Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The innocent in prison live in an incubator of dark dreams and nightmares. A recent terror was a confrontation with an evil presence that evoked an Angelic Advocate.

September 25, 2024 by Fr Gordon J. MacRae

I have had my share of nightmares and dreamscapes as an unwilling guest of the State, but I have been hesitant to write about most of them. Our dreams reflect the reality of our conscious lives — both our hopes and our fears. Few of mine are worthy of note, but those few also feel a bit risky to write about. I am not certain that I want to let anyone wander willy-nilly into the chasms of my psyche, a place where even I do not wish to wander alone. It is not because there is anything nefarious to be found there. It is because people who do not have actual evidence to throw will weaponize just about anything to justify their causes. We have seen this at work most recently in the weaponized lawfare in our politics.

To wander “willy-nilly” is an interesting term. It comes from 17th Century New England, a time and place when concerns about the devil dominated the literature and thought of the period. The term is a derivative of “Will I, Nil I,” meaning, “whether I wish it or do not wish it.” That is really the essence of dreams. They enter our psyche through no conscious will of our own while everything in them reflects our perception of ourselves and our place in this world, “our hopes and fears o’er all the years.”

Most of our dreams are quickly forgotten. This has more to do with biology than the content of our dreams. They are experienced differently from other mental processes and are thus not encoded in memory in the same way as conscious experience. A minority of our dreams are frightening and unforgettable. I had one of those recently, and I cannot forget it despite wanting to. It haunts me still. So I will take the plunge and just narrate it without judging either its reality or its sanity. I can only assert that the dream is true.

What made this particular dream most unusual is that I was dreaming that I was asleep and having a dream within the dream. I know this is convoluted but bear with me. In the dream, I was awakened in the night by something unknown. I arose from my bunk and took a walk. I was walking through doors that my conscious mind knew to be always locked. This is, after all, a prison. Outside the locked doors on a walkway at the top of the four-story prison building where I live, I descended alone down the 52 stairs to the ground level. And it was night.

That last sentence is important, and I write it with foreboding. Those same words appeared in another post of mine that described the presence of the Evil One. In “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light,” I wrote of the Gospel account of the betrayal by Judas Iscariot that led to the Crucifixion: “After eating the morsel, he went out. And it was night” (John 13:30). My awareness of night reveals the spiritual setting of my dream. To live in wrongful imprisonment is to live in perpetual night.

At the bottom of the 52 stairs are a few steel doors that are storage areas. They are always locked, but in the dream one door was ajar. As I approached it in the night it opened, and I stepped in. Outside was a hot summer night, but in this room I could see my breath even in the dark. The door slammed shut behind me leaving me in pitch blackness. The room was filled with castoff debris, and lurking among it in the far left corner was what I can only describe as sheer terror. I could feel it more than I could see it.

I could not flee, so I prepared to fight. “I am stronger than you,” I said boldly, but stupidly. We do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. In this one, those were the only words spoken, but they were not the only thoughts. I felt panicked terror from the Presence I was in. I felt this unseen thing overtake me in the dark, and I feared that my soul would be ripped from me. I invoked Saint Michael in the dream, and then I passed out.

The Devil’s Best Trick

And then I was again in my bunk in my cell on the top floor of the building. I was awake. Was I awake then too? I do not know. It took awhile for the terror to leave me. I looked at my alarm clock. It was just a little after 3:00 AM. I did not sleep again that night, and I did not want to be in the dark. So I went out of the cell into a day room. There are four prisoners who sleep out there due to overcrowding and a shortage of cells .I sat there until sunrise.

For the rest of the day and for many days to follow, the dream shadowed over me like a dark cloud. At the other end of that day, at mail call around 6:00 PM, I received my copy of The Wall Street Journal. I usually turn first to the Journal’s Editorial Page, a habit likely born from the fact that I was in it several times. The Journal has a daily, and prominent, book review on the top right of its main Opinion Page. On this day (May 28,2024) the Review was by Micah Mattix entitled, “In Search of the Unseen Evil.” It was a review of a book by Randall Sullivan entitled, “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared.”

