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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‘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

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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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 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.