Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and the Gift of Life

There was once a Little Flower who became a spiritual giant. The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux inspired many souls. This is the story of just a few.

Back in September, 2013, I happened upon a FOX News interview of Megan Kelly with Miriam Ibrahim. You may remember her as the young Sudanese woman who was cast into a Sudan prison with a death sentence. Miriam’s “crime” was two-fold. She married a Catholic, and then refused to renounce her Christian faith and convert to Islam. In chilling words, she spoke of having to give birth to her second child with her ankles chained in that prison cell. Her story received worldwide attention.

The courage of Miriam Ibrahim is inspiring. Her being a Christian and marrying a Catholic were both crimes punishable by death in her Islamic country, and she was given three days to recant. The world responded, and many intervened, including Pope Francis. Miriam Ibrahim is an extraordinary woman of immense courage and faith. My heart leapt at this exchange:

Megan Kelly: “But why not just say what they wanted to hear to save your life?”

Miriam: “If I did that it would mean I gave up. It’s not possible because it’s not true. I have committed no crime.”

I wonder today about the story that will be told to her child whose life began with a death sentence in that Sudanese prison. The story makes me wonder about the gift of life, about how Miriam’s Islamic captors would so casually extinguish it in the name of Sharia law and justice. It makes me wonder about what Western Culture could learn from such courage rooted in the sanctity of life and freedom. It makes me wonder about the raw courage of Miriam’s “fiat” to suffer not for its own sake, but for the sake of a message to the world.

I did have an ironic laugh, however, at the conclusion of the interview. Miriam Ibrahim now lives about twenty miles away from the prison in which I write. Megan Kelly asked her what her life is like now living in New Hampshire. Miriam paused thoughtfully and said, “Well, it’s better than a Sudanese prison!”

On that note, I sometimes wonder what draws so many people to visit me in prison from beyond these stone walls week after week. I have never once dropped a completed post in the prison mailbox and walked away thinking it might inspire anyone. I don’t think it’s a result of false humility, or the power of prisons everywhere to stifle any evidence of self-respect. I just don’t think that what I write is particularly noteworthy. I guess a part of that comes from reading a lot. I read so much from writers I admire that I never feel that anything I write could ever measure up to them.

All of which makes me wonder why it is that so many others write about what I write. Father James Valladares, PhD in Australia wrote a book a decade ago entitled Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, about a third of the book references my writing at Beyond These Stone Walls. Then Dr. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League did the same in “Travesty of Justice: The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae” at the same time. Both of them generated lots of responses from around the globe.

One of the memorable responses appeared at Freedom Through Truth, the blog of Michael Brandon writing from Canada. His post “From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love” is a reflection on Bill Donohue’s guest post that rivals anything I write in depth and understanding. Then a few days later Mr. Brandon posted “The Parable of the Prisoner,” a post about Pornchai Maximilian and me. I had to wait for that one to arrive by mail because the person who tried to read it to me by telephone sobbed all the way through it.

I was so inspired by what Michael Brandon wrote that I forgot it was about me! I am always struck by the number of people, like the talented Catholic writer behind Freedom Through Truth who read Beyond These Stone Walls and tell me they felt as though I were writing directly to them. I am also struck by the many letters, comments, and posts by other writers all expressing the thought that, had I not been in such straits in prison, they would not have been drawn to what I write.

Thorns Before a Rose

As I try to wrap my mind around that, don’t think for a moment that I actually know what I’m doing when I write. I do not. I just plod along casting outposts like messages in a bottle cast into the sea. I am not gifted with the insight into the meaning of suffering that God has given to those I admire, those whose writings I write about, such as Saint Padre Pio, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and this week, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

In “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor”, Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD described the nuts and bolts of this blog (Pornchai Max might say “more nuts than bolts”) and how she became its editor. When this blog first began in 2009, my first posts were brief, and handwritten because at the time I had nothing more in this prison cell to write with than a Bic pen and some lined paper. There are few posts from back then that are still read today. But one that is, and that remains one of my most read and most shared posts today, is about an ordinary encounter with an extraordinary young woman. That post is “A Shower of Roses,” and since this post appears on BTSW on the day after the Feast Day of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, I want to mention it again.

Readers may recall that back in 2013 my friend Pornchai Moontri and I took part in an “in-house” retreat based on the book 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Father Michael Gaitley. We recently featured an article about this from Felix Carroll in Marian Helper magazine, “‘Mary Is at Work Here’.” One evening during that retreat, our esteemed coordinator, Nate Chapman, mentioned that he had been awaiting a wonderful new book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God’s Holy Ones, by Scott Hahn (Image Books, 2014). I didn’t tell Nate that I had ordered that same book and it arrived just days before. One of its chapters is about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and Scott Hahn approached writing of her with the same trepidation I experienced:

“Her prodigy was her littleness – and, paradoxically, her littleness is so large that it can be frightening. For no other chapter in this book have I been so intimidated. For no other chapter have I stared so long at a blank page”

— Saints and Angels, p. 155

I know the feeling, Dr. Hahn! When I set out to write of Saint Thérèse, I was thoroughly intimidated as though my soul were but a tabula rasa — a blank slate — in the presence of pages that spoke volumes, Story of a Soul, in the Presence of God. I could not write of Saint Thérèse. I had no frame of reference with which to relate to someone whose footprint in this world was so small, yet one whose spiritual impact was so immense that Saint John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, one of the 33 spiritual giants of Church history.

I could not really write about Saint Thérèse at all. I could only write about a chance encounter between us, a moment in my own life that somehow intersected with Saint Thérèse. It’s a snapshot in my life as a priest that changed the way I view faith, hope, and suffering, the way I live life toward dying.

“A Shower of Roses” is the story of Michelle, a suffering and dying teenage girl. With fear and trembling as a young priest, I took the hand of this girl as she surrendered her life. As I look back across 42 years of a priesthood mired in suffering, I keep going back to that moment, for it is filled with meaning and with mysteries yet to be unraveled.

There was a moment in which Saint Thérèse took that girl’s hand from mine, and in doing so, left an impression of how her suffering was a conduit between the soul and God. Consider these words of Saint Thérèse in Story of a Soul, the diary of a young woman leaving this life:

“My heart was fired with an ardent desire of suffering… Suffering became my attraction; in it I found charms that entranced me —Suffering has held out its arms to me from my very entrance to Carmel, and lovingly have I embraced it… For one pain endured with joy… we shall love the good God more forever — Suffering united to love is the only thing that appears to me desirable in this Vale of Tears.”

