To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe are both set during Advent. They are harbingers of the greatest story ever told.

December 8, 2021

For most of my life as a priest, I treated the visions at Lourdes, Fatima and other elements of our collective beliefs about Mary and the saints with entrenched skepticism. I considered myself to be a sort of scientist-priest. All knowledge had to be sifted by the scientific method using concepts such as objective scientific study with experiments that can be replicated in a laboratory.

Armed with studies of cosmology and astrophysics, and degrees in behavioral science, my inner world was both predictable and provable. I scoffed inwardly at the pious notion that the Mother of God has appeared in visions to some of the poorest people in some of the most unlikely places on this planet. I also, to my shame today, dismissed openly the notion that the wounds borne by Padre Pio were anything but psychosomatic evidence of an intense psychological focus on Christology.

Then came my Great Comeuppance. It was 1992 and I was living in New Mexico where I was Director of Admissions at a facility for spiritually and psychologically troubled priests. During those years I made regular pilgrimages to the Very Large Array, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the high desert of Socorro.

In 1992, I was visited by two priest friends, one from Maine and one from New York. I wanted to bring them to the desert observatory but they wanted to visit a Catholic shrine in the opposite direction north of Santa Fe where some sort of Marian miracle had once supposedly taken place there. I was not the one driving which really irked me all by itself — so their votes prevailed.

Sitting in the back seat of the car as we approached the shrine, I scoffed in silence and arrogantly dismissed their interest as spiritually immature fluff. What happened next I have never really been able to articulate with any clarity. I was stricken with a momentary inward vision of how small I am next to the immense power of grace that God has bestowed upon Mary.

It lasted only a moment. I could not see her with my eyes, but she became a momentary presence in the deep recesses of my mind. I could not have withstood more than a moment. And like an intense light, it left me with an echo of itself that has never left me. It cast me then into a state of inexplicable interior collapse. It was not fear, but rather overwhelming awe. It lingers nearly three decades later.

There was nothing about that experience that gave me any sense that I am anyone special, for I am not. Instead, it forced me to reinventory the tools necessary to see and encounter life as it is, and not as I would have it. I was wrong to think that the required tools of life are all intellectual, and I was wrong to think that I had them. Up until that day, I was missing the most essential of receivers and didn’t even know it.

Radio waves fill the atmosphere, but without a receiver, they remain silent. A spiritual life is our receiver. We ignore it, or just go through the motions, to our spiritual peril.

There have been other instances when I felt that I had been spoken to. I described two of those instances in two special posts that left me feeling that it just makes more sense to believe than not. Newer readers may not have seen those posts. They were: “A Shower of Roses” and “A Corner of the Veil.”

Inmates Pornchai Moontri (left) and Fr. Gordon MacRae (right) make their consecration to Jesus through Mary on Nov. 24, 2013, the Solemnity of Christ the King, in New Hampshire State Prison for Men. They pray to become instruments in Mary’s “immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God.”

An Encounter with Christ the King

In a post some months ago, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote of the years I spent in empty exile in prison before anything like a spiritual life began to manifest itself. For twelve years, from 1994 to 2006, I did little more than survive here with no sense of a purpose for the heavy cross I carried. As that post linked above reveals, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, spent those same twelve years in prison in the torment of solitary confinement in the neighboring state of Maine. In 2006, our lives converged.

From there, looking back with hindsight, it seems as though our parallel lives were meant to cross. Today, I am certain of that. As our lives converged, we were set — apparently by “accident” on a path that led Pornchai to a Divine Mercy conversion and led both of us to a relationship with a persistent Patron Saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe entered our lives in prison in mysterious ways, and then led us on a path to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I would have scoffed at and dismissed such a story thirty years ago, but now I cannot because it has captured me in far greater ways than any unjust prison sentence. Over the course of our long walk along the path of Divine Mercy, other events began to unfold in our lives leading me to believe that everything that happened to me — though evil in and of itself — was somehow hijacked by Divine Mercy to bring about a great and wondrous good.

