Why this Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison

Why are some innocent defendants kept in prison? Attorney Harvey Silverglate unmasks the perversion of justice when judges give finality more weight than justice.

August 30, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Preliminary Note: I first wrote this post in 2018. The entire landscape of my own situation has radically changed since then. On October 9, 2022, famed Boston civil rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate penned an Op-Ed for The Wall Street Journal entitled “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.” He wrote of how any hope for my ongoing defense fell into silence for several years until early 2022. At that time, new evidence emerged that James F. McLaughlin, the Keene, New Hampshire police detective who choreographed the case against me in 1994 had been present on a secret list for police misconduct. The charge against him, which preceded my trial by a few years, was “falsification of records.” Since then a New Hampshire court has sealed his file and has, in a secret hearing, allowed his name to be removed from the public misconduct list. Others who have written of this matter have somehow uncovered other incidents of police misconduct by him including allegations of falsification of evidence, witness intimidation, destruction of tape-recorded evidence, and other examples of official dishonesty, all of which I have been accusing him of for the last 30 years. There are signs of an official coverup going on in New Hampshire, and until someone gets to the bottom of it, progress in my defense had once again fallen into silence.

Until now. Next week in these pages we will host an explosive Op-Ed by a Los Angeles documentary researcher who seems to have arrived, if not at the bottom line of what has actually gone on, then very near to it. She has described her Op-Ed as “the epic of all epic scandals.”

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In North Carolina in 1983, half brothers Henry Lee McCollum, 19, and Leon Brown, 15, were arrested and charged with a heinous crime, the rape, and murder of an 11-year-old girl. Public pressure to solve the case was intense. A lot of facts were overlooked because the police felt certain they had the right suspects. The two brothers were interrogated for hours on end, finally confessed, and then were sentenced to death.

But after an initial state appeal, the young men’s confessions were seen as coerced and vacated. They stood trial but were convicted again. Only the sentence changed. This time Henry Lee remained on death row while Leon, being still a minor, was sentenced to life in prison. Further attempts to appeal their case were rejected by judges citing the state’s interest in “finality,” a principle of law that often prevails over justice.

I often receive letters and comments from readers who may not know the history of my own attempts toward justice. The well-meaning comments suggest that I seek out the Innocence Project for assistance, or that I appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, or file a habeas corpus petition in the federal courts.

I know that these readers would have to plow through a lot of past material on this site to get a sense of how strenuously we have tried all of the above. The Innocence Project has saved many lives, but before taking a case it usually requires the existence of irrefutable DNA evidence that would exonerate a prisoner.

Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence

A conviction like mine is different. Because no crime ever actually took place — a truth that comes down to my word against an accuser’s word — there was no evidence and nothing to review except the accuser’s claims themselves. For reasons you might understand if you keep reading, emerging evidence of innocence, no matter how compelling, has so far been unable to prevail over the court’s interest in finality.

The sheer number of cases overturned with irrefutable DNA evidence do not seem to translate for judges into a concern that wrongful convictions are more common than they want to admit. Mistakes that are made when there is evidence do not compel judges to consider that mistakes are also made when there is none. How finality prevailed over justice in my own attempts at appeal was laid out in an important article by Ryan MacDonald, “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”

The grievous error notwithstanding, Judge Laplante was not in error in his procedural handling of my habeas corpus appeal. He simply followed existing case law. One of the most egregious principles of law to come out of the United States Supreme Court in modern times was a 1993 decision in Herrera v. Collins.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in his majority opinion that “A claim of Actual Innocence is not itself a constitutional claim” that entitles a convicted defendant to federal habeas corpus relief. This also applies to death penalty cases. Actual innocence is not a bar to lawful execution.

Let that sink in. But first, back to half-brothers Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown in North Carolina: After being sent to prison for the heinous rape-murder charges, the two young men themselves became the victims of sexual and physical assaults.

