“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
How December 25 Became Christmas
Father Abraham first heard God 21 centuries before a star rose above Bethlehem. We now live in the 21st century after. At the center of all things, Christ is born.
Father Abraham first heard God 21 centuries before a star rose above Bethlehem. We now live in the 21st century after. At the center of all things, Christ is born.
December 22, 2021
“For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, thy all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed.”
No one really knows when or why tradition first places the Birth of Christ on December 25th, but the custom is ancient. Some theorize that it was influenced by a Roman pagan feast called Saturnalia that stretched for twelve days from the winter solstice into January. The “Twelve Days of Christmas” are thus linked by some historians to pre-Christian Roman tradition. The Persian cult of Mithra, “Sol Invictus” (the “Unconquerable Sun”) practiced by many Roman legionnaires, was also marked on December 25th, and some propose a link between that and the date for Christmas.
However the observance of Christ’s birth on December 25th is far older than the time when Christianity became respectable in the Roman Empire. The first recorded mention of December 25 as the date of observance of the Feast of the Holy Birth was in a Roman document called the Philocalian Calendar dated as early as 336 A.D. Popular observance of the December 25 date of the Nativity, however, was at least a century older.
One obscure theory points to an early Roman Empire legend that great men are fated to die on the same date they were conceived. One tradition traced the date of Passover at or near March 25 in the year Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. If thus among some Romans it became popular belief that he was conceived on that date, then nine months to the day later would be December 25. In the Roman Calendar which preceded our Gregorian Calendar, March 25 was considered the first day of the new year, and to this day it remains observed as the Feast of the Annunciation.
The Roman Martyrology also includes a solemn and far more ancient reach into Judeo-Christian Tradition. The “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” is sometimes read at the Midnight Mass at Christmas after a procession from the entrance of a church to the Nativity scene. That proclamation places us at a special point in Salvation history. In fact, from our perspective, it places Christ at the very center of that history.
The Proclamation declares that Christ was born in the 21st century after Abraham, our Father in faith, ventured out of Ur of the Chaldees and first encountered God. We now live in the 21st century after. So we kneel before Him this Christmas season knowing that Christ is exactly equidistant between us and the very genesis of the human experience of God. It’s a realization that ought to shake us out of our political and theological divisions, out of our spiritual doldrums, out of any more mundane concerns.
Instead of quibbling over who among the alienated might be saved and how, this Christmas makes us fall on our knees, in sin and error pining, as He appears and our souls feel their worth. All divisions cease.
The Roman Martyrology Proclamation of the Birth of Christ:
“The twenty-fifth day of December when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created the heavens and earth, and formed man in His own likeness; when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace — In the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees; in the thirteenth century since the people of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt; in the tenth century since David was anointed King; in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel; in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the founding of Rome; in the forty-second year in the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace — Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since His conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.”
O Come! Let us adore Him!
Our BTSW Christmas Card: Lead, Kindly Light
I am forced by circumstance to live in a place with men who are banished, not just from home and family and freedom, but too often also from hope. Some with even the darkest pasts have come into the light to thrill us with their stories of grace and true repentance and conversion. You have read of several in these pages and there are other stories yet to come. Some of these wounded men become saints, I am not fit to fasten their sandals.
We live East of Eden, a place from which the Magi of the Gospel saw a star and heard good news, the very best of news: Freedom can be found in only one place, and the way there is to follow the Star they followed. If you follow Beyond These Stone Walls, never follow me. Follow only Christ.
My Christmas card to you is this message, a tradition of sorts from behind these stone walls. My small, barred cell window faces East. It is there that I offer Mass for readers Beyond These Stone Walls. So my gaze is always toward the East, a place to which we were all once banished to wander East of Eden.
At the end of these cold and gray December days I step outside to watch toward the West as the sun descends behind towering prison walls. It reminds me of my favorite prayer,
“Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead Thou me on.
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path, but now, Lead Thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: Remember not past years.
So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone.
And with the morn those Angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.”
+ + +
Note from Father Gordon MacRae:
Blessings to you all during this joyous Christmas Season. We are living in darker times, and this Christmas is like no other, but we are children of the Light and we are promised that the darkness will never overcome it. I invite you to join us for another favorite Christmas post during this Season: "Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear."
One year ago at this time, our friend Pornchai Moontri was spending Christmas in the long purgatory of ICE detention in a grossly overcrowded warehouse in Jena, Louisiana. After 150 days he was returned to his native Thailand from where he was taken away at age 11.
So this Christmas is his very first in freedom. Divine Mercy and grace have led him down other paths. Because of his story, one of the poorest parishes in Canada was moved to take on a mission of mercy for the poorest of refugees in Thailand. Despite the challenges we in the First World face this Christmas, those in the Third World suffer so much more. I wrote of this story in “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.”
It is not too late to step on to that bridge. You may do so by visiting our Special Events page.
Please share this post!
The McCarrick Report and the Silence of the Sacrificial Lambs
Days before release of a Vatican report on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American Archbishop called for the laicization of all priests ‘credibly’ accused.
Days before release of a Vatican report on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American Archbishop called for the laicization of all priests ‘credibly’ accused.
In the last months of 2020, as the Catholic Bishops of the United States anxiously awaited the long sought release of a Vatican report on the Rise and Fall of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an obscure writer somewhere in France published a small but potent article on the knots of sin. Surprisingly, the subjects of the article were me and our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.
The article was published at a site entitled, in French, “Cheminons avec Marie Qui Défaits les Noeuds” — in English, “Walk with Mary Who Unties the Knots.” The article, translated into English, is “Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison” by Marie Meaney. In it, she accomplished something in just a few short paragraphs that I have never before seen nuanced so succinctly. She summed it up in a single sentence: “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.”
