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.

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.

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Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes

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

November 2, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

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

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

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

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

The Communion of Saints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Greater Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Viva Cristo Rey!”

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

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

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

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

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

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To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate

The Gospel of St. Luke for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time is a summons to enter the Kingdom of God through a narrow gate, but it requires shedding some baggage.

August 17, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Readers of a certain age who grew up in the United States might remember “S&H Green Stamps.” The Sperry and Hutchinson Company first introduced them in grocery stores in 1896 as promotional bonus awards to promote retail purchases. By World War II, gas stations and other retail outlets caught on. By 1960, ninety percent of U.S. retailers were awarding Green Stamps. In 1962, S&H issued more stamps that the U.S. Post Office.

My mother was a dedicated collector. About once a month, when I was seven or eight, I was cajoled into sitting at our kitchen table to paste the month’s supply of Green Stamps into collection booklets. When enough books were accumulated, they were taken to a place that I thought then to be magical. It was called the “S&H Redemption Center” where Green Stamps of dubious value could be redeemed for something new. S&H published the world’s largest catalog of redeemable items. It had a whole page of skateboards which had become all the rage in 1962. Alas, my mother passed it by in favor of a boring toaster.

By 1982, the year I became a priest — having never broken a bone because I never had a skateboard — Green Stamps disappeared from the retail landscape of America and our collective consciousness. The Redemption Centers are gone now, but hope for redemption never left and must never leave. Losing that hope would be catastrophic for humanity. We express that transforming hope every day, even if we do not realize it, and it is far more than a marketing ploy.

What do you mean when you pray, “Thy Kingdom Come,” “Adveniat Regnum Tuum”? It’s the third subordinate clause of the Lord’s Prayer, the “Pater Noster,” also known by its first two words of address in English, the “Our Father.” You pray, “Thy Kingdom Come” once at every Mass. If you pray the Rosary, you say it at least six times. A core expectation of the Gospel is that “The Kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:5). In Volume One of his great book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI described the implications for that statement:

“The core constant of the Gospel is this: The Kingdom of God is at hand. A milestone is set up in the flow of time; something new has taken place, and an answer to this gift is demanded of man: conversion and faith.” (p. 47)

The phrase “Kingdom of God” occurs 122 times in the New Testament. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) it is found 99 times and 90 of them are from the direct words of Jesus. In the post-Vatican II world, some came to believe that this expectation of the Kingdom of God is fulfilled and made manifest primarily in the Church. That may be true, but it is not the only truth as Pope Benedict explains in this surprising analysis:

“Instead of the great expectation of God’s own Kingdom, of a new world transformed by God himself we got something quite different, the Church! And what a pathetic substitute it is … Is changing the subject from the Kingdom of God to the genesis of the Church really just the collapse of a promise and the emergence of something else in its place?” ( p. 48)

The Cross and the Kingdom of God

The answer to that question depends on how we understand “Kingdom of God” as Jesus meant it. As Pope Benedict asked: “Is Jesus just a messenger charged with representing a cause that is ultimately independent of him, or is the messenger himself the message?” In other words, is Jesus Himself the Kingdom of God?

In the Gospel, “Kingdom of God” and “Kingdom of Heaven” refer to the same destination. Heaven — which I always capitalize — is distinct from “the heavens” which refer to the material universe. “Kingdom of Heaven” is not uttered as a substitute for God, but is rather in respect for the Jewish tradition that the name of God was not to be uttered or written. This is why you may often see Hebrew scholars write G-d in place of God.

Among the Fathers of the Church, Origen, in his early Second Century treatise, On Prayer, wrote,

“Those who pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God pray without any doubt for the Kingdom of God that is contained in themselves. For in every holy person it is God who reigns and has dominion. So let God stroll in us as a spiritual paradise and rule in us with his Christ.”

The idea of that beautiful image is that the Kingdom of God is not found on any map. It is not the kingdom of a fallen world. It is Christ himself and the extent to which he lives in us. So even if there is doubt that the Kingdom of God somehow touches my life, at least there is always hope. Just like most of you, I, too, struggle with that hope.