In a bizarre twist, an older prisoner befriended them, stating his belief in their innocence. That prisoner, Roscoe Artis, had been convicted for a series of sexual assaults against women and was a suspect in at least one “cold case” homicide. It turned out that Mr. Artis believed in the innocence of Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown because he himself actually committed the crime for which they were in prison. He did not tell them this, however.

In 2014 — 31 years after being sentenced to prison — the case of Henry Lee, still not yet executed, was revisited by Sharon Stellato, an investigator for the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. She undertook a dogged pursuit of the actual evidence against them but found none. What she did find, however, was some DNA evidence from the crime scene that had never been tested.

It was enough — just enough — to overcome finality so a judge ordered it to be tested. It excluded Henry Lee and Leon from any involvement in the crime, and it convicted Roscoe Artis, the man who befriended and protected them in prison. It was also revealed that fingerprints found at the 1983 crime scene were not a match for either Henry Lee or Leon, a fact that the police never conveyed to defense attorneys. At ages 50 and 46, more than 30 years after they were sent to prison, Henry Lee and Leon were finally released.

Politics, Prosecutors, and Career Paths

About every other week or so, usually on a Friday afternoon, I am summoned to a prison office to open and sign for an item of legal mail. Anything sent to a prisoner that obviously comes from a court, a lawyer, or a law firm falls into this category. It simply means that unlike all other mail, the item is opened in my presence after I sign a log indicating that I accepted it.

Prisoners shudder when the P.A. system announces their names for legal mail. It is generally an omen of bad news for prisoners. Those who are guilty of their charged offenses — and yes, they are the vast majority — don’t mind so much. They expect little beyond the justice already meted out to them. But those who maintain their innocence brace themselves for a letdown, or another step toward bankruptcy, whenever their names are called.

It is one of the myths of prison that many prisoners claim to be innocent. The reality is just the opposite. Those who do so are taunted as “damn fools” by nearly all others. I spent my first few years here fending off a taunt by both prisoners and guards: ‘You could have been out of here in ONE YEAR if you took a deal? What an idiot!” 

Much of the legal mail that I am summoned to pick up these days is from Harvey A. Silverglate, a well known civil rights and appellate defense lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. Silverglate is author of the book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (Encounter Books 2009).

The foreword of the book is by Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor and a colleague and friend of the author. Both Misters Silverglate and Dershowitz appear frequently in the Boston and national media, and I have followed them for years.

In his Foreword, Alan Dershowitz presents with clarity a crucial point that I have made many times. Mr. Dershowitz writes:

“Prosecutors in other countries are civil servants who do not pander to the people’s understandable wish to be safe from crime ... in the United States, prosecutors are not only elected ... but the job is a stepping stone to a higher office as evidenced by the fact that nearly every congressman or senator who ever practiced law once served as a federal or state prosecutor. Winning becomes more important than doing justice.”

— Three Felonies a Day, p. xxv

It is also an important fact that prosecutors routinely move on to political appointments as judges. Judge Joseph Laplante, who declined to hear any evidence or testimony in my federal habeas corpus appeal, had a career as a federal prosecutor spanning twenty years before his appointment to the federal bench. Judge Laplante had been prosecutor in the NH Attorney General’s office at the time of my trial and first State appeal, and likely knew of Detective McLaughlin presence on the secret list of dishonest police.

Judge Arthur Brennan, who presided over my 1994 trial, was personal legal counsel to then-Governor Judd Gregg (1989-1992) when he received a political appointment to a judgeship just months before my trial. Judge Larry Smukler, who declined to hear my State habeas corpus appeal, also declined to provide any biographical information about his career trajectory for the official New Hampshire Law Directory.

The Acknowledgements section of Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day is a virtual Who’s Who of many of the advocates for justice who have taken up my case. The names there include Dorothy Rabinowitz whose writings in The Wall Street Journal reopened my story in the important court of public awareness.

Also included there is Bob Chatelle, founder and president of the National Center for Reason and Justice which continues to feature my story and its appellate case files. Mr. Chatelle also hosts the Friends of Justice blog which links to many of my posts and has featured posts about my experience of justice.

