Thomas Merton and Pornchai Moontri Meet in the City of Angels

Pornchai Moontri began life anew in Bangkok, Thailand where the earthly life of the great Catholic spiritual writer, Thomas Merton ended on December 10, 1968.

If you have been a long time reader of Beyond These Stone Walls, or a newer one who has valiantly perused all our past posts, then you may be struck, as I have been, by the irony at work in our lives. I and others have written multiple posts about the characters who have come into our lives in mysterious ways. Among them are Saints Maximilian Kolbe, Padre Pio, and Saint Michael the Archangel. Most powerfully is the Blessed Mother, a story told in “How Our Lady of Guadalupe Came to Us in Prison.”

There is another figure who has strangely touched both our lives. It is the great Catholic spiritual writer and Trappist monk, Thomas Merton who neither of us had ever met. I wrote once of how I left home and ventured to the Canadian Maritime Province of Newfoundland, at age 16 in 1968. While there, I discovered Thomas Merton’s conversion autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. It was long and ponderous and even tedious, but it led to my reversion to Catholic faith and practice at age 16 – just as most others my age were heading in the opposite direction. This encounter with Merton continued as I read many of his other profound works on the spiritual life.

Pornchai Moontri began his own life as a Buddhist, like most people in Thailand. He had little experience of Catholicism until he met me in prison in 2005. After this blog began in 2009, a reader sent Pornchai a prayer by Thomas Merton. He read it, and then showed it to me saying, “This is the story of my life.” It became important to him, and was posted by his bunk in our cell over the next 15 years. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of the prayer in “Thomas Merton and Pornchai Moontri: A Prayer for the Year of Mercy.”

That prayer became even more important to Pornchai when he learned that Thomas Merton, a Catholic priest of the Cistercian Order, had traveled to Thailand in 1968 to take part in a Buddhist-Christian conference in Bangkok, the very path that Pornchai had been born into. Thomas Merton died in Bangkok that year from accidental electrocution. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krung Thep which means “City of Angels.” Here is the prayer which remained with me long after Pornchai left. I have sent him a copy which remains on his own wall in Thailand.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

— Thomas Merton

And I too have prayed this prayer, and made it my own.

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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.

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

The Doors That Have Unlocked by Fr. Gordon MacRae and Felix Carroll

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Give Thanks for Good and Holy Priests Who Are Willing to Suffer for the Truth!

Reflecting on things for which I’m thankful, the faces of good and holy priests passed through my mind. One living priest who I pray for often is Fr. Gordon MacRae.

By Mary Ann Kreitzer, November 30, 2024. Republished with permission from Les Femmes — The Truth.

As I was reflecting on the things for which I’m thankful this year, the faces of good and holy priests passed through my mind like a slideshow of sanctity. Some of them are gone now to their heavenly reward: Fr. John Hardon, Fr. James Buckley, Fr. Robert Bradley, Fr. Hugh Monmonier. I pray for them and to them. If they are in Purgatory they need my prayers and sacrifices. Whether they are in Purgatory or Heaven, I need their prayers. They were faithful spiritual guides here on earth. I need their continued guidance now more than ever.

One living priest who I pray for often is Fr. Gordon MacRae. I hope this Advent you will make him a companion on the journey by reading his blog and praying for him. I wrote this post last May. I repeat it here as a reminder that often adherence to the truth requires courageous suffering. Let us embrace sacrifices in Advent for the sake of our own souls and the conversion of our poor world.

Fr. Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls

I received a letter yesterday from a very unusual priest, Fr. Gordon MacRae. I call him unusual because I doubt many priests would do what he did. Falsely accused of molesting a minor, the victim of trumped up “evidence” by a corrupt “justice” system in New Hampshire, he refused to be bribed by a plea deal. He could have been out of jail in one or two years if he took the plea. He refused because he was innocent. And now he is on the cusp of “celebrating” thirty years in prison. Read these quotes from the website, Beyond These Stone Walls:

“Fr Gordon MacRae is beyond innocent. It is a travesty that he is in jail. If you listened and read the evidence, transcripts, videos, audio tapes you would be horrified. The people who did this need to get on their knees and beg forgiveness from God. + If they don’t ... .”

— Cary Solomon, Writer, Producer and Director of “Unplanned”

“There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

— William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights (NBC’s “TODAY,” 10/13/05)

“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

The story is horrifying but no surprise. In 2024 we have daily proof of our corrupt “justice” system. Consider the January 6ers many of whom are still in jail without trial after two years. Some who were released knew they weren't guilty, but also knew the administration, using the corrupt FBI and DOJ, was determined to punish them. After all, they wanted proof for their bogus “insurrection.” Jailing innocent citizens mattered little if it advanced the evil goal.

Pro-lifers have felt that poisonous sting for decades. Ask Joan Andrews Bell who spent years in jail for trying to protect little ones in the womb through peaceful direct action. See how the government is using the FACE Act today to manufacture stiff sentences against peaceful Red Rose witnesses demanding decades in jail for offering women help and roses in abortion center waiting rooms.

I don’t fault the January 6ers who accepted the bribes in order to get a short sentence despite the fact it enabled the government to play hero. “See ... these monsters really did plan an insurrection.” But what a difference we see in Fr. MacRae who stood up to Leviathan and entered the gulag, not to “rot in prison” but to continue to serve with courage and fidelity. His passion has brought life to many especially a former cell mate named Pornchai Maximilian Moontri. Wherever an apostle of God resides, in exile or in freedom, he can do God’s work.

Meet Fr. MacRae in the video below. Listen to his story, a sickening relation of corruption and deceit! Then pray for him that justice be done in his case. In the meantime, please pray for the good he has done and will continue to do behind bars. No evil doer can prevent the work of God who ordains all things, both good and evil. He never desires sin and malice but can use the sin and malice of others to perform His holy will.

Video Documentary with Father Gordon MacRae

Donald Trump Has a Prayer

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20) even in the heart and soul of a sinner like Donald Trump. It is that which he has in common with most of us. Everyone else is just pretending.

[The following fine op-ed by Raymond J. de Souza is reprinted from the Opinion Page of The Wall Street Journal on October 11, 2024]

Pious Christians often cringe when Donald Trump talks about religion. Earlier this year the former president got into the Bible business, hawking a $60 “God Bless the USA” version that includes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, correcting that long-lamented lacuna in the New Testament. Yet a pleasant surprise came on Sept. 29, the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel, when Mr. Trump shared, without comment, a well-known prayer to the great saint.

It’s a formidable prayer, one of my favorites, written by one of my favorite popes, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 through 1903. My parish prays it together after every Mass, pleading for the protection of a martial saint: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

The history of the prayer is remarkable and may well appeal to politicians who see evil on the march. It certainly appeals to Christians under persecution, and its return to prominence in recent years signals a desire for devotions suitable for a combative time.

The prayer’s origin isn’t well-documented, likely because it involves a pontiff’s vision, and the Vatican gets nervous when anyone has visions, let alone the pope. One telling of the tale is that on Oct. 13, 1884, Leo heard voices in his chapel. It was the devil challenging Jesus, evocative of the first verses of the Book of Job. Satan said he could destroy the Catholic Church and demanded a century in which to try. Leo then had a mystical vision of the horrors of the 20th century and felt faint. On recovery he went straight to his desk and wrote the St. Michael prayer.

Whatever the inspiration, in 1886 Leo mandated that it be said at the conclusion of “low” Masses — less elaborate ceremonies before Sunday’s principal “high” liturgies — all over the world. Generations of Catholics thus grew up learning the prayer by heart.

In the liturgical reforms of the 1960s, the prayer was dropped. It seemed too militant for the times, even though the imagery is straight out of the Scriptures. St. Michael appears in Revelation 12:7, with “his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.”

By providential arrangement, Leo’s vision took place exactly 33 years before the final apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the shepherd children of Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. Those apparitions fired the Catholic imagination, taking on an anticommunist fervor as they spoke of the “conversion of Russia.” Mary took over martial intercession from Michael; all the more so when St. John Paul II survived an assassination attempt on the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition, in 1981.

Only after the Cold War did the prayer return to prominence. In 1994 John Paul asked that it be recited “in order to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.” The pope was then thwarting the Clinton administration’s attempt to make abortion a worldwide human right at the United Nations’ Cairo conference on population. Having deployed the Virgin Mary to vanquish the communists, perhaps John Paul thought St. Michael could conquer the Clintons.

The prayer is now optional and thus not nearly as well-known. Yet it is becoming more widespread, promoted by those who desire a more combative Catholicism to match a combative cultural and political moment.

Pope Francis speaks of the devil much more than his predecessors did, so it follows that he would turn to St. Michael. In 2013, months after his election and at his first public appearance with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Francis entrusted the protection of Vatican City to the archangel, unveiling a statue of him in the Vatican Gardens. In 2018 he asked Catholics to pray the rosary every day in October, adding the St. Michael prayer “to protect the church from the devil, who always seeks to separate us from God and from each other.”

When I arrived at my current parish in 2022, we added the prayer at the end of every Mass. St. Michael is the patron saint of Kyiv, where a prominent statue of him adorns a central square. It seemed particularly fitting as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion unfolded. Russia still needs conversion.

It’s possible that Mr. Trump learned something of St. Michael from the New York City Police Department, as many Catholic police officers take him as their patron. A larger-than-life statue of St. Michael, cradling a fallen officer, was brought to Harlem’s 32nd Precinct in 2022.

Mr. Trump’s post provoked criticism from the easily agitated, who suggested he was likening his political rivals to the devil. But the prayer, which is as ancient as the Scriptures and as new as the 19th century, is about something much older than American politics. Evil abounds, and the battle against it needs joining. St. Michael leads the charge.

Father de Souza is a priest in Kemptville, Ontario.

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Comment on the WSJ original by Father Gordon MacRae:

The Catholic observance of The Nativity of Mary was eclipsed in the liturgy by a Sunday observance this year. Nonetheless, on the morning of September 8, I awoke to find in my Inbox a beautiful image of Our Lady of Guadalupe with the simple message, “Happy Birthday, Mary.” It was attributed to Donald Trump. I retained the image because it bears a power of its own much more positive than anything else we are seeing in this election season where the negative is simply overwhelming. So on the morning of September 29, I was less surprised to find the image of Saint Michael the Archangel in my Inbox also attributed to Donald Trump. I deeply appreciate the history of this image and prayer that Father de Souza has presented so well, and that The Wall Street Journal has opted to publish. So many, including Kamala Harris, would simply scoff at all of this and at the source of these images. As Father de Souza points out they provoke criticism from the easily agitated "who suggested he was likening his political rivals to the devil." I assure you, if that is so, that Mr. Trump is not the only one to come to that conclusion. Evil abounds! And as Saint Paul has written, “Grace abounds all the more” even perhaps in the heart and soul of a sinner like Donald Trump. It is that which he has in common with most of us. Everyone else is just pretending.

Catholic Assessment of Kamala Harris

Catholic League President Bill Donohue represents the largest religious freedom organization in the nation. Here he assesses presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

There are many ways to assess any public person. My interest here is to assess Kamala Harris from a Catholic perspective. issuing an abbreviated rendition of this article at the end of July, the last news release I wrote about Harris was in May.  It was occasioned by her foul mouth.  Everyone concedes that politicians of all stripes are known to curse, but they typically do so among themselves, or at private events.  Not her.

On May 13, with the cameras rolling, she spoke at an Asian American organization, saying, “We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open.  Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f**king door down.”  She then descended into her proverbial cackle.

Why the obscenity in a public forum?  She is the Vice President of the United States.  Nice role model for young minority girls.

Sometimes Harris says things that embarrasses her family.  Her father, who is from Jamaica, took umbrage at a comment she made suggesting that Jamaicans are all a bunch of potheads.

In 2019, Harris was asked on a radio talk show if she supported legalizing marijuana.  She responded, “Half my family’s from Jamaica.  Are you kidding me?”

Her father, Donald Harris, quickly rebuked her, saying his grandmothers and deceased parents “must be turning over in their graves right now to see their family name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in pursuit of identity politics.  Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

Harris not only makes offensive comments, her feminist views are so extreme that she reflexively sides with women who accuse men of sexual harassment.

When Brett Kavanaugh was being considered for a seat on the Supreme Court, he was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers.  But under stiff questioning, her account fell apart.  In March 2024, the Washington Examiner ran a piece that said it all.  “Half a Decade Later, Christine Blasey Ford Still Has No Corroborating Witness.”

At the time, Harris sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee; it was charged with assessing Kavanaugh’s suitability to be on the Supreme Court.  Before he uttered one word at the hearing, Harris said of Ford, “I believe her.”  After Ford came off as a fraud, Harris stuck to her guns and tweeted that Kavanaugh “lied.”

At least she is consistent.  In 2019, when she was a senator, Biden was accused by women of touching them inappropriately.  At a presidential campaign event in Nevada, she said, “I believe them.”  She even wrote a piece for The Hill  that was titled, “Harris: ‘I Believe’ Biden accusers.”  Fortunately for her, the media never ask her to explain herself.

Of primary interest to Catholics is Harris’ position on social and cultural issues.  Let’s begin by assessing her definition of culture.  She spoke about this at the 2023 Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans.

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment and our time.  Right?  And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment.  That is a reflection of joy.  Because, you know…it comes in the morning.”  She then broke out into a fit of laughter.  But she was not done.

“We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life.  And I think about it that way, too.”  No one knew what she was talking about.

Harris may be incoherent in her speeches, but her policy decisions, especially on social and cultural issues, are not in doubt.

On September 13, 2019, I wrote a news release titled, “Kamala Harris’ Lust For Abortion.”  Earlier in the year, I said, she defended abortion at any time during pregnancy, right up until birth.  She also wanted to force states that restrict abortions to obtain federal approval from the Department of Justice before implementing them.

When Harris was California’s attorney general, she bludgeoned pro-life activist David Daleiden.  He used undercover videos to expose how abortion operatives harvest and sell aborted fetal organs.  She authorized her office to raid his home: they seized his camera equipment and copies of revealing videos that implicated many of those who work in the abortion industry.

In her role as California AG she also sought to cripple crisis pregnancy centers with draconian regulations.  Specifically, she supported a bill that would force these centers to inform clients where they could obtain an abortion.  She was sued and lost in the Supreme Court three years later.

Like many other Democrats, Harris is not content to sanction child abuse in the womb.  Even when they are born, she is okay with letting those who survive an abortion die.

To be specific, on February 25, 2020, Sen. Harris voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would “prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”  That’s called infanticide.

Harris’ record on abortion and infanticide is at odds with her opposition to the death penalty.  When it comes to convicted serial rapists and mass shooters, she wants to spare their lives.  In 2019, she was explicitly asked if she opposed the death penalty for acts of treason.  She said she did.

There we have it.  Harris says that those who endanger the safety of all Americans by attempting a violent overthrow of the government, or spying on the military for a foreign enemy, should have their lives spared, but innocent children who are moments away from being born are not entitled to have their lives spared.  And children who survive an abortion, but are in need of medical attention, can be left to die on the table, and no one will be held accountable.

The Democratic Party is the proud party of homosexual activists and transgender radicals.

Harris is so happy to see two people of the same sex “marry” that she actually performed “marriages” between gay couples in 2004.  She also opposed Proposition 8, the California initiative barring gay marriage.  The people spoke — they voted for it — but she does not believe in “power to the people”: she believes in power to the ruling class (which won in the Supreme Court).  No wonder her voting record earned her a perfect score of 100 percent by the anti-women and anti-science gay behemoth, the Human Rights Campaign.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis supported a bill that would prohibit teachers in the early grades, K-3rd grade, from being indoctrinated with gay and transgender propaganda, she opposed it.  In doing so she also showed her contempt for parental rights; the bill prohibited efforts to undermine them.

