A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers

A global pandemic, a world in chaos, divisive politics, sheepish shepherds, misguiding lights, Catholic confusion. Even in a year from hell, there was hope.

I offered Midnight Mass in my prison cell this Christmas. It was for the intentions of our readers beyond these stone walls. I much appreciate your presence here at this new site, and I hope you will subscribe. It makes things a lot easier for me.

The First Reading at Midnight Mass this year was from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was both familiar and comforting: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom, a light has shone” (Isaiah 9:2). Without a doubt it seemed as though Isaiah had walked through this year with me. He went on to bring some perspective to the present darkness: “For the yoke that burdened them, the pole on their shoulder, and the rod of their taskmaster you have smashed ... For a child is born to us, a son is given us. Upon his shoulder dominion rests” (Isaiah 9:4,6).

I thought the Prophet had really nailed my experience of dwelling in the land of gloom that was 2020. Of course, if you have been a regular reader, then you know that I cannot let a cool word like “gloom” pass by without a little digging. It’s a fascinating word with origins both obscure and mysterious. It first came into use in English around the Twelfth Century in the period that we now call Middle English. Unlike about half the vocabulary of that era, gloom has no Latin root, however.

My digging took me to a much older term, “the gloaming,” which arose from Anglo-Saxon tribes in the Fifth Century in the period we call Olde English. The gloaming referred to the dark of night just before the dawn when the first glow of twilight could be seen on the eastern horizon. We in the 21st Century cannot fathom the darkness of the Fifth. The gloaming was a time of both dark and the promise of light. The words, “gloom” and “glow” both arose from it even though they are functionally opposites.

That Midnight Mass excerpt from the Prophet Isaiah was packed with hidden meaning. “Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom, a light has shown.” The word “dwelt” (or dwelled) also comes from an Olde English term, “dwellan,” which originally meant “to be misled.” How and when it came to refer to a place in which you live is uncertain. It could thus be fair to reinterpret Isaiah’s Christmas prophecy in light of that original meaning: “Upon those misled in the land of gloom, a light has shown.”

Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo and the Bishop of the Diocese of Syracuse, Bishop Douglas J. Lucia

Misled by Earthly Powers

It is likely, however, that many or even most of you never got to hear that Midnight Mass proclamation from Isaiah because many civil authorities placed severe limits on the practice of your faith in 2020. The contradictions were staggering, but never explained. The coronavirus was extremely contagious in Catholic and other Christian churches, but only minimally during anti-police urban riots this year. Liquor stores (which in my State are all owned by the State) were deemed essential, along with abortion clinics, casinos, etc. Churches were deemed nonessential and saddled with draconian limits.

I believe that many have been misled in the current darkness of 2020, and fear has drawn some of us away from the light. The governors of New York and California, for example, imposed limits on Catholic Masses and other congregations that made no sense. In New York, a church that can accommodate 1,000 people was forced to limit Mass participation to ten, or 25 if the church was in a less infectious zone. Most of the news media has been complicit in furthering such propaganda. The pastor on one small Evangelical congregation began his Sunday service with strip club music while he loosened his tie and threw it into the pews. He explained that strip clubs are open in his state while churches were ordered closed.

I was encouraged recently when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an edict from New York Governor Cuomo declaring his limits on church attendance to be an unconstitutional infringement on the free exercise of religion as defined in the First Amendment. The Governor dismissed the SCOTUS ruling as “irrelevant and political.”

But then a bigger bomb dropped. After the Supreme Court ruling, the Bishop of Syracuse, Bishop Douglas Lucia, reinstated the very restrictions that the Court said the Governor could not impose. So Masses in churches that could hold 1,000 remained limited to 25. As in many areas, government imposed registration is also required. Even when some civil authorities did not demand this, some bishops imposed it anyway. This memo from the bishop of a large archdiocese was sent to his priests:

“Contact Tracing: Especially during the Christmas season, it is mandatory that each parish maintain a list of all persons attending services in the church including their contact information (i.e. phone number). Such lists shall be placed with parish financial records and maintained for a period of not less than six years.”

