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

+ + +

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

Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest

Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F. McLaughlin brought forward more than 1000 cases. One of them was an innocent Catholic priest sent to life in prison.

By Ryan A. MacDonald | SAVE

February 20, 2021

In September, 1988, Keene, New Hampshire sex crimes detective James F. McLaughlin received a letter from Ms. Sylvia Gale, a New Hampshire child protection social worker. Ms. Gale’s letter reported third-hand information that Catholic priest, Gordon J. MacRae, had once been a priest in Florida “where he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated. The case is supposed to be still unsolved.”

According to Sylvia Gale’s letter, the information was passed to her by an unnamed employee of New Hampshire Catholic Social Services who claimed that she had been told this information by her employer, Monsignor John Quinn, on condition that she would be fired if she ever divulged it.

Detective McLaughlin skipped the logical first steps that such a letter might have set in motion. He did not consult the priest’s personnel file — which revealed nothing about his ever being in Florida. And he did not consult Monsignor John Quinn, the named originator of the story.

Instead, armed with the explosive Florida murder-molestation letter, McLaughlin set out to interview dozens of parents and their adolescent sons who had prior contacts with MacRae. Within a week, the entire community was in a state of alarm about the murderous lecher-priest in its midst.

Among those McLaughlin interviewed about Ms. Gale’s letter in 1988 were four young adult brothers, Jonathan, David, Thomas, and Jay Grover, the adopted sons of another state social worker, Ms. Patricia Grover, a colleague of Sylvia Gale. According to McLaughlin’s 72-page report, she vowed to question each of her sons about their interactions with MacRae. None of them reported knowing or suspecting anything of a criminal nature.

McLaughlin’s report on this investigation was filled with innuendo, but no substance. He repeatedly attributed untrue information about MacRae to unnamed “informants” and other “subjects.” Toward the end of the report he finally quoted a “Sgt. Smith” from an unnamed Florida police agency.

“Sgt. Smith,” if he actually exists, reported that while there was no molestation-murder case involving a priest, there was a priest who molested a child in Florida and was “quietly moved by the church to New Hampshire.” “Sgt. Smith” added that “your suspect is too young to be that priest.” McLaughlin’s report gives the impression that he never even thought to ask for the name of that priest.

Five years passed. In 1993, one of the Grover brothers, Jonathan, age 24, appeared in McLaughlin’s office with a new story that he had been unable to remember five years earlier. He said he was repeatedly sexually assaulted when he was twelve years old by two priests, Gordon MacRae and Stephen Scruton. His initial claim was that the two priests acted in concert, fondling his genitals with their feet while in a hot tub at the YMCA. He then went on to describe other assaults “in the rectory where the priests live.”

An immediate problem was that MacRae was never in that parish until Grover was fourteen years old, and Scruton was never there until Grover was sixteen. A second problem was that one of Grover’s high school classmates, “T.B.” claimed 18 months earlier in an interview with McLaughlin that he was molested by Stephen Scruton alone who fondled his genitals with his foot in a hot tub at the YMCA. “T.B.” received an undisclosed financial settlement from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, NH.

The “T.B.” case had no connection to MacRae. McLaughlin wrote the Grover report while apparently having no memory whatsoever that he wrote a nearly identical report eighteen months earlier about a foot molestation event by a priest in a hot tub at the YMCA.

Complicating both accounts, McLaughlin’s investigation file contained a transcript of “The Church’s Sexual Watergate,” an episode of a Geraldo Rivera Show that aired in November 1988. It had apparently been faxed to McLaughlin from the studio. The Geraldo transcript preceded McLaughlin’s reports in both cases above, and contained this excerpt:

Geraldo: “What did the priest do to you, Greg?”

Greg Ridel: “When I was 12 years old, he placed his foot on my genitals in a YMCA hot tub and began rubbing. This went on to other things in the rectory where the priests live.”

MacRae was brought to trial for these unsubstantiated claims in September, 1994. Pre-trial, he was twice offered plea deals to serve one-to-three years in prison for a guilty plea. Then the offer was reduced to one-to-two years. Citing his innocence, MacRae rejected these offers. Before his trial commenced, his Catholic diocese, already heavily into settlement negotiations, issued this press release:

“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals …. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

After the trial, the Grover brothers received financial settlements from the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, NH in excess of $610,000.

Unlike his protocols in nearly all other cases, Detective McLaughlin recorded none of his interviews with claimants in the MacRae case. A reason for the absence of recorded interviews may become clear from a statement of Steven Wollschlager, a young man who accused MacRae during one of McLaughlin’s interviews, and then recanted, refusing to repeat his accusations to a grand jury. From his sworn statement:

“In 1994 before [MacRae] was to go on trial, I was contacted again by McLaughlin. I was aware at the time of the [MacRae] trial, knowing full well that it was all bogus and having heard all the talk of the lawsuits and money involved, and also the reputations of those making the accusations …. During this meeting I just listened to the scenarios being presented to me. The lawsuits and money were of great discussion and I was left feeling that if I would just go along with the story I could reap the rewards as well.

“McLaughlin asked me three times if [MacRae] ever came on to me sexually or offered me money for sexual favors. [He] had me believing that all I had to do was make up a story about [MacRae] and I could reap a large sum of money as others already had. McLaughlin … referenced that life could be easier with a large sum of money … I was at the time using drugs and could have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money. A short time later after being subpoenaed to court, I had a different feeling about the situation.”

Mr. Wollschlager has never been allowed to present his testimony before a judge in any of the summarily denied state and federal appeals of the MacRae case.

Knowing that MacRae rejected plea deal offers to serve only one to two years in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan chastised the priest for insisting on a trial and sentenced him to consecutive terms for a total of 67 years. MacRae is now in his 27th year in prison and continues to maintain his innocence.

Author’s Note: For a full version of this story, see “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?”