Weaponized Psychology: The Psych Evals of Father MacRae

Writer Damien Fisher cited psychological reports to bolster the condemnation of a priest in the court of public opinion, but some omitted facts expose a cover-up.

October 12, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Editor’s Note: The following is Part Two of a series of posts by multiple writers presenting facts in the case of a wrongly imprisoned priest that some in the media have ignored or distorted. Part One, posted here one week ago, was: “A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae.”

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Part One in this series, linked above, explores a tendency of some in modern day news media to simply mimic material gleaned from prosecutorial officials. In news coverage, this practice has increasingly come to replace the hard work of investigative journalism and the natural skepticism every journalist should have.

One of the factors that irked me and other writers in Damien Fisher’s recent coverage of the MacRae story was his blind acceptance of an old and inadequate psychological evaluation of the accused priest that was debunked a decade ago. In 2012, a Catholic magazine published a letter to the editor from a reader of Father MacRae’s blog who defended him. In response, a member of SNAP, the activist Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, wrote a rebuttal which was also published citing psychological evaluations of MacRae as evidence of his presumed guilt.

I wrote a more up-to-date and factual response, but it was a testament to the one-sided jaundice of even Catholic media on this topic that the lurid claims against the priest were published while my factual response was not. Given that Damien Fisher’s recent article cited here a week ago referenced the same biased and one-sided reports, I now present anew what I first uncovered in 2012.

Like all accused Catholic priests, Fr. Gordon MacRae was required by Church officials to undergo a psychological evaluation. It was one of the many travesties of justice in this case that elements of two of those reports inexplicably ended up in public view while a far more extensive and professional report did not.

Mr. Fisher gleaned his information from a 2003 Grand Jury Report on the Diocese of Manchester that referenced an inadequate and one-sided evaluation from an M.A. level clinician with a state contract to evaluate those accused of sexual offenses. The Grand Jury Report omitted a much broader and more professional assessment from a team of licensed psychologists and psychiatric experts that negates the validity of the evaluation cited in the Grand Jury Report and repeated by Damien Fisher.

It is indeed correct that MacRae was labeled a “fixated sexual offender” in a 1989 report by a masters-level clinician at the Strafford Guidance Center, a New Hampshire outpatient center with a state contract to evaluate those accused of sexual offenses. This evaluation was the result of a misdemeanor solicitation charge that was debunked extensively in my article, “A Reporter’s Bias Taints the Defense of Fr Gordon MacRae.”

A second evaluation was conducted over a four-day period at the now-closed House of Affirmation, a treatment center for clergy in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. It was entirely prosecutorial in nature, and in many ways it violated the priest’s basic civil rights. It weaponized the psychological process, reporting, for example, a finding that “Father MacRae exhibits extremely high abstract intellectual ability.” That result, from a single evaluation tool called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, was later used to unjustly label the accused priest as a potential sociopathic manipulator. The report and its conclusions were criminally unprofessional.

EEG recorded during scanning session.

A Forensic Search for Truth

Another, far more extensive evaluation was conducted by a team of three doctoral-level forensic clinical psychologists and two staff psychiatrists with decades of experience in the assessment of offenders. This in-depth assessment was conducted over a period of months at an inpatient facility, the Villa Louis Martin Center in New Mexico. What follows are excerpts of that report introduced by licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Peter Lechner, Ph.D.:

“Of the reports mentioned earlier, one from House of Affirmation where Fr. MacRae spent four days and the other from the Strafford Guidance Clinic where he was evaluated, according to their report, for a two-hour period, they arrived at far-reaching, all embracing and definitive conclusions in regard to Fr. MacRae. The staff at VLM believes that such time periods would be inadequate to properly understand complex problems.

“The conclusions we arrived at came after many months.... It became clear that [Fr. MacRae] did not fit the description of the Strafford Guidance Clinic. He had a depth of conscientiousness and sensitivity to others, and a very high degree of ethical concern that did not fit with what their report said of him. Fr. MacRae does NOT fit the description of a fixated sexual offender. The reports are inaccurate.”