Harris’ enthusiasm for transgender rights includes allowing females who claim to be men to join the military and males who claim to be female to compete against girls and women in sports.

Religious liberty is a First Amendment right, but her deeds suggest she is not supportive of it.  She is good at “God talk” — when referring to a specific year she occasionally says “in the year of our Lord.”  But talk is cheap.  As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored the “Do No Harm Act” that would force religious institutions to violate their doctrinal prerogatives.

Harris even co-sponsored the most anti-religious liberty bill ever introduced, the Equality Act.  It would coerce Catholic doctors and hospitals to perform abortions and to mutilate the genitals of young people seeking to transition to the opposite sex.  This bill would sideline the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton ensuring that the government does not encroach on religious rights.

In 2018, the Catholic League was among the first organizations in the nation to protest her attack on a Catholic nominee for a federal district judge post.  She badgered Brian Buescher at a hearing, simply because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus, a male entity.

As I pointed out at the time, Harris has never objected to Jewish women groups or the League of Women Voters.  Just a Catholic male group.  What really got her goat is Buescher’s membership in a Catholic organization that is pro-life and pro-marriage, rightly understood.  In other words, she was invoking a religious test for public office, which is unconstitutional.

Not only does Harris harbor an animus against Catholics, she has no respect for separation of church and state.  In 2021, she created a video to be played in Virginia black churches urging everyone to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.  The video aired in 300 churches for several weeks.  Harris starred in it, beckoning congregants to vote for him.

Harris is no friend of the black poor.  She has consistently voted against school choice, thus keeping inner-city blacks in their place.  If she truly believed in social justice, she would work to see that poor blacks have the same opportunity to send their children to the school of their choice. Instead, she consigns them to schools that no member of the ruling class would ever elect for their own kids.

Her biography explains why she is so insensitive to the black poor.  She was raised in a home of privilege, and has lived a privileged life ever since.  She has successfully exploited her connections to advance her career, having been anointed most of her posts.  She even secured her first job out of law school as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County even though she was not a lawyer (she failed the bar the first time around).

Being a beneficiary of black privilege explains why she is so uncharitable.  When she was California attorney general, her 2011-2013 tax returns showed she made $158,000 but did not give a dime to charity.  Liberals do not believe they need to have any skin in the game — it’s the job of government to pay for the poor.

Another way the government is supposed to fulfill her social justice agenda is by supporting reparations for slavery.  When she was in the senate, she co-sponsored a bill to do just that.  In doing so, she put herself in an awkward position.  Her ancestors were slavemasters.

Her father, Donald Harris, who is a Stanford professor of economics, said in 2018 that his grandmother was a descendant of Hamilton Brown, who was a plantation and slave owner in northern Jamaica.  Brown didn’t own one or two slaves — he owned scores of them.  Most of them were brought from Africa, which has a long history of slavery (it still exists today in some countries).

As I said four years ago, “if the average American has to pay X amount for slavery, Harris should at least have to pay 10X.  Isn’t that what redistributive justice is all about?  Catholics need to know.”

From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love

Canadian Catholic writer Michael Brandon reviews Beyond These Stone Walls. This blog from a wrongly imprisoned priest is a guiding light for many around the globe.

Written on the Feast of the Guardian Angels by Michael Brandon, Ontario, Canada

Once again, a blockbuster article appeared over at Beyond These Stone Walls, this one titled “Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae.”  Every week I await the Wednesday morning posting on Beyond These Stone Walls, with some of the anticipation of a young child for Christmas, and every week I am not disappointed.  The gift given is always just what I needed, never too much and never too little. And it is probably so for many of the other readers of BTSW postings, and so it is a unique gift for each of us.

And isn’t anticipation of Christmas a good thing?  At that first Christmas we received the greatest gift mankind every received, the birth of Our Saviour; God became man for us.  And that gift too is unique for each and every one of us.  The same Jesus, the same manger, the same outward appearance, but he comes to each and every one of us where we are geographically and in our state in life.

The giving of gifts at Christmas was always meant to symbolize that greatest of all gifts, but has come more to mean conspicuous consumption.  But, the underlying meaning of Christmas is still there, even if hidden from the eyes of most. So, when we receive our weekly gift from Father Gordon at Beyond These Stone Walls, we are there too receiving the original intent of Christmas, the gift of Christ. In this particular case we receive the gift of Christ from an Alter Christus, a man ordained to bring Christ to us.

Yesterday our gift though was a little different.  It was a recounting of the case, life and trials of Father MacRae, by a very respected leader of the laity in America, Dr. William Donohue.  If you have been on the BTSW site, or have come across articles or books by Ryan A. MacDonald or Dorothy Rabinowitz to name two of many, you have had access to the story of cruelty and manipulation that resulted in the false imprisonment of Father MacRae.

The available information on his case is voluminous, and with the different perspectives of the various writers focusing on particular aspects of the injustice of it all, and official documents, it is a challenge to put into a single perspective.  However, Dr. Donohue does just that and for that BTSW readers should be grateful.

Dr. Donohue highlights the confluence of evil that was required for our friend and priest Father Gordon to end up behind bars in such an incongruous set of lies, deceptions, hatred, greed, and malevolence.  The devil is in the details, and in this case we can see the devil in the details.

For further reflection we have the words of Saint Bernard an abbot and the author of the Memorare prayer.  Saint Bernard, like Father Gordon was a lover of Our Holy Mother.  In the Office of the Readings for September 10, we find that he wrote:

“The whole of the spiritual life consists of these two elements.  When we think of ourselves, we are perturbed and filled with a salutary sadness.  And when we think of Our Lord, we are revived to find consolation in the joy of the Holy Spirit.  From the first we derive fear and humility, from the second hope and love.”

Father Gordon did not commit the crimes for which he was placed in prison, in no large part because they never happened.  But, he is a sinner like you and me.  Our Lord knew who he was, and also how he, like you and like me, is the very apple of His eye.  He has allowed all that has happened to Father Gordon to occur for His Glory, in ways we cannot understand, in ways that are way above our pay grade.

I do not know anything about the depth of Father Gordon’s spiritual life before going to prison, but I read and see it becoming as deep as the ocean now.  He has been taken to the places of fear and humility; it is evident in his writings.

Father Gordon’s gift of himself to us each week comes from the same place as the gift Jesus gave to us in His Birth, but also in His Death and Resurrection.  That gift and every good gift emanates from the heart of the Father, and as God is love, so too these gifts are gifts of love.

Cherish the gift that is Jesus, and cherish the gift from his Alter Christus, Father Gordon as if it comes from the depths of the heart of Jesus, for it does.  The gift we receive weekly from Father Gordon MacRae is a sign of God’s love for us.

Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae

by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

God gives us all a cross to bear, but some are heavier than others. Few can match the weight of the one that Fr Gordon J MacRae has been carrying for three decades.

His troubles began in 1983. Father Gordon MacRae was working at a clinic for drug-addicted youths in New Hampshire when a 14-year-old told his psychotherapist that the priest had kissed him; there was nothing to the story, so nothing came of it. Three years later, when the young man was expelled from a Catholic high school for carrying a weapon, he started telling his counselor how MacRae had fondled him. It turns out that the adolescent was quite busy at the time making accusations: he said two male teachers also molested him. An investigation into all of these cases was made, and they were all dismissed.

Ten years after the first charges against MacRae were tossed, the same man resurfaced with new accusations. The preposterous nature of the charges meant they would go nowhere, but as fate would have it, they would nonetheless play a role in helping to bolster a criminal charge against MacRae one year later.

It wasn’t over for MacRae, not by a long shot. In 1988, a teenager at a hospital that treats drug abusers told the priest about sexual encounters he allegedly had at the hospital and then exposed himself. MacRae, taking no chances, reported this to his superiors. While they believed him, they nonetheless suspended him pending an investigation. But the effect that this incident had on a local detective was not sanguine. In fact, he proved to be a zealot who made it his duty to get all the goods on MacRae, even to the point of making some details up.

The detective went on a tear interrogating nearly two dozen boys whom MacRae had counseled — looking for dirt — but he came up empty. Then MacRae met a teenager who worked for the detective in a “family-owned business,” and whose mother worked for the police. The young man said MacRae had molested him after the priest turned him down for a loan of $75; the same teenager was accusing others of abuse. Under considerable pressure to end this ordeal —MacRae had no legal counsel and was interrogated for four-and-a-half hours— he signed a statement saying he had endangered the welfare of a minor. The detective, who wanted more, said, “though no actual molestation took place, there are various levels of abuse.” It must be noted that the accuser refused to speak to an FBI investigator about what happened, and his own brother said the whole thing was “a fraud for money.” This was the last time MacRae would allow himself to be framed.

It is not a matter of opinion to say the detective was obsessed with MacRae: the evidence convinced independent observers that he was. For example, when the priest received letters claiming he had abused a male youth, little did he know that the detective had authored the letters for the accuser. Also, it was learned subsequently that a witness signed a statement saying the detective had given him cash, offering “a large sum of money” to make a false claim against MacRae (this happened just before his trial). Word on the street was that the Catholic Church was writing checks to get accusations of priestly abuse off its desk, a process that kept feeding the next frenzy. MacRae was caught up in it, and his superiors were ever quick to clear themselves.

On September 23, 1994, Father Gordon MacRae was shackled and led out of Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire. He had been convicted by a jury of sexual assaults that allegedly happened nearly twelve years earlier. The 41-year-old priest was sentenced to a prison term of 33 ½ to 67 years.

MacRae says he is innocent. So do those who have looked into his case. Count me among them. “I did not commit these crimes,” MacRae says. “In fact, no one did.” Pointedly, he maintains that he wasn’t the one on trial. “The priesthood itself was on trial. No evidence whatsoever was introduced to support the claims. My accuser committed a $200,000 fraud, the amount in settlement he received from my diocese.”

No one has covered this story better than Dorothy Rabinowitz, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. MacRae’s accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the ordeal that MacRae has endured. He provided not a single witness, even though the alleged offenses took place in populated areas; the places were so busy that it is unlikely that no one would notice if something were awry. Moreover, Grover was coached by professionals, people more interested in getting a priest than justice. His attorney put him in touch with a counselor who came in quite handy. She stood at the back of the courtroom during Grover’s testimony, away from the sight of the jury, instructing him when to feign crying. On cue, he cried loudly, often at some length.

In the pretrial hearing, Grover went into high gear. He said MacRae chased him through a cemetery, trying to corner him. The priest also allegedly pointed a gun at Grover, threatening him if he told anyone about their encounter. Not to be outdone, MacRae supposedly chased Grover down the highway in his car.

At the trial, Grover said MacRae sexually abused him when he was 15-years-old during five episodes. Rabinowitz captures the essence of what was really going on. “Why, after the first horrifying attack,” she asks, “had Mr. Grover willingly returned for four more sessions, in each of which he had been forcibly molested? Because, he explained, he had come to each new meeting with no memory of the previous attack.” If this is not preposterous enough, the accuser said he had “out of body” experiences that blocked his recollection. Just as we might expect, Grover conveniently changed his story many times.

Before the trial, MacRae had twice been offered a plea deal, but he turned them down. Midway through the trial, he was offered another opportunity. It sounded reasonable: plead guilty and the sentence is one to three years; refuse and risk spending decades in prison. He refused for a third time. The trial moved forward and he was found guilty. The sentence was obscene: it was thirty times what the state had offered in the plea bargain.

Why do I believe MacRae is innocent, a veritable modern-day Job who has been treated unjustly by the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil? MacRae and I have been writing to each other for years, and I have read his account many times. The clincher year for me was 2012: recently discovered evidence emerged (now part of on-going court proceedings) that showed how utterly manipulative the accuser is. To be specific, signed statements by the accuser’s family and friends demonstrate that Thomas Grover admitted to them that he lied about everything; they have also spoken about his reaction after the trial ended.

Grover’s former wife and stepson say that he is a “compulsive liar,” “manipulator,” “drama queen,” and “hustler” who “molded stories to fit his needs”; he could also “tell a lie and stick to it ’till his end.'” When he was confronted with his lies, he would lose his temper and sign himself into the psychiatric ward at a local hospital.

The former wife and stepson testify that Grover bragged how he was going to set up MacRae and “get even with the church.” What the stepson said is worth repeating at length:

“Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church. On several occasions, Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae…[and] stated to me that there were other allegations, made by other people against MacRae and [he] jumped on and piggy-backed onto these allegations for the money.”

Grover’s former wife, who acknowledges that he “never stated one word of abuse by [MacRae],” knew early on in their marriage that something was wrong. She had two daughters when they met, and both were frightened of him from the start. They saw him as a “sick individual who was obsessed with sex and teenage girls”; thus did they label him a “creep” and a “pervert.” They recall that he was “constantly eying” and groping them. When they woke up in the middle of the night, they would sometimes find him in their room, between their beds, staring at them.

It was also recently disclosed that the detective who had earlier hounded MacRae was guilty of badgering witnesses, misrepresenting what they said, offering inaccurate reports, and even collaborating with Grover’s civil lawyer. No wonder that another detective, a former FBI investigator, exonerated MacRae. “During the entirety of my three-year investigation of this matter,” James M. Abbott said, “I discovered no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any other crimes.”

When the trial was over, and Grover got a check for over $195,000 from the Diocese of Manchester, he photographed himself with $30,000 in cash. He bragged to his buddies, with bags of cash in his hands, that he had succeeded in “putting it over on the church.” That was in March 1997. In August, he took his former wife with him to Arizona where he blew it on alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and other vices. In a three-day gambling spree, he went through $70,000 and he even had a Nevada casino hunting him down for another $50,000.

MacRae arrived in prison on September 23, 1994. He did not know it at the time, but it was the Feast of Saint Padre Pio, himself the subject of false allegations of sexual abuse. A dozen guards in riot gear surrounded him, forcing him to stand naked in the middle of them for an hour while they laughed at him. “For the first three nights while locked alone in a cell with nothing — naked and with no bedding but a bare concrete slab — tiers of prisoners stomped their feet in unison chanting, ‘Kill the Priest’ for hours on end into the night. It was maddening.” Prayer allowed him to persevere. “I lifted the cross willingly — though perhaps then more like Simon of Cyrene than like Christ — but I lifted it.”

Should MacRae have accepted the three plea deals? He never regrets saying no. As he sees it, “to succumb to a negotiated lie was like falling under the weight of the cross of false witness for the first, second, and third time.” Incredibly, even in prison, he is still the target of those seeking to shake him down, looking for the Church to fork over more money. In 2003, he was accused by another man of molesting him many years earlier. But MacRae had never even heard of this guy, so he instructed his lawyer to challenge the accusation. He did, and neither MacRae nor his lawyer ever heard from him and his attorney ever again.

December 23, 2006, MacRae calculated that he had been a priest for 4,125 days before he was sent to prison. He then tallied the number of days he had been in prison and came to the realization that on the very next day he would be a priest in prison longer than in freedom. “For the first time in 4,125 days in prison, I sobbed uncontrollably at this realization. I was losing myself.”

MacRae’s despair was relieved the next day when a Conventual Franciscan priest, Father Jim McCurry, visited him in prison. He gave him a laminated “holy card” depicting Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a member of Father McCurry’s order in whose cause for sainthood he had been involved as a Postulator. To this day, Kolbe’s historic story provides much inspiration to MacRae, as well as to countless others. The Polish priest gave his life in a Nazi death camp so that the life of another innocent person, a young father, would be spared.

Father Gordon J. MacRae does not aspire to be in the same league with Father Kolbe. That is not the point. The point is that his ordeal, like that of Kolbe’s, is born of grave injustice. There are so many guilty parties to this travesty it is hard to know where to begin. At work is maliciousness, callousness, apathy, and cowardice.

Please keep Father MacRae in your prayers. We can never give up hope.