About sixty miles from this prison, Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC, had been working on a book called “33 Days to Morning Glory.” It’s a self-directed retreat program that Father Gaitley used to develop a superb DVD presentation for a course in Divine Mercy which culminates in consecration of the self to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The very language of this would likely have turned me away as a younger priest. My theology was far beyond such pious nonsense. That was all before my Comeuppance, however.

I did not know Father Gaitley then. Had never even heard of him. But because I had been writing about our story and Pornchai’s conversion, someone at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts took notice. As Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning G1ory began to sweep the country with profound popularity, someone at the Shrine suggested that this retreat should be offered in a prison. Then they chose this prison, and invited me and Pornchai Moontri.

You likely know elements of this story from past posts about it, but there is a point that I must stress. Pornchai and I had, at the time, been through a series of grave disappointments and discouragement. It seemed at the time that prison was winning the battle for our souls and we felt powerless to interrupt it. We declined the invitation. In the days to follow, St. Maximilian Kolbe intervened, and we reluctantly agreed, but with my usual skepticism. There was, however, a nagging inner sense that we were being led to something of great importance.

It was the fall of 2013. The “33 Days” retreat ended with Mass in the prison chapel on the Solemnity of Christ the King on November 24 that year. It ended with our consecration to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a consecration I have renewed ever since on the Solemnity of Christ the King. Here is Fr. Michael Gaitley’s Consecration Prayer that we used:

“I,_____, a repentant sinner, renew and ratify today in your hands, O Immaculate Mother, the vows of my Baptism. I renounce Satan and resolve to follow Jesus Christ even more closely than before. Mary, I give you my heart. Please set it on fire with love for Jesus. Make it always attentive to His burning thirst for love and for souls. Keep my heart in your most pure Heart that I may love Jesus and the members of His body with your own perfect love. Mary, I entrust myself to you: my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions. Please make of me, of all that I am and have, whatever most pleases you. Let me be a fit instrument in your immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God. If I fall, please lead me back to Jesus. Wash me in the blood and water that flow from His pierced side, and help me never to lose my trust in this fountain of love and mercy. With you, O Immaculate Mother, you who always do the will of God, I unite myself to the perfect consecration of Jesus as he offers Himself in the Spirit to the Father for the life of the world. Amen.”

The Immaculate Conception

Why should anyone enter into such a personal consecration of the self? I have renewed this consecration on the Solemnity of Christ the King every year since 2013. Each time, I was carried back to that strange day at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 when Mary Herself knocked on the door of my soul. I have no other way to put it. Like Mary, I have since pondered these things in my heart (Luke 2:13), and they took over my heart.

The answer to why we should make such a consecration rests in the very identity of the Immaculate Conception. It is not a mere coincidence that at Mass for the Immaculate Conception, the Church chooses as the proclamation of the Gospel St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38). I wrote of the same passage in “St. Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

In that exchange between the Angel of the Annunciation and Mary, Gabriel, one of the Angels who stands in the Presence of God, refers to Mary with a term never before used in all of Sacred Scripture. Never before had an angel referred to a human being with a title and not a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). When translating the New Testament Greek into Latin, St. Jerome interpreted the Greek title used by Gabriel as “gratia plena” which, in English is rendered “full of grace.” No English words can fully capture the meaning of the original Greek.

The term in St. Luke’s original Greek is “kecharitōmenē,” a title unique in Sacred Scripture. It refers to a vessel that is, and always has been, filled with divine life. St. Maximilian Kolbe developed a fascinating identification of the Holy Spirit as the “Uncreated Immaculate Conception” and of Mary as the “Created Immaculate Conception,” living in an interior union, from the first moment of her existence, a “union of essence” with the Holy Spirit.

