Faith and Freedom at the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

Photo by John Sonderman (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch offers a candid view of the state of our civil liberties after three years of forced Covid pandemic restrictions and shutdowns.

June 28, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Readers in the United States may recognize the second half of my title this week as a line from the Star Spangled Banner, our National Anthem: “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.” It was composed during a battle in the War of 1812. Thirty-six years after the American Revolution in 1776, the War of 1812 was called by some the second war for American independence.

In 1814, two years into the war, a British warship bombarded Fort McHenry in the Port of Baltimore. The part of the text of the famous poem that became our National Anthem was composed on the spot by American lawyer and poet, Francis Scott Key. “He was aboard a British frigate under a flag of truce to negotiate the release of a prisoner. While aboard, a fierce battle broke out between British and American warships.

As the smoke of battle cleared at dawn, Francis Scott Key was so inspired by the sight of an American flag still intact aboard a battered U.S. ship that he wrote down what he saw. His “Star Spangled Banner” appeared in a Baltimore newspaper. Then its first stanza was set to music to the tune of a popular pub drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” It became the National Anthem of the United States by an act of Congress on March 3, 1931.

Few people seem to know that the famous poem that inspired the U.S. National Anthem had four stanzas. Only the first was set to music. Nonetheless, at age eight I was one of four fourth grade students required by our teacher, Miss McNeil, to each memorize a stanza for an Independence Day school assembly. I was fortunate enough to draw the first stanza which was the most familiar and easiest to memorize. I remember imagining at the time that Miss McNeil might actually have been present when Francis Scott Key composed the text in 1814:

“Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there .
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

“On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposed,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully’ blows, half concealed, half disclosed?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
’Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“Oh! Thus be it ever, when free men shall stand
Between their beloved home and war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

— Francis Scott Key, 1814

Independence Day 2023: The State of Our Freedom

For Independence Day 2023, I want to look at what the land of the free and the home of the brave has done with the sacrifices that won for us this cherished freedom. Freedom was never free, so justice requires that we honor it. Sadly, we went awry over the last few years when the threat was not so tangible a thing as bombs flying, but rather the tiniest of things: a virus that emerged in China.

Lest someone take umbrage with that last thought, the evidence now seems clearer that Covid originated from a lab, though likely by accident, in Wuhan, China. That said, I must remind myself and all of us that China is the Peoples’ Republic, but Covid was not the peoples’ pandemic. The good people of China live under the hammer of an oppressive communist regime. They had nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic.

What I find so ironic, however, is what we did with it. Perhaps the best commentary on the state of our post-pandemic freedom as we emerge from three-plus years of government Covid policy is a statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. It was published on May 18, 2023 in a Supreme Court Order halting a lawsuit filed to continue Title 42. If you have not heard or read this before, it is because the free press suppressed it. The statement is a bold assessment of post-pandemic truth:

“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of the United States. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.

“They threatened violators not just with civil penalties, but with criminal sanctions as well. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent .

“Federal executive officials entered the act too, and not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace safety agency to issue a vaccine mandate for working Americans. They threatened to fire non-compliant employees and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

“At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another.”

— Justice Neil Gorsuch, May 18, 2023

Churches, Casinos and Liquor Stores

At a time of intense public anxiety, Churches were deemed non-essential by government officials in many states. Justice Gorsuch pointed out above that state government officials “closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.” In New Hampshire, churches were forced to remain closed while all the liquor stores remained open — even on Sunday. No one pointed out that in New Hampshire, the State owns all the liquor stores.

But the saddest oppression came later. When constitutional civil rights lawsuits in various states succeeded through the courts in reopening churches with reasonable safeguards, some of our own Catholic bishops instantly replicated the heavy hand of government to keep them closed. On June 10, 2020, I posted “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.” My own bishop issued a chilling decree.

“As Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester understanding my responsibility to issue liturgical norms by which all are bound (Canon 838:3), I hereby decree the public celebration of Mass remains suspended ... until such time as I deem it prudent to modify [this] decree.”

In a state that led the nation in opioid overdose deaths among young people (and still does) deaths by overdose outpaced deaths by Covid substantially. The closure of churches never took into consideration the hopelessness to which it contributed. The year of the Bishop’s decree saw 250 deaths statewide from Covid. All but 65 of its victims succumbed in nursing homes where government failed to protect the elderly. In contrast, the same period saw 2,500 fatal overdoses from street drugs.