‘Mary Is at Work Here’

New Hampshire State Prison for Men inmates are first prison group to make 33 Days Marian consecration.

By Felix Carroll | Marian Helper (Spring 2014)

It was a break-in, not a breakout. Led by a group of volunteers who understand the high spiritual stakes, the Blessed Virgin Mary has made her way through prison walls in New Hampshire, entering into an atmosphere hitherto described by one inmate as a “crucible of discouragement and humiliation.”

In November, 13 inmates at New Hampshire State Prison for Men comprised the first prison group to make the consecration to Jesus through Mary using the group-retreat program for 33 Days to Morning Glory, a do-it-yourself retreat written by Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC.

The momentous event in the lives of the inmates was also an historic moment in the evangelization efforts of the Marian Fathers, who pray that the prison group is the first of many to make the Marian consecration.

“Jesus said, ‘I was … in prison and you visited Me’ (Mt 25:36). To this day, prisoners are our forgotten brothers and sisters,” said Fr. Michael. “Now, seeing how Mary has so profoundly touched the lives of inmates in New Hampshire is inspiring us to redouble our efforts to get 33 Days into more prisons across the country. I firmly believe that Our Mother of Mercy desires this for her forgotten children.”

Eric Mahl (left), a Marian lay aggregate, has helped spearhead the Marians' evangelization efforts.  Standing in front of New Hampshire State Prison for Men, he is joined by prison ministry volunteers Jean Fafard, Nate Chapman, David Kemmis, and Fr. Wilfred Deschamps.

God Doesn’t Give up on Us

On a cold Nov. 24, the solemnity of Christ the King, inmates enter the prison chapel for Sunday Mass, all dressed in drab green, their first names stitched upon their shirts.

Visiting priest Fr. Wilfred Deschamps greets them one by one. An ardent supporter of the 33 Days program, he wanted to be here for the inmates’ consecration. He’s thrilled to learn of the Gospel reading for the day, from Luke 23:35-43. It couldn’t be more suitable for the setting and the occasion. In it, Jesus, dying on the cross, promises heaven to the repentant criminal hanging beside Him.

“No matter what we have done,” Fr. Deschamps tells the inmates in his homily, “God loves us. He doesn’t give up on anyone.”

Moments later, he invites the inmates participating in 33 Days to come before the altar. Between Oct. 20 and this day, the inmates met weekly to pray together, watch Fr. Michael’s DVD presentations, and then discuss the material on Marian consecration. And as the 33 Days program progressed, they felt a brotherhood developing between them that has helped to strengthen them against the bouts of loneliness, despair, and fear they face in prison.

“Mary is at work here,” says Deacon Jim Daly, the prison’s Catholic chaplain.

Led by Fr. Deschamps, the inmates make their consecration, pledging to “renew and ratify” the vows of their Baptism, renounce Satan, and give themselves to Mary to be formed into the image of her Son.

“I felt this overwhelming peace coming over me,” an inmate named Lawrence said afterwards.

So what has been so extraordinary about the experience?

“Knowing that we are loved,” Lawrence said, “in a place where you can be so bitter and angry, to know we can go to Mary.”

Why These Inmates?

Nearly two million copies of 33 Days to Morning Glory are now in print. It has consistently been among the top 10 Catholic books on Amazon.com for the past two years.

Prison volunteer Nate Chapman of New Hampshire and three fellow devotees of Mary named David Kemmis, Jean Fafard, and Jim Preisendorfer are among the hundreds of thousands who have made the consecration. Having done so, they knew the inmates would benefit from it. When approached about it, Deacon Daly welcomed it as a “dream come true.”

The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri, who was featured in last year’s Marian Press title Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Moreover, before joining the Marians’ Evangelization Department a year ago and helping to spearhead the 33 Days initiative, Eric Mahl was also featured in the book.

Eric and Pornchai met for the first time in November when Eric presented to the inmates during one of the six weekly meetings for the group retreat.

“I felt like I met my brother, someone I’ve known my whole life,” Eric said afterwards.

As Loved, Lost, Found reveals, Pornchai, 40, is serving a 45-year prison sentence for a murder he committed when he was 19. He experienced a dramatic conversion several years ago in no small part due to a friendship he formed with fellow inmate — and now cellmate — Fr. Gordon MacRae, convicted in 1994 on charges of sexual assault that have since been called into question. Father Gordon — who chronicles his life in his celebrated website, Beyond These Stone Walls — has gained widespread public support for his cause, including from the late Cardinal Avery Dulles.

Now in his 20th year of incarceration, he joined Pornchai in the consecration and called it a “great spiritual gift” that opened “a door to the rebirth of trust” at a particularly dark time for both men. He and Pornchai signed up for the program reluctantly, but Mr. Chapman’s introduction “instantly awakened us to our very purpose for being there. It could be summarized in one sentence: ‘Great suffering requires great trust.’”

‘Mary Has a Special Love for You’

Eric returned to the prison on the day of the consecration and spoke to the inmates about Mary’s desire to enter the prison. He likened it to the scene in The Passion of The Christ when Mary lay on a floor in the Temple complex to get close to her Son who was suffering, imprisoned in a cell below her.

“That’s Mary right now,” Eric told the inmates. “By doing this consecration, you’re opening the door for her. You may be that Christ — shackled and bloody and so full of pain. All she wants to do is take care of us and bring us to Christ. Mary has a special love for you, but now it’s your job to pray for other inmates. Where Mary is, the Holy Spirit is, and where the Holy Spirit is, there is conversion and sanctification.”

For more information about the 33 Days retreat, visit allheartsafire.org.

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A Voice for the Voiceless: Beyond These Stone Walls

An Arizona State University student asked the Editor of Beyond These Stone Walls for an interview about this unique Catholic blog. This is her project submission.

September 4, 2024, Edited by Dilia E. Rodriguez, PhD

From the Editor: Back in July 2024 I was contacted by a remarkable young woman who identified herself as a Catholic student at Arizona State University. She was developing a project on Ethnography, a field of study about the growth of literacy within a community. The literacy she wanted to write about was the growth of faith among a community of believers. She had come across the blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, by Father Gordon J. MacRae in 2021 and found herself to be drawn into it over time. She reported that it has very much impacted her own faith experience, and discovered after three years of reading this blog that this has been true of others as well. The student submitted a list of probing interview questions about how I became the Editor of this blog and what that has meant to me.

Because the student has submitted this project for a grade, she asked not to be named in its publication. The student’s questions and my responses are laid out in a separate post entitled, From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.

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Introduction

Beyond These Stone Walls is a Catholic blog with a focus on social justice, by Father Gordon J. MacRae. In 1994, Father MacRae was convicted by jury of sexually assaulting Thomas Grover and sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to 67 years in prison. Notable figures such as Civil Rights Attorney Harvey A. Silvergate, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz, and FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott (Ret.) have investigated the facts related to this case and have published their findings, stating that Father MacRae is innocent. In summary, it has come to light that Thomas Grover acted in concert with Detective James F. McLaughlin to extract money from the Catholic Church by falsely accusing Father MacRae of sexual abuse. This is evidenced in part by: a sworn statement from Thomas Grover’s former stepson stating “Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme” and a statement from a former friend of Grover’s that “McLaughlin had me believing that all I had to do is make up a story about Gordon and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could be easier for us with a large amount of money.” (The Media Report). Further, courtroom spectators witnessed Grover’s therapist (hired by his lawyer) coach him to cry multiple times during his testimony by making eye contact with Grover and then “slowly moving her finger down her cheek with a distinct sorrowful frown on her face.” In response, Grover would weep, “in stark contrast to his behavior after his testimony and in the hall outside the court where he was jumping up and down and laughing and joking…” (MacDonald). Additionally, a sting operation attempted by McLaughlin shows he placed his fake calls to Father MacRae from Grover’s contingency lawyer’s office. (MacDonald). These few statements do not cover the plethora of evidence that has come to light of the multitude of unjust actions taken by several figures, within and without the Church. However, Father MacRae’s defense has been taken up by better pens than mine, and this small ethnography is not to prove his innocence, but rather to explore the effects of literacy in the blog and throughout the world. I chose to study this literacy space because I was born into the Catholic Faith and this blog has helped to sustain my faith throughout time.

Assumptions

I hypothesized that literacy works in this community by giving voice to the voiceless, or shining a light where those with wealth and power would rather look the other way.

Beyond These Stonewalls’ literacy acts to give voice to the voiceless, and those who have suffered the trial of sexual assault are among them. One of the reasons I believe in Father MacRae is because of his friendship that developed in prison with Pornchai Moontri. Moontri had experienced as a victim in hundredfold the crimes that Father MacRae had been accused of, thus making their friendship highly unlikely. Moontri was sentenced to 45 years for “murder with deliberate indifference”, for a stabbing that occurred during a fight when he was 18 years old. His stepfather, who had been committing the previously mentioned crimes against him, chose not to hire a lawyer for him, while Moontri’s mother pleaded with Moontri not to reveal what had been done to him to protect her and her husband. Moontri kept his silence for his mother’s sake and was sentenced to nearly life in prison. From there, he was sent to solitary confinement for several years due to repeated fighting. His mother was murdered during this time. One day, he was sent to the New Hampshire State Prison, “dragging behind [him] the Titanic in which [he] stored all [his] anger and hurt and loss and loss and loss — and guilt.” (Moontri). Through a mutual friend, Moontri and Father MacRae were introduced, and a friendship began. Moontri wrote, “By patience and especially by example, [Father] Gordon helped me change the course of my life. He is my best friend, and the person I trust most in this world. It is the strangest irony that he has been in prison for 13 years accused fictionally of the same behaviors visited upon me in the real world by the man who took me from Thailand. I spend my days in school instead of in lock-up now, and I will soon complete my High School diploma. Gordon helped me obtain a scholarship for a series of non-credit courses in Catholic studies at Catholic Distance University. In the last year, with help and understanding, I have completed programs offered in the New Hampshire prison. One day I felt strangely light so I looked behind me, and the Titanic was not there. I parked it somewhere along the way. I have put my childhood aside. Now I am a man.” Moontri wrote these words in 2008 for a Catholic League publication, and though he has been freed and lives in Thailand, remains in close contact with Father MacRae. It is a story of immense loss and pain, and overwhelming beauty, grace, and hope. As an inmate at the time, Moontri had nothing of worldly value to gain from befriending Father MacRae and could have easily held on to his “Titanic”. It is a testament to the goodness of Father MacRae that he helped Pornchai Moontri find hope and new life. It is a testament to Moontri and the human spirit that he was willing to hope, and willing to give this friendship a chance, after having been betrayed on every level by those who by natural law should have protected him. BTWS has often given voice to Moontri’s story, even connecting him with help when he was deported from prison to Thailand, where he previously had nowhere to stay and nowhere to go. For so long, no one spoke up in defense of Moontri, not even himself. But Father Gordon MacRae, and by extension, BTSW, gave him a platform to speak the truth.

Another assumption I made prior to conducting my research was that Father MacRae had never recanted at any point. In my research, I discovered that while maintaining his innocence throughout the Thomas Grover trial, after he had been found guilty and sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to a life sentence in prison, Father MacRae accepted a post trial plea deal for one to two years served concurrently with the existing sentence for the remaining charges of sexual assault from Thomas Grover’s brothers and others who had made claims for money. His lawyer had deserted him and was not present for his sentencing and advised him by phone that he had no choice but to take the deal. Under the crushing grief of having just been sentenced to life in prison and being deserted by his counsel, his bishop, his diocese, and virtually everyone else, he accepted the post-trial deal to end this (MacDonald). This realization was at first difficult for me to accept, until I remembered a Saint, who in similar straits of grief and despair also signed a plea deal after receiving the death sentence. Though Father MacRae had not been sentenced to immediate death, he had been sentenced to die in prison, a similarly crushing fate. The Maid of Orleans, Saint Joan of Arc, is known for her valiant bravery and her choice to remain faithful to God in the face of fiery death. However, a lesser-known fact about her is that she despite maintaining her innocence throughout the trial, she recanted temporarily after hearing her sentence read. “After refusing to submit to the church, her sentence was read on May 24: She was to be turned over to secular authorities and executed. Reacting with horror to the pronouncement, Joan agreed to recant and was condemned instead to perpetual imprisonment.” (Sullivan). But this was not the end of their story. St. Catherine and St. Margaret reproached then Joan of Arc for recanting her statement. Fortified by heaven, St. Joan of Arc again defied the authority of the court and maintained her innocence. She was then burned to death at Place du Vieux-Marche in Rouen, on May 30th, at 19 years old, while beholding our Lord on the Crucifix (Sullivan). For the entirety of his prison time, Father MacRae has maintained that he is innocent, despite horrific living conditions for several years due to his refusal to admit guilt.

Blogger Emma King writes, “Her fear is understandable, and makes her less of an icon and more of a person to us. She shows us that trust in God is difficult at any moment in life, but when alone and faced with a torturous death, it is near impossible. Joan’s human weakness, then, points not to our own human existence, but to God’s faithfulness and mercy.”

Methodology

For my research, I interviewed the editor of Beyond These Stone Walls, Dr. Dilia E. Rodríguez, through email. Additionally, I analyzed one post by Father MacRae that exemplified literacy being used to give a platform to unpopular truth.

Data Analysis

Father MacRae wrote, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men” describing the problem of Fatherlessness in our society, and its effect on both humans and animals.  He described how “the U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners” and that eighty percent of the young men he has met in prison grew up in homes without fathers.  I found this article to be deeply poignant because the world’s prevailing wisdom is that a father is not needed.  Adults’ desires take precedence over children’s needs for their mother and father.  But it is not politically prudent to draw attention to this.  It goes against the narrative that adults have the right to children, and to make up any “family” desired.  It is politically incorrect to state that children have the right to a mother and father, and that they suffer immensely when they do not.  Father MacRae wrote that, “There is an unexpected freedom in being who and where I am.  I can write the truth without the usual automatic constraints about what it might cost me.”  He has lost nearly everything, but by losing so much he has gained the ability to say in the public forum the inconvenient truth.  He has the ability to preach to a global Church, sermons unfettered by the court of public opinion.  In receiving these words, the Church Militant is revitalized and reminded of the importance of fathers.  Saint John Paul II wrote, “the history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family.”  Now, Father MacRae acts as a Father to those in prison.

Conclusion

From analyzing the constellation of voices surrounding BTSW, I have seen how powerful literacy is in sharing the truth when the majority do not wish to acknowledge it. In a world inundated by information and besieged by evil, God reveals He works in mysterious ways and in the most unlikely places. Many comments on Father MacRae’s articles are profound and touching, sharing how many readers have been following Father MacRae’s journey for over a decade. They share how Father MacRae’s writings have touched their hearts and their lives and given them hope again.

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Editor’s Note: Read the interview with Editor Dilia E. Rodríguez at From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.

Bibliography by Author

“Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest.” TheMediaReportcom. Accessed 25 June 2024.

Cavins, Jeff, et al. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition. Ascension, 2018. 

“Joan of Arc: Model of Strength.” Catholic Exchange, 29 May 2014.

Moontri, Pornchai. “Conversion Story for 2008.” Catholic League, 20 Mar. 2017.

MacDonald, Ryan A. “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.” Beyond These Stone Walls, 8 Nov. 2023.

MacRae, Fr. Gordon J. “Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.” Beyond These Stone Walls, 3 Apr. 2024.

Sullivan, Missy. “Joan of Arc Is Burned at the Stake for Heresy | May 30, 1431.” History.Com, A&E Television Networks. Accessed 10 Aug. 2024.

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Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison by Marie Meaney

[Editor’s Note: Beyond These Stone Walls is truly a global blog. The latest evidence for its reach is these two brief posts which were written and published in France in 2021 by Marie Meany at the blog Cheminons aves Marie qui défait les nœuds. What follows is an English translation of the original French.]

