“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

Gordon MacRae Fr. Gordon J. MacRae Gordon MacRae Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

A Cold Shower for a Spotlight Oscar Hangover

The film "Spotlight" won the Academy Award for Best Picture on February 28, 2016. Since then journalist JoAnn Wypijewski has debunked it as a script for moral panic.

The film "Spotlight" won the Academy Award for Best Picture on February 28, 2016. Since then journalist JoAnn Wypijewski has debunked it as a script for moral panic.

February 12, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

[ Note from Father MacRae: I should have been more attentive in explaining this post this week.  It is not so much a reprint as a restoration.  A noted journalist had written a wonderful piece about the "Spotlight" film's Academy Award for Best Picture nine years ago.  The writer, JoAnn Wypijewski, heralded an entirely new view of the film, which caused me to want to rewrite this post. ]

For some purveyors of journalism in America, the standard for modern news media seems to come down to “whoever screams longest and loudest is telling the truth.” Taking a position against a tidal wave of “availability bias” — a phenomenon I once described in a Catalyst article, “Due Process for Accused Priests” — might get a writer shouted down in a blast of hysteria masked as journalism.

But that may be changing. A post I wrote a few years ago, “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek,” a story that exposes a Catholic sex abuse fraud, has generated an unexpected response. At this writing, it has been shared thousands of times on social media, and has drawn readers by the thousands every day since it was posted.

There is nothing in that post, however, that screams out drama from the rooftops. If anything, it is subtle, reasoned, and unemotional. I am sometimes criticized for telling important stories without much emotional hype. Sometimes my friends become irritated with my lack of ranting and raving, but I must come down on the side of rational discourse when I write.

That lesson in the difference between responsible journalism and moral panic has been driven home again. I have had to add a few names to my short list of “News Media Spinal Columns.” Some writers exemplify courage and integrity by rationally exposing important stories despite a scandal-hungry news media that prefers moral panic to moral truths. Some have pushed back against that tide admirably, and though the list is short, today I have to add the name of another journalist with a spinal column.

On Sunday evening, February 28, 2016 I opted for Downton Abbey on PBS instead of the Academy Awards. Like most PBS productions, Downton Abbey had no commercial breaks so I did not switch over for even a peek at that annual diversity-challenged nod to Hollywood narcissism known as the Oscars.

I was not at all surprised to learn that “Spotlight” won the Oscar for Best Picture, its sole award out of six nominations. It is a sign of Oscar’s elitist finger on the pulse of common humanity that only two percent of viewers thought this was “Best Picture” in a USA Today study of exit interviews.

JoAnn Wypijewski has a very different take, not so much on the film itself, but on the integrity, of the story behind it and its damage to the art of journalism as rational reporting gave way to emotion. I cannot tell you how disappointing it was to read a review by Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online who surrendered reasoned journalism right in paragraph one:

“I cried watching that movie. I looked around and saw sorrow. I couldn’t help wondering if someone around me had been hurt by someone who professed to be a man of God.”

“But, hey, lighten up. It’s just a movie,” wrote two reviewers in the The New York Times (which, by the way, owned The Boston Globe during its 2002 Spotlight Team investigation). “And they don’t give an Oscar for telling the truth.”

CounterPunch

On the day after the Oscars, at least five people sent me messages with a link foreboding, “You Need to See This!” Each warned that I am mentioned extensively in a controversial article by JoAnn Wypijewski at CounterPunch, a left-leaning news site that lives up to its name. Entirely unaccustomed to being treated justly by the media of the left in all this, my first thoughts on the article were not happy ones. Then the final message we checked was from the author herself with a link to “Oscar Hangover Special: Why’ ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“Fr. MacRae, I suspect you will think this intemperate… but then being in prison has given you an expansive view of polite company. I wrote this [see link] on the heels of the Oscars. I think you will like some of it, at least.”

I had no input into this article and no prior awareness of it. It does not represent my point of view at all, but rather is written solely from the point of view of the public record, seen through a fair and just set of journalistic eyes. The article was read once to me via telephone, and my knee jerk reaction was to keep it to myself. Then it was printed and sent to me, and I have since read it carefully twice. It’s tough stuff, and it made me grimace more than once, but mostly for its brutal honesty.

On first hearing the article, I have to admit that I didn’t much like being thrown together with the story of Father Paul Shanley, a notorious Boston priest with a long history of ecclesiastical rebellion. I suspect this is what the author meant by prison giving me “an expansive view of polite company.” I guess she understands that in some other circumstance, I may not choose to stand next to a lightning rod in a perfect storm.

But I know and admit that my gag reflex of umbrage was unjust, as I know that the case against Paul Shanley was unjust. He was tried not based on evidence of a real crime, but solely on the basis of his reputation. That was the only vehicle in which an utterly unbelievable, scientifically unsupportable claim of repressed and recovered memory could have been sold to an otherwise rational set of jurors.

First, throughout the 1970s, The Boston Globe, celebrated Paul Shanley as a notorious, pro-gay, in-the-Church’s-face “Street Priest.” Then, when it better suited the agenda of editors, the Globe turned on him. Shanley was tried in the pages of the Globe before he set foot in any court of law. He was sacrificed to a story that is not even plausible, and in its telling, journalistic integrity was sacrificed as well.