Unlike Saint Thérèse, but like most of the rest of us, I have spent a lot of time and effort struggling against suffering in many forms. I am daunted and intimidated by this little saint and her Story of a Soul, the story of her simple acquiescence to God’s will that turns every moment of suffering into an instrument of grace. It is the story of extraordinary grace reaching into souls through ordinary things, and it still shakes the earth beneath my feet.

Sometime in this month that opens with the Feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, read anew and share with someone else “A Shower of Roses.”

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A Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Don’t stop here, Dear Readers. With all the is going on in the world, and going wrong with the world, it is not easy to keep a focus on all that really matters. So sometime today, this week, or this month come back here and read or reread a few gems, three of which were written by others, about the transformation of sacrificial suffering into glory:

A Shower of Roses by Fr Gordon MacRae

From Fear and Humility to Hope and Love by Michael Brandon

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor by Dilia E. Rodríguez, PhD

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.”

Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial

Padre Pio was proclaimed a living saint for the wounds he bore for Christ, but his reputation for sanctity became another wound, this one inflicted from the Church.

September 20, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“Six Degrees of Separation,” a famous play by John Guare, became a 1993 film starring Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, and Stockard Channing. The plot revolved around a theory proposed in 1967 by sociologists Stanley Milgram and Frigyes Karinthy. Wikipedia describes “Six Degrees of Separation” as:

“The idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of ‘a friend of a friend’ statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.”

It’s an intriguing idea, and sometimes the connections are eerie. In “A Day Without Yesterday” I wrote about my long-time hero, Fr. Georges Lemaitre, the priest-physicist who changed the mind of Albert Einstein on the creation of the Universe. A few weeks after my post, a letter arrived from my good friend, Pierre Matthews in Belgium. Pierre sent me a photo of himself as a young man posing with his family and a family friend, the famous Father Lemaitre, in Switzerland in 1956. In a second photo, Pierre had just served Mass with the famous priest who later autographed the photo.

When I wrote of Father Lemaitre, I had no idea there are but two degrees of separation between me and this famous priest-scientist I’ve so long admired. The common connection we share with Pierre Matthews — not to mention the autographed photo — left me awestruck. The mathematical odds against such a connection are staggering. Something very similar happened later and also involving Pierre Matthews. It still jolts my senses when I think of it. The common bond this time was with Saint Padre Pio.

When Pierre visited me in prison in 2010, I told him about this blog which had been launched months earlier. When I told Pierre that I chose Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio as the patrons of Beyond These Stone Walls, Pierre quietly and modestly said, “I’ve met Padre Pio.”

Pierre’s casual remark dropped like a bomb on our conversation. What were the odds that I would be sitting at a table in the prison visiting room with a man who traveled from Europe to tell me of how he met Padre Pio. The saint imposed his wounded and bandaged hands in blessing upon Pierre’s head over a half century earlier.

The labyrinthine ways of grace are far beyond my understanding. Pierre told me that as a youth growing up in Europe, his father enrolled him in a boarding school. When he wrote to his father about a planned visit to central Italy, his father instructed him to visit San Giovanni Rotondo and ask for Padre Pio’s blessing. Pierre, a 16-year-old at the time, had zero interest in visiting Padre Pio. But he obediently took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo. He waited there for hours. Padre Pio was nowhere to be seen.

Pierre then approached a friar and asked if he could see Padre Pio. ‘Impossible!’ he was told. Just then, he looked up and saw the famous Stigmatic walking down the stairs toward him. Padre Pio’s hands were bandaged and he wore gloves. The friar, following the young man’s gaze, whispered in Italian, ‘Do not touch his hands.’ Pierre trembled as Padre Pio approached him. He placed his bandaged hands upon Pierre’s head and whispered his blessing.

Fifty-five years later, in the visiting room of the New Hampshire State Prison, Pierre bowed his head and asked for my blessing. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I placed my hand upon Pierre knowing that the spiritual imprint of Padre Pio’s blessing was still in and upon this man, and I was overwhelmed to share in it.

This wasn’t the first time I shared space with Padre Pio. Several years ago, in November 2005, we shared the cover of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I also share a painful date with Padre Pio. September 23 was the date he died in 1968. On September 23, 1994 I was put into chains and taken to prison to begin a life sentence for crimes that never took place.

That’s why we shared that cover of Catalyst. Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote of his appearance on NBC’s “Today” show on October 13, 2005 during which he spoke of my trial and imprisonment declaring, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.” That issue of Catalyst also contained my first major article for The Catholic League, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” written from prison in 2005.

The Indictment of Heroic Virtue

Padre Pio was on that Catalyst cover because three years after he was canonized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II, Atlantic Monthly magazine carried a brief article by Tyler Cabot entitled “The Rocky Road to Sainthood” (November 2005). Of one of the most revered priests in Church history, Cabot wrote:

“Despite questions raised by two papal emissaries – and despite reported evidence that he raised money for right-wing religious groups and had sex with penitents – [Padre] Pio was canonized in 2002.”

I’m not sure whether the bigger scandal for Tyler Cabot and Atlantic Monthly was the sexual accusation or “raising money for right-wing religious groups.” Bill Donohue expressed surprise that such a “highly regarded magazine would publish such trash.” I was more dismayed than surprised by the irresponsibility. Yes, it’s irresponsible to tell half the story and present it as the truth.

It wasn’t the first time such attacks were launched against Padre Pio. Four years before his canonization, and thirty years after his death, The New York Times (September 24, 1998) carried an article charging that Padre Pio was the subject of no less than twelve Vatican investigations in his lifetime, and one of the investigations alleged that “Padre Pio had sex with female penitents twice a week.” It’s true that this was alleged, but it’s not the whole truth. The New York Times and Atlantic Monthly were simply following an agenda that should come as no surprise to anyone. I’ll describe below why these wild claims fell apart under scrutiny.

But first, I must write the sordid story of why Padre Pio was so accused. That’s the real scandal. It’s the story of how Padre Pio responded with heroic virtue to the experience of being falsely accused repeatedly from within the Church. His heroic virtue in the face of false witness is a trait we simply do not share. It far exceeds any grace ever given to me.

Twice Stigmatized

Early in the morning of September 20, 1918, at the age of 31, Francesco Forgione, known to the world as Padre Pio, received the Stigmata of Christ. He was horrified, and he begged the Lord to reconsider. Each morning in the month to follow, Padre Pio awoke with the hope that the wounds would be gone. He was terrified. After a month with the wounds, Padre Pio wrote a note to Padre Benedetto, his spiritual advisor, describing in simple, matter-of-fact terms what happened to him on that September 20 morning:

“On the morning of the 20th of last month, in the choir, after I had celebrated Mass . . . I saw before me a mysterious person similar to the one I had seen on the evening of 5 August. The only difference was that his hands and feet and side were dripping blood. The sight terrified me and what I felt at that moment is indescribable. I thought I should die and really should have died if the Lord had not intervened and strengthened my heart which was about to burst out of my chest.