It is troubling, at best, that some bishops would confuse the care of souls with the exercise of their own Earthly powers as sheepish deputies of civil authority. I am by no means the first to recognize this troubling trend. I felt a glow of hope when Matthew Hennessey, the Deputy Editorial Features Editor for The Wall Street Journal, addressed this head-on in this OpEd, "No More Bishop Nice Guy" (December 9, 2020):

“We are told that lives have been saved by keeping churches half empty. Do we know how many souls have been lost? As a Catholic raising five children in the faith, I’m particularly concerned wit the future of my church ... It’s inspiring to see ordinary people stand up to bullies like (Governors) Cuomo an Newsom. But what are America’s bishops doing to inspire their flocks? What will they do? We are tired of watching our leaders kneel before junior varsity Caesars ... Show some backbone. Open the churches. Get rid of the sign-up sheets. No more roped off pews. No more 25% capacity ... Be the heroes we need you to be. The alternative is subservience. The alternative is empty pews forever. The pandemic generation may never return.”

— Matthew Hennessey

AMEN!

With prophetic witness early in the pandemic, Father James Altman courageously preached his now famous homily, “Memo to the Bishops of the World.” It came as Catholic Masses across the nation were shutting down and, for many, the Eucharist became inaccessible. It alarmed Father Altman, just as it alarms me, that many of the shutdown orders came, not from governors, but from our bishops. I wrote of this in what I think is the most urgent post of 2020, “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.”

From Fr. James Altman, “Memo to the Bishops of the World: The Faithful do not need you to look after their bodies. They need you to follow the supreme law of the Church and look after their souls.”

A Year of Pandemic in Prison

I just realized that I began this post with a description of my Christmas Eve Mass this year. Dorothy Rabinowitz did the same in a series in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Trials of Father MacRae.” Here is her first paragraph from seven years ago:

“Last Christmas Eve, his 19th behind bars, Catholic priest Gordon MacRae offered Mass in his cell at the New Hampshire state penitentiary. A quarter-ounce of unfermented wine and the host had been provided for the occasion, celebrated with the priest’s cellmate in attendance.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, "The Trials of Father MacRae," WSJ

The “cellmate in attendance” then was, of course, Pornchai Moontri. This year is the first time in 15 years that he has not been here with me at Christmas. It is during Mass that his absence is most deeply felt. It is a wound upon my heart that, despite all our valiant efforts, Pornchai remains in ICE detention soon to begin a fifth month beyond his sentence, which had been fully served. It is not too late to join me and Catholic League President Bill Donohue in our petition to the White House to “Help Pornchai Moontri.”

I know I am working backward in my description of the year spent in pandemic mode behind prison walls, but the last four months since Pornchai was taken away have been too busy to grieve.

Besides, I do not want to grieve. I want to rejoice, but I have had to postpone it until he arrives safely in Bangkok. You know from reading these pages all that happened to Pornchai in life. You also know that in the fifteen years in which we lived in the same prison cell, Saint Maximilian Kolbe insinuated himself into our lives in profound and mysterious ways. Together, with the help of Mary, Undoer of Knots, St. Maximilian and I set course to reverse the damage life had inflicted upon my friend who wrote of our lives here in “Pornchai Moontri: Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind.”

By the time Pornchai wrote those parting words to us, he and I had been through many trials together. Some have been recounted in these pages, but many others were not. One of them was our ordeal early in 2020 during which — we now both believe — we both contracted Covid 19.

It was late in January 2020. Everyone around us here had come down with a flu virus that moved among us like a wildfire. I went to work every day — even when I contracted it myself — because there seemed no cause to fear any contagion. Everyone with whom I had contact already had it. For some it seemed just a head cold. For others it was a more serious flu. For me and several others, it was devastating. I was fatigued to the point of collapse, chronically short of breath, and had frequent troubling episodes of cardiac arrhythmias — all what we later learned to be classic symptoms of Covid-19. I had this for all of February and well into March.

Pornchai also had it, but for only three weeks and not as severe. We just toughed it out, rested as much as we could, and looked after some others even worse off. By March, I had to seek medical intervention. I have a lifelong autoimmune disorder called sarcoidosis. It develops painful but otherwise benign tumors on the lymphnodes. The Covid — presumably Covid anyway — caused my immune system to go into overdrive. So I spent several weeks on prednizone to quiet the immune system. I was miserable, and I hope my posts at the time didn’t show it.

Pornchai and I both fully recovered, but I would not want to repeat the experience. To date, 231 prisoners here and 81 staff have tested positive with symptoms. Most went into quarantine, which in prison is quarantine from quarantine and it’s miserable. As the first and biggest wave traveled through the country, it had dire consequences for prisoners and equally so for you in the real world. For a time, my Sunday Mass in my cell was the only Mass offered in the entire state.