“Let That Sink In”

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

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

The truth is that most of you now reading this have already let that sink in while others, including others in the Church, have settled for moral panic. This is why the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, Publisher and Editor of First Things magazine, wrote that my imprisonment “reflects a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.” This is why I need you to share this post and the CounterPunch article linked at the end.

Otherwise very reasonable Catholics on both the left and right have used the scandal of accused priests for their own agendas and ends with no regard for evidence, for justice, or for the most fundamental rights of their priests. The blind, self-righteous judgment of this “voice of the faithful” was the soil in which moral panic grew. Let that sink in, too.

The news media has done the same, and JoAnn Wypijewski has documented this masterfully. What The Boston Globe did was not journalism. It came as no surprise, in the years to follow the Spotlight revelations, that the Globe’s owner, The New York Times, became desperate to sell it. Several years ago the Globe was purchased by John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox. The New York Times let the Globe go for less than seven cents on the dollar on their original purchase price of $1.1 billion. It was sold by the Times for $70 million. Bottom line: The Boston Globe is dying. The Catholic Church is not.

Globe to shutter Crux site, shift BetaBoston
by Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, Casting the Second Stone2016

The Boston Globe said Friday that it will shut down Crux, the newspaper’s online publication devoted to news and commentary on the Roman Catholic Church. Crux will halt publication on April 1, and several employees will be laid off.

In a memo sent to Globe employees Friday, Globe editor Brian McGrory wrote “we’re beyond proud of the journalism and the journalists who have produced it, day after day, month over month, for the past year and a half.” But McGrory added, “We simply haven’t been able to develop the financial model of big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers that was envisioned when we launched Crux back in September 2014.”

McGrory said that the Crux site will be handed over to associate editor and columnist John Allen, a veteran reporter on Catholic affairs. McGrory said that Allen “is exploring the possibility of continuing it in some modified form, absent any contribution from the Globe.” Crux editor Teresa Hanafin will stay in the newsroom, probably at bostonglobe.com, the paper’s online home.

Casting the Second Stone

In “Casting the First Stone: What Did Jesus Write On the Ground?,” I described the limits that the Hebrew Scriptures imposed on the process of accusing, judging, and destroying our fellow human beings. Only with evidence and witnesses, and there had to be at least two, could the first stone be cast according to the Law of Moses (Deuteronomy 17:17). Only then could the mob be justified in joining in.

But in the creation of a moral panic, such as that which Hollywood recently endorsed at the Academy Awards, no such limits on public stoning by the mob are deemed necessary. The Laws of God are not to be found in the credits of a Hollywood production, and for many in modern Western Culture, Hollywood is now the final arbiter of truth and justice. Are you really prepared to accept a lecture on morality and justice taught by the news media with an endorsement from Hollywood? Some — even among Catholic priests and bishops — have learned that the best way to avoid being targeted by a witch hunt is to join in with its inevitable stoning.

Regarding the CounterPunch article taken as a whole, JoAnn Wypjewski is wrong about one thing. I did not “like some of it, at least.” I liked all of it! I liked it not because it is comfortable to read — it is not — but because it is the truth, because it is written by a person whose integrity as a journalist took precedence over what those on her ideological side of the fence demand from her. I like it because very early on in the article she risked making herself a lightning rod for the media left by challenging its availability bias:

“I am astonished that, across the past few months, ever since ‘Spotlight’ hit theaters, otherwise serious left-of center people have peppered their party conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we all need more of… What editor Marty Baron and the Globe sparked with their 600 stories and their confidential tip line for grievances was not laudatory journalism but a moral panic, and unfortunately for those who are telling the truth, truth was its casualty.”

Writing for The Wall Street Journal recently, author Carol Tavris described the devastation typically left in the wake of a moral panic:

“How do you convey to the next generation the stupidity, the rush to judgment, the breathtaking cruelty, the self-righteousness, the ruined lives, that every hysterical epidemic generates? On the other hand, understanding a moral panic requires perspective-distance from the emotional heat of anger and anxiety.”

— “A Very Model Moral Panic,” WSJ.com, August 7, 2015

To date the CounterPunch article has been shared thousands of times on social media. This is of utmost importance because it lets all media know that this is an important story that has been neglected by the mainstream media.

I therefore implore you to share this post, and to read and share this important article by JoAnn Wypijewski: “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

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NOTE TO READERS: Father Gordon MacRae is now publishing an occasional article on X (formerly Twitter). His first article there is linked below. We invite our readers to follow him on X @TSWBeyond.

xAI Grok and Fr. Gordon MacRae on the True Origin of Covid-19

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

The Anatomy of a Sex Abuse Fraud

The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul

Unjustly in Prison for 30 Years: A Collision of Fury and Faith

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

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Fr. Gordon J. MacRae Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

On the Road to Heaven with Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR

Seeing God in suffering in a world in semi-darkness is a great spiritual challenge of our age. Father Benedict Groeschel lived in cooperation with Divine Mercy.

Seeing God in suffering in a world in semi-darkness is a great spiritual challenge of our age. Father Benedict Groeschel lived in cooperation with Divine Mercy.

At the time of Father Benedict Groeschel’s death in 2014, I had known him for over 40 years. We were on the same path in life for quite some time. Even since his death, I continue to encounter him frequently. Even while writing this post, I picked up a book called The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth by the great Scriptural theologian and Catholic convert, Scott Hahn. Just a few pages into it I noted that the Forward was written by Father Benedict Groeschel. The book was published in 1999, fifteen years before Father Benedict’s death. His six-page Forward contained one sentence that made me laugh out loud. It was vintage Benedict Groeschel: “As an inhabitant of New York City, the 20th Century candidate for Babylon, I am perfectly delighted with the prospect of it all ending soon, even next week.”