In some areas, Masses were relocated to online only where the reception of Communion was impossible. When court challenges opened up churches, some state governments — and later some bishops — required Catholics who chose to attend Mass to register their name, address, and signature at the church door. Some priests were removed from ministry for openly defying these edicts. In his post, “Coronavirus “Creativity” for Mass”, my friend Fr. George David Byers famously challenged “Just do it in the Parking Lot.” No. And … Hell no.

Easter 2023 mercifully did not look much different from Easter 2019 except perhaps in the size of congregations gathered to observe it. In a Wall Street Journal - NORC poll published in April, 2023, 39-percent of Americans reported that religion was “very important” to them. This was down from 48-percent in 2019 before the pandemic. In 1998, this figure was 62-percent. It seemed that Covid had the effect of accelerating a pre-pandemic trend.

In March, 2023, the Pew Research Center released a study reporting that the percentage of U.S. adult Christians who participated in worship at least once per month was 43-percent, down from a pre-pandemic report of 49% in 2019. However, 22-percent of the respondents in 2023 reported that their “participation” was either online or on television. Of interest, Catholic parishes that kept congregations engaged throughout the pandemic using social media and streaming parish services to their own parishioners have retained more of their communicants than Catholic parishes that just rode the wave and remained closed.

The great downside to streaming Catholic Masses online is that it habituated the practice of many faithful to take part in worship without reception of the Eucharist which is central to the Mass and to the identity of Catholics.

An interesting story developed out of China while American Christians wrangled with our post-pandemic commitment to faith. All 63 members of an Evangelical Chinese Christian congregation escaped communist China, the first parish ever to do so en masse. In response to increasing oppression of the Chinese communist government religious identity and practice, the entire parish community fled China, first to South Korea, then to Thailand, and then to the United States.

Aided by Freedom Seekers International, a Texas non-profit that helps people flee religious persecution, the group submitted applications to the United Nations refugee agency in Bangkok. Having overstayed their Thai travel visas by one year, the group had to be deported, but Thai police worked with the U.S. State Department to deport them not back to China, but to Tyler, Texas.

The Chinese communist government viewed the church as illegal and threatened to shut it and its religious school down. Rather than risk the loss of their faith community, the 63 members of this small congregation decided unanimously to preserve their faith and flee their country. Here in America, we have never faced the forced choice between God and country. What we obtain too cheap we may esteem too lightly.

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

The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

A Year in the Grip of Earthy Powers

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Sound of Freedom

Click or tap image to watch the movie trailer. Get your tickets at: https://www.angel.com/soff.

Celebrated new film starring Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ ) about the precarious state of human freedom. Jim Caviezel is asking Americans to view this movie around its opening on Independence Day.

Having unjustly lost my own freedom, this project is dear to my heart.

With Blessings,

Fr. Gordon MacRae

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 the image for live access 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.”

Falsely Accused by Facebook: Like Déjà vu All Over Again

Wrongly accused of violating Facebook Community Standards my page was restored on appeal with an apology. Then Facebook warned me to never again do what I never did.

June 29, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Some time ago, I wrote an article for Linkedin Pulse entitled, “Gene Roddenberry and Captain Kirk’s Star Trek Epiphany.” It was an odd blend of science fiction and faith. Linkedin users loved it — even some who were never Star Trek fans. It told the story of my childhood affinity for Star Trek which first entered our collective consciousness when I was 13 years old in 1966.

Actor Wil Wheaton caught my attention recently when he had a terrific essay published in the “Gears & Gadgets” section of The Wall Street Journal. A self-described geek, Mr. Wheaton played a somewhat cooler geek as Ensign Wesley Crusher in the 1980s Star Trek revival series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” My own geekness survived into adulthood so I saw every episode twice.

Since then, several additions to the Star Trek franchise have come and gone. My all-time favorite is the current one, Star Trek Discovery, a streaming series now in its third season. Prisoners do not have access to streaming television, but someone donated the DVDs for seasons one and two for broadcast on this prison’s in-house closed circuit channel.

But I’m off topic already. Wil Wheaton’s WSJ essay was “When Did We Lose the Internet?” (WSJ June 4-5, 2022). It was about how the Internet has evolved from his days as a young blogger in the early 1990s on Greymatter created by and named for Noah Grey. Wheaton wrote of Mr. Grey’s habit of personally assisting users:

“Can you imagine emailing Mark Zuckerberg any time you had a problem with Facebook? Now imagine him immediately fixing it.”