“The vision disappeared and I became aware that my hands and feet and side were dripping blood. Imagine the agony I experienced and continue to experience almost every day. The heart wound bleeds continually, especially from Thursday evening until Saturday.

“Dear Father, I am dying of pain because of the wounds and the resulting embarrassment I feel in my soul. I am afraid I shall bleed to death if the Lord does not hear my heartfelt supplication to relieve me of this condition.

“Will Jesus, who is so good, grant me this grace? Will he at least free me from the embarrassment caused by these outward signs? I will raise my voice and will not stop imploring him until in his mercy he takes away . . . these outward signs which cause me such embarrassment and unbearable humiliation.”

— Letters 1, No. 511

And so it began. What Padre Pio faced that September morning set in motion five decades of suspicion, accusation, and denunciation not from the secular world, but from the Catholic one. From within his own Church, Padre Pio’s visible wounds brought about exactly what he feared in his pleading letter to his spiritual director. The wounds signified in Padre Pio exactly what they first signified for the Roman Empire and the Jewish chief priests at the time Christ was crucified. They were the wounds of utter humiliation.

Within a year, as news of the Stigmata spread throughout the region, the people began to protest a rumor that Padre Pio might be moved from San Giovanni Rotondo. This brought increased scrutiny within the Church as the stories of Padre Pio’s special graces spread throughout Europe like a wildfire.

By June of 1922, just four years after the Stigmata, the Vatican’s Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) began to restrict the public’s access to Padre Pio who was accused of self-inflicting his own wounds and sexually abusing penitents. He was even accused of being a political agitator for a fascist group, and helping to incite a riot. His accusers included fellow friars, and neighboring priests, bishops, and archbishops increasingly threatened by Padre Pio’s growing fame and influence. A physician and founder of Rome’s Catholic university hospital labeled Padre Pio, sight unseen, “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited peoples’ credulity.”

Padre Pio and I have this one thing in common. You would not believe some of the things I’ve been called, sight unseen, by people presenting themselves as the voice of the faithful.

From 1924 to 1931, accusation after accusation was investigated by the Holy See which issued a series of official statements denying the supernatural origin of Pio’s wounds and the legitimacy of his gifts. At one point, the charge that his wounds were self-inflicted was withdrawn. Several legitimate examinations found no evidence for this. It was then charged that Padre Pio’s wounds were psychologically self-induced because of his “persistent concentration on the passion of Christ.”

Finally, in the one instance in which I can personally relate to Padre Pio, he responded with sheer exasperation at his accusers: “Go out to the fields,” he wrote, “and look very closely at a bull. Concentrate on him with all your might. Do this and see if horns grow on your head!”

By June of 1931, Padre Pio was receiving hundreds of letters daily from the faithful asking for prayers. Meanwhile, the Holy See ordered him to desist from public ministry. He was barred from offering Mass in public, barred from hearing confessions, and barred from any public appearance as sexual abuse charges against him were formally investigated — again. Padre Pio was a “cancelled priest” long before it became “a thing” in the Church.

Finally, in 1933, Pope Pius XI ordered the Holy Office to reverse its ban on Padre Pio’s public celebration of Mass. The Holy Father wrote, closing the investigation: “I have not been badly disposed toward Padre Pio, but I have been badly informed.” Over the succeeding year his faculties to function as a priest were progressively restored. He was permitted to hear men’s confessions in March of 1934 and the confessions of women two months later.

Potholes on the Road to Sainthood

The accusations of sexual abuse, insanity, and fraud did not end there. They followed Padre Pio relentlessly for years. In 1960, Rome once again restricted his public ministry citing concerns that his popularity had grown out of control.

An area priest, Father Carlo Maccari, added to the furor by once again accusing the now 73-year-old Padre Pio of engaging in sex with female penitents “twice a week.” Father Maccari went on to become an archbishop, then admitted to his lie and asked for forgiveness in a public recantation on his deathbed.

When Padre Pio’s ministry was again restored, the daily lines at his confessional grew longer, and the clamoring of all of Europe seeking his blessing and his prayers grew louder. It was at this time that my friend, Pierre Matthews encountered the beleaguered and wounded saint on the stairs at San Giovanni.

The immense volume of daily letters from the faithful also continued. In 1962, Padre Pio received a pleading letter from Archbishop Karol Wotyla of Krakow in Poland. The Archbishop’s good friend, psychiatrist Wanda Poltawska, was stricken with terminal cancer and the future pope took a leap of faith to ask for Padre Pio’s prayers. When Dr. Poltawska appeared for surgery weeks later, the mass of cancer had disappeared. News of the miraculous healing reached Archbishop Wotyla on the eve of his leaving for Rome on October 5, 1962 for the convening of the Second Vatican Council.

Former Newsweek Religion Editor Kenneth Woodward wrote a riveting book entitled Making Saints (Simon & Shuster, 1990). In a masterfully written segment on Padre Pio twelve years before his canonization, Kenneth Woodward interviewed Father Paolo Rossi, the Postulator General of the Capuchin Order and the man charged with investigating Padre Pio’s cause for sainthood. Fr. Rossi was asked how he expects to demonstrate Padre Pio’s heroic virtue. The priest responded:

“People would better understand the virtue of the man if they knew the degree of hostility he experienced from the Church . . . The Order itself was told to act in a certain way toward Padre Pio. The hostility went all the way up to the Holy Office, and the Vatican Secretariat of State. Faulty information was given to the Church authorities and they acted on that information.”

— Making Saints, p.188

It is one of the Church’s great ironies that Saint Padre Pio was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002 just as the U.S. bishops were implementing a response to the newest media furor about accused U.S. priests. I am one of those priests. The irony is that if the charter the bishops adopted was imposed in Italy forty years earlier, Padre Pio may have been denied any legitimate chance of ever clearing his name. The investigations that eventually exposed those lies simply do not take place in the current milieu.

I’ll live with that irony, and I’m glad Padre Pio didn’t have to. Everything else he wrote to his spiritual director on that fateful morning of September 20, 1918 came to pass. He suffered more than the wounds of Christ. He suffered the betrayal of Christ by Judas, and the humiliation of Christ, and the scourging of Christ, and he suffered them relentlessly for fifty years. As Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote of him in First Things (June/July 2008):

“With Padre Pio, the anguish is not the absence of God, but the unsupportable weight of His presence.”