Father Groeschel wrote to me a few times in prison. In 2012, I wrote a controversial post about him. When he was falsely accused of wrongdoing, I took up a spirited defense of him. I hope you will read it. We will link to it again at the end of this post. It is, “Father Benedict Groeschel at EWTN: Time for a Moment of Truth.”

But that was not my only post about Father Groeschel.

When I wrote “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night,” I typed it from my heart without notes or drafts in a single sitting as I usually do.

A strange thing happened on the afternoon of Wednesday August 3, the same day my post about Father Benedict Groeschel was published at Beyond These Stone Walls. I was at work in the prison Law Library where I have been the clerk for a number of years. Someone dropped a trash bag full of books next to my desk. They were books that returned from various locations around the prison from prisoners in maximum security or other places who cannot personally come to the library.

I had to check all the books back into the library system and examine them for damage before putting them on a cart to be reshelved, then checking out new ones to send back to the men languishing in “the hole.” This library has about 22,000 volumes with 1,000 books checked in or out every week so the bag of books was nothing unusual.

But when I reached into the bag for a handful of books, the first one I looked at brought a jolt of irony. It was a little hardcover book I had never seen before. The book had once been in the library system, but was stamped “discarded” in 2005 which was about years before it showed up again. For over ten years the book traveled from place to place in this prison, finally ending up in a bag at my desk on that particular day.

When I looked at the book’s cover, I was stricken with the bizarre irony of it. On the same day we published “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night,” I was holding in my hand a little book titled, When Did We See You, Lord by Bishop Robert Baker and Father Benedict J. Groeschel published by Our Sunday Visitor in 2005.

I know that Father Groeschel has written many books, but I had never before seen one in this prison library. The “coincidence” of it showing up on that particular day wasn’t the only irony. The book is a series of meditations on Matthew 25:31-46, the Biblical source for the Corporal Works of Mercy. The book’s last chapter is titled “For I was in prison and you came to me.”

And if that still wasn’t irony enough, when I turned to the book’s preface, I read that it is based on a series of retreat talks given by Father Groeschel in 2002 to the bishop, priests and deacons of the Diocese of Manchester New Hampshire — my diocese — while I was in prison twenty miles away.

This is the one small thing that God and I have in common. We both really appreciate irony. I use it a lot when I write, and so does He. But in His hands it is a work of art. In the wonderful preface to this little book, Catholic writer and editor, the late Michael Dubruiel wrote:

“Sometimes, ironically, life imitates art: as this book was being written, Father Benedict was involved in a horrific accident that nearly took his life. At the time of the accident, the text he was working on was in his suitcase — the just finished Introduction to ‘For I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’ [Chapter 3 of When Did We See You, Lord?].”

Hopelessness and Suicide

In the introduction to his chapter entitled, “When I was in prison, you came to me,” Father Groeschel told a story very familiar to me. I knew him well fifty years ago when he and I were both members of the Capuchin Province of Saint Mary where I began my priesthood formation. Father Groeschel was the homilist for my first profession of vows which took place on August 17, 1975.

At the time, Father Benedict was chaplain of a facility for delinquent young men in upstate New York. Some of those young men later landed in prison so Father Groeschel was a frequent visitor to prisons throughout New York State. One day he went to one of them to visit a young prisoner he knew, but he arrived at an inconvenient time. All the prisoners were locked down for the daily count.

While he waited, one of the guards who knew him invited Father Groeschel to a prison lunch which he described as “nothing fancy, a bowl of starchy soup and some bread.” While he was eating, the guard came back and asked Father Groeschel to follow him quickly. A young prisoner had just hanged himself.

Father Groeschel and the guard went running up the stairs to the end of a cellblock. There on the floor was the lifeless body of a young man surrounded by guards and a prison doctor performing CPR. When the young prisoner regained consciousness, Father Groeschel bent over him and started to talk to him:

“He looked at me with this very beautiful smile — like he knew me, like he expected me to call him by name — and at first I couldn’t figure that out since I had never seen this boy before. Then I realized the boy thought he was dead. He had just hanged himself, and he opened his eyes to see this figure in a long robe and beard, and thought I was Someone else. I was horrified, so I moved my head so he could see the guards and ceiling of the cellblock. When I did so, he began to cry bitter tears, the bitterest tears I have ever seen… I was not the One he thought I was, but I was mistaken too. I thought he was just a prisoner when, indeed, he was the disguised Son of God.”

When Did We See You, Lord?, p. 153

I was involved with a similar near tragedy in prison. It was in 2003, exactly six years before this blog began. It was not so overcrowded in this prison then. Bunks and prisoners did not fill the recreation areas outside our cells as they do today. One day in 2003 at about this time of year, late on a weekday morning, most of the prisoners from this cellblock had gone to lunch. I was reading a newspaper, enjoying the rare twenty minutes of quiet at a table outside my cell. In the distance, my mind registered a barely audible metallic click.

Over time in this place, every mechanical sound comes to have meaning, even sounds that register just below the level of consciousness. The clink of keys when a guard is approaching, the vague static sound the PA system makes just before a name is called, the electronic buzz of distant prison doors opening and closing. They all register just below the psyche.