I have to admit that this subtle truth overshadows and informs my perspective on every aspect of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and priesthood. I have to sum it up bluntly. From 1985 to 1988 in the State of Maine, Pornchai Moontri was the victim of an unspeakable combination of sexual assault and physical violence that nearly destroyed his life while those tasked with child protection looked the other way. At one point, local police even arrested him while running away and handed him back over to his abuser. When finally brought to justice, that man was convicted of forty felony charges of sexual abuse, but sentenced only to 18 years probation.
In those same years, less than 100 miles away in the State of New Hampshire, I became the subject of a witch hunt launched by a crusading sex crimes detective who pegged me as a suspect.
There is a lot more to this story that new evidence and witnesses will hopefully bring into the light of day, but the short version is more than disturbing as is. With no one having accused me, and no evidence to support this detective’s prejudice, he launched a determined search for a crime beginning with a horrific lie. Exactly whose lie it was, we still do not know. The detective claimed receipt of a letter attributing to a chancery official a story that I was once a priest in Florida where I molested two boys, “one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.”
I had never been a priest in Florida, had never even visited Florida, and no such account, according to Florida police, had ever taken place there. The chancery official later denied, but minimally and without nuance, that this story was ever told to anyone by him and he had no idea of how it started. But over the next four years, from 1988 to 1992, the detective spread the story until he found someone willing to accuse me for the right price.
Today, I am serving life in prison for this prosecutorial abuse after having refused a plea deal, a negotiated lie, to plead guilty and serve only one year. To date, no one in any official capacity in either the justice system or the Church has been willing to look under the hood of this case or hear any testimony from me or any of the truth tellers who have come forward — including the statement of a young man who accused me, then recanted saying that he was offered a substantial bribe to secure his perjured testimony.
Saint John Paul II Under a Cloud
So, having read the above, you might imagine why I take with a dose of healthy skepticism rumors and innuendo that arise from or against priests and bishops. So did Pope John Paul II whose own experience in Soviet-controlled Poland made him cautious in accepting destructive rumors about priests with no accompanying evidence. His good name had been thrown under the bus in the 2020 McCarrick Report, but I will get back to this in a moment.
By the time Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was formally accused in 2017, he had been the subject of rumors for decades. He became bishop of the newly formed New Jersey Diocese of Metuchen in 1981, and previously served as an Auxiliary Bishop of New York where he was widely known to ambitiously seek eventual elevation to Archbishop of New York and the rank of Cardinal. By the time he arrived in Metuchen, rumors of a double life had already begun to circulate. I wrote of this in a controversial and not very politically correct post that I solidly stand by: “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix.”
This requires a little side story. At the time it was written, a Jesuit priest and pro LGBTQ activist, Father James Martin, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he called for increased screening and vigilance to prevent the ordination of priests with pedophilic tendencies. His editorial veered away from any consideration of the role of homosexual orientation in the McCarrick case or the abuse scandal in general.
I wrote a comment to be posted on the op-ed, but received a notice the next day that The Wall Street Journal had rejected my comment for inappropriate language. I included a link to my post on Cardinal McCarrick along with what was perceived to be this inflammatory statement: “It is a testament to the power of reaction formation that an entire institution would prefer the term ‘pedophile scandal’ to ‘homosexual scandal’ even when the facts say otherwise.”
I assumed that the offending word in my comment was “pedophile,” but that was not the case. I protested the blocking of my comment because Father Martin had used that same terminology in his WSJ op-ed. But I was wrong. The WSJ Comments Moderator contacted me and said that the algorithm employed by the WSJ had blocked the comment for use of the now politically incorrect word, ‘homosexual.’ He apologized for this, posted the comment and link, and vowed to fine tune the algorithm to prevent this from happening again.
The incident revealed the lengths that some in our culture and in the U.S. Church have employed to shield same-sex attraction from playing any role in the abuse narrative. The McCarrick story was a great threat because it lifted the veil of secrecy from the role homosexual predation played in the victimization of young men and minors. Writers like Father James Martin with an obvious agenda scrambled to again separate the two in the public eye, but to no avail.
I was a seminarian at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore from 1978 through 1982, the usual period of four years after earning college degrees in philosophy and psychology. Several of then Bishop McCarrick’s seminarians were studying with me then, and I knew them well. I heard all the rumors about his notorious beach house at the New Jersey shore. In 1986, when he became Archbishop of Newark, I was told by a chancery official in my own Diocese that McCarrick was warned by the Apostolic Nuncio to sell his beach house which became the subject of scandalous rumors.
Most, if not all, of this was kept from Pope John Paul II until the 1990s when New York Cardinal John O’Connor broke the ranks of silence and wrote about the rumors to the Pope, urging him not to appoint McCarrick to the post of Archbishop of Chicago because of the scandalous rumors circulating about McCarrick.
Of all the commentary on the 400-page McCarrick Report, the best and most readable is one by Catholic League President Bill Donohue entitled, ‘Assessing “The McCarrick Report”’ (Catalyst, Dec. 2020).
Somehow, Bill Donohue managed to summarize 400 pages of nauseating truth without leaving anything out and without sparing anyone. His assessment is blunt, factual, and truthful, providing context where needed while letting the truth speak for itself. I highly recommend it. It revealed something I had not known. McCarrick wrote to Pope John Paul in his own defense and dismissed all the rumors about him as false and politically motivated by a culture of rumor, innuendo, and jealousy. In other words, he knew exactly how to play this Pope.
Bill Donohue was disappointed that Pope John Paul listened to McCarrick and heeded his plea over that of the heroic Cardinal O’Connor. It was then, in 2001 just as the Catholic clergy abuse story was about to erupt on a national scale, that McCarrick became Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Bill Donohue also expressed grave disappointment that Archbishop Viganó was never interviewed despite being mentioned in it 306 times — and mostly negatively.
In my view, there is nothing further to be said of Pope John Paul II in this, nor is there cause to fault him. He received competing versions from Cardinals O’Connor and McCarrick, and the latter manipulatively withheld his version until Cardinal O’Connor had died. In the absence of evidence or corroboration from other U.S. bishops who remained silent, the Pope opted not to act solely on rumor and innuendo. You might understand why I would agree.