Some Catholics (I was once one of them) and some fundamentalist Protestant Christians rebel against such an interpretation as assigning a state of divinity to Mary. That is not the case. Another Greek phrase used of Mary by the Church Fathers is “Theotokos,” the “bearer of God,” a term that identifies Mary as the New Ark of the Covenant. It makes complete sense that God, from the moment of Mary’s bodily existence, created within her a union with the Holy Spirit. The same Protestant Christians also stress vehemently the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture. There is simply no other way to interpret what the Archangel Gabriel says to Mary — and says to us about Mary — in Luke Chapter One: “Kecharitōmenē” — one who lives in a union of essence with the Holy Spirit. Among all human beings, Mary lives a unique existence in the Presence of God.

At the beatification Mass for Maximilian Kolbe on October 17, 1971, Saint Pope Paul VI addressed this: “A mysterious communion unites Mary to Christ, a communion that is documented convincingly in the New Testament ... The Church is faithful to honor Mary, her most exceptional daughter and her spiritual Mother.”

Our Patron and friend on this path, St. Maximilian Kolbe, gave Mary another name: The Immaculata. He honored her with his life, and he handed over that life in the horror of Auschwitz to free another prisoner. While writing this post, I spoke by telephone with Pornchai Moontri in Thailand who also has been pondering.

He told me that he knows he would not be free today — in every sense of that word — if not for me. And it troubles him greatly, he said, that I remain unjustly in prison. He is wrong about this. If Pornchai is free, so am I. I know without a doubt today that the powerful grace instilled in my heart was for this singular purpose. I know this for two reasons. On the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013, when Pornchai and I first entered into Marian consecration, Marian Helper magazine editor Felix Carroll wrote of it in “Mary Is at Work Here”:

“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press Title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.”

However, the strongest hint came as I pondered all of this in my heart. It came as somewhat of a bombshell. I did a deep dive into the events I describe here and realized with astonishment that the inexplicable event I experienced at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 is what set this story in motion. It was during Holy Week in 1992. Just days before, some 2,000 miles away in Bangor, Maine, a desperate teenager fleeing a horror inflicted on him committed the act of despair that would send him to prison. Fourteen years later, our paths merged, and set us upon a road to Divine Mercy.

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A Note to readers from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please share this post, and please visit our “Special Events” page to assist with an important Advent project and mission of Divine Mercy. This was the subject of my important Advent post, “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.”

Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll invited me to write for the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016. That article, “The Doors That Have Unlocked,” is the featured post this week at “Voices from Beyond.”

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“O Come, Thou Key of David, come,

And open wide our heavenly home,

Make safe the path that sets us free,

And leads us on the road to liberty.

Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel

To Thee shall come Emmanuel”

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Photo by Dennis Jarvis

The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education

There are subtle and overt signs in our culture of a ‘woke’ agenda to revise our history, transform our values, and filter our ideas. Resistance is not yet futile.

October 20, 2021

There is a new feature on the menu of Beyond These Stone Walls called “Voices from Beyond.” The photo atop the new page is a radio astronomy telescope from the Very Large Array National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico. I chose the image because I spent some time studying there long ago. My adventure in radio astronomy was a happier time for me, but by “Voices from Beyond,” I didn’t mean quite that far beyond.

I meant the dozens of articles, editorials and other commentary about my situation and this blog that have been published in various other venues from the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell to The Wall Street Journal. We decided to collect some of them in one place, though it is a hefty task. We hope to add one or two examples each week. I hope you will check it out on occasion.

The “Voice” the new feature presents this week is that of Rod Dreher from The American Conservative for which he is an editor and major contributor. His commentary is about a “blood boiling” review of my trial by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. We chose it even before I planned to write this post which also happens to feature the voice of Rod Dreher on a topic he calls “soft totalitarianism.” Coincidence is sometimes not very subtle.

Totalitarianism is an ideology in which all social, political, economic, intellectual, cultural and spiritual information is subordinated to a central authority. But before I get back to that and Rod Dreher, I must first explain what prompted this post. Even from behind these high walls, I see daily signs that our culture is being subtly molded to a radically revised agenda. It is chosen for us, and imposed on us, by an elitist few who require our conformity with it. Sometimes the nudge toward that agenda is so subtle that we barely notice and feel little pressure to resist.

