“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
Bombshells and Black Ops Defeated Justice in New Hampshire
Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F McLaughlin is retired but his legacy of bombshells and black ops left a lingering trail of deceit, injustice and ruined lives.
Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F McLaughlin is retired but his legacy of bombshells and black ops left a lingering trail of deceit, injustice and ruined lives.
June 26, 2024 by Ryan A. MacDonald
(Editor’s Note: The photo above depicts the Keene, NH Central Square gazebo. Photo: “Keene NH 26” by Alexius Horatius, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 / cropped)
On the day this article is published, a Catholic priest in America will awaken in a prison cell at age 71 in his thirtieth year of wrongful incarceration for fictitious crimes, sans evidence alleged to have occurred in 1983.
Every time I write about this story, my Inbox fills with messages from readers stunned and appalled by the facts of the 1994 trial of Fr Gordon MacRae. A small minority pose questions such as “How do you know he is innocent?” to which I usually reply, “What makes you think he may not be?” Then the tirades begin, but they never answer my question. Those who labor to suppress this case of false accusation preface their answers with statements like, “Priests did terrible things and bishops covered it up!” “We all know these priests are guilty,” and (from a SNAP activist) “The Catholic Church is a child raping institution!”. The prevailing logic here is that the details of this specific case do not matter. Father MacRae went to prison in 1994 for the sins of the Church, the sins of the bishops, and the sins of the priesthood. For too many silent Catholics who just want to move on from The Scandal, that is okay. It is not okay.
Then there are those who trumpet the fact that after Fr MacRae’s trial he pled guilty to other things. It is a favorite chant of the prosecutorial voices in all this which, sadly, include some officials of MacRae’s diocese. But it is true only if one is jaded enough to view the truth in its narrowest sense, disconnected from its factual history. It is not the whole truth. I explored that phenomenon in depth in “The Post Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae,” a previous chapter in this series.
In the trial of Father MacRae, the sole evidence was the word of Thomas Grover, a 27-year-old, 200 pound former high school football player who fell on bad times. Grover had a criminal rap sheet for assault, theft, forgery, and narcotics charges — all kept from the jury by Judge Arthur Brennan. He had a long history of drug abuse, and gained nearly $200,000 for “telling a lie and sticking to it,” as his ex-wife later described his testimony. She also says, today, that he punched her and broke her nose when she questioned his perjury.
And yet throughout this case, with all these factors in plain sight of everyone but the jury, not one person questioned whether this man might be lying for money. Not the zealot Detective James F. McLaughlin who today reportedly responded to the question of injustice with one of his own: “Why didn’t MacRae just take the plea deal?” Not the two prosecutors, one of whom was fired after this trial while the other later committed suicide. Not Judge Arthur Brennan who sent this priest to prison for the rest of his life while citing evidence that no one has ever seen or heard, evidence that never existed. Evidence that Grover was lying for money would have been in plain sight in a legitimate investigation. It emerged only years later in the Statement of Charles Glenn.
Nor was the possibility of lying for money ever openly considered by anyone in the Diocese of Manchester as they wrote six-figure checks to pay Grover and his brothers off. By the time it was all over, Thomas Grover, Jonathan Grover, David Grover and Jay Grover — all adults “remembering” their claims in the same week over a decade later — emerged from the case with combined settlements in excess of $650,000. Father MacRae boldly addressed the nature of such settlements, which continue to this day, in “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants.”
MacRae took, and passed, two pre-trial polygraph (lie detector) tests in this case. Thomas Grover and his brothers never assented to take a polygraph.
In “The Ordeal of Father MacRae,” President Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights charged that Fr MacRae, “has been treated unjustly by the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil.” Bill Donohue is not the first Church figure of note to suggest this. The late writer and editor, Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote that this case “reflects a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.” The late Cardinal Avery Dulles expressed a similar analysis of the case. I do not imagine any of them would blithely suggest that some Church officials — by commission or, more likely, omission — abetted a process in which a priest was wrongly imprisoned less than twenty miles from the Chancery Office of his diocese while denied proper legal assistance and due process for three decades.
Celebrating a Witch Hunt
The truth is worse than you know. During these same three decades , Fr MacRae — and he is still “Father” MacRae — has been forced to divide his less than meager resources to also fight off a simultaneous attempt by his Bishop to have him dismissed from the clerical state based on the fact that he is convicted and in prison. In a commentary for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, I referred to such forced laicization as “a sort of ecclesiastical equivalent of lethal injection.” To date, that one-sided effort has not yet been successful in the MacRae case, but the effort was initiated by the same bishop who was the subject of this letter from a former official at PBS television:
“I contacted the Manchester Diocese from WGBH… A few weeks later, when I met with Bishop [John] McCormack, the very first words he said to me were, ‘This must never leave this office. I believe Fr MacRae is innocent and his accusers likely lied.’.”
— Letter to Judge Brennan, Oct. 24, 2013
This whole story began with an explosive, slanderous lie. But the question remains, “Whose lie was it?” Bill Donohue wrote that MacRae’s troubles began in 1983 with a vague claim that was investigated, but nothing came of it. In 1985 the same claim surfaced again, was investigated by state officials, and was formally dismissed as “Unfounded.” This story should have ended there, but it was only just beginning.
In September of 1988, Ms. Sylvia Gale with the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) sent a letter to Keene, NH sex crimes Detective James F. McLaughlin. The letter claimed that she had developed information that before coming to New Hampshire, Father Gordon MacRae was a priest in Florida where “he molested two boys, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.” She identified MacRae as the primary suspect in that case, and claimed in the letter that the case remained unsolved when MacRae was sent by Church officials to “Berlen (sic) NH” to avoid that investigation. The Sylvia Gale letter was at best, a bombshell.
The explosive letter went on to claim that this information was passed on to Sylvia Gale by a former employee of Catholic Social Services who claimed to have been told this account by her supervisor, Monsignor John Quinn of the Diocese of Manchester. Ms. Gale’s letter alleged that Msgr Quinn threatened to fire his employee if she divulged this story further. This unnamed Catholic social services worker appears to have also been the therapist who began the MacRae case with the repeated but unfounded claims in 1983 and 1985.
Until 1994, when he received it as part of pre-trial discovery, Fr MacRae was entirely unaware of the libelous letter from Sylvia Gale implicating him in molestation and murder. But in New Hampshire, state social workers, prosecutors, and judges are immune from lawsuits. Nor was MacRae even aware of Detective McLaughlin’s investigation that ensued as a result of the Sylvia Gale letter. He had no idea that Detective McLaughlin, armed with this letter, proceeded to track down every family whose adolescent sons knew Father MacRae at any time during the 1980s. His report describes questioning twenty-six Keene, NH adolescents and their parents while generating little more than gossip and innuendo for most, and the first thoughts of lucrative opportunities for some.
Among those approached by Detective McLaughlin armed with the Florida molestation and murder story in 1988 was Patricia Grover, the mother of accusers yet to come and herself a state social worker in the same child protection agency that employed Sylvia Gale. It appears from the reports that the two had already collaborated about the Florida letter, and Ms. Grover vowed that she would begin speaking with her sons who knew Father MacRae.