Coverup Or Smoke Screen?
I now wonder why New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond chose the week before the release of the McCarrick Report to launch a campaign seeking the forced laicization of all “credibly accused” priests. This requires more reflection than the usual knee jerk reaction that children must be protected from abuse. The increasingly alarming Catholic newsweekly, Our Sunday Visitor highlighted a letter to the editor by Steven Shea (OSV, Nov. 29) who deduced from the Report that “bishops all the way up to Pope John Paul II put clerical careers and ‘avoiding scandal’ ahead of protecting victims.” This is nonsense, and there is nothing in the Report that suggests this. The “minor” who accused McCarrick in 2017 was 63 years old at the time of the accusation.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s proposal to now laicize all accused priests is shocking, and its motive is highly suspect. Cardinal McCarrick was appointed Archbishop of Washington just in time to collaborate with then USCCB President Bishop Wilton Gregory and SNAP activists to shield homosexual clergy from being implicated in the scandal in any way. At the 2002 Dallas Bishops’ Conference, they pushed a zero tolerance policy that now bars any accused priest from ministry even decades later.
Meeting in Dallas in 2002, in full view of the news media and with SNAP’s David Clohessy and Barbara Blane as invited guests, the nation’s bishops hanged their heads in shame as accusations of a sex abuse coverup were leveled at them. But what was really going on was a smoke screen. Then USCCB President Wilton Gregory, now Archbishop of Washington, and then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick led the bishops through a carefully choreographed agenda designed to shield homosexual orientation from having any exposure whatsoever in the scandal. They presented it as a pedophile scandal and allowed the news media to do the same.
By imposing a policy of zero tolerance and “one-strike-and-you’re-out, the bishops imposed a “credible” standard on their priests which from that day forward would treat every one of them as guilty for being accused. Bill Donohue described the agenda behind it all:
“Lurking behind all this is the overwhelming presence of a homosexual network of priests, both in the U.S. and in Rome. Until and unless this web of deceit and perversion is owned up to — which it hasn’t been — lay Catholics will be wary of the hierarchy.”
— Bill Donohue, Assessing “The McCarrick Report”
Archbishop Gregory Aymond knows well that the credible standard now imposed on U.S. priests is the weakest standard of justice and would not hold up in any legitimate arena of due process. He knows well that what our bishops mean by “credible” is simply that an accusation cannot be immediately disproven on its face. If a priest and an accuser lived in the same area 40 years ago, then the accusation is credible and the priest barred from ministry.
To take the next step and also summarily dismiss these priests from the clerical state is an egregious affront to justice and an absolute denial of mercy. Archbishop Aymond also knows that the same standard does not apply to accused bishops. Catholic author and commentator, Philip Lawler, who has been no friend to accused priests, has conceded this point:
“American church leaders who once ignored the rights of innocent children now ignore the rights of accused priests.”
— Philip Lawler
In a brief but potent article in First Things magazine published just days before The McCarrick Report emerged, Father Thomas G. Guarino wrote of Archbishop Aymond’s affront to justice in “The Battered Priesthood.” He charges that this push for laicization “accelerates the profound erosion of the Sacrament of Holy Orders that began with the Dallas Charter of 2002.” I remind you that this zero tolerance and the scapegoating of accused priests was pushed forward by a concordat between SNAP activists, then Bishop Wilton Gregory who is now Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
“A bedrock principle of Catholic faith and theology is that priests are called to the altar by Jesus Christ, and are ordained priests of Jesus Christ forever. They are not priests merely until they become inconvenient or troublesome for the local bishop. And American bishops, no matter how beleaguered or besieged they may be, need to understand and ardently defend that truth.”
— Rev. Msgr. Thomas Guarino, “The Battered Priesthood”
In the era of the post-Dallas Charter no one has summed up the cost paid by good priests better than David F. Pierre, Jr., moderator of The Media Report:
“The Catholic Church has become
the safest place in the world for children,
and the most dangerous place in world for priests.”
+ + +
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. The Truth will set us free, but usually not before we suffer for standing by it. These related posts may be an additional aid in understanding The McCarrick Report:
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix
The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories,
David F. Pierre, Jr.
A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe
Just decades after Christopher Columbus explored the New World, a Marian apparition near Mexico City left behind a work of art as wondrous for science as for faith.
Just decades after Christopher Columbus explored the New World, a Marian apparition near Mexico City left behind a work of art as wondrous for science as for faith.
I am not certain about how to explain my fascination with this story. I have been a priest for over 40 years, most of them in very challenging circumstances, and for the vast majority of those years I never had even a fleeting thought about Juan Diego, his strange encounter on Tepeyac Hill, or the image left behind. It is actually even worse than that. As a “science priest,” I thought it was very uncool to have a faith focused on Marian apparitions. Then I was taught a humbling lesson by the very image atop this post. I’ll get back to this in a moment.
Some years ago as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was on an official mission in Mexico City. Among her itinerary, her hosts brought her to view one of the nation’s most endearing and enduring national treasures. In the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Secretary Clinton marveled at the beautiful image and asked, “Who was the artist?” The astonished rector of the Basilica answered simply, “God.” Mrs. Clinton may have brushed that answer off, but to date there is no other rational account of how this image entered our world.
Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (we’ll settle for “Juan Diego!”) was a 15-year-old Aztec teenager when Christopher Columbus first sailed to the New World landing in the Caribbean in 1492. Two additional voyages, the last being in 1498, landed Columbus in Mexico where he charted the coast and claimed this New World for Spain. The sorely misled “cancel culture” wave of today would seek to erase this history. Saint Juan Diego might be among the most vocal in opposition to such a misguided cleansing of history.
In the ensuing years, as the Spanish colonized Mexico, many of the indigenous Aztecs converted to Catholicism. Among them was Juan Diego. Monsignor Eduardo Chavez Sanchez, the postulator of his cause for canonization, wrote of the depth of his spiritual commitment to letting faith inform the rest of his life:
“He had time for prayer in that way in which God knows how to make those who love Him understand when to exercise deeds of virtue and sacrifice.”