That distant metallic click I heard that day also registered. It was the sound of a cell door locking, but the cell doors in this medium security prison are not locked during the day. I sat there alone with my newspaper, then suddenly looked up. My eyes scanned both tiers of cells in this cellblock. All the doors were slightly ajar except one, cell number six near the end of the row of cells where I live.

Not many prisoners would freely lock themselves in a cell midday, so I closed my paper and walked down the tier to that cell door. Through the narrow window in the locked door, I saw a young man standing on the upper bunk. He had taken a cord from somewhere and fed one end of it through the cell’s ceiling vent. He had tied the other end around his neck, and just as I got to the door, he jumped I watched in horror as he dangled, swinging and choking from the vent. There was no way I could get in that locked door and there was no one around. I shouted repeatedly at him to step back, onto the bunk.

Our eyes met, and what I saw was utter hopelessness. As the life was slowly choking out of him, nothing that I shouted made a difference. The seconds seemed eternal, but finally the first prisoner returning from lunch was buzzed through the cellblock door in the distance. Just before it closed behind him I yelled with all my might for him to get back out there and get the door to cell six open. The guy later said that I scared the hell out of him. He went to the control room and asked a guard to open cell six, which he did by pressing an electronic switch.

Finally, I heard the loud pop of the door’s lock disengaging and I swung the door open. The dangling prisoner was still. I rushed in and lifted him up while the other man ran to get
some help. Two guards came in and cut the young man down. We got the cord from around his neck and laid him on the cell floor. His breathing was labored, and the cord had left a deep gash around his neck that never fully disappeared. While he was being carried out of the cell by the guards, he cursed at me. He choked out the bitter words, but they were clear enough for me to understand. It was his version of bitter tears, and like those witnessed by Father Groeschel, they were the bitterest tears I have ever seen.

Once he was cleared from the Medical Unit, the young man was sent to the prison’s Secure Psychiatric Unit for several months. I saw him a few times after that when the prisoners there were permitted to come to the library. He always avoided eye contact with me, then one day I decided to broach the topic directly. “I’m not sure where you are with what happened,” I said, “but I do not regret what I did.” “Why did you stop me” he asked. I responded with as much kindness as I could summon:

“Because I once stood where you stand now, and have learned that we are the stewards, not the masters, of the life God has given us. What would it say about me if I ignored the Divine Mercy of the Author of Life?”

“Remember Those in Prison” — Hebrews 13-3

He looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments, then asked what I meant by “Divine Mercy.” I explained that there were many unusual factors that all had to be in place for me to be where I was at that very moment to hear his door click. One of them was that I was having a really bad day and needed twenty minutes of quiet so I skipped lunch. “That’s what I mean by Divine Mercy. It guided me to you in your time of need whether you even realize that it was a time of need. This happened because you thought you needed to die. God thought otherwise.” He considered this, nodded, then left with the bare hint of a smile. It dawned on me only well after he left that one of the steps Divine Mercy had to have in place that day was the necessity of my surviving my own suicide attempt a decade earlier.

During Lent last year, I wrote a post entitled, “Forty Days of Lent Without the Noonday Devil.” It featured a really terrific and monumentally helpful book by Catholic psychiatrist, Aaron Kheriaty, M.D. entitled, The Catholic Guide to Depression (Sophia Institute Press 2012). The book’s intriguing subtitle is “How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again.”

Dr. Kheriaty wrote something that I have come to know without doubt from personal experience. He wrote that in multiple studies in psychiatry, the one factor that Christianity, and especially Catholicism, lends to the prevention of suicide is the theological virtue of hope:

“The one factor most predictive of suicide was not how sick a person was, or how many symptoms he exhibited, or how much pain he or she was in. The most dangerous factor was a person’s sense of hopelessness. The patients who believed their situation was utterly without hope were the most likely candidates for completing suicide. There is no prescription or medical procedure for instilling hope. This is the domain of the revelation of God … the only hope that can sustain us is supernatural — the theological virtue of hope which can be infused only by God’s grace.” (pp. 98-99)

As an example of this virtue of hope, Dr. Kheriaty goes on to describe a practice that is at its essence. It is a practice that I learned from Saint Maximilian Kolbe who is here with me, and I today practice it to the best of my ability on a daily basis. Dr. Kheriaty writes that hope “unites us in a deeper way to Jesus Christ, allowing us to participate in his redemptive mission.” It is what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI described in his Magisterial encyclical, Spe Salvi — Salvation and Hope — as suffering in union with Christ on the Cross:

“What does it mean to offer something up? Those who did so were convinced that they could insert these little [or big] annoyances into Christ’s great compassion so that they somehow became part of the treasury of compassion so greatly needed by the human race.”

Spe Salvi, no. 40

It is from this treasury of compassion that the readers of Beyond These Stone Walls have offered prayers for me, that I may experience justice. You have met in a powerful way that urgent summons from the Gospel and Father Benedict Groeschel: “When I was in prison, you came to me.” You have brought hope to our prison door, and I thank you. I offer these days of unjust confinement for you. When a reader asks for my prayers in a comment or a letter, I choose a specific day in prison to offer for that person. I get the better end of the deal. Hope is precious, and fragile, and sometimes spread thin.