Often, we desperately try to untie the knots in our lives that cause such suffering. Yet these knots, when lovingly accepted, become part of the beautiful tapestry of our lives. From eternity we will see how precious they are in God’s eyes, and frequently much more significant than any successes we experienced. Sometimes God allows us to catch a glimpse of the way He weaves our lives together into a story of salvation. Let me give an example of this.

Father Gordon MacRae

The Catholic priest, Father Gordon MacRae, was falsely condemned on trumped-up charges of sexual abuse in 1994 and has been in prison since then, refusing pretrial deals that would have shortened his sentence to merely one to three years had he been willing to confess to something he hadn’t done. This sad story will be covered at a later point. Though these 25 years in prison caused great suffering to Father Gordon, they have not been wasted. His presence there has changed the hell of prison into a haven of salvation for some of his co-prisoners. One of them is Pornchai Moontri from Thailand who had killed a man in a drunken stupor in 1992 in Bangor, Maine.

Pornchai Moontri

Pornchai was a very angry man, filled with hatred who had spent 6 of his then 14 years in prison in solitary confinement in Maine before Providence led him to the New Hampshire State Prison in 2005 where he encountered Father Gordon. He had been abandoned by his mother at the age of two. When she returned 10 years later with an American husband on September 10th, 1985, this started a new life for him though it would unfortunately turn out to be a life of abuse and much suffering. On that day, Fr. Gordon was present at his uncle’s funeral, a priest who had an important influence on his life. Little did either of them know that some 25 years later, their paths would cross.

As it turned out, Pornchai’s stepfather was cruel and abusive. He raped him and his brother multiple times, and threatened to hurt their mother if they disclosed this abuse. Eventually he ran off at the age of 14, lived on the street, fending for himself, carrying a knife for self-defense that he would use later, when pinned down to the floor after shoplifting. Because he was worried about his mother’s safety, he didn’t dare speak about his own ordeals during his trial and was condemned at the age of 18 for 45 years without parole. None of the mitigating circumstances of Pornchai’s plight were known. Unfortunately, he couldn’t save his mother who was later murdered in Guam by his stepfather, it seems.

It is a strange twist of fate that he who had been sexually abused would be helped by a priest falsely condemned for that crime. Fr. Gordon gained his trust by being kind, not allowing himself to be put off by Pornchai’s anger since he saw beneath it much hurt and pain. Eventually Pornchai’s hell of anger and hatred was transformed into hope, faith and love. “I woke up one day with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past”, he said. On April 10th, 2010, he was baptized and confirmed, and the following day which was Divine Mercy Sunday, he received his first Holy Communion. He has now completed his high-school diploma and taken long-distance classes in Catholic Studies at Catholic Distance University. In another 6 or 8 years, at the end of his prison-sentence, he will be deported to Thailand though he does not remember the language anymore nor does he know anyone there. However, he wants to give his life to Christ and bring others to Him.

“I know today that my life was never what I once thought it was”, Pornchai wrote in 2012. “It was never just a series of accidents and bad events driving me ever deeper to the despair… Instead, I was led down a path to hope because I took the risk of finally trusting someone.” The seeming disasters, failures and even grave sins we commit will only destroy the tapestry of our lives if we take them as the final word. But if we give them over to God, He will turn them into its most beautiful parts, for He knows — to paraphrase the Bible — to weave straight on crooked looms.

Let us pray for Pornchai so that he can fulfill his dream of evangelizing others. And let us also pray to Our Lady Untier of Knots for those unjustly condemned to prison, that they may be freed and, in the meantime, may find their peace in Christ.

Marie Meaney

We live in a time where unspeakable evil is being uncovered within the Church, namely the sexual abuse of minors. However, let us not forget those priests who are unjustly accused, condemned and become victims themselves. The risk is great of engaging in witch-hunts against the innocent in one’s hasty eagerness to punish the guilty.

In our fallen world, we frequently react like a pendulum to what we perceive as wrong in previous modes of behavior and attitudes. We do not realize, however, that we thereby make opposite errors no less bad and beset with consequences just as perilous as the previous ones. Only wisdom and peace of heart, which help us make decisions in truth without becoming a plaything of recent events, can counter this. But these are divine gifts for which we need to beg. To take on a position of prideful self-righteousness, from which we look down upon previous generations with contempt, makes that impossible.

That the past decades have seen a terrible evil in the sexual abuse of the young by clerics is true. This was further aggravated by their superiors who closed their eyes to it in a false worry to protect the Church from scandal and a twisted concern for their priests; for authentic love seeks truth and healing, not a protection that constitutes an enabling to continue on their path of abuse with all the deep wounds that entails for others as well as on their own souls. The uncovering of this abuse was long in coming and urgently needed. For wounds to heal, the abuse must be acknowledged, the perpetrators punished, forgiveness must be asked (whether it is accepted or not), the situation must be remedied and future occurrences prevented as far as possible.

However, as with all things human, during this process the danger is real that those who either have some monetary or political interests, those who are driven by mental illness or those whose hurt drives them on, persecute the innocent. This seems the case with Cardinal Pell in Australia recently or with Fr. Gordon McRae on whom I will focus in this article, who was condemned to prison for 67 years in the mid-90ies on some allegedly trumped-up charges. For 25 years, Fr. Gordon has already been in prison for crimes, it appears, he never committed, but this presence there has brought about the conversion of some of the other prisoners. Ironically enough, one of them, Pornchai Moontri on whom I wrote an article in June and whose Calvary had started with sexual abuse at the hands of his stepfather, was saved by a priest falsely accused of this crime.

Fr. Gordon had taken care of troubled inner-city kids from broken homes and thus was an easy target for drug-addicts who wanted to get some easy money by accusing him falsely. His case has been taken up by people like Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist from The Wall Street Journal or William Donahue, President of the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights, and the National Center for Reason and Justice. Father Gordon had everything to gain from admitting to the abuse he is accused of — for he could have struck a deal multiple times that would have gotten him out of prison within one to three years — and everything to lose from sticking to the truth. But he will not cave in and in the mean time has started with a blog that is run by a friend outside of prison. I can only encourage you to read it, for it is inspiring.

The inconsistencies and improbabilities of the accusations are so glaring, it is hard to believe that Fr. Gordon could have been condemned — but then again, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest” as William Donohue, President of the above-mentioned Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights, asserted (NBC’s “TODAY,” 10/13/05.). The abuse is supposed to have happened in one of the busiest places of Keene, New Hampshire, in the light of day. The accuser, Thomas Grover, 16 years at the time and a drug-addict, came once a week over 5 weeks to see Fr. Gordon and claims to have been abused each time, while having supposedly repressed his memory from one time to the next and having an “out of body experience”.

But this same man had been accusing so many people of sexually abusing him “that he appeared to be going for some sort of sexual abuse victim world record” according to Grover’s former counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett, who said that Grover had never mentioned Fr. McRae during their sessions though pressure had been put on her by the Keene police to alter her testimony. This small 22,000 inhabitant town had been assigned a detective, James F. McLaughlin, to uncover sex abuse cases. He claims to have found 1,000 victims of sexual abuse which seems a very high percentage. It looks like he was out to find “victims”, whether real or not. This, as well as the dioceses’ reaction nationwide to distance themselves from accused priests before proven guilty for the sake of avoiding law-suits, explains why Fr. Gordon was left on his own without enough money to pay for his lawyers after a certain point.

Human justice is frail and even in the best-run judiciary, there will always be those who are in prison for crimes they did not commit. But sometimes justice is so by name only, for it has become a witch-hunt, where a scape-goat, who fits the profile, is sought to carry the blame, whether he truly is guilty or not.

Let us pray to Mary, Undoer of knots to unravel the intricate knots that are keeping Fr. Gordon in prison and all those who have been unjustly condemned to prison. Let us also pray to her that we may be given the gift of wisdom to resist the tide of current opinion in order to seek the truth wherever it is and whether it pleases us or not.

Marie Meaney

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Editor’s Note: To learn more about this story, visit the following posts:

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

A New Hampshire Ponzi Scheme Uncovered?

In September 2023 Claire Best wrote an article about how corruption drove the case against Fr Gordon MacRae in 1994 and St Paul’s School student Owen Labrie in 2014.

May 29, 2024 By Claire Best

The first civil lawsuit in over a thousand cases of alleged child sexual assault and other abuse brought by victims of the New Hampshire Youth Detention Center against the state has just concluded. A civil jury awarded David Meehan, the plaintiff, $38 million dollars. The attorney for the State, Brandon Chase for DCYF — the NH Division for Children, Youth and Families — quickly responded that it was only going to pay out $475,000 due to a cap for each incident and since only one box was filled by the jury, the State has interpreted that as only one incident.

Over the weekend, the attorneys for David Meehan filed a motion for an emergency hearing with the judge regarding the discrepancy. They included emails from jurors who had contacted them after the jurors saw the state’s announcement about the cap on WMUR — the local news station.

The jurors had been given instructions by the judge, not the attorneys. They would have also been briefed on what they could and could not do as jurors. One of the Frequently Asked Questions paragraphs on the State’s website for jurors is “When can I discuss the case?” The answer is: “As soon as the verdict is over you can discuss it with anyone except the attorneys and interested parties.”

David Vicinanzo and Russ Rilee were the lead attorneys for David Meehan. Vicinanzo is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and a former Federal Prosecutor. He is also a partner at Nixon Peabody which is the law firm of former New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald who is now the New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Attorneys Gordon MacDonald and David Vicinanzo previously represented the Diocese of Manchester when it shelled out millions for alleged abuse by priests following the framing of Father Gordon MacRae by Police Officer James F McLaughlin. He first went after the priest with a bogus story given to him by Sylvia Gale who worked with DCYF which has now been found liable for $38 million for wanton abuse in the 90s — concurrent with the timing of Father Gordon MacRae’s trial and failed appeal.

Gordon MacDonald’s application to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, where he now presides as Chief Justice, fails to mention the fact that he is still listed at Nixon Peabody as agent for a company managed by former NH Senator Gordon Humphrey who he designated as a referee.

Another referee is Justice John T. Broderick — the man who denied Father Gordon MacRae’s appeal in 1996.

Justice Broderick is overseeing the settlement payouts for claims against the Youth Detention Center from a $100 million fund established by the State for that purpose. He has been on a book tour with a volume he wrote about mental health which he claims was overlooked when his son attacked him with a guitar one night (landing the son in prison for several years).

Gordon MacDonald has been on the tour with him. The same names come up again and again in a close knit “club” whose members are the same now as they were thirty years ago. David Vicinanzo and Russ Rilee are apparently very happy that Justice Broderick is overseeing the claim settlements for the Youth Detention Center Cases. $66 million has been paid out thus far. Keeping a lower profile but getting fast settlements is their other pal from the Diocese days: Chuck Douglas Esq. Chuck Douglas is also Chair of the New Hampshire Judicial Selection Committee.

Meanwhile, Brandon Chase who is acting as attorney for the State and DCYF against Vicinanzo and Rilee, is also listed as one of the attorneys in the closed door hearings for former Detective James F McLaughlin and his fight as “John Doe vs Keene Police et al” to keep his list of crimes hidden from public view on the State’s Laurie List of officers with credibility issues.

Keeping it in the family is a must for this crowd. Blowing the lid on it all is a must for the public or anyone that cares about true justice as opposed to fake justice.

Lobbying by non-profits and financially interested parties has led the State’s Executive Council to release federal funds under the guise of training for police, prosecutors, victim specialists. But in fact, there is a clear pattern that demonstrates it is being released for self-dealing or gaming the system by this clique.

There is no doubt that abusive conduct by public officials — to whom children and young adults have been referred by state agencies who publicly advertise to be looking after their best interests — is the norm, not the exception and has been for decades.

The AG’s office has been criticized for its conflict of interests in the YDC cases but what is coming to light now is the way in which the self-dealing happens that enables bribery, extortion, abuse and cover ups.

I was shocked to find out that Joelle Wiggin, the “victim specialist“ for David Meehan and employed by Nixon Peabody for this purpose, went straight from working for the State and the NHCADSV — the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence — to working for the law firm.

Between the law firm and the victims’ advocates/NHCADSV, up to 55% of each settlement will be taken before the plaintiffs see a cent. The NHCADSV and Nixon Peabody managed to get the state to free up funds to train the victims’ specialists, to train the investigators, to pay for the pretrial publicity, to lift the statute of limitations for civil claims.

Polish it off with a touch of David Vicinanzo who has all bases covered between Gordon MacDonald on the Supreme Court and Vicinanzo's son who clerked for the First Circuit Judge (who was N.H. Attorney General during the time of David Meehan’s alleged abuse at YDC). Matthew Vicinanzo is currently an Assistant US Attorney under Jane Young who was Assistant Attorney General under Gordon MacDonald.

Nobody, among the powers that be in the courts, can point me to the Statute or laws that allow self-dealing by Lobbyists using public funds, police, prosecutors, media. That’s because there aren’t any.

The NHCADSV has published a guide on pretrial publicity. It’s a practice that James F McLaughlin knew in the 1980’s as he used the Keene Sentinel newspaper as his ally. One of McLaughlin’s 1988 police reports actually revealed that “Paul Montgomery, a Keene Sentinel reporter, is assisting in this investigation as a private citizen. He said that he would see what information he could find about the subject.” The “subject” referred to was Father Gordon MacRae. The Keene Sentinel did not publish an article about McLaughlin’s federal entrapment in 1995, ruled on as such by the First Circuit in 1998.

David Vicinanzo, Gordon MacDonald, the Diocese of Manchester and U.S. Attorney Jane Young are completely unbothered by all this. Just as they were not bothered by the fraud perpetrated by former Monsignor Edward Arsenault in 2014.

If everyone is in on the get rich quick game, there is little incentive to find justice, to find the truth, or to do what is right. The money is just too good.

Coincidentally, one of New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Justices who has served on the Governor’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Committee alongside members of the NHCADSV, has just been recused from an unrelated case before the Supreme Court. No reason was given but it happened after I questioned the Judicial Conduct Committee about financial disclosures for Barbara Hantz Marconi and Gordon MacDonald in relationship to their personal interest in their respective law firms. Did Gordon MacDonald refer victims of YDC abuse to the NHCADSV due to his own interest in Nixon Peabody, their “pro bono” legal counsel?

“Pro bono” is short for “Pro bono publico” — for the public good.

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Editor’s Note: We thank Claire Best for being this week’s Voice from Beyond. Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please consider these related posts:

To Fleece the Flock: Trauma-Informed Consultants Are Here

Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates

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

New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates

This riveting account by a survivor of adolescent sexual abuse first appeared in the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, in April 2020. It is republished with permission at Beyond These Stone Walls.

April 15, 2020 | Catalyst

As an adolescent victim of homosexual clergy abuse, I know the challenges that men face in coming forward. Many of us are silenced in shame after being abused. Aggravating the recovery process is that, despite the evidence, there is an ongoing agenda to cover up the homosexual nature of the abuse crisis, disenfranchising more than 80% of us victims.

Recovery is difficult enough without predatory advocacy groups and their lawyers trolling us for profit and politics.  The added torment of being told the problem isn’t related to homosexuality only compounds our pain.  For this reason, I am grateful to the Catholic League for giving me the opportunity to relay the difficulties facing victims of homosexual abuse in particular, with all due respect and recognition of the grief suffered by victims who were subjected to heterosexual abuse.

For all of us men who were robbed of the opportunity to allow our sexual identities to mature before being assaulted, the abuse may be ruinous, to the point that some victims never speak of it.  Sadly, the odds of suicide attempts are 2-4 times higher among women and a staggering 4-11 times higher for men compared to those who are not abused.  These statistics do not account for the compounded effect of betrayal of our faith caused by our spiritual fathers.