Like so many throughout Salvation History, God chose in Juan Diego the humble, simple, and unpretentious to make known His omnipotence, His eternal wisdom, His constant love for those He calls. It is a paradox of faith that He also saddles them with a heavy cross. Juan Diego’s cross was to rely only on his faith and his humility to speak truth to power — to bring to Church leaders who would set themselves against him the truth of what he encountered on Tepeyac Hill at the age of 55 in 1531.
Beginning on December 9 of that year, Juan Diego heard a woman’s voice call to him as he crossed Tepeyac Hill early in the morning on his way to Mass near Mexico City. Three days later, on December12, he was wearing a tilma, the broad cloak worn by the Aztecs of Mexico. It was woven from the thick, coarse fibers of a cactus called the agava plant. The fibers were known to break down and disintegrate within twenty years or so. The tilma hanging in the Basilica in Mexico City has been there for nearly 500 years with no sign of decay, and it has become the most visited shrine in the world.
Ave Maria, Gratia Plena
The Church’s Lectionary for the Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe presents a choice of two passages for the proclamation of the Gospel: the account of the Archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary foretelling the Birth of the Messiah (Luke 1:26-38), and the passage that immediately follows, the account of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth ending with Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:39-47). I have written previously of both accounts.
In “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us,” I wrote of the great theological depths of Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation which in time became the First Decade of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. Mary’s encounter with the Herald of God stands in striking contrast with the Archangel’s previous encounter with Zechariah, the father-to-be of John the Baptist. Gabriel approaches Mary with great deference and deep respect, a demeanor captured above by the artist, Fra Angelico in one of his most famous works, “The Annunciation.”
This encounter with Mary is unique in all of Sacred Scripture. It is the only instance in which an angel addresses a human with a title instead of a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). In Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of this passage from its original Greek, he rendered the title, “Gratia Plena” which was translated into the English, “Full of Grace.” It is accurate, but does not reflect the full sense of the original Greek.
Saint Luke had used the term in Acts of the Apostles as well. In his account of the demeanor of Saint Stephen at the time of his arrest and martyrdom, he again used the term, “full of grace.” It was translated from his original Greek, “pleres charitos” (Acts 6:8), referring to a characteristic of Stephen. The “full of grace” title given to Mary is very different. In Greek, the term used by Saint Luke was “kecharitomene” (Luke 1:28), referring not to characteristic, but essence. It implies that God had filled Mary with divine grace as a predestined vessel, a foundation for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
In another post, “Advent of the Mother of God,” I mined the depths of the alternate Gospel passage for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is Saint Luke’s account of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, which ends with the beautiful “Magnificat” (Luke 1:39-56). The passage begins, “In those days, Mary rose and went in haste into the hill country to a city of Judah.” These words were meaningful to the ears of Israel. A thousand years earlier, King David arose and went in haste to the very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:2).
In Luke’s Visitation account, which in time would become the Second Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped in the presence of the Divine Presence in Mary’s womb. Elizabeth is struck with a sense of awe and unworthiness in Mary’s presence, the same awe and unworthiness that David felt (2 Samuel 6:9) as he leaped for joy as the Divine Presence in the Ark of the Covenant was on the way to being restored to Jerusalem. In this passage, Saint Luke presents Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant, a vessel bearing the Divine Presence into our world. It is from this passage that she received the title, “Theotokos,” meaning, “God Bearer.”
Outside Mexico City, AD 1531
Fifty-five year old Aztec convert, Juan Diego heard a voice on his way to Mass as he crossed Tepeyac Hill outside Mexico City. It was a woman’s voice calling to him on the morning of December 9. The next day he heard the voice again in the same place, and a “beautiful lady” appeared instructing him to go to the bishop to ask for a church to be built on this site. The bishop demanded proof, of course, and told Juan Diego to return with it.
The later biographers of his cause for sainthood would describe him as a simple man who always chose to remain in the shadows. When he went back to the Lady on December 12, she pointed to some roses that had not been there previously. They were a rare variety that was never in bloom at that time of year or even in that region. She told him to bring these roses to the bishop so Juan Diego removed his coarsely woven tilma to collect them.
When Juan Diego returned to the bishop, there was a small entourage present. To their shock, he opened his tilma spilling the rare roses out, but that was not the source of the shock. Emblazoned upon the tilma was the image atop this post, an image that would become as mysterious to science as it is to faith. Nearly 500 years later, centuries after all similar tilmas have disintegrated, this image remains in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe where it is revered by millions of pilgrims each year.
Seeing the mysterious image for the first time, the Aztecs gave it the name, “Tecoatlaxope” which was translated into the Spanish, “de Guadalupe,” meaning “she will crush the serpent of stone.” After five centuries, her colors have never faded, not even after centuries of exposure to light, the smoke of incense, or the vapors released by countless vigil candles lit in her honor. Scientists and art historians who have carefully studied the tilma have no explanation for how it could exist. It has been the source of conversion for a multitude of skeptics.
And it has not been spared the spiritual warfare that sets its sights on all that is sacred. In 1791, a worker cleaning its silver frame spilled an entire bottle of nitric acid on it, but the image was unscathed. In the 1920s, when the Church in Mexico suffered under the persecution and tyranny of socialist governor, Plutarco Calles, the atheistic regime devised a plan to destroy the image and to kill the many Catholics who reverenced it. This is a dark time in Mexico history that I recounted in “Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes”
On November 14, 1921, a powerful bomb was planted in a nearby flower vase. The explosion in the middle of a Pontifical Mass destroyed the floor, the altar, the stained glass windows, and was felt a mile away. But it killed no one, and left not a scratch on the sacred image.
Studies with electron microscopes, infrared radiation, and multiple other tests have left scientists with the conclusion that no human hand could have painted this image, and none of its composition materials — other than the coarse fibers of the tilma itself — can be found anywhere on Earth. Electron microscope studies revealed no trace of any brushstroke or preliminary sketch on or within it.