Fifty years after receiving the Stigmata, Padre Pio’s wounds disappeared. They left no scar — no trace that he ever even had them. Three days later, on September 23, 1968, Padre Pio died. I was fifteen years old — the age at which he began religious life.

In April, 2010, the body of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was moved from its shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo to a new church dedicated in his honor in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI. Padre Pio’s tomb is the third most visited Catholic shrine in the world after the Vatican itself and the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

The New York Times might still spread another story, but the people of God have spoken. Padre Pio was canonized by the sensus fidelium — by the near universal acclaim of believers long before the Church ratified their belief. Padre Pio is a saint of the people.

Some years ago, a priest in Dallas — who read of Padre Pio’s “Patron Saint” status on our About Page sent me a relic of Saint Pio encased in plastic. He later wrote that he doesn’t know why he sent it, and realized too late that it might not make it passed the prison censors. Indeed, the relic was refused by prison staff because they couldn’t figure out what it was. Instead of being returned to sender as it should have been, it made its way somehow to the prison chaplain who gave it to me.

The relic of Saint Pio is affixed on my typewriter, just inches from my fingers at this moment. It’s a reminder, when I’m writing, of his presence at Beyond These Stone Walls, the ones that imprison me and the one I write for. The relic’s card bears a few lines in Italian by Padre Pio:

“Due cose al mondo non ti abbandonano mai, l’occhio di Dio che sempre ti vede e il cuore della mamma che sempre ti segue.”

“There are two things in the world that will never forsake you: the eye of God that always sees you, and the heart of His Mother that always follows you.”

— Padre Pio

Saints alive! May I never forget it!

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EPILOGUE

In 2017, Pierre Matthews, my friend and Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather, passed from this life. After his death someone in his family sent me a photograph of him kneeling at the Shrine of Saint Padre Pio where he offered prayers for me and for Pornchai.

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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.”

Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes

For Catholics, the month of November honors our beloved dead, and is a time to reinforce our civil liberties especially the one most endangered: Religious Freedom.

November 2, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of attention has been paid to a recent post by Pornchai Moontri. Writing in my stead from Thailand, his post was “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.” Many readers were able to put a terrible tragedy into spiritual perspective. Writer Dorothy R. Stein commented on it: “The Kingdom of Thailand weeps for its children. Only a wounded healer like Mr. Pornchai Moontri could tell such a devastating story and yet leave readers feeling inspired and hopeful. This is indeed a gift. I have read many accounts of this tragedy, but none told with such elegant grace.”

A few years ago I wrote of the sting of death, and the story of how one particular friend’s tragic death stung very deeply. But there is far more to the death of loved ones than its sting. A decade ago at this time I wrote a post that helped some readers explore a dimension of death they had not considered. It focused not only on the sense of loss that accompanies the deaths of those we love, but also on the link we still share with them. It gave meaning to that “Holy Longing” that extends beyond death — for them and for us — and suggested a way to live in a continuity of relationship with those who have died. The All Souls Day Commemoration in the Roman Missal also describes this relationship:

“The Church, after celebrating the Feast of All Saints, prays for all who in the purifying suffering of purgatory await the day when they will join in their company. The celebration of the Mass, which re-enacts the sacrifice of Calvary, has always been the principal means by which the Church fulfills the great commandment of charity toward the dead. Even after death, our relationship with our beloved dead is not broken.”

That waiting, and our sometimes excruciatingly painful experience of loss, is “The Holy Longing.” The people we have loved and lost are not really lost. They are still our family, our friends, and our fellow travelers, and we shouldn’t travel with them in silence. The month of November is a time to restore our spiritual connection with departed loved ones. If you know others who have suffered the deaths of family and friends, please share with them a link to “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.”

The Communion of Saints

I’ve written many times about the saints who inspire us on this arduous path. The posts that come most immediately to mind are “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II,” and more recently, “With Padre Pio When the Worst that Could Happen Happens.” Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio inspire me not because I have so much in common with them, but because I have so little. I am not at all like them, but I came to know them because I was drawn to the ways they faced and coped with adversity in their lives on Earth.

Patron saints really are advocates in Heaven, but the story is bigger than that. To have patron saints means something deeper than just hoping to share in the graces for which they suffered. It means to be in a relationship with them as role models for our inevitable encounter with human trials and suffering. They can advocate not only for us, but for the souls of those we entrust to their intercession. In the Presence of God, they are more like a lens for us, and not dispensers of grace in their own right. The Protestant critique that Catholics “pray to saints” has it all wrong.

To be in a relationship with patron saints means much more than just waiting for their help in times of need. I have learned a few humbling things this year about the dynamics of a relationship with Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio. I have tried to consciously cope with painful things the way they did, and over time they opened my eyes about what it means to have their advocacy. It’s an advocacy I would not need if I were even remotely like them. It’s an advocacy I need very much, and can no longer live without.

I don’t think we choose the saints who will be our patrons and advocates in Heaven. I think they choose us. In ways both subtle and profound, they interject their presence in our lives. I came into my unjust imprisonment over 28 years ago knowing little to nothing of Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio. But in multiple posts at Beyond These Stone Walls I’ve written of how they made their presence here known. And in that process, I’ve learned a lot about why they’re now in my life. It is not because they look upon me and see their own paths. It’s because they look upon me and see how much and how easily I stray from their paths.

I recently discovered something about the intervention of these saints that is at the same time humbling and deeply consoling. It’s consoling because it affirms for me that these modern saints have made themselves a part of what I must bear each day. It’s humbling because that fact requires shedding all my notions that their intercession means a rescue from the crosses I’d just as soon not carry.

Over the last few years, I’ve had to live with something that’s very painful — physically very painful — and sometimes so intensely so that I could focus on little else. In prison, there are not many ways to escape from pain. I can purchase some over-the-counter ibuprophen in the prison commissary, but that’s sort of like fighting a raging forest fire with bottled water. It’s not very effective. At times, the relentless pain flared up and got the better of me, and I became depressed. There aren’t many ways to escape depression in prison either. The combination of nagging pain and depression began to interfere with everything I was doing, and others started to notice. The daily barrage of foul language and constantly loud prison noise that I’ve heard non-stop for over 28 years suddenly had the effect of a rough rasp being dragged across the surface of my brain. Many of you know exactly what I mean.