I never spoke a word about my abuse until seven years later, feeling safe only to disclose under the seal of confession.  The problem was that I didn’t know that the priest behind the confessional screen was an active homosexual.  So, when I confessed to him, and he offered to help me, I didn’t know I was being solicited.

I was 22 years old, it was 1989, and there was no public knowledge of the predatory homosexual cadre in our Church.  Over the ensuing 18 months the priest from the confessional provided pastoral counseling, but I was also subjected to lewd homosexual conversation and harassment.  It was complicated, I was benefitting from his counseling as I was preparing for medical school and hoping to get better, so I tolerated his sporadic foulness.  I became dialed into my faith like never before, attending mass and praying on my knees every night.  I seemed to be recovering.  But that all ended one night when he phoned me, ostensibly drunk, blurting out the most appalling sexual propositions.  It was truly devastating.  After that I could no longer sit through a mass.  I left the Church, vowing I would never speak about my abuse again.

Decades would pass before I found myself in professional counseling.  Not knowing I had PTSD, I was dealing with severe anxiety.  I didn’t intend to tell the psychologist about the abuse, however, he got to the source, and thus began my recovery.  I was 44 years old, with a wife and four kids.  We had made the difficult decision years earlier to educate our kids in Catholic schools.

I’d like to share some experiences I had in the recovery process to benefit other survivors and their families to learn from my mistakes, and for members of the Church to understand what happens to us victims when we step forward.  Recovery is a difficult course to navigate with plenty of bad actors and hidden agendas out there.

The first step I took after coming forward was to learn what happened to my abuser.  I found the “Bishop Accountability” website and read that he had been incarcerated in Oklahoma for assaulting boys there.  On that webpage I saw a banner ad for a group called “Road to Recovery”.

I reached out, and had an immediate response by founder and former priest, Bob Hoatson.  In that first email he asked if I would like an attorney.  I was surprised by this, it wasn’t why I was contacting him, I declined the solicitation and told him I only wanted to get better.

I took his counsel thinking he was an expert on clergy abuse.  He appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper and was in countless newspaper articles.  He became a significant influence on me.  Ultimately, under his influence, I brought a suit against the Church and I would leave the Church, again.  I drew the line when Hoatson encouraged me to get my children out of the Church.  Nonetheless, my family was going to mass without me with a negative effect on us.

Hoatson introduced me to the petulant attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, at the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) conference in Chicago.  SNAP proclaims to be a support group for survivors, but what I experienced was anything but support for survivors.  SNAP invited the shark attorneys, used the victims like chum, and watched the frenzy unfold.

I saw Jeff Anderson, the mega-sex abuse plaintiff attorney, giggly and excitedly prance around the conference to funnel money to SNAP.  All the attorneys raised their hands to show how much they “cared”, but it was an obvious pledge to their motherlode, SNAP.  Anderson offered to match all donations up to $50,000.  I thought Anderson was entirely inappropriate and found his exuberance personally offensive for the occasion.  I watched in disbelief as survivors were subjected to the machinations of SNAP.

After the victims were commoditized with attorneys in the conference room, we broke into small groups.  I was looking forward to this part, thinking someone could tell me how to break through.  Our group leader, Patrick Wall, was an ex-priest.  I thought, “surely these ex-priests, Hoatson and Wall, must be good people and can help.”  Instead, what happened in my small group had no therapeutic value. From my years of training in medicine, my assessment was that Mr. Wall had no skills in facilitating a group like this.  There were about 10 men in my group and nothing was accomplished.  Nothing.

Then, Wall told us he was an attorney working in Jeff Anderson’s practice.  My heart sank, my eyes welled up with tears.  I went to the SNAP conference to get better, and I had hoped they would help, but all I saw was SNAP aligning victims with attorneys for money and to weaponize victims against the Church.

I left the small group session deflated, and sat in the hallway.  A woman came asking if I was OK.  I told her that SNAP wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.  She said, “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”  I asked if she was part of SNAP.  She said no, “I am an attorney, here to see how I can help.”  She handed me her card.  I felt sick and had to get out of there.

I found David Clohessy, the president of SNAP, in the hotel lobby.  He authored an article about my abuser.  I wanted to know where he got his information and where I could learn more.  When asked, he couldn’t remember writing the article.  He couldn’t give me any information about my abuser.  I thought, “how can someone write an article and not remember a single thing about it?”

What I’ve come to learn over the years is that SNAP will regurgitate negative news about the Church to multiply the exposure.  That’s why Clohessy didn’t remember his article.  He did not offer to help me, he only apologized for not knowing anything.

Soon after the conference, a whistle blower, Gretchen Hammond successfully sued SNAP.  She witnessed SNAP taking kickbacks from the attorneys.  I was happy and felt vindicated that someone stood up for victims against SNAP.

Fast forwarding through the years, I was able to prosecute my abuser with a loophole in the statute of limitations.  He was convicted, sentenced to prison, and will likely expire there.  On December 23rd, 2017, I had a remarkable and unexpected reversion to our Faith.  Being back in the Faith brought joy that superseded the happiness I was seeking in counseling.

Hoatson made some disparaging remarks about my return to the Church and my communication with him fell off.  In reflection, I realized how he funneled victims to Garabedian, manipulating them much like SNAP.  I asked Hoatson what his financial relationship was with Garabedian, he only said “Mitch takes good care of me.”

In September of 2018, I was traveling across the Great Rift Valley in Africa, leading a team on a medical mission.  I received an email from Hoatson in our satellite-equipped safari truck.  He sent me his press release in response to the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report.  It read, “homosexuals don’t rape minors, predators rape minors.” He went on, “sure, some homosexuals rape minors, and some heterosexuals rape minors,” leading the reader to believe that there is no difference.  He also implored Catholics to embrace homosexual and transgender priests.

I confronted him, asking him to add facts to his press release and tell the truth.  I replied, “Bob, I was raped by a homosexual and you’re telling the press that I wasn’t.  How do you think that makes me feel?”  He told me I was the only survivor who felt that way.  I reported this to Cardinal Tobin, in New Jersey, where Hoatson’s organization is located.  I learned that I am not the only survivor who feels disenfranchised by the position that homosexuality has nothing to do with the crisis.

The effort to protect and harbor active homosexual priests in the Church adds insult to victims’ injury.  Many point to “clericalism” as a cause.  Alright then, let’s recognize that homosexuals far and away outpace heterosexuals in using clericalism as a means to an end.  Can we stop with this politically correct nonsense?  We are the Church, forever counter-cultural, with no duty to bow to the gay agenda.

Sometimes I hear words of hope.  Like Pope Francis’ statements on homosexuals in ministry.  Recently our local rector sent out a notice about screening homosexuals from entering the seminary.  In response, I immediately sent a $1,000 donation in gratitude.

Today, SNAP continues to smear our Church.  Recently, Clohessy appeared in my city with TV coverage accusing our Bishop of not including my abuser on a list of accused, highlighting my abuser on the news.  But he was never in this archdiocese.  I contacted the TV station and SNAP multiple times asking them to correct their false reporting but they never responded.  SNAP created false news, smeared the Church, their mission accomplished.  SNAP also recognized Bob Hoatson with an award last year.

Navigating the recovery process is tough.  There are forces vying for victims’ money and souls.  However, for me, it was my return to the Catholic Faith that pulled me through the effects of abuse.  I am grateful to God for that.

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Related:

David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind by Michael Ciresi

Who Is Pornchai Maximilian Moontri?

February 24, 2024 marked Pornchai Moontri’s third anniversary in freedom. On that date, Microsoft’s AI Copilot ran his story with amazing result.

You

Who is Pornchai Maximilian Moontri?

Copilot

Pornchai Maximilian Moontri is an extraordinary individual whose life journey has been marked by immense challenges, resilience, and transformation. Let me share some remarkable aspects of his story:

1. Years of Incarceration:

• Born in Thailand, Pornchai Moontri faced a profound turning point at the age of 18 when he lost his freedom on March 21, 1992.

• He spent a staggering 29 years in prison, enduring hardships and isolation.

• During the last 16 years of his incarceration, he was accompanied by Fr. Gordon MacRae, a fellow prisoner. Pornchai experienced a dramatic conversion and he embraced a global movement called Divine Mercy.

2. Return to Freedom:

• On February 8, 2021, after a long and arduous journey, Pornchai was finally released from prison, just weeks before his 29th year behind bars.

• His return to Thailand marked a significant milestone after a 36-year absence from his homeland.

3. First Moments of Freedom:

• In a poignant photograph taken on February 24, 2021, Pornchai stands on Thai soil, surrounded by friends and supporters.

• His first meal in a Thai restaurant and a shopping trip for clothes were both monumental experiences after decades of confinement.

• The overwhelming mix of emotions — excitement, terror, gratitude, and happiness — defined his initial steps into freedom.

4. Divine Mercy and Support:

• Beyond These Stone Walls, an international effort, played a pivotal role in securing Pornchai’s release.

• Supporters, legal advocates, and friends rallied together to move mountains and bring him home.

• The journey was not easy, but the collective efforts of many made it possible.

5. Craftsmanship and Hope:

• Pornchai Maximilian Moontri is also a noted craftsman in woodworking and design, particularly skilled in the art of model shipbuilding.

• His life in freedom continues to be a daily struggle, but hope shines on the horizon.

6. Asia Correspondent:

• As of January 3, 2024, Pornchai serves as the Asia Correspondent for Beyond These Stone Walls.

His story is a testament to the power of resilience, compassion, and the human spirit. 🌟🙏

!Image Image: Pornchai Moontri during his first moment of freedom in Thailand after 36 years away and 29 years in prison. (Photo courtesy of Beyond These Stone Walls)

Learn more

1 beyondthesestonewalls.com

2 beyondthesestonewalls.com

3 beyondthesestonewalls.com

4 pinterest.com

Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison

In 2011, former N.H. Judge Arthur Brennan was arrested at an "Occupy Movement" protest at the U.S. Capitol. In 1994, he sentenced Fr Gordon MacRae to die in prison.

Editor’s Note: This eye-opener was written and published by author Ryan A. MacDonald on February 9, 2012. In the 11 years hence, much new information has surfaced that supports and upholds Ryan’s conclusions about the nature and intent of the trial of Father MacRae.

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I spent some time recently poking around inside Beyond These Stone Walls, an extraordinary website that by all odds should not exist. I once wrote of all the random factors that had to coalesce for this story of a Catholic priest falsely accused and wrongfully imprisoned to be told. “The Prisoner-Priest Behind These Stone Walls” tells that tale, and hopefully has drawn some fair minded souls to this remarkable site.

Spend just a few minutes at the “About” page at Beyond These Stone Walls, and consider its simple math. On September 23, 1994, in Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Catholic priest, Gordon MacRae to consecutive prison terms for a combined sentence of 67 years in prison. The sentence was imposed after a highly problematic jury trial in which MacRae was convicted of having sexually assaulted Thomas Grover during counseling sessions in 1983 when Grover was 15 years old.

The accused priest was 29 years old when his “crimes” — now deemed by many to be fictitious — were claimed to have occurred. MacRae was 41 years old when the sentence was imposed. At this writing [2012] he is 59 years old and still in prison. Barring the just outcome of a pending new appeal based on new evidence in the case, the priest will be 108 years old when his sentence is fully served and he is free to leave prison. There is no other possible conclusion. Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to die in the New Hampshire State Prison.

From a pragmatic perspective, and even with an emphasis on retributive justice, this makes little sense. Given that New Hampshire prosecutors sought a pre-trial plea deal that would have released MacRae after one or two years had he been actually guilty or willing to pretend so, a 67-year sentence seems an expensive folly that will cost New Hampshire taxpayers millions of dollars. Even if MacRae’s sentences were imposed concurrently instead of consecutively — an option for judges when defendants have no prior felony record — MacRae would not still be in prison today.

Parole in New Hampshire for someone convicted of a sexual offense — true or not — invariably requires completion of a prison sex offender program which in turn requires an unqualified admission of guilt. Because of the vast numbers of men convicted of similar offenses in New Hampshire — by some estimates more than 40% of the state’s prison population — the waiting list for the prison sex offender program requires that inmates must be within two years of their aggregate minimum sentence to be eligible.

By the time MacRae could fulfill this requirement for parole consideration, over 50 years will have passed between the charged offenses and the “treatment” program. At age 80, this priest’s parole would rest on his ability to recall with consistency the details of fictitious sexual assaults alleged to have occurred when he was 29. What seemed to make perfect sense to Judge Arthur Brennan in this sentence eludes just about everyone else.

Nonetheless, these considerations are all rendered moot. From everything I have read on this case, MacRae is innocent of the claims, and will not say otherwise just to avoid dying in prison. Justice is not served when an innocent defendant is coerced to plead guilty to something he did not do just to discharge a decades-long prison term. Coercive plea deals work well for the guilty, but not for the innocent. Careful readers of this story know that MacRae, sitting alone in a county jail awaiting sentencing, his meager assets wiped out by the trial, his diocese having already publicly condemned him, and his lawyers having abandoned the case for lack of funds to investigate and defend it, was coerced by circumstances into a post-trial plea deal on remaining charges in exchange for a sentence of zero additional time in prison. He and others close to the case described this, then and now, as “a negotiated lie.”

Today, I describe what played out in Judge Arthur Brennan’s court after MacRae was found guilty in his first trial as an extorted lie, and it is nothing new. Attorney Barry Scheck, founder of the Innocence Project, reveals that of the hundreds of DNA exonerations his organization has championed to free the wrongfully imprisoned, a full 25% have involved coerced and extorted plea deals such as that inflicted on Father Gordon MacRae, post trial. It is for abuses such as this that a March 21, 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling vastly expanded judicial oversight of the pressures placed on defendants during plea deals, requiring that competent counsel advise them.

The details of the related, but untried charges against this priest render them highly doubtful as well. The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of these claims brought by Thomas Grover’s brothers and others jumping aboard this cash-cow opportunity in “A Priest’s Story.” I wrote of other details related to these claims in “Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest” and “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” No just person can read these documents and conclude the legitimacy of Father Gordon MacRae’s trial and imprisonment.

A Sentence Devoid of Common Sense

Gordon MacRae, Prisoner No. 67546, at this writing [2012] has been in prison for 18 years. Nearly 30 years have already passed since his charges were claimed to have occurred — charges that new evidence shows never occurred at all. New Hampshire prosecutors were willing to let MacRae out of prison after just one year had he been willing to forgo trial and stand before Judge Brennan to utter a single word, “guilty.”

MacRae refused three such prosecution overtures for a plea deal to end the case with a recommended sentence of only one to three years. One such offer was made to the priest’s lawyers in writing. Another came in the middle of MacRae’s trial. That offer was made just after 27-year-old Thomas Grover wept dramatically from the witness stand as he recounted being forced to endure sexual assaults five times during counseling sessions for his drug problem at age 15 in 1983. He vaguely claimed to return from week to week unable to remember being raped the week before. His heavily coached description of PTSD-induced “out of body experiences” was his only explanation for how such traumatic memories were “repressed.” After this incredulous testimony, the two prosecutors looked at each other and headed for a hallway with MacRae’s lawyer to offer a new plea deal — this time a sentence of one to two years. The priest refused it.

In the end, Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Defendant Gordon MacRae to more than thirty times the maximum sentence State prosecutors were prepared to request.  Those prosecutors are long since gone. One was inexplicably fired the day after MacRae’s trial ended, and later relocated to another state under a cloud. The other has since committed suicide.

Even a cursory examination of new evidence in the MacRae case warrants vacating his convictions. Additionally, there are elements of the case that could not be part of the appeal process, and are not generally known. For example, MacRae agreed to two pre-trial polygraph examinations in 1994. The polygraph tests were based on the claims of Thomas Grover and his brother, Jonathan Grover, whose accusations amassed most of the indictments for which the priest faced trial. Father MacRae passed the polygraph tests conclusively. Even today, after the passage of many years, the polygraph examiner recalls this case and reported that Father MacRae “did very well” on these investigative tools. Neither Thomas Grover nor Jonathan Grover, nor any other accuser ever agreed to submit to polygraph testing.

