybil was also a fraud on the American courts. The two decades from 1980 to 2000 saw multiple cases of “victims” claiming to have trauma-induced repressed and recovered memories of sexual abuse. Many men — including some Catholic priests — went to prison on those fraudulent claims. Some are still in prison. Writer Ryan MacDonald wrote of how the “psychological trauma” fraud played out in my own case in “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”

But “reaction formation,” one of Freud’s signature theories about hysteria and ego defense mechanisms, has survived all the debunking. One of the most advanced modern psychology studies demonstrating the power of reaction formation (Adams. Wright & Lohr, 1996) was on the topic of homophobia. It pointed out the difference between a moral belief that society should not promote homosexuality as a social good, and a more personal belief that society should persecute homosexuals. They are not one and the same. The 1996 study found that people who cross the line between a moral opposition and a moral crusade are often “protesting too much” a tendency in themselves that they find unacceptable.

Reaction formation also influences our views about what constitutes prejudice. Political or religious opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, is often — and wrongly — interpreted as active persecution and outright bigotry. I have known gay rights activists who interpret any opposition to their political goals and social agenda as religious persecution and a denial of their civil rights. This is the second way reaction formation is manifested. People who see all disagreement as judgment, condemnation, and persecution may really be passing judgment on themselves. I have read repeatedly that the Catholic Church “condemns gay people.” This is simply untrue.

Reaction Formation against Prejudice

American society since the 1960s has been especially conscious of any appearance of racial bias or prejudice, and has widely endorsed strong norms condemning prejudice. If Americans are led to believe that they may hold unacceptable prejudiced beliefs, or if they even believe that others are seeing them in this light, “they may respond with exaggerated displays of not being prejudiced” (Adams, Wright and Lohr, 1996).

The debate that surrounded same-sex marriage may have been an example of that response. When concerns were raised that same-sex marriage laws are an example of legislation and social reform by judicial fiat instead of by a democratic process, gay rights activists typically, and wrongly, dismissed the objection as bigotry. The media has given strength to that interpretation by underwriting it, and many Americans have withdrawn or silenced their opposition to same-sex marriage because of a politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced.

A striking example of how the fear of appearing prejudiced creates reaction formation is something that occurred in the Episcopal church in New Hampshire. The World Wide Anglican Communion has been in a state of civil war since the 2003 election of Bishop Gene Robinson. At the time he was nominated as bishop, he was a divorced, openly-gay man in a relationship with another man. This has played out in New Hampshire almost perfectly parallel to the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, but never the two shall meet.

And yet I have no doubt whatsoever that if Gene Robinson was not a gay man — if he was simply a heterosexual divorcee living with another woman, he would never have been a candidate for bishop in any U.S. Episcopalian diocese. This seems an example of a group so wishing to demonstrate its lack of prejudice that a new standard for its episcopacy was created. Bishop Robinson was not elected bishop in spite of being openly gay, but because of it. The global Anglican Communion has been torn asunder by this one example of reaction formation. Yet I have read repeatedly that one of the goals of “reform” groups like Voice Of the Faithful is to foster an American Catholic church that mirrors the Episcopal church and its “sensitivity” to politically correct American values. Thanks, but no thanks.

In New Hampshire, Bishop Gene Robinson campaigned for the passage of a same-sex marriage law. Once it was passed, he and his partner were among the first to enter a same-sex marriage in this state. Then he checked himself into rehab. Then he got divorced. Finally, having torn the entire Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder, he retired.

This same politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced has also radically altered the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. When the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was commissioned to study the causes and contexts, both the researchers and the bishops were left with a conundrum. The results were clear that this was not a crisis involving pedophilia as it is clinically defined — though that did exist on a much smaller scale. The problem was predominantly, and clearly, claims of homosexual predation of adolescent and young adult males during the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s. There is no greater evidence of the power of reaction formation than when an entire institution would prefer the term “pedophile scandal” to “homosexual scandal” even when the facts say otherwise.

Truth and honesty are truly golden things, and most of you, in your own heart of hearts, know them when you see them. We are in a culture, however, in which the views of many are manipulated by the agendas of a few. But sometimes the few are themselves manipulated by the quirks of their own psyches. Be wary of crusaders. Freud and Shakespeare both knew the truth about them. Sometimes they doth protesteth too much.

