Unjustly in Prison for 30 Years: A Collision of Fury and Faith

From opposite ends of the world Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae share thoughts on a dark milestone: Thirty years wrongly in prison on the Day of Padre Pio.

September 18, 2024 by Pornchai ‘Max’ Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae

HERE’S MAX

On September 8, 2020, I left my best friend, Father-G, inside the walls of New Hampshire State Prison where we spent the previous 15 years as cell mates. The term, “cell mates” might seem foreign to you. Having to share a space of about 60 square feet around the clock with another human being can be like torture. The daily drama of cell mates thrown together but never able to live together was the all-day every-day prime time drama of our prison.

I was an angry young man with a very short fuse which caused me to spend most of my prior years in prison in solitary confinement beginning at age 18. I was not very sociable. I trusted no one, and least of all could I trust a priest convicted of the very crimes that tormented my life and set me on a road to destruction. We went through a lot in those years, and over time I came to know with total certainty that this priest was a victim of false witness and a Catholic witch hunt. He became my best friend and the person I trust most in this world. We became each other’s family.

I know in my heart that I would not be free today — physically, mentally, or spiritually — if Father-G had not been present in my life. I wake up each day now on the other side of those stone walls of prison and on the other side of the world from where Father-G lives in captivity still. I now live in Thailand, a land I was taken from at age 11 for someone else’s dark agenda. It is a land I thought I would never see again. I am here today, and free, only because of God and His servant, Father-G.

The day this little introduction appears with Father-G’s post is September 18. It anticipates the September 23rd date on which he was sent to prison thirty years ago in 1994. There was no truth or justice in it. None at all! That is also the date that one of our Patron Saints was freed from another kind of bondage — a bondage that has been a grace for millions of souls. Father-G once described the heroic virtue of the life Padre Pio lived ...

“A half century bearing the wounds of Jesus — all of them, including false witness, rejection, ridicule, public shaming, and the crucifixion of his body and his priesthood, sometimes even by the very Church he served.”

With some help from Dilia, our Editor, I wrote a whole post about this day, about Father-G, and about the sacrifices he made that restored my life and freedom, and saved my soul. I would trade them back to restore his freedom, but he will have none of that. He said that sacrifice is sacred and it is not refundable. I hope you will read my post for it is very important to me. It is my tribute to hope from a time when all mine was stolen from me so Father-G sacrificed his. It is “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Now here, from our prison cell thousands of miles away from where I wake up each day in freedom, is Father-G:

Parallax Views and Inflection Points

On the night before starting my part of this post, I called my friend, Pornchai-Max in Thailand. He asked me how I feel about approaching a 30th year in prison for crimes that never took place. I spent much of that night rehearsing in my mind a long angry rant. How could intense anger not be part of the equation of how I face the injustice, corruption, a cover-up by police and prosecutors and lawyers and judges who heard and ruled on their corruption in secret? How could I feel anything but fury for the people who profited from it all? In the fictitious case against me alone, a million dollars changed hands.

If you have been following publications by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Claire Best, Ryan MacDonald, and a few others over recent years then you are already familiar with all this and there is no need for me to waste your time ranting about it. It would indeed be a waste of my time and yours.

I thank my friend, Max, for his part in this post, and in this story. He and our editor, Dilia E. Rodríguez, have conspired to point me toward a parallax view. That’s a scientific term for what happens when an event or series of events is observed from a new position or angle with insights that were limited or unavailable before. In his introduction, Max mentioned a post he wrote with Dilia’s help just after his return to Thailand in 2020. It is linked at the very end of his Introduction and again at the end of this post. It is very important, and it is my parallax view.

And in recent weeks in these pages, Dilia E. Rodríguez wrote “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It, too, presents a parallax view, a summary of these 30 painful years in this abomination of unjust imprisonment. Dilia’s conclusion was in part about the mystical connections between me and Max now living on opposite sides of the planet, and the introductions of two Patron Saints into our world. Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe are inflection points in both our lives in and beyond these stone walls.

In science and history, an inflection point is a point at which, usually only in hindsight, an event becomes pivotal, and, once experienced, all perceptions about it change. When I could bring myself, through grace, to look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment, our Patron Saints became inflection points and the powers that bind us. Even my language describing this needs a background explanation. To “look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment” recalls vividly another “inflection point” that occurred in a dream.

I know I risk sounding a little pretentious here, but in that dream I was instructed by a nighttime visitor on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, to “look beyond the prison lights,” and when I did, my eyes were opened. I hope to return to this in a week or so in these pages when I write about the Great Patron of Justice, Saint Michael the Archangel.