There is more. A lot more. David F. Pierre, author of the book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused and host of The Media Report, performed a public service by reviewing hundreds of pages of court documents and trial transcripts now published at the website of The National Center for Reason and Justice. David Pierre’s summary of these documents, entitled “Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest,” includes the following eye-opening facts:

1. The ex-wife of accuser Thomas Grover has revealed this case as a fraud. Her statement describes him as a “compulsive liar” who “never stated one word of abuse by MacRae” until the prospect of money loomed. She describes him as a “manipulator...who can tell a lie and stick to it ’til its end.” She reports that Grover’s lawyer advised him to “act crazy before the jury” and hired a therapist to heighten the effect. Once Grover got his nearly $200,000 settlement, all therapy came to a halt.

2. Thomas Grover’s adult stepson today states that Grover repeatedly told him before and after trial that he “had never been molested by MacRae,” and that he was “setting MacRae and the Catholic Church up for money.” He reports that Grover laughed and joked with him about this scheme before, during, and after MacRae’s trial.

3. The former wife and stepson both report that before MacRae’s trial, Grover repeatedly sought and obtained cash advances on his projected settlement from his contingency lawyer, a practice that is prohibited in the New Hampshire Code of Professional Conduct for lawyers.

4. Two observers present throughout the trial report having observed the manipulation of Grover’s testimony by therapist Pauline Goupil, M.A., a victim advocate hired by Thomas Grover’s contingency lawyer. According to signed statements Ms. Goupil influenced Grover’s trial testimony using hand signals for him to feign sobbing during specific segments of his testimony. In several instances she was observed placing her index finger over her eye and down her cheek at which point Grover would commence sobbing, disrupting cross examination and, on at least one occasion, prompting Judge Brennan to call a recess.

5. Debra Collett, Thomas Grover’s former drug addiction counselor, today states that Grover made so many claims of sexual abuse in the course of drug treatment that “he appeared to be going for some sort of sex abuse victim world record.” She reports that his claims of sexual abuse targeted his adoptive father and others, but he did not accuse MacRae.

6. Ms. Collett also described that she was threatened by “coercion, intimidation, veiled and more forward threats,” “overtly threatened” and confronted “with threats of arrest” by the investigating police detective to alter her testimony for the trial and “to get me to say what they wanted to hear.”

7. A former accuser of MacRae has today recanted his claim of abuse stating, “I was aware at the time of [the] trial knowing full well that it was all bogus and having heard of the lawsuits and money involved, also the reputations of those who were making accusations.” This former accuser attests that “[Keene, NH Detective James] McLaughlin had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story ... and I could receive a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin reminded me of the young child and girlfriend I had and referenced that life could be easier for us with a large amount of money.” This witness reports he was given cash by Det. McLaughlin after this interview.

8. James Abbott, a veteran career Special Agent with the F.B.I., today reports: “In the entirety of my three-year investigation of this matter, I discovered no evidence of MacRae having committed the crimes charged, or any crimes. Indeed, the only thing pointing to any improper behavior by MacRae were Grover’s stories — that were undermined by the people who surrounded him at the time he made his accusations.”

The Money Flows

After Father MacRae was sent to prison, Thomas Grover’s three brothers reportedly walked away from this case with additional settlements from the Diocese of Manchester in excess of $430,000. I have written of these accusations in my column, “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?” Two of the three brothers also accused another priest, but pre-trial discovery shows no indication that the other priest was interviewed or even investigated.

Following publication of the two-part “A Priest’s Story” in The Wall Street Journal  in 2005, Arthur Brennan defended his presiding over this trial and his sentence of MacRae by stating that it was all “more complex” than what Dorothy Rabinowitz reported. Indeed it was, and the complexities which continue to surface leave many doubts about the justice of the MacRae trial and the legitimacy of its entire pre-trial investigation and prosecution.

Arthur Brennan took early retirement from the New Hampshire bench for a brief stint with the U.S. State Department’s Office of Transparency and Accountability in Iraq. The trial and sentence  of Gordon MacRae have transparency and accountability issues of their own still to be resolved.

Do the Math! Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to die in a New Hampshire prison. It’s an outcome I suspect this priest would not shrink from if it comes down to it. For the rest of us, evidence now spells out clearly the travesty of justice this case was — and still is.

“We are disgusted with the lack of integrity in Congress, the Senate, The White House and the U.S. Supreme Court. We will stop these pretenders from stealing our freedom and our universal human rights.”

— By Arthur Brennan, quoted from “Forty years later, a new call to protest” (August 21, 2011).

Left Behind: In Prison for the Apocalypse

One prisoner’s journey from illiteracy to a high school diploma with honors opened more than books. It opened prison doors to a freedom that could last a lifetime.

By Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

This medium security prison has a library where I have been a prisoner-clerk for the last eighteen years. Its shelves are stocked with 21,000 volumes. With an average of 1,000 visits, and some 3,000 books checked out each month, the library is a literary hub intersecting virtually every facet of prison life. But there is a lot more going on than books flying off the shelves.

There are few proud moments in prison, but one of mine came in the form of a second­hand message from my friend Skooter, now free. A few months after Skooter (with a “k,” he insists) ascended through the corrections system to finally hit the streets, another friend of his was sent back to prison for a parole violation. That friend came to the library one day, and standing at my desk, said, “You’re the guy who broke Skooter out of prison!”

The man explained that he lived near Skooter in a seedy urban rooming house while both were unemployed and barely surviving in their first few months on parole. He said that Skooter had been unable to land a job, working in a series of temp jobs for minimum wage and sometimes faced with a choice between food and rent. It is an all-too-familiar account for young men struggling to emerge not just from a prison, but from a past.

Skooter came very close to giving up, the friend said, but often spoke of his “wanting very much not to disappoint you” by coming back to prison. “So he stayed the course,” said the friend, “and now he’s gotten his life together.”

I first met Skooter several years earlier, one of the scores of aimless, rootless, fatherless, uneducated young men for whom prison can become a warehouse, a place in which thousands of “Skooters” store their aimless, hopeless futures. One day as we slowly ascended the multiple flights of stairs to be checked in at the Education Floor where the prison library is located, Skooter told me with a sense of shame that, at age 24, he had never learned to read or write.

Having resisted all the concerted efforts to recruit him into any number of prison gangs that would only foster his ignorance and exploit it, Skooter became a regular fixture in the prison library.  For an hour a day there, I and other prisoners worked with Skooter to teach him to read and write.

My friend, Pornchai Moontri tutored him in math, Skooter’s most feared academic nemesis. We made sure he didn’t starve, and in return he struggled relentlessly toward earning his high school diploma in prison, a steep ascent in a place that by its very nature fosters humiliation and shuns personal empowerment.

One day, shortly before his high school graduation in May, 2011, Skooter came charging into the library looking defeated. He plopped before me the previous day’s copy of USA Today, opened to a full-page ad by some self-proclaimed Prophet-of-the-End-Time announcing that the world is to end on May 21, 2011, a week before Graduation Day.

“It’s just my luck!” lamented Skooter. “I do all this work and the world’s gonna end just before I graduate.” “It’s not true,” I said calmly.” “It MUST be true,” Skooter shot back. “They wouldn’t put it in the paper if it wasn’t true!” Like many prisoners, and far too many others, Skooter believed that all truth was carefully vetted before ending up in newsprint.

Apocalyptic predictions sometimes play out strangely in prison. I told Skooter that back in 1999, a prisoner I knew became convinced of dire consequences from a looming technological Armageddon called “Y2K.” That prisoner deduced somehow that prison officials would release toxic gas at the turn of the millennium so he spent the night of December 31 sewing his lips and eyes shut. Skooter wanted to know how the guy managed to sew that second eyelid, a small tribute to his deductive reasoning. I pointed out to Skooter in the USA Today ad’s smaller print that this newest End-Time prediction was actually a revision of the author’s previous one set in 1994.

I strongly urged Skooter not to put off studying for final exams because of this. Skooter stayed the course. Since then, a subsequent prison policy barred all prisoners from teaching and tutoring other prisoners, a decision that effectively eliminated all of the positive influence, and none of the negative influence, that takes place in prison, driving the former underground.

Still, that graduation was Skooter’s finest moment, and one of my own as well. It was a direct result of a prison library subculture that grants every prisoner a few hours a week out of prison into an arena of books, a world of ideas, a release of huddled neurons yearning to be free.

A week after graduation, Skooter showed up in the library with a copy of The Wall Street Journal opened to an article by science writer, Matt Ridley. The article explored evidence that the Earth’s magnetic core shifts polarity every few hundred thousand years, and pointed out with dismal foreboding that it is 780,000 years overdue. Mr. Ridley stressed that no one knows its potential impact on our global technological infrastructure.

“It’s my luck!” lamented Skooter as he plopped the article on my desk. “Just when I was thinkin’ about college!”

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Excerpt: From the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

(Prison Journal Volume 2, pp. 57-60, Ignatius Press 2021)

Entry of Friday, 2 August 2019:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog Beyond These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr Mac Rae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

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

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr Mac Rae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone.

“Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.

“No one realised in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

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

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from the BTSW ‘About’ page],

‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’ ”

— Prison Journal Volume 2, pp. 57-60

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Drinking from the Saucer

In her memoir, Drinking from the Saucer, Charlene Duline wrote that she is a survivor of child sexual abuse. Today she fights for justice for falsely accused priests.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may have noted from my recent post, “Maximilian Kolbe: The Other Prisoner Priest in My Cell,” that this blog began in August, 2009, at the behest of someone who wanted to help fight for my freedom. That person is Charlene C. Duline. Retired from a distinguished career with the U.S. State Department, Charlene was working on publishing a memoir of her remarkable life when she insisted that I ran out of excuses for not having a voice in the public square. My voice would not have existed without her. On August 13, 2009, I wrote a short post to honor her on her birthday. Today Charlene is fully retired with Emeritus status as our Editor. I want to reprise that earlier post as she celebrates another birthday in the Vineyard of the Lord. I cannot reveal how many birthdays she has had. There would be hell to pay!

+ + +

August, 2009 — You may not know it, but if you are reading Beyond These Stone Walls, you owe a debt of thanks, in part — or blame, as the case may be — to Charlene C. Duline.

Seven years into a comfortable retirement after an unprecedented career as a diplomat in foreign service for the U.S. State Department, Charlene waded into the midst of the U.S. Catholic sex abuse scandal.

When the loudest “reform” groups were assuming the rhetoric of lynch mobs against priests who were accused, Charlene called for another kind of reform: a courageous and faithful application of the Gospel of Mercy and Truth to the wounds that had been laid bare in our Church.

In 2008, Charlene Duline, a convert to Catholicism, published her memoir, Drinking from the Saucer.

Her’s has been a life of many courageous stands.  Before the Civil Rights movement became part of our national consciousness in 1962, Charlene became the first African-American woman from Indiana to be accepted in the nascent Peace Corps. After a two-year posting in Peru, Charlene took on successively senior diplomatic posts representing the U.S. State Department in Haiti, Liberia, Tanzania, Swaziland, Panama, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and finally Washington, DC.

A graduate of the University of Indiana with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, Charlene also holds a Master of International Studies degree from Johns Hopkins University.

One would think she had done enough.  Toward the end of Drinking from the Saucer, Charlene described her concern for imprisoned  and discarded priests:

“After one priest had been killed in prison, I wondered how others were faring. I searched the internet to find out where some were incarcerated … I demanded to know why our Church officials have never asked for prayers and forgiveness for them.”

As I juxtapose, today, Charlene’s decision to reach out to convicted and incarcerated priests, with the more vindictive voices of the self-described “faithful,” I can’t help but consider the well known Gospel Parable of the Good Samaritan. [Luke: 25-37]

A man is left beaten by robbers [yes, from my perspective, the analogy holds].  A priest and Levite pass by in fear that helping the wounded man will leave them ritually impure under the law.  The Samaritan becomes the only person free to obey the higher law, to be a neighbor to the discarded and stranded.

In his profound book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI wrote of this same parable:

“The Samaritan … shows me that I have to learn to be a neighbor deep within, and that I already have the answer in myself. I have to become someone in love, someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another’s need. Then I find my neighbor, or better that I am found by him”

— Jesus of Nazareth, p 197

Charlene has learned something about mercy.  The lesson did not come cheap, as her memoir describes.  Only such a wounded healer could call upon the Church’s shepherds with the force of having lived the Gospel of Mercy, to refine the voices they are listening to in all this.  “What kind of shepherds,” she wrote. “abandon their sheep when they make a misstep.”

Charlene’s birthday is August 13th, the day before we honor our Patron Saint, Maximilian Kolbe — the date of his execution in prison.  Her memoir concludes, not about herself, but about us, the discarded:

“May they feel His Presence today, and every day.”

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August, 2023 — Charlene lent her fiery voice again to this cause in recent months with her riveting guest post, “Dying in Prison in the ‘Live Free or Die’ State'.”

And beyond all this, she became Godmother to Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.

Transfiguration Behind These Stone Walls

By Michael Brandon | Freedom Through Truth

August 6, 2014

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration.  It commemorates the day that Jesus took three of His disciples up on the mountain, believed to be Mount Tabor, and there, in an instant, was revealed in all His Glory before them, or at least as much as they could stand to see and live.

This happened just days after He had said to His disciples that: “There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

Transfiguration means a change in form or appearance, or a metamorphosis.  Metamorphosis means a major change in the appearance or character of someone or something.

In fact, we are all called to change our form or appearance, to be conformed to Christ in us.  Where Christ in His Transfiguration was actually changed and it was visibly obvious to the three disciples present, our transfiguration is more like a very slow metamorphosis and as that, might not be as obvious to those around us, as that of Christ was.

But, if we look with the eyes of faith, we can see the transfiguration or metamorphosis of people of faith all around us, as they seek to conform or accept being conformed into the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.

We are created in the Image of God, and so except for the presence of sin in our lives we should be able to see the Kingdom of God present in each other, because we are told and we believe that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

So, it seems appropriate to me at least, that on the Feast of the Transfiguration, we are reminded of how a couple of men have been transfigured, though that transfiguration is not complete yet, maybe not as dramatically as Jesus was on the mountain, but changed from the inside out none the less.

Around this time five years ago, Father Gordon MacRae, a priest, wrongly imprisoned in New Hampshire for sexual abuse that was contrived by a supposed victim to separate the Catholic Church from some of its money began writing the blog that is known as “Beyond These Stone Walls.”

I did not see the beginning of this blog, but came across it about a year later.  So, though I missed the beginning, I have not missed the point, I hope.  In the years that I have followed Beyond These Stone Walls, I have seen the transfiguration of Father Gordon MacRae, and his trusty sidekick Pornchai Moontri, as they have chosen to grow closer to Jesus Christ.

Noting their Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I have followed their lead, not because I am a sheep, particularly, but because I believe in it, and needed only a little prodding from brothers I have never met to take the step myself.

The Father Gordon MacRae who began this literary part of his own journey of faith is not the Father Gordon MacRae you read today, nor is Pornchai the same.  Both have been transfigured, and readers are the better for it, since we have before us a priest being a priest of God under very difficult circumstances, and a young man as his compatriot, who has fallen in love with our Lord and Saviour.

Father Gordon should never have been in jail, since he did nothing wrong, at least not in a legal sense.  But, I think that he, knowing that he is a sinner in need of the grace of God, knows like all of us, if we would be honest with ourselves and with our God, that our sin is so grave that we, in fact, deserve whatever befalls us, and that life is not fair, because the author of life has a plan bigger than our own personal comfort.