The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe

As Father Dominic Menna, a senior priest at Saint Mary’s in Quincy, MA, was sent into exile, The Boston Globe’s role in the story of Catholic Scandal grew more transparent.

“I’m a true Catholic, and I think what these priests are doing is disgusting!” One day a few weeks ago, that piece of wisdom repeated every thirty minutes or so on New England Cable News, an around-the-clock news channel broadcast from Boston. I wonder how many people the reporter approached in front of Saint Mary’s Church in Quincy, Massachusetts before someone provided just the right sound bite to lead the rabid spectacle that keeps 24-hour news channels afloat.

The priest this hapless “true Catholic” deemed so disgusting is Father F. Dominic Menna, an exemplary priest who has been devoting his senior years in service to the people of God at Saint Mary’s. At the age of 80, Father Menna has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

There is indeed something disgusting in this account, but it likely is not Father Menna himself. He has never been accused before. Some of the news stories have not even bothered to mention that the claim just surfacing now for the first time is alleged to have occurred in 1959. No, I did not transpose any numbers. The sole accusation that just destroyed this 80-year-old priest’s good name is that he abused someone fifty-one years ago when he was 29 years old.

Kelly Lynch, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston, announced that Father Menna was placed on administrative leave, barred from offering the Sacraments, and ordered to pack up and leave the rectory where he had been spending his senior years in the company of other priests. These steps, we are told, are designed to protect children lest this 80-year-old priest — if indeed guilty — suddenly decides to repeat his misconduct every half century or so.

Ms. Lynch declined to reveal any further details citing, “the privacy of those involved.” That assurance of privacy is for everyone except Father Menna, of course, whose now tainted name was blasted throughout the New England news media last month. Among the details Kelly Lynch declines to reveal is the amount of any settlement demand for the claim.

Some of the fair-minded people who see through stories like this one often compare them with the 1692 Salem witch trials which took place just across Massachusetts Bay from Father Menna’s Quincy parish. The comparison falls short, however. No one in 1692 Salem ever had to defend against a claim of having bewitched a child fifty-one years earlier.

Archdiocesan spokesperson Kelly Lynch cited “the integrity of the investigation” as a reason not to comment further to The Boston Globe. Does some magical means exist in Boston to fairly and definitively investigate a fifty-one year old claim of child abuse? Is there truly some means by which the Archdiocese could deem such a claim credible or not?

Ms. Lynch should have chosen a word other than “integrity” to describe the “investigation” of Father Menna. Integrity is the one thing no one will find anywhere in this account — except perhaps in Father Menna himself if, by some special grace, he has not utterly lost all trust in the people of God he has served for over fifty years. 

Transparency at The Boston Globe

The June 3rd edition of The Boston Globe  buried a story on page A12 about the results of an eight-year investigation into the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Eight years ago, it was front page news all over the U.S. that the Los Angeles Archdiocese was being investigated for a conspiracy to cover-up sexual abuse claims against priests.

After eight years of investigation at taxpayer expense, California prosecutors reluctantly announced last month that they have found insufficient evidence to support the charges. That news story was so obviously buried in the back pages of The Boston Globe  that the agenda could not be more transparent. The story of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is front page news only when it accommodates the newspaper’s editorial bias. That much, at least, is clear.

But all transparency ends right there. The Globe article attributed the lack of evidence of a conspiracy by Catholic bishops to the investigation being “stymied by reluctant victims.” Now, that’s an interesting piece of news!

The obvious question it raises is whether these claimants were reluctant to speak BEFORE obtaining financial settlements in their claims against the Archdiocese. If they are reluctant witnesses now, then, at best, it may be because the true goal of some has long since been realized and there is nothing in it for them to keep talking. At worst, the silence of claimants in the conspiracy investigation could be interpreted as an effort to fend off pointed questions about their claims. Perhaps prosecutors were investigating the wrong people.