— 1990 Evaluation Report of the staff at Villa Louis Martin

Dr. Lechner went on to describe that the Strafford Guidance Center evaluation was conducted by an unlicensed masters-level clinician. It consisted of a single psychological test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which was dismissed by the evaluator as “unrevealing and within normal range.” The sweeping negative conclusions of the rest of the report, according to the file, were arrived at based on three 45-minute interviews over the course of six weeks.

The clinician began his assessment with clear bias. The mere fact that MacRae is a Catholic priest with a commitment to practice celibacy, like all priests, was itself treated as sexually aberrant by the evaluator. His process and conclusions were dismissed as invalid and unjust by staff at the Villa Louis Martin Center. They concluded that “Two hours of interviews by a masters-level clinician is simply not professionally adequate to brand a man in the court of public opinion for the remainder of his life.” The director of the VLM Center added another comment to his report:

“In my report to the NH Department of Probation, I mentioned the accusations that had been made in the above reports by way of background information regarding what had been said about [Fr. MacRae]. I indicated that he did not present as someone obsessed by sexual fantasies or driven to act out. I then went on to write about our assessment and the medical issues [MacRae] faced. I was later dismayed to find out that my reports were misquoted, and positive statements that were essential to the reports were left out. This I feel was a serious injustice.”

The far more comprehensive VLM report by Dr. Lechner and his staff directly refuted the impressions of the Stafford Guidance Center assessment arrived at after three 45-minute interviews. However, the prosecutorial files released by the Diocese of Manchester after its bishop signed over the rights of the priests involved, and published online by the Attorney General in 2003 omitted the more professional report opting to publish only the impressions of the negatively biased one.

In the far more extensive report, the director of the VLM facility explained that MacRae remained at the Center for one year in 1989, an unusual length of time for inpatient treatment, but it was not because he was diagnosed as a sexual offender. That was discounted earlier. MacRae remained at the center for a year because a neurological evaluation that included an EEG and MRI revealed a diagnosis of epilepsy.

It has been professionally suggested that a diagnosis of untreated epilepsy and complex partial seizure disorder that was difficult to manage raised further questions about the legitimacy of the priest’s 1988 misdemeanor plea entered into without legal counsel after hours of intense badgering by a police detective with an agenda other than truth. This was disclosed in my article one week ago.

The VLM report of the evaluation of Fr. MacRae indicated that MacRae succumbed to coercion under duress in 1988 while talked into waiving his Constitutional right to legal counsel because Detective McLaughlin conned him into believing that he would be sparing the Church from adverse publicity if he took the plea. If MacRae is to be faulted for anything in this picture, the report concluded, “it is for placing his own well-being second.”

That 1988 misdemeanor charge was brought forward and propagated by the same detective who would five years later charge MacRae with more serious, but just as dubious offenses that now date back forty years. This is the same detective who now appears on a previously secret list accused of falsifying records, and has now also been accused of lying, erasing tapes, and tampering with evidence.

Four years after writing the Strafford Guidance Center report on MacRae, its author applied for employment at the Villa Louis Martin Center citing its thorough assessment of the priest as the reason for his desire to work there.

When Detective James McLaughlin’s new allegations emerged with new demands for settlement money in 1993, Fr. MacRae voluntarily submitted to two polygraph examinations with an expert. He passed both conclusively. No one who accused MacRae would agree to take a polygraph.

The Most Expert Evaluation

Perhaps the most important assessment, however, is one uncovered by Fr. George David Byers revealed in his article “Omertà in a Catholic Chancery: Affidavits Expanded.” Over 28 years in the New Hampshire State Prison, Fr. MacRae has never been even suspected of any form of predation. The prison system’s own evaluation labeled him at the lowest level of risk for any form of aberrant sexual interest or behavior. For 15 of those years MacRae was housed in a 60-square-foot cell with Pornchai Moontri, an adult survivor of sexual abuse. There is perhaps no better expert on the character of Fr. MacRae.

In Fr. Byers’ article linked above, he conveys a true story revealed to him by Pornchai:

“Pornchai has helped me to understand a truth that is nearly universal among those who have in fact been victims of sexual assault. The only thing that is as obnoxious to them as having been raped is to see their own sufferings capitalized upon by false accusers for money, and by clericalists who make themselves into heroes by paying out settlements with no evidence or due process of law. Priests are too often considered guilty just for being accused.

“Prison, by nature, is often a violent place. As a child of 12 brought to the State of Maine from a foreign country, Pornchai became a victim of violent sexual abuse. When Pornchai went to prison at age 18, he dealt with prison violence in the only way he could. He vowed that he would never again be someone’s victim. So he understandably met violence with violence of his own. It landed him in repeated long years in solitary confinement.

“After 14 years, Pornchai was transferred to the New Hampshire prison. He ended up in a cell with a man accused and convicted of the very thing that destroyed his life. It did not take him long — with his innate alertness to victimization — to discover that Father G had been falsely accused. Pornchai once told me this story that I held off writing until he was out of the prison system:

‘One day, I got a notice from the prison mental health department that a new 2O-week program was beginning called ‘Interpersonal Violence.’ My friend Father G thought it might be an opportunity for me so I said I would go if he goes with me. So we both signed up for it. Prison is filled with needy young men who have really broken lives. Some of them look for safe, comfortable older prisoners who might buy them things and take care of them. The result is a sort of mutual exploitation and prisons are filled with this. One young kid, about 19, who was attending the program quickly tried to latch on to Father G without knowing anything about him. I was going to speak with the kid, but decided to wait.

‘Over the next few sessions as I sat next to Father G, I was aware of how this kid was skillfully trying to gain his interest and maneuver his way into his life, but Father G was oblivious to it. Later that night I told him what I observed, but he had no idea what I was talking about. At the next session, Father G and I simply agreed to switch seats. In all his years in prison, Father G has been surrounded by people like this, many of them young drug addicts who would sell their soul for a few bucks for drugs. In all those years, Father G was never observed or even suspected of having any interest in them at all except to show those receptive to it a way out of their prison within a prison.’ ”

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IMPORTANT EDITOR’S NOTE:

During the 15 years that Fr. MacRae and Pornchai Moontri lived in the same prison cell, MacRae investigated Pornchai’s life and wrote about it in an explosive account that brought his abuser to justice. Richard Alan Bailey was convicted in 2018 on 40 felony counts of child sexual abuse. This most important story is told in

“Getting Away With Murder on the Island of Guam.”

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BREAKING NEWS — NEW IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

Nationally prominent criminal-defense and civil-rights Attorney Harvey Silverglate has just published an op-ed on developments in the Fr. MacRae case in the WSJ. This is the fourth major article in the WSJ on this story. We have reprinted the op-ed so it may be viewed by our readers:

Justice Delayed for Father MacRae by Harvey A. Silverglate

How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night

Prayers for justice, for the fall of prison walls, are prayers for hope. On the night hope fell, Fr Benedict Groeschel served upon me a summons from the Highest Court.

I don’t think I have ever struggled with a post as I struggle now with this one. It is painful to write, and, in part at least, I know it will be painful to read. What I am about to describe is an earlier scene in the story of my own passion narrative that you do not know about, and now it is time to put it openly before you. I only ask you to withhold judgment for the judgment on this story is not yours to have. And I ask that you bear with me to the end for, as you will read, that is exactly what I am doing.