I have actually tried to imagine that. Facebook today boasts of having two billion users worldwide. I am one of them, but a reluctant and atypical one. I have never actually seen Facebook, but there is a page there for me and Beyond These Stone Walls that was created and maintained by our editor. I do not have a cat so readers will never see photos of my cat, but by some miracle my page has thousands of followers.

My entire Facebook experience involves simply posting my weekly post with help from our editor. My posts are then shared to a number of Catholic and prolife Facebook groups around the world. By posting to groups like CatholicismRocks and Catholic News Agency this humble blog reaches tens of thousands of readers.

Beyond These Stone Walls is not at all dependent on Facebook for readers, however. Those who come to the site from Facebook each week constitute less than ten percent of the readers of this blog. The vast majority come with “no referring link,” meaning that they subscribe directly (which is free and something I hope everyone will do).

In early March, 2022, I received an ominous message from Facebook that my account has been suspended and I am henceforth banned from posting, sharing, or commenting due to “violations of Facebook’s Community Standards.” I had no idea how this happened. So again with help, I reviewed the Community Standards and could not find any that I had ever violated.

From there, the story gets a little comical. At least, it would be comical if it were not also so frustrating. It was my first experience of pleading my case before an algorithm instead of a human person. I first wrote of this in another Linkedin article, “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

The Facebook Oversight Board

It turned out that the offending post was one that I had written a decade ago. Facebook had no issue with it then. But when it was linked in another, newer post, it seriously riled Facebook’s Orwellian algorithm. The link was to a true story of anti-Catholic oppression that I had written back in 2011. It has been hiding in plain sight ever since. You may judge it for yourself. My banishment was because of “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

That post was an entirely true and fully documented account of false witness in 1939 Germany. Angered over an anti-Nazi document bravely published by Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, falsely accused over 300 German Catholic priests of sexual abuse and arrested them all. It was a demonic effort to silence the Church. In the end, all but three were acquitted and exonerated because the German courts had not yet fallen into lockstep with the Nazi regime. The post opened with a quote from Hitler himself: “The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

Somehow, Facebook’s algorithm immediately detected this mention of Hitler and his quote, and determined it — and me — to be socially and culturally dangerous. So Facebook froze my account. We appealed that decision in a lengthy process that rivaled any state or federal appeal I have encountered before or since.

Anyone who has ever taken the time to endure a Facebook Oversight Board appeal knows firsthand what I was up against. The aura of suspicion and prejudice was a reminder of all I have witnessed in state or federal courts. With help, I completed a multitude of forms and answered page after page of probing questions such as “What was your motivation in writing this offending material?”

Finally, I was asked what community purpose the questioned post served. I explained that the Catholic Church has been rocked by allegations of often decades-old abuse in multiple countries, and reviewing all aspects of this phenomenon is in the best interests of the Catholic community. I then asked the Oversight Board to simply read the post instead of reacting to the algorithm’s rejection of it. Apparently someone did read it. We received this reply from the Facebook Oversight Board a week later:

“Sorry that we did not get this right. Our review of your post indicates that you did not violate Facebook Community Standards. Your post has been restored. Thank you for taking the time to appeal this matter and assist us in our continuing efforts to assure the safety of the Facebook forum.”

There were no angels singing the Alleluia Chorus. I actually did not care at all what Facebook concluded from my posts. My concern was for the Catholic groups that choose that forum to communicate with other members. I estimate that our posts reach about 200,000 people in those groups, and I was not keen on abandoning them to the usual Facebook fare.

But it wasn’t over. The Oversight Board restored the post within 12 days of discovering it. But Facebook did not restore my account. For the next 30 days it remained visible, but inactive meaning that we could not post or comment. Then for another ninety days Facebook censured all our posts by preventing them from being shared on the newsfeed for each of the Catholic and pro-life groups we had joined. The Facebook fiasco finally ended on June 5, 2022 which also just happened to be the Solemnity of Pentecost and my 40th anniversary of priesthood ordination. So my last post to be suppressed was “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost.”

Metaverse Madness and Independence Day

One week later, when our editor checked our Facebook account status, the following message popped up: “Your account has been fully restored. If you violate Facebook’s Community standards again your account will risk being permanently suspended.” Facebook is now ever ready to penalize me for again doing what I never did in the first place.