“Woman, Behold Your Son.” (John 19:26)

Here’s a recent example that bows to the so-called “woke” cultural agenda to revise and impose new, and sometimes bizarre, language rules about gender. The American Civil Liberties Union has decided that the word “woman” no longer belongs in any reference to gender.

In a September 18, 2021 tweet about a pro-abortion quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the ACLU took it upon itself to edit out the word, “woman,” and replace it with “person” using editorial brackets. The ACLU, the guardian of civil liberties, also neutered the related pronoun from “her” to “their”:

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity.”

Setting aside the fact that the ideology behind the Ginsburg quote disregards the “well-being and dignity” of the child’s life, the editing out of “woman” by the ACLU renders it ridiculous. Would any “person” other than a woman bear a child? Also, the gender neutral replacement pronoun, “their” instead of “her” adopts the rules of “wokeness” while discarding the rules of grammar. Is the denial of gender differences worth destroying the English language? Charles Cooke, writing at NationalReview.com, protested:

“[The ACLU] is an organization that once understood that even viewpoints widely considered odious deserved to be defeated in the marketplace of ideas, not with redaction tape. But it now seeks to retroactively alter the speech of public figures with whom it shares common cause to avoid offending those who deplore the idea that only women can have babies ... . This kind of thinking requires ‘the acceptance of the Soviet-esque idea’ that history ought to be revised to serve the current definition of ‘progress.’ ’’

The push now underway to eliminate gender distinctions is only just beginning, but the concerted effort to revise and replace the word “woman” only gets worse. The U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland (who was President Obama’s last minute, mercifully defeated, nominee to the Supreme Court) made a notation in a brief filed to combat a new Texas abortion law by substituting “women” with “any individuals who become pregnant.”

The White House budget proposal also replaced the word “mothers” with “birthing people.” In a September bill, House Democrats defended the use of “birthing people” by saying that it “reflects the majority of people” who might seek an abortion citing that ...

“... it is intended to protect all people with the capacity for pregnancy — cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who identify with a different gender and others.”

It gets even worse. The distinguished British medical journal, The Lancet, published an article on problems with menstruation by replacing the word, “women” with “bodies with vaginas.” After some people whose bodies fit that description objected, Richard Horton, The Lancet Editor-in-Chief, defended this as an attempt to reach “maximum inclusivity of all people.”

How far will we go to allow these substitutions for traditional terms that, for thousands of years, have described our identities and distinctions as human beings? Sacred Scripture has 4,976 references to man or men and 710 references to woman or women. In a very popular post awhile back, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men,” I wrote that the word, “father” appears 1,932 times in the Bible while the word “mother” appears 354 times. “Father” is how God identifies Himself. The differential is only because Scripture has its own inclusivity: Human-kind = “mankind” which was never understood as a value statement about gender differences.

Caving in to this redesign of language about our identities and faith requires our abandonment of both. It also demands that we radically re-edit and reinterpret Sacred Scripture, the story of our lives in the Presence of God. Are we prepared for this divisive adventure in nihilism, the belief that the destruction of our existing political, social, and religious institutions and traditions is necessary for a just society?

Like a Colonization of the Mind

“Totalitarianism” as both an ideology and a system of government is unique to the 20th Century. In its practice, people become wholly dependent on and subjugated to the whims of a political party. Among its typical features are a monopoly of media and mass communication, a centrally controlled economy, and an enforcement arm in service of the ideology itself and the party it represents. Every totalitarian system has begun with re-education on acceptable language and thought. As for enforcement, consider the recent U.S. Justice Department decision to send the FBI to investigate dissent over mask and vaccine mandates in local school districts.