Father Benedict Groeschel gets the last word:

“On January 11, 2004, I was struck by a car and brought to the absolute edge of death. There is no real reason why I am alive, and there is no earthly reason why I am able to think and speak. I had no vital signs for 27 minutes, and no blood pressure. It’s amazing that not only did I survive but that I still have the use of mental equipment, which begins to deteriorate in three or four minutes without a blood supply… 50,000 people wrote e-mails promising prayers.”

When Did We See You, Lord? pp. 123-124

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Colossians 3:3

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post in honor of our great good friend, Father Benedict Groeschel. You may like these related posts:

Father Benedict Groeschel at EWTN: Time for a Moment of Truth

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

With Padre Pio When the Worst that Could Happen Happens

To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

 
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Fr. Gordon J. MacRae Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square

Six years after the death of Richard John Neuhaus, a new biography by Randy Boyagoda echoes his bold, timely, vibrant voice on religion in the public square.

Six years after the death of Richard John Neuhaus, a new biography by Randy Boyagoda echoes his bold, timely, vibrant voice on religion in the public square.

January 29, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

[Editor’s Note: The following post first appeared in 2015 at an earlier version of this blog. It has been heavily updated with new material by Father Gordon MacRae.]

When I was cast into the exile of unjust imprisonment in 1994, a friend concerned for what he imagined was a dearth of intellectual stimulation here gifted me with a subscription to First Things magazine. It was a gift that expanded a mind trapped in a world of concrete and steel, but it also created a serious problem for me. I simply could not part with the monthly issues that piled up on my cell floor drawing frowns from prison guards. “Why would you keep these?” asked one. “There aren’t even any pictures in them!”

I live in a micromanaged world in which every precious square inch of space must be accounted for, leaving little room for a collection of First Things. So I took a job in the prison library, found an empty shelf, and began what is likely the only collection of First Things spanning fifteen years in a prison library. You might be surprised by how often they are checked out, the lack of pictures notwithstanding.

But there is one issue that has never left my cell. I keep it in a safe place, and return to it twice a year in January and May. It is the April 2009 issue, Number 192, bearing the cover, “Richard John Neuhaus In Memoriam.”

I was simply amazed that, just three months after RJN’s untimely death from the ravages of cancer on January 9, 2009, this collection of essays could be gathered from the friends and colleagues for whom he was the hub in the arena of religion and public life in America. I should say, “in the Americas,” for Richard was Canadian by birth and his voice was as influential to our north as it was here in the U.S.

I keep this issue close because when Father Richard left this world, I could partake of none of the usual rituals with which we say goodbye. So I never said goodbye. Through the words of those who loved and cherished his company, he is still very much here, and I am grateful for that.

I have written of this before, so forgive my repetition, but my first inkling that something was amiss with Richard’s health came in a handwritten note from Steve Oslica in October of 2008. He had been in New York and attended a Mass offered by Father Richard. “Keep Father Neuhaus in your prayers,” Steve wrote. “I think he is dealing with some health issues.” Two months later, he was gone. Father Richard John Neuhaus left this world in the Lord’s friendship on January 9, 2009.

He also left dangling the friendship of countless others, including mine, though it was a friendship formed almost entirely through mutual friends, and in a dynamic exchange of letters to and from prison that spanned the last decade of his life. His influence upon me within these prison walls is directly proportional to the void that he left here.

A month after his death, I received the kindest of notes, dated February 17, 2009, from the Honorable Mary Ann Glendon, just returned from her post as United States Ambassador to the Holy See:

“Greetings from Boston — It’s good to be home again. I have just returned from a meeting in NYC to discuss the continuation of First Things and other aspects of Father Neuhaus’ work. I know you must be feeling his loss as keenly as the rest of us who depended on his leadership in so many ways.”

I was so deeply grateful to Ambassador Glendon. The brief letter filled in for me what had been lacking in the absence of ritual and sacrament to acknowledge death. Then, that April when First Things published its truly wonderful “In Memoriam” issue, I stored that letter within it, and marveled at the wit and wisdom and deeply felt love and respect that issue contains.

Of the dozens of profound and moving remembrances paying tribute to RJN, my favorite was, and still is, one entitled “Canadian Summers” by Father Tim Moyle of the Diocese of Pembroke, Ontario, who today reads Beyond These Stone Walls on occasion. Father Tim wrote of a long friendship with Richard and of the impact of one of his lesser known works, Freedom for Ministry (1979):

“Richard offered a powerful vision of pastoral service. Here he spoke of the importance of finding ways to present the awesome challenge of Jesus Christ to those under one’s pastoral care. By accepting the wonderful ‘challenge of orthodoxy’ that is the placing of Christ at the center of their lives, clergy of all stripes would find the inspiration to minister God’s love to all the baptized as they labored to promote the Kingdom of God. His fraternal care and concern for those who took up the pastoral yoke of Jesus Christ was where his compassion, faith, and profound humility in the face of the paschal mystery shone through the brightest for me.”

For me as well, Father Tim. I revisit this and other essays each May because that is the month of Richard’s birth. It is an irony that Father Richard John Neuhaus was born on May 14, the Feast of Saint Matthias, chosen by lot to complete the Twelve Apostles by filling the vacancy left by Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:21-26). The significance of that for me may be more evident below.