At the same time, we received an email message from some unknown, even darker entity claiming to represent Facebook. It informed us that our account is “almost fully restored, but we need your account information and passwords to complete the restoration.” This was, of course, a fraud. A previous message also informed us that Facebook needs our debit card number and $50 to complete the restoration of the account.

We ignored and deleted both messages. It is troubling that Facebook’s algorithm can readily detect and react to anything suspected of violating “woke” sensitivities, but cannot detect attempts at fraud carried out in Facebook’s name. Facebook has enslaved itself to woke culture and for the same reasons MSNBC and, to a slightly lesser extent, CNN and network news outlets have. Advertisers require keeping a level of viewership, and viewers require content they agree with.

At Facebook, advertising dollars reign supreme. Facebook’s most valuable demographic is young people, but that age group’s mass migration to Tik Tok and other venues is underway. In 2022, quarterly revenue dropped significantly because Facebook’s advertising empire depends on keeping that demographic online and satisfied. Anything deemed offensive or disagreeable to that demographic is edged out of Facebook’s daily discourse — the First Amendment and free speech be damned.

Two weeks ago in these pages, we posted “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing.” In that post, I cited the grim reality of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people in our culture, an alarming problem that exists today at a level never before seen. Something has gone terribly wrong. Over the last two years, daily users of Facebook rose exponentially because schools were closed and young men and women were learning remotely.

A lot of extra time was spent on Facebook in those two years, but the mental health crisis we are seeing demonstrates that Facebook just isn’t enough. Real, meaningful, human contact is essential to the development of the young. A computer just doesn’t cut it. We may never break free of social media, but we must break free of its addictive qualities. Independence Day 2022 is upon us, and it’s a good time to start with a Facebook-free day.

In the future world envisioned by Star Trek, no one ever even mentions Facebook or any anticipation of the accumulation of “likes.” Maybe our future might see Facebook as ancient history. Once you come face to face with a Klingon, no one wants to be his Facebook friend anyway.

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Actor Wil Wheaton in “The Game,” a classic episode of Star Trek the Next Generation in which he had to be liberated from enslavement to a mind-altering computer game.

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Next week at Beyond These Stone Walls, I will present a post about the stunning news that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade.

Please visit our newest addition to our Voices from Beyond page and please Subscribe if you haven’t already. You may also like these other titles that celebrate our hard-won freedoms this Independence Day:

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Cry Freedom! Saint Paul and a Prisoner of the Apocalypse

Two prior posts from Beyond These Stone Walls revisit the ideal of freedom, what it means to find it, what it costs to keep it, what it takes to give it to another.

Some readers who are aware of my day to day life as a guest of the state have heard that I was held in a high security quarantine dormitory setting for the entire month of May and part of June this year. I did write briefly of this just before it happened, but it seems that what I wrote was too cryptic. I just received a letter from a reader who wanted to launch a petition over my continued heightened confinement. Please don't show up here with picket signs. I am now liberated from my dungeon.

I was not technically in quarantine. Due to a planned construction project where I was living, I and 23 others were moved to an unused dormitory space that had been previously set up as a Covid-19 triage and quarantine area. It commenced on May 1 and was supposed to last for just ten days at which time, it was promised, we would all move back to our housing assignments.

The construction ran into obstacles, however, and the predicted ten days ultimately turned into forty. During that time, I was pretty much locked into a crowded, noisy room with 23 other disgruntled prisoners. I had no access to my typewriter while there so writing was extremely difficult. Somehow, I still managed to write three posts, but with great difficulty. One of them was for my 39th anniversary of priesthood entitled, “It Is the Duty of a Priest to Never Lose Sight of Heaven.”

I wrote that post “by fits and starts,” a term meaning “haphazardly” that has gone out of style in writing. I wrote that post only in my mind. I was still able to work, as needed but with greatly reduced hours, in the prison law library where I am the sole legal clerk. There is an old manual typewriter there, so I managed to type that post over two hours one afternoon. I mailed it just at the final deadline to have it posted on time. I hope its troubled creation was not so evident.

