“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls
After eleven years in publication, These Stone Walls begins life anew as “Beyond These Stone Walls” in order to lend some volume to a wrongly imprisoned voice.
After eleven years in publication, These Stone Walls begins life anew as “Beyond These Stone Walls” in order to lend some volume to a wrongly imprisoned voice
I cannot put into words the gratitude I feel for the voice from behind these stone walls that has been given to me. I will always be grateful to God and to those who set my voice free when TSW began in 2009. A lot has happened in recent months that now calls for a change of direction and a broadening of our scope. For whatever remaining time God allows me to have this voice, These Stone Walls will have a change of name and venue to become “Beyond These Stone Walls.”
This new site will contain all the content of the old, but if you have found your way here then you have already noticed a substantial change in format and appearance. We ask for your patience as this is a work in progress that will require time to rebuild. Each week, we hope to present not only my new post for the week, but also related content from this and other sources. The idea for a “spin off” of sorts began when a reader came upon TSW one day in a Google search for Pope Benedict XVI which brought the reader to one of my posts, and then to others.
This reader is a person of deep faith and a broad background in science and technology, but chooses to remain anonymous. The reader also discovered scattered among the Internet a broad range of articles, commentary, blog posts, and a few published books about me, Pornchai Moontri, and These Stone Walls. A suggestion was made to allow this content to be collected in one place and call it, “Beyond These Stone Walls.”
As most readers know, my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri has been a part of this endeavor since my very first post in 2009. It was he who first came up with the name, “These Stone Walls.” As you know, Pornchai’s prison sentence ended on September 8, 2020. After 14 years as roommates, he was released to return to his native Thailand. You must not miss this story told in “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.”
As you might imagine, life was not easy behind These Stone Walls after Pornchai left. Since that day two months ago, I have been at the hub of a rescue mission. We had developed a promising new life for Pornchai in Thailand. That was entirely the work of TSW and its readers. We were well prepared for the day he was taken away, a day I described in a post about one of TSW ’s Patron Saints, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”
The rescue mission began because Pornchai’s departure should have been a simple affair that was filled with hope. All his necessary documents had been carefully prepared in advance. He left here with us both expecting that his stay in ICE detention would be brief — a matter of days, two weeks at most. Instead, he was thrust ever deeper into a nightmare of for-profit ICE detention while he was dragged across the country from one overcrowded facility to another. That whole story must be told, and it will be told.
So for much of the last two months since Pornchai was taken away, my prison cell became a center of operation for giving support to my friend and coordinating the efforts of people on three continents to secure his release and repatriation. Like all spiritual warfare, this battle was waged on many fronts. It was at this most difficult time that unwelcome changes began to take place with These Stone Walls. One technical difficulty after another surfaced over the last two months, and I finally decided that the new site currently being considered had to take on a larger role. The content on These Stone Walls was being manipulated.
Imprisoned Voices on a Global Scale
Complicating all of the above was our global confrontation with Covid-19, its latest series of outbreaks, and the near civil war taking place between left and right in America. There are those in our midst who know just what buttons to push and when to push them. The stories you have heard and read about people being silenced — even in the Church — are real, and I was nearly silenced as well.
Through grace, and with the help of advocates and your prayers, I think I have survived the onslaught for now. Pornchai is also surviving, though in horrible conditions, and is offering what he endures for our readers. I had hoped that by the time you read this his ordeal would be over and he would have arrived intactly in Thailand. But even after 70 days in ICE detention, that is not the case. I will write a full account of this story when that time comes, and I will count on you to make it known.
The photograph atop this segment demonstrates the enormity of the obstacles we face on a daily basis to maintain a voice from behind these walls and bring it to you. The most basic forms of human communication that we all take for granted must overcome many obstacles here. Even though Pornchai is no longer a prisoner, but merely an ICE detainee, I had to go to extreme lengths to reach out to him. One of our friends, Claire Dion in Maine, had to utilize two phones with separate lines and configure them so that their microphones and speakers were opposite each other. She added our photos for effect. Welcome to our world!
The real founder of These Stone Walls is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. When spiritual fatherhood beckoned him to secure the salvation of another prisoner, it cost him his life. He knew that going in, but self-preservation was overcome by heroic virtue. I do not lay claim to any of that, but I was beckoned by Divine Mercy to set my quest for freedom aside to help secure freedom for another. That did not end when Pornchai left these stone walls. Even in our disposable culture, spiritual fatherhood has no expiration date.
Others of our friends who were here with me behind these walls are now free, and restored to their homelands. They write to me, and read what I write, from Japan, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Each of these countries, and also Thailand, have seen recent dramatic increases in visits to These Stone Walls. Divine Mercy is powerful, and prison walls were no match for it.
Beyond These Stone Walls
It has been interesting to hear from some of our friends in Asian countries where Catholicism is a small minority faith. Our friend in Japan wrote that he had no idea what I had been typing during all those years he was here with us. He said he was astonished to look up me and Pornchai from Tokyo and discover These Stone Walls. He spent weeks devouring posts that he knew were written during some of our most trying times. He finds them to be not only meaningful, but powerful. He is in awe of the back story of Pornchai, and finds the account of how we were thrown together, of all we endured, and of Pornchai’s conversion to be life-changing.
I think that what our friends around the world have found so enthralling is that they expected what I write to mirror the deprivation of prison. But it doesn’t. Just like real life, there are many sordid things here to write about, but what a waste that would be. The fact that we believe, and continue to believe even in the face of adversity and loss, is an affirmation of the Gospel. At a time when Americans are at each others’ throats in the most recent election cycle, this little voice from behind these prison walls has grown in magnitude abroad.
About seventy percent of our readers are in the United States. Canada, England, and Australia have always comprised the majority of others. In the last year or so, this has changed. In the weeks before making this transition to Beyond These Stone Walls, people from many other nations have flocked to these pages. Routinely now, India, Nepal, Japan, Thailand, China, Nigeria, and South Africa show up here in large numbers. Meanwhile, much of the European Union has drifted down the ranks of visitors. This mirrors almost exactly the weakness of Catholic practice and presence in historically Catholic countries while it thrives in Asia.
I like to think that the growing presence of readers from Beyond These Stone Walls is not because they relate to my imprisonment, but rather to the power of the Gospel and Divine Mercy to break through it. I hope you will continue to come here as we venture further Beyond These Stone Walls. We will need your help as this new adventure finds a foothold in the vast wasteland called the Internet.
A Necessary Postscript
Father Richard Heilman at the site, RomanCatholicMan.com has published a little book, the United States Grace Force Prayer Book. Claire Dion sent one each to Pornchai and me. It is a potent little book with a collection of the very prayers and devotions that I would have chosen had I composed it. My friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, has a presence in its pages. His Prayer of Consecration to Jesus Through Mary is found there along with the Consecration Prayers of Saint Louis de Montfort and Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I sure hope that doesn’t go to Father Michael’s head, but I doubt that it will.
But none of that is the final point I want to make. If you ever doubt the power of Divine Mercy to invade your life with a not so-always-easy-to-see abundance of grace, then consider this: as I write this first post for Beyond These Stone Walls, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri is living in a cramped room with eighty ICE detainees in a chaotic place with the blazing lights on 24/7.
As he was preparing to leave here on September 8 for what we hoped would be a short stay in ICE detection during this global pandemic, we prepared a box of his books and other personal belongings to ship to Thailand ahead of him. Before sealing the box, he removed his copy of the United States Grace Force Prayer Book. He said he would rather risk losing it than not having it.
I had to pause while typing this because he contacted me through a friend to ask if we could send him another copy. “Did you lose it?” I asked in our phone call while wedged between two books. “No,” he said. “The other guys in the bunks around me all want to borrow mine.”
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: If you have been a subscriber to These Stone Walls, we have done our best to transfer your email address for notification of posts at Beyond These Stone Walls. If by chance we missed you, or if you wish to subscribe anew, please subscribe at the end of the post.
Also from Father G: If you would like to send a note or card of encouragement to Pornchai, it may help to sustain him through this trial. The address is:
Pornchai Moontri
A039064244
LaSalle Detention Facility
P.O. Box 560
Trout, Louisiana 71371
And if you would like to help him as he begins life anew you may do so at:
Pornchai Moontri
c/o Beyond These Stone Walls
P.O. Box 205
Wilmington, MA 01887-0205
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From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell
Seven judges of the Australia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Cardinal George Pell was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. He and we deserve to know how and why.
Seven judges of the Australia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Cardinal George Pell was wrongly convicted and imprisoned. He and we deserve to know how and why.
Strange things had been happening in the weeks leading up to Holy Week 2020. For the first time in our lifetimes, Catholic churches were inaccessible to most Catholics observing Holy Week and Easter as a community of believers.
Then, in the midst of all the church closures due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, Cyrus Habib, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Washington State, announced that he is leaving politics to study for the Catholic priesthood. This was not the sort of hopeful news the news media likes to hype in Holy Week so it was barely noticed. Then the Supreme Court of Australia announced that, on Tuesday of Holy Week, it would release its decision on the final hope for appeal in the case of Cardinal George Pell.
I did not greet this news with a sense of hope. Far back in April of 2010, I wrote a post with the controversial title, “Breaking News: I Got Stoned with the Pope.” It was about how some consistently anti-Catholic news outlets have a tradition of exploiting Catholic scandal during or just prior to Holy Week.
The pope in question back then was Benedict XVI. For full disclosure, neither he nor I inhaled anything illicit. That was not what I meant by getting stoned with the pope. It was meant in the Biblical sense, the same sense found in one of the most popular posts on These Stone Walls, “Casting the First Stone: What Jesus Wrote in the Sand.”
The type of stoning that brutally took a person’s life in Biblical times is carried out today in another way. Instead of taking a life, a person’s reputation is destroyed. False witness and sensational headlines are now the stones of choice. We have all seen the “gotcha” media at work. You cannot sit through a White House press conference without witnessing firsthand how some in the news media insinuate, inflame, and then exploit the interpretations that too often today pass for real journalism.
A vivid example came during the 2016 Presidential election cycle. A group of 200 noisy white supremacists demonstrated in Virginia using slogans such as “Make America Great Again.” For much of the far left mainstream news media, this was evidence enough to link them with Donald Trump implying falsely that he must support racism because some racists support him.
The real scandal is the news media itself. By giving these marginal racists a spotlight, the news media took their tiny microphone and turned it into a national megaphone. The news media does not even try to justify its viral coverage of 200 white supremacists while turning a blind eye to 200,000 prolife advocates at the annual March for Life in Washington DC.
I admit that I was cynical and suspicious when I learned that the High Court of Australia chose Tuesday of Holy Week to announce its long awaited final verdict on Cardinal Pell. As soon as the decision was announced, victim groups and some in the media went into high gear to denounce the finding and declare that it is not an exoneration or acquittal.
This is nonsense. The unanimous finding that Cardinal Pell’s charges were fatally flawed, his trial unjust, his convictions unsupported by evidence, are in fact an exoneration. He stands convicted of no crime. It exposed for all the world to see the harsh reality that — as for so many other priests facing the cruel tyranny of false witness in the current age — Cardinal Pell was considered guilty merely for being accused.
The Integrity of Justice Itself Is at Stake
Four hundred and five days! That is how long 78-year-old George Cardinal Pell spent in prison before Australian justice woke up. On the day of his exoneration, I marked 9,350 days of wrongful imprisonment. I do not write that as a comparison, but rather as an expression of deepest empathy for what Cardinal Pell endured.
Throughout his ordeal, I believed in his innocence; I supported him with my prayers, and I offered some of my own unjust imprisonment in spiritual alliance with him. I hope this was evident in my series of widely-read posts about his plight that I will link at the end of this one. When I say that those end posts were widely read, the truth is that they were widely read everywhere but in Australia.
The first of these posts was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.” Its focus was on the fact that the whole world was watching these charges as they proceeded to trial with no real evidence and much media exploitation. In the end, it is Australia’s justice system that now seems indicted and facing trial in the court of public opinion.
I hope this exoneration brings some much-needed soul searching to the people of Australia, the Australian courts, and the police and prosecutors who ignored much exculpatory evidence to bring these charges. However, evidence for that soul-searching was not reflected in the public statement of Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria State where Cardinal Pell was convicted.
After the unanimous Supreme Court exoneration, the public statement of the Victoria State Premier addressed none of what the Court covered or decided. He instead addressed himself to what the media calls victims and survivors but what the legal system must treat as accusers. His statement to them was: “I see you. I hear you. I believe you.”
On its face, that seems benign, but it isn’t. It is perhaps the most dangerous affront to justice in a case like this. It is grotesquely irresponsible to reduce the application of justice to a set of hashtags instead of evidence. Why have courts and trials at all if the personal beliefs of police, prosecutors and state officials are all that is needed to convict and condemn?
In the United States, the Center for Prosecutor Integrity has joined over 100 legal scholars in a petition to the department of Justice to cease its support for #BelieveSurvivors and guilt-presuming investigations. It is one of the most prolific causes of wrongful convictions and other injustices. When police and prosecutors — and the governments on whose behalf they operate — launch “Victim-Centered Investigations” they begin with a faulty assumption that crimes did occur and that the accused is guilty.
The Prosecutor Integrity website lists hundreds of scholarly articles by legal experts about how innocent defendants like Cardinal Pell are victimized by investigators wearing blinders. Police and prosecutor misconduct were central factors in 42-percent of wrongful convictions. One article at the Wrongful Convictions site is “The Intersection Between Innocence, Expert Witness and Religion: The Case of Rev. Gordon MacRae.”
Victim-Centered instead of fact-centered investigations result in a failure of the justice system to look honestly at itself. The Australian police and prosecutors — and the two judges who upheld a guilty verdict against Cardinal Pell in his first appeal — have some explaining to do.
I know only too well what the trashing of Cardinal Pell’s good name has cost him, but the other damage is to the integrity of the criminal justice system. I also know well the treachery of those — both inside and outside the Church — who disregard a lack of evidence or substantiation, mindlessly poised to believe any lurid tale regarding any priest so accused.
On social media after this exoneration, some in Australia suggested that, innocent or not, Cardinal Pell should have remained in prison in reparation for the sins of other priests. This is nothing more than evidence of the moral panic this story set in motion. It is easy to offer up someone else’s good name and freedom for a politically correct cause.
Minds should not be made up because the media celebrates the fall of Catholic priests and prelates. Minds should be made up by clear and compelling evidence, and there was none. Anything less is to surrender our own personal integrity to the news media and to reduce justice to a lynch mob.
Priestly Scandal: A Pandemic of Trophy Justice
Accusations against a high profile cardinal and member of the curia too easily result in “Trophy Justice,” a term that also has grave implications for the integrity of the justice system. Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in prison because those empowered to impart justice were too reluctant to give up their trophy.
Since his exoneration there has been no shortage of biased treatment in the news. The much needed voice of Bill Donohue at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has been, as usual, on the front lines exposing this. Annual membership in the Catholic League is the best $30 investment I have ever made.
Ironically, in the wake of this exoneration, editorials in The New York Times and The Boston Globe have criticized a lack of transparency in the Australian justice system. Bill Donohue rightly pointed out that neither newspaper ever questioned its transparency when Cardinal Pell was found guilty without evidence, or when he was sentenced to prison, or when a lower court disregarded the shoddy work of prosecutors to uphold an unjust verdict. That was all perfectly transparent.
And it was all front page news. The exoneration did not at all receive anything even close to equal treatment. I am thankful to Bill Donohue for informing us that The Boston Globe reported Cardinal Pell’s exoneration on page 19. Why any thinking, reasonable Catholic is still reading The New York Times or The Boston Globe is a mystery. There are alternatives. In ten years of writing behind These Stone Walls, I have never seen anti-Catholic bias and media distortion in The Wall Street Journal.
I am ashamed to add to the above that some Catholic media have fared little better. After Cardinal Pell’s first appeal to a lower court failed in a two-to-one decision, Our Sunday Visitor reported in its news section that his conviction was upheld by a three-judge panel. In a letter of protest to the editors, I pointed out that this was inaccurate and misleading.
Judge Weinberg the most experienced judge on that Australian three-judge panel, published a blistering dissent against the conclusions of the other two, but Our Sunday Visitor did not publish my letter clarifying this. After Cardinal Pell spent another six months unjustly in prison, the seven judges of Australia’s Supreme Court agreed with Judge Weinberg’s dissent.
Why should we support obviously biased or agenda-driven news outlets? When we know the truth behind a mishandled story, logic requires that we ask how many other stories are misrepresented in the news without our awareness. The Catholic League has never retreated from reporting on the crisis in the Church without sacrificing the rights of priests. In the March 2020 issue of Catalyst, just weeks before the exoneration of Cardinal Pell, Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote of both our cases:
“Cardinal George Pell, who is in an Australian prison for alleged sexual abuse (awaiting a final appeal) was accused as far back as 1962. The case was dismissed because nothing could be substantiated. His accuser had been convicted 39 times for offenses ranging from assault to drug use. He was a violent drug addict…. There is another priest, Father Gordon MacRae, who is still in prison in New Hampshire for crimes he vehemently denies, and whose accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. Even his former wife and stepson call him a compulsive liar and manipulator.”
— Catalyst, Accused Priests Deserve Better
Pope John Paul II once cautioned that the Church must be a mirror of justice to the world. The mirror of justice has since cracked, however, when the American bishops adopted merely “credible” as sufficient evidence to discredit and discard a priest, and then pressed Rome to apply that standard throughout the Church. The result is the treatment that we have just witnessed in the case of Cardinal Pell.
Too many in the media — sadly including some in the Catholic media — simply presumed his guilt just as they presume the guilt of most priests so accused. But there were other, even darker agendas at work in the case of Cardinal Pell, and real transparency will require getting to the bottom of them.
Some in Rome, convinced of his innocence, remained silent while others may have been complicit with getting Cardinal Pell and his financial reforms out of the way. It has been suggested recently by Paul Kelly, an Australian political commentator for The Australian, that “State power had been recruited in an effort to destroy Pell.”
Cardinal Pell was a scapegoat who was targeted by enemies of the Church — enemies perhaps both foreign and domestic. Pope Francis had been careful to withhold any public statement until the Cardinal Pell case had exhausted all appeals. On Tuesday of Holy Week, just hours after Cardinal Pell’s release from prison, Pope Francis released this remarkable statement via Twitter:
“In these days of Lent, we have been witnessing the persecution that Jesus underwent and how He was judged ferociously, even though He was innocent. Let us pray together today for all those persons who suffer due to an unjust sentence because someone had it in for them.”
Someone had it in for Cardinal Pell. He and we deserve to know who and why. And as for Pope Francis, his summation sure sounds like an exoneration to me.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please pray for Cardinal Pell, for his restoration from this years-long ordeal, and for a just and honest reckoning about the process that brought it about. You may also wish to read this related post:
Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood — by Pornchai Moontri
Pornchai Maximilian Moontri takes us behind These Stone Walls where he is the safety trainer for a captive audience producing some woodcraft marvelous to behold.
Pornchai Maximilian Moontri takes us behind These Stone Walls where he is the safety trainer for a captive audience producing some woodcraft marvelous to behold.
“I will stand on my watch, take up my station at the post, and wait to see what He will say to me… For the stones shall cry out from these walls and the woodwork shall answer.”
A lot has been happening here behind these stone walls. My friend, Father G has just started a new job as the one and only law library clerk serving 1,500 men in this prison. Every prison has to have a law library and a full-time clerk. So when the job came open he was asked if he would take it. It’s a real challenge for him because he took it on suddenly, and all his training is “on-the-job” training.
And his new job came with a pay raise. His pay jumped from $2.00 per day to $2.15 per day. We have been trying to figure out how he will spend that extra 75¢ cents per week. I earn the same pay he does, but prison work for both of us is not about how much we can make, but rather how many we can help.
So Father G spends his days behind a desk now, helping prisoners to complete and file hundreds of complicated state and federal legal forms for everything from legal motions, to medical planning, to power of attorney forms, legal medical releases, divorce petitions, and applications for drug court and addictions treatment. Father G eventually connects with just about everyone in this prison in the most difficult times of their lives.
He just finished his third week there and is still finding his way. This is why he asked me to write this guest post. We both work Monday through Friday from 07:00 AM until 2:30 PM, so now all the TSW posts have to be typed in our cell on Saturday. Well, Father G can type one on a Saturday. This one took me a week, one page at a time. People here ask me if the constant “tap-tap-tap” of the typewriter every Saturday drives me crazy, but for me it is like music. It is our connection with you.
I also have a job that I like very much. I have been working on my own projects in the woodworking shop that is part of the “HobbyCraft” project here. Last year I also became the Safety Trainer. I teach new workers in the woodworking shop how to use all the equipment, and how to map out their projects to order the wood that they will need.
Prisoners in the wood shop purchase their own lumber from a local vendor, and then I show them how to use a Radial Arm Saw to cut the rough lumber. I also train them on using the planers, chop saw, table saws, band saws, routers, shapers, and the lathes which are in three sizes for woodturning projects.
I also save to purchase wood for my own projects. Most of the items I have created in recent years are smaller items such as keepsake boxes, a Divine Mercy box, mantle clocks, and wood-turned pen sets made from olive wood imported from the Holy Land.
Lots of the items I have made are featured on a Pinterest board called “Woodworking and Model Shipbuilding by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.” Below is the most recent keepsake box that I designed and crafted from mahogany with a basswood inlay in the top engraved with a wood burned image of the Praying Hands. The inside is finished with velour.
I have lately been working on some larger furniture projects.
The photo at the top of this post is me with a round dining table that I designed and created. It is solid maple, 48-inches in diameter and 32-inches in height. Below is another photo of the same table emphasizing the legs which are also solid maple wood-turned with a lathe. I have just been asked to custom build a slightly smaller version of the same table.
The table below is called a sofa table. It is made from solid cortisone oak and the legs are made from cherry. It is 30-inches high and 36-inches in length.
The cabinet below was custom-made to requested specifications. It is made from cherry with raised panel doors. It is 48-inches high.
But as wonderful as it is to work with wood, none of this is the wood that sets me free. That comes Holy Week. Behold the wood of the Cross on which hung the Salvation of the world.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post on Facebook and other social media. The story of Pornchai Moontri is an epic of immense importance for the cause of social justice and for the Church. As Catholics consider leaving their faith over the abuse scandal, Pornchai found the only healing and hope he has ever known in the Catholic Church.
A ship designed and built by Pornchai Moontri for a special order.
The Once and Future Catholic Church
The Book of Daniel and the Gospel of Mark warn of a great tribulation to come. Its early signs are already upon us and require invoking the Patron Saint of Justice.
The Book of Daniel and the Gospel of Mark warn of a great tribulation to come. Its early signs are already upon us and require invoking the Patron Saint of Justice.
A strange case has been simmering in the courts of the European Union for several years, and it came to an even stranger close at the end of October. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld a 2011 Austrian court verdict against a seminar presenter, a woman, for “disparaging religious doctrines.” In a 2009 seminar sponsored by the conservative Freedom Party in Austria, the woman recounted an event in the life of Muhammad ibn Abd Allah whose 7th Century proclamations of the Qur’an gave birth to Islam. The event is well documented.
In 620 AD, at the age of 56, soon after the death of his first wife, Muhammad married a young girl named A’isha. At the time of their marriage, A’isha was six years old. Muhammad described her as “very attractive and of a lively mind.” Many of the revelations resulting in the Qur’an occurred while he was in her company.
One day, when she was left behind during one of Muhammad’s expeditions, she returned to the group accompanied by a young man. This set off a monstrous scandal that threw the girl’s marital fidelity into doubt. Muhammad then dictated what he described as a divine revelation that assured him of her innocence. This story is recounted in the Qur’an (24:11-20).
In 2009, in an Austrian seminar entitled “Basic Information about Islam,” the seminar presenter described the story of the marriage of Muhammad and A’isha, concluding, “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old?… What do we call it if not pedophilia?” In 2011, the Austrian court convicted the woman, imposing a fine for statements that constitute “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam.”
The woman appealed the verdict to the European Court of Human Rights. Last month, the verdict was unanimously upheld by an ECHR panel of seven judges including judges from Ireland, Germany, and France. The ECHR judges reasoned that the marriage between Muhammad and six-year-old A’isha lasted until Muhammad’s death when A’isha was 18-years-old. Thus, according to the court, “the marriage need not be motivated by pedophilia.”
The ECHR further reasoned that the convicted woman’s observations about the marriage could “stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace” and “could only be understood as having been aimed at demonstrating that Muhammad was not worthy of worship.” The ECHR arrived at this conclusion after having “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.”
I could go into a long protracted analysis of a double standard in what constitutes “stirring up prejudice and threatening religious peace” — and how political correctness influences it — but I think you may already get the point. If you contrast the above story with the treatment the Catholic Church has been receiving in the news media and power centers of Western Culture, the duplicity is not at all subtle.
Sometimes you have to stand back a little from scandal in the Catholic Church to see a more panoramic view. The scandals feel less personal then, but also seem more ominous. A view from a little distance will leave you with a sense that there have been, and still are, some nefarious agendas behind the scenes of the Catholic abuse story.
The truth is that the world in which we live is retreating from all the institutions that once gave us meaning and purpose, and, most important of all, identity. “Losing my religion” is not just a 1991 pop culture hit by R.E.M. It is a cultural calamity.
The State of the Union
Without doubt, trust in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has been strained in recent years. There is no denying it, and some of that distrust is justified by inconvenient truths that too many have tried to keep hidden. But look around you. Where DO you place your trust? Our politics are at the brink of civil war. Our news media once respected as the “Fourth Estate,” has hit rock bottom in public trust. Among polls of Americans, Congress is the second lowest source of trust among all institutions and the news media lower even than that.
Fatherhood has retreated into the forests. Families are falling apart. Gender has become confused, and a product of the will instead of the heart of one’s identity. In the Western world, the psyches of the young have become fragile. Universities pamper screaming mobs of students who block points of view that challenge them. Conservatives make them feel “unsafe.”
Colleges hire grief counselors to help 20-something year-old men and women cope with a C-level grade, or the trauma of being exposed to ideals, or of seeing a mouse in their dorm room. The resilience of young people — though still with some courageous exceptions — is under siege.
Politically, we are at each others’ throats in a game of one-upmanship and gotcha. It seemed to reach its most hurtful and horrifying peak in the public spectacle to which we were subjected in the Senate confirmation hearings for “Justice Brett Kavanaugh, guilty for being accused.” That was the point at which I realized that we have reached a new low, and cannot descend much further without dissolving our union in hate.
In October this year, a middle-aged man in Florida mailed pipe bombs to a long list of political figures with whom he disagrees. Then a middle-aged man in Pittsburgh, a Holocaust denier on social media, killed eleven worshippers in a Synagogue after posting a rant about Jews and President Trump. Much of the news media played down the fact that the man despised Trump. Politics, that once honorable favorite pastime of America, has become dangerous.
Our Once and Future Faith
The same is true or is fast becoming true, in our Church. Canadian Catholic blogger, Michael Brandon wrote in response to a post on These Stone Walls awhile back: “The Catholic Church has become the safest place in the world for children, and the most dangerous place in the world for Catholic priests.” I wrote of the origin for that conclusion in a controversial post that was shared 25,000 times on social media: “Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy.”
The news media would have us all believing that the now forty-year-old sexual abuse scandal “could bring down the Catholic Church.” This is nonsense. The Church will survive this, but there is a far more pernicious threat that the news media makes it a point not to cover. I found a scary analysis of it in “The Catholic Crisis,” a fine article in Commentary (May 2018), by Sohrab Ahmari who also has a panoramic view of why Catholicism stands at a precipice and, surprise, the sexual abuse story is but a symptom of it, not the cause.
Sohrab Ahmari was the London editor of The Wall Street Journal. A senior writer at Commentary, he is currently an editor for the New York Post and author of From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith. His article, “The Catholic Crisis” is a review of a new book by The New York Times’ columnist, Ross Douthat, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.
Both Ahmari and Douthat note that “the principal duty of a Catholic” is not to the pope, but to “the truth the papacy exists to preach, to preserve, and to defend.” Mr. Ahmari wrote:
“There is a reason to worry that lately a spirit of relativism has entered the Roman Church that threatens to undermine its unity and catholicity. That should concern Catholics and non-Catholics because the Church is the living bedrock of the West and one of the last bastions of the principal that moral truth is moral truth yesterday, today, a thousand years from now.”
In Pope Francis, both writers see a papacy that “thrives in ambiguity.” Their evidence is found among a list of perplexing notions including recent comments by Pope Francis calling into question the existence of hell. Defenders of the Pope excused the incident as a misreading of the Pope’s remarks by leftist, atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari. However, as Ahmari points out, this particular faux pas was the fifth interview Pope Francis has granted to this journalist.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis has remained unresponsive to a request for dialogue and clarification on some controversial points in Amoris laetitia. American Cardinal Raymond Burke and other conservative cardinals posed a series of “Dubia” asking whether the prohibition on authorizing communion for those divorced and remarried in a civil, but not sacramental, union still stands. The pope, according to Ahmari, “first ignored, and then ridiculed them.”
Mr. Ahmari also reports on Ross Douthat’s “fascinating speculation” on the future of Catholicism, and it is one in which conservatives should find cause for hope. As I have written in previous posts, the Church and faith will survive this current age of doubt. In the meantime, fidelity is our only effective response to it. But Ross Douthat offers a more sobering source of hope summarized by Ahmari:
“The liberals simply don’t have the numbers… theological liberalism is in demographic decline, and liberal orders struggle to attract vocations. Church coffers may be full, but the pews are empty. The leading lights of theological liberalism are octogenarians, and there are no successors in the wings.
“Conservatives and traditionalists, meanwhile, have the numbers, the intellects, the energy. Orders that prize tradition and orthodoxy are thriving worldwide. In population terms, Africa is a beacon of hope for conservatives, a continent where weekly Mass attendance averages 70 percent (compared with just 20 percent in Europe) and where the Church wins nine million new believers each year.”
Quite by accident in the last few weeks, I came across a much more local summation of the state of the Church in North America, and it seems bleak. At least, it did for me until I got to the last few stunning paragraphs.
In a climate in which I thought the faithful had abandoned the notion of the Church as a mirror of justice, a faithful Catholic, a lawyer no less, concluded his stunning take on the state of the Church by profiling what the witch hunt has meant for one wrongly imprisoned priest. Don’t miss “Priests, Good and Bad” by Frank Friday published at American Thinker (October 27, 2018).
The Patron Saint of Justice
Some extraordinary things can be found in Ordinary Time. It is by no human design that readings assigned long ago for the Sunday liturgy arose just weeks ago at a time of tribulation for the Catholic Church. The readings for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time were anything but ordinary. Their timing seems a divinely inspired gift.
But before I proceed down this path through the labyrinthine ways of Sacred Scripture, I want to share with you a message from a very good priest and a friend, Father Stuart MacDonald. Writing from Ontario, Father Stuart is a canon lawyer and author of the TSW guest post, “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
This is a time of great tribulation for faithful Catholics, and especially so for priests who feel their loyalties torn and their allegiance under clouds of doubt. I am not shielded behind These Stone Walls from the doubt and pain experienced by so many priests right now.
A few weeks ago, Father Stuart sent a series of messages to me containing Archbishop Viganò’s published response to Cardinal Ouellet. Archbishop Viganò has challenged Pope Francis for his handling of the Cardinal McCarrick affair and other matters. I wrote about this in a series of posts I will link at the end of this one.
Just days before sitting down to type this post, wondering what on earth I could write about without taking a side on the vortex of information and misinformation, Father Stuart sent me this message:
“I have been so shaken by all this that a few weeks ago, I informed my small congregation that henceforth all weekday masses would be ad orientem because the time has come to focus on Christ and not the cult of the priest and his performance. I pray the canon in Latin sotto voce now and we pray the Prayer to St. Michael at the end of every mass. Call me foolish if you want, but it is the only way I am going to survive.”
The world might call him foolish, but I could only call him faithful. And like me, he perhaps had no idea when he wrote that message that the Mass readings for the following Sunday, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, provided a solid basis in Scripture for what he has undertaken. The Book of Daniel (12:1-3) calls upon Michael, the Great Prince, and Guardian of the Faithful of God, while the Gospel of Mark (13:24-32) warns of a time of great tribulation. For many, that time has come. I can only add to Father Stuart’s resolve the words of Saint Peter, Bishop of Rome:
“Stay sober and alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, knowing that the same suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world.”
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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. You may also like this related post from Father Gordon MacRae at These Stone Walls:
The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’
The Passion of the Christ has historical meaning on its face, but a far deeper story lies beneath where the threads of faith and history connect to awaken the soul.
The Passion of the Christ has historical meaning on its face, but a far deeper story lies beneath where the threads of faith and history connect to awaken the soul.
There are few things in life that a priest could hear with greater impact than what was revealed to me in a recent letter from a reader of These Stone Walls. After stumbling upon TSW several months ago, the writer began to read these pages with growing interest. Since then, she has joined many to begin the great adventure of the two most powerful spiritual movements of our time: Marian Consecration and Divine Mercy. In a recent letter she wrote, “I have been a lazy Catholic, just going through the motions, but your writing has awakened me to a greater understanding of the depths of our faith.”
I don’t think I actually have much to do with such awakenings. My writing doesn’t really awaken anyone. In fact, after typing last week’s post, I asked my friend, Pornchai Moontri to read it. He was snoring by the end of page two. I think it is more likely the subject matter that enlightens. The reader’s letter reminded me of the reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians read by Pornchai a few weeks ago, quoted in “De Profundis: Pornchai Moontri and the Raising of Lazarus”:
“Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
I may never understand exactly what These Stone Walls means to readers and how they respond. That post generated fewer comments than most, but within just hours of being posted, it was shared more than 1,000 times on Facebook and other social media.
Of 380 posts published thus far on These Stone Walls, only about ten have generated such a response in a single day. Five of them were written in just the last few months in a crucible described in “Hebrews 13:3 Writing Just This Side of the Gates of Hell.” I write in the dark. Only Christ brings light.
Saint Paul and I have only two things in common — we have both been shipwrecked, and we both wrote from prison. And it seems neither of us had any clue that what we wrote from prison would ever see the light of day, let alone the light of Christ. There is beneath every story another story that brings more light to what is on the surface. There is another story beneath my post, “De Profundis.” That title is Latin for “Out of the Depths,” the first words of Psalm 130. When I wrote it, I had no idea that Psalm 130 was the Responsorial Psalm for Mass before the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus:
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Lord hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication…
”I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and I hope in his word;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than sentinels wait for the dawn,
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.”
Notice that the psalmist repeats that last line. Anyone who has ever spent a night lying awake in the oppression of fear or dark depression knows the high anxiety that accompanies a long lonely wait for the first glimmer of dawn. I keep praying that Psalm — I have prayed it for years — and yet Jesus has not seen fit to fix my problems the way I want them fixed. Like Saint Paul, in the dawn’s early light I still find myself falsely accused, shipwrecked, and unjustly in prison.
Jesus also prayed the Psalms. In a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic, he cries out from the Cross, “Eli, Eli làma sabach-thàni?” It is not an accusation about the abandonment of God. It is Psalm 22, a prayer against misery and mockery, against those who view the cross we bear as evidence of God’s abandonment. It is a prayer against the use of our own suffering to mock God. It’s a Psalm of David, of whom Jesus is a descendant by adoption through Joseph:
“Eli, Eli làma sabach-thàni?
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are You so far from my plea,
from the words of my cry? …
… All who see me mock at me;
they curse me with parted lips,
they wag their heads …
Indeed many dogs surround me,
a pack of evildoers closes in upon me;
they have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones …
They divide my garments among them;
for my clothes they cast lots.”
So maybe, like so many in this world who suffer unjustly, we have to wait in hope simply for Christ to be our light. And what comes with the light? Suffering does not always change, but its meaning does. Take it from someone who has suffered unjustly. What suffering longs for most is meaning. People of faith have to trust that there is meaning to suffering even when we cannot detect it, even as we sit and wait to hear, “Upon the Dung Heap of Job: God’s Answer to Suffering.”
The Passion of the Christ
Last year during Holy Week, two Catholic prisoners had been arguing about why the date of Easter changes from year to year. They both came up with bizarre theories, so one of them came to ask me. I explained that in the Roman Church, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (equinox is from the Latin, “equi noctis,” for “equal night”). The prisoner was astonished by my ignorance and said, “What BS! Easter is forty days after Ash Wednesday!”
Getting to the story beneath the one on the surface is important to understand something as profound as the events of the Passion of the Christ. You may remember from my post, “De Profundis,” that Jesus said something perplexing when he learned of the illness of Lazarus:
“This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it”
The irony of this is clearer when you see that it was the raising of Lazarus that condemned Jesus to death. The High Priests were deeply offended, and the insult was an irony of Biblical proportions (no pun intended). Immediately following upon the raising of Lazarus, “the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council” (the Sanhedrin). They were in a panic over the signs performed by Jesus. “If he goes on like this,” they complained, “the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place (the Jerusalem Temple) and our nation” (John 11 47-48).