Harvey Silverglate’s “Freedom Watch”

Mr. Silverglate, being a Massachusetts attorney, is not able to represent me in New Hampshire, but he generously sends me each installment in his series of articles called “Freedom Watch” published by WGBH News. I am most grateful for these informative glimpses into the inner function, and too often DYSfunction, of the criminal justice system. Mr. Silverglate has also long been a reader and supporter of Beyond These Stone Walls.

A recent article he sent was “When the Criminal Justice System Can’t Admit a Mistake: The James Rodwell Case.” He refers to this murder conviction as “a case that will not go away” because “too many people remain disturbed by the outcome.” Harvey Silverglate is one of them because …

[The] instinct that drives people to persevere when the system misfires is countered by the system’s self-protective reflex that makes it difficult to get judges to take a second, third or fourth look into a case, even when new and powerful evidence of a severe miscarriage of justice surfaces.”

This self-protective reflex, Mr. Silverglate says, has long roiled the justice system, producing “considerable disagreement between the two camps of judges — those who view finality as the ultimate goal, and others who deem justice to be paramount.” The central issue in the James Rodwell case, says Silverglate, is whether Mr. Rodwell actually committed the murder for which he has constantly maintained his innocence throughout 36 years in prison.

The sole evidence against him was the testimony of “two inmate thugs” who were treated favorably by prosecutors and police in exchange for their testimony. One of them claimed that Rodwell confessed to the murder while they occupied neighboring cells in a county jail where they were held pre-trial. Further, the district attorney’s office had since “lost” the entire file of its prosecution of this case.

Mr. Silverglate went on to describe the “remarkable display of clairvoyance” in a Superior Court judge who denied Rodwell’s latest appeal. The judge stated that “it is highly unlikely” that the ‘lost’ files contain evidence of prosecution deals afforded to inmate witnesses in exchange for their testimony.

This judicial clairvoyance struck a familiar note. When my own habeas corpus appeal came up against a wall of finality, Judge Joseph Laplante offered some clairvoyance of his own. While declining to hear from witnesses, including my accuser’s former wife, Judge Laplante attributed a motive for her to lie today about her ex-husband’s perjury: Thomas Grover was charged with felony domestic assault for punching her and breaking her nose before my trial — a charge conveniently dropped on the day my trial ended in a conviction.

Her bravely coming forward with the truth today was explained away by Judge Laplante who asserted that my defense could have called her as a witness at my 1994 trial, and could have tried to elicit the truth then. This assertion completely overlooks the fact that she may have been terrified of the man who had just broken her nose for questioning his truthfulness then. It is fascinating how all the credence afforded to victims of abuse and domestic violence is set aside when their testimony might right a judicial wrong.

Mr. Silverglate’s “Freedom Watch” article went on to describe some of the “far too many infamous cases where the indications are strong that justice misfired, but where the systemic preference for finality and the resistance to the confession of judicial error are strong.” One of these cases he cited is that against the Amirault family and the “witch trial” prosecution of them in the notorious Fells Acres Day Care Center case. 

This story and others convey powerfully both the perversion of finality prevailing over justice and the perversion of justice when politics preside over a courtroom. In their book, Actual Innocence (New American Library, 2003) Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld describe how the doctrine of “finality” is an obstacle to justice:

“Only the criminal justice system exempts itself from self-examination. Wrongful convictions are not seen as catastrophes, but as topics to be avoided... Finality is a doctrine that can be explained in two words when it comes to innocence tests: willful ignorance... The Innocence Project and other advocates have spent hundreds of hours just arguing against ‘finality’ doctrines that are used to block inquiries that no fair person would resist.”

— Actual Innocence, p. 320

For Harvey Silverglate, Advocate for Justice, “The key question is whether judges, clothespins firmly attached to noses, will continue to pretend that justice was done.” None of the rest of us are given clothespins.

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Please share this post, and please return here next week for the “epic of all epic scandals.” You may also be interested to see some new evidence added to our Important Documents in the Fr Gordon MacRae Case. It is the evidence that appellate judges have declined to hear.

Affidavit of Former FBI Special Agent James Abbott

Statement of Steven Wollschlager

Statement of Debra Collett

Statement of Leo Demers

In Honor of Mom: A Corner of the Veil

The photograph above is the house where Father Gordon MacRae grew up just north of Boston. It is the home where his single-parent mother raised three sons and a daughter alone. The stone wall in the front was built by Father Gordon and his brother at ages 15 and 16. It still stands today.

Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae have met the challenge of honoring their mothers during a most difficult time in life, the latter through this moving 2009 post.

Note from Father Gordon: This post, which is dear to my heart, was first published in 2009 three years after my mother’s death. After I decided to repost it, Pornchai Moontri sent me some photos of how he has honored his mother in northern Thailand last month. For the first time in his life, Pornchai took part in the April celebrations of Songkhram, the Thai New Year, and Loy Krathong, the annual Water Festival and its ritual cleansing of the tombs of his mother and grandmother at a Buddhist temple in the village of his birth. (Note: Pornchai wants everyone to know that the shirt was a gift from one of his cousins!)

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When I was first sent to prison, my mother visited me weekly. She lived North of Boston, about a ninety minute drive from Concord, NH. She was usually brought here by my sister and her husband or by my younger brother. I was very concerned about how my imprisonment affected my mother. The mothers of most priests enjoy a sort of vicarious respect that they cherish with pride. My mother was visiting her priest-son in prison.

My mother was painfully aware that I could have left prison after only one or two years had I been willing to plead guilty to something that never took place. I knew she knew this. One day when we were alone during a visit, I took her hand and asked her if she was disappointed that I did not take a “deal” for the easy way out. She pondered this for a moment, squeezed my hand, and said,

“No, I would have been disappointed if you lived a lie. There’s no freedom in living a lie. I want you to fight for the truth.”

— Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, Father Gordon’s mother

I was very proud of my mother, for in those few simple words she, too, put herself and her pride aside for principle. A few days after our visit, my mother sent me a simple card. It was a quote from Winston Churchill, plain white text on a black background, “Never, ever, ever give up!” It was one of my treasures. The card spent several years on my cell wall, then disappeared one day, lost —as are many such things when I was moved from place to place in the prison.

In the years to follow, my mother became very ill. Her visits were fewer and further between. I witnessed the digression as she appeared in the prison visiting room one day with a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair — and then I saw her no more. Over the next two years, I could only speak with my mother by telephone. In the last year of her life, my mother and I could not speak at all.

It was a special agony to know that my mother was dying just seventy miles away. As her son and as a priest, I had lost any means to offer support for her except through prayer. I wrote to a priest-friend in Boston, Franciscan Father Raymond Mann, who graciously prepared my mother spiritually for death in my stead. I was most grateful to him, and to my sister and her family who cared for our mother every moment of her last years in this life. On November 5, 2006, my mother died.

Most of you cannot imagine being unable to see or comfort a loved one dying just seventy miles away. There is a barrier between the imprisoned and the free — almost as impenetrable as the barrier between the living and the dead. My duty as her son and as a priest would be carried out in silence in my own heart.

Redemptive Suffering

When I saw the Mel Gibson film, “The Passion of the Christ,” I was struck by the powerful, silent scenes in which Mary viewed her Son’s path to Calvary from a short distance, and yet could not touch him, could not speak to him. I felt as though I was living the reverse of those scenes, that I witnessed from the far side of an abyss the suffering and death of my mother, and could not be present.  It was as though I had died before her — already, but not yet.

I was angry. As her son and as a priest, being present to my mother in death was a sacred duty, but one denied to her and to me through the false witness of accusers and the enticement of money — an enticement that has played a far greater role in the Church’s scandal than our bishops and the plaintiff lawyers will admit. How could I not be angry?

