On the Road to Heaven with Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR

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

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

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

But that was not my only post about Father Groeschel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopelessness and Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

— When Did We See You, Lord?, p. 153

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Remember Those in Prison” — Hebrews 13-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Spe Salvi, no. 40

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

Father Benedict Groeschel gets the last word:

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

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

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

— Colossians 3:3

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

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

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

With Padre Pio When the Worst that Could Happen Happens

To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

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

Are You Suffering a Great Deal?

As this blog by a priest unjustly in prison began in 2009, Fr Gordon MacRae had to write 12 brief posts to send to an editor. Here are three of these early gems.

July 19, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

A lot has been going on here this summer. Even in this place where time often seems to stand still, finding blocks of time to write has suddenly become a challenge. Nonetheless, I am enthused by a new development. Gloria.tv is an international Catholic video and news sharing venue launched in Switzerland in 2005. It is known for its high degree of fidelity. I cannot see it, of course, but on rare occasions over the years it has reported on one of my posts.

After reviewing and then reposting “Convicted for Cash,” the 44-minute video documentary about my trial by Frank X. Panico, Gloria.tv invited me to establish a page and submit selected past posts on the site. The result has been a huge increase in visits to this blog from around the world. Please visit our presence there at Gloria.tv/FrGordonJMacrae.

A flood of activity this July, along with some technical difficulties where I live, has temporarily slowed my ability to write. So this week, and again two weeks from now, we are returning to July, 2009 and the first days of this blog. As it was beginning, I was asked to quickly write and submit 12 short posts to launch it. I am told today that a few of them are “gems,” so I want to share them with you anew.

Our first entry today is “Are You Suffering a Great Deal?” It’s from a laminated card that fell into my lap from a book in 2009 just as I was beginning to write. At the time, I was in fact suffering a great deal.

Pornchai Moontri was here with me then and was very much a part of this beginning. It was Pornchai who named this blog, “These Stone Walls,” then in 2020 I renamed it “Beyond These Stone Walls” as he was returning to Thailand. Pornchai has contributed many posts to this site, some more popular than my own, but please don’t tell him I said that. So the second of our three short selections is “Bunkies: Pornchai’s Story.” Next week in these pages, we will have some exciting news about developments in Pornchai’s new life in Thailand.

My last entry this week is “Contentious Convicts.” I will let that one speak for itself. You might think it seems a little fishy.

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Are You Suffering a Great Deal?

Are you suffering a great deal? No, the question isn’t from Oprah or Dr. Phil. It is on a bookmark kept in my breviary. It was asked by Our Lady of Fatima on June 13, 1917:

“Are you suffering a great deal? Don’t lose heart. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge, and the way that will lead you to God.”

There is immense power in that promise, and for someone who has lost everything, it is like a lifeboat at sea. There is sometimes nothing else to cling to. Even when I feel that my faith dangles from a thread — which is often, in prison — I cling to that promise.

I don’t know where the bookmark came from. Like most of the things I cling to for spiritual support, it just sort of showed up one day. I like to think it was handed down to me — in the way important things are handed down by brothers — by Maximilian Kolbe whose reverence for the Immaculate Heart of Mary guided him through life, and death, at Auschwitz.

Even when my faith is so diminished and darkened by the prison around me that I believe in little, I believe that promise. Sometimes I can only believe that Maximilian believed — with the very fabric of his life.

It’s often hard to pray in prison. It’s not just the noise, the harshness, the lack of privacy, the relentless obstacles. It’s just hard to raise my mind and heart beyond these stone walls at times. In that, at least, I am not alone.

The Vietnamese Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan wrote that there were long periods during his years in a Communist prison when he was unable to pray. I guess any Catholic who ever looks inward has a dark night of the soul. If not, why would the Blessed Mother ever ask such a question in her appearance at Fatima? It’s not the usual question a mother would ask when she comes a long way for a brief visit.

Are you suffering a great deal? When Saint Maximilian’s life was finally snuffed out after days of starvation chained to the corpses of those who could not endure, he was heard gasping a hymn of praise. I wish I had his heart! I don’t, but I wish I did. I have to learn how to suffer, and I am a slow learner.

In Spe Salvi, his Encyclical on Christian Hope, our Holy Father Pope Benedict wrote the most masterful prose on suffering that I have ever read. I cling to it like I do my bookmark with Our Lady of Fatima’s Promise:

“Christ descended into ‘Hell,’ and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and well-nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen — the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering — without ceasing to be suffering — becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.”

Spe Salvi, ¶37

Brilliant! Simply brilliant! There’s something hopeful in that, and I should listen.

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Bunkies: Pornchai’s Story

In prisons all over the world, the most crucial issue for prisoners is where one has to live, and with whom. Confined to a 60 square foot cell with another human being can be a nightmare. Most of us have no say in the choice of “Bunkies,” as cell mates are called here. If a bunky is moved — even after two or three years with the same person — sometimes a total stranger is living in the cell within minutes.