The two major religious schools of thought in Judaism in the time of Jesus were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Both arose in Judaism in the Second Century B.C. and faded from history in the First Century A.D. At the time of Jesus, there were about 6,000 Pharisees. The name, “Pharisees” — Hebrew for “Separated Ones” — came as a result of their strict observance of ritual piety, and their determination to keep Judaism from being contaminated by foreign religious practices. Their hostile reaction to the raising of Lazarus had nothing to do with the raising of Lazarus, but rather with the fact that it occurred on the Sabbath which was considered a crime.
Jesus actually had some common ground with the Pharisees. They believed in angels and demons. They believed in the human soul and upheld the doctrine of resurrection from the dead and future life. Theologically, they were hostile to the Sadducees, an aristocratic priestly class that denied resurrection, the soul, angels, and any authority beyond the Torah.
Both groups appear to have their origin in a leadership vacuum that occurred in Jerusalem between the time of the Maccabees and their revolt against the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanies who desecrated the Temple in 167 B.C. It’s a story that began Lent on These Stone Walls in “Semper Fi! Forty Days of Lent Giving Up Giving Up.”
The Pharisees and Sadducees had no common ground at all except a fear that the Roman Empire would swallow up their faith and their nation. And so they came together in the Sanhedrin, the religious high court that formed in the same time period the Pharisees and Sadducees themselves had formed, in the vacuum left by the revolt that expelled Greek invaders and their desecration of the Temple in 165 B.C.
The Sanhedrin was originally composed of Sadducees, the priestly class, but as common enemies grew, the body came to include Scribes (lawyers) and Pharisees. The Pharisees and Sadducees also found common ground in their disdain for the signs and wonders of Jesus and the growth in numbers of those who came to believe in him and see him as Messiah.
The high profile raising of Lazarus became a crisis for both, but not for the same reasons. The Pharisees feared drawing the attention of Rome, but the Sadducees felt personally threatened. They denied any resurrection from the dead, and could not maintain religious influence if Jesus was going around doing just that. So Caiaphas, the High Priest, took charge at the post-Lazarus meeting of the Sanhedrin, and he challenged the Pharisees whose sole concern was for any imperial interference from the Roman Empire. Caiaphas said,
“You know nothing at all. You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, so that the whole nation should not perish”
The Gospel of John went on to explain that Caiaphas, being High Priest, “did not say this of his own accord, but to prophesy” that Jesus was to die for the nation, “and not for the nation only, but, to gather into one the children of God” (John 11: 41-52). From that moment on, with Caiaphas being the first to raise it, the Sanhedrin sought a means to put Jesus to death.
Caiaphas presided over the Sanhedrin at the time of the arrest of Jesus. In the Sanhedrin’s legal system, as in our’s today, the benefit of doubt was supposed to rest with the accused, but … well … you know how that goes. The decision was made to find a reason to put Jesus to death before any legal means were devised to actually bring that about.
Behold the Man!
The case found its way before Pontius Pilate, the Roman Prefect of Judea from 25 to 36 A.D. Pilate had a reputation for both cruelty and indecision in legal cases before him. He had previously antagonized Jewish leaders by setting up Roman standards bearing the image of Caesar in Jerusalem, a clear violation of the Mosaic law barring graven images.
All four Evangelists emphasize that, despite his indecision about the case of Jesus, Pilate considered Jesus to be innocent. This is a scene I have written about in a prior Holy Week post, “Behold the Man as Pilate washes His Hands.”
On the pretext that Jesus was from Galilee, thus technically a subject of Herod Antipas, Pilate sent Jesus to Herod in an effort to free himself from having to handle the trial. When Jesus did not answer Herod’s questions (Luke 23: 7-15) Herod sent him back to Pilate. Herod and Pilate had previously been indifferent, at best, and sometimes even antagonistic to each other, but over the trial of Jesus, they became friends. It was one of history’s most dangerous liaisons.
The trial before Pilate in the Gospel of John is described in seven distinct scenes, but the most unexpected twist occurs in the seventh. Unable to get around Pilate’s indecision about the guilt of Jesus in the crime of blasphemy, Jewish leaders of the Sanhedrin resorted to another tactic. Their charge against Jesus evolved into a charge against Pilate himself: “If you release him, you are no friend of Caesar” (John 19:12).
This stopped Pilate in his tracks. “Friend of Caesar” was a political honorific title bestowed by the Roman Empire. Equivalent examples today would be the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed upon a philanthropist, or a bishop bestowing the Saint Thomas More Medal upon a judge. Coins of the realm depicting Herod the Great bore the Greek insignia “Philokaisar” meaning “Friend of Caesar.” The title was politically a very big deal.
In order to bring about the execution of Jesus, the religious authorities had to shift away from presenting Jesus as guilty of blasphemy to a political charge that he is a self-described king and therefore a threat to the authority of Caesar. The charge implied that Pilate, if he lets Jesus go free, will also suffer a political fallout.
So then the unthinkable happens. Pilate gives clemency a final effort, and the shift of the Sadducees from blasphemy to blackmail becomes the final word, and in pronouncing it, the Chief Priests commit a far greater blasphemy than the one they accuse Jesus of:
“Shall I crucify your king? The Chief Priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.”
Then Pilate handed him over to be crucified.