One of them, Jonathan Grover, was soon to be discharged from the U.S. Navy for refusing its alcohol intervention program after a drunk driving arrest. Jonathan years later died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 48 in Phoenix, Arizona. Another, Thomas, then age 21, had been terminated from his third or fourth stint in residential treatment for drug addiction after he was caught smuggling drugs into the treatment facility. In 1988, these approaches to the Grover brothers yielded no accusations. Five years later, as the prospect of money loomed, they changed their minds.
In regard to the slanderous Florida, claim, Father MacRae had never been a priest in Florida, had never even visited Florida, and had never been assigned in Berlin, NH, as Sylvia Gale’s letter alleged. A simple check with the records of the Diocese of Manchester would have revealed that he was ordained for that diocese in 1982. He spent the previous four years at St Mary Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland and the four years before that at St Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Detective McLaughlin ran with the Sylvia Gale letter without ever bothering to check the facts. This is consistent with a reading of all of his reports in the MacRae case and with new witness statements. It appears that McLaughlin skillfully avoided asking questions or pursuing leads that might yield any information contrary to his bias.
I read up to page fifty of Detective McLaughlin’s voluminous, outrageous witch hunt that was his 1988 report before the Florida story emerged again. He learned from unnamed Florida police that the story was bogus and never happened, that there was never a molestation and murder case involving a Catholic priest, and that they had never before even heard the name of Father Gordon MacRae.
However McLaughlin’s report also claimed that another Florida sheriff, a “Sgt. Smith,” revealed that some other priest molested two boys there and was moved by the Church to New Hampshire. “But the names don’t match and your suspect is too young to be that suspect,” McLaughlin quoted the Florida sheriff. His report gives the impression that McLaughlin did not even think to ask for the name of that priest. Officials of the Diocese of Manchester later wrote that no priest ever came to the Diocese of Manchester under those circumstances.
It is of interest in these reports that Fr MacRae was somehow transformed from a “subject” to a “suspect,” but of what? This was never a case in which individuals went to the police with a complaint about this priest. From all the witness statements I have seen, it was McLaughlin who went to them, and it was McLaughlin who suggested that “a large sum of money” could be had by accusing MacRae. In another report McLaughlin wrote, “I asked him where he stood on a civil lawsuit.”
Meanwhile, written questions to Monsignor John Quinn about his reportedly being the source of the Florida story were answered minimally, with one-word denials but no light. Others in the Diocese of Manchester cooperated in similar fashion and often only after prompting by the suggestion of a subpoena.
The door and window of Father MacRae’s office at Saint Bernard rectory in Keene, New Hampshire in 1983. It overlooks Main Street and the busiest part of downtown Keene, NH.
“Going for a Sex Abuse Victim World Record”
A year before the above investigation ensued, Thomas Grover was a patient at Derby Lodge, a drug treatment center in Berlin, NH, and his third or fourth attempt at such treatment. While there, according to his counselor, he was repeatedly confronted for his distortions, dishonesty, and manipulation. He reportedly told his counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett , that he had been sexually abused by his adoptive father who by this point had been divorced from Patricia Grover.
According to Ms. Collett’s statements, Grover also claimed to have been sexually abused by so many people in the past that it appeared that he was “going for some sort of sexual abuse victim world record.” Also according to her statements, he never accused Fr Gordon MacRae. Ms. Collett went on to reveal an alleged series of coercive harassment and overt threats from Detective McLaughlin to get her to alter her account before testifying at MacRae’s 1994 trial.
Four and a half years after the Florida letter and Detective McLaughlin’s investigation swept through Keene, NH, Thomas Grover and two of his brothers — and later a third brother, Jay Grover, who once told Detective McLaughlin that MacRae had never done anything wrong — all now accused the priest. Two of them also accused another priest, Father Stephen Scruton, providing highly detailed accounts of rape and molestations by Scruton. Fr Scruton was also named as someone who witnessed MacRae’s abuse of Jonathan Grover, and in two of his claims, the two priests abused him simultaneously at age 12. Then it was changed to age 14.
However, Fr Scruton was not present in that parish with MacRae until Jonathan Grover was over sixteen years old. When that fact became apparent, it never raised a doubt in McLaughlin’s mind. He just excised Scruton’s name from future reports as though never mentioned, and MacRae became the sole priest accused. The entire file contains no evidence that Detective McLaughlin ever questioned Rev. Stephen Scruton about Jonathan Grover’s claims despite having already investigated and charged Scruton with an entirely unrelated claim brought by Todd Biltcliff who was a high school classmate of Jonathan Groven. That claim resulted in a financial settlement by the Diocese of Manchester.
McLaughlin wrote in one of his reports that he gave the Grovers a copy of MacRae’s resume “to help them with their dates.” At the end of this three-ring circus, Father MacRae ended up in a trial of the facts where there were no facts, in a courtroom where credibility was the sole measurement of guilt or innocence. But there was also no credibility. Hype and a stellar performance by a practiced con artist had to suffice, and it did.
Witness Tampering
Late in 2013, a man who was present at that 1994 trial wrote a letter about it to retired Judge Arthur Brennan who presided over the MacRae trial. What follows are some excerpts of that letter postmarked November 24, 2013:
“My wife and I were present in the courtroom throughout most of the trial of Fr Gordon MacRae in 1994. I have had many questions about this trial and much that I’ve wanted to clarify for my own peace of mind… We saw something in your courtroom during the MacRae trial that I don’t think you ever saw. My wife nudged me and pointed to a woman, Ms. Pauline Goupil, who was engaged in what appeared to be clear witness tampering. During questions by the defense attorney, Thomas Grover seemed to feel trapped a few times. On some of those occasions, we witnessed Pauline Goupil make a distinct sad expression with a down-turned mouth and gesturing her index finger from the corner of her eye down her cheek at which point Mr. Grover would begin to cry and sob on the stand. The questions were never answered.
“I have been troubled about this for all these years. I know what I saw, and what I saw was clearly an attempt to dupe the court and the jury. If the sobbing and crying were not truthful, then I cannot help but wonder what else was not truthful on the part of Mr. Grover. If he were really a victim who wanted to tell the simple truth, why was it necessary for him and Ms. Goupil to have what clearly appeared to be a set of prearranged signals to alter his testimony? The jury was privy to none of this to the best of my knowledge.”
One of the challenges for the prosecution of this trial was to get Thomas Grover to look like a victim. It was not easy. At 27 years old at trial, Grover was a 5’ 11”, 200-pound ex-high school football player with a history of alcoholism and a police record including domestic violence, assault, forgery, narcotics, and theft charges — all suppressed in this trial by Judge Arthur Brennan. The sobbing Thomas Grover on the witness stand could not mask his real persona for long. Consider this next excerpt from the above letter to Judge Brennan from a witness at trial:
“Secondly, I was struck by the difference in Thomas Grover’s demeanor on the witness stand in your court and his demeanor just moments before and after outside the courtroom. On the stand, he wept and appeared to be a vulnerable victim. Moments later, during court recess, in the parking lot he was loud, boisterous and aggressive. One time he even confronted me in a threatening attempt to alter my own testimony during sentencing.”
The presence of Ms. Pauline Goupil in this story is highly problematic, and, to a layman’s eyes, most suspicious. A masters level psychotherapist, she was retained pre-trial by Grover at the behest of his contingency lawyer “because it would look better for the jury,” according to Grover’s ex-wife, Trina Ghedoni, whose later Statement cast some previously unseen light on this trial.