Beyond These Stone Walls

In the midst of all this misery, just as Covid was again rampaging, just as Pornchai was leaving, while separation loomed and life in prison became solitary for me, and filled with gloom, someone chose that moment to attack These Stone Walls and bring it down. There were some weeks of unclarity as we pondered what to do. It was also just as the elections in America were elevating to a state of frenzy.

At the end of October this year, we had serious decisions to make. I told Pornchai by telephone in ICE detention that These Stone Walls had come to an end. “It can’t end!” he said forcefully. He asked me, “What would Maximilian do?”

A proposal had been floated by a friend who announced that she had an inkling from some unknown grace to copy all the content from These Stone Walls and preserve it. I had no idea that she had done this. Then she proposed starting anew with a new name and blog format. Connecting with Father George David Byers and me, she chooses to remain in the background while rebuilding this Voice from the Wilderness. I have not yet seen it, but then again, I never saw These Stone Walls either.

Beyond TSW is a work in progress now, and is slowly being built. One feature of this new site format that I especially like is our “BTSW Library.” Instead of just chronologically listing posts by date, the Library displays them in multiple categories such as “Father Gordon MacRae Case,” “Mysteries of History,” “Science & Faith,” etc. like a real library’s card catalog where posts are sorted by subject. We have only a few categories up right now as the site is being rebuilt, but we expect to have at least twenty five. Our volunteer webmaster said that I “have written on so many topics that we could fill a library.” I think that is a polite way of saying that I have never had an unpublished thought!

Pornchai Moontri was thrilled and encouraged when I told him that he will have a category of his own. There was a time when he could not imagine a life beyond these stone walls. Now he cannot imagine life without it.

We have a new “ABOUT” page too, and bigger print! I still have a few things to write about so I hope you will stay, subscribe, and continue to walk in this land of gloom with us. Thank you for being here with us in this year of trials. You have been the glow that we see from beyond at twilight.

May the Lord Bless you and keep you in this New Year.

Father G.

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Editor's Note: Please share this post with others. You may also like to visit the related posts mentioned in this one:

The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

The Trials of Father MacRae by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ

Help Pornchai Moontri by Catholic League President Bill Donohue

Pornchai Moontri: Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind

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The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

Conspiracy theories abound about the new coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic. Evidence now points to an origin other than what the Chinese Communist Party has claimed.

March 5, 2023 — Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

Early in 2020, I wrote the post below about the burgeoning pandemic of Covid 19. My post rejected the Chinese Communist Government’s explanation of its origin. The CCG claimed, and still claims, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by natural means through an animal sold at the Wuhan, China open market. I laid out a case for why this is likely not so, and why it is much more likely that the virus escaped from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research and other experimentation was being conducted since 2013. This week, a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress concluded, along with the Department of Energy and the FBI, that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a Wuhan laboratory.

If the Chinese Communist Government had been transparent from the beginning, the world may have had a better response to this pandemic. But please remember: China is by force the People’s Republic, but Covid is by no means the people’s pandemic. The good people of China had nothing to do with this.

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My niece, Emily is a Registered Nurse in the specialized Covid-19 treatment unit of a large inner city hospital near Boston. Working many 16-hour days, she and many of the other RNs from that unit were told weeks ago that they cannot go home. Between grueling double shifts they have been staying at a local hotel because of their daily exposure.

Emily has two small children at home where her husband, a native of Hong Kong, is now caring for them while working from home. Recently, Emily took a quick break for a ten-minute virtual Face-Time visit with her family. A still from the visit was sent to my GTL tablet. Emily is masked, covered in her protective gear, and looking tired but resolute. Emily is a warrior on the front lines of battle. I am most proud of her and all medical staff working tirelessly to help contain a pandemic.

I am among those who bristle when some refer to the virus that causes Covid-19 as “the China virus.” I knew that some lurking in the darker corners of America would thus see a new enemy in the many Asian Americans who contribute to the welfare of this nation. Pointing fingers of blame at them is an ignorant and inhumane response to a pandemic that needs unity much more than it needs a fraudulent place to level blame.

There is no evidence to support some of the wilder theories that the virus behind Covid-19 was created and unleashed to destroy the economies of America and other democracies. That is nonsense. There is no economy more imperiled by this global pandemic than that of the People’s Republic of China.