“One of the great temptations I have had to face in prison is the impulse to keep a litany of losses. It is a naturally human response to injustice, but the resentment to ensue would be a spiritually toxic weapon of self-destruction.”

My first post on These Stone Walls was “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.” In it, I described something that occurred just six weeks after the death of my mother. I had been standing at the mirror in my cell shaving on the morning of December 23, 2006. I suddenly realized that the equation of my life had just changed, that on that very day I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else.

The sense of loss and futility was overwhelming until later that same day when I received in the mail an image of Father Maximilian Kolbe in both his Franciscan habit and his prison uniform. I have described in several posts my encounter with St. Maximilian Kolbe just at the point at which the equation changed — the point at which more of my life as a priest was spent in prison than in freedom. 

Father Kolbe’s sacrifice of his life for another made me realize the power that exists in sacrifice and especially in the sacrifice of unjust suffering.  I have come to know without doubt that suffering offered for another is redemptive of both. It’s a difficult concept for someone on the wrong end of injustice to grasp, and I struggled with it at first.  I began to offer my days in prison as a share in the suffering of Christ in the final weeks of my mother’s life.  It was all I had to give her.

Newfoundland

My mother, Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, emigrated to the United States from Newfoundland at age 22 in 1949.  The oldest of six, she was close to her three sisters and two brothers who remained in Newfoundland.  My mother was closest in age and in friendship to her sister, Frances, two years younger.

In 2003, my mother visited her childhood home for the last time. 

Even in sickness and in pending death, my mother never lost her Irish sense of humor. During the visit my mother sent me a postcard with a scene from a high cliff overlooking Saint John’s Harbour. She wrote the following message:

“Dear Gordon,

Newfoundland is simply beautiful. I am writing this while visiting Redcliff, a 200-foot sheer cliff where Newfoundlander mothers of old would take their most troublesome sons and threaten to heave them over the edge.

Wish you were here. Love, Mom”

She also sent me a terrific photograph of herself with her sister, Frances at Logy Bay, just north of St. John’s on the Avalon Peninsula where they grew up.

It was the only photo I had of my mother in her last years.  I put the photo away, and then lost it.  When my mother died, Pornchai helped me search our cell for the photo, but it was gone.  It’s difficult for prisoners to hold onto such things.  Prisoners’ cells are routinely searched — sometimes even ransacked in the process — and we have very little ability to preserve items we treasure such as photographs. The photo of my mother was lost.

In the July/August, 2009 issue of This Rock magazine (which later became Catholic Answers ), Father Dwight Longenecker has an interesting article, “Weird Things Happen.” He wrote of an experience in the Chapel of the Convent of Saint Gildard in Nevers, France as he prayed before the uncorrupted body of St. Bernadette:

“I kept silence there and noticed a beautiful fragrance of flowers. As I prayed, the fragrance grew stronger, and I felt transported by a presence that was beyond my understanding.”

Father Longenecker — who hosts the Standing on My Head blog — wrote of other phenomena that defy logical explanation in our repository of faith experience. He wrote of Padre Pio’s stigmata, apparitions of the Blessed Mother, healings in the presence of sacred relics. In a later issue of This Rock, Father Longenecker took some heat for what was wrongly interpreted as his dismissal of such experiences.

I found his article to be respectful and serious, with but one small flaw. Father Longenecker later questioned what, exactly, happened to him in that chapel before the body of St. Bernadette, and suggested that we need to be both believing and skeptical.

“Whenever a natural explanation for a seemingly supernatural event is available,” he wrote, “it is to be preferred”

But why should natural explanations preclude the miraculous? Naturally occurring events can be powerful catalysts of actual grace, and as such they seem miraculous. We have all had the experience of coincidence that is so unlikely, so personally shaking that it defies explanation. Who hasn’t picked up the telephone to call a loved one only to find that person already there calling you?