So one night, I asked Saint Padre Pio to intercede that I might be delivered from this awful nagging pain. I fell off to sleep actually feeling a little hopeful, but it was not to be. The next morning I awoke to discover my cross of pain even heavier than the night before. Then suddenly I became aware that I had just asked Padre Pio — a soul who in life bore the penetrating pain of the wounds of Christ without relief for fifty years — to nudge the Lord to free me from my pain. What was I thinking?! That awareness was a spiritually more humbling moment than any physical pain I have ever had to bear.

So for now, at least, I’ll have to live with this pain, but I’m no longer depressed about it. Situational depression, I have learned, comes when you expect an outcome other than the one you have. I no longer expect Padre Pio to rescue me from my pain, so I’m no longer depressed. I now see that my relationship with him isn’t going to be based upon being pain free. It’s going to be what it was initially, and what I had allowed to lapse. It’s the example of how he coped with suffering by turning himself over to grace, and by making an offering of what he suffered.

A rescue would sure be nice, but his example is, in the long run, a lot more effective. I know myself. If I awake tomorrow and this pain is gone forever, I will thank Saint Padre Pio. Then just as soon as my next cross comes my way — as I once described in “A Shower of Roses” — I will begin to doubt that the saint had anything to do with my release.

His example, on the other hand, is something I can learn from, and emulate. The truth is that few, if any, of the saints we revere were themselves rescued from what they suffered and endured in this life. We do not seek their intercession because they were rescued. We seek their intercession because they bore all for Christ. They bore their own suffering as though it were a shield of honor and they are going to show us how we can bear our own.

For Greater Glory

Back in 2010 when my friend Pornchai Moontri was preparing to be received into the Church, he asked one of his “upside down” questions. I called them “upside down” questions because as I lay in the bunk in our prison cell reading late at night, his head would pop down from the upper bunk so he appeared upside down to me as he asked a question. “When people pray to saints do they really expect a miracle?” I asked for an example, and he said, “Should you or I ask Saint Maximilian Kolbe for a happy ending when he didn’t have one himself?”

I wonder if Pornchai knew how incredibly irritating it was when he stumbled spontaneously upon a spiritual truth that I had spent months working out in my own soul. Pornchai’s insight was true, but an inconvenient truth — inconvenient by Earthly hopes, anyway. The truth about Auschwitz, and even a very long prison sentence, was that all hope for rescue was the first hope to die among any of its occupants. As Maximilian Kolbe lay in that Auschwitz bunker chained to, but outliving, his fellow prisoners being slowly starved to death, did he expect to be rescued?

All available evidence says otherwise. Father Maximilian Kolbe led his fellow sufferers into and through a death that robbed their Nazi persecutors of the power and meaning they intended for that obscene gesture. How ironic would it be for me to now place my hope for rescue from an unjust and uncomfortable imprisonment at the feet of Saint Maximilian Kolbe? Just having such an expectation is more humiliating than prison itself. Devotion to Saint Maximilian Kolbe helped us face prison bravely. It does not deliver us from prison walls, but rather from their power to stifle our souls.

I know exactly what brought about Pornchai’s question. Each weekend when there were no programs and few activities in prison, DVD films were broadcast on a closed circuit in-house television channel. Thanks to a reader, a DVD of the soul-stirring film, “For Greater Glory” was donated to the prison. That evening we were able to watch the great film. It was an hour or two after viewing this film that Pornchai asked his “upside-down” question.

“For Greater Glory” is one of the most stunning and compelling films of recent decades. You must not miss it. It’s the historically accurate story of the Cristero War in Mexico in 1926. Academy Award nominee Andy Garcia portrays General Enrique Gorostieta Delarde in a riveting performance as the leader of Mexico’s citizen rebellion against the efforts of a socialist regime to diminish and then eradicate religious liberty and public expressions of Christianity, especially Catholic faith.

If you haven’t seen “For Greater Glory,” I urge you to do so. Its message is especially important before drawing any conclusions about the importance of the issue of religious liberty now facing Americans and all of Western Culture. As readers in the United States know well, in a matter of days we face a most important election for the future direction of Congress and the Senate.

“For Greater Glory” is an entirely true account, and portrays well the slippery slope from a government that tramples upon religious freedom to the actual persecution, suppression and cancelation of priests and expressions of Catholic faith and witness. If you think it couldn’t happen here, think again. It couldn’t happen in Mexico either, but it did. We may not see our priests publicly executed, but we are already seeing them in prison without just cause, and even silenced by their own bishops, sometimes just for boldly speaking the truth of the Gospel. You have seen the practice of your faith diminished as “non-essential” by government dictate during a pandemic.

The real star of this film — and I warn you, it will break your heart — is the heroic soul of young José Luis Sánchez del Río, a teen whose commitment to Christ and his faith results in horrible torment and torture. If this film were solely the creation of Hollywood, there would have been a happy ending. José would have been rescued to live happily ever after. It isn’t Hollywood, however; it’s real. José’s final tortured scream of “Viva Cristo Rey!” is something I will remember forever.

I cried, finally, at the end as I read in the film’s postscript that José Luis Sánchez del Río was beatified as a martyr by Pope Benedict XVI after his elevation to the papacy in 2005. Saint José was canonized October 16, 2016 by Pope Francis, a new Patron Saint of Religious Liberty. His Feast Day is February 10. José’s final “Viva Cristo Rey!” echoes across the century, across all of North America, across the globe, to empower a quest for freedom that can be found only where young José found it.

“Viva Cristo Rey!”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Our Faith is a matter of life and death, and it diminishes to our spiritual peril. Please share this post. You may also like these related posts to honor our beloved dead in the month of November.

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

A Not-so-Subtle Wake-Up Call from Christ the King

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With Padre Pio When the Worst That Could Happen Happens

Inspired by Padre Pio’s surrender to sacrificial suffering, this priest wrongly imprisoned for 29 years still sees signs and wonders even in life’s darkest corners.

September 21, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

I write this week in honor of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, more popularly known as Padre Pio. He is one of the two Patron Saints of Beyond These Stone Walls and one who has had a living presence in my life behind these walls. The other, of course, is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Pornchai Moontri and I share a somewhat mystical connection with both. A little time spent at “Our Patron Saints” in the BTSW Public Library might demonstrate how they have come to our spiritual aid in the darkest times of our lives here.

Though they were 20th Century contemporaries, Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe did not know each other except by reputation. Among the many letters of Padre Pio to pilgrims who wrote to him are several in which he urged suffering souls to enroll in the Militia of the Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross, the two spiritual movements founded by Maximilian Kolbe. I stumbled upon this after Pornchai Moontri and I enrolled in both. It is ironic that both saints were canonized by another saint. The lives of St. Padre Pio, St. Maximilian and St. John Paul II were lived with heroic virtue even as they suffered. I wrote of the latter two in a recent post that touched the hearts of many: “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II.”