This confession of sorts was prompted by the 54-day Rosary Novena in which so many readers of Beyond These Stone Walls are engaged on my behalf. Many others who could not commit to that effort are offering prayers and sacrifices for those who are. Some include our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in these prayers, and I am most grateful for that. I mentioned in a post two weeks ago that I have been simply lost for words by this outpouring of faith and hope, and I will have something to say about it in my post this week.

But that was not entirely true. I have not been as “lost for words” as I claimed. It’s just that the words that come, the words that I must convey to you now, are from a time when my own faith and hope fell into the darkest of nights, and I fear you may think less of me for it. That is what I risk for total candor, but I risk far more if I do not speak up.

When my post, “Seven Years Behind These Stone Walls” appeared on BTSW on June 29, some readers surprised me with an overture to begin a 54-Day Rosary Novena for the cause of justice. It was to begin on the following day, June 30, the Commemoration of the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome.

Your prayer for me is much more a prayer for hope, and you may have no idea how much that prayer is needed. Most have no idea how fragile hope can be for the falsely accused. BTSW reader, Helen, sent me a note asking if I am conscious of the prayer support of so many. What I have been most conscious of is what happened on the morning this Rosary Novena began.

At 3:00 AM that Thursday morning, June 30th, I was awakened in my cell from a very vivid and troubling dream. You know that in February I underwent surgery and now have a seven-inch scar extending under my ribcage from the front to my side. In the dream, I woke up with a strange sensation. I lifted my shirt to discover with horror that my scar had opened and blood and water were pouring out from it drenching everything. It was not water mixed with blood. Both were streaming out of the open wound, blood on one side and water on the other. I tried to put my hand over it to stop it, but the flow continued right through my hand. It went on for a long time, and in my subconscious mind this was somehow connected with your prayers.

When I finally awoke for real, I quickly sat up and lifted my shirt. I grabbed my book light and a mirror, but all was dry and the scar was sealed and intact. It was a little after 3:00 AM and I was filled with anxiety and had trouble breathing.

So I got up and paced around this cell. Soon after, Pornchai was awakened in the bunk above me. He asked me what was wrong. I was shaken, but I told him about the dream. As I spoke, he glanced over my shoulder at the Divine Mercy image on our cell wall. Pornchai got it immediately, but I am a little slow in such matters. Saint Faustina wrote:

“During prayer I heard these words within me: The two rays denote Blood and Water. The pale ray stands for the Water which makes souls righteous. The red ray stands for the Blood which is the life of souls... These two rays issued forth from the very depth of my tender mercy when my agonized heart was pierced by a lance on the Cross.… Happy is the one who will dwell in their shelter for the just hand of God shall not lay hold of him.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 299

Later that morning, I called Father George David Byers and told him about this dream. It was only then that I connected it with an event in the Gospel of John (19:34), “But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.” Please do not misunderstand me. I have no messianic delusions whatsoever. Christ asked, and I merely fled. The first stunning lines of Francis Thompson’s haunting, “The Hound of Heaven” capture best what happened when I was first issued a summons to Divine Mercy:

“I fled him, down the night and down the days; I fled him, down the arches of the years; I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the midst of tears, I hid from him.”

Christ at the Crossroads

A note on John 19:34 describes the flow of blood and water as evidence of Christ’s humanity, that place where His life and that of fallen humanity intersects. The dream has stayed with me through the days of your prayers, and I find it to be both scary and hopeful. The hardest, most unrepentant criminal here fears only one thing: dying in prison. You can imagine then the toll that such a prospect takes on someone wrongfully imprisoned.

So of course I want your prayers to have real meaning, and to succeed despite the fact that I am not worthy of them. I am not worthy of them because there was a time in my life when, on the night of my own Gethsemane, faith and hope utterly failed me and I fell. In my hopelessness, I attempted to take my own life, and was hospitalized for it.

I have to try to convey the context. It was May of 1993, weeks after I had been accused. At the time, ironically, I served in ministry as Director of Admissions of the New Mexico Servants of the Paraclete residential center for priests.

There is no point in the details, but what I did was serious, and deadly, and I should not have survived it. But I did survive. It is one thing for someone justly accused to face such charges, but to be falsely accused, summarily declared guilty by my own bishop and diocese, disposed for the sake of thirty pieces of silver, is devastating for a priest.

Complicating this picture was the fact that I have epilepsy — specifically, complex-partial seizure disorder with a focus bilaterally in the temporal lobes. That, combined with the crushing experience of being falsely accused and discarded, swept away in a moment of despair all frame of reference for my life as a priest, and left me drained of all resources.

This was a time when the U.S. church was reeling over the sudden emergence of many such claims from decades past, and many in the Church pretended to believe them all just to ease the path to quick, quiet financial settlement. It was the dawn of what Father George David Byers described as “The Judas Crisis.” As my broken spirit descended into chaos, I believed that a sacrifice was required, the sacrifice of the life of a priest, and I believed I was to be that sacrifice. It was a moment when all hope went out of my world, and my faith and sanity fell along with it.

By some miracle of actual grace, I survived. On that night late in May of 1993 I regained consciousness in the Intensive Care Unit of Albuquerque Presbyterian Hospital. I did not, for a time, know where, or even who I was, but within a day my mind came back on line as though rebooted. I felt the deepest darkest shame and despair over this shattering of all hope as my life and priesthood lay before me in utter ruins.

My friend, Father Clyde Landry, was there with me. He told me that I had written a letter to the Servant General, Father Liam Hoare, asserting my innocence of these charges, but asking his forgiveness for the sacrifice of my life because of the harm these false claims brought upon priesthood and Church. I do not know what became of that letter.

That night in my hospital room, my friend Father Clyde brought me something that he knew I treasured and might want. It was a portable shortwave radio. Later, when I was alone, still deeply shattered, I turned it on and placed the earpiece in my ear. I randomly turned the dial, then stopped suddenly.

I had used that radio on many nights as I surfed the shortwave band for broadcasts from around the world, but I had never before come across what I heard that night in Gethsemane. I distinctly heard intoned the “Salve Regina,” and then an announcer’s voice that I was listening to EWTN broadcasting on a shortwave band from Irondale, Alabama. Then I heard a clear and very familiar voice. It was the voice of someone I had known well many years earlier, but lost touch with. The lilting voice and Yonkers accent were unmistakable. It was Father Benedict Groeschel.

My Gift to the Lord: An Empty Vessel

Some time ago, I wrote a post in defense of Father Groeschel entitled, “Father Benedict Groeschel at EWTN: Time for a Moment of Truth.” What happened on the night I am now describing is why I wrote that post. He was accused of calling into question a claim of victimhood in the Catholic scandal, and the Gospel of Political Correctness that American bishops had cowardly agreed to was not going to spare him. The wolves began to circle Father Groeschel and several Catholic institutions he so generously served all began to get some distance from him. In my challenging post, I drew a line in the sand that many stood behind. “Not this time! Not this priest!” I wrote.

I wrote that post because twenty years earlier, Father Benedict Groeschel entered my darkest night with a message of hope, and a plan for redemption when all was lost. In that hospital bed that night, it was as though he was addressing me directly. I can only paraphrase it here, and hope that I am doing it justice:

“When life seems as though it has fallen apart, and you face an immeasurable sense of loss, whether the cause is tragic illness, or loss of a loved one, or financial ruin, or public shame, or grave injustice, the loss of all hope seems to be the final loss. It leaves you as though an empty vessel which you feel can never be filled again. This is a crucial and vulnerable time. It is also a moment when God is nearest to you.”

Father Groeschel went on that night to speak of the only response left for an empty vessel: a spirit of abandonment and surrender to God’s Providence. God alone can fill what has been torn asunder by the forces of this world. “Surrender control, for control of your life is an illusion,” he said. “Embrace surrender to God’s Providence so that your empty vessel may serve Him in the salvation not just of your soul, but of many souls.” I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, ready to hear these words and absorb them. Nothing made sense up to then, but Father Groeschel made total sense.

You may remember a post of mine about the suicide of another priest from my diocese, Father Richard Lower. I wrote of this tragedy in “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul.” After being informed by Monsignor Edward Arsenault of the emergence of a decades-old sexual abuse claim, Father Lower was given the usual 24 hours to vacate his parish and residence without a word to his parishioners whom he had served for a dozen years. He was to be just another priest who disappears in the night. In his darkest night, he walked out to a deserted mountain path and took his own life. In “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul” I wrote that I would have given anything to have been on that path with him. It’s because I HAVE been on that path, and I survived.

Some twenty-six accused U.S. Catholic priests have taken their own lives since the U.S. Bishops entered into The Judas Crisis by presuming every money-driven claim against a priest to be true. Whatever cynic presumes from this their guilt knows nothing of the identity of priesthood and its permanent bond with the notion of sacrifice. No priest should be required to sacrifice his life to satisfy the demands of contingency lawyers, insurance companies, and the agendas of those who despise the Church.

The Summons of Divine Mercy

The summons served upon me by Father Benedict Groeschel that night came from the Highest Court of justice, a Court in which Divine Mercy is its mirror image. It was actually the second time that summons was served. The first time was exactly one month earlier. A friend and coworker in the Servants of the Paraclete ministry to priests was Father Richard Drabik, MIC. He was also my spiritual director. You may recognize him as the former Provincial Superior of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, and the author of the Preface to the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina.

In early April, 1993, Father Drabik came to my office with a request. He was leaving for Rome a week later to concelebrate Mass at the Beatification of (then) Blessed Faustina on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 18, 1993. Father Drabik invited me to draft a petition that he would place on the altar at the Beatification. The petition I wrote was this simple note sealed in a small envelope:

“I ask for the intercession of Blessed Faustina that I may have the courage to be the priest God intends for me to be.”

Fifteen days after the Beatification, I was charged with crimes alleged to have taken place over a decade earlier, crimes that never took place at all, and the violent emptying of the vessel of my life and priesthood began. Two weeks later, the courage I asked for gave way to hopelessness as I lay in ICU hearing this summons repeated by Father Benedict Groesechel.

So on that awful night, I solemnly vowed to go the distance, to remain an empty vessel with hope and trust as my only choices in life while discerning God’s Providence. Since then, as you know if you have been an attentive reader of Beyond These Stone Walls, that summons to Divine Mercy has become woven into every fiber of my life, and not only my life, but many others.

The stunning evidence for this is found in many places, but one of the more striking is the medical miracle confirmed as attributed to Saint Faustina by the Vatican Congregation for the Cause of Saints. The recipient of that miracle was Mrs. Maureen Digan who shares a chapter along with Pornchai Moontri in Felix Carroll’s wondrous book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. Seeing Pornchai’s and Maureen’s stories together in that volume is to see Divine Mercy come full circle in my life and priesthood, and this empty vessel filled with hope beyond imagining. I thank you for your heroic prayers for justice on my behalf. The most fundamental aspect of justice is the preservation of hope.

“O Blood and Water which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as Fount of Mercy for us, I trust in You.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 309

“To priests who proclaim and extol My mercy, I will give wondrous power; I will anoint their words and touch the hearts of those to whom they will speak.”

— Diary of Saint Faustina, 1521

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Editor’s Note: This post continues next week on Beyond These Stone Walls with “Saint Maximilian Kolbe: A Knight at My Own Armageddon.”

And with joy and thanksgiving, Father Gordon MacRae wants you to know about the publication of an inspiring biography, A Friar’s Tale: Remembering Father Benedict J.Groeschel, C.F.R. by John Collins available from Our Sunday Visitor.

A Friar’s Tale — Remembering Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel by John Collins (Our Sunday Visitor)