Prison is not a good place. Let me put that differently. Prison is not a place where much good happens. But what good DOES happen in prison is often spectacular and it accomplishes spectacular things. One could easily dismiss those things as mere coincidence. I did just that for a long time. But a steady stream of graceful events in a place where grace seems otherwise to be entirely absent brings us back to seeing the ordinary as extraordinary. Saint Paul described such a place permeated by the light of faith: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Romans 5:20)

Convergence : St Maximilian Kolbe Lets Himself In

In my twelfth year of priesthood, I was convicted in a sham trial after refusing multiple plea deals to serve only a year or two in prison. My refusals were met with fury by Judge Arthur Brennan who ridiculed and mocked me before imposing on me a sentence that would live longer than I would live.

The numbers are important. In my twelfth year of priesthood I went to prison, and in my twelfth year in prison, I came as close as I ever had or ever will to despair. The year was 2006. The series of “accidents” leading up to this point are, in hindsight, astonishing. From seemingly out of nowhere, I was contacted by a priest who arranged with this prison’s Catholic chaplain, a deacon, to visit me, though I never understood why. In the previous 12 years, not a single priest had ventured behind these prison walls. Father James McCurry is a Conventual Franciscan priest who said only vaguely that he heard or read about me somewhere and felt compelled to reach out (or in) to me.

In the prison visiting room, his first words after shaking my hand were, “Have you ever heard of St. Maximilian Kolbe?” Fr McCurry told me that he had been the Vice Postulator for the cause of sainthood leading up to St. Maximilian’s canonization in Rome in 1982, the year I was ordained. On the twelfth anniversary of that canonization, and my ordination, Father McCurry felt compelled to visit me. The visit had to be brief.

The year was 2006. One week later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry along with something that I should not have received. It was a laminated holy card depicting Maximilian in both his prison garb from Auschwitz and his Franciscan habit. I should not have received it because laminated cards had been strictly banned for security reasons then. This one, however, mysteriously made its way from the prison mail room to my cell. I was mesmerized by the image on the card. On the backside was “A Prisoner’s Prayer to St. Maximilian Kolbe.” It was about despair.

I taped the card to the top of the battered steel mirror in my cell. It was December 23, 2006. Then I realized with near despair that on that very day, I was a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. I was losing myself. There is nothing here that supports in any way an identity of priesthood. The image on the mirror impacted me greatly, and painfully. It was three years before Beyond These Stone Walls would begin with my first post, “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.”

Months earlier, unknown to me at that time, another prisoner was dragged in chains out of years in solitary confinement in a Maine prison and shipped against his will to New Hampshire. After several weeks in “the hole” in high security housing, he arrived on the pod where I live. Walking around the pod to stake out his new turf, a very tough-looking Thai fighter stuck his head in my cell door. Upon seeing the image of Maximilian on my mirror, he stared at it for a time, and then he stared at me asking, “Is this you?”

This man had been through a lot, and was a little rough around the edges. The only part of that he might disagree with today is “a little.” He wore the wounds life had inflicted on him like a shield of armor to keep everyone else away. Everything about him spoke “dangerous,” and indeed he was at times. He had a short fuse, and that kept everyone else at a safe distance — except me.

We somehow became friends. He paid rapturous attention to the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life and especially how his earthly life ended as he gave it over to the Nazis, his false accusers, to spare the life of a despairing young man. My inflection point with Saint Maximilian was this: The image on my mirror was not about all that I had lost. It was about all that I was called to become. Like Maximilian, I could not change my prison. Not one bit. I could only place it in service to my priesthood.

Saint Maximilian, in turn, led both Max and me to the Immaculata. Through his Divine Mercy Sunday conversion and his consecration to the Lord through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pornchai Moontri took the name Maximilian. Like many in Sacred Scripture, a new name also came with a new life.

Over at our Voices from Beyond section this week, we are featuring “Mary is at Work Here” by Felix Carroll first published in Marian Helper magazine (Spring 2014). It tells the story of Mary, Maximilian, Pornchai-Max, and me, and the wonder of Divine Mercy we embraced as it also embraced us.

Out of Time and Space, Padre Pio

Our second inflection point — the point at which our spiritual fortunes changed — was Saint Padre Pio who is venerated in the Church calendar on the same date on which I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. It is also the date Padre Pio died. This was briefly alluded to by Max in his part of this post, but I would like to expand on it a bit because I know that Max will be reading this from half a world away.