At one point in the trial, Ms. Goupil, once exposed, was forced under a court order to turn over her treatment file. It contained but a few pages, and not a single therapeutic record pertaining to any claims of abuse of Thomas Grover by Father MacRae. However, Ms. Goupil’s file did contain this letter purportedly written by her to Thomas Grover who apparently had not been showing up for his pre-trial coaching sessions with her:
“Jim tells me MacRae is being offered a deal his lawyers will want him to take so there won’t be a trial. We can just move on to the settlement phase.”
I discussed this letter previously in “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud,” my first installment in this series. The letter was part of a file of perhaps six pages that Pauline Goupil turned over upon orders of the court. A year later, during evidentiary proceedings from lawsuits brought by Thomas Grover and two of his brothers — a hearing in which everyone but the imprisoned priest had lawyers representing them — Ms. Goupil testified at length about her pre-trial sessions with Thomas Grover and her work in aiding the reconstruction of his memories of abuse at age 15. For excerpts of that testimony see my article, “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”
None of Ms. Goupil’s role in this case ever became known by the Fr MacRae trial jury. Like everyone else involved in the prosecution of this case, she has since declined to be interviewed or to answer any questions.
“Jim” in Ms. Goupil’s above letter to Thomas Grover refers to Detective James McLaughlin, a now retired sex crimes investigator for the Keene, NH Police Department. In 2018, his name was briefly added to a secret list of police officers with a history of official misconduct. McLaughlin sued in a secret “John Doe” lawsuit heard with no public accountability. In May 2024, he was allowed to have his name removed from that public list. The prevailing belief among court observers in New Hampshire was that McLaughlin was afforded this level of anonymity and the judicial outcome because leaving his name on that list could have reopened hundreds of other cases like MacRae’s.
At some point in his investigation of Thomas Grover’s claims against Gordon MacRae, the detective appears to have taken up some sideline work on behalf of Grover’s contingency lawyer. In 1993 before Fr MacRae was charged or even aware of the claims against him, McLaughlin obtained a warrant for a “one-party intercept,” a sting attempt to record a telephone call from Thomas Grover to the priest who at that time was involved in in New Mexico. Little, if any, of the resultant call made its way into the 1994 trial, however. The recorded claims from Grover elicited nothing more than the bewildered voice of Father MacRae apparently wondering what on Earth the caller was talking about. However, this attempt at a telephone sting revealed something far more interesting.
Detective McLaughlin had apparently learned of a toll-free “800” number for contacting Fr MacRae. His police report detailed his attempts to call that number from his office at the Keene Police station. However, phone records which coincided with McLaughlin’s reports about executing the warrant indicate that the calls were not placed from his office at Keene Police headquarters, but from the office of Grover’s contingency lawyer 50 miles away. This has never been explained. Also never explained are statements from Grover’s family members who today reveal that the contingency lawyer gave Grover repeated cash advances before MacRae’s criminal trial, a practice that, if true, was a violation of the New Hampshire Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers. It is but another example of the pervasive lure of money in this story from start to finish.
An immediate problem for anyone trying to get to the bottom of all this is the absence of recorded interviews. It seemed to be Detective McLaughlin’s standard procedure to record interviews with accusers — referred to as “victims” in every one of his reports that I have read.
Another new witness statement from Steven Wollschlager alleges that McLaughlin knowingly elicited false accusations against Fr MacRae in exchange for cash and an implication that “life could go easier with a lot of money.” Wollschlager was subpoenaed to testify before a Grand Jury to process a new indictment against Fr MacRae just before the Grover trial, but decided at the last minute that he could not pursue this lie. Wollschlager added that McLaughlin’s reports contain statements that he never said, and distortions of what he did say.
The one recording McLaughlin did appear to make was that of his interview with Thomas Grover’s counselor, Ms. Debbie Collett. Today, she reports that he badgered her, threatened her, and allegedly bullied her into restating her account into something he wanted to hear, and he did all of this on tape. That recording was never turned over to the defense and has never seen the light of day.
Detective McLaughlin did not seem to record his interviews with any of the Grover brothers accusing Gordon MacRae. This was a startling departure from his own longstanding methods and protocols. The choice not to record anything in this one case seems calculated, and it has never been explained. The fact that today, multiple witnesses claim to have been bribed, coerced, badgered, and otherwise manipulated by this detective could lead a rational observer to question what has gone on here, and to doubt the credibility of the claims against this priest.
It is true that there has been a cover-up in the Catholic clergy sex abuse story, but it is not the one everyone thinks it is. It took place twenty years ago in beautiful downtown Keene, New Hampshire.
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Editor’s Note: The above article continued a series by Ryan A. MacDonald. Other titles in this series include “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud,” “The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence,” and “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.”
Judge Arthur Brennan, who sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to life in prison, being arrested in the Congressional Chambers in Washington, DC as part of the “Occupy Movement.”
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
The Twilight of Fatherhood: Cry, the Beloved Country
Fatherhood fades from the landscape of the human heart to the peril of the souls of our youth. For some young men in prison, absent fathers conjure empty dreams.
Fatherhood fades from the landscape of the human heart to the peril of the souls of our youth. For some young men in prison, absent fathers conjure empty dreams.
June 12, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae
“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.”
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, 1948
I was five days shy of turning fifteen years old and looking forward to wrapping up the tenth grade at Lynn English High School just north of Boston on April 4, 1968. That was the day Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. On that awful day, the Civil Rights struggle in America took to the streets. History eventually defined its heroes and its villains.
There is an unexpected freedom in being who and where I am. I can write the truth without the usual automatic constraints about what it might cost me. There is only one thing left to take from me, and these days the clamor to take it seems to have abated. That one thing is priesthood which — in this setting, at least — places me in the supporting cast of a heart-wrenching drama.
But first, back to 1968. Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream” speech still resonated in my 14-year-old soul when his death added momentum to America’s moral compass spinning out of control. I had no idea how ironic that one line from Martin’s famous speech would be for me in years to come: “From the prodigious hills of New Hampshire, Let Freedom Ring!”
Two months later, on June 5, 1968, fourteen years to the day before I would be ordained a priest, former Attorney General and Civil Rights champion, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August was marked by calamitous riots as Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the nominee only to lose the 1968 election to Richard Nixon in November.
Cry, the Beloved Country
It was at that moment in history — between the murders of two civil rights giants, one black and one white — that a tenth grade English teacher in a racially troubled inner city high school imposed his final assignment to end the school year. It was a book and a book report on Alan Paton’s masterpiece novel set in South Africa during Apartheid. It was Cry, the Beloved Country.
In a snail mail letter some months ago, a reader asked me to write about the origins of my vocation. His request had an odd twist. He wanted me to write of my call to priesthood in light of where it has put me, “so that we might have hope when God calls ordinary people to extraordinarily painful things.” I recently tried to oblige that request when I wrote “The Power and the Glory If the Heart of a Priest Grows Cold.”
I gave no thought to priesthood in the turmoil of a 1968 adolescence. Up to that time I gave little thought to the Catholic faith into which I was born. At age 15, like many adolescents today if left to their own devices, my mind was somewhere else. We were Christmas and Easter Catholics. I think the only thing that kept my family from atheism was the fact that there just weren’t enough holidays.