Padre Pio also had a global reputation for doing remarkable things, but he did them in the midst of remarkable suffering. After bearing the wounds of Christ for a half century he passed from this life on September 23, 1968, the date upon which the Church now honors him. On that same date, 26 years later, I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison for life after having tossed aside three chances to save myself and my freedom with a lie.

Since that day, September 23, 1994, Padre Pio has injected himself into my life in profoundly grace-filled ways. I have written of these encounters in multiple posts, but the two that seem to stand out the most are “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls” and one that delves into the deeper mysteries of his life and death, “I Am a Mystery to Myself! The Last Days of Padre Pio.” We will link to them again at the end of this post and invite you to read them in his honor this week.

Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane

As long as our lives are tied to this world, we will never resolve the mystery of suffering. Like so many of you, I, too, have been confronted with the paradox of suffering. We are trapped in it because, unlike God, we live a linear existence. We see only what has come before and what is now, but we can only imagine what is to come.

But God lives in the '“nunc stans,” the “eternal now” seeing all at once our past, present, and future. Some believers expect God to be the Director of the play that is our lives, but He is more a participant than a director. He allows suffering as a means toward a specific end, but the end is His and not necessarily ours. In my post, “Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane,” Jesus discovers that the very first of his suffering is that he is inflicted with a human heart. He asks God to take away the great suffering that is to come, “but Thy will be done.” It is an aspect of the truth of the Resurrection that Jesus brought both His Divinity and the human heart with him when He opened the Kingdom of Heaven to us.

I have encountered this same paradox about suffering, and did so again on the night before writing this post. It comes in the night as a nagging litany of “What-Ifs.” It consists of a series of inflection points, points at which, in my own history, my current state in life could have been avoided had I turned left instead of right. I have identified about five such times and places in my life when a different decision would likely have prevented all the unseen suffering that was to follow.

But “What-Ifs” are spiritually unproductive. They deny the sacrificial nature of at least some of what we suffer and they disregard the plan God has for our souls. During my most recent nighttime Litany of “What-Ifs,” I was reminded of that prayer by St. John Henry Newman that I wrote about in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare”:

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next …”

I do not have the gift of foresight, but my hindsight is clear. Had I allowed myself to take any of those five alternate steps that I have been reminiscing about, then the work committed to me and no other could not have taken place, and a life and soul may have been lost forever. That life and soul became important to me, but only because it was a work God committed to me and no one else. It was the life and soul of my friend, Pornchai whom God has clearly called out of darkness. It is my great honor to have been an instrument of the immense grace that transformed Pornchai, but to be such an instrument means never to ask,”What was in it for me?”

So, if given the chance now, would I trade Pornchai’s life, freedom, and soul to erase the last 28 years of my own unjust imprisonment and vilification? Our Lord answered that question with one of his own: “What father among you would give his son a stone if he asks for bread?” (Matthew 7:10). This verse is followed just a few verses further by one that I wrote about recently in “To the Kingdom of Heaven Through a Narrow Gate”:

“Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

— Matthew 7:13-14

I could not have foreseen any meaning in what I suffered during my own agony in the garden. Such clarity is only in hindsight. Being sent to prison on false charges seemed to me the worst thing that could ever happen to a person — certainly the worst that could ever happen to a priest because a priest in such a circumstance is almost equally reviled by both Church and State. But today, when recognition of the alternative dawned — recognition that the life and soul of my friend would have been lost forever — I find that I can bear this suffering. I do not choose it. It chose me.

When Padre Pio Stepped In

The story of how Padre Pio stepped into my life as a priest and prisoner came also through Pornchai Moontri. Like Padre Pio himself, I had been shunned and vilified by Catholic activists in groups like S.N.A.P. and V.O.T.F. Out of fear, many other priests and Church officials joined in that shunning during my first decade in prison. The police, the courts, the news media, and the rumor mill in my diocese all amounted to a perfect storm that I was powerless to overcome. In 2002, the storm became a hurricane, first in Boston, then in New Hampshire and from there across the country.

In 2005, The Wall Street Journal’s explosive 2-part publication of “A Priest’s Story” altered the landscape. After it was published, Catholic League President Bill Donohue reached out to me with an invitation to write an article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. My article, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” was published in the November 2005 issue.

When I received that month’s issue, I was more stricken by its front-page revelation than with my own centerpiece article. It was “Padre Pio Defamed.” I was shocked to learn, for the first time, that Padre Pio suffered more than the visible wounds of the crucified Christ. He also suffered a cascade of slander from both secular and church officials with wild suspicions and accusations that he sexually abused women in the confessional resulting in multiple Church investigations. In 1952, the Congregation of the Holy Office placed in its Index of Forbidden Books all books about Padre Pio.

Heaven can be most forgiving. The bishop who suspended the priestly faculties of Padre Pio based on the rapid spread of false information was Bishop Albino Luciani. Just a few weeks ago after a miracle attributed to his intercession was confirmed, he was beatified as Blessed Pope John Paul I.

It is ironic — not to mention boldly courageous — that Pope John Paul II canonized Padre Pio in 2002 at the height of media vitriol during the clergy abuse scandal in the United States. One of the last investigations against Padre Pio was a 1960 report lodged by Father Carlo Maccari alleging, with no evidence, that Padre Pio had sexual liaisons with female penitents twice per week.

In the same month my Catalyst article was published, Tylor Cabot joined the slander in the November 2005 issue of Atlantic Monthly with “The Rocky Road to Sainthood.” He wrote, “despite questions raised by two papal emissaries — and despite reported evidence that [Padre Pio] raised money for right-wing religious groups and had sex with penitents — Pio was canonized in 2002.”

Fr. Maccari’s original slander also found its way into The New York Times. Maccari went on to become an archbishop. On his deathbed, Maccari recanted his story as a monstrous lie born of jealousy. He prayed on his deathbed for the intercession of Padre Pio, the victim of his slander.

A Heaven-Sent Blessing from Padre Pio

Also in November of 2005, Pornchai Moontri arrived in this prison after his experience of all the events I described in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio teamed up to reverse in him a road to destruction in ways that I was powerless to even imagine. A few years later, in 2009, this blog was born and some of my earliest posts were about what Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe suffered in life on the road to becoming the spiritual advocates they have been for us and millions of others. Just after I wrote about Padre Pio for the first time, I received a letter from Pierre Matthews from Ostend, Belgium who had been writing to me since reading of me in The Wall Street Journal.