In the Eyes of Mary
The most astonishing revelations about the image came 400 years after it first appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma. In 1929, Alfonso Gonzales, a professional photographer, photographed Mary’s face and enlarged it many times. He saw something very strange within her eyes. It appeared to be the face of a bearded man. From 1950 to 1990, a series of studies with more sophisticated equipment revealed a miracle within the miracle. The interior of the eyes is three dimensional allowing a depth and mirror-like reflection similar to human eyes. Reflected back to the observer looking deep within the eyes is the impossible stereoscopic reflection of twelve persons.
The Catholic site, Aleteia, published a study of this phenomenon entitled, “What’s to Be Seen by Looking into Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Eyes,” (November 1, 2016). I was staggered by what the author discovered there. So are some of the world’s leading experts in optics and ophthalmology.
But none of this is the “encore” for which I entitled this post. It was something much more personal. I wrote of this briefly in my post, “Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri From His Prisons.” Some say I was too subtle so I will write of it again. It happened in 2017 in the middle of our latest front in our ongoing spiritual warfare. I work as the sole clerk in this prison’s law library. It is a job I inherited but never wanted. I was just the only person who did not step back leaving the impression that I did step forward. I was more or less saddled with a massive headache that pays all of $2.00 per day.
On my desk are two computers, one with the library database and one with a Lexis Nexus law office database. My predecessor in the job had a screen background on one of the computers that was a Hubble image of a galaxy. I liked it a lot, but on a whim one day, I decided to change it. I deleted the galaxy, but was out of time. So I went to a list of available backgrounds and saw only hundreds of computer coded numbers. Hundreds! So I randomly clicked one, then checked “Save as Background,” and left for the day.
On the next day, I went to work and booted up the computer. The image that greeted me was staggering, and it remains there to this day. It was Our Lady of Guadalupe perfectly reproduced on a tapestry photographed outside the Basilica in Mexico City. I could not begin to explain how it found its way into a prison and onto that computer, just one numbered image among hundreds. The date this happened seemed even more astronomically impossible than the photo of the galaxy the image replaced. It was the morning of December 12.
Many of our Protestant friends are critical of the Church’s reverence for Mary. They have no problem comprehending that Jesus is the Son of God who gave His life for all, but He also had a Mother and she witnessed it.
From Saint John Henry Newman
“The glories of Mary for the sake of her Son”
(Discourse 17)
“And hence it was, that, when time went on, and the bad spirits and false prophets grew stronger and bolder, and found a way into the Catholic Body itself, then the Church, guided by God, could find no more effectual and sure way of expelling them than that of using this word Deipara (Mother of God) against them… When they came up again from the realms of darkness, and plotted the utter overthrow of Christian Faith in the sixteenth century, then they could find no more certain expedience for their hateful purpose than that of reviling and blaspheming the prerogatives of Mary. They knew full well that if they could once get the world to dishonor the Mother, the dishonor of the Son would soon follow.”
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post so that it may one day end up before someone who needs it.
You may also like these related posts mentioned in this one:
Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri From His Prisons
Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
The Gospel of Saint Luke opens with a news flash from the Archangel Gabriel for Zechariah the priest, and Mary — Theotokos — the new Ark of the Covenant.
Prisoners, including me, have no access at all to the online world. Though Wednesday is post day on Beyond These Stone Walls, I usually don’t get to see my finished posts until the following Saturday when printed copies arrive in the mail. So I was surprised one Saturday night when some prisoners where I live asked if they could read my posts. Then a few from other units asked for them in the prison library where I work.
Some titles became popular just by word of mouth. The third most often requested BTSW post in the library is “A Day Without Yesterday,” my post about Father Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein. The second most requested is “Does Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” Prisoners love the science/religion debate. But by far the most popular BTSW post is “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.” And as a result of it, dozens of prisoners have asked me for copies of the prayer to Saint Michael. I’m told it’s being put up on cell walls all over the prison.
Remember “Jack Bauer Lost The Unit On Caprica,” my post about my favorite TV shows? In the otherwise vast wasteland of American television, we’re overdue for some angelic drama. For five years in the 1980s, Michael Landon and Victor French mediated the sordid details of the human condition in Highway to Heaven. The series was created and produced by Michael Landon who thought TV audiences deserved a reminder of the value of faith, hope, and mercy as we face the gritty task of living. Highway to Heaven ended in 1989, but lived on in re-runs for another decade. Then in the 1990s, Della Reese and Roma Downey portrayed “Tess and Monica,” angelic mediators in Touched by an Angel which also produced a decade of re-runs.
Spiritual Battle on a Cosmic Scale
The angels of TV-land usually worked out solutions to the drama of being human within each episode’s allotted sixty minutes. That’s not so with the angels of Scripture. Most came not with a quick fix to human madness, but with a message for coping, for giving hope, for assuring a believer, or, in the case of the Angel of the Annunciation, for announcing some really big news on a cosmic scale — like salvation! What the angels of Scripture do and say has deep theological symbolism and significance, and in trying times interest in angels seems to thrive. The Archangel Gabriel dominates the Nativity Story of Saint Luke’s Gospel, but who is he and what is the meaning of his message?
We first meet Gabriel five centuries before the Birth of Christ in the Book of Daniel. The Hebrew name, “Gabri’El” has two meanings: “God is my strength,” and “God is my warrior.” As revealed in “Angelic Justice,” the Hebrew name Micha-El means “Who is like God?” The symbolic meaning of these names is portrayed vividly as Gabriel relates to Daniel the cosmic struggle in which he and Michael are engaged:
“Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to understand, and humbled yourself before God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. So I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to befall your people in the latter days . . . But I will tell you what is inscribed in the Book of Truth: there is none who contends at my side against these except Michael.”