The review was thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps only slightly skeptical of the subject matter. After my experience of the early morning hours of that same day, I was not skeptical at all. But there are many other factors that diminish my skepticism about the existence of personified evil. The image on our Home Page, reproduced atop this post, makes that as clear as it can be.

Randall Sullivan is no stranger to the Catholic mystical. A previous book, The Miracle Detective (2004) is reported to have profoundly changed him. His current book cited above, opens with a question: “Does the Devil exist, or is he a figment of our imagination?” The second question follows: “If he is real, who or what are we describing when we refer to ‘the Devil’”? Sullivan concludes his book with a statement of personal conviction: “There is a Devil, a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it. To acknowledge this, he says, is to throw open the door “the Devil hides behind.”

That certainly got my attention. I was stunned to read this in the WSJ on the same day as my haunting dream. Replaying the dream in my mind, one of my first thoughts was to wonder whether the location of the Evil entity — a “far left” corner — was actually a metaphor for a present trend in our culture. It is a trend I wrote about in my recent post (published just a week before my dream) “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” There is a lot there that I imagine the Devil would prefer you and I did not ponder.

Today many people no longer believe in the Devil — Randall Sullivan gives it an uppercase “D” throughout — and many of those also no longer believe in God. This is a cultural phenomenon that the Devil finds most promising. It’s the theme of a psychological masterpiece by C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I wrote of it in Holy Week this year in a post that I am certain the Devil would also prefer that you did not see. In his book, C.S. Lewis laid out the long, subtle descent upon which humans travail a slippery slope away from God:

“It does not matter how small sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge a man away from the Light and out into the Nothing... . Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

— The Screwtape Letters, p. 60-61

Getting you to look away by altering your belief system to discard his very existence is, as Randall Sullivan entitled his book, The Devil’s Best Trick. Don’t fall for it. We have seen the face of evil many times as it overtakes human beings lured to act on its behalf. Two recent and vivid examples are “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing,” and Pornchai Moontri’s striking “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

Angelic Justice

I'm sorry if this gets a little weird, but at 3:00 AM on another dark night — this one in 2016 — I had a prequel to this mysterious dream. It was preceded by all manner of dark clouds gathering on the horizon of my life in a time of chaotic upheavals. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016 the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.

In the dream, I found myself gazing out the small barred window in the prison cell in which I lived then with Pornchai “Max” Moontri. It was four years before his deportation to Thailand. A small stretch of sky was all that I could see beyond our cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see my friend, Max, fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was eerily familiar and someone I felt I knew, but in recalling the dream I could not recall what he looked like.

He pointed to the sky and asked,“What do you see?” I replied, “I see only the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the Guardian. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light connecting them. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. And again, we do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. Then the Guardian said just one sentence before departing my dream: “Michael dwells within the light.”

I stood there for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awoke in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only the invasive prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.”

Later that morning, I called a friend. I was embarrassed to relate the dream, but I asked her to search an astronomy database to see if a triangular constellation actually exists. This was what was sent to me:

“1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. A light year is thus a distance of 5. 6 trillion miles. [It’ s a difficult calculation, but the distance of this object in miles is 12.2 billion times 5.6 trillion. Good luck with the math!]

"A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjuna Dey of Johns Hopkins University was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when the team noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy as being 90 million light- years farther than the previous most distant galaxy ever before discovered. They dubbed this discovery, ‘RD1.’

“Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, [knowledge first discovered by famed physicist and mathematician, Father George Lemaitre] Galaxy RD1 was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the Cosmos. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from our post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,” co-written by me and Oxford priest-physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe born in an instant, “out of nothing.”

In the early Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis account of Creation, God’s declaration, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), “God separated the light from the darkness.” For Saint Augustine, this was the moment the angels fell and were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts. Is this all metaphor or is it real? On a spiritual level it is very real.