Because of the connection between Padre Pio and the date of my imprisonment, I decided to write a post about this mysterious saint. Padre Pio died in 1968 when I was fifteen years old and had just begun my return to a long neglected Catholic identity. I today cannot articulate what exactly called me to that change in such a tumultuous time as 1968. I wrote a story about the calumny and false witness Padre Pio suffered in his priesthood. It was that which I could initially most connect with. The post was titled, “Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial.” It was published in the early days of this blog.

After I wrote it, I received a rather frantic letter from the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium. Pierre learned about me from a lengthy 2005 article by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. He and I exchanged several letters back in the few years after those articles first appeared in 2005. Pierre was alarmed about my Padre Pio post. He urgently wanted me to know that he had a personal encounter with Padre Pio when he was 15 years old.

Like many in Europe at that time, Pierre’s father had sent him to a boarding school. The school was sponsoring a train trip to a few points in Italy. When Pierre’s father learned of this, he sent Pierre a letter instructing him to take a train to a place called San Giovanni Rotondo, and go to a Capuchin Friary. Pierre was instructed to ask for a blessing from Padre Pio.

Pierre was skeptical, but did as his father asked. He took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo, and rang the bell. A friar answered the door and led young, nervous Pierre to a foyer. Pierre asked to see Padre Pio. “Impossibile!” the friar snapped back. He gave Pierre a prayer card and started to usher him back toward the door.

Just then, from a wide staircase leading to the foyer, a bearded Capuchin with bandaged hands came slowly down the stairs with eyes focused on Pierre. Padre Pio approached him while the astonished friar at the door whispered in Italian, “Do not touch his hands.” Padre Pio then placed his bandaged hands on Pierre’s head and spoke a blessing, making the Sign of the Cross.

Sixty years later, when Pierre read at Beyond These Stone Walls that Pornchai Moontri had decided to become Catholic and would enter the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, Pierre pleaded with me to ask Pornchai to allow him to act as Godfather to sponsor his reception into the Church. Then, again, things that should not have happened did happen. Pierre could not attend a Baptism in the prison chapel so I acted as proxy. But he could arrange to visit either me or Max in the prison visiting room a few days before. Under the rules, he could be on the visiting list of only one of us. That rule was impenetrable, firmly embedded in stone.

“The worst they can say is no,” Pornchai said. So I wrote to the prison warden and explained the details. The request came back miraculously just in time. It was approved that Mr. Matthews could visit with both of us on the same day, but separately. This was, and still is, unheard of. Pierre told us both the story I told above — the story of his strange encounter with Padre Pio many years earlier.

In his visit with me, 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.

I do not fully understand the mystery of what happened to the angry priest who pondered prison and the fate of his priesthood, or the angry young man who pondered the deep wounds life had inflicted upon his body, mind and spirit. We are both still here, and on opposite sides of the planet now, but we are both also changed. As I am typing this, a friend sent me a letter with a brief prayer at the top. It is a parody of the Serenity Prayer, and it could now be the prayer of my priesthood:

“God, grant me
Serenity to accept the people
I cannot change,
Courage to change
the only one I can, and the
Wisdom to know
that it’s me!”

Thank you for reading these stories of our lives. May the Lord Bless you always, and keep you.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free, and we will usually haunt your Inbox only once per week. You might also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ — a Marian Helper presentation

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

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

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor

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A Special Note to our Readers: Thank you for your readership and support of this blog. As annual fees become due, Father Gordon could use your help if willing and able. Additionally, we have been notified that the National Center for Reason and Justice is ceasing operations after two decades of advocacy and sponsorship of the defense of Father MacRae and other wrongfully convicted.

For any future defense of Father MacRae it is imperative that the National Center for Reason and Justice website at ncrj.org remain active and in place. It contains volumes of crucial legal information on the Father MacRae case and must be preserved or all will be lost. We have been granted permission from the NCRJ to take over management of its site and preserve its contents. This will add to our annual operating expenses. If readers are able to help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please see Contact and How to Help

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.”

Eternal Life Matters: Spiritual Survival in Trying Times

#EternalLifeMatters because God is a God of the living, not of the dead. As political and cultural chaos descends all around us, it is our end game that matters most.

October 25, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

One of my favorite political columnists is Gerald F. Seib. He is retired now, but still writing occasional feature articles. For several years, he wrote The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Capital Journal” column. He always managed to open my eyes to a more panoramic view of what is going on in America and throughout Western Culture. On October 6, 2020, his title was, “Turning-Point Year Heads to Parts Unknown.”