Having a good roommate seems to be everyone’s goal, but I tried another approach years ago. Being a good roommate is a goal I have more control over. The result has been that in 10 years since being moved from the torturous 8-man cells in which I spent my first seven years in prison, I have never had a roommate (we prefer to call our cells “rooms”) request a move.

The downside of that is that I have had some very dysfunctional roommates who have no wish to move elsewhere. My assigned roommates here have ranged in age from 19 to 67 or so, and have included men convicted of murder, rape, armed robbery, various drug crimes, and gang-related crimes. Everyone here knows all the details of why everyone else is here. Rumor and gossip fill in what the facts leave out.

My roommate of the last two years was also a good friend for several more. It was the first time I have been assigned to live with someone I know well, so it feels more like living with a family member than a felon.

Pornchai (his name is Thai, and the “r” is silent, as in “Paunch-eye”) is 35 years old and has been in prison since the age of 18.

He is about to convert to the Catholic faith and currently he is a scholarship student in theology in the Catholic Distance University’s excellent Distance Learning Program for prisoners.

Pornchai caused a minor sensation last year when he wrote a very brief autobiographical sketch that ended up being published as “The Conversion Story of 2008” by The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I hope you will take a moment to read it.

A year after publication, Pornchai still receives occasional mail about his life story. The most recent being a personal letter from Cardinal Kitbunchu, Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok, Thailand, and a note from Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Oh, and there was also a letter from the late Father Richard John Neuhaus.

Pornchai takes his new notoriety in stride, though one letter had a profound impact. It was from a young man who wrote that he turned his life around, dropped out of his gang, swore off drugs, and returned to faith after reading “Pornchai’s Story” online.

Pornchai mistakenly credits me with some small role in his extraordinary life of late. He has fallen under the power of grace and cannot escape it now even if he tried. Now, he creates. Here is a photo of one of his creations, “The Olde Baldy” (named after me) which he carved piece by piece (over 600 of them) from scratch.

Pornchai Moontri — Master Craftsman

Pornchai was designated a master craftsman in wood and model shipbuilding. One of his first ships was a circa 1800 British warship from the Napoleonic era which he named after Father MacRae. He dubbed it “The Olde Baldy,” which is now docked in the home of our friend, Bill Wendell in Stow, Ohio.

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Contentious Convicts

There was little I could do to stop the fighting. Convicts are so territorial; they do not hesitate to take on intruders twice their size. They just can’t be reasoned with. It’s even worse when the convicts are mating. What drama!

No, no, no! I’m not talking about bizarre behavior among my fellow prisoners — though they do have their moments. I’m referring to Herichthys (Archocentrus) Nigrofasciatus, a fish of the cichlidae family native to the tropical river basins of Central America. They are popularly known as convict cichlids, or just convicts because of their characteristic black stripes.

Oh, go ahead and yawn! Whenever I would recite the scientific nomenclature for the fish in my aquarium, my friends would always yawn! Aquarium buffs are used to it! The more serious among us always felt duty-bound to learn the scientific names of the residents of our aquatic neighborhoods. Hey, we don’t talk that way by choice, you know!

My 100 gallon cichlid aquarium was my spare-time-consuming hobby for most of my life as a priest until I was sent to prison at age 41. It was an oasis of life, light, and aquatic drama that kept me mesmerized for hours at the end of each day. Only one other priest in my diocese had an aquarium, and we had an instant bond of shared knowledge and interest.

I had a breeding pair of convict cichlids who shared their home — perhaps “shared” is too strong a word — with a pair of Astronotus Ocellatus, or red oscars native to the Amazon Basin. I also had a single Herichthys (Archocentrus) Octofasciatus known otherwise as a “Jack Dempsey,” and for good reason. He ended up in a smaller aquarium of his own. Couldn’t play well with others.

Convicts typically excavate a cave when preparing to breed, so an old clay flower-pot in the corner sufficed. I named my convicts Bonnie and Clyde (at the time, I had limited knowledge of suitable convict names. Today I’d go with Bubba and Bella.) The other denizens, the Oscars, were named Oscar Madison and Oscar Wilde. (I’m glad I only had two!)

The Oscars gave their testy neighbors a wide berth once eggs were laid in the cave. Oscar Madison, twice the size of the convicts, sometimes paid a price for lumbering over to eat the convicts’ food. He had the nips in his fins to remember them by.

I once tried to use a mirrored barrier to keep everyone happy, but Clyde kept launching himself furiously at his own reflection. In time, everyone learned to respect some boundaries. My current convict friends could learn a lot from that. “The Aquarium is Gone.” That’s actually a line from a poem by Robert Spence Lowell (“For the Union Dead.” 1964)

Its absence from my world is still deeply felt. It is one of the three recurring dreams I have in prison. (I’ll write of the other two later.) It haunts me a bit. I often dream that my aquarium is on the concrete shelf of my cell, and Oscar Wilde is staring at me with his bulging eyes willing me to bring food.

I miss them. There is nothing with water and life here.

“And the fish of the sea will declare to you. In His hand is the life of every living thing.”

— Job 12:8,10

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.”