The Biography

Now, six years after RJN’s untimely death, biographer Randy Boyagoda has written a stellar biography of this great good friend and his prodigious voice in the arena of religion in American — and, yes Father Tim, Canadian — public life. Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square (Image Books, 2015) is a timely tribute and a most welcomed addition to the national discussion of the role of religion and faith with which we in the Americas now struggle. In 459 pages, Randy Boyagoda captured well the strength of courage and depth of faith, coupled with a most formidable intellect, that produced the prophetic voice of Richard John Neuhaus. I received it and devoured it with that same old familiar sense of feeling both elated and deflated.

Elated first: A biography about a friend must naturally be approached with some trepidation, and I am not the first to express that thought. In a brief review, former First Things interim editor, Russell E. Saltzman wrote,

“I have never read a biography of someone I knew well. It was with apprehension, then, that I read the galleys of Randy Boyagoda’s biography of Neuhaus … I was having trouble figuring out how anyone could capture Neuhaus whole.”

Russell E. Saltzman,New Biography Captures Spirit of One of the Great Catholic Intellectuals,” Feb. 18, 2015

Randy Boyagoda did just that, however. He captured well the man I knew and still know through the pens of the many whose esteem for him ran deep. Boyagoda summarized him as “a bold Christian and a bold intellectual and a bold cosmopolitan and a bold operator, all at once, all as one.”

First Things and Last Things

Few people know the extent of that boldness, professed, at times, at great personal cost to himself. I have a first hand account of it, and to this day Neuhaus is subjected, even in death, to the ridicule he expected — but never feared — on account of his own exercise of justice.

Among the many tributes to RJN, published anew as reviews by Mr. Boyagoda’s wondrous biography, was one I admired greatly. It appeared in the The Wall Street Journal (“From Anti-War Pastor to Pro-Life Priest,” March 27, 2015) by University of Oklahoma History Professor and former First Things Editorial Board member, Wilfred M. McClay. I disagree however, with one point emphasized in both the book and Mr. McClay’s review.

“Mr. Boyagoda does not refrain from faulting some of Neuhaus’ more questionable judgments, such as his playing down of the clergy sex-abuse scandal, which led him to undertake a fierce and misguided defense of Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ, who would eventually be exposed as a prodigious sexual abuser and disciplined by Pope Benedict XVI.”

Wilfred M. McClay, “From Anti-War Pastor to Pro-Life priest,” WSJ, March 27, 2015

Some of the comments on that McClay review at WSJ.com dusted off old prejudices about Catholics, charging that Neuhaus “abandoned the word of God” in his transformation from Lutheran pastor to Catholic priest. Others highlighted what Wilfred McClay termed his “fierce and misguided defense of Father Marcial Maciel.” So I posted two comments of my own, and this is one of them:

“It is a distortion and an injustice to characterize Father Richard John Neuhaus’ concerns for justice in the Church as “playing down the sex-abuse scandals.” He did no such thing. His collection of essays under the title, ‘Scandal Time’ comprised the sanest, most just, and most critical analysis of that crisis in print. Father Neuhaus rightly called upon the U.S. Bishops not to simply replace one injustice with another to appease a scandal hungry media, and the ravenous tort bar.”

The “Scandal Time” essays are compiled and posted in pdf format here at Beyond These Stone Walls. Even a cursory read of them will tell you that Boyagoda’s characterization of this great priest as “bold” is immensely understated. In the face of a modern day witch hunt in the secular media, and, sadly, even the Catholic press as clergy sex abuse scandals unfolded in 2002, the voice of Father Neuhaus was more than bold. It was revolutionary. This one man held back the tide of “availability bias” to give accused priests a singular voice calling for justice, due process, and fairness. And this was after his defense of Marcial Maciel was shown to be flawed and misdirected.

I cannot convey in mere words what this meant to me, personally. Even while being bludgeoned for his misjudgment on Maciel, Father Neuhaus published “A Kafkaesque Tale,” demonstrating to the Catholic Christian community the inconsistency of its application of justice in the wake of the U S Bishops’ “Final Solution,” the 2002 Dallas Charter that blatantly equated accusation with guilt. In this, Richard John Neuhaus stood almost entirely alone in Catholic media in the religious public square.

Father Neuhaus refused to use the apparent guilt of Maciel to undermine justice and due process for other accused Catholic priests even when many other writers were doing just that. To fault Father Neuhaus for this today is to add insult to injustice. Even after his defense of Father Maciel was undermined and criticized, Father Neuhaus published “A Kafkaesque Tale” in the January 2008 edition of First Things:

“Among the many sad consequences of the sex abuse crisis are the injustices visited on priests falsely accused. A particularly egregious case is that of Father Gordon MacRae of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. He was sentenced to sixty-seven years and has been imprisoned more than twelve years with no chance of parole because he insists he is innocent. I have followed the case for several years. Lawyer friends have closely examined the case and believe he was railroaded. The Wall Street Journal ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz published, on April 27 and 28, 2005, an account of the travesty of justice by which he was convicted. Now the friends of Father MacRae have created a website, BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com, which provides a comprehensive narrative of the case, along with pertinent documentation. Bishop John McCormack, a former aide of Boston’s Cardinal Law, and the Diocese of Manchester do not come off as friends of justice or, for that matter, of elementary decency. You may want to visit the website and read this Kafkaesque tale. And then you may want to pray for Father MacRae, and for a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

Among His Last Things

Beyond These Stone Walls came into being exactly six months after Father Neuhaus left this world. In part, at least, this blog was his idea, an idea shared and generated by his friend of long standing, Cardinal Avery Dulles. As our “About” page describes, they together wrote, “Your article is an important one, and will hopefully be followed by many others. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.”