— Daniel 10:12-14, 21
In the Talmud, the body of rabbinic teaching, Gabriel is understood to be one of the three angels who appeared to Abraham to begin salvation history, and later led Abraham out of the fire into which Nimrod cast him. The Talmud also attributes to Gabriel the rescue of Lot from Sodom. In Christian apocalyptic tradition, Gabriel is the “Prince of Fire” who will prevail in battle over Leviathan at the end of days. Centuries after the Canon of Old and New Testament Scripture was defined, Gabriel appears also in the Qu’ran as a noble messenger.
In Jewish folklore, Gabriel was in the role of best man at the marriage of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I found that a strange idea at first, but then it dawned on me: Who else were they going to ask? In later rabbinic Judaism, Gabriel watches over man at night during sleep, so he is invoked in the bedside “Shema” which observant Jews must recite at bedtime in a benediction called the Keri’at Shema al ha_Mitah:
“In the name of the God of Israel, may Michael be on my right hand, Gabriel on my left hand, Uriel before me, behind me Raphael, and above my head, the Divine Presence. Blessed is he who places webs of sleep upon my eyes and brings slumber to my eyelids. May it be your will to lay me down and awaken me in peace. Blessed are You, God, who illuminates the entire world with his glory.”
In a well written article in the Advent 2010 issue of Word Among Us (www.WAU.org) – “Gabriel, the Original Advent Angel,” Louise Perrotta described Gabriel’s central message to Daniel:
“History is not a haphazard series of events. Whatever the dark headlines — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, economic upheavals — we’re in the hands of a loving and all-powerful God. Earthly regimes will rise and fall, and good people will suffer. But . . . at an hour no one knows, God will bring evil to an end and establish His eternal kingdom.”
East of Eden
The Book of Tobit identifies the Archangel Raphael as one of seven angels who stand in the Presence of God. Scripture and the Hebrew Apocryphal books identify four by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. The other three are not named for us. In rabbinic tradition, these four named angels stand by the Celestial Throne of God at the four compass points, and Gabriel stands to God’s left. From our perspective, this places Gabriel to the East of God, a position of great theological significance for the fall and redemption of man.
In a previous post, “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden,” I described the symbolism of “East of Eden,” a title made famous by the great American writer, John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for it in 1962. I don’t mean to brag (well, maybe a little!) but a now-retired English professor at a very prestigious U.S. prep school left a comment on “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden” comparing it to Steinbeck’s work. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Archangel Gabriel, but I’ve been waiting for a subtle chance to mention it again! (ahem!) But seriously, in the Genesis account of the fall of man, Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden to the East (Genesis 3:24). It was both a punishment and a deterrent when they disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:
“Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and to the east of the Garden of Eden he placed a Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every which way, to guard the way to the Tree of Life.”
— Gen.3: 22-24
A generation later, after the murder of his brother Abel, Cain too “went away from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, East of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16). The land of Nod seems to take its name from the Hebrew “nad” which means “to wander,” and Cain described his fate in just that way: “from thy face I shall be hidden; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14). The entire subsequent history of Israel is the history of that wandering East of Eden. I wonder if it is also just coincidence that the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the only source of the story of the Magi, has the Magi seeing the Star of Bethlehem “in the east” and following it out of the east.
An Immaculate Reception
In rabbinic lore, Gabriel stands in the Presence of God to the left of God’s throne, a position of great significance for his role in the Annunciation to Mary. Gabriel thus stands in God’s Presence to the East, and from that perspective in St. Luke’s Nativity Story, Gabriel brings tidings of comfort and joy to a waiting world in spiritual exile East of Eden.
The Archangel’s first appearance is to Zechariah, the husband of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth. Zechariah is told that he and his wife are about to become the parents of John the Baptist. The announcement does not sink in easily because, like Abraham and Sarah at the beginning of salvation history, they are rather on in years. Zechariah is about to burn incense in the temple, as close to the Holy of Holies a human being can get, when the archangel Gabriel appears with news:
“Fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife, Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John . . . and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God and will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah . . .’”
— Luke 1:12-15
This news isn’t easily accepted by Zechariah, a man of deep spiritual awareness revered for his access to the Holy of Holies and his connection to God. Zechariah doubts the message, and questions the messenger. It would be a mistake to read the Archangel Gabriel’s response in a casual tone. Hear it with thunder in the background and the Temple’s stone floor trembling slightly under Zechariah’s feet:
“I am Gabriel who stand in the Presence of God . . . and behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass.”
I’ve always felt great sympathy for Zechariah. I imagined him having to make an urgent visit to the Temple men’s room after this, followed by the shock of being unable to intone the Temple prayers.
Zechariah was accustomed to great deference from people of faith, and now he is scared speechless. I, too, would have asked for proof. For a cynic, and especially a sometimes arrogant one, good news is not easily taken at face value.
Then six months later “Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the House of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.” (Luke 1: 26-27). This encounter was far different from the previous one, and it opens with what has become one of the most common prayers of popular devotion.
Gabriel said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” His words became the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that and centuries of “sensus fidelium,” the consensus of the faithful who revere her as “Theotokos,” the God-Bearer. Mary, like Zechariah, also questions Gabriel about the astonishing news. “How can this be since I have not known man?” There is none of the thunderous rebuke given to Zechariah, however. Saint Luke intends to place Gabriel in the presence of his greater, a position from which even the Archangel demonstrates great reverence and deference.
It has been a point of contention with non-Catholics and dissenters for centuries, but the matter seems so clear. There’s a difference between worship and reverence, and what the Church bears for Mary is the deepest form of reverence. It’s a reverence that came naturally even to the Archangel Gabriel who sees himself as being in her presence rather than the other way around. God and God alone is worshiped, but the reverence bestowed upon Mary was found in only one other place on Earth. That place was the Ark of the Covenant, in Hebrew, the “Aron Al-Berith,” the Holy of Holies which housed the Tablets of the Old Covenant. It was described in 1 Kings 8: 1-11, but the story of Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary draws on elements from the Second Book of Samuel.