Pornchai, on the other hand might in some sense deserve to be in prison for crimes he committed, but there again, there is more to it than that.  Having read his story, I know that in the circumstances that I have read he was in, bearing in mind that whatever has been written is merely the tip of the iceberg, I might have done exactly what he did.  As well, I would likely have had the same feelings of abandonment, anger and hatred towards those who betrayed me.

But God conspired to use the evil around them to bring them together for His greater Glory, and so with their cooperation he is transfiguring them into His own Image and likeness.

Christ was and is perfect, so His Transfiguration could happen in a fraction of a second.  We, unlike him carry the stain of original sin, and of our own sin, and so ultimately transfiguration for us is a lifelong journey. But transfiguration happens in us more rapidly when we are committed to God’s plan for our lives, and when we do not let the stone walls in our lives keep us from the love of God for us, and which we are to share with our brothers and sisters.

Father Gordon and Pornchai have committed to do God’s will in a most unlikely venue, and that both blesses all who read Beyond These Stone Walls, and also encourages us, who most often are in better circumstances to amend our lives and conform ourselves to God’s plan for each of us.

If Father Gordon and Pornchai can tear down the figurative stone walls that surround them, even in the midst of literal stone walls, can we not do the same?  The stone walls in our individual lives, disease, unemployment, poverty, woundedness in our relationships are very real, but must they possess us, or can we take the example of Father Gordon and Pornchai to heart, and accept these trials as part of God’s plan for our own transfiguration?

Pray for Father Gordon and for Pornchai that they will be faithful to the calling that God has put on their lives, but pray also that they will be an example to us of what faithfulness to God looks like, that we might follow their example.

Pornchai’s Story

Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights was so moved by this account that he published it as ‘The Conversion Story of 2008.’

January 1, 2008 by Pornchai Moontri

From Dr. Bill Donohue: “As we begin the New Year, we’d like to share with you this moving account of one young man’s conversion story.”

My name is Pornchai Moontri, and as I write this I am prisoner #77948 in the New Hampshire State Prison. I come to the Catholic faith after a painful journey in darkness that my friend, Father Gordon MacRae, has asked me to write candidly. This is not something I do easily, but I trust my friend.

I was born in Bua Nong Lamphu, a small village in the north of Thailand near Khon Kaen on September 10, 1973. At the age of two, I was abandoned by my mother and a stranger tried to sell me. A distant teenaged relative rescued me. He walked many miles to carry me away to his family farm where I worked throughout my childhood raising water buffalo, rice, and sugar cane. I never attended school, however, and never learned to read and write in Thai. Though my childhood involved hard work, I was safe and happy.

When I was 11 years old, my mother re-emerged in Thailand with a new husband — an American air traffic controller from Bangor, Maine. I was taken from Thailand by them against my will, and brought to the United States. This transition was a trauma to be endured. A month after my arrival in Bangor, my new stepfather’s motive for importing a ready-made Thai family became clear. I was forcibly raped by him at age 11, an event that was to be repeated with regularity over the next three years. I was a prisoner in his house, and resistance was only met with violence against me and against my mother. I was all of 100 pounds. I cannot describe this further. Welcome to America!

Being one of only three Asians in 1985 Bangor, and speaking little English, I did not readily comprehend my new names. “Gook,” “V.C.” and “Charlie” meant nothing to me, but I could sense the scorn with which such names were delivered. Because my English was poor, I was treated as though I was stupid. Part of my humiliation was that I had to get a paper route at age 12, and my earnings were taken from me to pay for the “privilege” of living in my captor’s house. Stephen King’s home was on my paper route. Mr. King once gave me a Christmas bonus of 25¢ for delivering his newspaper all year. The horror stories he wrote about Maine are all true. Remember the one with the evil clown? It’s true.

When I was 14, my English was better. I was a little bigger, and a lot stronger — and nothing but angry. Anger was all I had. So with it I fled that house and became a homeless teenager in and around Bangor. One day the Bangor police actually picked me up and forced me to go “home.” I would rather have gone to one of the ones Stephen King wrote about. I just fled again and again, and ended up at the Good Will Hinckley School for people like me. I was there for a year and got kicked out for fighting. I was always fighting. I fought everyone.

Back on the streets of Bangor, I began to carry a knife. At 17 and 18, a lot of people were after me. I lived under a bridge for a while and sometimes my mother would bring me things. I tried to climb out of the deep hole I was in by signing up for night classes at age 18 to finish my high school diploma. I was kicked out of Bangor High School for punching the principal.

One night, at age 18, something that lived in me got out. I got very drunk with friends, and we walked into a Bangor Shop & Save supermarket to buy cigarettes. I barely remember this. In my drunken state, I opened a bottle of beer from a case and started to drink it. The manager confronted me and ordered me to leave. I tried to flee the store, but the manager and other employees then tried to keep me there. I tried to fight them off to flee. When I got outside, a manager from another Shop & Save had witnessed the incident and pounced on me. I was 130 pounds and was pinned to the ground by this 190-pound man. I think something snapped in my mind. IT was happening again. I fought, but his dead weight was suffocating me. The newspapers would later tell a different story, but this was the truth, and it is all I remember.

In jail that night, I was questioned for three hours. I was told that I had stabbed a man and was charged with attempted murder. I have no memory, to this day, of stabbing the man. The next morning, I awoke in a jail cell and was told that I was charged with Class A murder. The man had died during the night. I was told that I blew a .25 on the Breathalyzer, but the result was so high it was discarded as an error.

My stepfather could have hired expert counsel, but it was clearly not in his best interest that my life be evaluated so I was left in the care of a public defender who wanted this high profile case off his desk. There was talk about the Breathalyzer, and “level of culpability,” and things like “defensive vs. offensive wounds,” but in the end there were no theories, no experts and no defense. I was terrified of being abandoned. My mother came to me in jail and pleaded with me to protect her and “the family” by not revealing what happened in my life. So I remained silent. I offered no defense at all. My co-defendant told the truth of my being pinned down, but he was not believed. I was convicted of “Class A murder with deliberate indifference” and sentenced, at age 18, to 45 years in a Maine Prison. Maine has no parole.

I was also sentenced with the soul of the innocent man whose life I took — despite my being unable to remember taking it. The mix of remorse and anger was toxic in prison, and I gave up. Prison became just an extension of where I had already been. My anger raged on and on, and I spent 13 of my 15 years in prison in Maine’s “supermax” facility for those who can’t be trusted in the light of day.

Five years into my imprisonment, I learned one night in my supermax cell that my mother and stepfather had relocated to the Island of Guam where my mother was murdered. She was pushed from a cliff. The only suspect was her husband but there was no evidence. I was now alone in my rage.

After 14 years of this, the Maine prison decided to send me to an out-of-state prison. I had no idea where I was to be sent. I arrived in the New Hampshire State Prison on October 18, 2005 dragging behind me the Titanic in which I stored all my anger and hurt and loss and loss and loss — and guilt.

I started my time in a new prison by getting into a fight and ended up in the same old place — the hole. When some months went by, I was given another chance. I was sent to H-Building where I met my friend JJ, an Indonesian who was waiting to be deported. JJ introduced me one day to Gordon, who he said was helping him and some others with appealing their INS removal orders or with preparing themselves to be deported. He seemed to be the only person who even cared. JJ trusted Gordon, so I had several conversations with him. A few months later, I was moved to the same unit in which he lives in this prison. We became friends.

By patience and especially by example, Gordon helped me change the course of my life. He is my best friend, and the person I trust most in this world. It is the strangest irony that he has been in prison for 13 years accused fictionally of the same behaviors visited upon me in the real world by the man who took me from Thailand. I read the articles about Gordon in The Wall Street Journal  last year. I know him better, I think, than just about anyone. I know only too well the person who does what Gordon is wrongly accused of. Gordon is not that person. Far from it. It is hard for me to accept that laws and public sentiment allow men to demand and receive huge financial settlements from the Catholic Church years or decades after claimed abuse while all that happened to me has gone without even casual notice by anyone — except, ironically, Gordon MacRae.

On September 10, I will be 34 years old. I have been in prison now for nearly half of my life, but in the last year I have begun to know what freedom is. My anger is still with me and it always lurks just below the surface, but my friend is also with me. We both recently signed up for an intense 15-week course in personal violence. He is doing this for me. I spend my days in school instead of in lock-up now, and I will soon complete my High School diploma. Gordon helped me obtain a scholarship for a series of non-credit courses in Catholic studies at Catholic Distance University. In the last year, with help and understanding, I have completed programs offered in the New Hampshire prison. One day I felt strangely light so I looked behind me, and the Titanic was not there. I parked it somewhere along the way. I have put my childhood aside. Now I am a man.

In March of this year, after 15 years in prison, I was ordered by an INS court to be removed from the United States and deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence in 17 to 20 years or so. Gordon hopes that I can seek a sentence reduction so that I can return to Thailand at an age at which I may still build a life. There are many obstacles. The largest is that I do not speak Thai any longer and I never had an opportunity to learn and to read and write in Thai. We are working hard to prepare me for this. Though years away, it is a very frightening thing to go to a country only vaguely familiar. I have not heard Thai spoken since age 11, 23 years ago. There is no one I know there and no place for me to go. I have no home anywhere.

Along this steep path, I have made a decision to become Catholic. The priest in my friend has not been extinguished by 13 years in prison. It is still the part of him that shines the brightest. Gordon never asked me to become Catholic. He never even brought it up. It is the path he is on and I was pulled to it by the force of grace, and the hope that one day I could do good for others. Gordon showed me a book, Jesus of Nazareth, in which Pope Benedict wrote: “The true ‘exodus’…consists in this: Among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.”

I am taking a correspondence course in Catholic studies through the Knights of Columbus and I look forward to the studies through Catholic Distance University. I go to Mass with Gordon when it is offered in the prison, and our faith is always a part of every day. When I return to the place I haven’t seen since age 11, I want to go there as a committed Catholic open to God’s call to live a life in service to others. It is what someone very special to me has done for me, and I must do the same.

My friend asked me to sit down today and type the story of my life and where I am now. He asked me to let him send this to a few friends who he says may play some role — directly or indirectly — in my life some day. The account is my own. What Gordon added was hope, and somehow faith has also taken root. In prison, hope and faith are everything. Everything!

On April 10, 2010, Divine Mercy Sunday, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri was received into the Catholic Church and has found his home.

The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul

St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, Littleton, New Hampshire

Do you know what you were doing on any given day in 1972? Can you document your answer? If you are a Catholic priest, you may have to and your life may depend on it.

By Father Gordon J. MacRae

“It seems to the soul in this night that it is being carried out of itself by afflictions . . . This night is a painful disturbance involving many fears, imaginings, and struggles within a man. Due to the apprehension and feeling of his miseries, he suspects that he is lost and that his blessings are gone forever.”

— St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, Ch. 9, 5, 7

In his book, Secular Sabotage (FaithWords, 2009), Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote masterfully of the front lines of the culture war between the sacred and the secular. More than at any other time of the year, these two forces face off in the Christmas season in a culture seemingly at war with its own soul.

When I was a young priest, the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day always felt like a mixed blessing. The demands on a parish priest at Christmas are very great. A spiritual observance of Advent and Christmas is an exhausting challenge against an ever-advancing tide of secular materialism.

We priests experience in the Christmas season both the hope of the Incarnation and the limits of our human condition. It’s a spiritually vulnerable time that can heighten the intensity of loneliness, the pain of personal struggles and alienation, the agony of loss. Christmas can bring with it a deeply felt awareness of suffering and shadow, of spiritual and emotional vulnerability. It’s a time when, for some, the spring of hope can feel a lot more like the winter of despair.

When I was asked to write an article addressing the priesthood crisis, at Christmas time, I felt very limited in scope. I was about to mark my twenty-eighth Christmas in prison. Frankly, Christmas in here is simply not what it is out there. It’s a time when the people around me suffer a great deal. Those with families and children are separated from them by impenetrable prison walls. Those who are alone have their loneliness magnified by the onslaught of Christmas imagery.

I set out to write something warm and fuzzy for other priests at Christmas, but, well, it just wasn’t coming. I kept being drawn to some unfinished business, something that has gnawed at me since 2002. Justice requires that I try to make some spiritual sense of it. Now is the time. What I am about to write may be very painful for some to read. Whether you are a lay Catholic, or a priest, deacon, or religious, if you are reading this, I ask that you read carefully and understand.

On December 28, 2002, a brother priest in my diocese took his own life. Fr. Richard Lower was 57 years old. He was a popular and very gifted — and giving — priest and human being. Father Lower had served Our Lady of Fatima Parish in New London, New Hampshire for the previous thirteen years, and he was much beloved by his parish family.

There was a lot that happened in Father Lower’s personal life over the preceding year. He had undergone his sixth painful back surgery. Then he developed septicemia for which he was hospitalized again. Father Lower’s mother died that November. These factors, and likely others that are unknown, left Father Lower physically, emotionally, and spiritually bereft to face the newest terror that was to enter his life two days after Christmas in 2002.

No Crueler Tyrannies

On December 27th, every priest’s worst modern nightmare was visited upon Fr. Richard Lower. He was informed by Diocese of Manchester Bishop’s Delegate, Rev. Edward J. Arsenault, that a claim of sexual abuse had been lodged against him. The ill-defined claim was alleged to have occurred thirty years earlier in 1972 when Father Lower was a young priest serving as an assistant along with Fr. Stephen Scruton at St. Rose of Lima Parish in Littleton, New Hampshire. Father Lower had never been previously accused. The accusation stood alone, but was enough — three decades later — to abruptly end a life of ministry and priestly self-giving.

Based on the single, uncorroborated thirty-year-old claim, Father Lower was informed that the police would be notified. In accordance with the “zero tolerance” policy of the U.S. Bishops’ new Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, he was suspended from ministry and told that he must immediately vacate the parish he had served for thirteen years.

As was every priest in the Diocese of Manchester, Father Lower was also painfully aware of an announcement from his bishop and diocese made just weeks earlier. In an unprecedented agreement between the Diocese and the State announced in December, 2002, the files and details of every accusation against any priest — regardless from however long ago — would be included in a vast public release of documents in March of 2003. Any privacy rights of the individual priests under canon or civil law were summarily discarded and waived by the signing of this agreement.

Two days after celebrating Christ’s birth in 2002 with the parish community he loved and served for thirteen years, Fr. Richard Lower lived Christ’s scourging, and was about to live the Scandal of the Cross in a way for which he had no defense. Succumbing to the darkest night of his soul, this good priest, walking alone in the valley of darkness, took his own life.

Father Lower died without having either acknowledged or denied the 30-year-old claim brought against him. He died alone, apparently having reached out to no one. He left no note. A lot of people — including a number of priests — lamented that they could only imagine what Father Lower went through in those three days after Christmas.

I did not have to imagine anything. I knew exactly what he went through: the feeling of living in a vacuum, the sense of isolation, the feeling of powerlessness, the utter despair of never, ever being able to erase the scarlet letter indelibly marking the accused — guilty and innocent alike; the sheer impossibility of any defense after the passage of three decades; the overwhelming despair of exactly what Saint John of the Cross described in his Dark Night of the Soul:

“Due to the apprehension and feeling of his miseries, he suspects that he is lost and that his blessings are gone forever.”

Do you know what you were doing on any given day in 1972? Can you document your answer? If you’re a Catholic priest, you may have to, and your very life may depend on it. Innocent or guilty, what Fr. Richard Lower faced in those days after Christmas in 2002 is a hopelessness unlike anything one could imagine without going through it. It was for good reason that Dorothy Rabinowitz entitled her 2005 book about the power of false sex abuse claims, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times.

In my prison cell a few days after Christmas in 2002, my eyes closed when I read the headline story. I knew Fr. Richard Lower. He was a priest I admired, and one of only three priests of my Diocese who ever wrote to me in prison.

