‘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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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

The Doors That Have Unlocked

By Father Gordon MacRae and Felix Carroll | Marian Helper

Winter 2016-2017

At the outset of the extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis decreed that prisoners who pass through the doors of their cells may receive the indulgence usually attached to passing through a designated Holy Door if they turn their hearts to God’s mercy. With that in mind, we reached out to Fr. Gordon J. MacRae, an inmate at New Hampshire State Prison, to share with us his thoughts on living the faith during this Jubilee Year. Father MacRae writes for the award-winning blog TheseStoneWalls.com at the behest of the late Cardinal Avery Dulles. Here’s his surprising response:

On Sept. 23, 1994, I was taken to prison with a 67-year sentence after three times refusing a “plea deal” that would have released me after one year. It’s a tough story that has been extensively covered, including a series in The Wall Street Journal.

For the last 23 years, I have lived in a harsh world of concrete and steel, an asphalt jungle surrounded by high walls and razor wire. It’s a world where prison gangs vie for influence, for control of young minds and the suppression of hope. It was into this world that a profoundly powerful grace has unfolded. This tough story is now no longer about justice or injustice alone. It’s now about Divine Mercy, a term once foreign to this imprisoned world. It started with a series of what seemed to be mere “accidents.”

Two lives converge

Refusing to plead guilty came with a price steeper than just the length of my sentence. For my first seven years in prison, I was confined with seven other men in a cell built for four.

Unbeknownst to me, a person who was to become pivotal to this story of Divine Mercy spent that same seven years in a prison in a neighboring state confined in a polar opposite circumstance: the utter cruelty of solitary confinement. Pornchai Moontri was brought to the United States from Thailand at age 11. His story is told wonderfully, painfully, powerfully by Felix Carroll in his celebrated Marian Press book, Loved, Lost, Found.

After a series of moves and seemingly unrelated events, Pornchai’s life and mine converged. He was moved to this prison eight years ago. He and I became cellmates, sharing a two-person cell. Two years after his arrival, in 2010, Pornchai announced his decision to become Catholic. He chose my birthday to be baptized and confirmed, but due to other seemingly unrelated “accidental” events, it was postponed until two days later. On Sunday, April 11, 2010, Pornchai was received into the Church. It also just so happened to be Divine Mercy Sunday, the day in which the Lord promised “all the divine floodgates through which graces flow are opened” (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 699).

Mary comes knocking

A few years earlier, I had introduced Pornchai to St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose image in both his priestly and prisoner garb is fixed above the mirror in our cell. Pornchai was so inspired by his life and sacrifice that he took the name “Maximilian” as his Christian name. Pornchai-Max was called from darkness into a wonderful light, and his response to that call has led other prisoners here to examine the direction of their own lives.

Three years later, in 2013, the transformation — not only of Max, but of our prison — took another major step. The Marian Fathers sponsored a group of volunteers to introduce into prison the consecration to Jesus through Mary using the 33 Days to Morning Glory group retreat written by Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC. It was the first such effort in any prison, and Max and I were invited.

There was just one problem: We were not going. We did not understand what the retreat was all about, and in the previous months we had been hit with a barrage of trials and disappointments, small things that add up painfully behind prison walls. In the midst of this spiritual warfare, I asked Max if he wanted to attend, and he responded with a sullen, “Not really.” I felt the same way.

However, these Marian-trained volunteers were not giving up so easily. After missing the first session, we learned that it would be repeated for the “stragglers.”

“I think that’s us,” I told Max. We also learned that St. Maximilian Kolbe appears prominently in the 33 Days book and retreat. “So I guess we’re going,” said Max.

Several others who had originally opted out also changed their minds. The retreat culminated in our consecration on the Solemnity of Christ the King, Nov. 24, 2013.

Seeing signs in a cellblock

Our consecration didn’t result in thunder and lightning, and our spiritual warfare continued. That’s the nature of prison life. Only in hindsight could we see the immense transformative grace that was given to us. This consecration to Jesus through Mary changed not only our interior lives, but our environment as well.

In the months to follow, many other inmates signed up for subsequent 33 Days group retreats. Several pris­oners converted to Catholicism as a result. Others, such as our friend Michael Ciresi, have come home to their Catholic faith, which they had abandoned. Of the 60 prisoners in this one cellblock, a full 20 percent have entered into Marian consecration.

The Marian-trained prison volunteers have returned to guide two additional groups of prisoners to consecration through 33 Days to Morning Glory and have also led our original group through two other retreat programs in Fr. Gaitley’s Hearts Afire program.

“Part of the risk of real mission and service is the uncertainty of whether it will make any difference,” said Jim Preisendorfer, one of the volunteer retreat leaders. This risk paid off.

Moreover, in this Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I were invited by Fr. Gaitley to become Marian Missionaries of Divine Mercy, a group committed to consciously and deliberately trying to win the whole world for God through the two powerful spiritual weapons of Divine Mercy and Marian consecration.

On Divine Mercy Sunday 2016, in the prison chapel, Jim witnessed our commitment to the Missionaries’ life and mission.

Walking across the walled prison yard on the way back to our cell that day, Max and I felt like the disciples who met the Risen Lord on the road to Emmaus (see Lk 24:13-53). Having once seen life as not worth living, Max, holding his Marian Missionaries handbook, turned to me and said, “How did this happen?”

In announcing the Jubilee Year of Mercy, which began last Dec. 8, the Holy Father spoke of how the thresholds of prison cells can signify inmates’ passage through a Holy Door, “because the mercy of God is able to transform bars into an experience of freedom.”

We’re thankful for the Holy Father’s beautiful gesture. But it seems Mother Mary beat him to it.