Learning of my faith despite false charges and imprisonment became for Pierre the occasion for his return to faith and the Church after a long European lapse. When he read my early posts about the plight of Padre Pio, Pierre excitedly told me of a mystical encounter he had with Padre Pio as a young man. A letter from his father to him at his boarding school in Italy instructed him to go to San Giovanni Rotondo to ask for the blessing of the famous stigmatist, Padre Pio.

When 16-year-old Pierre got there, a friar answering the door told him this was impossible. He then gave Pierre a blessed holy card and ushered him toward the door. Just then, while inside the cavernous Capuchin Friary, an old man with bandaged hands came slowly down a flight of stairs and walked directly to the surprised teenager. Padre Pio held Pierre there firmly with his bandaged hands while he spoke aloud a blessing and prayer. Pierre was stunned, and never forgot it.

Sixty years later, Pierre had a dream that this blessing from Padre Pio was for us, and he wanted to pass it on. He insisted that he must be permitted to become Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather when Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010.

Pierre left this life in 2020 just as Pornchai was awaiting his deportation to Thailand, his emergence from prison and the start of a new life. To this day, we both hold Padre Pio in awe as a mentor and friend. He gave us spiritual hope when there was none in sight. His advice is profoundly simple and characteristically blunt:

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry.”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading. Please share this post so it may come before someone who needs it. And please Subscribe if you have not done so already. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

I Am a Mystery to Myself! The Last Days of Padre Pio

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America

Father MacRae being led to prison, September 23, 1994

On the Feast of St Padre Pio, Fr Gordon MacRae marks 27 years of wrongful imprisonment amassing tools for coping mentally and spiritually with life’s unjust wounds.

September 22, 2021

Note from the Editor: The title for this post was inspired by a 2019 article at LinkedIn by Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D. entitled, “A Catholic Priest 25 Years Wrongly in Prison in America.” It was written by Father Valladares from excerpts of his acclaimed book on priesthood cited below. Still in prison two years later, this version is written entirely from the perspective of Fr. Gordon MacRae as his 27th year in prison comes to an end.

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Wounds from the Church

As most readers know, I was convicted and sent to prison on September 23, 1994, the same day the Church honors Padre Pio, a great saint whose shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo is the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. Padre Pio was canonized by another saint, Pope John Paul II, on June 16, 2002 at the height of the Catholic sex abuse scandal as it emerged out of Boston and spread like a virus.

For fifty years, Padre Pio bore the visible wounds of Christ on his body. He also bore the less visible wounds of slander and false witness inflicted from inside the Church. On several occasions in his life, his priestly ministry was suspended because lurid and ludicrous accusations were hurled at him from unscrupulous critics, many of whom were Church personnel. It was because of this, and some uncanny threads of connection, that Padre Pio entered our lives and became a Patron Saint of Beyond These Stone Walls. This is an account last told in 2020 in “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

In 2012, Australian Catholic priest, psychologist, and author, Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D., published a widely acclaimed book, “Hope Springs Eternal in the Priest1y Breast” (iUniverse). It cites a good deal of my own writing on the subjects of sacrifice, suffering, and priesthood. I am not at all worthy of this citation that appears on his "Acknowledgments" page:

“Fr. Gordon MacRae — an extraordinarily heroic priest with indomitable courage, unrelenting tenacity, unwavering patience, and Christ-like magnanimity who personally reflects what Pope Benedict XVI confessed: ‘All of us [priests] are suffering as a result of the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust or failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse.’”

— Hope Springs Eternal in the Priest1y Breast, p.xviii

I don’t know about any of that, especially the part about “unwavering patience.” (Maybe Pornchai, writing from Thailand will weigh in on that.) Anyway, the book extensively cites the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal whose three major articles on my trial and imprisonment took this story out of the darkness of one-sided suppression. It also cites the work of Ryan A. MacDonald, most notably his investigative journalism compiled in “Truth in Justice.”

However, the cryptic statement of Pope Benedict cited by Father Valladares above needs clarification. The Pope’s reference to “the sins of our confreres who betrayed a sacred trust” needs no explanation. His further statement referring to those who “failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse” is broader in scope. Fr. Valladares understood it to refer to some in the Church who tried to remedy one injustice by inflicting yet another. Some bishops went far beyond what has been required by the rule of law and also acquiesced to demands of the media and others with an agenda by publishing lists of priests deemed “credibly accused” but without basic due process of law.

Before my trial in 1994, for example, a past bishop of my diocese wrote a press release declaring me guilty of victimizing not only my accusers, but the entire Catholic Church. Two years ago, twenty-five years into my unjust sentence, a subsequent bishop joined the mob with stones in hand by publishing anew such a list with the stated goal of “transparency.” A year later, that same bishop was himself accused in a case that on its face is “credible” according to the standards bishops have used against priests.

The claims against Bishop Peter Libasci are alleged to have taken place in 1983, the same year as the claims against me. His defense is being handled by a law firm that most priests could never afford. But as I have documented in the post linked below, I believe the claims against him to be untrue and unjust. I was criticized for defending my bishop after my own name appeared on his list, but I am not looking for the mob approval my bishop was apparently looking for. I wrote of the injustice he faces in “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Detective James McLaughlin celebrates his 350th arrest.

Wounds from the State

I cannot bring myself to rehash the litany of false witness and official misconduct that sent me to prison on September 23, 1994. I just read a report by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). It reveals the disturbing fact that in more than half of the cases overturned with new evidence revealing that the person in prison did not commit the crime, misconduct by prosecutors or police was the primary cause. (See Dale Chappell “Report Shows Official Misconduct Responsible for More than Half of Exonerations.”)

In the cases of many falsely accused Catholic priests, however, misconduct usually has a different outcome. There is never any “planted evidence,” but there is usually a lot of money in play as accusers become plaintiffs in civil lawsuits. Money is often an enticement to corruption and false witness. In many of these cases, no actual crime was ever committed 20, 30, or 40 years earlier when claims were alleged to have occurred.

In the Exonerations Report, sex offenses constituted the second highest category of wrongful convictions. Exonerations in that category encompassed a wide range of official misconduct including police threatening defendants and witnesses, falsified forensic evidence, police not pursuing exculpatory evidence, and police lying under oath. All of this was in the background of my trial and is documented in “Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct.”