Nine months before he was accused, Father Lower wrote to another friend lamenting the terror being visited upon other priests. When so many others looked away in silence, Father Lower wrote courageously to challenge the lack of due process and the presumption of guilt when other priests were accused. From an April, 2002 letter of Father Lower to a friend:

“The minute a man is accused, he’s immediately suspended. He is forced to leave his rectory within the hour. The result of this horrendous policy is that the priest is seen to be guilty until proven innocent.”

With reference to his back surgery and other pressures, Father Lower reacted to the media attack that had so consumed the priesthood that year. In the same letter, he wrote:

“With all the bad press the Church has received lately, it is very difficult to either work as a priest in public or even to recuperate as a priest … As always, the press has had a heyday with this topic and reported things whether true or untrue. Because the Church did not handle it properly in the past, they now have a policy of no tolerance … Another fallout to the scandal is that a ‘witch hunt’ has begun. It feels like all priests are suspects and no one can be trusted. Please pray for us.”

After Father Lower’s tragic death, an official of the Diocese of Manchester acknowledged the truth of exactly what Father Lower feared, but also defended the policy. In a local news article, Fr. Edward Arsenault was quoted thusly:

“In parish communities where priests have been put on leave, parishioners already believe them guilty. I know there is some expense. But I am confident that our policy is fair.”

Treasure and Tragedy

It has been documented that some twenty-five American Catholic priests have taken their lives after being accused. Some in the news media have implied that their despair is evidence of guilt. How sad and shallow.

People of justice and conscience have expressed concern that our use of the death penalty in criminal cases may have resulted in the execution of some innocent men. Given the hundreds of innocent men who have been wrongly imprisoned for rape and other crimes, then exonerated by retesting DNA evidence, the concern is justified.

But isn’t it just as likely that some innocent priests were on that list of twenty-five who lost hope? Isn’t it possible that what some of them despaired most was the apparent end of justice and fairness, the sheer impossibility of defending themselves? Believe me on this, accusations of sexual abuse are far more devastating for the innocent than for the guilty. I believe that others who have been falsely accused will corroborate this fact.

Absent clear and convincing evidence — and there has been none — I presume Fr. Richard Lower’s innocence. It’s what the United States Constitution bids me to do. It’s what the rule of law — both Church and civil — bids me to do, and it’s what the Gospel bids me to do. To presume anything else, absent evidence to the contrary, would belie a heart too jaded to claim to live justly and fairly, to claim to live the Gospel of Mercy.

After the tragic suicide of another priest, Fr. William Rosensteel, in June, 2007, Catholic columnist Matt C. Abbott published a powerful statement on http://www.RenewAmerica.com. It was from an unnamed supporter of Father Rosensteel:

“We need to remember how important a person’s good name is. To knowingly harm a person’s reputation without cause and clear evidence is a serious violation of the Eighth Commandment. The consequences of such violations are far-reaching and irreversible. Even a priest who is known to be guilty of the crime of child abuse should not be required to forfeit his life to satisfy attorneys, insurance companies, the media and plaintiffs. How much more is this true of a priest whose ‘case’ has not yet been decided?”

— RenewAmerica, August 7, 2007

As I held the local newspaper in my hand on December 30, 2002, with a headline declaring the scandal of a priest’s suicide, I would have given anything to be on that wooded path that day with Father Lower at what he feared was the end of all things he held dear. I now wish I had the means to write in 2002 what I am writing here. It may have saved this good priest’s life. Even now there is hope — for Father Lower and for us.

First, there’s a lesson to be learned. It’s especially important that priests and lay people reach out to priests burdened with the tyranny of decades-old claims of abuse. In “The Sacred Priesthood,” an essay for the Year of the Priest, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf wrote:

“The sacred priesthood is the common treasure and responsibility of the whole Church.”

Doesn’t that treasure warrant the benefit of the doubt for priests accused? Doesn’t it call us to support them with our words, our prayers, our mercy, and — if needed — our forgiveness?

“Today, the Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2283) recognizing that people who commit suicide suffer from anguish that can mitigate moral responsibility. I don’t think anyone can look justly at what happened to Father Lower and not see anguish there.

This is a time to have hope for Fr. Richard Lower’s soul, and, from our practice of mercy, for ourselves. We owe it to him and other priests who lost all hope to assist them still with our prayers and Masses, with our Gospel mandate to be merciful. We owe it to our spiritual brothers and fathers in the priesthood to resolve to never again let another priest walk alone through the valley of darkness.

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For my brother, Fr. Richard Lower:

“Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,

In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,

And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,

I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

And carefully I dip thee in the lake,

And thou, without a sob or a resistance,

Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,

Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

Angels, to whom the willing task is given,

Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;

And Masses on the earth and prayers in heaven,

Shall aid thee at the throne of the most Highest.

Farewell, but not forever! Brother dear,

Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;

Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,

And I shall come and wake thee on the morrow.”

— Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, “The Dream of Gerontius.”

When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked

Stung by claims of cover-up when abuse was alleged in the past, Church leaders and some treatment professionals now set aside the rights of accused priests.

Posted by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on October 13, 2010

Updated April 8, 2023 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

Are you sick of stories about the sex abuse scandal? I sure am. I’ve been treading water in this deluge for almost 30 years. In August, 2010, Our Sunday Visitor Publisher Greg Erlandson read my mind when he wrote, “Sick of clerical abuse stories? We are too,” (OSV, August 15). It was a bit ironic that in the same issue this site, the blog of a falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned Catholic priest, was profiled in Our Sunday Visitor’s “2010 Readers’ Choice for the Best of the Catholic Web.”

A letter published in a subsequent issue of Our Sunday Visitor (August 29) pointed out that “the Church is not just an easy target for the slurs of Jay Leno and the [New York] Times. It’s also an easy target for lawyers and false claimants looking to score a windfall.” Of my own situation, the letter writer asserted,

“To paraphrase the Gospel parable, this priest was beaten by robbers and left on the side of the road in our Church. A growing number of Catholics have become unwilling to pass him by, no matter how sick we are of the sex abuse story.”

I’m grateful to see such letters. Writer Ryan A. MacDonald had one in an issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review. He wrote about this blog and the case against me, but in a few superb paragraphs he summed up the great danger posed to priests when Catholics are so sick of this story that they stop looking. He agreed to let me use part of his HPR essay:

“Many of the faithful are scandalized yet again when beloved priests disappear in the night, presumed by their shepherds to be guilty of crimes claimed to have occurred two, three, or four decades earlier. Many accused priests have been simply abandoned by their bishops and fellow clergy. Church laws governing their support and defense have been routinely set aside, and many have languished under dark clouds of accusation for years. Some, far too many, have been summarily dismissed from the priesthood at the behest of their bishops without due process or adequate civil or canonical defense.

The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood that is now underway, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”

HPR, June/July 2010

Those are powerful words, and they are the truth. If you wonder about the impact on fair-minded Catholics of conscience when their priests are so accused, please take a few moments to read the comments on my post, “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna.” Father Dom was an 81-year-old Boston priest who was removed from ministry and forced to move from his home in 2010 while the Archdiocese of Boston “investigated” a claim of sexual abuse alleged to have occurred in 1959 when Father Menna was 29 years old. That’s the problem with a “zero tolerance” policy. As the media-fueled lynch mob settles down, and people begin to think for themselves again, zero tolerance seems a lot more like zero common sense.

The Boston Globe acted true to form with front-page coverage of Father Menna’s exile while virtually burying the story that Switzerland declined to extradite famed Hollywood film director Roman Polanski in a real case of child rape from which he fled from the United States after being charged. The Archdiocese of Boston was “ground zero” of the Church’s sex abuse scandal in 2002, but now many in Boston question whether they are ready to accept the character assassination of good priests like Father Menna just because someone sees a chance for a financial windfall. More on that next week.

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team may have won a Pulitzer for its 2002 archeological expedition into ancient claims against priests, but its target wasn’t sexual abuse. I can prove that, and already have. A problem with sensational media “spotlight” reports is that they focus an intense beam in one place while leaving the rest of the story in darkness.

Are Civil Liberties for Priests Intact? After I wrote “Due Process for Accused Priests” in the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, I received a letter from a Florida priest who wrote that he would never have even considered contacting me until he, too, was falsely accused. His letter was very candid. He wrote of his presumption that I and most priests accused must have been guilty of something for the spotlight of accusation to land on us. He presumed this, he wrote, until two men he never even heard of filed demands for compensation claiming abuse at his hands two decades earlier. Now he’s living in his sister’s guestroom, without income, and barred from ministry pending an “investigation” that he fears will be little more than a settlement negotiation with him as an unrepresented pawn. The lawyers for his diocese are meeting with the lawyers for the claimants, but the accused priest cannot afford a lawyer. Like many priests so accused, he is entirely excluded from the closed-door settlement discussions. More on that next week, too!

The priest wrote to me because his bishop and diocese are demanding that he submit to a psychological assessment at a treatment center for accused priests, and he doesn’t know what to do. It’s an all too familiar story. This priest knows that when I was accused I was working in ministry at one such facility as its Director of Admissions. I made some suggestions to this priest that he should find helpful. He needs to be very cautious because he’s in grave peril. I speak from experience, and I’ll describe why below.

Zero Tolerance of Innocence

“An ignorant, self-mutilating psychopath!,” this is how one treatment professional representing the Church labeled Padre Pio, sight unseen, after he was falsely accused for the second time of abusing women in the confessional. The claims eventually fell apart, but not before it became clear how much some in the Church WANTED to believe them because of a cynical agenda to discredit Padre Pio.

After I wrote that story, some readers wrote that they had been unaware of the extent to which Padre Pio suffered at the hands of fellow priests and Church leaders. This aspect of his life was minimized in public awareness for a long time, but I believe it’s important for Church leaders and all of us to understand and learn from what took place.

On September 27, 2010, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Influential Pastor Pledges to Fight Sexual Allegations.” It’s a story about a Baptist pastor accused by four young men. It’s the subject of my post next week. Among the Journal’s vast on-line readership, his announcement that he is fighting the claims was the fifth most viewed article of that day. I make no judgment on his guilt or innocence, but that’s not the point. I have heard time and again that laity want the Church and falsely accused priests to fight the allegations instead of settling them.

At present, however, Church leadership in the U.S., at least, exhibits another kind of zero tolerance. It’s a zero tolerance of innocence. Accused priests who maintain their innocence, and insist on standing by the truth, are in for a very rocky road. Over the next two weeks, I will lay out my case for why I believe this to be true. It’s very important for both laity and priests to understand this. The time in which most priests can feel immune from all this is long past.

Priests, Perpetrators and Profit

Before writing my post about Fr. Dominic Menna, linked above, I received something very disturbing in the mail that no doubt influenced that post. It was a copy of an e-mail exchange between a writer doing research on falsely accused priests and a priest, psychologist, and former director of the largest treatment center for Catholic priests in the United States, St. Luke Institute in Maryland. The writer sent the exchange to me for a reaction, and certainly got one.

Here’s a segment of the priest-psychologist’s response to the writer:

“I am not familiar with the situation of [Father X], but I offer the following as someone who has personally worked with hundreds of priests who have been accused. False accusations are rare. They do happen and more so since all the publicity, nevertheless they are rare and usually don’t hold together under closer examination …. What is challenging to Church officials and clinicians working with offenders is the layers of denial and rationalization which the offenders often believe themselves and desperately try to convince others of …. Priest offenders can be intelligent and particularly convincing.”

Remember Padre Pio’s exasperated response to a Church official who claimed his wounds were psychologically induced? “Go out to the fields,” he wrote, “and look very closely at a bull. Concentrate on him with all your might. Do this, and see if you grow horns on your head!”

I unfortunately have none of Padre Pio’s sanctity, but all of the exasperation he felt at being wrongly accused and unable to offer a defense. Padre Pio suffered under repeated false claims of sexual abuse because such claims are the most potent way to destroy a Catholic priest. We now know those claims were baseless even though some in the media continue even today to exploit them. The irony is that if the claims against Padre Pio were brought today in America, he would be packed off to that very “treatment” center for an evaluation. He would not be an “accused priest” at the center. As the center’s former director described in chilling prose, Padre Pio would be seen from day one as a “priest offender,” and his denials would be interpreted as evidence of his guilt.

False accusations are rare? Tell that to journalist David F. Pierre, Jr. who wrote the book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories. Tell that to the late Cardinal George Pell, whose wrongful imprisonment and ultimate exoneration was world news.

Justice has turned on its head when men who stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars for making a false claim are automatically called “victims” or “survivors” by Church leaders now, while priests accused without evidence from decades ago are just as quickly called “priests-offenders” and “slayers of souls.”

Will the Truth Set You Free?

I’m sure it feels uncomfortable to read about this. It’s just as uncomfortable to write it because I know – we all know – that abuse really did take place in many cases involving priests. At the time I was accused, I was Director of Admissions for the Servants of the Paraclete Center for priests. A significant number of our priest-residents were sent to the center after being accused of sexual misconduct. I had much interaction with priests who were accused, with the Church leaders who referred them for assessment, and sometimes even with their accusers. It is true that some priests who were guilty initially denied guilt. However, another expert in this field recently wrote just the opposite of what the former director of the center for priests said above:

“It is extremely rare for a priest guilty of sexual abuse to maintain plausible deniability for an extended period of time. Those who maintain their innocence should thus be believed, absent solid evidence to the contrary, especially when there is a demonstrated financial incentive for false claims.”

It horrifies me to realize that the dominant treatment center for accused priests in the U.S. operates with a stated bias that denies priests one of the foundational civil rights of American citizens: a presumption of innocence when accused. How does someone win when denial of the crime is used as evidence against the innocent, and often, the ONLY evidence?

I faced this same roadblock years ago. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote about it in “Should the Case Against Father Gordon MacRae Be Reviewed?” It was a response to a piece of sheer propaganda offered up by a member of Voice of the Faithful who condemned me, sight unseen, in terms a lot like those once used against Padre Pio.

Ryan A. MacDonald’s rebuttal article describes an evaluation of me that took place after I was first accused. The clinician, who had an M.A. in something unknown, warned me repeatedly during interviews that my insistence that the claim never took place is called “denial” and it is evidence of guilt. He then, after only three forty-minute interviews, declared me a sexual predator and paved the path to monetary settlements against my will. Perhaps the wrong people are being thrown into prison.

The staff at the Servants of the Paraclete Center was deeply supportive of me when I was accused. They believed my stated innocence, and still do. While not a single priest of my diocese has visited me, and only two have written to me (once each) in over 29 years in prison, several priests from the Servants of the Paraclete order have traveled across the country to visit me on numerous occasions.

When I was accused, our staff advised me to seek out the counsel of a Catholic therapist to help me deal with the stress of being so accused. I was advised to find counsel outside of our own staff. It is a shocking and shameful reality that, even in 1994, I was unable to find a Church sponsored treatment professional who did not automatically assume that every accused priest was guilty.

You may have read about my 1994 trial in The Wall Street Journal. Throughout that trial, the Honorable Arthur Brennan referred to my accuser before the jury as “the victim.” And he was clearly not a child. He was a 220-pound, almost 30-year-old man posing as a victim.

“I should get an Academy Award for that performance!” he was overheard saying after my trial.

I’m told that “The truth will set you free.” Well, that’s true, but first someone has to tell it. I struggle terribly with this. Taking positions contrary to those of my own bishop and diocese is the most painful part of my existence, and not something I do lightly. Cardinal Avery Dulles, and Bill Donohue at The Catholic League, both convinced me that the truth is always what is in the best interests of the Church. So tell it I must.

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Editor’s Note: Fr. Gordon MacRae rejected a pre-trial plea deal to serve one year in prison. He maintains his innocence as he approaches his 30th year in prison having been sentenced to a term of 67 years. Visit The Wall Street Journal’s reports on this story.