The ruling ideology assumes control of the news, social media, and publishing, as well as radio and television broadcasting. Social media especially lends itself to totalitarian controls dictated by a “woke” agenda. Recent examples are too many to fit into a single post:

An elected president’s Twitter account was permanently suspended while he was still in office; Twitter, Facebook and most print and broadcast news media removed or suppressed content about evidence of influence peddling by the ethically-challenged son of a presidential candidate during an election season; Amazon removed books from its catalog based upon conservative political views; An editor of The New York Times was forced to resign upon the demands of a “woke” newsroom when he allowed a conservative Republican senator to publish an op-ed. This list could go on for many pages.

I experienced a personal example recently. Catholic author Ryan A. MacDonald wrote about it in these pages a week ago in “Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell.” When our editor published an article at the r/Catholicism page of Reddit, I was permanently banned by an unnamed Catholic moderator from future participation in the site. It was not because I am in prison nor was it because I am an accused priest. It was because the article called into question claims of victimhood that are considered sacrosanct for the far left, and never to be questioned.

In 2020, Rod Dreher responded to this not-so-brave new world by publishing a brave new book entitled, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. In a review in Chronicles magazine (“The Soft Revolution,” September 2021) C. Jay Engels wrote:

“Dreher maintains that our soft totalitarianism is ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it spreads like a colonization of the mind, infecting our everyday language and behavior, in turn shaping governmental policy ... . If we are to effectively resist, we must understand the crucial importance of religion. A vague resistance unmoored from that bedrock is not only incapable of endurance under totalitarian conditions ... . To cultivate cultural memory as a method of resistance demands that we rediscover, and spiritually dwell within, our Christian historical reality.”

Rod Dreher warning of “a colonization of the mind” captures exactly what I have written above about imposed gender-related language. It is intriguing that resistance requires cultural memory and assent to the truth that Western Culture is a product of Christian religion. I believe this to be true, and its most direct evidence is the vehemence with which the socialist left seeks to marginalize and diminish Christianity and its role in society.

In light of this, it is troubling that Pope Francis imposed severe restrictions on more traditional forms of liturgy, a deeply felt suppression of a tradition cherished by many that I wrote of in “A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Traditional Latin Mass.”

“Islam Would Never Stay Silent!”

No one should feel helpless to respond in the face of all this, but response is a long effort that requires commitment. Rod Dreher described the necessity of regaining and maintaining our religion. Historical and cultural awareness of Christian traditions is our best and only hope for “woke” resistance. In the 20th Century, Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan literally brought down history’s most oppressive totalitarian regime, the Soviet Union, through their teaching and promotion of Christian ideals.

I hope readers did not choose to skip over my recent post, “Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, and Credibility.” It was a hefty dose of history, but only 30 years' worth. The catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would have gone quite differently with a better understanding of that culture’s historical and religious context. Our culture marginalizes religion to its peril.

Islam is currently the fastest growing religious faith on the planet. That is so only because it has its own “woke” extremists who demand totalitarian compliance. I have to give the last word to Jamil Malik. That is not his real name. Jamil was Coptic Christian university student when he began writing to me after the famous public ISIS beheading of Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya in 2011. Due to the grave danger he faced for “visiting the websites of the infidels” he adopted a screen name. I have not heard from him for a decade. His last message to me was this:

“Americans and American Catholics seem divided over many issues, but they are mostly the issues of the elite while most of the rest of the world’s people struggle to survive and preserve their lives and freedoms and basic human rights.

“My struggling Christian friends in Iran and Syria have something to say to American Catholics ready to leave their faith over the latest demands of popular culture. I have friends who have been killed for their faith in just the last few months.

“Over here, Catholic priests are sacrificed by radical Islamic fundamentalists seeking revenge over the 1,000 year old Crusades. In America, priests are sacrificed by lawyers, the news media, and Catholic bureaucrats. Most Catholics stay passively silent. Islam would NEVER stay silent.’ ”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Please share this post and Subscribe to Beyond These Stone Walls. Remember to visit Rod Dreher's brief commentary at our new feature:

Voices from Beyond

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