I could not bring myself to complain about the forty-day confinement. I was constantly aware that our friend, Pornchai Moontri, spent five full months in ICE detention awaiting deportation in a room of the same size, but housing 60 to 70 detainees at any one time. That story should become another BTSW classic post on freedom. The gripping story is told in “ICE Finally Cracks: Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”

More importantly, it was also impossible for me to offer Mass during my stay in what I can only describe as “a FEMA shelter without the disaster.” I had hoped to offer Mass on June 6, the Solemnity of Corpus Christi this year and the anniversary of my First Mass on the day after my priesthood ordination on June 5, 1982. But it was not meant to be. After forty days, we were all finally liberated and returned to the place in which I have lived since July of 2017.

It is difficult for me to believe that it was four years ago this month that Pornchai and I were finally moved to that better housing. For the previous 23 years — 12 for Pornchai — we were prisoners in a building housing 504 prisoners but built for half that number. There was little to no access to the outside. It contained all the trouble and chaos that such constant confinement brings.

But we are now free from that. Even in a state of unjust imprisonment, I can honor Independence Day and thank God for the freedoms I have. I am free to write to the world beyond these stone walls which means more to me than you may know.

As I pondered Independence Day in America this year, I realized that it falls on the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. This time is anything but ordinary for me and Pornchai. When I looked at the Mass readings for that day, I noted that I wrote of those same readings for Independence Day six years ago. So I want to invite you to visit that post anew. It is the story of Saint Paul and his plea to be free of his famous but cryptic “thorn in the flesh.”

The second post I want to present anew is a memorable one you also may have previously read. It is brief, but you should not miss it.

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Independence Day: St Paul and His Thorn in the Flesh

A Mass Reading from Second Corinthians on the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time conveys Saint Paul’s thorny lesson about freedom and power. Our world has it all wrong.

It is not by design, but the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time falls on Independence Day in the United States in 2021. The Mass readings assigned to that day (Lectionary 101 – Year B) have an important lesson about the nature of freedom and the source of true power. The lesson’s focal point, as in every Mass, is the Gospel (Mark 6:1-6). Jesus concludes that the people in his own “native place” would not hear Him, but “only took offense at Him.” I certainly know the feeling.

These were his own people. The Gospel mentions that they knew Joseph. They knew Mary. They knew some of the Apostles, but Jesus “was amazed by their lack of faith.” He concluded famously that “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). It is having confronted that reality that the Mission of Christ Universal begins to unfold.

As I read this Gospel passage, I thought of a letter sent to me two years ago by Cardinal Raymond Burke. In it, he expressed his concern for my plight and asked for my prayers for him and for the Church. His words suggesting that I offer some of what I endure for a greater good — “pro bono Ecclesiae,” a phrase taught to us recently in Father Stuart MacDonald’s provocative post, “Last Rights: Canon Law in a Mirror of Justice Cracked.”

Cardinal Burke’s request that I suffer for something greater than suffering was an honor without measure. I wrote of this in a Christmas post last year. Here is an excerpt from my post, “Silent Night and the Dawn of Redeeming Grace.”

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This letter is among the best Christmas gifts I have received out here among the Church’s debris, and it came as a source of grace, a sort of awakening. What follows may be the most important sentence in this post: There is no greater service to those who suffer than to give meaning to what they suffer.

A few months after my receipt of Cardinal Burke’s letter, a bishop came to this prison to offer Mass on Divine Mercy Sunday. Our friend, Pornchai Moontri and I were among the fifty Catholic prisoners gathered in the prison chapel for Mass. You know Divine Mercy Sunday is a special day for us.

After the Mass, as we filed out, the Bishop grasped my hand and said something very strange to me. He had obviously been reading These Stone Walls. As he took my hand, he bent forward a bit and said quietly but forcefully, “You are a prophet! YOU are a prophet.” There was no further exchange.

As we descended down the long flights of stairs outside, my friend, Pornchai said, “Wow! That was weird. What do you think it means?” I responded sarcastically, “If the Church is consistent, it means my head is about to be lopped off!”

Our prophets do not fare very well. In Scripture, some were thrown into prison. The Prophet Jeremiah was stoned to death. According to legend, the Prophet Isaiah was sawed in half. The Prophet Jonah was thrown overboard. John the Baptist was beheaded. Saint Paul was shipwrecked, beaten, imprisoned, and finally martyred.

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As the great Saint Teresa of Avila once said to God in prayer, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few!”