But even among some of the wilder conspiracy theories there has emerged some grains of truth. The official story told by the Chinese Communist government has been that the virus originated entirely by accident at a wildlife market in Wuhan, central China and it likely began with a bat that was either sold at the market or infected another mammal sold at the market. I recently wrote of the plausibility of this in “Holy Week, Coronavirus, Loneliness, Politics, Yikes!”

That official account now seems only partially true. In a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley — a science writer from the United Kingdom where he is also a member of the House of Lords — wrote an intriguing and eye-opening account in “The Bats Behind the Pandemic” (WSJ, April 11-12, 2020). Here is his stunning revelation:

“RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species, Rhinolophus affinis, or rather a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China [over 1,000 miles from Wuhan]. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January [2020], the sample … contains the virus that causes Covid-19.”

As Lord Ridley points out, bats are sold in markets and provided to restaurants across China. The horseshoe bat, however, is a small species that is not typically consumed by humans nor is it sold in Wuhan’s now infamous wildlife market or “wet market.”

It is thus a “horrible coincidence” that China’s Institute of Virology, where the virus that causes Covid-19 has been studied since 2013, just happens to be in Wuhan, the origin of the current pandemic that the Chinese government is blaming on a marketplace. The Washington Post has reported that U.S. officials are now investigating whether the Wuhan lab is the actual source for the global pandemic.

A Global Pandemic from a Communist State

Such an investigation is very difficult to conduct without the cooperation of the Chinese Communist government which, like all such regimes, seeks to preserve itself more than its people. In China, the government filters all information through the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Early in the viral spread, the government expelled foreign journalists from The Wall Street Journal  and The Washington Post, first from Wuhan and then from the nation.

In 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to visit and assess the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The result was a pair of cables sent to Washington warning of inadequate safety measures and “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians” at the lab. The diplomats called for additional funding for the lab from the Chinese government to address these safety concerns. The funding recommendation was ignored. The Chinese government continues to cite the wildlife market as the accidental origin of the virus.

In December, 2019, a team of Wuhan CDC researchers were the subjects of a documentary film about their collection of virus samples from bats in caves across China. The researchers expressed concern about the risk of infection from the samples they obtained. The government then silenced under threat of arrest several local journalists and scientists who began to voice concerns over the emergence of the new virus.

In January, 2020, well after the virus was discovered and began its viral spread, the government allowed an immense banquet with 40,000 families in attendance to take place in Wuhan. At 11 million inhabitants, Wuhan is larger than any U.S. city. Its airport and train depots transport thousands of people per day to points all around the globe.

Of interest, Chinese researchers reported as recently as January 24 that the outbreak had no connection with the Wuhan market. The bat species now known to cause Covid-19 is not found anywhere near Wuhan. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton reported that Yuan Zhiming, a top researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, denied any connection with the lab and accused the Senator of “deliberately trying to mislead the people.” Yuan Zhiming also serves as Secretary for the lab’s Communist Party Committee.

It is also a “horrible coincidence” — horrible for the people of China, at least — that this global pandemic originated and was spread just in time to terminate the growing pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong that were beginning to spill over into mainland China. I am not suggesting that this coincidence is evidence of intent, for all that I have written here is merely circumstantial evidence. But there are rumblings now in Hong Kong to resume the pro-democracy movement. Never has there been a more important time to lend Western voices in support of them.

There is growing evidence that the whole truth has not been told. China has misled the world about this pandemic in other ways by continuing to falsify vital information. In a classified report to the White House, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that China has severely underreported the number of deaths related to the virus and its incidence of transmission.

There is evidence that the total number of cases that China has concealed is greater than the total number reported throughout the rest of the world. This deceit, according to Wall Street Journal  columnist Walter Russell Mead, “allowed a local outbreak to turn into a global disaster on a massive scale.”

The People’s Republic but NOT the People’s Pandemic

None of this, however, is the fault of the Chinese people. There is a vast difference between the Communist Chinese government (CCG) which is imposed on the people, and the people themselves. They are subjects of the People’s Republic of China but this is clearly not the people’s pandemic. Assessing a pandemic requires accurate knowledge of its origin, timeline, and rate of contagion but in a communist regime, truth is filtered through an agenda more interested in preserving the regime than its subjects.