My immediate concern was what he meant by “turning point” and “parts unknown.” You may not be able to see this landmark column without a WSJ subscription, but I don’t think Mr. Seib will mind if I summarize his main points. There have been times in the history of this nation when one shocking event after another became an “inflection point” that turns the culture in a new direction and ushers in a new era with a radical redirection of the future. For example, in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Civil War broke out which in historical hindsight turned out to be a major inflection point for this nation. In 1932, the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal which was not nearly as radical as the left’s proposed “Green New Deal,” but nonetheless was an inflection point for life in America.

By the standard of shocking points that become “inflection points,” the year 2020 appears to be one of these moments in history. A global pandemic, four years of a highly contentious and divided political climate, a major party turning decisively left while the party in power turns the Supreme Court decisively right. The Covid pandemic has changed everything about us in just three years. It has altered how we live, interact, work, and recreate. It has also greatly altered our politics. It has become very important to sift through the politics of Covid lest we repeat them to our detriment. For example, potential courses of treatment became shunned, not for medical reasons but for political ones. The shuttering of schools and churches while liquor stores and casinos remained open had the effect of shattering rational dialogue about what is good for America and Americans. The origins of Covid, necessary to identify, were defined based on politics and not science. I wrote of this to much criticism from the left in “Covid: The Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. News Media.”

Polls have been little help as predictors of what comes next for either our politics or our culture. Our lives as individuals also experience a kind of “inflection point” tendency in the face of crisis. A radical change of direction within ourselves is usually associated with some sort of event or a series of events. Here is a small example. You likely recall that our friend, Pornchai Moontri, stepped onto my path after spending several years in a solitary confinement prison. For a view of how life-changing and destructive that was, see the riveting PBS Frontline documentary “Locked Up in America — Solitary Nation,” a production that depicts the very prison and cell that held my friend for fourteen years, seven in one long grueling stretch.

Just before writing this post, I received a lengthy message from John C., a young man who was in that same prison with Pornchai and knew him well. They helped each other to survive. John wrote to me after coming across posts about Pornchai’s current life at Beyond These Stone Walls. He was deeply impacted not only by the revelations about all that Pornchai suffered in life, but by the story of his Divine Mercy conversion. John wrote that he was brought up Catholic as a child, but became an atheist in prison.

When Pornchai told me sixteen years ago that he does not believe in God, I told him that I, too, lost all faith as a young man. I said that I awoke one morning uttering the words, “God, I do not believe in you.” What I heard simultaneously in my head and in my heart was, “Just be glad it isn’t mutual!” That was one of the inflection points in my life at age 16, and hearing about it became one of Pornchai’s as well. Perhaps that may also become true for John. The mere fact that he is now reading this blog of all things is a signpost of its own.

As for Pornchai, I do not think he could have coped with all that he endured if he had not become a person of faith. After leaving prison in September 2020, he spent the next five months imprisoned not only in an ICE deportation warehouse in Louisiana, but by Covid which left all international travel frozen in place. He was packed into a room with seventy ICE detainees — most from Central America, where the noise was unbearable and the blazing lights were kept on 24/7. He was sleep-deprived and suffered terribly. However, he also reached out to help several others who suffered much more. He protected and helped a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese refugee who spent a year in that place before we were able to help hasten his return to his mother and family in Vietnam. Pornchai recruited me to find others to assist “Tri.” In Vietnam he is still in touch with Pornchai and me. He does not understand the Catholic use of the word “Father.” So in his messages he refers to me as “Dad Gordon.”

A conversation between Father G and Pornchai Max, “breaking through ICE.”

Bearing the Cross of My Neighbor

With the help of BTSW reader Claire Dion, who put two cellphones together enabling us to communicate for about ten minutes each day, Pornchai and I were able to talk by phone during his five months in ICE detention. Pornchai himself wrote of the impact of this time, and his survival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

I wrote recently in these pages a post entitled “The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God.” I wrote it because each week when I sit down to write a post, I look at the Mass readings for the Sunday that will follow it. That is often, besides the depressing news, my first source for something to write about. In the post I just cited, the Prophet Isaiah’s unintended connection to current events was striking. The connections in this post with the next Sunday’s Gospel (from Matthew 22:34-40) are much more subtle, but they are in there and I hope to pull them out. The connections of the First Reading (from Exodus 22:20-26) are much more clear:

“Thus says the Lord: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”

It is one thing to require that an alien observe the laws on entering and remaining in a country legally. It is quite another to treat him as something less than a human being.