The Gospel is, of course, the centerpiece of the Liturgy of the Word, but on the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time it is the Second Reading that really leaps off the page in my quest for my own Independence Day. It is Saint Paul’s famous account from the Second Letter to the Corinthians (12:7-10) about his thorn in the flesh:

“… A thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ ”

— 2 Corinthians 12:7-8

Scripture scholars — both real and imagined — have pondered for centuries to decipher what this cryptic thorn in the flesh could mean. Some have interpreted it to mean a physical ailment or disability of some sort that rendered Paul weak and challenged. His phrase, “my power is made perfect in weakness” lends itself to that theory when you consider the vast influence he has had on the growth of Christianity.

THE AGENT OF SATAN

Others have suggested that his thorn in the flesh was the manifestation of some mental illness which, in Saint Paul’s time, was often described in Jewish tradition as a manifestation of Satan or some other demonic attack. His words, “to beat me, to keep me from being too elated” suggest a sense of personal diminishment that could support a theory about some mental condition such as bouts of chronic depression or anxiety.

In more modern times, some have suggested with a straight face that the thorn in the flesh could be an allusion to some morally compromising sexual proclivity over which Paul experienced little self-control. I believe that all three of these theories are incorrect, and the third one is far more descriptive of the preoccupations of our own time than Saint Paul’s.

I have formed my own conclusions about Paul’s mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” and they come from a more panoramic understanding not just of what he wrote, but also of who he was — and is. I believe his “thorn in the flesh” is a person, someone who stood in hostile opposition to Paul and his missionary activities.

Saint Paul, formerly Saul, was a Jew born in the town of Tarsus in the Roman Province of Celicia. In his Letter to the Romans (11:1) he revealed that he was from the Tribe of Benjamin. He was also a Roman citizen which gave him certain rights and privileges. In Acts of the Apostles (22:25-29) Paul was about to be scourged by a Roman tribune. When it was learned that he was a Roman citizen by birth, the punishment was halted.

Paul was also a zealous member of the Pharisees (Acts 26:5). This meant that in Jewish circles, he was highly educated in the law and Jewish Scripture and traditions. His writing has to be seen in this context, and the phrases he used have to be weighed against the Hebrew Scriptures with which he was thoroughly familiar.

In those Scriptures, the word, “thorns” is often symbolically used to refer to enemies. The context for its use by Paul in the excerpt from Second Corinthians cited above was not that the “thorn in my flesh” was placed there by Satan, but rather is described as “an agent of Satan.” This presents an impression that this thorn is a person in hostile opposition to Paul.

As a Pharisee, Paul would have been thoroughly familiar with the Torah, the Books of Moses held to be especially sacred. The Book of Numbers, which is a re-telling of the Exodus story and the arrival of the Israelites in the Promised Land, contains an allusion with which Paul would have been very familiar:

“But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your side.”

— Numbers 33:55

Saint Paul’s description of this “thorn” as a “servant” or “angel” (messenger) of Satan suggests that Paul was faced with a growing personal hostility and oppression from someone within his own community. By “his own community,” I mean his Jewish community and not the community of believers in “The Way.” It was more likely someone in the Jewish community who oppressed Paul because his allusion to the thorn as depicting an enemy is a purely Old Testament Jewish symbolism.

So the only remaining mystery is not “what” the thorn in his flesh was but rather who. It was during Paul’s Second Missionary Journey commencing in 50 A.D. that he established the Church in Corinth, a city in Greece on the Isthmus of Corinth. Paul remained there for over a year, but before departing he was viciously attacked by an unnamed enemy (2 Corinthians 11:13).

The unnamed enemy may well be the thorn in Saint Paul’s flesh. Paul was a Pharisee who had previously persecuted Christians, capturing them and handing them over for stoning. He was deeply committed to the Pharisaic tradition of maintaining legal and ritual purity for the Jews. Now Paul was promoting this new faith, and not only promoting it, but actively welcoming gentiles to its ranks.

It was during his Third Missionary Journey to Macedonia that he wrote the Second Letter to the Corinthians in 53 A.D. He wrote it from Philippi in Macedonia. Then, proceeding to Corinth, he wrote his Letter to the Romans. At the time he wrote both Second Corinthians and Romans, he began to speak of his impending imprisonment and martyrdom.

Saint Paul’s allusion that “Three times I begged the Lord” about the thorn in his flesh, i.e., the hostility he encountered — likely refers to a leader in the Jewish community. Using the past tense, “begged,” infers that he has stopped begging, and has accepted the answer that came to him:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power [the power of God] is made perfect in [your] weakness.”