This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are dreams or our struggles or pain. We are individuals, but we are also a collective part of an immense tapestry God has woven toward a specific end. And within the threads, we can find allies. I could no longer face the darkness without them.

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From The Prayer of Saint Pope Leo XIII against Apostate Angels :

“Most Glorious Prince of the Heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Come to the aid of man whom God has created to His likeness, and who He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, the ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.”

— An Excerpt from the Prayer of St. Pope Leo XIII, 1878-1903

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will also visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls. And please subscribe if you have not already done so. It’s free, and we usually only haunt your inbox once per week.

A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ

Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light

Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle

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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 over two decades of sponsorship of the defense of Father MacRae and other wrongfully convicted.

It is imperative for us that the National Center for Reason and Justice website at NCRJ.org remain in place. It contains volumes of crucial critical legal information on the Father MacRae case and must be preserved for the time being. We have been granted permission from the NCRJ to continue to maintain its website. Doing so 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.

Thank you. May the Lord Bless you and keep you .

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.”

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Keene New Hampshire sex crimes Detective James McLaughlin developed claims against a Catholic priest while suppressing exculpatory evidence and coercing witnesses.

Editor’s Note: The following guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald is a response to Fr. Gordon MacRae’s recent, “Predator Police: The New Hampshire Laurie List Bombshell.”

January 26, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Last week, Fr. Gordon MacRae wrote here about the manipulation of facts and witnesses in his 1994 trial on charges brought forward by former Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin. This manipulation included allegations that he coerced and threatened a witness, Debra Collett, to alter her first-hand testimony because it did not agree with his bias. Another witness, a former accuser of Father MacRae who recanted, alleged that McLaughlin presented him with a proffered bribe to concoct a false claim against MacRae and conspired to attempt perjured testimony before a grand jury.

These are very serious allegations. They were uncovered years after the trial by former FBI Special Agent James Abbott who conducted a three year investigation of this case. Mr. Abbott obtained signed statements from these witnesses and others that became part of a habeas corpus petition seeking to free Father MacRae from an unjust imprisonment.

As MacRae’s post linked above points out, New Hampshire judges at both state and federal levels overlooked these allegations, and declined to allow an evidentiary hearing to permit these witnesses to testify under oath. From a political standpoint, this may be business as usual in New Hampshire. From a justice standpoint, it is most disturbing.

At the start of 2022, advocates for Father MacRae learned that former Detective James McLaughlin appears on a newly published list of police officers with professional misconduct or credibility issues previously held in secret personnel files. The list had been held in secret for years by the NH Attorney General, but a recent legal decision required its public release. Formally called the “Exculpatory Evidence Schedule,” the list is also known as the “Laurie List” for the NH Supreme Court case that initiated it.

It came as no surprise to discover Detective McLaughlin on this list for a 1985 incident of “Falsification of Records.” That was nine years before MacRae’s trial. Over fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brady v. Maryland that state and federal prosecutors are required under the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution to reveal to defendants and legal counsel all exculpatory evidence uncovered in the investigation of a case.

The failure of prosecutors to reveal the “falsification of records” charge against Detective McLaughlin was a violation of what is known as the “Brady Rule” that can and should overturn a conviction. As a minimum, it constitutes new evidence that can reopen a case for judicial review of the entire case.

Advocates first learned of this Brady violation from an article published at InDepthNH.org by Damien Fisher entitled, “AG Hides Some ‘Laurie List’ Names Hours After Release.” The article, though largely accurate, contained some misinformation. It described MacRae as a “former” Catholic priest which is not accurate. It also cited that MacRae “claimed that McLaughlin offered to pay cash to one of his accusers.” That claim was not made by MacRae, but by the accuser himself who recanted in a signed statement obtained by former FBI Agent James Abbott.

Politics and Prosecution

The New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism, which publishes InDepthNH.org, is continuing its lawsuit seeking full and unredacted disclosure of the “Laurie List” in its entirety. A more recent article by Damien Fisher, “Famed Keene Cop Called Out for Federal Entrapment” (January 11, 2022) detailed a clear case of entrapment by McLaughlin. The article describes the original “Laurie List” charge of “Falsification of Records” by McLaughlin as “Falsification of Evidence.”

Noted Boston lawyers Harvey Silverglate and Alan Dershowitz are long-time associates in the cause of preservation of our civil rights and civil liberties. Mr. Dershowitz wrote the Forward for Silverglate’s acclaimed 2009 book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. The following is an excerpt:

“Our system of investigation and prosecution is unique in the world. We [in America] have politicized the role of prosecutor, not only at the federal level but in all of our states and counties as well. Nowhere else are prosecutors (or judges) elected. Indeed, it is unthinkable in most parts of the world to have prosecutors run for office, make campaign promises and solicit contributions. In the United States, prosecutors are not only elected but the job is a stepping stone to higher office as evidenced by the fact that nearly every congressman or senator who ever practiced law once served as a prosecutor. Winning becomes more important than doing justice.” (p. xxv)

There were two prosecutors at Father Gordon MacRae’s 1994 trial. One inexplicably took his own life several years later after the first articles challenging this case appeared in The Wall Street Journal and were published along with the items in our Documents page at a site that preceded MacRae’s blog. The lead prosecutor was Bruce Elliot Reynolds. At the time of the high profile trial, he used its notoriety to campaign for another Assistant County Attorney in his office who was running to unseat the incumbent. In New Hampshire, a County Attorney is equivalent to a District Attorney in other states.

There was a lot that went on behind the scenes of this trial. The lead prosecutor was reined in by the judge for sensational media statements about the trial which could (and did) taint the jury pool. The trial drew lots of local news coverage. As it got under way, Mr. Reynolds was chastised by Judge Arthur Brennan for wearing his campaign button before news cameras.

On the day after the trial, for reasons unknown, Reynolds was fired by the winner of the election, the incumbent against whom he was campaigning. Sometime later, Reynolds decided to run for County Attorney himself. His campaign cited his “vigorous” prosecution of Father Gordon MacRae as his most significant “tough on crime” career achievement. Mr. Reynolds was then exposed for some sort of tax matter, dropped out of the race, and left the state. He relocated to the State of Wisconsin.

Prior to the trial, Reynolds sent a letter to MacRae’s defense counsel which laid out terms for a strikingly lenient plea deal for a sentence of one to three years in prison if MacRae would simply plead guilty. He refused this offer because he is not guilty. He refused a similar offer in the middle of trial when the offer was reduced to one-to-two years. The prosecutor asked what it would take to get MacRae to take the deal. His lawyer’s answer: “The dismissal of charges because he is innocent.”

It seemed clear throughout pretrial motion hearings and the trial itself that the real prosecution of this case was carried out by Detective James McLaughlin, the sole sex crimes detective among the 25 or so officers in the Keene, NH Police Department. An account of how Detective McLaughlin investigated this matter is laid out in “Wrongful Convictions: the Other Police Misconduct.”

A Conspiracy of Fraud

This trial was a classic example of why the blending of politics and the justice system often defeats justice. The trial was not about arriving at the truth. It was all about winning, at any cost, because political aspirations and careers were at stake. In no other arena but the political could a prosecution accept without question testimony from a grown man who claimed that he was sexually assaulted five times by a Catholic priest a dozen years earlier at age 15, but returned to be assaulted again and again for a total of five times because he repressed all memory of the vicious assaults from week to week.

Only political blindness could deny and obfuscate the fact that a $200,000 settlement from a Catholic diocese is a possible enticement for perjury and fraud. As Alan Dershowitz observed above, “Winning becomes more important than doing justice.” Such an arena requires the work of an unethical crusader to mold and shape a case toward that end. In Detective James McLaughlin, the State had just such a crusader.

At the “Documents” section on this site is a three-part case history which was the result of substantial research. It includes a most telling document entitled, “United States District Court: Gordon J. MacRae v. James F. McLaughlin, et al.” It requires a little background. Prior to the 1994 MacRae trial, the suppression of evidence and one-sided media coverage was so great that Father MacRae felt his only recourse was to file a lawsuit of his own. It lays out the bold but simple truth of this matter. No one refuted even one of its many claims.

The lawsuit was upheld and survived several attempts to have it thrown out, but in the end it had to be dismissed without prejudice — meaning without a judicial ruling — when MacRae was convicted at trial. He could only bring the lawsuit again if the underlying convictions were resolved. This document lays out perhaps the most chilling factual abuse of police power in this or virtually any other case. It is well worth a review.

Prior to this trial MacRae voluntarily took, and conclusively passed, two polygraph examinations with a noted expert. Some of Detective McLaughlin police reports made allusions to the possible creation of child pornography by MacRae. At the time of his sentencing, Judge Arthur Brennan cited this, claiming that “This Court has heard clear and compelling evidence that you created pornography of your victims.” This never surfaced at all during the trial, but the ugly accusation at sentencing was later used for a purely evil endeavor. It was used by SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to bolster a crimes against humanity charge targetting Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Mercifully the effort failed. Eleven years later in 2005 Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal questioned Detective McLaughlin about the nature and substance of that evidence. “There was never any evidence of child pornography,” he admitted. In this entire matter, that was the only time McLaughlin told the truth.

During the trial, two court observers reported spotting a woman in the gallery giving hand signals to Thomas Grover to begin crying during his testimony. It came after he testified that he was unaware of any plan to sue the Catholic Church. He was asked by MacRae’s counsel to reveal to whom he went first with his accusations: the police or a lawyer. At this point, Ms. Pauline Goupil was observed from the gallery signalling Grover to cry. He was riveted upon her for his entire testimony. At that point she was seen placing her fingers below her eye and then down her cheek in a pantomime of crying. In response, 27-year-old Grover wept loudly and at length. The two witnesses who observed it reported it to the defense counsel who then approached the bench. Judge Brennan cleared the jury from the court and called Ms. Goupil to the stand. She identified herself as a therapist retained by Thomas Grover at the behest of his attorney. All treatment records of Mr. Grover were to be reviewed by the defense pretrial, but neither Pauline Goupil’s records nor the fact of her treatment of Grover were revealed.

Hard evidence surfaced pretrial that Detective McLaughlin conducted some of his one-sided investigation, not from his Keene police office, but from 60 miles away in the law office of Robert Upton, the personal injury lawyer who brought a lawsuit on behalf of Thomas Grover and obtained a $200,000 settlement from the Diocese of Manchester. Family members of Grover revealed years later that Grover was coached to “act crazy” before the jury, to appear vulnerable, and to commit perjury in regard to some of his testimony. When asked who did this coaching, their answer was Pauline Goupil and Detective McLaughlin. These family members, the former wife and stepson of Thomas Grover, were also barred from giving testimony under oath. The two people who observed Pauline Goupil’s courtroom witness tampering were also barred from testifying.

A public debt is owed to the NH Center for Public Interest Journalism which publishes InDepthNH.org. The Center continues an open lawsuit contending that the new law that only partially released the “Laurie List” does not protect the public right to know its extent.

In a 2003 Concord Monitor article — now apparently removed from the Internet — fellow Keene, NH officer Sgt. Hal Brown defended McLaughlin’s shady tactics and actions:

“It’s our job to ferret the criminal element out of society.”

I believe Father MacRae would today agree with me that those are very scary words!

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post on your social media.

You may also be interested in these related articles:

Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Police Investigative Misconduct Railroaded an Innocent Catholic Priest

A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph LaPlante’s Court

Several years after sentencing Father Gordon MacRae to life in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan was arrested in Washington, DC in 2011 during a protest in which he tried to occupy the US Capitol Building.