I think that most of our readers have come to understand that I have had my share of hardship. To be falsely accused and cast into prison for the last 28 years and counting seems the equivalent of living on the wrong side of a rather famous parable. It is one of the parables that most represents life in the Kingdom of God as it exists in the here and now. It involves choices. Commonly known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, it is more accurately called the Parable of a Man Beaten by Robbers and Left for Dead.

The parable, found in Luke 10:25-37, begins with a question posed by a lawyer/Pharisee, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer, an expert in Hebrew Scripture, already knows the answer but he poses his question “to put Jesus to the test.” So Jesus answers the famous question with one of his own. “What is written in the law?” The lawyer responds correctly by combining two verses from the Hebrew Scriptures which were very familiar to Jesus:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” (Deuteronomy 6:5) “and your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

Elsewhere, in Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus called these two Scripture verses “the greatest Commandment,” the one upon which all others depend. The Ten Commandments and the 613 precepts of the Mosaic Law — all the dietary and ritual laws of purity in the life of Israel — are distilled into striving for these two. Love of God and Mercy to others are the towering rules of the Kingdom of God.

In the parable itself, the man beaten by robbers and left at the side of the road is simply passed over by a priest and a Levite. The lawyer hearing this understands well that their religious duty, written in the laws of ritual purity described above, requires them not to touch the body of a dead or dying man. The Samaritan, on the other hand, is already an outcast from the religious practice of Israel, and is thus the only one free to show mercy.

The lawyer/Pharisee hearing this Parable would find it painfully familiar. It recalls a very similar story from the Second Book of Chronicles (28:8-15). About 1,000 years before Jesus told this parable, a group of people from the Kingdom of Judah were assailed and captured by the Northern Israelite army. Four men from Samaria came upon the beaten captives. The four Samaritans clothed, fed, and, anointed them, and placing them upon their own beasts of burden, took them peacefully to Jericho. The fact that the parable had a precedent deep in the history of Israel would have crushed the lawyer’s resistance to the story of grace imparted by way of mercy.

The Narrow Gate

The question posed by the lawyer/Pharisee that opens the Parable of the Man Beaten by Robbers is very similar to one posed in the Gospel at Mass on the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time. Jesus had just described the Kingdom of God as being “like leaven.” Leaven used in dough is a rising agent. So what is it about the Kingdom of God that gives rise to it like leaven? He earlier refers to the kingdom as “like a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds that grow into great trees where birds may make their nests.”

Then a question was posed. “Lord, will those who are saved be few? (Luke 13:23) The response of Jesus that follows has been disheartening for many, but I believe it is misunderstood:

“Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter but will not be able.” He then went on to talk about weeping and gnashing of teeth and “seeing Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God and you yourself cast out” (Luke 22:28). Not exactly a hopeful narrative.

The place I turn to for context is one that I have written about before. It is the story of the only human being, at first glance a seemingly unlikely one, who was directly given salvation and eternal life in the Gospel. I wrote of the story of this man in “Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found.”

In Jesus of Nazareth Volume II: Holy Week Pope Benedict XVI wrote of that same account: “Of the two men crucified with Jesus, only one joins in mocking him. The other grasps the mystery of Jesus.” To do so while in the middle of one’s own crucifixion is the most hopeful and encouraging image that I have found in all of Sacred Scripture. The crucified Dismas asks but one thing, and it is not deliverance from his cross. He asks only, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”

Clearly, while on the cross, the penitent Dismas realized that this powerless man beside him is a true king. He wanted to be at this man’s side in both crucifixion and in Glory. The simple response of Jesus recognized both the weight of this man’s cross and the depth of his conversion and transformation: “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43).

The Greek word Luke’s Gospel used in describing what this man will encounter that day is “Paradeisos.” It is used only three times in the New Testament and was first used in all of Sacred Scripture in Genesis 2:8 where it refers to the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. There is no talk between Jesus and Dismas of weeping and gnashing of teeth, nor is there any mention of entering the Kingdom through the narrow door. Jesus promises to this repentant man nothing less than life in the eternal dwelling place of God.

There are hints for this through Scripture: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.” (John 14:6-7). This conveys to me a truth that Dismas Crucified to the Right, came to see only from his own cross.

Jesus does not have a map to the narrow gate, nor is he a key to it. He is not even a ticket through it. Dismas discovers on his cross that Jesus is Himself the Narrow Gate to the Kingdom of Heaven, the only passageway from this life to eternal life. It could not be clearer.

So our only task is to follow Him, to imitate Him, and not even perfectly because He knows we can do nothing perfectly. What he seeks in us is mercy in our hearts, the knowledge that the measure with which we measure will be measured back to us. This is the leaven, the stuff that expands the Kingdom of God within us.

Strive to enter through the Narrow Gate.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post which will be placed in our Library Categories, Catholic Spiritual Life and Sacred Scripture. You may also want to visit — or revisit — these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found

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

To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

Please visit our “Special Events” Page for ways to help us bring mercy to those left on the side of the road.

Courtesy of L’Obsservatore Romano

Shaming Benedict XVI, Catholic Schism, Cardinal Zen Arrested

Benedict XVI and a Threat of Catholic Schism — 92 Bold Bishops — Communist China Arrests Cardinal Zen

May 18, 2022

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This is an unusual post. I set out to revisit a few topics of the last several months that have had new and important developments. I ended up writing three short posts which I invite you to read either all at once or over the next few days. There is a lot going on, not least of which is some breaking news. Our friend, Catholic League President Bill Donohue has just received a Doctorate of Laws Honoris Causa and offered the Commencement Address at Florida’s Ave Maria University School of Law on May 14. This underscores the importance of Religious Liberty which is Dr. Donohue’s field of expertise. If you are not yet a member of the Catholic League, remember that it is on the front lines protecting our Religious Freedom.

Pope Benedict XVI and That German Inquisition

In early March, 2022, I posted “Benedict XVI Faces the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.” Armed with partisan agendas and an ideological bias, a commission of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising where Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger served as Archbishop in 1980 has accused him of deceit and a sexual abuse cover-up.

This was solely because the elderly Pope Emeritus could not readily recall a 1980 meeting in which an accused priest was reportedly discussed. The progressive and partisan news media capitalized on this to embarrass the elderly Benedict whose painful response spoke volumes about his effort to satisfy the pernicious detractors. Here is an excerpt of his response:

“In addition to responding to the questions posed ... this also demanded reading and analyzing almost 8,000 pages of documents ... and almost 2,000 pages of expert opinion. Amid the massive work, an oversight occurred regarding my participation in the chancery meeting of 15 January 1980. This error was not intentionally willed. To me it has proved deeply hurtful that this oversight was used to cast doubt on my truthfulness and even to label me a liar.”

Statement of Pope Emeritus Benedict, 8 February 2022

Even if the allegations had substance (they do not), this decades-old expedition and revisionist history had the tone and substance of a witch hunt demanding answers out of context for the apparent purpose of isolating and demeaning Pope Benedict.

So why did this inquisition stop there? If it dug back just another forty years it would have faced a reckoning with the Germany of 1942 when vast-atrocities visited upon the Children of Yahweh were amply documented and are globally known. With what moral authority does Germany now point a finger of blame at Benedict for being unable to recall a decades-old meeting?

It turns out, however, that the claims were not true. In a follow-up statement, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, longtime personal secretary to Pope Benedict, addressed the political, moral and spiritual depravity of those pointing these fingers of blame. Here is an excerpt of Archbishop Gänswein’s Statement:

“Benedict denied personally mishandling abuse cases ... in a letter compiled by-four lawyers acting on Benedict’s behalf. The three canonists and one attorney said that all four charges made against him were false. Benedict’s enemies nevertheless used the error to launch attacks on the Pope Emeritus with theologians and others accusing him of lying and perjury.”

Pope Benedict added to his response that, “I have come to increasingly appreciate the repugnance and fear that Christ felt on the Mount of Olives when he saw all the dreadful things that he would have to endure inwardly.”

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Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas

A Push-Back from 92 Bold Bishops

In this shameful debacle, Benedict was the only one talking about Christ. None of these accusers ever even mention God, or Jesus, or fidelity to the Church as they prop up their own progressive agenda.

It did not take long for the true agenda to be unmasked. In the same week as this condemnation of Benedict, a meeting of Germany’s “Synodal Path” declared its support for same-sex unions, sweeping revisions in Church teaching on homosexuality and priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, lay involvement in the selection of bishops, and other signs of a post-Catholic “woke” agenda.

After I first wrote about this story in March, 2022, several Catholic clergy from Germany shared my post with other German clergy and on social media. I had already been banned from Facebook for another post about events in Germany entitled, “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

Some of the German clergy bravely disseminated that post as well. On April 11, 2022, a group of 92 bold bishops from the United States, Canada, and around the world signed “A Fraternal Open Letter to Our Brother Bishops in Germany.” I recommend reading the letter. Here is an important excerpt:

“Events in Germany compel us to express our growing concern about the nature of the entire German Synodal Path process and the content of its various documents ... The urgency of our joint remarks is rooted in Romans 12 and especially St. Paul’s caution: ‘Do not be conformed to this world.’ And their seriousness flows from the confusion that the Synodal Path has already caused and continues to cause, and the potential for schism in the life of the Church that will inevitably result.”

The letter briefly lays out seven areas of specific concern. In his weekly podcast carried by LifeSiteNews, Tyler, Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland explained why he was one of the bishops to sign that letter:

“It should be every bishop, in my opinion, and it’s because we are being bishops. Bishops are to guard the deposit of faith. It’s a promise we made. And frankly, the Synodal Path of Germany is doing the opposite. It is eroding the deposit of faith, saying, ‘It’s all up for grabs.’”

It is encouraging that 92 brave and faithful bishops signed that open letter. Some of our readers have penned letters to their own bishops asking for a reason why they did not sign the letter. To date, none have reported receiving any reply.

From my perspective, the bishops of Germany — and too many in the United States and other nations — are failing to read and interpret the writing on the wall. The agenda of the bishops of Germany is barely distinguishable from the one being imposed on our culture by “woke” politicians. I wrote of that agenda in “The Woke Have Commenced our Totalitarian Re-Education.”

I would say that it’s all very scary except that voters across the land, in the United States at least, are amassing to trounce that trend and vote its political proponents out of office. One of the demands of the German bishops is more lay involvement in the selection of bishops. If recent polls are any predictor, the bishops of Germany should be careful what they ask for.

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The Chinese Communist Imprisonment of Joseph Cardinal Zen

Having suppressed pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party arrested 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen for loyalty to his faith even when Rome did not reciprocate.

As an unjustly imprisoned Catholic priest, I simply could not let this story go. Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, has been arrested on a charge of conspiracy to engage with foreign powers. To date, Pope Francis has said nothing in support of him other than a vague statement of “concern” and “monitoring the situation.” The rest of the Roman Curia is also keeping its distance. Cardinal Zen was released on bail pending a one-sided trial on the charges. Based solely on the fact that he is a faithful Catholic priest and prelate, he is widely expected to be easily convicted and imprisoned for life. He is facing martyrdom.

In early 2020 I published at my blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, “Catholics, Communist China, and Hope for Hong Kong,” by my friend, James W. Harris. James is a former resident of China where he taught English at the Hua Mao Foreign Language School. His post is a well written eye-opener from someone with firsthand experience of life as a Catholic under a repressive Communist regime.

In 2018, as that post describes, the Vatican signed a concordat with the Chinese Communist Government. The terms of the agreement are still not made public, but the most well known concession hands over the selection of Catholic bishops to the Communist regime instead of the Holy See. Bishops are thus chosen from the state sanctioned church under the authority of Beijing instead of the underground Church that remains loyal to Rome even when Rome has not remained loyal to it.

After the James Harris post was published, much of what it predicted would happen did happen. Once the Vatican concessions were in place, the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China launched a wave of suppression including disappearances of priests, destruction of churches, and forced removal of crosses and other Catholic symbols.

In follow-up comments on social media regarding that post, I wrote (with the help of third parties, of course) about Beijing’s newest demand. Beginning in March 2020, Catholics in China must profess that ultimate authority rests not with God or the Church, but with the Chinese Communist Party.

The Vatican-China deal stands in stark contrast to the papacy of Saint John Paul II who boldly confronted communism in Western Europe. He is widely believed today to have been an essential force in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sticking my own neck out perhaps a bit too far, I can only conclude that the concordat signed by Pope Francis is reminiscent of the Chief Priest's response to Pilate (John 19:15), “We have no king but Xi Jinping.”

In the February 18, 2020 edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of my favorite columnists, William McGurn, wrote “The Vatican’s Unholy China Deal.” You may not be able to view it without a subscription so I will mention its major points. It begins with a pointed statement of Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong from his September 2019 appeal to the world’s 223 cardinals:

“The Catholic Church in China is being murdered while the Vatican stands idly by.”

In 2020 Cardinal Zen was invited to Washington, DC where he was presented with the Chinese Democracy Champion Prize. It was much deserved. Bill McGurn had an opportunity to interview him and asked about his “murder” remark. Cardinal Zen’s reply was that of a courageous man, a prelate worthy of the Church’s history of pushing back against oppression and violations of human rights:

“You can never compromise with a totalitarian regime because they want everything. Would you have encouraged St. Joseph to have negotiated with Herod?”

WSJ columnist Bill McGurn points out that the Vatican-China agreement was exclusively the work of European bureaucrats to the almost complete exclusion of Chinese Catholics — including Cardinal Zen. He likened it to the 1933 concordat that Germany struck with the Vatican when Hitler came to power. Both Cardinal Zen and Bill McGurn omit any mention that the groundwork for this deal was laid for the Vatican by then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sent by Pope Francis as an emissary to China.

In 1933, Church authorities questioned the Third Reich’s post-concordat abuses. In response, the Nazi Party launched a deadly campaign of persecution. I wrote of this in “Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz.” Under Xi Jinping in China, increased persecution also followed the current agreement. The Vatican may be trying to protect lives by being silent, but the True Church of China will not be silent — as evident in the courage of Cardinal Zen. For him, the price extracted from all this has been high: “the pope’s silence.” But Bill McGurn is more pointed:

“Yet the leader of the world’s largest religious denomination — a pope who rails against everything from air conditioning to Donald Trump — utters not a peep of protest against what is arguably the world’s largest persecutor of religion.”

I have a close friend in Shanghai, China, a city of 25 million that has recently been subjected to a severe and extended lockdown. My friend was well on his way to a Catholic conversion. After several years of ongoing contact in our friendship, my calls to him are now diverted to some unknown third party. My letters never arrive. My publications are blocked. My friend had never even heard of the 1989 slaughter of pro-Democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, nor had he ever seen the famous photo of the protester known only as “Tank Man.”

The much feared pro-democracy protests that spread from Hong Kong to mainland China have now completely stopped. The once international city of Hong Kong has been brought to heel. The Catholic Church has been subjugated to the will of the Chinese Communist Party. The arrest and persecution of his Eminence Joseph Cardinal Zen is but the latest trophy for Communism resurgence in the world.

Let us pray for Cardinal Zen. Saint Pope John Paul II, please pray for the rest of us.

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ADDENDUM MAY 19, 2022:

NEWS ALERT ON CARDINAL ZEN FROM LIFESITENEWS

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Another note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this collection of short takes from Beyond These Stone Walls. Remember that our Special Events page remains active until the Solemnity of Pentecost. You may also like these related posts:

Benedict XVI Faces the Cruelty of a German Inquisition

The “Woke” Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education

Stones for Pope Benedict and the Rusty Wheels of Justice

Following revelations about possible deliverance after 28 years of wrongful imprisonment, hope is hard to come by, but it was not so for Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

February 9, 2022

“This prisoner of the State remains, against all probability, staunch in spirit, strong in the faith that the wheels of justice turn, however slowly.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, “The Trials of Father MacRae,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013

When this blog was but a year old back in 2010, my friend and prison roommate, Pornchai Moontri, was received into the Catholic faith. He was 36 years old and it was his 18th year in prison. Everyone who knew him, except me, thought his conversion seemed quite impossible. Pornchai does not have an evil bone in his body, but his traumatic life had a profound effect on his outlook on life and his capacity for hope. There is simply no point in embracing faith without cultivating hope. The two go hand in hand. We cannot have one without the other.

To sow the seeds of hope in Pornchai, I had to first reawaken hope from its long dormant state in my own life as a prisoner. I am not entirely sure that I have completed that task. It seems a work in progress, but Pornchai’s last words to me as he walked through the prison gates toward freedom on September 8, 2020 were, “Thank you for giving me hope.” I wrote of that day in “Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

A decade earlier, back in April of 2010, Pornchai entered into Communion with the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday. On the night before, he asked me a haunting question. It was what I call one of his “upside down” questions. As he pondered what was to come, his head popped down from his upper bunk so he appeared upside down as he asked it. “Is it okay for us to hope for a happy ending when Saint Maximilian didn’t have one?” Pornchai had a knack for knocking me off the rails with questions like that.

Before responding, I had to do some pondering of my own. Our Patron Saint lost his earthly life at age 41 in a Nazi concentration camp starvation bunker. His death was followed by his rapid incineration. All that Maximilian Kolbe was in his earthly existence went up in smoke and ash to drift in the skies above Auschwitz, the most hopeless place in modern human history.

Retroactive Guilt and Shame

What I am about to write may seem horribly unpopular with those harboring an agenda against Catholic priests, but popularity has never been an important goal for me. In recent weeks, the news media has trumpeted a charge launched by a commission empowered by some Catholic officials in Germany. The commission’s much-hyped conclusion was that Pope Benedict was negligent when he did not remove four priests quickly enough after suspicions of abuse forty-one years ago in 1981. Some of my friends have cautioned me to stay out of this. Perhaps I should listen.

But I won’t. At what point do we cease judging men of the past for not living up to the ideals and politically correct sensitivities of the present? Merely asking that question puts me in the crosshairs of our victim culture, but it also forces me to ask another. Go back just another forty-one years and you will find yourself amid the hopelessness of 1941 as the children of Yahweh suffered unspeakable crimes in Germany and Poland. Where do we draw the line of historic condemnation? Should the German Church stop with Joseph Ratzinger in 1981?

The condemnation of Pope Benedict called for by some media and German officials today should be seen through the lens of history. It is a part of our hope as Catholics and as human beings that neither Pope Benedict nor the German people would act today as they did — or allowed to be done — forty or eighty years ago. The real target of such pointless inquiry and blame was not Pope Benedict, but rather hope itself.

I think we have to be clear in our response which should include something about the splinters in our eyes and the planks in the eyes of those pointing misplaced fingers of blame. Perhaps the moral authority that chastises Pope Benedict today in Germany doth protesteth too much. A new book by historian Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 marshals a plethora of facts and critical skills of historical writing to portray the postwar “country’s stubborn inclination toward willful delusion.”

Thank you for indulging my brief tirade. Catholic League President Bill Donohue also came to the defense of Pope Benedict by shedding some light of historical context on the matter.

Hope Is Its Own Fulfillment

But back to Father Maximilian Kolbe. On the day of Pornchai’s Baptism, I responded to his question. I told him, “YOU are Maximilian’s happy ending!” Eighty-one years after his martyrdom at Auschwitz, the world honors him while the names of those who destroyed him have simply faded into oblivion. No one honors them. No one remembers them. God remembers. Their footprint on the Earth left only sorrow.

St. Maximilian Kolbe is the reason why I was compelled to set aside my own quest for freedom — which seemed utterly hopeless the last time I looked — in order to do what Maximilian did: to save another.

In all the anguish of the last two years as deliverance and freedom slowly came to Pornchai Moontri, the clouds of the past that overshadowed him began to lift. My prayer had been constant, and of a consistently singular nature: “I ask for freedom for Pornchai; I ask for nothing for myself.”

I am no saint, but that is what St. Maximilian did, and it seemed to be my only path. But since then that 2013 quote atop this post from The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz has once again become my reality. As you know if you have been reading these pages in recent weeks, a frenzy of action and high anxiety has surrounded the recent release of the New Hampshire ‘Laurie List,’ known more formally as the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. If you somehow missed the earthquake that struck from Beyond These Stone Walls in January, I wrote about it in Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell. 