The power Paul encounters is manifested in his acceptance of weakness, meaning his acceptance that it is not his own gifts and talents that are driving the bus on this mission:

“I will rather boast: most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”

— 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

Independence Day thus dawned for the Apostle Paul.

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Left Behind: In Prison for the Apocalypse

This medium security prison has a library where I have been a prisoner-clerk for the last ten years. Its shelves are stocked with 21,000 volumes. With an average of 1,000 visits, and some 3,000 books checked out each month, the library is a literary hub intersecting virtually every facet of prison life. But there is a lot more going on than books flying off the shelves.

There are few proud moments in prison, but one of mine came in the form of a second-hand message from my friend Skooter, now free. Two months after Skooter ascended through the corrections system to finally hit the streets, another friend of his was sent back to prison for a parole violation.

That friend came to the library one day, and standing at my desk, said, “You’re the guy who broke Skooter out of prison!” The man explained that he lived near Skooter in a seedy urban rooming house while both were unemployed and barely surviving in their first few months on parole. He said that Skooter had been unable to land a job, working in temp jobs for minimum wage and at times faced with a choice between food and rent.

It is an all-too-familiar account for young men struggling to emerge not just from a prison, but from a past. Skooter came very close to giving up, the friend said, but often spoke of his “wanting very much not to disappoint you” by coming back to prison. “So he stayed the course,” said the friend, “and now he’s gotten his life together.”

I first met Skooter several years earlier, one of the scores of aimless, rootless, fatherless, uneducated young men for whom prison can become a warehouse, a place in which thousands of “Skooters” store their aimless, hopeless futures. One day as we slowly ascended the multiple flights of stairs to be checked in at the Education Floor where the prison library is located, Skooter told me with a sense of shame that, at age 24, he had never learned to read or write.

Having resisted all the concerted efforts to recruit him into any number of prison gangs that would only foster his ignorance and exploit it, Skooter became a regular fixture in the prison library. For an hour a day there, I and other prisoners worked with Skooter to teach him to read and write.

My friend, Pornchai Moontri tutored him in math, Skooter’s most feared academic nemesis. We made sure he didn’t starve, and in return, he struggled relentlessly toward earning his high school diploma in prison, a steep ascent in a place that by its very nature fosters humiliation and shuns personal empowerment.

One day, shortly before his high school graduation in May 2011, Skooter came charging into the library looking defeated. He plopped before me the previous day’s copy of USA Today, opened to a full-page ad by some self-proclaimed Prophet-of-the-End-Time announcing that the world is to end on May 21, 2011, a week before Graduation Day.

“It’s just my luck’” lamented Skooter. “I do all this work and the world’s gonna end just before I graduate.” “It’s not true,” I said calmly. “It MUST be true,” Skooter shot back. “They wouldn’t put it in the paper if it wasn’t true!” Like many prisoners, and far too many others, Skooter believed that all truth was carefully vetted before ending up in newsprint.

Apocalyptic predictions sometimes play out strangely in prison. I told Skooter that back in 1999, a prisoner I knew became convinced of dire consequences from a looming technological Armageddon called “Y2K.” ‘That prisoner deduced somehow that prison officials would release toxic gas at the turn of the millennium so he spent the night of December 31 sewing his lips and eyes shut. Skooter wanted to know how the guy managed to sew that second eyelid, a small tribute to his deductive reasoning.

I pointed out to Skooter in the USA Today ad’s smaller print that this newest End-Time prediction was actually a revision of the author’s previous one set in 1994. I strongly urged Skooter not to put off studying for final exams because of this. Skooter stayed the course.

Since then, a subsequent prison policy barred all prisoners from teaching and tutoring other prisoners, a decision that effectively eliminated all of the positive influence, and none of the negative influence, that takes place in prison, driving the former underground.

Still, that graduation was Skooter’s finest moment, and one of my own as well. It was a direct result of a prison library subculture that grants every prisoner a few hours a week out of prison into an arena of books, a world of ideas, a release of huddled neurons yearning to be free.

A week after graduation, Skooter showed up in the library with a copy of The Wall Street Journal  opened to an article by science writer, Matt Ridley. The article explored evidence that the Earth’s magnetic core shifts polarity every few hundred thousand years, and pointed out with dismal foreboding that it is 780,000 years overdue. Mr. Ridley stressed that no one knows its potential impact on our global technological infrastructure.

“It’s just my luck!” lamented Skooter as he plopped the article on my desk. “Just when I was thinkin’ about college!”

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