Since childhood, I have had a fascination with and high regard for China and its people. The first urban community among the Chinese people dates back to the Xia Dynasty in pre-history. When Yu, the last of the ancient Chinese kings died, the people acclaimed his eldest son to take his place.

This was the first example of hereditary “dynastic” leadership. The Xia Dynasty survived for fourteen generations beginning two centuries before Melchizedek blessed Abraham in the 21st Century B.C. (For some historical context, see “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek”).

The stories of Chinese history that I treasured the most in my youth, however, were those told by Marco Polo thirty-four centuries later. Marco Polo’s father and uncle, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, left Venice in 1260 on a commercial venture to Constantinople (now Istanbul). They were forced by an outbreak of war behind them to continue moving east along the Volga River into present day Russia where they were trapped for three years. Then they joined a diplomatic mission to China to the Court of Kublai Khan.

Kublai Khan, grandson of the great Mongol warrior-king, Genghis Khan, received them warmly. The Khan (which means “ruler”) had embraced Buddhism and made it the Chinese state religion. But his reign also tolerated other religions. The Khan was fascinated with Christianity. He asked the Polo brothers to return home and persuade the pope to send scholars to China so he may learn more.

In 1269 A.D., nine years after their departure from Venice, the elder Polo brothers returned to present the Khan’s request to Pope Gregory X. The pope agreed to fund another journey to China to include two missionaries and Niccolo’s son, Marco Polo. Five years later, in 1275, the group reached the court of Kublai Khan where they spent the next 17 years.

The Khan took a great liking to Marco Polo whose stories of his adventures in China would later fascinate the Western World and open the Asian continent for trade with the West. During his time with Kublai Khan, the emperor sent Marco on several diplomatic missions to represent him in Sichuan province in the south of China and Yunnan province in the southwest.

Marco asked several times for the Khan to grant him leave to return to Venice, but the Khan would not agree. Finally, he asked Marco to escort a Chinese princess to Persia (now Iran) to marry its Mongol ruler and then return to Europe. Marco Polo arrived home in 1295, twenty years after leaving. Five centuries after Kublai Khan and Marco Polo brought China to the West, in the 17th Century Ming Dynasty, the Emperor Kangxi invited Jesuit priests to serve as astronomers and allowed them to instruct Catholic converts.

The relationship ended, however, when Pope Alexander VII ruled that the Jesuits must not permit converts to also practice their ancient Chinese ancestral rites. This did not irreparably disrupt Catholicism in China, however. Converts continue to be drawn to it up to the present day, but a threat to religious liberty is China’s other contagion, a story told in my recent post on the “Vatican-China Deal.”

What We Obtain Too Cheap, We May Esteem Too Lightly

Thanks for indulging me in all this history. It is told for a reason, and the reason is to convey that the Chinese people lived for nearly four millennia in a culture rich in honorable customs and openness to the world, including openness to science, faith and technology.

Communism and socialism were once seen as interchangeable terms. There are differences, but their goals remain the same. The socialist doctrine demands state ownership and control of all fundamental means of production and distribution of wealth. Unlike communism, socialism achieves its ends not by violent revolution, but by reconstruction of capitalist political systems through peaceful, democratic, means.

Communism and socialism advocate for the nationalization of natural resources, public utilities, banking and credit, and industry and trade. These are the tenets of the Socialist Party of the U.S., the Labour Party of the U.K., and the labor or social democratic parties of various other democracies.

What they advocate is a slippery slope. Americans and the Western World would do well to remember that the rise of socialism is not historically conducive to the preservation of individual rights and freedoms, including and especially religious freedoms. Like the Chinese Communist Party, in a socialist system the state is always in danger of becoming its own religion.

In China, it was not until the rise of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong in 1949 that communism became the official state religion of what from then on became the People’s Republic of China. Like all oppressive communist regimes, the real battle is over the minds and souls of the people. The Party views all competing loyalties — especially religious ones — with contempt.

But there is one result of the global pandemic unleashed in China that might today bring another snicker of contempt to the faces of the ruling regime. At Holy Week and Easter, 2020, State governments across America — the Cradle of Liberty and self-proclaimed bastion of the Freedom of Religion — ordered churches closed while the liquor stores remained open.

America may not be entirely free of government self-interest either. In the place where I live in captivity — though not by choice or by any act that justifies it — the state just happens to own all the liquor stores.

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You may also like this related post:

Catholics, Communist China, and Hope for Hong Kong

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