It seems a minor miracle when it happens, something inexplicable and astonishing, then the experience slowly diminishes as doubt and natural skepticism reinterpret the event for us. The task of getting on with life causes us to shrug off the experience over time. Sometimes the balance between belief and skepticism in the modern world can lean too heavily toward the latter.

I wrote of such an event in "A Shower of Roses" in October. While accompanying teenage Michelle through the last weeks of her life, I spoke of St. Therese, the Little Flower, who promised a shower of roses. Michelle, a day away from death, pointed at the ceiling where drifted a helium balloon with a vivid rose imprinted upon it. It left me stunned — for awhile, but in time the trials of life diminished the light of that event. How common are the signs and wonders that come to people of faith? Can we always see them when they arrive?

The Undiscovered Country

In Hamlet Shakespeare called death, “The Undiscovered Country.” I know many people who have suffered the death of someone they love. Think, in the midst of that suffering, of the incredible gift that it contains. Loss is not felt at all but for love, and love is a direct result of grace. It is what folds back a corner of the veil — what links the living to the dead. We have something very special to share with those whose physical life is lost to us: the grace of redemptive suffering, the hope of our prayers, the sacrifice of our trials.

Eight months after my mother’s death, I learned that her beloved sister, Frances, died in Newfoundland. She died on July 10,2007, but I did not learn of it for several days. Prisoners cannot be reached by telephone, so it was July 14th when I received my sister’s letter about the death of my aunt. The next day, July 15th, was my mother’s birthday, the first since her death the previous November. Late that night, I prepared to offer Mass in my cell for the souls of my mother and her sister. Pornchai Moontri was with me for the Mass and told me this week that he remembers this story very well.

Just as Mass began, a prisoner came to my cell to borrow a book. I was irritated. Couldn’t he wait? I had to pull a foot locker from under my bunk and rummage for the book. I found the book and handed it to him, and he left.

I turned back to the Mass, and a moment later there he was again at my door. He walked into my cell and plopped something right onto the corporal I had laid down for Mass. Pornchai and I were both stunned.  It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier — the photo we searched for in vain when my mother died. It’s the photo above. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday — at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister — their last photograph together found me

An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace.

When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side — my mother on the right — on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land.

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Please share this post in honor of Mother’s Day. You may also wish to visit the posts linked herein:

A Shower of Roses

St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror

Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning Part Two

Gordon-MacRae-Falsely-Accused-Priest-Maximilian-Kolbe

See Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part OneAs a young priest in 1982, I was only vaguely familiar with the name Maximilian Kolbe. I remember reading of his canonization by Pope John Paul II, but Father Kolbe's world was far removed from my modern suburban priestly ministry. I was far too busy to step into it.I didn't know that nearly two decades later, Father Kolbe's life, death, and sainthood would be proclaimed on the wall of my prison cell. I also didn't know this would help define the person I choose to be in prison.Being a Jew and not a Catholic, Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning, said nothing about Maximilian's sainthood or any miracles attributed to his intercession. Instead, Dr. Frankl was moved by the profound charity of Maximilian, which defied the narcissism of our times.For those unfamiliar with him, the story is simple.The prisoners of Auschwitz were packed into bunkers like cattle. To encourage informants, the camp had a policy that if any prisoner escaped, 10 others would be randomly chosen for summary execution.At the morning role call one day, a prisoner from Maximilian's bunker was missing. Guards chose 10 men to be executed. The 10th fell to the ground and cried for the wife and children he would never see again. Father Kolbe spontaneously stepped forward and said,

"I am a Catholic priest, and I would like to take the place of this man."

Two weeks later, he alone was still alive among the 10 prisoners chained and condemned to starvation. Maximilian was injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, and his remains unceremoniously incinerated.For the unbeliever, all that Maximilian was went up in smoke. Viktor Frankl shared some other corner of that horrific prison. The story of the person Father Kolbe chose to be rippled through the camp. This story offered proof to Viktor Frankl that we can be as much inspired by grace as doomed by despair. We get to choose which will define us.Within days of reading Man's Search for Meaning and learning of Father Kolbe's sacrifice, I received a letter from out of the blue.Conventual Franciscan Father Jim McCurry had been in an airport in Ireland when he heard an Irish priest nearby mention that he corresponds with a priest in a Concord, New Hampshire prison. Father McCurry said he was on his way to visit his order's house in Granby, Massachusetts and would arrange to visit the Concord prison.Weeks later, Father McCurry and I met in the prison visiting room. When I asked him what his "assignment" is, he said,

"Well I just finished a biography of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Have you heard of him?"

Father McCurry went on to say that he was involved in Father Maximilian's cause for sainthood. He had met the man whose great grandfather life was saved by Father Kolbe.A few years later, Father McCurry arranged a Father Maximilian Kolbe exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum. It was then that he sent me the card depicting Father Maximilian clothed in his Franciscan habit with one sleeve in his prison uniform. I keep the card above my mirror in my cell.I can never embrace these stone walls. I can't claim ownership of them. Passively acceding to injustice anywhere contributes to injustice everywhere. Father Maximilian never approved of Auschwitz.One can't understand how I now respond to these stone walls, however, without hearing of Father Maximilian's presence there.

Above my mirror, he refocused my hope in the light of Christ. The darkness can never overcome it.

What hope and freedom there is in that fact! The darkness can never, ever, ever overcome it!Please share with me your comments below in the comments area. 

Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning Part One

How I came to be in this prison is a story told elsewhere, by me and by others. How I "met" Father Maximilian Kolbe 60 years after he surrendered his life at Auschwitz is a story about actual grace. In his Catholic Catechism, Jesuit Father John Hardon defines actual grace as God's gift of "the special assistance we need to guide the mind and inspire the will" on our path to God. Sometimes, it's very special.

My first three years in prison are a blur in my memory. There is no point trying to find words to express the sense of loss, of alienation, of being cast into an abyss that was not of my own making -- a loss that could not be grounded in any reality of mine.

About 1,000 days and nights passed in the abyss before what Father Hardon described as "special assistance" crossed my path.

Someone, somewhere -- I don't know who -- sent the prison's Catholic chaplain (a layman then) a book entitled Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, M.D. Somewhere in my studies, I heard of this book, but only a prisoner can read it in the same light in which it is written. The chaplain called me to his office.  He wanted to know whether he should recommend this book, but didn't have time to read it.  He wanted my opinion.

It had been three years since anyone had asked my opinion on anything.  I didn't read Dr. Frankl's book so much as devour it.  I read it through three times in seven days.  As a priest, I often preached that grace is a process and not an event. It is not always so.  I was meant to read Man's Search for Meaning at the precise moment that it landed upon my path. A week earlier,  I would not have been ready.  A week later may have been too late.

I was drowning in the solitary sea of deeply felt loss.  I was not going to make it across.   My priesthood and my soul were dying.  The book, as I have come to call it, is Viktor Frankl's vivid account of how he was alone among his family to survive imprisonment at Auschwitz.  This was an imprisonment imposed on him for who he was: a Jew.

There is a central message in this small book.  A profound message, so clear in meaning, that it has within it the hallmark of inspired truth.   Like Saul thrown from his mount, I remember sinking to the floor when I read it.

"There is a freedom that no one can ever take from you: The freedom to choose the person you are going to be in any set of circumstances."

This changed everything. Everything! You will see how later.  At the very end of his book, Dr. Frankl revealed the name of his inspiration for surviving Auschwitz. He wrote of Sigmund Freud's cynical view that man is self-serving. And a man's instinctual need to survive will trump "quaint notions" such as grace and sacrifice every time.   For Dr. Frankl, Auschwitz provided the proof that Freud was wrong.

That proof is Father Maximilian Kolbe.

To be continued in Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part TwoPlease share your thoughts below in the comment area.