Many people ask me why I am still in prison when others have come forward with evidence and testimony that casts doubt on the integrity of my conviction. I believe that the most important factor in my continued imprisonment is that the officer behind it has scored convictions via lenient plea deals in over a thousand cases of suspected sexual abuse. Lenient plea deals bolstered his conviction rate without totally destroying the defendants for life. As most readers know, I was offered such a deal in 1994 which would have had me released from prison by 1996 had I actually been guilty or willing to pretend so.

Reversing a conviction based on Detective James F. McLaughlin’s malfeasance in my case may have the unintended consequence of reopening a thousand others that he was involved with. It would have required moral courage and judicial integrity on the part of the judge, a former federal prosecutor who declined a hearing in my habeas corpus appeal. Judges rely on a procedural ruling giving state courts a right to finality. No judge has ruled on the evidence or witnesses that have arisen in the years since my trial. No judge has ever even heard the evidence or witnesses.

This raises a hard truth about our justice system. Guilty defendants are inclined to accept lenient plea deals while many innocent defendants cannot or will not. I am one of them. As a result, many guilty defendants spend far less time in prison than innocent ones. You have already seen a glaring example.

As a direct result of my writing about the horrific crimes perpetrated against Pornchai Moontri when he was brought to America against his will at age 12 in 1985, Richard Alan Bailey was found and arrested in Oregon. Due to extensive evidence, he pled no contest to forty felony charges of sexual assault in the State of Maine in 2018. He was sentenced to 18 years probation and never saw the inside of a prison. In nearby New Hampshire, I refused a one year plea deal and faced trial with no evidence. I was then sentenced to 67 years in prison. Let that sink in.

The Prophet Jonah: A Final Chapter

But none of this addresses what I intended to be at the heart of this post that marks those 27 years. There is nothing I can do to secure justice or freedom for myself. And there was nothing I did do to bring about my loss of them. But there was a lot I could do to secure justice and restore freedom for one whose path on this journey from Jerusalem to Jericho crossed with mine.

I did nothing so grandiose as the conversion of Nineveh, but through the Grace of God I became a necessary instrument in the conversion of Pornchai Moontri who once was lost and broken and now lives free in the light of Divine Mercy. In a September 10 telephone call to him in Thailand on his birthday, his first as a free man, he told me that his deliverance from both prison and his past could not have happened without me. I do not regret paying that ransom. I today believe this to be the purpose for what I have endured.

In my recent post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote about the Seventh Century BC Prophet Jonah and why much of the Book of Jonah is today considered to be a parable. I did not want to detract from the hopeful outcome of that story, so I held its final chapter until now. Its last chapter also took place in Nineveh, but in our time and not Jonah’s.

Though the story of Jonah and the Great Fish is a parable, the Prophet Jonah was a historical figure honored by all three of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Jonah was sent by God to the ancient city of Nineveh in the Seventh Century BC, it was the capital of the Assyrian Empire in its time of glory. Nineveh was a center for commercial trade routes on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq, just opposite the modern city of Mosul. Nineveh was established in the Neolithic period more than 8,000 years ago, and inhabited almost without a break until about 1500 AD.

In the centuries before the Prophet Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the city was known as a religious center, but it fell far away from its religious roots. The city honored the Assyrian goddess, Ishtar, a goddess of healing who somehow was transformed by the time of Jonah into a goddess of war. The Assyrians built the city with broad boulevards, parks and gardens, and a magnificent palace of more than 80 rooms.

Today, Nineveh is reduced to two large mounds beneath which are the ruins of a city once thriving. The mounds are called, in Arabic, “Kuyunjik” and “Nebi Yunus” which means “place of Jonah.” In ancient times, a massive tomb in honor of the Prophet Jonah was built in a Sunni mosque in Nineveh on the site of an Assyrian church where the remains of Jonah were thought to be buried. This part of the city was revered by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Tomb of the Prophet somehow managed to survive intact until just a decade ago. After standing for over a thousand years, the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah was blown up and destroyed in 2011 by the fundamentalist Islamic group, al Qaeda.

The Taliban had been doing the same thing in Afghanistan. Islam was preceded there by Buddhism which was eventually eclipsed by Islam and driven out around the Seventh Century AD. In the Sixth Century AD, Buddhist monks carved into a cliff side the world’s largest statue of Buddha. Standing at 180 feet, it survived for 1,500 years before it was blown up by the Taliban in 2001. It was destroyed at about the same time the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda while the September 11, 2001 assault on the United States was planned.

I bring all of this up now because witnessing in my own recent lifetime the demise of people, places, and things once held sacred by many people has had an outsized impact on me that some might find perplexing. Why would I care so much about the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah or a 1,500 year-old gigantic stone Buddha? No matter who these monuments ultimately served, they arose from the hearts and souls of a people. When religious icons are destroyed by evil intent, so is the spirit of those people.

Catholicism and the cancel culture assault on the priesthood now risk this same fate. That risk is manifested most in America over just the last two decades. This threat does not come from the Taliban or Islamic State — though they may be poised to take advantage of the vacuum of hopelessness left in its wake. The terrorism behind this threat is called “apathy.”

If the priesthood and the Mass fall away, it will have as its primary cause the agendas of a few and the silence of too many.

We have witnessed in just recent years a chronic disparagement of the priesthood even from Pope Francis and our bishops, a canceling of a widely reverenced ancient form of the Sacrifice of the Mass, a handing over of the Church’s patrimony to the Chinese Communist government, a disparaging of our Church and faith as a “non essential service” by secular authority, a rampant capitulation to that by some bishops, a failure to defend the sanctity of life and the sanctity of the Eucharist, and a Catholic President who believes in neither.

This is why the Taliban despise us and judge us to be “Infidels,” which means exactly what it implies: “A people of little faith.”

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From a Homily of Padre Pio

“Why does is there evil in the world? Listen closely to me. There was a mother who was embroidering on a small weaving frame. Her young son was seated in front of her on a small low stool watching his mother work. But as he watched, he saw only the underside of the weaving frame. And so he said, ‘But Mother, what are you doing? The embroidery is so ugly!’ So his mother lowered the frame to show him the other side of the work, the good side with all its colors in place and all the threads in a harmonious pattern. That is it. Have you seen what evil is like? Evil is the reverse side of that embroidery and we are all sitting on a small stool.”

— From a homily of St. Padre Pio

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I want to thank readers who have consulted our Special Events page to assist our friend Pornchai in the daunting task of rebuilding his life. As you know, he was taken from Thailand at age 11. On his September 10 birthday this month, he had a touching reunion with his cousin who was eight when they lived together and is now 45 and an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. They met on September 10th for a birthday celebration at the Gulf of Thailand.

You may also wish to review the related posts linked herein:

Padre Pio, Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo