The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

Prayerful observance of Holy Week is a challenge in a climate of woke ideology and political outrage. Spend time with us this week Beyond These Stone Walls.

Something timely and fascinating was unearthed in the days just before Holy Week in 2021. It actually began in 1960 near the Dead Sea in Qumran, an ancient Hebrew settlement in Jordan. Archeologists discovered fragments showing that caves there were used as a hide-out by Bar Kochba’s rebel army which staged a three-year revolt against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem from AD 132-135.

The 1960 discovery included Roman coins, arrows, and a fragment of parchment bearing sixteen verses in Hebrew from the Book of Exodus. In a deep cave in Wadi Haver, archeologists also discovered several of Bar Kochba’s letters on papyri and wood.

Sixty-one years later, on March 16, 2021 the Israeli government announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments of Hebrew texts from the Prophets Zechariah and Nahum from an adjacent cave. The “Cave of Horrors,” as it is called, contained other evidence that it was used by followers of Bar Kochba to evade the Roman armies. The cave is located in the Judean desert about 262 feet (80 meters) below a cliff top.

The Bar Kochba rebellion took place about 60 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, an event predicted by Jesus during his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:28ff). In AD 70, Romans destroyed the Temple. The revolt of Bar Kochba was triggered 60 years later when Roman emperor Hadrian decided to erect a shrine to the mythological Roman god, Jupiter, upon the site of the Temple.

Emperor Hadrian came personally to Judea to put down the Bar Kochba revolt which ultimately cost the lives of over a half million Jews. The revolt was called the “Liberation of Jerusalem” by its adherents. It was led by Simon Ben Kosibah, known to the documents of the early Christian Church as Bar Kochba.

Hadrian and his General, Sextus Julius Severus, crushed the revolt by a long, slow starvation of the Jewish revolutionaries and their families who had been driven into the desert to take refuge in the desert caves. When it was all over, Hadrian destroyed what was left of Jerusalem. He then decreed that the whole Jewish nation should be barred, from that day forward, from entering the City of Jerusalem and its surrounding area so that “they may not even view from afar their ancestral home.”

Little is known today about the state of Christianity at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. It was a time in which a break between synagogue and church was taking place for Jewish Christians. A succession of thirteen Jewish-Christian bishops ruled Jerusalem until the time of Hadrian. At the time of the first destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Simeon, son of Clopas, was Bishop of Jerusalem and was martyred there. The Second Century historian Eusebius, reported that between the martyrdom of Simeon and the Bar Kochba revolt, “many thousands of Jews had come to believe in Christ.”

A Revolution in the Soul

These remnants of a revolution seem an almost fitting discovery just before Holy Week in this of all years. I believe that the bones of Bar Kochba’s faithful Jewish and Jewish-Christian revolutionaries are calling to us from those caves. I have never written a Holy Week post like this before because we have never had a Holy Week like this before in our lifetimes. For the second year in a row, many Catholics face a drastic reduction in their ability to participate in the liturgy and Sacraments of their Faith.

The first time Holy Week was limited by fears of a pandemic — in Holy Week 2020 — Christianity was caught off guard on a global scale. We never imagined that the restrictions set in place by both civil and religious authorities would further impede our faith as we approach another Holy Week a year later. We never imagined that many of our spiritual leaders would continue their passive acceptance of the severe limits placed on our practice of faith. I wrote of this at the turn of the year in “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.”

On what we today call “Passion Sunday,” Jesus entered Jerusalem as the triumphant Son of David, a title given to him by Sacred Scripture. As he entered the Holy City, he wept. It is notable that he did not weep over his knowledge that he enters Jerusalem to commence the Passion of the Christ. Saint Luke’s Passion Narrative makes clear that Jesus wept over Jerusalem and what he knew to be the coming destruction of the Temple and Holy City by Earthly Powers. He knew that many would lose their lives in revolt against it.

Many people in our era are just now awakening to a revolution in the soul as clarity dawns that demonic forces behind so-called “cancel culture” are using a pandemic to suppress our churches, our liturgy, our voices, and our communal values and expressions of faith. Many are also awakening to the reality that some — but certainly not all — of our religious leaders have acquiesced to this suppression, most by their silence, but some by outright endorsement of government-imposed shutdowns.

I have written of at least two instances in which the courts have overruled political impositions on Mass attendance and Catholic practice only to have the local Catholic bishop re-impose the same restrictions the courts had declared unconstitutional. I feel indebted to the many priests — and, in fairness, some bishops too — who have found courage in their fidelity to reject the modern version of one of my most memorable Holy Week posts: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”

That Whisper in the Ear of Judas

There is another force, also seemingly demonic in its origin, that has impinged upon our expressions of fidelity in the public square. I could sense it all around us throughout the last year and it has not abated. It has just festered and grown deeper within many of us as persons and as communities. I had a hard time putting a name on it until I saw it spelled out by one of my favorite columnists in The Wall Street Journal.

On March 9, 2021, political columnist Gerald F. Seib published a masterful analysis entitled “The Perpetual Outrage Machine Churns On.” You may not be able to read it without a subscription but I will give a brief summary of its evidence.

Two months after the January 6 events at the U.S. Capitol, prison-like fencing still surrounded the area. In Minneapolis, the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd — seemingly every horrid moment of it caught on national television — has commenced amid another round of protests. Innocent Asian Americans have suddenly become targets of physical and verbal assault across the nation. Four women at a Bed and Body Works store in Arizona erupted into a wild brawl. Eight persons were killed by a single gunman in a spa in Atlanta. Ten more were murdered while shopping in a Colorado supermarket.

This list of present day atrocities spawned by rage could go on for pages. There is an influence behind it. A master opportunist has been doing what he does best. In Holy Week 2020, I wrote “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light.” Its point was that the whisper into the ear of Judas at the Last Supper was preceded by other events. Before it happened, Satan entered into Judas (Luke 22:3) as Judas entered into a deal with the chief priests to betray Christ. His sin of greed left him vulnerable to the exploitation of Satan and his minions. That is always the case. The mere whisper in the dark is never enough. Through a long, slow, barely noticeable descent toward ever greater darkness, Satan finds an opportunity just as he found one in Judas Iscariot.

Our rage against the affairs of this world can also be a point of vulnerability. The great Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, described that path to spiritual destruction in his allegorical story, The Screwtape Letters (1940). He captures Satan instructing his nephew in the ways of spiritual warfare: “It is the cumulative effect of sin that draws the Man away from the Light and out into the Nothing ... The safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle curves, soft underfoot, without turns, without signposts, without a roadmap. (The Screwtape Letters, p. 61)

Satan exploits fear, rage, even political contention and a pandemic to drive a wedge not only between persons, but within them. If your life of faith has been assailed by the world, the flesh, and the devil in this past year, we invite you to walk the Way of the Cross Beyond These Stone Walls this week.

We are posting on Monday of Holy Week instead of our usual Wednesday post day to present this special Holy Week post and a short list of six others for you to read and share in each day of Holy Week. The list begins in an hour of darkness and ends in the glory of Salvation.

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Satan at The Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light

Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane

The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’

Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands

Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found

Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb

The McCarrick Report and the Silence of the Sacrificial Lambs

Days before release of a Vatican report on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American Archbishop called for the laicization of all priests ‘credibly’ accused.

In the last months of 2020, as the Catholic Bishops of the United States anxiously awaited the long sought release of a Vatican report on the Rise and Fall of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an obscure writer somewhere in France published a small but potent article on the knots of sin. Surprisingly, the subjects of the article were me and our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.

The article was published at a site entitled, in French, “Cheminons avec Marie Qui Défaits les Noeuds” — in English, “Walk with Mary Who Unties the Knots.” The article, translated into English, is “Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison” by Marie Meaney. In it, she accomplished something in just a few short paragraphs that I have never before seen nuanced so succinctly. She summed it up in a single sentence: “It is a strange twist of fate that he who had been sexually abused would be helped by a priest falsely condemned for that crime.”

I have to admit that this subtle truth overshadows and informs my perspective on every aspect of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and priesthood. I have to sum it up bluntly. From 1985 to 1988 in the State of Maine, Pornchai Moontri was the victim of an unspeakable combination of sexual assault and physical violence that nearly destroyed his life while those tasked with child protection looked the other way. At one point, local police even arrested him while running away and handed him back over to his abuser. When finally brought to justice, that man was convicted of forty felony charges of sexual abuse, but sentenced only to 18 years probation.

In those same years, less than 100 miles away in the State of New Hampshire, I became the subject of a witch hunt launched by a crusading sex crimes detective who pegged me as a suspect.

There is a lot more to this story that new evidence and witnesses will hopefully bring into the light of day, but the short version is more than disturbing as is. With no one having accused me, and no evidence to support this detective’s prejudice, he launched a determined search for a crime beginning with a horrific lie. Exactly whose lie it was, we still do not know. The detective claimed receipt of a letter attributing to a chancery official a story that I was once a priest in Florida where I molested two boys, “one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.”

I had never been a priest in Florida, had never even visited Florida, and no such account, according to Florida police, had ever taken place there. The chancery official later denied, but minimally and without nuance, that this story was ever told to anyone by him and he had no idea of how it started. But over the next four years, from 1988 to 1992, the detective spread the story until he found someone willing to accuse me for the right price.

Today, I am serving life in prison for this prosecutorial abuse after having refused a plea deal, a negotiated lie, to plead guilty and serve only one year. To date, no one in any official capacity in either the justice system or the Church has been willing to look under the hood of this case or hear any testimony from me or any of the truth tellers who have come forward — including the statement of a young man who accused me, then recanted saying that he was offered a substantial bribe to secure his perjured testimony.

Saint John Paul II Under a Cloud

So, having read the above, you might imagine why I take with a dose of healthy skepticism rumors and innuendo that arise from or against priests and bishops. So did Pope John Paul II whose own experience in Soviet-controlled Poland made him cautious in accepting destructive rumors about priests with no accompanying evidence. His good name had been thrown under the bus in the 2020 McCarrick Report, but I will get back to this in a moment.

By the time Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was formally accused in 2017, he had been the subject of rumors for decades. He became bishop of the newly formed New Jersey Diocese of Metuchen in 1981, and previously served as an Auxiliary Bishop of New York where he was widely known to ambitiously seek eventual elevation to Archbishop of New York and the rank of Cardinal. By the time he arrived in Metuchen, rumors of a double life had already begun to circulate. I wrote of this in a controversial and not very politically correct post that I solidly stand by: “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix.”

This requires a little side story. At the time it was written, a Jesuit priest and pro LGBTQ activist, Father James Martin, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he called for increased screening and vigilance to prevent the ordination of priests with pedophilic tendencies. His editorial veered away from any consideration of the role of homosexual orientation in the McCarrick case or the abuse scandal in general.

I wrote a comment to be posted on the op-ed, but received a notice the next day that The Wall Street Journal had rejected my comment for inappropriate language. I included a link to my post on Cardinal McCarrick along with what was perceived to be this inflammatory statement: “It is a testament to the power of reaction formation that an entire institution would prefer the term ‘pedophile scandal’ to ‘homosexual scandal’ even when the facts say otherwise.”

I assumed that the offending word in my comment was “pedophile,” but that was not the case. I protested the blocking of my comment because Father Martin had used that same terminology in his WSJ op-ed. But I was wrong. The WSJ Comments Moderator contacted me and said that the algorithm employed by the WSJ had blocked the comment for use of the now politically incorrect word, ‘homosexual.’ He apologized for this, posted the comment and link, and vowed to fine tune the algorithm to prevent this from happening again.

The incident revealed the lengths that some in our culture and in the U.S. Church have employed to shield same-sex attraction from playing any role in the abuse narrative. The McCarrick story was a great threat because it lifted the veil of secrecy from the role homosexual predation played in the victimization of young men and minors. Writers like Father James Martin with an obvious agenda scrambled to again separate the two in the public eye, but to no avail.

I was a seminarian at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore from 1978 through 1982, the usual period of four years after earning college degrees in philosophy and psychology. Several of then Bishop McCarrick’s seminarians were studying with me then, and I knew them well. I heard all the rumors about his notorious beach house at the New Jersey shore. In 1986, when he became Archbishop of Newark, I was told by a chancery official in my own Diocese that McCarrick was warned by the Apostolic Nuncio to sell his beach house which became the subject of scandalous rumors.

Most, if not all, of this was kept from Pope John Paul II until the 1990s when New York Cardinal John O’Connor broke the ranks of silence and wrote about the rumors to the Pope, urging him not to appoint McCarrick to the post of Archbishop of Chicago because of the scandalous rumors circulating about McCarrick.

Of all the commentary on the 400-page McCarrick Report, the best and most readable is one by Catholic League President Bill Donohue entitled, ‘Assessing “The McCarrick Report”’ (Catalyst, Dec. 2020).

Somehow, Bill Donohue managed to summarize 400 pages of nauseating truth without leaving anything out and without sparing anyone. His assessment is blunt, factual, and truthful, providing context where needed while letting the truth speak for itself. I highly recommend it. It revealed something I had not known. McCarrick wrote to Pope John Paul in his own defense and dismissed all the rumors about him as false and politically motivated by a culture of rumor, innuendo, and jealousy. In other words, he knew exactly how to play this Pope.

Bill Donohue was disappointed that Pope John Paul listened to McCarrick and heeded his plea over that of the heroic Cardinal O’Connor. It was then, in 2001 just as the Catholic clergy abuse story was about to erupt on a national scale, that McCarrick became Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Bill Donohue also expressed grave disappointment that Archbishop Viganó was never interviewed despite being mentioned in it 306 times — and mostly negatively.

In my view, there is nothing further to be said of Pope John Paul II in this, nor is there cause to fault him. He received competing versions from Cardinals O’Connor and McCarrick, and the latter manipulatively withheld his version until Cardinal O’Connor had died. In the absence of evidence or corroboration from other U.S. bishops who remained silent, the Pope opted not to act solely on rumor and innuendo. You might understand why I would agree.

Coverup Or Smoke Screen?

I now wonder why New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond chose the week before the release of the McCarrick Report to launch a campaign seeking the forced laicization of all “credibly accused” priests. This requires more reflection than the usual knee jerk reaction that children must be protected from abuse. The increasingly alarming Catholic newsweekly, Our Sunday Visitor highlighted a letter to the editor by Steven Shea (OSV, Nov. 29) who deduced from the Report that “bishops all the way up to Pope John Paul II put clerical careers and ‘avoiding scandal’ ahead of protecting victims.” This is nonsense, and there is nothing in the Report that suggests this. The “minor” who accused McCarrick in 2017 was 63 years old at the time of the accusation.

Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s proposal to now laicize all accused priests is shocking, and its motive is highly suspect. Cardinal McCarrick was appointed Archbishop of Washington just in time to collaborate with then USCCB President Bishop Wilton Gregory and SNAP activists to shield homosexual clergy from being implicated in the scandal in any way. At the 2002 Dallas Bishops’ Conference, they pushed a zero tolerance policy that now bars any accused priest from ministry even decades later.

Meeting in Dallas in 2002, in full view of the news media and with SNAP’s David Clohessy and Barbara Blane as invited guests, the nation’s bishops hanged their heads in shame as accusations of a sex abuse coverup were leveled at them. But what was really going on was a smoke screen. Then USCCB President Wilton Gregory, now Archbishop of Washington, and then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick led the bishops through a carefully choreographed agenda designed to shield homosexual orientation from having any exposure whatsoever in the scandal. They presented it as a pedophile scandal and allowed the news media to do the same.

By imposing a policy of zero tolerance and “one-strike-and-you’re-out, the bishops imposed a “credible” standard on their priests which from that day forward would treat every one of them as guilty for being accused. Bill Donohue described the agenda behind it all:

“Lurking behind all this is the overwhelming presence of a homosexual network of priests, both in the U.S. and in Rome. Until and unless this web of deceit and perversion is owned up to — which it hasn’t been — lay Catholics will be wary of the hierarchy.”

— Bill Donohue, Assessing “The McCarrick Report”

Archbishop Gregory Aymond knows well that the credible standard now imposed on U.S. priests is the weakest standard of justice and would not hold up in any legitimate arena of due process. He knows well that what our bishops mean by “credible” is simply that an accusation cannot be immediately disproven on its face. If a priest and an accuser lived in the same area 40 years ago, then the accusation is credible and the priest barred from ministry.

To take the next step and also summarily dismiss these priests from the clerical state is an egregious affront to justice and an absolute denial of mercy. Archbishop Aymond also knows that the same standard does not apply to accused bishops. Catholic author and commentator, Philip Lawler, who has been no friend to accused priests, has conceded this point:

“American church leaders who once ignored the rights of innocent children now ignore the rights of accused priests.”

— Philip Lawler

In a brief but potent article in First Things magazine published just days before The McCarrick Report emerged, Father Thomas G. Guarino wrote of Archbishop Aymond’s affront to justice in “The Battered Priesthood.” He charges that this push for laicization “accelerates the profound erosion of the Sacrament of Holy Orders that began with the Dallas Charter of 2002.” I remind you that this zero tolerance and the scapegoating of accused priests was pushed forward by a concordat between SNAP activists, then Bishop Wilton Gregory who is now Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

“A bedrock principle of Catholic faith and theology is that priests are called to the altar by Jesus Christ, and are ordained priests of Jesus Christ forever. They are not priests merely until they become inconvenient or troublesome for the local bishop. And American bishops, no matter how beleaguered or besieged they may be, need to understand and ardently defend that truth.”

— Rev. Msgr. Thomas Guarino, “The Battered Priesthood”

In the era of the post-Dallas Charter no one has summed up the cost paid by good priests better than David F. Pierre, Jr., moderator of The Media Report:

“The Catholic Church has become

the safest place in the world for children,

and the most dangerous place in world for priests.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. The Truth will set us free, but usually not before we suffer for standing by it. These related posts may be an additional aid in understanding The McCarrick Report:

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix

The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Catholic Priests Falsely Accused

The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories,

David F. Pierre, Jr.

A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe

Just decades after Christopher Columbus explored the New World, a Marian apparition near Mexico City left behind a work of art as wondrous for science as for faith.

I am not certain about how to explain my fascination with this story. I have been a priest for over 40 years, most of them in very challenging circumstances, and for the vast majority of those years I never had even a fleeting thought about Juan Diego, his strange encounter on Tepeyac Hill, or the image left behind. It is actually even worse than that. As a “science priest,” I thought it was very uncool to have a faith focused on Marian apparitions. Then I was taught a humbling lesson by the very image atop this post. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

Some years ago as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was on an official mission in Mexico City. Among her itinerary, her hosts brought her to view one of the nation’s most endearing and enduring national treasures. In the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Secretary Clinton marveled at the beautiful image and asked, “Who was the artist?” The astonished rector of the Basilica answered simply, “God.” Mrs. Clinton may have brushed that answer off, but to date there is no other rational account of how this image entered our world.

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (we’ll settle for “Juan Diego!”) was a 15-year-old Aztec teenager when Christopher Columbus first sailed to the New World landing in the Caribbean in 1492. Two additional voyages, the last being in 1498, landed Columbus in Mexico where he charted the coast and claimed this New World for Spain. The sorely misled “cancel culture” wave of today would seek to erase this history. Saint Juan Diego might be among the most vocal in opposition to such a misguided cleansing of history.

In the ensuing years, as the Spanish colonized Mexico, many of the indigenous Aztecs converted to Catholicism. Among them was Juan Diego. Monsignor Eduardo Chavez Sanchez, the postulator of his cause for canonization, wrote of the depth of his spiritual commitment to letting faith inform the rest of his life:

“He had time for prayer in that way in which God knows how to make those who love Him understand when to exercise deeds of virtue and sacrifice.”

Like so many throughout Salvation History, God chose in Juan Diego the humble, simple, and unpretentious to make known His omnipotence, His eternal wisdom, His constant love for those He calls. It is a paradox of faith that He also saddles them with a heavy cross. Juan Diego’s cross was to rely only on his faith and his humility to speak truth to power — to bring to Church leaders who would set themselves against him the truth of what he encountered on Tepeyac Hill at the age of 55 in 1531.

Beginning on December 9 of that year, Juan Diego heard a woman’s voice call to him as he crossed Tepeyac Hill early in the morning on his way to Mass near Mexico City. Three days later, on December12, he was wearing a tilma, the broad cloak worn by the Aztecs of Mexico. It was woven from the thick, coarse fibers of a cactus called the agava plant. The fibers were known to break down and disintegrate within twenty years or so. The tilma hanging in the Basilica in Mexico City has been there for nearly 500 years with no sign of decay, and it has become the most visited shrine in the world.

Ave Maria, Gratia Plena

The Church’s Lectionary for the Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe presents a choice of two passages for the proclamation of the Gospel: the account of the Archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary foretelling the Birth of the Messiah (Luke 1:26-38), and the passage that immediately follows, the account of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth ending with Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:39-47). I have written previously of both accounts.

In “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us,” I wrote of the great theological depths of Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation which in time became the First Decade of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. Mary’s encounter with the Herald of God stands in striking contrast with the Archangel’s previous encounter with Zechariah, the father-to-be of John the Baptist. Gabriel approaches Mary with great deference and deep respect, a demeanor captured above by the artist, Fra Angelico in one of his most famous works, “The Annunciation.”

This encounter with Mary is unique in all of Sacred Scripture. It is the only instance in which an angel addresses a human with a title instead of a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). In Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of this passage from its original Greek, he rendered the title, “Gratia Plena” which was translated into the English, “Full of Grace.” It is accurate, but does not reflect the full sense of the original Greek.

Saint Luke had used the term in Acts of the Apostles as well. In his account of the demeanor of Saint Stephen at the time of his arrest and martyrdom, he again used the term, “full of grace.” It was translated from his original Greek, “pleres charitos” (Acts 6:8), referring to a characteristic of Stephen. The “full of grace” title given to Mary is very different. In Greek, the term used by Saint Luke was “kecharitomene” (Luke 1:28), referring not to characteristic, but essence. It implies that God had filled Mary with divine grace as a predestined vessel, a foundation for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

In another post, “Advent of the Mother of God,” I mined the depths of the alternate Gospel passage for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is Saint Luke’s account of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, which ends with the beautiful “Magnificat” (Luke 1:39-56). The passage begins, “In those days, Mary rose and went in haste into the hill country to a city of Judah.” These words were meaningful to the ears of Israel. A thousand years earlier, King David arose and went in haste to the very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:2).

In Luke’s Visitation account, which in time would become the Second Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped in the presence of the Divine Presence in Mary’s womb. Elizabeth is struck with a sense of awe and unworthiness in Mary’s presence, the same awe and unworthiness that David felt (2 Samuel 6:9) as he leaped for joy as the Divine Presence in the Ark of the Covenant was on the way to being restored to Jerusalem. In this passage, Saint Luke presents Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant, a vessel bearing the Divine Presence into our world. It is from this passage that she received the title, “Theotokos,” meaning, “God Bearer.”

Outside Mexico City, AD 1531

Fifty-five year old Aztec convert, Juan Diego heard a voice on his way to Mass as he crossed Tepeyac Hill outside Mexico City. It was a woman’s voice calling to him on the morning of December 9. The next day he heard the voice again in the same place, and a “beautiful lady” appeared instructing him to go to the bishop to ask for a church to be built on this site. The bishop demanded proof, of course, and told Juan Diego to return with it.

The later biographers of his cause for sainthood would describe him as a simple man who always chose to remain in the shadows. When he went back to the Lady on December 12, she pointed to some roses that had not been there previously. They were a rare variety that was never in bloom at that time of year or even in that region. She told him to bring these roses to the bishop so Juan Diego removed his coarsely woven tilma to collect them.

When Juan Diego returned to the bishop, there was a small entourage present. To their shock, he opened his tilma spilling the rare roses out, but that was not the source of the shock. Emblazoned upon the tilma was the image atop this post, an image that would become as mysterious to science as it is to faith. Nearly 500 years later, centuries after all similar tilmas have disintegrated, this image remains in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe where it is revered by millions of pilgrims each year.

Seeing the mysterious image for the first time, the Aztecs gave it the name, “Tecoatlaxope” which was translated into the Spanish, “de Guadalupe,” meaning “she will crush the serpent of stone.” After five centuries, her colors have never faded, not even after centuries of exposure to light, the smoke of incense, or the vapors released by countless vigil candles lit in her honor. Scientists and art historians who have carefully studied the tilma have no explanation for how it could exist. It has been the source of conversion for a multitude of skeptics.

And it has not been spared the spiritual warfare that sets its sights on all that is sacred. In 1791, a worker cleaning its silver frame spilled an entire bottle of nitric acid on it, but the image was unscathed. In the 1920s, when the Church in Mexico suffered under the persecution and tyranny of socialist governor, Plutarco Calles, the atheistic regime devised a plan to destroy the image and to kill the many Catholics who reverenced it. This is a dark time in Mexico history that I recounted in “Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes”

On November 14, 1921, a powerful bomb was planted in a nearby flower vase. The explosion in the middle of a Pontifical Mass destroyed the floor, the altar, the stained glass windows, and was felt a mile away. But it killed no one, and left not a scratch on the sacred image.

Studies with electron microscopes, infrared radiation, and multiple other tests have left scientists with the conclusion that no human hand could have painted this image, and none of its composition materials — other than the coarse fibers of the tilma itself — can be found anywhere on Earth. Electron microscope studies revealed no trace of any brushstroke or preliminary sketch on or within it.

In the Eyes of Mary

The most astonishing revelations about the image came 400 years after it first appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma. In 1929, Alfonso Gonzales, a professional photographer, photographed Mary’s face and enlarged it many times. He saw something very strange within her eyes. It appeared to be the face of a bearded man. From 1950 to 1990, a series of studies with more sophisticated equipment revealed a miracle within the miracle. The interior of the eyes is three dimensional allowing a depth and mirror-like reflection similar to human eyes. Reflected back to the observer looking deep within the eyes is the impossible stereoscopic reflection of twelve persons.

The Catholic site, Aleteia, published a study of this phenomenon entitled, “What’s to Be Seen by Looking into Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Eyes,” (November 1, 2016). I was staggered by what the author discovered there. So are some of the world’s leading experts in optics and ophthalmology.

But none of this is the “encore” for which I entitled this post. It was something much more personal. I wrote of this briefly in my post, “Our Lady of Guadalupe Led Pornchai Moontri From His Prisons.” Some say I was too subtle so I will write of it again. It happened in 2017 in the middle of our latest front in our ongoing spiritual warfare. I work as the sole clerk in this prison’s law library. It is a job I inherited but never wanted. I was just the only person who did not step back leaving the impression that I did step forward. I was more or less saddled with a massive headache that pays all of $2.00 per day.

On my desk are two computers, one with the library database and one with a Lexis Nexus law office database. My predecessor in the job had a screen background on one of the computers that was a Hubble image of a galaxy. I liked it a lot, but on a whim one day, I decided to change it. I deleted the galaxy, but was out of time. So I went to a list of available backgrounds and saw only hundreds of computer coded numbers. Hundreds! So I randomly clicked one, then checked “Save as Background,” and left for the day.

On the next day, I went to work and booted up the computer. The image that greeted me was staggering, and it remains there to this day. It was Our Lady of Guadalupe perfectly reproduced on a tapestry photographed outside the Basilica in Mexico City. I could not begin to explain how it found its way into a prison and onto that computer, just one numbered image among hundreds. The date this happened seemed even more astronomically impossible than the photo of the galaxy the image replaced. It was the morning of December 12.

Many of our Protestant friends are critical of the Church’s reverence for Mary. They have no problem comprehending that Jesus is the Son of God who gave His life for all, but He also had a Mother and she witnessed it.

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From Saint John Henry Newman

“The glories of Mary for the sake of her Son”

(Discourse 17)

“And hence it was, that, when time went on, and the bad spirits and false prophets grew stronger and bolder, and found a way into the Catholic Body itself, then the Church, guided by God, could find no more effectual and sure way of expelling them than that of using this word Deipara (Mother of God) against them… When they came up again from the realms of darkness, and plotted the utter overthrow of Christian Faith in the sixteenth century, then they could find no more certain expedience for their hateful purpose than that of reviling and blaspheming the prerogatives of Mary. They knew full well that if they could once get the world to dishonor the Mother, the dishonor of the Son would soon follow.”

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