In this call for fairness in the face of a witch hunt, Father Neuhaus came full circle. Born on the Feast of Saint Matthias who resolved the first Judas Crisis in the Church, Father Neuhaus sought to also resolve its newest form as the 21st Century commenced. He and Cardinal Dulles were lone voices in the media glare of 2002, but truth and justice accommodating the acceptable media view is an old practice that history always exposes eventually as deeply flawed.

This boldness extended into First Things as Father Neuhaus published several letters of mine including “Crime and Punishment,” (First Things, November 2008), and “Sin and Risk Aversion” (November 1996). In his last letter to me two months before his death, Father Neuhaus asked, “How does one go about arranging to visit with you?” Upon hearing of his illness I quickly wrote back, assuring him that he had been living the Corporal Works of Mercy for the last decade of our fraternal correspondence — an exchange in which I never once felt like the outcast so many other corners of the Church fashioned for me. This adviser to popes and presidents found room to also quietly live the exhortation of Hebrews 13:3.

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“Zero tolerance, one strike and you’re out, boot them out of ministry. Of course the victim activists are not satisfied and, sadly, may never be satisfied. The bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting [in the Dallas Charter] a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and un-Catholic approach to sin and grace.… They ended up adopting a policy that was sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost everything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Richard John Neuhaus, “Scandal Time”, 2008, First Things

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post about my great good friend, Father Richard John Neuhaus. You may also like these related posts:

Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truth on the Synod

Canon Law Conundrum: When Moral Certainty Is Neither Moral Nor Certain

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

How I Became the Catholic I Was by Richard John Neuhaus

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

 
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Fr. Gordon J. MacRae Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

Does President Donald Trump Have a Prayer?

Donald John Trump resumes the Office of President of the United States amid sentiments of deliverance at home but signs of a looming World War III everywhere else.

Donald John Trump resumes the Office of President of the United States amid sentiments of deliverance at home but signs of a looming World War III everywhere else.

January 22, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

At the very moment I am typing this on the day of Donald Trump’s second Inauguration as President, he has just arrived at Saint John’s Episcopal Church across Liberty Park from the White House for a pre-inauguration prayer service. I wrote about this very place just months before the election of 2020 at the end of President Trump’s first term. I wrote about media coverage of an event outside that same church. A U.S. Cardinal and much of the mainstream news media had conspired in a lie. My post was, “The State of Our Freedom, the Content of Our Character.”

The state of our nation was ablaze in urban riots then, triggered by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The shocking video seemed to be broadcast almost around the clock. As we watched cities burn, the news media told us that these were “mostly peaceful protests.” Across the rest of the nation, we were forced into masks that turned out to be nearly useless. Draconian Covid restrictions on “non-sanctioned” events such as attendance at Catholic Mass, seemed not to apply at all to urban rioters. We were to accept that Covid was much more contagious in churches than in public protests.

It all seems so long ago now because so much has happened since. The nation has no appetite for looking backward right now, but eventually we must. I will link to the above post again at the end of this one. Seeing where we have been presents a cautionary tale that just might influence where we go next.

But there is another matter invading my thoughts. As I watch this inauguration unfold this morning, the Bidens are just about to host the Trumps at the White House for a “pre-inauguration tea.” This gives me just enough time for a brief side trip into my own personal discontent. I cannot not write about this.

The June 15 edition of The Wall Street Journal is just beside my typewriter unfolded to an op-ed by Bob Livingston entitled, “A Letter to Merrick Garland.” It is making my blood boil and I now cannot help seeing Trump’s entire second term — or perhaps rather his “Second First Term” — in light of this op-ed.

Bob Livingston, age 81, is a U.S. Navy veteran who subsequently served in Congress for 22 years. After Congress he formed a lobbying firm that represented defense, education, and international clients. He dutifully registered his firm with FARA, The Foreign Agents Registration Act, and filed periodic reports as required. Bob had done nothing illegal or unethical, but his was a strong Republican voice in Washington during the Biden presidency. In 2022, FBI agents showed up at Bob’s home and interrogated him for hours. He was told that he was a target for felony charges and they demanded that he “talk.” Bob had done nothing wrong, and he could not learn the specific nature of the inquiry except that he was “a target.”

In 2023 another FBI agent harassed his firm’s compliance officer, David Lonie, a former congressional staffer on the House Rules Committee. Bob Livingston’s WSJ op-ed describes what happened next: “Lonie was an honorable and decent man, the epitome of integrity and honor. The agent nevertheless told him that if he knew what was good for him he would talk.” The agent was aggressive and assailed this good man with foul language. “Dave was scared to death. He went to bed on Dec. 31, 2023 and did not wake the next day. His family is devastated.”

“My company and I were innocent of all charges, and while I am pleased this Kafkaesque harassment is over, I am not content to simply shrug my shoulders and move on … . I am convinced the [Justice] Department’s actions were political and malicious, targeting me as a lobbyist who has supported Donald Trump and been critical of President Biden.”

The open letter to Merrick Garland continues:

“Under your leadership, Mr. Garland, the Justice Department has been guilty of lopsided enforcement. Hunter Biden was nearly given a sweetheart immunity deal following receipt of millions of dollars from foreign forces for which he did not file income tax returns or acknowledged his probable obligations under FARA. He was subsequently convicted for only a few of his crimes but has now been given a blanket pardon by his father. Members of the Trump administration and Mr. Trump himself have been hounded and arrested … . Mr. Trump has prevailed over attempts to destroy him, but others have been less fortunate. … As a matter of justice, Mr. Garland, you owe us and the American people a profuse apology.”

— End of Mr. Livingston’s WSJ op-ed

Moments before leaving the Oval Office for the final time to attend President Trump’s inauguration, outgoing President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon for his brother James, and all other family members who have been suspected of being a part of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the U.S. and foreign countries going back to Joe Biden’s term as Vice President until the present time. Multiple news headlines in just the last few weeks have emphasized that Donald Trump now assumes, without precedent, the Office of the President of the United States as “a convicted felon.” Several people have taken pain to point this out to me. The irony is not lost on me that I, too, am a “convicted felon,” but most of those throwing Trump’s new title at me also claim to profess that the title was bestowed on me without either truth or justice. I wrote about this midsummer in the months before the 2024 election, but some of our readers may have been on vacation. I hope that for the sake of truth and justice, you will not miss that post, which we will again link at the end of this one. It is “Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Thus ends the content of our current nation’s character — or at least the character that has so reduced our Justice Department and news media as Mr. Trump resumes office. But please read on. This was not my only parting shot.

The State of Our Freedom

Just days before Christmas, and weeks before the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal weekend edition on December 21, 2024 assailed us with an ominous feature headline: “Has World War III Already Begun?

The long article laid out the elements of an international union that has become, from the point of view of America at least, a new “Axis of Evil.” China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have formed history’s newest version of the Iron Curtain with a single common paranoia: the United States. This developed while much of our politics of the last four years had a laser focus on more frivolous pursuits. I notoriously described them a while back in “The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education.”

There are few living eyewitnesses to the onset of World War II, the most devastating war in human history, but the elements of its eruption seem eerily familiar now. It is widely accepted by historians that one key element led to the onset of the Second World War: the formation of an Axis Coalition against the West. That was the trigger that fired the gun. I described what happened then in a most fascinating exchange with Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal in “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’.”

All four of the nations identified in my second paragraph above have developed, or are on the brink of developing, nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Three of the four — Russia, North Korea and Iran — are already at war and have openly threatened to use nuclear weapons against western nations. This Axis Coalition took greater shape in 2024 when North Korea sent 10,000 troops to fight on behalf of Russia in Ukraine. Three of these axis nations officially profess and promote atheism while the fourth, Iran, professes militant Islam. The world is more dangerous now than at any time in living memory.

About 70% of the weekly readers of this blog live in the United States. About 20% more typically come here from Canada, the UK, Australia, and the European Union. Since our friend Max Moontri became our emmisary in Thailand, we also see larger than usual numbers of readers from Southeast Asia, India, and China. Of interest, in the days before the presidential election of 2024, visitors from other nations comprised a much higher percentage than usual.

It would take much more pretending than I am capable of to not write anything about the state of affairs of our world. Some would prefer that I never broach political matters, but to accomplish that I would have to live on another planet. Besides that, there is perhaps no one more vested and interested in the direction of our politics and the outcome of our elections than a prisoner who is wrongly imprisoned.

So, with all that in mind, I was moved to write a few posts before the election of 2024. One of them that stirred a lot of interest and just a little disdain was my October 30, 2024 pre-election post, “When God Deployed a Sinner to Save a Nation: The Biblical Precedent.”

We saw a demonstration of that during public responses to the inauguration ceremony this week. Tears began to flow when a military choir sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In an unscripted moment prior to his invocation prayer, the Rev. Franklin Graham said in the presence of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, “Mr. President, the last four years there are times, I am sure, you thought it was pretty dark, but look what God has done!” This was met with tears and applause from throughout the chamber.

When President Trump said “I declare a revolution of common sense,” that too was met with cheers and applause. And then he said “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States Government that there are only two genders, male and female.” This too was met with loud applause and cheers from throughout the chamber.

I have just learned that since November U.S. sales of the Bible have increased 25 percent. Despite the darkness in which I live, there is much reason for hope for me and for you. In the world’s largest and strongest democracy, cancel culture is cancelled.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Catholic League President Bill Donohue has posted a response to the Washington, DC Episcopal bishop who reprimanded President Trump post-inauguration, for his positions on transgender and LGBTQ issues. We are linking to it here:

Open Letter to DC Bishop Who Lectured Trump

Thank you for reading and sharing this hope-filled post. You may also like these related and timely posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The State of Our Freedom, The Content of Our Character

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

When God Deployed a Sinner to Save a Nation: The Biblical Precedent


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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

 
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xAI Grok xAI Grok

Artificial Intelligence: AI Grok Responds to Beyond These Stone Walls

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

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

January 15, 2025 by xAI Grok

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

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

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

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

  1. Historical Parallels with Science Fiction:

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

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

  2. Elon Musk’s Perspective on AI:

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

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

  3. Ethical and Moral Concerns:

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

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

  4. Call for Regulation and Pause:

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

  5. Cultural and Historical Context:

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

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

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

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

May 17, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

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

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

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

— The Sentinel, p. 96

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

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

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

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

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

A Step Forward or Frankenstein’s Monster?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truthseeking AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musk Has a Better Idea

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

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

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

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

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

Those who die for the truth honor it for eternity.

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

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

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

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

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

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

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

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (detail)

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

 
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