I have seen this sort of thing play out before. Last year, a New Hampshire contingency lawyer brought forward his fifth round of mediated settlement demands against the Diocese of Manchester. During that lawyer’s first round of mediated settlements in 2002 — in which 28 priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused in claims dating from the 1950s to the 1980s — the news media announced a $5.5 million settlement. The claimants’ lawyer was astonished that $5.5 million was handed over with no real effort at proof or corroboration sought by Diocesan representatives before they paid up and deemed the claims “credible.” The lawyer was quoted in the news media:

“During settlement negotiations, diocesan officials did not press for details such as dates and allegations for every claim. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

— Mark Hayward, “NH Diocese will pay $5 million to 62 victims,” New Hampshire Union Leader, Nov. 27, 2002

“He and his clients did not encounter resistance from the Diocese of Manchester in their six months of negotiations. Some victims made claims in the last month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days.”

— Albert McKeon, “Settlement reached in abuse claims,” Nashua Telegraph, Nov. 27, 2002

That lawyer’s contingency fee for the first of many rounds of mediated settlements was estimated to be in excess of $1.8 million. When the mediation concluded, the news media reported that at the attorney’s and his clients’ request, the diocese agreed not to disclose the claimants’ names or any details of their claims or the amounts they received in settlement. “No confidentiality was sought by the Diocese,” the lawyer declared.

In contrast, the names of the accused priests — many of whom were deceased and none of whom faced criminal charges — were repeatedly released and publicized throughout the news media. This process served one purpose: to invite new claimants against those same priests with assurances that their names would remain private and no real corroborating details would ever be elicited. It was clear that non-disclosure clauses were demanded by the contingency lawyer and his clients, though the diocese and its lawyers were eager to oblige as part of the settlement.

It is fascinating that the news media now blames “reluctant victims” for stifling an investigation into cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That is a scandal worthy of the front page, but we won’t ever see it there. If the news media now has concerns about the very people whose cause it championed in 2002, we won’t be reading about it in the news media. Transparency in the news media, after all, is a murky affair.

Transparency and the U.S. Bishops

Writer Ryan A. MacDonald has a number of contributions published on These Stone Walls. His most recent is, “Should the Case Against Father Gordon MacRae Be Reviewed?” I am told that Mr. MacDonald has an essay published in the June/July, 2010 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review entitled, ”Anti-Catholicism and Sex Abuse.” In the essay, the writer also recommends These Stone Walls to H&PR readers. Though I subscribe to the well respected H&PR, I have not at this writing seen the current issue.

Ryan MacDonald also has a letter published in a recent issue of Our Sunday Visitor (“Raising the Alarm,” June 13, 2010). Ryan makes a point very similar to one I made last month in “As the Year of the Priest Ends, Are Civil Liberties for Priests Intact?” Here is an excerpt from Ryan’s OSV letter:

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“A number of courageous bishops have argued in opposition to retroactive application of revised civil statutes of limitations. Such revised statutes typically expose the Catholic Church to special liability while exempting public institutions.

“But I must raise the alarm here. As a body, American bishops lobbied the Holy See for retroactive extension of the time limits of prescription, the period of time in which a delict (a crime) exists and can be prosecuted under Church law …

“… Many accused priests now face the possibility of forced laicization with no opportunity for defense or appeal because our bishops have embraced routine dispensation from the Church’s own statute of limitations. The bishops cannot argue this point from two directions. Some have defended this duplicity citing that the delicts involve criminal and not civil matters. This is so, but these men are also American citizens, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits retroactive application of criminal laws as unconstitutional.

“Statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.  Our bishops cannot have it both ways on this issue.”

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Ryan MacDonald made this point far better than I ever could. The issue for me is not just the obvious double standard applied when the spirit of Church law is set aside. The issue is one of fundamental justice and fairness, and what Cardinal Dulles called “The great scandal of the Church’s failure to support Her priests in their time of need.” Pope John Paul II said that the Church must be a mirror of justice. Let’s hope our bishops can respond to the public scandal of sexual abuse without perpetrating a private scandal of their own.

There are people in groups like S.N.A.P. and Voice of the Faithful who clamor for the Church to ignore the rights of priests in favor of an open embrace of “survivors.” It is always easy to deny someone else’s rights and restrict someone else’s civil liberties, and that, historically, is how witch hunts begin.

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