My first independent practice of any faith came at age 15 just after reading Cry, the Beloved Country. It started as an act of adolescent rebellion. My estranged father was deeply offended that I went to Mass on a day that wasn’t Christmas or Easter, and my decision to continue going was fueled in part by his umbrage.
But there was also something about this book that compelled me to explore what it means to have faith. Written by Alan Paton in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country was set in South Africa against the backdrop of Apartheid. I read it in 1968 as the American Civil Rights movement was testing the glue that binds a nation. That was 56 years ago, yet I still remember every facet of it, for it awakened in me not just a sense of the folly of racial injustice, but also the powerful role of fatherhood in our lives. It is the deeply moving story of Zulu pastor, Stephen Kumalo, a black Anglican priest driven to leave the calm of his rural parish on a quest in search of his missing young adult son, Absalom, in the city of Johannesburg.
South Africa during Apartheid is itself a character in the book. The city, Johannesburg, represents the lure of the streets as a looming cultural detriment to fatherhood, family, faith and tradition. Fifty-six years after reading it, some of its lines are still committed to memory:
“All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black, they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg.”
— Cry, the Beloved Country, p. 83
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation marked by the political and social dominance of the white European minority in South Africa. Though it was widely practiced and accepted, Apartheid was formally institutionalized in 1948 when it became a slogan of the Afrikaner National Party in the same year that Alan Paton wrote his influential novel.
Nelson Mandela, the famous African National Congress activist, was 30 when the book was published. I wonder how much it inspired his stand against Apartheid that condemned him to life in prison at age 46 in 1964 South Africa. His prison became a symbol that brought global attention to the struggle against Apartheid which finally collapsed in 1991. After 26 years in prison, Nelson Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize with South African President F.W. de Klerk in 1993. A year later, Nelson Mandela was elected president in South Africa’s first fully democratic elections.
In the Absence of Fathers
I never knew my teacher’s purpose for assigning Cry, the Beloved Country at that particular moment in living history, but I have always assumed that it was to instill in us an appreciation for the struggle for civil rights and racial justice. I never really needed much convincing on the right path on those fronts, but the book had another, more powerful impact that seemed unintended.
That impact was the necessity of strong and present fathers who are up to the sacrifices required of them, and especially so in the times that try men’s souls. There is a reason why I bring this book up now, 56 years after reading it. I had a friend here in this prison who had been quietly standing in the background. I will not name him because there are people on two continents who know of him. He is African-American in the truest sense, a naturalized American citizen brought to this country when his Christian family fled Islamic oppression in their African nation. He was 20 years old when we met, and had been estranged from his father who was the ordained pastor of a small Evangelical congregation in a city not so far from our prison.
I came to know this young prisoner when he was moved to the place where I live. He disliked the new neighborhood immensely at first, finding little in the way of common ground, but Pornchai Moontri and his friends managed to draw him in. Perhaps what finally won him over was the fact that we, too, were in a strange land here. Pornchai brought him to me and introduced me as “everyone’s father here.”
We recruited him on Porchai’s championship baseball team which won the 2016 pennant defeating eight other teams.
I broke the ice one day when I showed our new friend a copy of a weekly traffic report for this blog. He was surprised to see a significant number of visits from the land of his birth. Our friend’s African name was hardly pronounceable, but many younger prisoners have “street names.” So after some trust grew a little between us, he told me some of the story of his life. It was then that I began to call him “Absalom.” The photo at the top of this post is Pornchai’s 2016 championship baseball team in which Pornchai, our old friend Chen (now in China), Absalom, and I are all pictured.
I do not think that I was even conscious at the time of the place in my psyche from which that name was dusted off. He did not object to being called “Absalom,” but it puzzled him.
It puzzled me, too. Absalom was the third son of King David in the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament. In the Second Book of Samuel (15:1-12) Absalom rebelled against his father, staging a revolt that eventually led to his own demise. In the forest of Ephraim, Absalom was slain by Joab, David’s nephew and the commander of his armies. David bitterly mourned the loss of his son, Absalom (2 Samuel 19:1-4).
When I told this story to our new friend,he said, “that sounds like the right name for me.” I told him that in Hebrew, Absalom means “my father is peace.” But even as I said it, I remembered that Absalom is also the name of Pastor Stephen Kumalo’s missing son in Cry, the Beloved Country.
So I told my friend the story of how Absalom’s priest-father in South Africa had instilled in him a set of values and respect for his heritage, of how poverty and oppression caused him to leave home in search of another life only to be lured ever more deeply into the city streets of Johannesburg. I told of how his father sacrificed all to go in search of him.
I also told my friend that I read this book at age 15 in my own adolescent rebellion, and the story was so powerful that it has stayed with me for all these years and shaped some of the most important parts of my life. I told Absalom of the Zulu people and the struggles of Apartheid, a word he knew he once heard, but had no idea of what it meant. I told him that the Absalom of the story left behind his proud and spiritually rich African culture just to succumb to the lure of the street and of how he forgot all that came before him.
“That’s my story!” said Absalom when I told him all this. So the next day I went in search of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. The prison library had a dusty old copy so I brought it back for Absalom to read, and he struggled with it. A part of the struggle is the Zulu names and terms that are vaguely familiar deep in our Absalom’s cultural memory. Another part of the struggle is the story itself, not just of Apartheid, but of the painful estrangement that grew between father and son, an estrangement that our Absalom could not articulate until now.
So then something that I always believed was going to happen, did happen. Absalom told me that he has contacted his mother to ask his father to visit him for the first time in the years that he has been in prison. He said they plan to visit on Father’s Day. They have a lot to talk about, and that is a drama for which I feel blessed to be in the supporting cast — all the rest of prison BS notwithstanding!
But there is something else. There is always something else. When I began writing this post, I asked Absalom to lend me his copy of Cry, the Beloved Country. When he brought it to me, he pointed out that he has only twenty pages left and wanted to finish it that night. “This is the first book I have ever read by choice,” he said, “and I don’t think I could ever forget it.” Neither could I.
As I thumbed through the book looking for a passage I remember reading 56 years ago (the one that begins this post), I came to a small bookmark near the end that Absalom used to mark his page. It was “A Prisoner’s Prayer to Saint Maximilian Kolbe.” I asked my friend where he got it, and he said, “It was in the book. I thought you put it there!” I did not. God only knows how many years that prayer sat inside that book waiting to be discovered, but here it is:
O Prisoner-Saint of Auschwitz, help me in my plight. Introduce me to Mary, the Immaculata, Mother of God. She prayed for Jesus in a Jerusalem jail. She prayed for you in a Nazi prison camp. Ask her to comfort me in my confinement. May she teach me always to be good.
If I am lonely, may she say, ‘Our Father is here.’
If I feel hate, may she say, ‘Our Father is love.’
If I sin, may she say, ‘Our Father is mercy.’
If I am in darkness, may she say, ‘Our Father is light.’
If I am unjustly accused, may she say, ‘Our Father is truth.’
If I lose hope, may she say, ‘Our Father is with you.’
If I am lost and afraid, may she say, ‘Our Father is peace.’
And that last line, you may recall, is the meaning of Absalom.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: South Africa is also home to Kruger National Park which forms its eastern border with Mozambique. Kruger National Park was also the setting for the most well read of our Fathers Day posts, the first those linked below:
In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men
Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind
If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!
Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed
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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
The Power and the Glory If the Heart of a Priest Grows Cold
After 42 years of priesthood, 30 unjustly in prison, ‘The Whisky Priest,’ the central figure of Graham Greene’s best known novel, comes to my mind in darker times.
After 42 years of priesthood, 30 unjustly in prison, ‘The Whisky Priest,’ the central figure of Graham Greene’s best known novel, comes to my mind in darker times.
June 5, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae
“You are sure to find another cross if you flee the one you bear.”
— Anonymous Mexican Proverb
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I was ordained to the priesthood on June 5, 1982, the sole candidate for priesthood in the entire State of New Hampshire that year. On the next day, June 6, 1982, I was nervously standing in a corner in the Sacristy as I prepared to offer my First Mass in Saint John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. The church was packed with friends, family, and strangers from near and far. I was standing in a corner because the Sacristy was filled with my brother priests all vesting to join me for the occasion. I imagined they were watching me for signs that I might flee.
I peered through the open sacristy door at the huge, anticipating crowd and my anxiety level was off the scales. I wished for a way to calm my nerves. Just then, a young lady came into the sacristy and handed me a written note. The driver of a Buick out in the parish parking lot had left the lights on and a thoughtful person jotted down the license plate number. So I totally broke protocol. I walked out of the sacristy into the sanctuary, approached the lectern microphone, and announced that someone had parked a car with its lights still on.
It worked! All the attention was suddenly off me as everyone looked around to see who would get up and embarrassedly walk outside. Then, still at the microphone, I announced, “I don’t know what the rest of you are expecting because I don’t have a clue how to say Mass!” The church erupted in laughter and spontaneous applause, and my anxiety went up in smoke. Back in the sacristy, the others did not understand what I had said. “What are you up to?” They asked.
In the years to follow, as you know, priesthood took me down some dark side roads. In many ways, and at many times over those years, I have felt as though I had been an utter failure as a priest. I should not be in this prison-place from where I write yet another epitaph on yet another year of priesthood offered up like incense to drift out beyond these stone walls. Yet here I am, and in the midst of sorrow and tears, I am powerless to change any of it.
I know today that I had been caught up in a dense web of corruption that resists unraveling despite some concerted efforts. I did not see any of this corruption as it arose around me. Priests tend not to be attuned to such things, but others have written about it. Among them is Claire Best, a most tenacious investigator, researcher, independent writer, and Hollywood talent agent who wrote, “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”
On the Day of Padre Pio
Back in 2009 as my 27th anniversary of priesthood loomed, this blog was just beginning to take shape. I did not foresee that coming either. I did not even know what a blog was. It was proposed to me by a writer in Australia. This is a familiar story to most readers, but I recently came upon a different perspective on this blog’s beginning. It’s a sort of parallax view, a telling of the same story but from a different angle. From his newfound cradle of freedom in Thailand, Pornchai-Max Moontri wrote about this with some help from our editor. We will link to it again at the end of this post, but if you plan to read it, bring a tissue. It is, “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”
On the very day I was ordained in 1982, my friend, Pornchai Moontri was eight years old, living in abject poverty, but happy, on a farm in northeast Thailand. He was three years away from being taken, trafficked to America, his mother brutally murdered, and his life consumed in the wreckage of real abuse by a real predatory monster while all the “officials” looked the other way. Our lives, his and mine, were on a collision course.
When this blog had its debut in July, 2009, a small number of self-described “faithful” Catholics, and some faithfully anti-Catholic activists, took umbrage with the notion that an accused and imprisoned priest might have such a voice in the Catholic public square. Some of them sought out anything and everything they could unearth and throw at me to discourage my writing. It was effective. Discouragement comes easily to a prisoner.
The strangest of the insults came from a man who felt obliged to tell me that he refuses to read anything written by “another Whisky Priest.” That was a bit of a mystery until months later when I read Graham Greene’s masterful 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory. Its main character is a priest without a name. He is the “Whisky Priest” known mostly for the prison of addiction.
That particular insult seemed entirely misplaced. Google did not always pay attention to punctuation back then. It turned out that the letter writer had Googled “Father Gordon MacRae” and stumbled upon a reference to an interview with actress Meredith MacRae in which she revealed, “My father Gordon MacRae was an alcoholic.” Gordon MacRae the film and Broadway star went on to win a multitude of awards for starring roles in Carousel and Oklahoma, among others. But, alas, I am not he, and nor am I the “Whisky Priest.” I have not consumed alcohol in any form other than at Mass since 1983.
But “Whisky Priest” did not quite have the force of insult the letter writer intended. Graham Greene’s “Whisky Priest” was sadly all too human, but his priesthood towered over his flawed humanity. The Power and the Glory is set in early 20th Century Mexico when an emerging totalitarian regime there outlawed the practice of Catholicism in a nation that was almost 100 percent Catholic. This is the story of the Cristeros, Catholics who rose up in civil war against a Marxist regime that tried to banish their faith. Priests were hunted; many were martyred; and those who remained, and stayed alive, were forced to abandon their priesthood, enter into marriage, and denounce the Church or face prison and eventual execution.
Many who were not martyred did as required, but not the Whisky Priest. In the most unique of literary twists, a police lieutenant made it his life’s mission to hunt down and trap the Whisky Priest. He knew of the priest’s alcoholism so he enticed him by leaving a trail of bottles of wine. The story conveys the priest’s spiritual battle within himself as he consumed the wine to silence his addiction while through grace and sheer force of will always forced himself to leave enough to offer Mass all throughout the country for Catholics who remained steadfast in their faith at a time when there was no other priest.
The Whisky Priest is the most unlikely of spiritual heroes. Priesthood was his greatest cross because it placed his life, and the lives of those who sought his sacraments, in grave danger. It was also his liberation. When he was finally arrested, the Police Lieutenant asked him why he stayed only to be captured and likely martyred:
“If I left, it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. But it doesn’t matter so much my being a coward and all the rest. I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same — and I can give him God’s pardon. It wouldn’t make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.”
A Voice in the Wilderness
But also among the din of objections to my writing came far louder and more voluminous words of encouragement from other sources. Among them, as most readers know, was Cardinal Avery Dulles who famously wrote,
“Someday your sufferings will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Someone may want to add a new chapter to the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison. In the spirit of St Paul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fr Walter Ciszek, and Fr Alfred Delp, your writing, which is clear, eloquent and spiritually sound, will be a monument to your trials.”
I was stunned to receive the support of this nation’s most prolific Catholic writer and prelate. But I was not sure that I believed him. Then, 15 years later as yet another ordination anniversary loomed, I learned from others just a week ago about a brief article at the blog, Les Femmes — The Truth. The writer, Mary Ann Krietzer, had written a letter to me about a year earlier.
I get many letters, a few of them hate mail but most of them strong gestures of support. However I fail, though not by choice, to answer most. I can purchase only six typewriter ribbons per year so I must preserve them for BTSW posts. I had carpal tunnel surgery on both hands so writing a large volume by hand is most difficult. I came upon a letter kindly sent to me from Mary Ann Krietzer that I somehow had misplaced. Six months later, near Pentecost, I discovered it in a pile of paper and wrote a brief reply. That prompted her to write a post on her widely-read blog entitled, “Fr Gordon MacRae and Beyond These Stone Walls.”
In many ways I was shocked by it. The author gave clear voice to all that Cardinal Dulles had predicted, without even knowing that he had predicted it. Mary Ann Kreitzer’s article included this passage published earlier by a recently ordained deacon that was given a magnified voice at Les Femmes — The Truth:
“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.”
For people who base their core purpose upon a lie, the truth is an especially threatening thing. I had no idea that my voice in the wilderness was no longer in the wilderness. I hope you will read Ms. Krietzer’s post linked again below. She provided articulate balance to the loud din of those who pursued me across the land just to disparage and demean. For my part, after reading Mary Ann Krietzer’s post, I just wanted to go hide under my bunk. But in truth, as I mark 42 years of priesthood in the deep peripheries to which Pope Francis once summoned the gaze of the whole Church, I remain a man in prison, and a priest in full.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I want to thank you for your support and prayers. I also want to ask for your prayers for a young man who encountered this blog along with his mother and father and family, back in its infancy in 2009. They have been devoted readers ever since. On May 29 this year Ben Feuerborn became Father Ben Feuerborn when he was ordained a priest in Lincoln, Nebraska. His first Mass went without a hitch — perhaps because no one had left their car lights on. His second Mass was offered at a Benedictine abbey near Kansas City, Missouri. While Father Ben was in the sacristy vesting for Mass, his mother spotted a plaque under the title “Ad Altare Dei” (To the altar of God). She took out her phone and snapped this photo, which I received this week. It is a bit of a mystery, one among many.
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We also recommend these related posts:
Fr. Gordon MacRae at Beyond These Stone Walls
by Mary Ann Krietzer @Les Femmes — The Truth
On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized
by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri
A Mirror Image in the Devil’s Masterpiece
by Dilia E. Rodríguez, Ph.D.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants
With no court oversight the Diocese of Manchester paid a six-figure settlement for an expired abuse claim urged on by discredited “trauma-informed consultants.”
With no court oversight the Diocese of Manchester paid a six-figure settlement for an expired abuse claim urged on by discredited “trauma-informed consultants.”
May 29, 2024 by Ryan A. MacDonald
Editor’s Note: The following post is by Ryan A. MacDonald who has published extensively on the sexual abuse narrative in the Catholic Church. His most recent was a collaboration with Los Angeles writer and researcher Claire Best entitled “The New Hampshire YDC Scandal and the Trial of Father MacRae.”
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I hear that there is a lot going on in New Hampshire, the “Live Free or Die” State. The State has long operated a juvenile detention facility called YDC — the Youth Development Center. In more recent years it was renamed the “Sununu Youth Development Center” after former Governor John Sununu, father of current Governor Christopher Sununu. They both now seem anxious to have their family name removed from that facility. The “YDC,” as it is commonly called has been at the center of a massive child sexual and physical abuse case in New Hampshire. There are currently an estimated 1,300 open lawsuits and other claims against the State and its officials for alleged physical and sexual abuse and attempts to cover that up. The alleged abuse was going on, but hidden, at the same time the Diocese of Manchester was on the public radar when Fr. Gordon MacRae faced trial in 1994. It was still going on in 2002 when the State launched a grand jury investigation of the Diocese whose abuse narrative paled next to the one being kept hidden by the State. After the State convened a grand jury to investigate the Catholic Diocese in 2002, it convened another to investigate the prestigious St. Paul’s School in later years. The State has convened no grand jury to investigate the YDC claims, though they dwarf other cases.
The YDC saga exploded into public view last year when former resident David Meehan filed a lawsuit against the State for hundreds of incidents of victimization by sexual and physical violence as a young teen held at YDC. He was but the first of many to come forward. Recognizing its liability, the State Legislature earmarked a $100 million fund to settle the YDC claims. The lawyers involved scoffed stating that it needed to be at least four times that amount. The list of plaintiffs then exploded. The State offers unquestioned settlements of up to $1.5 million for sexual abuse claims and $150,000 for claims of physical abuse.
A minority of the 1,300 claimants opted for a quick settlement while to date most others are holding out for a trial to present evidence and have their injuries heard in open court. The horrific case of David Meehan was the first to go to trial in early May, 2024. It generated lurid headlines about the abuse he suffered, including testimony of some staff who tried to report it, but were not allowed to. A shocked jury came back with a verdict just a week before I am writing this post. The jury awarded David Meehan $38 million in compensatory and punitive damages for his pain and suffering. Now there are over 1,000 trials yet to be scheduled and heard. Writer and researcher Claire Best has a companion post this week describing the connections in this story and how its tangled web has influenced the case against Fr. MacRae and the responses of the Diocese of Manchester.
Back in 2019, I wrote an article that I am told is among the most read and cited posts at this site. “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List” documents a 2019 decision of Bishop Peter A. Libasci, Bishop of Manchester, to publicize for at least the second or third time an ever expanding list of New Hampshire Catholic priests who have been “credibly” accused going back at least 50 years.
It is alarming to see that in that relatively small New England diocese, there are now over 75 names on Bishop Libasci’s list. Most of those priests are deceased, some for decades, and few have had anything resembling legal due process through which to defend themselves. That is most certainly so when they are accused posthumously like most of those on the list.
Bishop Libasci cited “transparency” as his motive for updating and republishing that list. However, the words “credibly accused” seem to have fallen off the list. In the Diocese of Manchester, the standard for public shaming is now simply “accused.” It seems far more Calvinist than Catholic. For some transparency of our own, we should clarify that Fr. Gordon MacRae is also on that list under the unique heading of “convicted.” There have been many published commentaries about the how and why of that, but perhaps the best of these is a series in the highly credible venue, The Wall Street Journal.
If you visit that link, be sure to view and listen to its first item, a five-minute video interview with Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the WSJ Editorial Board who was awarded a Pulitzer for her writings on “Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Time.”
Bishop Libasci’s published list does more than just inform the public. What would be the public interest in learning that a long deceased priest was posthumously accused of molestation? The list also acts as a “hit list,” giving an aura of credibility to scammers who would take advantage of the abuse crisis by filing false claims while using the list to get their facts straight. It is folly to believe this does not happen. Our bishops know full well that it does. Just recently in these pages, Fr. MacRae himself wrote of several modern examples in “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian. Courtesy of TheMediaReport
Given the well-founded caution about false claims and financial scammers cited above, it was alarming to read the following in a recent news article, “Diocese of Manchester Settles Sexual Abuse Claim from the 1970s.” Here is an excerpt:
“No lawsuit was filed because the alleged abuse happened outside the statute of limitations, ... but the attorney representing the ‘John Doe’ who was involved said it’s important for survivors to come forward as part of the healing process. Attorney Mitchell Garabedian and Bob Hoatson, President of the non profit “Road to Recovery,” announced the six-figure settlement outside the Diocese of Manchester office.”
Activist Bob Hoatson said he drove all the way to Manchester from New Jersey to recognize what he called “the heroic actions of the accuser.” In a statement, a spokesperson for the Diocese of Manchester explained why the Diocese opted for a six-figure settlement despite the fact that the statute of limitations for filing any claim at all had expired many years ago:
“The Diocese of Manchester provides financial assistance to those who have been harmed, regardless of when the abuse occurred, through a process utilizing independent trauma-informed consultants.”
To understand how this is all connected to the vast number of unquestioned settlements in the State of New Hampshire YDC cases, just take a moment to listen to this brief advertisement from a local New Hampshire lawfirm. This diocese should prepare itself now for an onslaught of claims filed with no judicial oversight, but demands for settlements brought by the likes of Attorney Mitchell Garabedian and victim-activist Bob Hoatson. Ironically, the two of them were also at the center of a most important op-ed here in these pages entitled, “Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates.”
The Center for Prosecutor Integrity
A most basic problem with handing the matter of due process for the accused and outcomes for the Diocese by abdicating judgment to “trauma-informed consultants” is that the term itself is widely noted and critiqued as highly biased by professionals. It has a documented negative impact on judicial fairness and due process of law in cases of sexual abuse and assault.
The Center for Prosecutor Integrity (CPI) is an organization that seeks to strengthen prosecutorial ethics, promote due process, and end wrongful convictions. Victim-centered investigations, also known in the sex abuse industry as “trauma-informed” investigations, presume the guilt of all defendants and lead to wrongful convictions by steering their investigations around an initial presumption of guilt.
According to the Center’s website, “The most destructive types of victim-centered investigations are known as “Start by Believing,” and “Trauma-Informed.” The CPI displays an entire bibliography documenting the “junk science” behind them, and how they have turned the problem of wrongful convictions into an epidemic of false witness and police and prosecutorial misconduct.
This has crept into the arena of sexual abuse and assault convictions in just the last decade as advocacy groups flourish through federal Department of Justice grants. One of these groups, “End Violence Against Women International,” had been the recipient of 18 grants totaling millions of dollars from the US Department of Justice since 2011. It had been one of the main proponents of “Start by Believing” and “Trauma-Informed” investigations. The organization widely distributed a “Start by Believing” Action Kit to police and prosecutors nationwide. According to the CPI, it openly endorses investigator bias, utilizes guilt-presuming terminology, and contains false claims."
The CPI website lists dozens of scholarly articles refuting the “trauma-informed” methods of civil and criminal investigation and adjudication of claims. Nasheia Conway, the Civil Rights Program Director for Prosecutor Integrity complained in 2019 to the Office of the U.S. Inspector General:
“These concepts and investigative methods abuse the mission of the Department of Justice, which states in part, “... to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” Termed a ‘multimillion dollar threat to justice,’ they abuse the purpose and intent of Congressional appropriations. And they abuse the public trust which is critical to the effective functioning of our criminal justice system.”
These facts have been documented and exposed by the Center for Prosecutor Integrity:
Since 1989 there have been over 2,400 documented cases of persons who have been wrongfully convicted and later exonerated.
An estimated 43% of wrongful convictions arise from misconduct involving prosecutors, police, investigators, and other officials.
More than 90% of criminal cases are adjudicated during closed-door plea-bargain negotiations. These cases have little or no public accountability or even awareness.
The most common types of ethical violations committed by prosecutors include:
Failure to disclose exculpatory evidence (Brady violation)
Use of inadmissible or false evidence/lack of candor
Plea bargain offenses (former Keene, NH Detective James F. McLaughlin vastly bolstered his conviction rate by offering minuscule and lenient plea-bargain deals to defendants.)
Inflammatory statements and witness harassment (Read the statement of Debra Collett.)
Mischaracterizing evidence
Vouching
In 2019, the CPI published an extensive report documenting the “Junk Science in Trauma-Informed Investigations.” The U.S. Department of Justice ceased funding for “trauma-informed” investigations because it was determined that they disavowed due process.
Upon information and belief, the trauma-informed prosecutorial organization to which the Diocese of Manchester has deferred in the matter of abuse investigations and settlements is the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (NHCADSV). The official investigator for the Diocese is now Julie Curtin, a former police officer in Concord, New Hampshire. She was also the principal investigator in a case that Fr. MacRae once wrote about in these pages: “Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester.” It is worth reading. It is also alarming to see that Ms. Curtin is now the investigator for the Diocese of Manchester Office for Ministerial Conduct.
Some months ago, Los Angeles researcher Claire Best wrote a long, nebulous, but entirely truthful analysis of the matter that sent Fr. MacRae to prison 30 years ago and keeps him there today. It is “New Hampshire Corruption Drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”
This week, Claire Best has a commentary on current events in New Hampshire which is simultaneously published at the Voices from Beyond page at this site.
“A New Hampshire Ponzi Scheme Uncovered?”
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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Weapons of Mass Destruction
At the behest of paid, unnamed ‘trauma-informed consultants,’ my diocese provided a six-figure settlement of a claim far too old to be filed in any court of law.
At the behest of paid, unnamed ‘trauma-informed consultants,’ my diocese provided a six-figure settlement for a claim far too old to be filed in any court of law.
May 22, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae
And they keep on coming. A year before the 2002 wave of clergy sex abuse claims rippled out of Boston across the country, Sean Murphy, age 37, and his mother, Sylvia, demanded $850,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston. Sean claimed that three decades earlier, he and his brother were repeatedly molested by their parish priest. In support of the claim, Mrs. Murphy produced old school records placing her sons in a community where the priest was once assigned. No other corroboration was needed. Shortly thereafter, Byron Worth, age 41, recounted molestation by the same priest and demanded his own six-figure settlement. The men were following an established practice of “mediated settlements,” a precedent set in the early 1990s when a multitude of molestation claims from the 1960s and 1970s emerged against Father James Porter and a few other priests. In 1993, the Diocese of Fall River settled some 80 such claims in a single negotiated deal. Other Church institutions followed that lead on the advice of insurers and attorneys.
Before the Murphys’ $850,000 demand was paid, however, Sean, his mother, and Byron Worth were indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury for conspiracy, attempted larceny, and soliciting others to commit larceny. It turned out that Sean and Byron were once inmates together at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Shirley where they concocted their fraudulent plan to score a windfall from their beleaguered Church.
On November 16, 2001, Sean Murphy and Byron Worth pleaded guilty to fraud charges and were sentenced to less than two years in prison for the scam. The younger Murphy brother was never charged, and Mrs. Murphy died before facing court proceedings. Local newspapers relegated the Murphy scam to the far back pages while headlines screamed about the emerging multitude of decades-old claims of abuse by priests. When two other inmates at MCI-Shirley accused another priest in 2001, a Boston lawyer wrote that it is no coincidence these men shared the same prison. “They also shared the same contingency lawyer,” he wrote. “I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that this is a current and popular scam.”
It is not difficult to understand the roots of such fraud. Prison inmates, like others, read newspapers. Just months before the onslaught of claims against priests, the Archdiocese of Boston landed on the litigation radar screen with the notorious arrest of Mr. Christopher Reardon, a young, married, Catholic layman, model citizen, and youth counselor at a local YMCA who was also employed part-time at a small, remote parish outpost north of Boston. As Mr. Reardon’s extensive serial child molestation case came to light—with substantial and graphic DNA, videotape, and photographic evidence of assaults that occurred over previous months—the YMCA quickly entered into settlements consistent with the State’s charitable immunity laws.
In a search for deeper pockets, however, a local contingency lawyer pondered for the news media about whether the rural part-time parish worker’s activities were personally known—and covered up—by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. It was a ludicrous suggestion, but it was a springboard to announce in the Boston Globe (July 14, 2001) that “the hearsay and speculation” among lawyers and clients, is that “the Catholic Church settled their cases [of suspected abuse by priests] for an average of $500,000 each since the 1990s.”
It was a dangled lure that would soon have many takers, some of whom have been to the Church’s ATM more than once. In January of 2003, at the height of the clergy scandal, a 68-year-old Massachusetts priest had the poor judgment to be drawn into a series of suggestive Internet exchanges with a total stranger, a 32-year-old man named Dominic Martin. Using a threat of media exposure of the printed exchanges, Mr. Martin demanded that the priest leave an envelope containing $3,000 in a local restaurant lobby.
The frightened priest, who never had a prior accusation, compounded his poor judgment by paying the demand. Soon after, another cash demand was made, but the priest finally called the police who set up a sting of their own. On January 24, 2003, Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna, were arrested at the drop point, and charged with extortion.
The police report revealed that Mr. Martin had changed his name. His birth name was identified as Tod Biltcliffe, a man who, a decade earlier, obtained a settlement when he accused a New Hampshire priest of molesting him in the 1980s. At the time the priest protested that Mr. Biltcliffe was committing fraud and larceny. The Church settled anyway. Biltcliffe’s claim was that when he was 15 years old, the priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA. Curiously, the investigation file contained a transcript of a 1988 “Geraldo Rivera” show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” One of the cases profiled was that of a young man who claimed that a priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA.
The 1988 “Geraldo” transcript was a sensationalized account of clergy sex abuse cases from the 1970s and 1980s. The transcript is notable because it contains many of the same claims of exposing secret Church documents, archives, and episcopal cover-ups in 1988 that lawyers and reporters claim to have exposed for the first time in 2003.
Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country. Jason Berry, who excoriates the Church and priesthood at every turn, actually defended, in 1988, the existence of so-called “secret” Church archives: “Canon law says that you have to have a secret archive in every diocese…. That’s funny because I’ve been attacking the Church for three years on this… I want to express my own irony of [now] being in a position of defending the Church.”
Enter Shamont Lyle Sapp
When Shamont Lyle Sapp first detected the smell of money, he found it too enticing to pass up. Convicted for a series of bank robberies, Mr. Sapp, then age 51, was serving a lengthy sentence in the dark peripheries of the U.S. Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania when the scent first drifted by his cell in 2008. That was when Sapp filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. Detailing his tragic past, Sapp’s lawsuit claimed that he was a stranded teenage runaway from his Pennsylvania home en route to stay with relatives in Oregon. Then Archdiocese of Portland priest, Father Thomas Laughlin took advantage of his plight to repeatedly sexually abuse him.
Sapp claimed in his highly detailed lawsuit that the priest offered the young runaway a job cutting grass, then sexually abused him at a Portland Catholic church. Then Father Laughlin sodomized him during a five-day motel stay paid for by the priest who then funded the youth’s return trip to Pennsylvania. It was the latest horror story in the Catholic abuse narrative, and one that dismayed Catholics coast to coast.
Mr. Sapp’s story rang true, so it flew. Further inquiry was deemed unnecessary. The detailed claims were reported to civil legal authorities for whom the story also rang true, but Father Tom Laughlin had already been accused and convicted by others with similar tales. Mr. Sapp’s disturbing story added to the weight of a growing millstone around the priest’s neck.
In all public documents in the case, Mr. Sapp found refuge among an ever-expanding list of “John Does” accusing priests from the Archdiocese of Portland to cash in on its bankruptcy proceedings. Sapp’s story was accepted at face value resulting in a cash settlement of $70,000. Inmate Sapp accepted the offer while lawyers, the Archdiocese, and victim advocates all pontificated about how no amount of money could compensate him for the trauma he endured. As for Father Laughlin, the “credible” (aka “settled”) accusations drove another nail into the coffin containing the remains of his priesthood as the Archdiocese sought his dismissal.
There was only one problem with Shamont Lyle Sapp’s story: “It was entirely fabricated,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer who in 2014 prosecuted Sapp for mail fraud and other federal charges for this and three similar frauds carried out against Catholic priests and dioceses in four jurisdictions. While serving another sentence in a medium security state prison in Minersville, PA, Mr. Sapp filed a second lawsuit claiming that a priest of the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona sexually abused him.
Later still, Sapp was serving a sentence in a South Carolina prison from where he sought compensation for claimed sexual abuse by another priest. And before all the above, Sapp filed a 2006 lawsuit claiming that a Spokane, Washington priest had sexually abused him in a similar account.
In all these other claims, Sapp picked from diocesan records the names of senior priests who had never before been accused, destroying not only their good names, but their vocations. Each was removed from ministry under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter. They became “Priests in Limbo,” as the National Catholic Register’s Joan Frawley Desmond described priests living, sometimes for years, under a cloud of shame and suspicion for events that could not be disproven after the passage of time. In each of his claims, Shamont Lyle Sapp simply did a little research on publicly available bankruptcy proceedings entered into by each of the four beleaguered dioceses he sued. He then attached his name and claims to each case — one by one over several years — aided and abetted by an assurance of anonymity as “John Doe” at every level in the settlement process.
He was also “John Doe” in the news media, and in the fired-up rhetoric of the activists of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests who are ready to dismiss any hard questions as “revictimizing the victims.” It was ultimately his own greed that unfolded Mr. Sapp’s hand. In 2011, Sapp gained some notoriety when he filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages against comedians Jamie Fox and Tyler Perry, falsely claiming that they stole from him an idea for a film project called “Skank Robbers.” Finally, someone took a hard look at Shamont Lyle Sapp, and it was his undoing.
“Like the Anti-Communist Witch Hunt of the 1950s”
In a 2004 article in the Boston Phoenix, “Fleecing the Shepherds,” legal expert and author Harvey Silverglate cautioned against capitulating to significant numbers of questionable claims brought after the Church entered into huge blanket settlements. In some cases, such claims were deemed “credible” — the standard established for permanent removal of accused priests — with no other basis than their having been settled.
As accusations swept over the U.S. Church, few in the media dared write anything contrary to the tidal wave gaining indiscriminate momentum against the Church. A notable exception was the left-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal, which editorialized: “Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties… All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.”
With media coverage of the unprecedented $4 billion invested in mediated settlements, the trolling for claims and litigation continues unabated. In 2007, a Boston area high school history teacher and coach of twenty years, a husband and father with no prior record or accusation, was caught up in an Internet sting by New Hampshire Detective James F. McLaughlin posing on-line as a teenage boy cruising Internet chat rooms for sexual encounters. The practice has netted the detective some 600 arrests, including — by his own estimation — one Catholic priest, six police officers, and 18 public school teachers.
The Keene, New Hampshire police detective was also known to have fielded cases for local contingency lawyers. The ex-teacher, now prison inmate, related that as the handcuffs were set upon him, before he was even led out of the YMCA to which he had been lured and arrested, Detective James F. McLaughlin reportedly asked some enticing questions: “Are you a Catholic?” “Yes,” said the suspect. “Were you ever an altar boy?” Another “Yes.” “Were you ever molested by a priest?”
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: The mainstream media, and sometimes even the Catholic media as well, too often shrinks from reporting on the story of fraudulent claims of victimhood. So please share this post on social media and elsewhere. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek
Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”