In Sunday’s First Reading from the Book of Exodus (22:20-26), if the oppressed alien in your midst cries out to me, “I will surely hear him, for I am compassionate.” That compassion is an attribute of God that is supposed to be a life-changing inflection point for us.

The Gospel, from Matthew 22:34-40, is much more subtle. It opens with an account that the Pharisees gathered when they learned that Jesus had somehow managed “to silence the Sadducees.” How Jesus did that requires a little background. The Sadducees make a brief, but important appearance in the Gospels. Their approach to Jesus is consistently hostile. They are a caste of priestly aristocrats who manage the affairs of the Jerusalem Temple. But their management is primarily political.

The Sadducees reject the Hebrew Prophets and all Scripture except the Pentateuch, the first five books that comprise the Torah, also called the Books of Moses. That is their sole source of religious consideration. They arose in the Second Century BC as a political interest group whose most important goal is to remain in good stead with whatever occupying force has swallowed up Jerusalem. In the case of the Gospel, it is the Roman Empire. The Sadducees are well represented in my post reflecting on John 19:15: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”

The Sadducees also reject the existence of angels, an afterlife, and resurrection from the dead. They took their name from the High Priest, Zadok, who served the Temple under King Solomon centuries earlier. They were political and doctrinal enemies of the Pharisees who took great interest in the fact that Jesus silenced them. He did so, as he is prone to do with the Pharisees as well, by trapping them in the hypocrisy of their own words.

To discredit the words of Jesus about resurrection, they concocted a story based on a fragment of law from the Book of Deuteronomy (25:5-6) holding that if a man dies childless, his brother is to take his wife and fulfill his duty to bear a son to continue his deceased brother’s name. The Sadducees presented Jesus with a query about a woman who lost seven husbands, taking in marriage each of the surviving brothers in turn. “In the resurrection,” they asked, “which of the seven will she be wife?” Jesus could have cited the Prophets on the hope of resurrection, but he knew the Sadducees rejected them. So he cited the only Scripture to which they gave credence:

“Have you not read what was said to you by God? ‘I Am the God of your Fathers, of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

By declaring the Patriarchs of Israel — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — to be alive and in the Presence of God, Jesus amazed the crowd and silenced the Sadducees who had no response.

The Pharisees and Saduccees Come to Tempt Jesus by James Tissot (cropped)

The Greatest Commandment

Having satisfied themselves that Jesus is right and the Sadducees most certainly wrong about resurrection, the Pharisees in this Gospel account (Matthew 22:34-40) went on to test Jesus further. One of them, “a lawyer” set up a question. The Greek word this Gospel account used for “lawyer” is “νομικός,” found only once in Matthew’s Gospel, but six times in Luke’s. The word is synonymous with “Scribe,” and therefore denotes a man very well versed in both the Law and the Prophets. The question posed is this “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Laws?”

Jesus answers, as he did previously with the Sadducees, by a quote from the Torah in the Book of Deuteronomy (6:4-5) laid out in the chapter following the Ten Commandments given to Moses:

“Hear, O Israel, The Lord your God is One Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

But then Jesus shocks the Pharisees by finding in their Torah a necessary addendum to their Great Commandment. He quotes from another Book of Moses, the Book of Leviticus (19:18) to lay out the fulfillment of the first part, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“On these two Commandments,” says Jesus, “depend all the Law and the Prophets.” In another Gospel passage, the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37), another lawyer stood up to put him to the test with a question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer is “Keep the Commandments,” and the Commandments referred to are those cited from the Torah – not the Ten, but the Two. The Love of God is rendered empty and false without its logical manifestation: love of neighbor and the bearing of his cross.

In the end, the Scribes and Pharisees employ even their theological enemies, the Sadducees, to stack the court when they haul Jesus before Pilate. The Way of the Cross and the rejection of God in the flesh was a mirror image of today’s effort to deny our true destiny: Life! and not just this one! Eternal Life Matters!

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

As the Church prepares to honor our beloved dead on the Solemnity of All Souls, you can silence any lingering doubts of Sadducees with “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.”

Writing from Thailand as I began a 30th year of unjust imprisonment, Pornchai Moontri wrote “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

And lastly, if you have been concerned by news out of Rome and Germany about fears of a schismatic synod, you might like my post “Synodality Blues: Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.”

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.”