I am most grateful to readers for making the extra effort to share that post. It was emailed by Dr. Bill Donohue to the entire membership of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It indeed came as a bombshell to me and to many. Just as the frenzy began to subside, Ryan MacDonald stirred it up again in his brilliant analysis with a very pointed title: “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

I am not entirely sure that “destroys” is the right term to use, but I understand where he is coming from. To survive twenty-eight years of wrongful imprisonment means relegating a lot of one’s sense of self to the ash heap of someone else’s oppression. Many of those who spend decades in prison for crimes they did not commit lose their minds. Many also lose their faith, and along with it, all hope.

I have to remind myself multiple times a day that nothing is a sure thing anymore — neither prison nor freedom. I keep asking myself how much I dare to trust hope again. To quote the late Baseball Hall of Famer, Yogi Berra, this all feels “like deja vu all over again.”

Deja vu is a French term which literally means “to have seen before.” It is the strange sensation of having been somewhere before, or having previously experienced a current situation even though you know you have not. It is a phenomenon of neuropsychology that I have experienced all my life. About 15 percent of the population has that experience on occasion.

A possible explanation of deja vu is that aspects of the current situation act as retrieval cues in the psyche that unconsciously evoke an earlier experience long since receded from conscious memory, but resulting in an eerie sense of the familiar. It feels more strange than troublesome. I have a lifelong condition called Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) which makes me prone to the experience of deja vu, but no one knows exactly why.

When Disappointments of the Past Haunt the Present

This time, my deja vu is connected to real events of the past, and the origin of my caution about current hope is found there. If you have read an important post of mine entitled “Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester,” then you may recall this story. In 2003 and 2004, the New Hampshire Attorney General conducted an intense one-sided investigation of my diocese, the Diocese of Manchester. When it was over, the former Bishop of Manchester signed a blanket release disposing of the privacy rights of priests of his diocese.

In 2021, when I wrote the above post, New Hampshire Judge Richard B. McNamara ruled that the 2003 public release of one-sided documents should have been barred under New Hampshire law because it was an abuse of the grand jury system and it denied basic rights of due process to those involved.

At the time this all happened in 2003, a Tennessee lawyer and law firm cited in a press statement that what happened in this diocese was unconstitutional. I contacted the lawyer who subsequently took a strong interest in my own case. He flew to New Hampshire twice to visit me in prison. I sent him a vast amount of documentation which he found most compelling. After many months of cultivated hope, he sent me a letter indicating that he would soon send a Memorandum of Understanding that I was to sign laying out the parameters under which he would represent me pro bono because I have not had an income for decades.

I waited. I waited a long time, but the Memorandum never came. Without explanation or communication of any kind, the lawyer and the hope he brought simply faded away. Letter after letter remained unanswered. It was inexplicable. It was at this same time that Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal published a two-part exposé, A Priest’s Story, on the perversion of justice that became apparent in their independent review of this matter. Those articles were actually published a few years after they were first planned. This was because the reams of supporting documents requested and collected by the newspaper were destroyed in the collateral damage of the terrorist attacks in New York of September 11, 2001.

Then in 2012, new lawyers filed an extensive case for Habeas Corpus review of my trial and imprisonment. It is still available at the National Center for Reason and Justice which mercifully still advocates for justice for me. However that effort failed when both State and Federal judges declined to allow any hearing that would give new witnesses a chance to testify under oath.

Now, in 2022 in light of this new ray of hope, some of the people involved in Beyond These Stone Walls have expressed frustration with my caution and apparent pessimism. I have not been as enthused as they have been over the hope arising from the current situation. Hope for me has been like investing in the stock market. Having lost everything twice, I am hesitant to wade too far into the waters of hope again.

I know only too well, however, that hope at times such as these is like that which both Pornchai Moontri and I once found in our Patron Saint. I wrote about it in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

So in spite of myself, I am now aboard this new train of hope and must go where it takes me. That, for now, is the best that I can do. My prayer has not changed. I ask for nothing for myself, but I will take whatever comes.

I thank you, as I have in the past, for your support and prayers and for being here with me again at this turning of the tide. I will keep you posted, but it won’t be quick. Real hope never is.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please visit our newest addition to the BTSW menu: The Wall Street Journal. You may also wish to visit these relevant posts cited herein:

Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance