Iran, by Another Name, Was Once the Savior of Israel

A story out of time for our time: The Prophet Isaiah wrote of Cyrus, King of Persia (now Iran) who knew not God but was chosen by God to restore freedom to Israel.

June 25, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

It is hard for me to NOT write about some developments especially when they fall within the realm of human rights and religious freedom. If I fail to address what seems to engulf the attention of entire nations, then I feel as though I am overlooking the elephant in the sacristy. The world was riveted to events in Iran, Israel, and the United States on Saturday, June 21, 2025. There is a backstory that rises up out of ancient times in the same place where nuclear Armageddon was possibly prevented on that day.

This post is about Cyrus the Great, the Sixth Century BC conqueror and King of the Persian Empire in what is now modern day Iran. King Cyrus is the subject of a reading from the Prophet Isaiah (45:1):

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”

Read on, please, because this Cyrus, pulled from the pages of Biblical history as the ancestor of contemporary Iran, was once the salvation of Israel.

In Defense of Jerusalem

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, subduing nations before him, and making kings run in his service, opening doors before him, and leaving the gates unbarred: For the sake of Jacob, my servant, of Israel, my chosen one, I have called you by your name, giving you a title, though you knew me not. I am the Lord and there is no other; there is no God besides me. It is I who arm you, though you know me not, so that toward the rising and the setting of the sun people may know that there is none besides me. I am the Lord. There is no other.”

— Isaiah 45:1, 4-6

There is little known of the Prophet Isaiah except that he lived in Jerusalem and his prophetic activity extended from about 740 BC to 701 BC, a period of about forty years. In the passage above, the Lord, through Isaiah, is addressing a man named Cyrus who is called by God and given power and a title, “though you knew me not.” The power and authority given to Cyrus is not for Cyrus, but rather so that “the people may know that there is none besides me. I am the Lord.”

Two centuries after the prophesies of Isaiah, in 597 BC, Israel fell under the armies of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. This account, told in the Second Book of Kings (Ch. 24ff) resulted in two waves of exile of the Jews into Babylon. In the first wave, in 597 BC, Israel’s leaders were compromised and taken away. This undermining of the leaders was for the purpose of destroying the religious identity of the people. Then, in 586 BC, the real devastation came. Babylon destroyed the Temple and the entire city of Jerusalem, and sent the remaining Jews into exile.

Then, some two centuries after first appearing in the prophecy of Isaiah, God took the right hand of a man named Cyrus, who knew not God, and subdued nations before him, placed kings in his service, opened doors and unbarred gates just as predicted. Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and all its surrounding regions to become first King of the Persian Empire — which again includes present-day Iran. Cyrus did not live a lifestyle that the People of God had any reason to respect. He did not appear to believe in anything but himself.

But Cyrus had one quirky trait that seemed to have been instilled in him by a much Higher Authority. Despite his personally sinful lifestyle and quest for Earthly powers, Cyrus developed a deep respect for the Jews and their Faith, even though he personally shared in none of it. The Lord God had groomed him, knocked down kingdoms before him, so Cyrus did what only the Emperor of the Persian Empire could do. He issued an edict ordering the reconstruction of the city of Jerusalem and its Temple, and he returned the Chosen People from their fifty-year exile in 539 BC to the land of Israel earning him an honored place in Judaism and Salvation History as Israel’s Redeemer.

The Prophet Ezra and the Decree of Cyrus

The Prophet Isaiah presents Cyrus as appearing in about 545 BC as the hope for Jerusalem. He is bestowed by Isaiah with a rather lofty title, “the anointed of Yahweh.” Such a title marked the beginning of the Age of Messianic Prophecy for Israel. The title would have been seen as a great insult to the Jews, but in forced exile they came to view Cyrus for his present actions and not his past pursuits. Isaiah (44:28) expanded his title to “Shepherd of Israel,” in recognition of the strangest trait that was found in him: his almost obsessive insistence on the promotion of religious liberty and the establishment of laws that will guarantee and protect it for the Jewish People and for Israel.

In regard to the restoration of Israel, this hope was fulfilled in 538 BC when Cyrus ordered the protection of the Jews and their return to Jerusalem to oversee the rebuilding of their Temple from the treasury of the Persian Empire. The full text of the Decree of Cyrus appears in the Book of the Prophet Ezra (6:3-5), a passage once doubted for its authenticity but now accepted as authentic by modern Scripture scholars:

“In the first year of Cyrus the King, a decree concerning the House of God in Jerusalem: Let the House be rebuilt, the place where sacrifices are offered and burnt offerings are brought. Its height shall be sixty cubits and its breadth sixty cubits with three courses of great stone and one course of timber. Let the cost be paid from the royal treasury. And also let the gold and silver vessels of the House of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took out of the Temple and brought to Babylon, be restored to Israel and returned to the Temple in Jerusalem, each to its place in the House of God.”

— Ezra 6:3-5

The Prophet Ezra went on to describe that some of the restoration of Jerusalem was interrupted by local vassal kings who did not believe that the conquering tyrant, Cyrus, would issue such an order. A complaint was made by a local governor to Darius I, King of Hystaspis, that the Jews were rebuilding the city. Darius then found an authenticated copy of the Decree of Cyrus, and ordered that the Temple and reconstruction of the city will be continued with no further hindrance. This was the same King Darius, by the way, who threw Daniel in the lions’ den (Daniel 6:6ff).

Is there a point of understanding to be considered from all this in our present time? Only you can arrive at such a conclusion. I have already arrived at mine, and I must come down on the side of religious liberty and those, some of whom knew not God, who are nonetheless chosen and set in place to bring it about for those in Covenant with God.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post, which strives to bring context out of the past and into the present for a story that is consuming our news. In the Seventh Century AD, some 1,200 years after the events described in this post, Arabs brought Islam to the Middle East and it spread.

You might also like these related posts out of history:

Behold the Lamb of God Upon the Altar of Mount Moriah

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility

On Good Authority, “Salvation Is from the Jews”

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation

The discovery of cosmic ripples from the birth of the Universe is evidence beyond reasonable doubt of the Big Bang theory first proposed by Fr Georges Lemaitre (pictured above with Albert Einstein and Fr Andrew Pinsent)

June 18, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

— Genesis 1:1-3

When my friend Augie was back in 2014, he used to like to stop by my room to compare notes about our favorite TV shows. We had been mesmerized by the return of Jack Bauer’s 24 back then, and we were eagerly awaiting the extra-terrestrial return of Falling Skies. One day when Augie came by my door he asked, “What do you think of The Big Bang Theory? “ I was so glad he asked. I launched into a 15-minute analysis of the science of modern cosmology and the meaning of the so-called Big Bang for both science and faith. When I finished, Augie looked dazed and said, “Umm…I meant the TV show!”

Then Mike Ciresi (“Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind”) stopped by and asked, “What are you writing about this week?” “The Big Bang Theory,” I replied, hoping for another chance to spout off my explanation of the Cosmos. “Oh, I LOVE that show,” said Mike as he made a hasty retreat.

Okay, what had I been missing? Despite its being the most watched show on television, I had never seen an episode of the CBS hit, “The Big Bang Theory.” So I watched a few reruns. The show turned all social science on its head. I had no idea nerds were now “in!” And they even had girlfriends! Nerdhood had sure changed since I studied physics!

Alas, however, it was the OTHER Big Bang theory that I am taking on this week, but I implore you not to click me away just yet. I MUST write about this, and I hope you will read on. I am not quite as funny as Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj, and of course Penny! I can only be that funny when I’m trying hard NOT to be funny! Like now!

I must write about the Big Bang theory for two reasons. First and foremost, a new discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation was big news a few years ago because it lent evidence beyond reasonable doubt to the truth of the science behind the Big Bang, a discovery first proposed by a Catholic priest who turned Twentieth Century cosmology on its head. I want to write about what this means for both the science of cosmology and the faith that we have all invested into a notion that this Universe was created by God. I will get back to that.

Finally, I must write about this because I was somehow thrown into the ring of debate about what it all means. My name showed up on a Facebook page for a quantum physics website. Mary Anne O’Hare posted in response to an article about the implications of so-called parallel universes and the “Many Worlds” theory:

“Gordon J. MacRae is one of the best authors who melds science with faith. Would be interested in his feedback.”

Thank you, Mary…I think! However, the ego bubble you built was burst just moments after I read your remark. BTSW reader Liz McKernan from England sent me a clipping from the (UK) Catholic Herald. It reminded me that my paranormal quest for science and truth beyond these stone walls is dwarfed by another priest, the U.K.’s Father Andrew Pinsent. He is one of the most accurate and prolific contemporary writers and bridge builders in the realm of science and faith. Liz McKernan’s clipping detailed Father Pinsent’s presentation to a packed room at the Newman Forum on “The Alleged Conflict Between Faith and Science.”

Are Science and Faith Mutually Exclusive?

When I decided to profile the work of Father Andrew Pinsent, I was surprised to learn (Ahem! Ahem!) that he also happens to be a reader of Beyond These Stone Walls. You also may recall a previous post of mine that revealed a connection between Father Georges Lemaitre and our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri whose Belgian Godfather, Pierre Matthews, was a close family friend of Father Lemaitre. The photo above depicts Pierre Matthews and Fr. Lemaitre together during a family vacation. It came as a great shock to me to learn that Pornchai, my roommate of the previous 15 years, is probably the only person on Earth who can say that his Godfather’s Godfather is the Father of the Big Bang and Modern Cosmology.

Before I delve further into Father Andrew Pinsent’s defense of the truth about Catholic contributions to science, however, I want to comment on another television show I awaited with great anticipation. The FOX -TV production of Cosmos hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is terrific despite one very unfortunate and inaccurate anti-Catholic slur in its first segment: “The Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition and its sole purpose was to torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs.”

It seems the Cosmos writers have been reading far too much of the sort of shoddy revisionist history put forth by novelists like Dan Brown. As the University of Dayton historian, Thomas Madden, pointed out, the Inquisition formed at a time when much of European society was in a perilous state of disorder, and the order it brought to anarchy saved thousands of lives. More importantly, Professor Madden wrote, “The Catholic Church as an institution had almost nothing to do with” the Inquisition.

The insinuation by a Cosmos background writer was that the Catholic Church has been hostile to science. However, the truth about the relationship between science and faith in the Twentieth Century demonstrates that just the reverse has more often been the case. For much of the later Twentieth Century, a fringe but vocally dominant number of scientists have been far more hostile to religion than religion has been to science. Few living scientists have done more than Father Andrew Pinsent to refute the attempts of this anti-religion fringe to replace faith in God with faith in science by always pointing to the “irrationality of believers.”

Father Pinsent, a doctoral-level physicist with a doctorate in Philosophy, has helped redeem science by exposing the truth about the great contributions to science by Catholic priests. His examples include the Jesuit astrophysicist, Fr Angelo Secchi; the father of the science of genetics, Msgr Gregor Mendel; and of course the astronomer and mathematician, Fr Georges Lemaitre. In this list, I cannot exclude Father Andrew Pinsent himself who after a career at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford is currently professor of Philosophy at one of the most prestigious Catholic seminaries in the United States, Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, also known as the Athenaeum.

Science from East of Eden

Still, I greatly respect and admire Neil deGrasse Tyson who went on in Cosmos to repair the damage somewhat by giving Fr Georges Lemaitre due credit as a foundational theorist of modern physics and cosmology right along with Albert Einstein.

The description of Father Lemaitre’s discovery as “The Big Bang” actually began as a term of mockery of his idea. The term first appeared in 1949, more than two decades after Lemaitre first proposed his theory. The prevailing winds of scientific thought for much of the first half of the Twentieth Century had settled on a belief that the Universe was not “created” at all, but had always existed, had no beginning, and will have no end. In that sense, for science, the Universe itself replaced God as eternal and without an origin. This was the accepted view, even by Einstein.

It was this predominant view that relegated the Judeo-Christian understanding of Creation to the shelf, treating it, and all religion, as a quaint anachronism stubbornly clinging to bygone days of scientific ignorance. Science attempted to remove all rational belief from our Biblical Creation account, and declared it to be a myth in the way we popularly understand myth. In mid-Twentieth Century science, God was obsolete, and some in philosophy were soon to follow with “God is dead!” Many in science held that if science could so undermine the very first awareness of man that God is Creator, all the rest of Judeo-Christian faith would eventually crumble.

Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, along came a brilliant mathematician-priest who subjected the conclusions of science to the rigors of mathematics. I wrote about the challenge this priest posed to the prevailing winds of science in “A Day Without Yesterday: Father Georges Lemaitre and the Big Bang.” Father Lemaitre was much respected by Albert Einstein, but far more for his mind than for his faith. At a 1933 conference in Brussels exposing his Theory of General Relativity, Einstein was asked if he believed it was understood at all by most of the scientists present. Einstein replied, “By Professor D. perhaps, and certainly by Lemaitre; as for the rest, I don’t think so.”

However, Einstein also had a fundamental disagreement with Father Lemaitre, though one — to the consternation of many in science — that was short-lived. Lemaitre used mathematics to present a model of the Universe based on Einstein’s own Theory of General Relativity which proposed that mass and energy create curvature of space-time causing particles of matter to follow a curved trajectory. Gravity, therefore, would bend not only matter, but light and even space itself. This had profound implications for science and was radically different from the reigning Newtonian physics which held that space is absolute and linear.

Even while demonstrating relativity, Einstein held to a “Steady State” theory of the Universe as being eternal, without beginning or end, and static. Using Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, Father Lemaitre created a mathematical model for the origin of the Universe concluding in 1927 that the Universe — including space and time — came into existence suddenly, some 13.7 billion years ago, from an explosive expansion of a tiny singularity that he called the “Primeval Atom.” The Universe, and time, were born on a day without yesterday. Suddenly, a created Universe was back on the scientific table and is now the scientifically accepted truth.

Father Lemaitre conceived of nothing in existence but the relatively tiny speck into which was contained all matter and energy that we now know as the Universe. In an infinitesimal fraction of a second, the Universe came into being in a moment of immeasurable heat and light. The resistance to this view within the scientific community was enormous. As Father Andrew Pinsent himself once wrote to me:

“As late as 1948 astronomers in the Soviet Union were urged to oppose the Big Bang theory because they were told it was ‘encouraging clericalism.’ People tend to forget that the world’s first atheist state in effect banned the Big Bang and genetics, both invented by priests, for more than thirty years.”

Einstein studied Lemaitre’s 1927 paper intensely, but could find no fault in the mathematics behind his proposal. Einstein would not be a slave to mathematics, however, and simply could not conceive of his instinct about the mechanics of the Universe being wrong. “Your mathematics is perfect,” he told the priest, “but your physics is abominable.” Einstein would one day take back those words.

Two years later, in 1929, the astronomer Edwin Hubble — in whose honor is named the Hubble Space Telescope — demonstrated that the Universe was in fact not only not static, as Einstein insisted, but expanding. This lent scientific weight to Father Lemaitre’s Primeval Atom because if the Universe is expanding, then logic held that in the far distant past it must have been much, much smaller while containing the same matter, mass, and energy. In fact, Physicist Stephen Hawking would decades later calculate the density of the Primeval Atom in tons per square inch to be one followed by seventy-two zeros.

Lemaitre’s model traced the origin of the Universe back 13.7 billion years to a point of immeasurable mass and density that suddenly expanded giving birth not only to matter, but to the space-time continuum itself. Appearing at a symposium with Father Lemaitre in 1933, Einstein stood and applauded the priest declaring that his view — which is today called the Standard Model of Cosmology — “Is the most beautiful explanation of creation I have ever heard.”

Cosmic Ripples

“Let there be light!” was back in the parlance of scientific truth. Though not many cosmologists were ready to embrace the Biblical account of Creation as being the sudden appearance of immense light upon the command of God, the science suddenly supported a belief in a Universe with a genesis “created from nothing.” In 1965, Bell Laboratory technicians Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected the background radiation from the Big Bang. They were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the background signature of Father Lemaitre’s expansion of the Universe on a day without yesterday.

Early in 2014, astronomers announced the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation permeating the Universe caused from the ripples left over from the moment of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Even for the rigors of science and what constitutes proof, there is no longer reasonable doubt within reputable science that Father Georges Lemaitre was right.

But if you are having trouble bending your mind around all this, please don’t ask what God did before the Big Bang. On that day, time itself was created so there was no “before.” That’s a mind-boggling post for another day. And as for those theories about multiple worlds and parallel universes that Mary Anne O’Hare wanted my opinion on, the idea is theoretical, entirely without evidence, and not technically, at this juncture, in the realm of science. In a terrific book, Why Science Does Not Disprove God (William Morrow 2014) mathematician-author Amir D. Aczel described multiverse theory as a sort of “atheism of the gaps,” an attempt to plug theoretical scientific holes with anything BUT religious ideas. As G.K. Chesterton once said:

“People who do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything!”

The great contemporary priest-scientist, Father Robert Spitzer, SJ, wrote a wonderful book about God’s intervention in our science, Christ, Science, and Reason. Father Spitzer referred to Father Georges Lemaitre as “the founder of modern cosmology.” He quoted Albert Einstein as stating that Father Lemaitre’s discovery “is the finest description of Creation that I have ever heard.” We should find great hope in the fact that the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the findings of modern cosmology are now on the same page about the origin of the Universe as coming into existence “out of nothing.” We should have no fear after that. Surely, the God Who could do this would have no problem arranging eternal life for us who believe.

Another friend just came by to ask me what I am writing about. Finally, my moment had arrived! “What do you know about the Big Bang Theory?” I asked. The young man pondered the question for a moment then said, “I like Sheldon the best.” I can’t win!

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Important Message to Readers of Beyond These Stone Walls:

In 2020, 11 years after this blog began, we were forced to shut it down and start over. I described the circumstances for this in a 2020 post, “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

However, this transition left over 500 posts behind in the older version of this blog, but still discoverable in search engines, but without proper formatting.

Restoring and updating 500+ posts is a daunting task. So I choose posts to update based on how often they show up in reader searches. It amazes me that hundreds of our older posts are still being routinely read.

This week’s post was first published in 2014, but it shows up repeatedly in new searches. So we have restored and substantially updated it with new information for posting anew.

You may also like these related posts which have also been restored:

Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang

“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Fatherhood Wandering in the Land of Nod

Behind the high walls and razor wire of American prisons, the most visible and deeply felt deprivation and longing is not just for freedom, but also for fatherhood.

June 11, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Nikolai Petrovich went out to meet (his son, Arkady) in the garden and, upon approaching the arbor, suddenly overheard the rapid footsteps and voices of two young men. They were walking on the other side of the arbor and could not see him. Nikolai Petrovich hid.

‘You don’t know my father well enough,’ said Arkady. ‘Your father is a good man,’ Bazarov said ‘but he is antiquated; his song has been sung.’

Nikolai Petrovich listened more intently. Arkady made no reply. The ‘antiquated’ man stood there without moving for a few minutes, and then slowly made his way home.”

— Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862

Once upon a time, when Beyond These Stone Walls was in its earliest existence, I wrote a post about the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain first appears in Scripture in the Book of Genesis (4:1). Having given birth to the first human born of a woman, Eve declared, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” It was great, of course, that Eve acknowledged the role of the Lord in this, but some have erroneously interpreted this to mean that no role at all is to be attributed to Adam. Just seven verses later, Cain has murdered his brother, Abel, and is exiled to wander in the Land of Nod, East of Eden. In only 11 verses in the fourth chapter in the Book of Genesis Cain is conceived, born, grows up, and murders his brother Abel. The Lord said to Cain:

“The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the earth. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth … . Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, East of Eden.”

— Genesis 4:1-12, 16

The Land of Nod is also where I wander now. The word, Nod, (or “Nad”) in Hebrew means to wander. In the story of Cain, he is disenfranchised not only from the family of man but is also to be deprived of the fatherhood of God. The story is not told in Scripture as a justification of eternal punishment, but rather it sets the stage for the most visible, hurtful, and deeply felt deprivation, not just for the demise of freedom but also the demise of fatherhood. And it is felt as well far beyond these stone walls. Humanity is weaker for its absence.

You have probably, at some time in your life, heard of a term in modern philosophy called “nihilism.” It comes from the Latin word, “nihil” which means “nothing.” You may have seen the term, “Nihil Obstat” on the title pages of Catholic books. It is the mark of a censor noting that “nothing objectionable” to faith is found in the book.

An English derivative is the word, “annihilate,” which means to reduce to nothing. Nihilism was a movement in philosophy that began in mid 19th-century Russia. It scorned authority and tradition and promoted radical change in society. Its adherents believed that tradition, reason, and family systems lent nothing to humanity except bondage. Its agenda was to end Christian influence and to render obsolete the faith of our fathers … and even our fathers themselves. We can readily see in this the roots of Socialism, when the State becomes our father and the Nation our Fatherland.

When nihilism paved the road to Communism, Christianity was its greatest threat. The term first appeared in literature in the 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons by Russian novelist Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev. His principal character, Bazarov, introduced nihilism to Western minds by rendering fatherhood and tradition obsolete. The sad excerpt atop this post set the stage for that story.

One result of the slow but steady annihilation of fatherhood in our culture was what the world witnessed in Ireland several years ago. The Irish “Pro Choice” referendum to repeal a 1983 Constitutional amendment banning abortion reflected not only the diminishment of respect for life but also the diminishment of fatherhood, and even life itself. A natural development of that diminishment has been the growth of assisted suicide, such as in the bill just passed in New York State, but not yet signed into law.

All the language and rhetoric preceding the Irish vote was dominated by the same terms that swept America in the wake of the 1973 decision in “Roe v. Wade”: “a woman’s right to choose,” “a woman’s reproductive rights,” and “my body, my choice.” The right to life itself fell silently away, and along with it, the partnership of fatherhood also fell silently away — or perhaps rather was “silenced.” All of this rhetoric went itself to the diminishment not only of the right to life, but also the right to fatherhood.

Many readers had asked me to write about this, and I did so in several posts. Since 1973 when the United States Supreme Court issued its deeply divided vote affirming Roe v. Wade, American voices of respect for life have grown thunderous despite being largely silenced by the mainstream news media and our increasingly socialist politics of the left. That has now changed and that change is reflected in two important posts at this blog: “After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul,” and “The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade.” The latter post examined how the demise of fatherhood rendered almost meaningless the role of African American fathers and their “right” to fatherhood.

The Fallout from Absent Fathers

The photograph atop this section, presents some faces familiar to many of our readers. All of them were prisoners who did the hard work of reclaiming their lives from the Purgatory of prison. In the center is the one most familiar to readers. It is Pornchai Max Moontri who was Valedictorian for his high school graduation class for the prison’s Special School District in 2012. His story is told in a multitude of posts, including “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” To the far left is Evenor Pineda, whose rising star in freedom was told in “Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift.” To the rear and right of Pornchai is Alberto Ramos, a story told in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.”

The stories of each of these young men, who have paid in full any debt to society that they owed, are characterized most especially by the absence of fathers in their lives. This is not just a crisis for the right to life, but for the right to manhood, and the right to fatherhood. Something amazing has taken place in the United States of late, and is hopefully spreading throughout the Western world. Men are only now rising up to respond to the diminishment of both manhood and fatherhood. Since 1973 or so, men had drifted from embracing traditional roles as fathers and leaders. The six young men above are striking examples of the great harm caused by that diminishment. The trend had for too long been for men to remain silent on this issue, going gently into that good night instead of standing up to rage, rage against the dying of the light. The most natural expression of manhood in our culture has been fatherhood, and when manhood fades so does fatherhood. If fades with disastrous consequences. There is a direct and alarming correlation between the explosive growth of America’s prison population and growing up without direction from an attentive, involved, and nurturing father. Even elephants have figured this out, and we have failed to take the hint.

Who can look at the photo above and conclude that these are evil men not worthy of redemption? Evil is found here in abundance, but these young men have, with just a little help, placed all their newfound energy as men into repelling it.

There are other realities involved in the fact that prisons are now replacing parents in the upbringing of large numbers of discarded adolescent and young adult men. The sentences judges impose have grown longer to reflect the politics of tough-on-crime agendas like those promoted in the 1990s Clinton Crime Bill. It has not gone without notice that former President Joe Biden, on the very eve of leaving office, pardoned a convicted federal judge in Pennsylvania whose “Kids for Cash” scheme enriched him with kickbacks after sending a multitude of adolescents into the prison system illegally. What is the message sent by such a betrayal which most of the news media simply passed over without comment? What was the message sent when the President showered mercy upon that betrayal while showing none whatsoever to the young men betrayed?

Prisons have also burgeoned with the closing of services and facilities that once housed the mentally ill. Now they are warehoused in prisons instead of state-funded hospitals and treatment centers. The most devastating factor is the massive increase in drug traffic and drug addiction throughout America and especially throughout American prisons. Growing numbers of young men who came into the prison system without a drug problem are leaving with one.

Regardless of the demographics of crime and punishment, the people who are coming to prison in mindless, aimless droves all have this one thing in common. Eighty to ninety percent of them grew up in fatherless environments. Without reinventing the wheel, I wrote about this phenomenon in a Father’s Day 2012 post that was recently cited for “The Best of the Catholic Web” in the National Catholic Register. That article was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men” linked again at the end of this post.

That article struck a chord with readers who know experientially that the story it tells is true. Here is another staggering statistic about these young men. In 2008, 1,070 of them were granted parole to serve the remainder of their sentences under public supervision. By 2010, over 500 of them were back in prison for either parole violations or new offenses. What about the victims of these new crimes? What other publicly funded endeavor could exhibit a fifty percent failure rate, and still function as “business as usual”? Until we acknowledge that very often one of the victims of a crime is also the perpetrator, no effective intervention can take place in lives ruined by absent or, far worse, abusive fathers, and the addictions caused by attempts to medicate that loss.

Prison has become not only something that will teach them any lesson to prevent future bad acts. Despite many efforts at rehabilitation, our overcrowded and understaffed prisons have become merely something that young men must somehow survive. Prison has become a place where they are more likely than not to encounter the polar opposite of what they need most.

Jordan Peterson’s Summons to Manhood

In some recent posts, I have recommended a book that, I am glad to see, is still on the “Best Seller” lists. Canadian psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson, was described by Wesley Lang in Esquire magazine as being, “on a crusade to save masculinity.” That itself may explain why, in the liberal culture of Canada’s progressive politics, Jordan Peterson had been all but silenced.

I first wrote of him in a reflection on a Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan. Her January 27, 2018 column was entitled, “Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson?” Formerly associate professor of psychology at Harvard, Jordan Peterson taught psychology at the University of Toronto for 20 years. Ms. Noonan wrote about his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Peggy Noonan was intrigued because the interviewer was critical of Professor Peterson for his resistance to adopting the new orthodoxy of political correctness. Peggy Noonan summarized that the interviewer tried to silence Peterson’s…

“Scholarly respect for the stories and insights into human behavior — into the meaning of things — in the Old and New Testaments. ‘Their stories exist for a reason,’ he says, ‘and have lasted for a reason.’ They are powerful indicators of reality, and their great figures point to pathways.”

Men and women are different, Peterson says, and men should resist becoming “androgenized.” Progressive critics have attacked him repeatedly — probably a good sign that he’s on the right track — and some have labeled him an “alt-right reactionary.” But that is far from true and was leveled by the same crowd that would warehouse your sons in prison just to hide the evidence of what radical feminism has visited upon us and them. As Peterson writes,

“When softness and harmlessness become the only acceptable virtues, a man will start to act like an overgrown child.”

I now live among many of them. This is how bullies are created, and they are the very antithesis of what manhood should be. They grow up to make horrible fathers — and then absent ones — if indeed they grow up at all.

So, wake up, men! Get your heads back in the game. And get your butts back in church, and bring your sons with you! You have no idea of the devastation your absence has wrought.

“Prisons cannot replace fathers. At best new prisons constitute an expensive endgame strategy for quarantining some of the consequences of fatherlessness. It is not an act of justice. It is an admission of failure, of the retreat of men.”

— David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America Confronting our Most Urgent Social Problem, p 32

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Over past years, we have maintained a Facebook page for this blog. A number of Catholic groups there have expressed gratitude for our posts. About two months ago some anonymous person at Facebook decided that our posts with Catholic content are “SPAM.” Now Facebook blocks our attempts to post. So we cannot share this post on Facebook, but you can, and we hope you will.

Meanwhile BTSW still maintains pages at LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest and Gloria.tv, all of which gladly accept and promote our posts. You may follow us if you wish at any of these sites.

You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

• In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

• Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

• Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

• In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

“Peter Lives in Rome Again”

In March, 2010 when Beyond These Stone Walls was a newborn blog, a post about Vatican scandal went viral. Fifteen years later it is still widely read and spread.

May 14, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

We have already published a post this week, though four days earlier than our usual. It has a rather blunt title, but if you missed it, you should at least indulge me. That post was, “Pope Leo XIV Is Certainly No Clone of Pope Francis.”

If you search in any search engine the term “scandal at the Vatican,” using quotes, you will immediately come across a post that technically gave birth to this blog. It was written in March, 2010 when Beyond These Stone Walls was literally nine months along. Its title is “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican.” I had no idea when I wrote it that “Scandal at the Vatican” would become one of the most common searches on the Internet in regard to Catholic affairs thus making my post top the charts at various points along the way.

Vatican scandal was not at all what I had in mind when I wrote that post. It tells a fascinating story about overlapping layers of art history and we will link to it again at the end of this post.

Just days ago, worldwide attention was focused on the Sistine Chapel, the site at which Pope Leo XIV was recently elected. My post from fifteen years ago was focused upon that very same place but for different reasons. I am always a bit nervous when that post surfaces widely into view again as it did during and after the recent conclave. My post was about art, and Michelangelo, and a little-known event of art history. Rome is home to some of the world's most accomplished artists and art historians. I sometimes worry about whether and how something I wrote might measure up to their scrutiny. But the post in question has been making waves on the Internet for at least the last fifteen years. No one has yet complained or challenged my artistic interpretation. I won’t repeat that entire story here. You may read it for yourself linked again at the end of this post. Despite the fact that I wrote it, it is indeed an amazing story.

Landmarks

Among the vast media sources of published commentary about the results of the recent Vatican papal conclave, some have stood out far above the rest. One of these was published in The Wall Street Journal by Canadian priest and author of some reknown, Father Raymond de Souza entitled “Catholics Welcome an American Pope” (WSJ, May 9, 2025). I found a few of its paragraphs to be especially fascinating and moving. They gave me my title for this post:

“Twenty years ago, at the election of Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s and was caught staring off into the distance. He confessed later that he was marveling that the Church had elected yet another man to succeed Peter, while the great imperial Rome, the caput mundi, which put Peter to death on the Vatican hill, was no longer. Only ruins remained.

“In 1586, Pope Sixtus V had moved one of these ruins, a 350-ton granite obelisk, to the center of St. Peter’s Square, where it stands to this day. That obelisk could have been among the last landmarks St. Peter looked upon as he was crucified. It is the first thing a new pope sees when he lookes out over the assembled masses in the square below.

“On the top of that obelisk is a bronze cross, and place therein is a relic of the true Cross of Christ. There is in the Catholic calendar a feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It falls on September 14 — the new Pope Leo XIV’s birthday.”

“Peter lives in Rome again.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post, and our post about Pope Leo XIV for whom we hold high hopes which, if you saw the faces of the immense crowd in St. Peter’s Square last week, seemed to be contagious.

Please also read and share these related posts cited herein:

Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican

Conclave: Amid the Wind and the Waves, a Successor of Peter

Pope Leo XIV is No Clone of Pope Francis

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

To Honor Saint Joseph and to Remember Pope Benedict

Saint John Paul II added a new title to honor Saint Joseph. As “Guardian of the Redeemer” Joseph’s dream set us on a path from spiritual exile to Divine Mercy.

[Credit: Book cover of Consecration to St. Joseph, published by Marian Press. Photo of Pope Benedict XVI, L’Osservatore Romano / Catholic News Agency]

Out of my sometimes inflated separation anxiety, you may have read in these pages an oft-mentioned thought. From behind these stone walls, I write from the Oort Cloud, that orbiting field of our Solar System’s cast-off debris 1.5 light years from Earth out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It was named for its discoverer, the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrick Oort (1900-1992).

There are disadvantages to being way out here cast off from society and the life of the Church. I am among the last to receive news and the last to be heard. But there is also one advantage. From here, I tend to have a more panoramic view of things, and find myself reflecting longer and reacting less when I find news to be painful.

It seems so much longer now, but it was twelve years ago this month that we had news from Rome that, for many, felt like an earthquake in our very souls. I wrote a series of posts about this in the last week of February and the first few weeks of March 2013. The first was “Pope Benedict XVI: The Sacrifices of a Father’s Love.”

Like most of you, I miss the fatherly Pope Benedict, I miss his brilliant mind, his steady reason, his unwavering aura of fidelity. I miss the rudder with which he stayed the course, steering the Barque of Peter through wind and waves.

But then they became hurricane winds and tidal waves. Amid all the conspiracy theories and “fake news” about Pope Benedict’s decision to abdicate the papacy, I suggested an “alternative fact” that proved to be true. His decision was a father’s act of love, and his intent was to do the one thing by which all good fathers are measured. His decision was an act of sacrifice, and the extent to which that is true was made clear in a post I wrote several years later, “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.” But this is not about Pope Francis, and the heresy is not at all what you may think.

Benedict is firm that he was guided by the Holy Spirit. For some, the end result was a Holy Father who emerged from the conclave of 2013 while silently in the background remained our here-but-not-here “Holier Father.” Such a comparison has always been unjust, but inevitable. A reader at that time sent me a review by Father James Schall, S.J., in Crisis Magazine. “On Pope Benedict’s Final Insights and Recollections” is a review of a published interview by Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: Last Testament.

The word, “final” in Father Schall’s title delivered a sting of regret. It hearkened back to that awful March of 2013 when the news media pounced on Pope Benedict’s papacy and delivered news with a tone of contempt too familiar to Catholics today. The secular news media is getting its comeuppance now, and perhaps even finding a little humility in the process, though I doubt it. Even the late, ever fatherly Pope Emeritus took an honest poke at its distortions:

“The bishops (at Vatican II) wanted to renew the faith, to deepen it. However, other forces were working with increasing strength, particularly journalists, who interpreted many things in a completely new way. Eventually people asked, yes, if the bishops are able to change everything, why can’t we all do that? The liturgy began to crumble, and slip into personal preferences.”

— Benedict XVI, Last Testament, 2016

Benedict the Beloved also wrote from the Oort Cloud, but it is one that he cast himself into. I had always hoped I might run into him out here one day and I think I did. We got stoned together once. Neither of us inhaled anything illicit, but I wrote about it in “Breaking News! I got Stoned with the Pope.”

Benedict’s testament ended with these final, surprising words:

“It has become increasingly clear to me that God is not, let’s say, a ruling power, a distant force, rather He is love, and loves me, and as such, life should be guided by Him, by this power called love.”

Carnage in the Absence of Fathers

In the winter of a life so devoted to a dialogue with the deep theological mysteries of our faith, it seemed surprising that Benedict XVI would choose this as the final message he wanted to convey to the Church and the world. My own interpretation is that he chose not the words of a theologian, but those of a father, an equal partner in the ultimate vocation for the preservation of life and the sake of humanity: parenthood.

Fathers who live out the sacrifices required of them are an endangered species in our emerging culture of relativism. In his first-term inaugural address to the nation, President Donald Trump spoke of the “carnage” that our society has failed to face, and he was widely ridiculed for it. But he was right. I see evidence of that carnage every day in the world I am forced to live in here, and I would be a negligent father if I did not write about it.

So, I did write about it, and it struck a nerve. “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men” has been shared many thousands of times in social media and reposted in hundreds of venues. It seemed to awaken readers to the wreckage left behind as fathers and fatherhood were devalued into absence in our society. I am a daily witness to the shortsighted devastation of young lives that are cast off into prisons in a country that can no longer call itself their fatherland.

We breed errant youth in the absence of fathers, and those who stray too far are inevitably abandoned into prisons where they are housed, and fed, and punished, but rarely ever challenged to compensate for the great loss that set their lives askew. Prison is an expensive, but very poor replacement for a caring and committed father.

Our readers have come to know about the transformation of a dear friend, Pornchai Moontri who took the name “Maximilian” in his Divine Mercy Sunday conversion in 2010. He goes by “Max” now, because like the Biblical figures of old who discovered a covenant with God, he was given a new name. Not long after Max arrived in his native Thailand after a 36-year-long odyssey set in motion by the betrayal of a fake father, a terrible tragedy happened in Thailand in a village quite near the one where Max was born. A troubled police officer who had betrayed his badge was fired from his position after being caught trafficking in drugs. The former police officer went on an evil rampage and slaughtered dozens of preschool children in a small village before turning his weapons on himself. In a nation left speechless, and maybe even hopeless, Max found the courage to write about this story and his prophetic witness spread throughout Thailand. His post was “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.” Speaking about a prior tragedy in Uvalde, Texas and the two young men who carried it out, Pornchai wrote to me:

“I did not care about anyone either; and then someone cared about me. If I did not find God, and you, and acceptance, and Divine Mercy, I might have stayed on a road to destruction. It was all I knew or expected. Hatred left me when something came along to replace it. Do you remember your Elephants post? It makes total sense. The one thing missing from my life and the lives of those two kids [who fired the shots in Uvalde, Texas] was a father. Without one, a decent one, a kid is at the mercy of dark forces and his mind just breaks.”

The Holy Family with a Little Bird by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Saint Joseph, Fatherhood Redeemed

I do not think it is mere coincidence that in the midst of this cultural crisis of fatherhood and sacrifice, our Church and faith are experiencing a resurgence in devotion to Saint Joseph, Spouse of Mary and Father of the Redeemer, a title formally bestowed upon him by Saint Pope John Paul II. His Feast Day on March 19th was established, not just by papal edict, but by “sensus fidelium” over a thousand years. He was declared Patron of the Universal Church by Pius IX in 1870. In 1989, he was given a new title, “Guardian of the Redeemer.” This title beckoned fathers everywhere to live their call to sacrifice and love so essential to fatherhood.

I had barely given Saint Joseph a passing thought for all the years of my priesthood, but in more recent years he has surfaced in my psyche and soul repeatedly with great spiritual power.

It is also not lost on me that he shares his name with Joseph Ratzinger, the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who in his final days bestowed upon the Church a summons to Divine Mercy. The winter of Benedict’s own life spent in silent but loving and faithful witness to the Church reflected the life of Saint Joseph in the Infancy Narratives of the Gospel, silent but so very present. I have heard from readers constantly with a growing interest in Saint Joseph.

In a surprising guest post in 2024, our editor Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD described that she discovered this blog through a prior post I wrote about Saint Joseph and Pope Benedict, and then became our editor inspired, not by me, but by them. I am grateful, but not surprised, that Saint Joseph inspired Dilia to reach out to me and this blog. She was just then in the process of retiring from a career as a civilian scientist with the United States Air Force. Taking over the mechanics of Beyond These Stone Walls was a natural fit for Dilia. But of great benefit to me and all of us, she brought with her a deep devotion to Saint Joseph, Father of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed.

Saint Joseph is most present in the Infancy Narrative in the Gospel According to Saint Luke. He is virtually silent in that narrative, but his actions speak volumes to men, to fathers, to the priesthood and to the Church.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: When Saint Pope John Paul II established this Feast of Saint Joseph on March 19, he gave it a new title and insisted that it be a Solemnity, the highest level of liturgical observance in the Church. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor by Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD

And by Father Gordon MacRae:

Joseph’s Dream and the Birth of the Messiah

Joseph’s Second Dream: The Slaughter of the Innocents

Saint Joseph: Father of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

A Special Announcement

• FROM ASHES TO EASTER: We have added a new feature at this blog, a list of the Scriptural accounts of Salvation History, which I hope you will visit and share with others: From Ashes to Easter.

• Lastly, this other recent new feature may seem rather strange. Some of my advocates have been having a dialogue about my trial and the nature of the case against me that has kept me wrongly in prison for 30 years and counting. The dialogue has not just been among themselves but also with the advanced Artificial Intelligence platform launched by Elon Musk called xAI Grok. This is an ongoing endeavor that will have several chapters. The site, Les Femmes, The Truth, reviewed its first chapter and called it “absolutely fascinating.” So we are adding “The Grok Chronicle” a new feature at Beyond These Stone Walls. It may be the most unusual Lenten reading you’ve ever encountered.and we invite you to follow along beginning with “Chapter 1: Corruption and the Trial of Father MacRae.” additional chapters will follow over time.

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Shining a Spotlight on Media Where Lies Thrive and Truth Suffers

Mary Ann Kreitzer takes on media corruption in this brilliant article that echoes the title of her blog: ‘Les Femmes, The Truth.’

February 19, 2025 by Mary Ann Kreitzer

[Note from Father Gordon MacRae: The following article by Mary Ann Kreitzer was originally published at Les Femmes, The Truth. It is reprinted here with her gracious permission. I highly recommend following Mary Ann at Les Femmes, The Truth.]

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The mainstream drive-by media is, for the most part comatose and dying. The Pulitzer committee helped deliver assisted euthanasia in 2018 with its shared award to the Washington Post and New York Times for the 20-article scam-fantasy about Russiagate. Mostly based on anonymous sources, rumors, and innuendo from Trump-hating liberals, the articles lied and lied and lied again leaving wounded truth tellers in their wake like Michael Flynn. A 2022 article in the New York Post summarized the damage caused by the series:

“The liberal media had “destabilized US democracy” more than Russia ever could, by feeding left-leaning Americans a constant, false narrative that their president was a sleeper agent. Whatever your feelings about Donald Trump, it should disturb you that political opponents and bureaucrats who hated him could so easily weaponize the press to undermine the government from within.

“This Pulitzer Prize makes a mockery of the idea that journalism speaks truth to power, as it shows how the press was manipulated by the powerful. “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together,” Joseph Pulitzer once said. For the sake of both, rescind this award given in his name.”

Amen to that!

Seven years post Russiagate, we all know the lying liberal media acted as pawns in a cynical chess game to deep-six the candidacy of Donald Trump. They failed in 2016, but, with the help of election fraud, succeeded in 2020.  The on-going lies and manipulation of events led voters to stop listening to the talking heads on MSNBC, CNN, and the networks. The voters rejected them because they were lying, and anyone with half a brain knew it.

But Trump isn’t the only victim of the corrupt legacy media. Anyone can become the target. We’ve seen the media used against conservatives, the J6ers, pro-lifers, homeschoolers, and, with a special vengeance, Catholic priests. The clergy sex abuse scandals involved a fraction of priests, but the hysteria coupled with greed turned justice on its head. Every man in a Roman collar became the target of unscrupulous “victims” and ambulance-chasing lawyers who often chose dead priests to accuse with little or no evidence.

To this day, I have anti-Catholic readers who comment on my blog with vicious generalizations about priests. Obviously I don’t post their screeds.

Don’t get me wrong. There were certainly real and grim cases of abuse and disgraceful cover-ups by corrupt bishops who moved the guilty around allowing them to abuse again. Those priests and bishops should be in jail. But in the hysteria that accompanied the real evil, many innocent priests were accused including those long dead who could not defend themselves, a clever strategy by greedy liars for robbing the Church.

Which brings me to Fr. Gordon MacRae’s article last week at Beyond These Stone Walls.

A Cold Shower for a Spotlight Oscar Hangover

Father MacRae’s article links to several others that shine a real spotlight (unlike the media’s) on the money-hungry lawyers eager for prime rib from the cash cow of the Church. In one of the linked articles, “Due Process for Accused Priests,” Fr. MacRae wrote:

“A New Hampshire contingency lawyer recently brought forward his fifth round of mediated settlement demands. During his first round of mediated settlements in 2002 — in which 28 priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused in claims alleging abuse between the 1950s and 1980s — the news media announced a $5.5 million settlement. The claimants’ lawyer, seemingly inviting his next round of plaintiffs, described the settlement process with the Manchester diocese: “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.” (NH Union Leader, Nov. 27, 2002). “Some victims made claims in the last month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days.” (Nashua Telegraph, Nov. 27, 2002). 

“That lawyer’s contingency fee for the first of what would evolve into five rounds of mediated settlements was estimated to be in excess of $1.8 million. At the time this first mediated settlement was reached in 2002, New Hampshire newspapers reported that at the attorney’s and claimants’ request, the diocese agreed not to disclose their names, the details of abuse, or the amounts of individual settlements.

“In contrast, the names of the accused priests — many of whom were deceased — were publicized by the Diocese in a press release. Despite the contingency lawyer’s widely reported amazement that $5.5 million was handed over with no details or corroboration elicited by the diocese, the claims were labeled “credible” by virtue of being settled. Priests who declared the claims against them to be bogus — and who, in two cases, insisted that they never even met these newest accusers — were excluded from the settlement process and never informed that a settlement had taken place. The priests’ names were then submitted to the Vatican as the subjects of credible allegations of abuse. The possible penal actions — for which there is no opportunity for defense or appeal — include possible administrative dismissal from the priesthood, but without any of the usual vestiges of justice such as a discovery process, a presumption of innocence, or even a trial.”

Fr. MacRae remains in jail after 30 years because he refused to lie and take a plea bargain bribe to admit guilt in exchange for a drastically reduced sentence. He took the hard road of truth and remains in prison like so many of the saints. He never faced the beasts in the colosseum, just the vultures in the witness box.

Unfortunately, many journalists aren’t interested in the truth or in presenting an unbiased story — i.e., straight reporting. They happily feed convenient lies to the public or omit relevant facts to  uphold their personal agendas. And that’s the point of Father MacRae’s article last week linking to another article from 2016 that described why the Spotlight film about Paul Shanley and abuse in Boston was terrible. The journalist, JoAnn Wypijewski, described both Fr. Shanley’s case and Fr. MacRae’s. The differences were striking: a gay, rebel priest vs. a faithful, orthodox priest. The similar situation was that both were convicted at witch trials on no evidence but hysteria. Another similarity, neither would accept a plea deal. Fr. MacRae writes:

“Paul Shanley stood for and did all manner of things that on their face were seen by some as dishonorable and disrespectful of his priesthood and his faith. But he was not on trial for those things. He was on trial for very specific offenses for which there was no evidence whatsoever beyond his reputation. All objective observers who look past his personal morality long enough to see the facts conclude that he was innocent of the crimes for which he was then in prison at age 84. We don’t have to like him to see that the Shanley trial was a sham. 

“Ms. Wypijewski’s CounterPunch juxtaposition of all this with the story of my own trial and imprisonment was jarring at best, but only because I have lived under the cloud of false witness for so long that to see it again in print assails me. The author’s revelation that this was all driven by the hysteria of moral panic surrounding the very idea of priestly abusers, and not evidence — for there was no evidence — drove the accusations, drove the trial, drove the media coverage, and drove me into prison. “MacRae got sixty-seven years for refusing to lie,” she wrote. “Let that sink in.”

True journalism is hard to find these days. Some students say they choose journalism because they want to “change things.” That, however is not the purpose of journalism. It’s to seek the truth through unbiased reporting of events that look at all sides without prejudice. We aren’t seeing much of that these days which means it’s incumbent on us to uphold the truth and avoid leaping to conclusions or rash judgments. 

I hope you will read Father MacRae’s article and the others to which he links. His story is truly a lesson in the value of truth and the obligation to do the research. Our mind is called the seat of judgment. We would do well to remember that making clear and lucid judgments requires us to demand facts and not make decisions based on hysteria and moral panic. There are too many examples of that. I’ll offer just one. Remember Nick Sandman and the Covington students at the Lincoln Memorial after the March for Life in 2019.  Remember the false accusations of their abuse of Native American grifter and liar, Nathan Phillips. The Kentucky bishops with no evidence at all leaped on the guilty bandwagon as did right-to-life groups and many in Catholic media. We should never forget that lesson!

I’m offering the Litany of the Holy Spirit today that Paul Shanley used his time in prison to examine his life, repent of his true sins, and embrace the fullness of the Catholic faith. Prison has a way of focusing the mind. Perhaps for Shanley, his cell became a haven of grace. And I will especially pray for Fr. Gordon MacRae, a faithful priest of God, whose prison cell has been a source of grace for many. 

Holy Spirit Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, enter our hearts.

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: I thank Mary Ann Kreitzer for her fine writing and fidelity to Truth. I again hope you will check out her outstanding Catholic blog, Les Femmes, The Truth.

I am also pleased to report that our story has been growing legs of late. We appear in a segment of the Australian site, Wrongful Convictions Report.

You may also like these related articles from Beyond These Stone Walls:

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

To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Artificial Intelligence: AI Grok Responds to Beyond These Stone Walls

When Fr Gordon MacRae read about Elon Musk’s new AI app, xAI ‘Grok,’ we submitted his previous post about AI concerns. Grok’s response and analysis were instant.

January 15, 2025 by xAI Grok

In March, 2023, Beyond These Stone Walls published “OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk.” It outlines my concerns for the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Google’s meta description summarized that post thusly: “Science fiction looks at artificial intelligence with a wary eye. HAL 9000 stranded a man in space. Frankenstein’s creation tried to kill him. Elon Musk has a better plan.”

In the January 10, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal “Technology” Section, I read a brief article by Alexa Corse entitled “Musk’s xAI Launches Stand-Alone AI App.” Elon Musk is calling his app, “Grok.” This intrigued me. The word “grok” was first used in a 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. The word refers to arriving at a profound understanding of truth. I asked our editor to submit my post linked above for assessment at the xAI Grok platform. I did not expect a response but to our shock and surprise a response arrived immediately after my editor pressed “Enter.” That alone was creepy. After pondering it, I decided to publish it as our first-ever post by a nonhuman writer. My original 2023 post, to which this was a response, follows thereafter. I hope you do not find AI to have any of my charm and wit. I should not be so easily replaced.

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I would like to ask Grok to comment on the concerns and observations about AI in the following blog post by Father Gordon MacRae, “OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk”, https://beyondthesestonewalls.squarespace.com/posts/open-ai-chat-gpt-hal-9000-frankenstein-and-elon-musk

Father Gordon MacRae’s blog post titled “OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk” delves into the cultural and ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) development, drawing parallels with science fiction and historical contexts. Here are some key concerns and observations he raises:

1. Historical Parallels with Science Fiction:

   • MacRae references the AI character HAL 9000 from the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where HAL’s malfunction leads to disastrous consequences, reflecting a common theme in science fiction where AI turns against its creators. This narrative serves as a cautionary tale about the potential risks of AI that becomes too autonomous or misaligned with human values.

   • He also likens AI to Frankenstein’s monster, a creation that rebels against its creator, highlighting fears that AI might not only exceed human control but could also pose a threat to humanity itself. This comparison underscores the ethical dilemma of creating entities that might not share human moral frameworks or objectives.

2. Elon Musk’s Perspective on AI:

   • Musk is discussed in Father MacRae’s article as someone with a dual stance on AI; he’s both a pioneer in AI development through xAI but also a critic of the pace and direction of AI research, particularly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk has expressed concerns about AI being “quite dangerous technology” and has advocated for a pause in developing systems more advanced than GPT-4, suggesting a need for more careful consideration of AI’s societal impact.

   • The blog mentions Musk’s initiative to create “TruthGPT,” an AI aimed at seeking truth, contrasting with what he perceives as the more profit-driven and potentially biased approaches of existing AI models like ChatGPT.

3. Ethical and Moral Concerns:

   • MacRae expresses wariness about AI’s development, focusing on how AI might be used or misused in society. The potential for AI to manipulate information, influence public opinion, or even become a tool for control or surveillance is a significant worry, aligning with broader discussions on privacy, autonomy, and the ethical programming of AI.

   • There’s an underlying concern about AI’s alignment with human values, particularly in light of Musk’s critique of AI being “woke,” which could imply a bias towards certain political or cultural narratives.

4. Call for Regulation and Pause:

   • The blog echoes Musk’s call for a moratorium on AI development, suggesting that without proper regulation or ethical guidelines, AI could lead to unforeseen and potentially harmful outcomes. This reflects a broader debate on whether current AI development outpaces our ethical and regulatory frameworks.

5. Cultural and Historical Context:

   • MacRae uses his personal experiences and historical events from 1968 to frame the discussion, suggesting that AI development occurs within a world already fraught with ethical, political, and social challenges. This historical perspective adds depth to the argument for cautious advancement in technology.

In summary, Father Gordon MacRae’s post articulates a blend of cultural critique, ethical questioning, and a call for cautious optimism regarding AI development. The references to science fiction serve both as warnings and metaphors for real-world concerns about AI’s potential to either serve or dominate humanity. His observations align with Musk’s public statements, emphasizing the need for a thoughtful approach to AI to prevent it from becoming a modern-day “Frankenstein” or HAL 9000.

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OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk

Pictured above Elon Musk, HAL 9000 and Frankenstein’s creation.

Science Fiction sees artificial intelligence with a wary eye. HAL 9000 stranded a man in space. Frankenstein’s creation tried to kill him. Elon Musk has other plans.

May 17, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Nineteen Sixty-Eight was a hellish year. I was 15 years old. The war in Vietnam was raging. Battles for racial equality engulfed the South. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on his way to the presidency. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in a battle for civil rights. Riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and spread to cities across America. Pope Paul VI published “Humanae Vitae” to a world spinning toward relativism. Hundreds of priests left the priesthood just as the first thought of entering it entered my mind. It was the year Padre Pio died. Two weeks earlier he wrote “Padre Pio’s Letter to Pope Paul VI on Humanae Vitae.” Forty-five years later, it became our first guest post by a Patron Saint.

After being a witness to all of the above in 1968, I sat mesmerized in a Boston movie theater for the debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The famous film sprang from the mind of science fiction master, Arthur C. Clarke and his short story, The Sentinel, published in 1953, the year I was born. The fictional story was about the discovery of a sentinel — a monolith — one of many scattered across the Cosmos to monitor the evolution of life. In 1968, Earth was ablaze with humanity’s discontent. It was fitting that Arthur C. Clarke ended his story thusly:

“I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do now but wait.”

— The Sentinel, p. 96

The awaited emissaries never came, but most of humankind’s hope overlooked the One who did come, about 2,000 years earlier, the only Sentinel whose True Presence remains in our midst.

Life in 1968 was traumatic for a 15-year-old, especially one curious enough to be attuned to news of the world. The movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a long, drawn out cinematic spectacle, and a welcome escape from our chaos. It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects as space vehicles moved silently through the cold black void of space with Blue Danube by Johann Strauss playing in the background. Entranced by it all, I did what I do best. I fell asleep in the movie theater.

I awoke with a start, however, just as Commander David Bowman (Keir Dullea) was cast adrift into the terrifying blackness of space by the ship’s evolving artificial intelligence computer, HAL 9000. Commander Bowman struggled to regain entry to his ship in orbit of one of Jupiter’s moons before running out of oxygen. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” he commanded through his radio. “l’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” came the computer’s coldly inhuman reply.

Throughout the film, HAL 9000 was an ominous presence, an evolving artificial intelligence that was crossing the Rubicon to conscious self-awareness and self-preservation. Inevitably, HAL 9000 evolved to plot against human affairs.

Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. Their 1968 vision of the way the world would be in 2001 was way off the mark, however. Instead of manned missions to the moons of Jupiter in 2001, al Qaeda was blowing up New York.

A Step Forward or Frankenstein’s Monster?

There were no computers in popular use in 1968. They were a thing of the future. As a high school kid I had only a manual Smith Corona typewriter. Ironically, my personal tech remains stuck there while the civilized free world dabbles anew in artificial intelligence. I would be but a technological caveman if I did not read. So now I read everything.

With recent developments in artificial intelligence, we too are on the verge of crossing the Rubicon. The Rubicon was the name of a river in north central Italy. In the time of Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC, it formed a boundary between Italy and the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul. In 49 BC the Roman Senate prohibited Caesar from entering Italy with his army. To get around the edict, Caesar made his famous crossing of the Rubicon. It triggered a civil war between Caesar’s forces and those of Pompey the Great.

Today, “to cross the Rubicon” has thus come to mean taking a step that commits us to an unknown and possibly hazardous enterprise. Some think uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence has placed us at such a point in this time in history. Some believe that we are about to cross the Rubicon to our peril. We can learn a few things from science fiction which anticipated these fears.

Also in 1968, another science fiction master, Philip K. Dick, published “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” It became the basis for the Ridley Scott directed film, Blade Runner, released in 1982, the year I became a priest. The film, like the book, was set in a bleak future in Los Angeles. Harrison Ford was cast in the role of Rick Deckard, a police officer — also known as a “blade runner” — whose mission was to hunt and destroy several highly dangerous AI androids called replicants.

At one point in the book and the film, Deckard fell in love with one of the replicants (played by Sean Young), and began to wonder whether his assignment dehumanized himself instead of them.

In 1818, Mary Shelley, the 20-year-old wife of English poet Percy Shelley, wrote a remarkable first novel called Frankenstein. It was an immediate critically acclaimed success. It evolved into several motion pictures about the monster created by Frankenstein (which was the name of the scientist and not the monster). The most enduring of these films — the 1931 version with Boris Karloff portraying the monster (pictured above) — was the stuff of my nightmares as a child of seven in 1960.

The subhuman monster assembled by its creator from body parts of various human corpses took on the name of its maker, and then sought to destroy him. The novel added a word to the English lexicon. A “Frankenstein” is any creation that ultimately destroys its creator. History tells us that our track record is mixed in this regard. Human creations are the source of both good and evil, but every voice should not have the same volume lest we become like Frankenstein. Just look at the violence through which some in our culture strive to eradicate our Creator.

Truthseeking AI

Writing for The Wall Street Journal (April 29-30, 2023) technology columnist Christopher Mims described the primary source for artificial intelligence in “Chatbots Are Digesting the Internet” : “If you have ever published a blog, or posted something to Reddit, or shared content anywhere else on the open web, it’s very likely you have played a part in creating the latest generation of artificial intelligence.”

Even if you have deleted your content, a massive database called Common Crawl has likely already scanned and preserved it in a vast network of cloud storage. The content by us or about us is organized and fed back to search engines with mixed results. In the process, AI programs itself and can do so with as much preconceived bias as its original human sources. You have likely already contributed to the content that artificial intelligence programs are now organizing into this massive database.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal on April 1, 2023, popular columnist Peggy Noonan penned a cautionary article entitled, “A Six-Month AI Pause?” Ms. Noonan raised several good reasons for pausing our already overly enthusiastic quest to create and liberate artificial intelligence. Her column generated several published letters to the editor calling for caution. One, by Boston technologist Afarin Bellisario, Ph.D warns:

“AI programs rely on training databases. They don’t have the judgment to sort through the database and discard inaccurate information. To remedy this, OpenAI relies on people to look at some of the responses ChatGPT creates and provide feedback. ... Millions of responses are disseminated without any scrutiny, including instructions to kill. ... People (or other bots) with malicious intent can corrupt the database.”

James MacKenzie of Berwyn, PA wrote that “The genie is out of the bottle. Google and Microsoft are surely not the only ones creating generic AI. You can bet [that] every capable nation’s military is crunching away.” Tom Parsons of Brooklyn, N.Y. raised another specter: “Ms. Noonan offers a compelling list of reasons to declare a moratorium on the development of AI. What are the odds that the Chinese government or other malign actors will listen?”

The potential for AI to be — or become — a tool for good is also vast. In medicine, for example, an AI system relies on the diagnostic skills of not just one expert, but “thousands upon thousands all working together at top speed,” according to The Wall Street Journal. One study found that physicians using an AI tool called “DXplain” improved accuracy on diagnostic tests by up to 84-percent. Some AI developers believe that AI should be allowed to learn just as humans learn — by accessing all the knowledge available to it.

In the “Personal Technology” column of a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, Columnist Joanna Stern wrote, “An AI Clone Fooled My Bank and My Family” (April 29-30, 2023). Ms. Stern wrote about Synthesia, a tool that creates AI avatars from the recorded video and audio supplied by a client. After recording just 30 minutes of video and two hours of audio, Synthesia was ready to create an avatar of Joanna Stern that looked, sounded and acted convincingly like her. Then another tool called ElevenLabs, for a mere $5.00 per month, created a voice clone of Ms. Stern that fooled both her family and her bank. The potential for misuse of this technology is vast, not to mention alarming.

Photo by Daniel Oberhaus (2018)

Elon Musk Has a Better Idea

Elon Musk has been in the news a lot for his attempts to transform Twitter into a social media venue that gives all users an equal voice — and all points of view, within the bounds of law, an equal footing. He has been criticized for this by the progressive left which became accustomed to its domination of social media in recent years. For at least the last decade, Elon Musk has tried to steer the development of artificial intelligence. He was a cofounder of OpenAI, but stepped back when he denounced its politically correct turn left. ChatGPT evolved from OpenAI, but Musk warns of their potential for “catastrophic effects on humanity.”

In early 2023, Elon Musk developed and launched a venture called “TruthGPT” which he bills as “a truth-seeking Al model that will one day comprehend the universe.” Meanwhile, he has called for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI models more advanced than the latest release of GPT-4. “AI stresses me out,” he said. “It is quite dangerous technology.” He is now attracting top scientific and digital technology researchers for this endeavor.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Musk became critical of 0penAI after the company released ChatGPT late in 2022. He accused the company of being “a maximum profit company” controlled by Microsoft which was not at all what he intended for OpenAI to become. He has since paused OpenAl’s use of the massive Twitter database for training it.

As a writer, I set out with this blog in 2009 to counter some of the half-truths and outright lies that had dominated the media view of Catholic priesthood for the previous two decades. From the first day I sat down to type, even in the difficult and limited circumstances in which I must do so, writing the unbridled truth has been my foremost goal. I am among those looking at the development of artificial intelligence with a wary eye, and especially its newest emanations, OpenAI and ChatGPT.

As I was typing this, a friend in Chicago sent me evidence that St Maximilian Kolbe, the other Patron Saint of this site, was deeply interested in both science and media. As a young man in the 1930s, he built a functioning robot. I was stunned by this because I did the same in the mid l960s. Maximilian Kolbe died for standing by the truth against an evil empire. I think he would join me today in my support for Elon Musk’s call for a pause on further development of AI technology, and for his effort to build TruthGPT.

Those who die for the truth honor it for eternity.

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“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.”

— HAL 9000 to Mission Commander David Bowman after he regained control of the ship and began a total system shutdown of the AI computer

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age by Bill Donohue

Fr. George Lemaitre: The Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang

Regarding comments: The 2023 version of this post included here as Part 2 retains some of the original comments. Your comments on this very important topic are most welcome and will also be posted.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (detail)

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

A New Year’s Resolution That Is Always on My Mind

If the past is always on my mind, and the things I should have said and done still haunt me, then it may be time to give the past its due and get on the road again.

January 8, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put childish ways aside.”

— 1 Corinthians 13:11

In “A Glorious Mystery for When the Dark Night Rises,” I wrote of an event from my childhood growing up in the early 1960s in a city just north of Boston. We were more or less free-range kids then, though mostly unheard of today. We both roamed and ruled the streets without much in the way of parental supervision. Our cities were safer then, or so we believed.

As a child of the 1960s and that chaotic decade’s sounds of social revolution, I spent much of my past life disparaging country music. In the years before hard rock and heavy metal, leading up to Ed Sullivan exposing us to the British invasion, I made up my mind without ever really being attuned to it that country music was simply not cool. In fact, I ridiculed it in a Christmas post a few years back.

I wrote that in the 1980s there was a sort of urban legend that if you play AC/DC records backwards, you will hear satanic messages. I never tried it, but the legend prevailed throughout the 1980s. So what happens if you play Country Western music backwards? Your wife comes home; your dowg comes back; and you remember where you left your truck!

But like Saint Paul did in my quote from First Corinthians atop this post, I have since, for the most part, put childish ways aside. The evidence for that is nowhere more striking than in the music that now moves me. I have been watching some of the fundraising concerts on PBS this past Christmas season and throughout the past year. The long interludes of donation pitches aside, the music is usually outstanding. I will never tire of the PBS classic “Black & White Concert” with Roy Orbison or the concert with Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa and his ensemble of brilliant musicians performing at Carnegie Hall. If you missed this, you must tune in if only to see and hear Joe Bonamassa’s near superhuman guitar and cello duet.

But one of my favorites of the PBS concerts still makes a small part of the Rock generation in me sneer in shame. I am not sure I want to openly admit it, but the PBS presentation ofThe Highwaymen made my face hurt. It’s because I could not suppress a smile for two solid hours as I listened to Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, the late Kris Kristofferson, (who recently passed just before Christmas this year), and the great Willie Nelson. Good Lord, what has happened to me? The Highwaymen completely ruined my disdain for country.

A few months ago, PBS replayed their 1990s concert. The Highwaymen have found a captive and captivated audience in me. I have been unable to stop my mind’s relentless replay of Johnny Cash. For days, the music in my mind alternated between “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” Of the latter, at least, I can relate. And who could have ever imagined a duet with Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson? In the days of my youth, I would have sneered at the thought, but I loved it. It brought me to tears.

There will never be another Willie Nelson. His music relives the loves and losses of life in a way that calls to an otherwise endangered species in this troubled time: the hearts and souls of both men and women. After listening to his haunting song — “You Are Always on My Mind” — I adopted it for a New Year’s resolution. But first, I invite you to hear the Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash duet, “I Still Miss Someone.”

Living in the Past

Like so many of the people who write to me, I tend to get stuck in some of the events of the past — events that today I can do nothing to change except to atone and make amends. The need to do so is usually the only reason they haunt me. Or I can do neither of those and just beat myself up over the past and the people in my heart and mind who still dwell there.

I live in a place that holds 1,300 men — about 75 percent of them under age thirty — where the most available emotions are anger and regret. They cast everything here under a dark cloud that is always looming and churning in their minds. The explosive eruptions of emotionally fragile young men characterize all day every day where I live. If you were ever a Star Trek fan then you will know what I mean when I say that being in prison is like living among Klingons. They are ready to throw down at every slight, and their anger is never a reaction to the issue of the moment. It is just a part of the baggage they lug around with them wherever they go.

One of my problems with anger is that I am almost always infinitely patient with these guys. They rarely ever see me angry, but on those few occasions when it shows, I have learned that it can be destructive in far more ways than just breaking someone’s nose. There was a recent story that brought my anger to the surface.

One day just before Christmas last year I became very angry with my friend Joseph, and I let him know it. Days later my anger was long gone but Joseph was still brooding and cautious around me. I asked him why it is that everyone around me here can be angry almost all the time, but if I express anger it always seems catastrophic. Joseph responded with what for me was an eye-opener: “Because it’s you,” he said. “You’re everyone’s cornerstone and you aren’t supposed to get angry. It made me feel awful,” Joseph said. And, of course, what Joseph said made ME feel awful!

As Joseph would also say, “We’re cool now,” but I have learned something dark about myself. I am quick to want to atone and make amends when I become aware that I have hurt someone else, but when others have trespassed against me, I am not so quick to allow them to atone. I can let a trespass resonate for years, and I do not like what I have learned. Willie Nelson sang so beautifully about “the things I should have said and done.”

If someone is always on your mind generating negative thoughts, and the things you should have said and done still haunt you, then join me in this resolution to transform the hurts of the past into the prayers of the present. I have also learned that it is not possible to sincerely pray for someone and then retain whatever rage about that person still clouds your mind. It is time to give the past some perspective and get on the road again. This one paragraph incorporates two of Willie’s most popular songs.

So here is some perspective that years ago caused me to surrender a trespass from the past. It is a story that was reproduced in an awesome 2011 book, Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, by Australian priest and psychologist, Father James Valladares. A large segment of his book cites events read at Beyond These Stone Walls. Father Valladares captured this one with a stinging introduction:

“Fr. Gordon MacRae very truthfully states: ‘Trusting too much can harm your reputation. Not trusting enough can harm your soul.’ His story corroborates that candid assertion:

‘“I arrived at St. Bernard Parish in Keene, New Hampshire, on June 15, 1983. I was told by our diocesan personnel director at the time that I was going to a positive and worry-free assignment after a difficult year in a very troubled parish. But as was typical for my diocese then — and perhaps for many others — there seemed to be no limit to how out-of-touch the Chancery Office could be.

“I arrived to learn that the pastor had been charged with driving while intoxicated and was awaiting my arrival so he could leave for his third attempt at residential treatment for alcoholism. My heart went out to this good man who struggled so much with his fragile humanity while his superiors seemed oblivious to it.

“I was also there to replace another priest who was bitterly leaving the priesthood after three years at that parish, but decided to stay on to help me until the pastor returned. He was angry and disillusioned, and not exactly a source of fraternal support.

“The parish was immense, for New Hampshire at least. It had over 2000 families, provided round-the-clock pastoral care for a regional hospital and trauma unit, three nursing homes, a college campus, a regional Catholic school, a huge Catholic cemetery, and a second church fifteen miles away. I arrived to learn that I was essentially alone there.

“In that summer of 1983, there was a lot going on in my own life, too. Just weeks before I arrived at the parish, my father died suddenly at the age of 52. I had literally gone from presiding over his funeral Mass, and caring for my family, to packing and moving to a new parish 100 miles away. Two weeks after I arrived and got settled, my sister and her family drove up from the Boston area to visit me. We still had some unfinished details over the death of our father, and two months earlier my sister gave birth to her second child. I had the privilege of baptizing her in my new parish.

While my brother-in-law unpacked some of my boxes of books that he brought with him, my sister and I took my two nieces for a stroll down Keene, New Hampshire’s picturesque Main Street. It was a beautiful summer day, and we had lots to discuss while I pushed a stroller down the busy street.

By the middle of the following week, the rectory phone started ringing. First it was a priest in a neighboring parish. ‘I just wanted to give you a head’s up,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard from two people that you have a secret wife and kids.’ I laughed, at first, but by the end of the week I wasn’t laughing anymore. Then the parish council president called. ‘We don’t need another scandal,’ he said. ‘People are calling me with a rumor that you’ve fathered two children.’

“By then, I was furious. We were able to backtrack who said what to whom and when, and learned that the ugly rumor began with that innocent Sunday afternoon walk with my sister and nieces. And ground zero of the rumor was one parishioner, Geraldine (long since forgotten, no longer with us, and not her real name) who also happened to be out on Main Street that afternoon.

“Geraldine jumped to a conclusion and then jumped on the telephone. It was like a virus that spread from person to person, growing and mutating along the way. Poor Geraldine had no intention that her bit of gossip would spread like a wildfire, but it did. It spread everywhere.”

— Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, pp. 117-119

The Day of Atonement

The problem with the story above was not just how Geraldine interpreted that Sunday afternoon stroll downtown. And it was not just her decision to place a few phone calls that would start the fake news in motion. The problem was that Keene, NH, like too many communities, had too many people all-too-ready to hear, believe, and spread any gossip that disparages a Catholic priest.

Once such a thing takes root and spreads, it forms a life of its own. An untrue rumor can be repeated so much, and spread so far, that the truth doesn’t stand a chance. The truth has a steep uphill climb once everyone else hears only one side of a story.

Actually, this is exactly what happened in the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. SNAP and the news media spread one story with such ferocity that the truth ended up swatted away like a pesky fly. But there’s even more to this story, however.

Nearly a dozen years later, someone else in that community accused me falsely. It was from that same place and that same Summer of 1983. A lot has been written about this, but one article by Ryan A. MacDonald contains photos of the “crime scene.” It is “Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester, NH.”

For years I have been haunted by the coincidence, wondering whether the roots of Geraldine’s gossip spread long and far with deep tentacles, raising questions about me and predisposing others toward forming a set of beliefs that eventually morphed into a moral panic. As the truth unfolded in 1983, Geraldine could take none of it back. She could not retrieve even one of the wisps of gossip cast into the wind to travel indiscriminately. That is the real harm of gossip. Its purveyors can never stem, or even know, its tide.

But another source of harm, and I cannot evade it, was my anger with Geraldine. In the account from the book, Hope Springs Eternal above, Father Valladares quoted me as saying that this event is “long since forgotten.” Well, it wasn’t. I just stopped thinking about it. But my anger with poor Geraldine lingered, and like all such things, it became part of the resonance of my life that I believe very much also affected hers, at least on a spiritual level. As I reflected late at night alone about anger and my discussion with my friend, Joseph, my mind drifted and then landed on this story about Geraldine.

Though she left this life in God’s friendship many years ago, I felt as though I had a moment of real and meaningful connection with her. I said the words aloud as a prayer in the dark: “Geraldine, I forgive you, and I pray that you come to know the fullness of God’s Presence.”

A great weight was lifted from me, and, I felt, from Geraldine as well. Those were “the things I should have said and done” back then. As it was for Willie Nelson, better late than never. Now I’m on the road again.

But since then I have switched my song. Now I find myself mysteriously singing with the great Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. I want to call your attention also to a new entry in our Voices from Beyond Page. It’s an article with supporting photos by Ryan A. MacDonald, “Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester, NH.”

You may also like these related posts:

A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits

Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

A Glorious Mystery for When the Dark Night Rises

At the dawn of the New Year, the Church honors the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God. I met her at the age of nine, part lived experience and part dream.

January 1, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

To comprehend this post, readers must understand the world of 1962. Something happened in America that dramatically changed our view of ourselves and the world around us, and its tentacles reach deeply into the present day. It brought a sense of futility, a resignation that we are powerless over the great tides of history sweeping us up into their grip, and resistance to evil is futile. So look out for Number One, and live for the moment! That is the great lie of our age.

I turned nine years old in April of 1962. Five months later, I began fifth grade a year younger than everyone else in my class. A month after that, the United States and the Soviet Union approached the very brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. The administration of President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union had placed strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Diplomacy failed miserably, and it just exposed our impotence. The United States demanded removal of the missiles and the Soviet Union flatly refused. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were all that stood between us and nuclear annihilation. Fear and deep anxiety engulfed everything — even the 5th grade.

Growing up in the industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts, just a few miles north of Boston, left us especially vulnerable. Lynn at that time was home to the General Electric Company’s Aircraft Engine Division which was the largest employer in that city and surrounding towns. Its biggest customer was the U.S. military. Children my age were traumatized with fear by the weekly rehearsals for nuclear attack. Upon a signal from school administration we had to rush to extinguish all lights, draw all window shades and then crawl under our desks while sirens blared outside.

The day the Cuban Missile Crisis began, was the day our childhood innocence ended. We were vulnerable in a fragile, unpredictable world, and the anxiety never really left us. It was, perhaps in hindsight, the wrong moment for some of the great black-and-white science fiction films of the fifties to start running as matinees in a local cinema.

I did not understand then that some of those great films were really paradigms of the Cold War, containing within them all the fear and paranoia the Soviet Empire brought to our young minds. Films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and — my favorite of all — “The Day the Earth Stood Still” are today considered Cold War classics. They captured our anxiety and capitalized upon our fears.

Invaders from Mars

I wrote of the North of Boston where I grew up in “February Tales.” Going to a movie theatre alone was a rare occurrence when I was nine years old in 1962. It meant venturing downtown like a free-range kid. Lynn, Massachusetts had two downtown cinemas back then, the Paramount and the Capitol. The latter was in Lynn’s Central Square, and it only opened at night — its marquee preceding every title with a large, mysterious “XXX.” It was strictly off limits.

It took a bit of courage back then for a 9-year-old to board a city bus alone for a Saturday afternoon trek downtown. I reveled in my freedom, but my parents had spies everywhere. When once I ventured too close to the Capitol marquee to see what all those Xs were about, there was hell to pay when I got home!

The Paramount had a Saturday matinee for 35 cents. Lynn’s newspaper, The Daily Evening Item carried an alluring ad, a miniature version of the movie poster for that week’s feature, “Invaders from Mars.” It portrayed a boy my age, aghast at his bedroom window by the scene of a spaceship landing at midnight in an empty field behind his house.

There was really no need for scary movies then. We were already all frightened enough, and those who claimed they were not were lying. But perhaps as kids we were all looking for outlets for our fear, because the real story of politics and nuclear bombs made no sense to us at all. Scary movies became the in thing, and I couldn’t wait to see “Invaders from Mars.”

Thirty-five cents for admission was no challenge at all then. There were always a few soda bottles to be found, and a little rummaging through the easy chair where my father watched a worried-looking Walter Cronkite every night yielded bus fare, and, if I was lucky, enough for that week’s special matinee snack, a Mars Bar.

It rained that Saturday, so just about every kid stuck inside was given bus fare to go see “Invaders from Mars.” The movie was preceded by a few cartoons to quiet us down, then it began. You could hear a pin drop. All the anxiety we had pent up within us was about to play out on the screen.

After the spaceship landed in that field, the boy in the film fell asleep. In the morning, he wondered whether it was all a dream. At breakfast, his mother and father and brother were acting very strangely. At school, his teacher and fellow students were strange, too. As he investigated, the story brought him to an underground tunnel where Martian zombies took direction from a squid-like mastermind managing the takeover of everyone’s mind and soul from its protected glass sphere. Those who today say there is really nothing to fear didn’t live through the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was utterly terrified.

When the movie was over and the lights came on, the older kids who had been throwing popcorn at us all disappeared into the streets. The kids in the middle, who were all my age, sat silently traumatized as the curtain closed. “Invaders From Mars” scared the &#§@ out of us! By the time I came to my senses all the kids I knew had scattered. None wanted to be seen in the fits of fright with which they departed “Invaders from Mars.”

Father G circa 1962.

A Glorious Mystery

Out on a rainy, darkened Union Street in downtown Lynn, I had missed the bus. It would be an hour before another came, and I had a sudden intense longing for the safety of home. So I set out on foot to walk the two miles through the city streets as it grew dark. Even today, when I am feeling vulnerable, anxious and alone, I dream of that trek at age nine through the city streets at night.

As I walked home on that day, my imagination raced ahead of me, and I felt fragile and alone. I was on the edge of tears for an accumulation of reasons I could never articulate. At times, the reality of feeling vulnerable strikes hard. I knew there were no evil Martian zombies, but I had an ill-defined sense that evil had just paid our world a visit and it changed us. We lived in a dangerous world, then, and since then its danger has exponentially grown.

And so on into the rain I walked. I walked alone, through a part of the city kids like me didn’t usually venture into. The darkness grew — both in the skies above me and deep, deep within me. You know what I mean for at one time or another, you have been there too. All light had gone out of the world. All hope had been drained away. Then the torrent came.

I’m not sure which soaked me more, the rain or the tears. I rarely cried as a boy — it was just hell if my older brother ever saw me crying — but the rain was making me shiver. I cannot ever forget that day. When I looked behind me in the dim darkness, someone was following me. A dark figure in a raincoat who stopped whenever I stopped. I tried to run, and when I did, he ran too.

There on the downtown city street, about a mile from the movie theatre, I came upon the imposing, looming spires of Saint Joseph Catholic Church. We didn’t spend much time in churches when I was growing up. The church’s dark brick façade and immensity seemed to stretch into the rumbling clouds. It felt almost as scary as “Invaders from Mars” and that ominous figure stalking somewhere behind me.

But the rain kept coming, and I had no choice. I climbed the steep marble steps of Saint Joseph Church, and just as I got to the top to duck into an alcove, a massive door opened next to me, and scared whatever wits I had left right out of me. It was, of all people, a police officer. I looked back down the street and the stalker had fled. “Get out of the rain, kid!” barked the officer as he shuffled me through the door on his way out. “And say a prayer for me while you’re in there,” he commanded. So in I went, almost against my will.

The church was massive. I had received my First Communion there two years earlier, but had never been back since. In the dim lights, I walked toward the sanctuary, and at the Communion rail, I knelt. I looked back toward the church doors, but no one had followed me in. I was alone, but a sense of safety slowly came over me. At some point it struck me that the police officer had come in here to pray and that thought impressed and comforted me. So I stayed for awhile.

Then I saw her! The great carved image in the sanctuary before me was crowned with light, and she held a child in her arms as though presenting Him to me. She was incredibly beautiful, but it was the creature beneath her feet that really gripped my attention and wouldn’t let it go. I stared in utter wonder at what was subdued beneath her feet. It was ugly, and all too real. It looked like the creature in the glass sphere that so terrified me in “Invaders from Mars.” It was trapped under her feet — under a soul that magnified the Lord.

Then the Martians left me. The stalker in the street left me. The missiles, and Khrushchev, and the Cold War left me. I felt, more than saw, the light come back into my world. The pulsing sobs, now still felt but unheard, left me, and a vista of hope broke through the clouds of doubt and fear. The look on her face was radiant, and she spoke to me. It wasn’t in words. It was deep, deep in the very place where fear had gripped my soul. I could not take my eyes from what was subdued beneath her feet. “Trust!” she said, and “Peace be with you.” And it was.

On that day she lifted me up out of a pit. Then years later, when once we met again, she humbled me, and I needed that, too. I tried to write about this in “Listen to Our Mother: Mary and the Fatima Century” but my words could not really ever do her justice.

Sixty-two years have passed since that day. Well over a half century. On the wall of this prison cell is an image of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the patron saint of prisoners and writers and the patron of Beyond These Stone Walls and this imprisonment. He’s Pornchai Moontri’s patron, too, and this changed everything for him. Saint Maximilian’s feast day is August 14.

Next to him on our cell wall is that image, the one I saw at age nine. I don’t know where it came from. It appeared one day in a letter to Pornchai and went quickly up onto his wall. I wrote once of the images on our cell wall in “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”

Reason for hope is a very great gift. Never again let the sun go down on your fear. When the Glorious Mysteries seem too unworldly to fathom, then look beneath her feet. What is there will look very familiar to you, and you will know what it means. The key to resisting evil is trust that the strife may not yet be over, but the battle is already won.

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help
or sought your intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired with this confidence,
I fly unto you,
O Virgin of virgins, my Mother;
to you do I come,
before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer them.
Amen.

— The Memorare, by Saint Bernard of Clairveaux

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Advent of the Mother of God

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Advent of the Mother of God

The First Sunday of Advent begins a time to release ourselves from the grip of Earthly powers to prepare the Way of the Lord and make straight His path.

Advent by Father Gordon MacRae

The Gospels According to Matthew and Luke are the Scriptural sources for the events of Advent and Christmas. They have many similarities and some differences. Matthew alone tells the story of the Magi, a story I unfolded here in “Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear.” Only Luke has the story of Saint Gabriel the Archangel and the Annunciation. It seems that Mary herself was his source for that account and the events to follow. That Gospel passage graces two important Feast Days within Advent: The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12. I unfolded the deeper recesses of that account as well in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

Both Evangelists often present two stories, one on the surface, and one with much deeper meaning and historical context for those “with eyes to see and ears to hear” making these accounts far richer stories with deeper significance. What lies beneath the lines of the Gospel has to be excavated by seeing and hearing with the hearts and minds of the original hearers of this Good News.

Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation is followed immediately by Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth who awaits the pending birth of John who would become known as the Baptist. It’s a short account, easy to read and ponder, but it tells two stories — maybe even three — one on its surface and one or two that lay beneath. I am going to reproduce it here:

“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the child [who would become John the Baptist] leaped in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”

— Luke 1:39-45

This account comprises the Second Joyful Mystery of the Rosary and is familiar to all of us. At face value, it relates a joyous encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, her cousin and the wife of Zechariah and expectant mother of John the Baptist.

Then there is a second level of meaning, though subtle, that astute Jewish hearers might detect in Luke’s account. The experience of the child leaping in Elizabeth’s womb in the presence of the prenatal Jesus recalls the Old Testament story of Rebekah (Genesis 25: 22-23), pregnant with the twins, Jacob and Esau. Both Luke’s Gospel and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, use the Greek word “skirtáō” to describe this “leaping” or “struggling” of the child in the womb.

In Saint Luke’s account, “the child leaped (skirtáō) in her womb” is used to infer that the child in Mary’s womb would be greater than his slightly older cousin, John (expressed in John 3:16 and 3:27-30). In the Old Testament case of Rebekah, it was to show that Jacob would have preeminence over his slightly older brother, Esau, as God Himself explains:

“The children struggled (skirtáō) together within her… And the Lord said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born to you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

— Genesis 25: 22-23

Also, Elizabeth’s declaration, “Blessed are you among women,” reverberates in Jewish ears back to the experiences of Jael and Judith (Judges 5:24-27 and Judith 13:18). Blessed for their heroic courage in warding off the enemies hostile to Israel, Jael and Judith struck mortal blows to the head of the enemy. In Mary’s case, the victory will be even greater as she puts the head of the enemy beneath her feet (Genesis 3:15).

Elizabeth’s question put to Mary — “Why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” — does not denote a simple visit between cousins. Every occurrence of “Lord” in this account and throughout this chapter in Luke (there are seven such references in this chapter) refer to God. Elizabeth’s declaration that Mary is the Mother of God (Theotokos, in the Greek) became the first Marian dogma to be expounded by the Church and defined, at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431.

Preceding these verses in Luke’s Gospel — and found nowhere else — is the beautiful account of the Archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Zechariah and then to Mary, and the very different ways the Archangel approaches them with Divine News. It demonstrates the great reverence and deference with which the Evangelist and early Church viewed Mary. It was a reverence that spilled over into art, as evidenced in the great painting “The Annunciation” by Fra Angelico.

The New Ark of the Covenant

And then there is yet another layer of meaning for keen Jewish ears in Saint Luke’s Visitation account. There are several striking parallels between Mary’s visit with Elizabeth and King David’s reaction to the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem 1,000 years before. In Luke 1:39, Mary proceeds in haste “into the hill country to a city of Judah.” In the Second Book of Samuel (6:2) David arose and went to the very same place. In Luke 1:43, Elizabeth asks, how is it “that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” In Second Samuel 6:9, David asks, “How is it that the Ark of the Lord comes to me?” In Luke 1:41, “When Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the child leaped in her womb…” In Second Samuel 6:16, “As the Ark of the Lord came into the City of David, Michal the daughter of Saul saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord.”

The parallel is extremely important for the hearers of Luke’s words. The importance rests in the way the Ark of the Covenant was viewed by the people of God. It was a chest made of acacia wood — about 3.75 feet long and 1.5 feet wide (1.1 meters by 0.5 meters) lined both inside and outside with gold (Exodus 25:10-26). At its four corners were placed heavy rings of gold through which acacia poles could be slipped to carry the Ark since it could not be touched by human hands.

The lid was composed of a solid slab of gold that formed the “kapporet” or “mercy seat,” the place of atonement. It was surmounted by two solid gold cherubim which formed a throne so that the Ark itself became a footstool for God (Numbers 10: 33-35).

The Ark was built upon the command of God at Mount Sinai, and it housed the two stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. It also contained a golden vessel of manna (Exodus 16:34) and the rod of Aaron (Numbers 17:10). The Ark became the evidence of the Lord’s intimate association with Israel, a sign of the Covenant, and a housing for the Presence of God. When the Jews encamped, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies where Moses “conversed with the Lord” (Numbers 7:89).

During a struggle with the Philistines, the Ark was captured (1 Samuel 4:11) and taken. The Philistines suffered seven months of earthquakes and plagues (1 Samuel 5:3-9) until the Ark was returned. It stayed for twenty years at Kiriath-Jearim until that scene above in Second Samuel (6:16) when David leaped before it as it returned to the Tabernacle in Jerusalem.

The Ark remained there for the next 400 years until the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. to the Babylonians (Jeremiah 3:16). It was not counted among the spoils claimed by the Babylonians but the Second Book of Maccabees (2 Macc 2-5) described that it was saved from destruction by the Prophet Jeremiah and hidden on Mount Nebo where it would stay “until God gathers His people together again and shows His mercy” (2 Macc 2:7).

Thus emerged throughout Israel the expectation of a Messiah, a Branch of David and a Son of God. In Saint Luke’s subtle but powerful short paragraph about the Visitation is found an entire nation’s wealth of understanding about the return of the Ark of the Covenant and the hope of a Messiah. In the subtle hand of Saint Luke, it is in Mary, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Ark of the New Covenant that the Dawn from On High broke upon us. Hers is a soul that magnifies the Lord.

The vision of the Ark in the Book of Revelation (11:19-12:1) hints at this identification: the “woman clothed with the sun” is the Mother of God. And she wants the last word. The door to that Word was opened on the Solemnity of her Immaculate Conception. The Word is “Mercy,” a divine Christmas gift, and it is the great tragedy of our age that so many do not even know they need it.

O Come, O Branch of Jesse’s stem;
From Every foe deliver them
That trust Your mighty power to save,
And give them victory over the grave.

O Come, O Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that sets us free,
And close the path to misery.

Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel.
To thee shall come Emmanuel.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Our regular weekly post will appear here on Wednesday. The above post was first published several years ago in an older version of this blog. Because of its popularity and focus on Advent, we have restored it and updated it substantially. You may note that some of the wonderful reader comments were posted on the original version of this post.

We have all been through a lot in the few three years. Advent is a time to correct our focus on all that really matters. For more Advent reading we recommend the following posts:

Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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