These elements are drawn by Saint Luke as he describes Mary’s haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea. In 2 Samuel 6:2, David visits this very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. Upon Mary’s entry into Elizabeth’s room in Saint Luke’s account, the unborn John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. This is reminiscent of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6:16.
For readers “with eyes to see and ears to hear,” Saint Luke presents an account of God entering into human history in terms quite familiar to the old friends of God. God himself expressed in the Genesis account of the fall of man that man has attempted to “become like one of us” through disobedience. Now the reverse has occurred. God has become one of us to lead us out of the East, and off the path to eternal darkness and death.
In Advent, and especially today the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we honor with the deepest reverence Mary, Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the new Ark of the Covenant. Mary, whose response to the Archangel Gabriel was simple assent:
“Let it be done to me according to your word.”
“Then the Dawn from On High broke upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet on the way to peace.”
— Luke 1:78-79
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.”
Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
Saint Michael the Archangel is often depicted wielding a sword and a set of scales to vanquish Satan. His scales have an ancient and surprising meaning.
Saint Michael the Archangel is often depicted wielding a sword and a set of scales to vanquish Satan. His scales have an ancient and surprising meaning.
I worked for days on a post about Saint Michael the Archangel. I finally finished it this morning, exactly one week before the Feast of the Archangels, then rushed off to work in the prison library. When I returned four hours later to print the post and get it into the mail to Charlene, my friend Joseph stopped by. You might remember Joseph from a few of my posts, notably “Disperse the Gloomy Clouds of Night” in Advent and “Forty Days and Forty Nights” in Lent.
Well, you can predict where this is going. As soon as I returned to my cell, Joseph came in to talk with me. Just as I turned on my typewriter, Joseph reached over and touched it. He wasn’t aware of the problem with static charges from walking across these concrete floors. Joseph’s unintentional spark wiped out four days of work and eight pages of text.
It’s not the first time this has happened. I wrote about it in “Descent into Lent” last year, only then I responded with an explosion of expletives. Not so this time. As much as I wanted to swear, thump my chest, and make Joseph feel just awful, I couldn’t. Not after all my research on the meaning of the scales of Saint Michael the Archangel. They very much impact the way I look at Joseph in this moment. Of course, for the 30 seconds or so after it happened, it’s just as well that he wasn’t standing within reach!
This world of concrete and steel in which we prisoners live is very plain, but far from simple. It’s a world almost entirely devoid of what Saint Michael the Archangel brings to the equation between God and us. It’s also a world devoid of evidence of self-expression. Prisoners eat the same food, wear the same uniforms, and live in cells that all look alike.
Off the Wall, And On
In these cells, the concrete walls and ceilings are white — or were at one time — the concrete floors are gray, and the concrete counter running halfway along one wall is dark green. On a section of wall for each prisoner is a two-by-four foot green rectangle for posting family photos, a calendar and religious items. The wall contains the sole evidence of self-expression in prison, and you can learn a lot about a person from what’s posted there.
My friend, Pornchai, whose section of wall is next to mine, had just a blank wall two years ago. Today, not a square inch of green shows through his artifacts of hope. There are photos of Joe and Karen Corvino, the foster parents whose patience impacted his life, and Charlene Duline and Pierre Matthews, his new Godparents. There’s also an old photo of the home in Thailand from which he was taken at age 11, photos of some of the ships described in “Come, Sail Away!” now at anchor in new homes. There’s also a rhinoceros — no clue why — and Garfield the Cat. In between are beautiful icons of the Blessed Mother, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Pio, and one of Saint Michael the Archangel that somehow migrated from my wall over to Pornchai’s.
My own wall evolved over time. The only family photos I had are long lost, and I haven’t seen my family in many years. It happens to just about every prisoner after ten years or so. In my first twelve years in prison I was moved sixteen times, and each time I had to quickly take my family photos off the wall. Like many prisoners here for a long, long time, there came a day when I took my memories down to move, then just didn’t put them back up again. A year ago, I had nothing on the wall, then a strange transformation of that small space began to take shape.
When These Stone Walls — the blog, not the concrete ones — began last year, some readers started sending me beautiful icons and holy cards. The prison allows them in mail as long as they’re not laminated in plastic. Some made their way onto my wall, and slowly over the last year it filled with color and meaning again.
It’s a mystery why, but the most frequent image sent to me by TSW readers is that of Saint Michael the Archangel. There are five distinct icons of him on the wall, plus the one that seems to prefer Pornchai’s side. These stone walls — the concrete ones, not the blog — are filled with companions now.
There’s another icon of Saint Michael on my coffee cup — the only other place prisoners always leave their mark — and yet another inside and above the cell door. That one was placed there by my friend, Alberto Ramos, who went to prison at age 14 and turned 30 last week. It appeared a few months ago. Alberto’s religious roots are in Caribbean Santeria. He said Saint Michael above the door protects this cell from evil. He said this world and this prison greatly need Saint Michael.
Who Is Like God?
The references to the Archangel Michael are few and cryptic in the canon of Hebrew and Christian Scripture. In the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Daniel, he is Michael, your Prince, “who stands beside the sons of your people.” In Daniel 12:1 he is the guardian and protector angel of Israel and its people, and the “Great Prince” in Heaven who came to the aid of the Archangel Gabriel in his contest with the Angel of Persia (Daniel 10:13, 21).
His name in Hebrew — Mikha’el — means “Who is like God?” It’s posed as a question that answers itself. No one, of course, is like God. A subsidiary meaning is, “Who bears the image of God,” and in this Michael is the archetype in Heaven of what man himself was created to be: the image and likeness of God. Some other depictions of the Archangel Michael show him with a shield bearing the image of Christ. In this sense, Michael is a personification, as we’ll see below, of the principal attribute of God throughout Scripture.
Outside of Daniel’s apocalyptic vision, the Archangel Michael appears only two more times in the canon of Sacred Scripture. In Revelation 12:7-9 he leads the army of God in a great and final battle against the army of Satan. A very curious mention in the Epistle of Saint Jude (Jude 1:9) describes Saint Michael’s dispute with Satan over the body of Moses.
This is a direct reference to an account in the Apocrypha, and demonstrates the importance and familiarity of some of the apocryphal writings in the Israelite and early Christian communities. Saint Jude writes of the account as though it is quite familiar to his readers. In the Assumption of Moses in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, Michael prevails over Satan, wins the body of Moses, and accompanies him into Heaven.
It is because of this account that Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus in the account of the Transfiguration in Matthew 11. Moses and Elijah are the two figures in the Hebrew Scriptures to hear the voice of God on Mount Sinai, and to be assumed bodily into Heaven — escorted by Saint Michael the Archangel according to the Aggadah, the collection of milennia of rabbinic lore and custom.
Saint Michael as the Divine Measure of Souls
In each of the seven images of Saint Michael the Archangel sent to me by TSW readers, he is depicted brandishing a sword in triumph over Satan subdued at his feet. In five of the icons, he also holds a set of scales above the head of Satan. A lot of people confuse the scales with those of “Lady Justice” the famous American icon. Those scales symbolize the equal application of law and justice in America. It’s a high ideal, but one that too often isn’t met in the American justice system. I cited some examples in “The Eighth Commandment.”
The scales of Saint Michael also depict justice, but of another sort. Presumably that’s why so many readers sent me his image, and I much appreciate it. However, some research uncovered a far deeper symbolic meaning for the Archangel’s scales. The primary purpose of the scales is not to measure justice, but to weigh souls. And there’s a specific factor that registers on Saint Michael’s scales. They depict his role as the measure of mercy, the highest attribute of God for which Saint Michael is the personification. The capacity for mercy is what it most means to be in the image and likeness of God. The primary role of Saint Michael the Archangel is to be the advocate of justice and mercy in perfect balance — for justice without mercy is little more than vengeance.
That’s why God limits vengeance as summary justice. In Genesis chapter 4, Lamech, a descendant of Cain, vows that “if Cain is avenged seven-fold then Lamech is avenged seventy-seven fold.” Jesus later corrects this misconception of justice by instructing Peter to forgive “seventy times seven times.”
Our English word, “Mercy” doesn’t actually capture the full meaning of what is intended in the Hebrew Scriptures as the other side of the justice equation. The word in Hebrew is ”hesed,” and it has multiple tiers of meaning. It was translated into New Testament Greek as “eleos,” and then translated into Latin as “misericordia” from which we derive the English word, “mercy.” Saint Michael’s scales measure ”hesed,” which in its most basic sense means to act with altruism for the good of another without anything of obvious value in return. It’s the exercise of mercy for its own sake, a mercy that is the highest value of Judeo-Christian faith.
Sacred Scripture is filled with examples of hesed as the chief attribute of God and what it means to be in His image. That ”the mercy of God endures forever” is the central and repeated message of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The references are too many to name, but as I was writing this post, I spontaneously thought of a few lines from Psalm 85:
“Mercy and faithfulness shall meet. Justice and peace shall kiss. Truth shall spring up from the Earth, and justice shall look down from Heaven.”
The domino effect of hesed-mercy is demonstrated in Psalm 85. Faithfulness and truth will arise out of it, and together all three will comprise justice. In researching this, I found a single, ancient rabbinic reference attributing authorship of Psalm 85 to the only non-human instrument of any Psalm or verse of Scripture: Saint Michael the Archangel, himself. According to that legend, Psalm 85 was given by the Archangel along with the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Saint Thomas Aquinas described Saint Michael as “the breath of the Redeemer’s spirit who will, at the end of the world, combat and destroy the Anti-Christ as he did Lucifer in the beginning.” This is why St. Michael is sometimes depicted bearing a shield with the image of Christ. It is the image of Christ in His passion, imprinted upon the veil of St. Veronica. Veronica is a name that appears nowhere in Scripture, but is simply a name assigned by tradition to the unnamed woman with the veil. The name Veronica comes from the Latin “vera icon” meaning “true image.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas and many Doctors of the Church regarded Saint Michael as the angel of Exodus who, as a pillar of cloud and fire, led Israel out of slavery. Christian tradition gives to Saint Michael four offices: To fight against Satan, to measure and rescue the souls of the just at the hour of death, to attend the dying and accompany the just to judgment, and to be the Champion and Protector of the Church.
His feast day, assigned since 1970 to the three Archangels of Scripture, was originally assigned to Saint Michael alone since the sixth century dedication of a church in Rome in his honor. The feast was originally called Michaelmas meaning, “The Mass of St. Michael.” The great prayer to Saint Michael, however, is relatively new. It was penned on October 13, 1884, by Pope Leo XIII after a terrifying vision of Saint Michael’s battle with Satan:
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, 0 Prince of the heavenly Host, by the power of God, cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
It’s an important prayer for the Church, especially now. I know the enemies of the Church lurk here, too. There are some who come here not for understanding, or the truth, but for ammunition. For them the very concept of mercy, forgiveness, and inner healing is anathema to their true cause. I once scoffed at the notion that evil surrounds us, but I have seen it. I think every person falsely accused has seen it.
Donald Spinner, mentioned in “Loose Ends and Dangling Participles,” gave Pornchai a prayer that was published by the prison ministry of the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association. Pornchai asked me to mention it in this post. It’s a prayer that perfectly captures the meaning of Saint Michael the Archangel’s Scales of Hesed:
“Prayer for Justice and Mercy
Jesus, united with the Father and the Holy Spirit, give us your compassion for those in prison. Mend in mercy the broken in mind and memory. Soften the hard of heart, the captives of anger. Free the innocent; parole the trustworthy. Awaken the repentance that restores hope. May prisoners’ families persevere in their love. Jesus, heal the victims of crime; they live with the scars. Lift to eternal peace those who die. Grant victims and their families the forgiveness that heals. Give wisdom to lawmakers and those who judge. Instill prudence and patience in those who guard. Make those in prison ministry bearers of your light, for ALL of us are in need of your mercy! Amen.”
