Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Convicted felon is a label bestowed like a scarlet letter solely to shame another. The real shame is when it is used selectively as cover for one’s own inadequacies.

July 10, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

The famous New England author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. In its time, it was a lurid Puritan New England soap opera that became classic American literature. In its pages, which shocked the Puritans of Hawthorne’s time, the young Hester Prynne was found to be with child, but the father was not her husband, a much older and morally ruthless Puritan man. The real father was the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the local Congregational minister. Refusing to reveal that truth, Hester Prynne was placed on display in the market square each day to be publicly shamed and shunned while adorned with a scarlet letter “A” for “adulterer” prominently on her dress. Nathaniel Hawthorne was well versed in the Puritan prejudices that shaped New England. His great grandfather was one of the three judges who presided over the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.

Today, the scarlet letter takes many other forms. We made it almost to the end of the now infamous June 27, 2024 Presidential Debate before President Joe Biden declared to the American people that Donald Trump, his opponent in the upcoming election, is a “convicted felon.” It seemed much more an act of desperation than inspiration. “What was the point of it?” a commentator asked. Everything about it told me that its only point was to lay shame upon the opposing candidate when all other rhetoric was failing.

It told us nothing about Donald Trump that we did not already know. It told us nothing about the New York trial that mysteriously transformed questionable misdemeanor charges into felonies to bestow that dubious title upon him for strictly political purposes. But it spoke volumes about the desperate state of the one who said it. It was the clearest thing said by President Biden that night, and likely the most rehearsed.

I, too, am a convicted felon, and if you are not reading this blog for the first time then you know, or at least suspect, that the term has been unjustly imposed. So I have a legitimate gripe about its use and misuse. Just about every fair-minded person familiar with this blog knows that even a cursory look under the hood of my 1994 trial leaves its outcome in serious doubt. Only those with bias and hidden agendas of their own still point to the “convicted felon” millstone around my neck.

Dorothy Rabinowitz, a longtime columnist and member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her bold series of concience-stirring revelations about some of the most notorious witch-hunts sex abuse trials of modern times. My trial was one of them. In regard to my “convicted felon” status, Ms. Rabinowitz wrote: “Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents.” (“The Trials of Father MacRae,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013).

To those who read and share my posts, I am grateful for your openminded conclusion that justice failed on the day that scarlet letter was imposed on me. And not only on me; the late Cardinal George Pell also refused to wear the “convicted felon” label before he was finally exonerated after 400 days and nights in solitary confinement in prison. Fortunately, the Australian justice system ultimately delivered him from that injustice. American courts differ from Australian courts in this respect. In modern times, American courts have developed a barrier to the pursuit of justice that grants to the justice system itself the last word and a right to finality. Experts described the dynamics behind this in an article, “Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison.”

There have been thousands of proven wrongful convictions in U.S. courts during the 30 years I have spent in prison for refusing to willfully accept the Scarlet Letter label. I could have left prison 28 years ago if I accepted the deal the State of New Hampshire tried to impose upon me. There are an estimated tens of thousands still wrongfully in prison in the United States because they are unable to “prove” their innocence even when no one had to prove their guilt.

Our incarceration nation leads the world in imprisonment with five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. So it would follow that it also leads the world in conviction errors, forty-percent of which are attributed to police and prosecutor misconduct.

Photo by Jim Heaphy (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A “Convicted Felon’ in the White House?

On the night before beginning this post, I had a long distance discussion about it with my friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. He is, as most readers know, a real survivor of the very sort of crimes for which I was falsely accused. He is also a survivor of almost 16 years in a prison cell with me. In our recent discussion, Pornchai told me that my only crime was being a Catholic priest and then letting it cost me everything I had. I guess I have to let that sink in. I could have devoted my life in this injustice to building a monument of volcanic bitterness. There is plenty of that to go around where I live. “Thank God you didn’t,” Pornchai said.

So instead of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, I write. I do not just write about the state of my own injustice. I also write about injustice that has befallen others. I write about the state of our freedom, and what is at stake when we take it for granted. I write about the state of our character, about our Church, our politics, our descent into evil and our capacity for good. I write about the senseless impact of prison, and about some, like my friend Pornchai, who overcame it, became redeemed from it, and now faces the challenge of avoiding debilitating labels like the one imposed on me and Donald Trump.

Pornchai Moontri added his belief that I would not be in prison today if I were not a Catholic priest. Then he said that Donald Trump would not have faced those charges in New York if he were not a Republican candidate for President. Mr. Moontri is right about this, and he zoomed in on the one thing that I find most disturbing about Trump’s candidacy: the elitist view that a political outsider has no business running for President of the United States. This prejudice has been evident in mainstream news media since his election in 2016. It has been nothing short of an attempt at voter nullification and egregious election interference.

I know that some of our readers do not like Donald Trump. Back in 2021, we lost some readers when I wrote “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.” It is globally one of our most read posts and it was also recommended by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. But some of our slightly left-leaning readers concluded that any criticism of President Biden is an ipso facto an affirmation of Donald Trump. That post is a classic example of the sometimes vague boundaries between politics and morality, and why no priest should be afraid to write or speak about the latter.

I have never promoted Donald Trump, and do not do so now. That said, I have never demoted him either. But as an American, I resent all the one-sided rhetoric denouncing his candidacy based on his character. That is a matter for voters to decide, not the courts, and not the news media, and certainly not the elite holding office in Washington, DC. In 2020, it was insisted to me that the whole Hunter Biden laptop story that emerged and was covered up before the election of 2020 was Russian disinformation. I know that I ruffled feathers when I wrote “Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell.” I was lied to then, and so were you.

The clincher in my decision to write this post about Donald Trump’s legal woes came from reading the June 21, 2024 issue of the National Catholic Reporter. It is a far left-leaning “independent” newspaper that I stopped reading decades ago. Another priest gave me a gift subscription to it, and I have wondered ever since what I did of offend him. The front-page headline in the June 21 issue is “Does the Catholic Vote Still Matter?” It was followed by this highlighted text: “A majority of Catholics are trending toward voting for Donald Trump — even after conviction.” Should that fact alone be evidence that the Catholic vote no longer matters just because it doesn’t fit NCR’s ideology?

… and to the Banana Republic for Which It Stands …

I am much informed by a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Why Republicans Don’t Abandon ‘Felon’ Trump” by Michael W. McConnell (June 20, 2024). The author is a Stanford Law School professor, a retired judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He dissected the various charges lodged against Mr. Trump during this election cycle. His conclusions are an eye-opener. Only one of these cases has gone to trial, and after a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, it appears that many of the other claims perhaps never will. Of the supposed felonies for which a New York State court declared Trump guilty, Professor McConnell wrote:

“Most Democrats I know persuaded themselves of the righteousness of criminally prosecuting Donald Trump to keep him from becoming President again. How, they ask, can any respectable person defend Mr. Trump now that he is a felon? Many Republicans … believe that Democratic prosecutors are waging lawfare against Mr. Trump [and] now consider the legal crusade against Trump to be as threatening to democracy as what happened on January 6, 2021. The charges against Mr. Trump in New York were bogus.”

The article lays out in compelling terms how New York DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution was an attempt to influence voters and the electoral process. DA Bragg had also been a donor to the Biden campaign and should have disqualified himself from prosecuting the case. Instead, according to Professor McConnell he “openly campaigned on a vow to hold Mr. Trump and his family accountable.” The attention grabber for me was what followed in Professor McConnell’s article: “Mr. Bragg didn’t pursue particular crimes of concern to the public. He pursued a particular defendant who happened to be the other party’s candidate for President.”

That analysis is so vastly unlike almost all other news coverage of that trial that is shocked me, and for good reason. The “suspect in search of a crime” motif was exactly what happened to me. No one ever went to Keene, NH Detective James F. McLaughlin with a complaint about me. Instead, this sex abuse crusader targeted me for no reason other than my being a Catholic priest. Then, armed with a fraudulent claim that he himself manufactured, he manipulated — sometimes with monetary bribes and threats — dozens of troubled adolescents and young adults in places where I had been assigned. He did this relentlessly for five years until he found some who would accuse me for money. (See the “Statement of Steven Wollschlager.”)

The “ lawfare” pursuit of Donald Trump was political, but it never reflected American justice. Its sole purpose was the imposition of a scarlet letter that would most likely be overturned on appeal. According to the purposes of D.A. Bragg, it need only hold up until the November election. After a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Presidential Immunity, New York State judge Juan Merchan delayed Mr. Trump’s sentencing until September 18, 2024.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, now also a “convicted felon” has been serving in the role of a senior advisor to the President during both family and staff negotiations about his future political life, negotiations in which Hunter Biden has a clear conflict of interest. The hypocrisy is stunning.

In his first term as 45th President of the United States, President Donald Trump sponsored the First Step Act. A major tenet of it was a call for the removal of “the box,” a prejudicial feature of federal job applications that kept thousands of former prisoners from finding meaningful work. Permanent “Convicted Felon” status is unjust, demeaning, useless and sometimes even baseless. Recall the words of Sheriff Beauford Puser in my post, “Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment”: “If you let ‘em get away with this, you give ‘em the eternal right to do the same damn thing to anyone of you!”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this timely post. You may also like these related titles from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison

Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment

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 Birds and the Bees Behind These Stone Walls

Photo by Lip Lee — CC BY-SA 2.0

Fr Gordon MacRae wrote this post for Independence Day 2012 when he lived in a far more confining space. We are updating this summer gem about the meaning of liberty.

July 3, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Okay, relax! This isn’t going to be a soap opera about the lurid things you’ve heard about prisons — most of which are not true at all. And I’m not going to San Francisco wearing flowers in my hair or anything. I don’t even have any hair, let alone flowers. So before you unsubscribe or delete BTSW from your blog lists, let me deflate your expectations. My title is far more boring than it sounds.

This is being posted on Independence Day in the United States, the peak of vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere. So I expect a lot of BTSW readers will be outside barbecuing and not stuck inside reading this post. Of course, in an age of iPhones and iPads — neither of which I have ever seen — you could be lounging at the beach while reading of Independence Day in the slammer. Actually, I hope most of you somehow manage to do both!

This post really is about birds and bees — real ones, not the metaphorical ones parents lectured us about growing up. This is about the great outdoors, which, from my perspective, is mostly experienced through a two-by-three-foot, sealed and heavily barred window in a concrete and steel prison cell. Through that window, I have seen 18 years of summers come and go. I was never one for hanging around bars, but now I have little choice. I have been a devoted observer of the rhythms of life through a small barred window for a long, long time.

Sometimes I receive letters from readers who tell me they’re hesitant to write of their vacations and travels, their celebrations and family gatherings, their liberties. They write that they fear making me depressed by reminding me of places I cannot see, things I cannot have, and freedoms I can no longer embrace. Please don’t ever feel this way. I do not see most things in terms of myself. I don’t think there is anyone who revels in your freedom more than I do.

Hebrews 13:3 tells us to “Remember those who are in prison as though in prison with them.” I much appreciate that so many of you fulfill this admirably. But I can also remember freedom, and I can celebrate yours. Perhaps there are things you can also learn about appreciating life and liberty from someone unjustly in prison. On this Independence Day, if you can log off Beyond These Stone Walls with some new appreciation for freedom, I will be the happiest writer in cyberspace.

The Inside-Out Aquarium

“Contentious Convicts” was one of my earliest posts on BTSW. (We later republished it as the third of three short posts, so if you click on it, just scroll to number three.) It was brief, so I hope you’ll take a few moments to read it anew because it is closely related to this post. Since I wrote it, I’ve had a recurring dream in prison that I live in a reverse aquarium. In the dream, I live inside the tank and all the water and life are on the outside. My view out my cell window is a lot like that, and is perhaps even the source of my disconcerting dream.

The more we are denied something as basic as the great outdoors, the more we long for it, and are fascinated by it. The patch of grass I can see is not really grass. It might have been at one time. Today, it is a few square yards of weeds interspersed with grass and a few wildflowers. My cell is on the bottom floor of a four-story cinder block prison containing 96 cells and 504 prisoners. It is one of six housing units in this prison complex.  All surrounded by a 20-foot wall.

Some prisoners in this building live eight to a cell, a horror I endured for over six years. Some prisoners live stacked in dayrooms and recreation areas with no windows at all. So today I count myself blessed to live on the ground floor, with only two to a cell, and a window but a few feet from the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees that I can see so closely, but never touch.

You might be amazed at the varieties of life I’ve seen in just the small patch of grass and shrubs that separates this window from the towering prison wall dominating my field of view from ten yards away. At night a family of skunks somehow manages to tunnel into the prison (Go figure!) to forage for grubs among the weeds and grass. Early one morning last summer, a beautiful red-tailed hawk perched for an hour atop the prison wall just beyond my window. It seemed as though he was watching me on this side of the bars and thick Plexiglas. Then his three-foot wingspan spread out. He swooped toward me, and caught a field mouse just two feet from my window. I was shocked at how quickly he devoured it. The experience really put me off field mice for breakfast. I’ll stick with Cheerios, thank you!

I’ve had a close-up view as the dandelions open to greet the dawn. I’ve watched the bees just a few feet away as they fly from flower to flower. There is a ficus tree about twenty feet from my window. I first spotted it years ago when it was just a foot tall.  It grows up the center of a dense spiral of razor wire that descends from a corner of the prison wall just outside my window. Over a few years the ficus tree slowly engulfed the spirals of razor wire and completely obscured them. It was a drama about the victory of life played out in slowest motion. I cheered that tree on! Then one morning, my spirits fell.

Through a security grate under the window I awoke to the sounds of saws and clippers. Was it four summers ago or five? Years in prison tend to blend together. Anyway, I watched in silent mourning as the ficus tree was cut down to its very roots. Someone had declared it a security hazard because it had grown so tall, blocking the view from atop a nearby guard tower. I missed that tree, and I resented the spirals of razor wire back in full view. My tree lost that battle.

Prison: 1 — Ficus Tree: 0

For the rest of that summer, I stared out the window at the small bare stumps left behind among the grass and weeds beneath the razor wire. I thought sure the tree was dead. Then three summers ago, I noticed a few shoots with tiny buds protruding from the stumps and the grass around them. Day after day the buds unfolded into leaves and a small bush slowly took shape.

Over each succeeding summer the ficus tree emerged anew, and grew bigger and stronger. It took on a different shape than it had in its first life, growing wider and taller. It became a host for birds and a way station for all manner of living things. The birds and the bees seem to thrive around it. I never before witnessed something cling so tenaciously to life.

Prison: 0 — Ficus Tree: 1

Photo by Francesco Pradella — CC BY-ND 2.0

Emily Dickinson on Poetic Justice

In a week or so, our friend Pornchai Moontri will commence a course in American Literature, his final class before earning his full high school diploma from Granite State High School, an accredited high school program inside prison walls.

Pornchai earned his GED equivalency years ago, and has since completed a few college level classes in theology at Catholic Distance University. But he decided to take on the challenge of finishing high school the hard way, and with this one last class he will graduate. (Note: In 2024, I wrote of this 2012 graduating class in “Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift.”) I’m proud of Pornchai’s undaunted effort like I’m proud of that ficus tree.

I’m looking forward to Pornchai’s American Lit class mostly because I’ll be able to steal a few hours with his textbook. I once wrote of my third year at Saint Anselm College in 1977. I had written a term paper entitled, “Emily Dickinson, Recalcitrant Daughter of Abraham.” The paper focused on Emily Dickinson’s reputation as a recluse and cynic in her poetry. Here are a few paragraphs that I wrote about her in a previous post:

“As I sat here yesterday morning thinking of a title, I heard something unusual through the open grate. It was a song, and it came from a red-breasted robin perched atop the spirals of razor wire on the twenty-foot wall that had been my view of the outside world for years. I watched the robin for a long time, and listened as he sang. It instantly made me think of Emily Dickinson and one of her most pessimistic poems:

“ ‘I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered, now,
I’m some accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though — ’ ”

I won’t depress you with the rest. I could just imagine the reclusive Emily Dickinson pondering with a grimace the signs of life that spring brought to her window — the very idea of cracking it open a bit to let some spring air clear the foul mood of her winter.

I understood her though. It’s hard to be depressed while listening to a robin sing. Her’s must have sung a lot, for she changed her own tune with a later poem:

“Hope is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the Soul —
And sings the tunes without the words —
And never stops — at all.”

My robin sings the latter song, and he was back again this morning. I don’t dread this robin at all. I just dread not being able to open this window so I can hear him better!

If you’re not planning some time outside, consider this: A recent study found that youngsters in America now spend more than four hours a day in front of computer screens of one sort or another. As a result, there’s no longer time for nature. Over the last few years, childhood outdoor recreation fell another 15 percent. In another study, psychologist Ruth Ann Atchley gave 60 backpackers a standard test of creativity before a hike. She gave the same test to a different group four days into a hiking trip. The latter group scored fifty percent higher on the creativity test across the board, and these results were consistent for all age groups. Without a doubt, exposure to the outdoors is good for us.

So as soon as the realities of prison allow it, I’ll get away from this window and take a long walk around the baseball field. I wrote about that field in a very special article published at LinkedIn entitled, “At Play in the Field of the Lord.”

To get to that field, I have to stare beyond the ficus tree to wait for a door to open in that prison wall. Then I have to wait to be buzzed through three sets of locked doors, wait in a long line at a guard station for a “movement pass,” wait for passage through two more security checkpoints, and then walk the walled path around the back of this building right past that “resurrected” ficus tree now consuming all the prison razor wire in its slow dance of victory over prison and death.

Your friends behind these stone walls offer some of our days and nights in prison for you. So on this Independence Day, honor life, and let freedom ring! Then resist with all your might the forces in our world now seeking to squander or squash them both.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts at Beyond These Stone Walls:

Faith and Freedom at the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

Contentious Convicts (scroll to the third section)

Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift

At Play in the Field of the Lord

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.”

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.

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.”

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

Former Boston Archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law was vilified by The Boston Globe and SNAP, but before that he was a champion of justice in the Civil Rights Movement.

June 19, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr MacRae: I first wrote this post in November 2015. I wrote it in the midst of a viral character assassination of a man who had become a convenient scapegoat for what was then the latest New England witch hunt. That man was Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop of Boston. I have to really tug hard to free this good man’s good name from the media-fueled availability bias that so mercilessly tarnished it back then. A good deal more has come to light, and I get to have the last word.

By coincidence, and it was not planned this way, but the date of this revised reposting is June 19, 2024, the day that the United States commemorates the emancipation of African American slaves on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas. As you will read herein, Cardinal Bernard Law was a national champion in the cause for Civil Rights and racial equality.

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Four years after The Boston Globe set out to sensationalize the sins of some few members of the Church and priesthood, another news story — one subtly submerged beneath the fold — drifted quietly through a few New England newspapers. After a very short life, the story faded from view. In 2006, Matt McGonagle resigned from his post as assistant principal of Rundlett Middle School in Concord, New Hampshire. Charged with multiple counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old high school student six years before, McGonagle ended his criminal case by striking a plea deal with prosecutors. McGonagle pleaded guilty to the charges on July 28, 2006.

He was sentenced to a term of sixteen months in a local county jail. An additional sentence of two-and-a-half to five years in the New Hampshire State Prison was suspended by the presiding judge in Merrimack County Superior Court — the same court that declined to hear evidence or testimony in my habeas corpus appeal in 2013 after having served 20 years in prison for crimes that never took place.

In a statement, Matt McGonagle described the ordeal of being prosecuted. He said it was “extraordinarily difficult,” and thanked his “many advocates” who spoke on his behalf. In the local press, defense attorney James Rosenberg defended the plea deal for a sixteen month county jail sentence:

“The sentence is fair, and accurately reflects contributions that Matt has made to his community as an educator.”

— Melanie Asmar, “Ex-educator pleads guilty in sex assault,” Concord Monitor, July 29, 2006

Four years earlier, attorney James Rosenberg was a prosecutor in the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office from where he worked to prosecute the Diocese of Manchester for its handling of similar, but far older claims against Catholic priests.

The accommodation called for in the case of teacher/principal Matt McGonagle — an insistence that he is not to be forever defined by the current charges against him — was never even a passing thought in the prosecutions of Catholic priests. Those cases sprang from the pages of The Boston Globe, swept New England, and then went viral across America. The story marked The Boston Globe’s descent into “trophy justice.”

Cardinal Sins

I have always been aware of this inconsistency in the news media and among prosecutors and some judges, but never considered writing specifically about how it applied to Cardinal Bernard Law until I read Sins of the Press, a book by David F. Pierre, Jr. On page after page it cast a floodlight on The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-endorsed lynching of Cardinal Law, offered up as a scapegoat for The Scandal and driven from Boston by the news media despite having never been accused, tried, or convicted of any real crime.

Does the “lynching of Cardinal Law” seem too strong a term? Historically, the word “lynching” came into the English lexicon from the name of Captain William Lynch of Virginia who acted as prosecutor, judge and executioner. He became notorious for his judgment-sans-trial while leading a band to hunt down Loyalists, Colonists suspected of loyalty to the British Crown in the War for Independence in 1776.

The term applies well to what started in Boston, then swept the country. Most of those suspected or accused in the pages of The Boston Globe, including Cardinal Bernard Law, were never given any trial of facts. As I recently wrote in, “To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants,” many of the priests were deceased when accused, and many others faced accusations decades after any supportive evidence could be found, or even looked for. The Massachusetts Attorney General issued an astonishing statement given short shrift in the pages of The Boston Globe:

“The evidence gathered during the course of the Attorney General’s sixteen-month investigation does not provide a basis for bringing criminal charges against the Archdiocese and its senior managers.”

— Commonwealth of Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly, “Executive Summary and Scope of the Investigation,” July 23, 2003

So I decided to explore the story of Cardinal Bernard Law for Beyond These Stone Walls. When I first endeavored to write about him, he had been virtually chased from the United States by some in the news media and so-called victim advocates deep into lawsuits to fleece the Church. Though not intended originally, my post was to be published on November 4, 2015, which also happened to be Cardinal Law’s 84th birthday.

When I wrote of my intention to revisit the story of Cardinal Bernard Law from a less condemning perspective, it sparked very mixed feelings among some readers. A few wrote to me that they looked forward to reading my take on the once good name of this good priest. A few taunted me that this was yet another “David v Goliath” task. Others wrote more ominously, “Don’t do it, Father! Don’t step on that minefield! What if they target you next?” That reaction is a monument to the power of the news media to spin a phenomenon called “availability bias.”

A while back, I was invited by Catholic League President Bill Donohue to contribute some articles for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. My second of two articles appeared in the July/August 2009 issue just as Beyond These Stone Walls began. It was entitled “Due Process for Accused Priests” and it opened with an important paragraph about the hidden power of the press to shape what we think:

“Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on a phenomenon in psychology and marketing called ‘availability bias.’ Kahneman demonstrated the human tendency to give a proposition validity just by how easily it comes to mind. An uncorroborated statement can be widely seen as true merely because the media has repeated it. Also in 2002, the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal swept out of Boston to dominate news headlines across the country….”

This is exactly what happened to Cardinal Law. There was a narrative about him, an impression of his nature and character that unfolded over the course of his life. I spent several months studying that narrative and it is most impressive.

Then that narrative was replaced by something else. With a target on his back, the story of Cardinal Law was entirely and unjustly rewritten by The Boston Globe. Then the rewrite was repeated again and again until it took hold, went viral, and replaced in public view the account of who this man really was.

Even some in the Church settled upon this sacrificial offering of a reputation. Perhaps only someone who has known firsthand such media-fueled bias can instinctively recognize it happening. Suffice it to say that I instinctively recognized it. I offer no other defense of my decision to visit anew the first narrative in the story of who Bernard Law was. If you can set aside for a time the availability bias created around the name of Cardinal Bernard Law, then you may find this account to be fascinating, just as I did.

From Harvard to Mississippi

As this account of a courageous life and heroic priesthood unfolded before me, I was eerily reminded of another story, one I came across many years ago. It was the year I began to seek something more than the Easter and Christmas Catholicism I inherited. It was 1968, and I was fifteen years old in my junior year at Lynn English High School just north of Boston. Two champions of the Civil Rights Movement I had come to admire and respect in my youth — Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy — had just been assassinated. And just as my mind and spirit were being shaped by that awful time, I stumbled upon something that would refine for me that era: the great 1963 film, The Cardinal.

Based on a book of the same name by Henry Morton Robinson (Simon & Schuster 1950), actor Tom Tryon portrayed the title role of Boston priest, Father Stephen Fermoyle who rose to become a member of the College of Cardinals after a heroic life as an exemplary priest. It was the first time I encountered the notion that priesthood might require courage, and I wondered whether I had any. I was fifteen, sitting alone at Mass for the first time in my life when this movie sparked a scary thought.

Father Fermoyle was asked by the Apostolic Nuncio to tour the southern United States “between the Great Smokies and the Mississippi River” — an area known for anti-Catholic prejudice. He was tasked with writing a report on the state of the Catholic Church there during a time of great racial unrest.

In the script (and in the book which I read later) Mississippi Chancery official, Monsignor Whittle (played in the film by actor, Chill Wills) was fearful of the racist, anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan. He tried to dissuade Father Fermoyle from making any waves, but his mere presence there would set off a tidal wave of suspicion. In a horrific scene, Father Fermoyle was kidnapped in the night, blindfolded, and driven to the middle of a remote field — a field where many young black men had disappeared.

His blindfold removed, he found himself surrounded by men in sheets and white hoods, illuminated by the light of a burning cross. Father Fermoyle was given a crucifix and ordered to spit on it or face the scourging of Christ. Henry Morton Robinson’s book conveys the scene:

“He held the crucifix between thumb and forefinger, lofting it like a lantern in darkness…. Ancient strength of martyrs flowed into Stephen’s limbs. Eyes on the gilt cross, he neither flinched nor spoke. [The music played] ‘In Dixieland I’ll take my stand.’ Stephen prayed silently that no drop of spittle, no whimpering plea for mercy, would fall from his lips before the end… The sheeted men climbed into their cars. Not until the last taillight had disappeared had Stephen lowered the crucifix.”

— The Cardinal, pp 412-413

This could easily have been a scene from the life of Father Bernard Law. Born on 4 November 1931 in Torreon, Mexico, Bernard Francis Law spent his bilingual childhood between the United States, Latin America, and the Virgin Islands. His father was a U.S. Army Captain in World War II and Bernard was an only child. Very early in life, he learned that acceptance does not depend on race, or color, or creed, and once admonished his classmates in the Virgin Islands that “Never must we let bigotry creep into our beings.”

At age 15, Bernard read Mystici Corporis, a 1943 Encyclical of Pope Pius XII that Bernard later described as “the dominant teaching of my life.” He was especially touched by the language of inclusion of a heroic Pope in a time of great oppression. The encyclical was banned in German-occupied Belgium for “subversive” lines connecting the Mystical Body of Christ with the unity of all Christians, transcending barriers such as race or politics.

As a weird aside, I was in shock and awe as I sat typing this post when I asked out loud, “How could I find a copy of Mystici Corporis while stuck in a New Hampshire prison cell?” Then our convert friend, Pornchai Moontri jumped from his bunk, pulled out his footlocker containing the sum total of his life, and handed me a heavily highlighted copy of the 1943 Encyclical. I haven’t yet wrapped my brain around that, but it’s another post for another time.

While attending Harvard University, Bernard Law found a vocation to the priesthood during his visits to Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard in 1953, the year I was born, a local bishop advised him that Boston had lots of priests and he should give his talents to a part of the Church in need. At age 29, Father Bernard Law was ordained for what was the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson, Mississippi.

Standing before the Mask of Tyranny

The year was 1961. The Second Vatican Council would soon open in Rome, and the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam (and I do mean steam!) in the United States, Father Law immersed himself in both. A Vicksburg lawyer once remarked that Father Law “went into homes as priests [there] had never done before.” With a growing reputation for erudition and bridge building on issues many others simply avoided, Bernard was summoned by his bishop to the State Capital to become editor of the diocesan weekly newspaper, then called The Mississippi Register.

It was there that the courage to proclaim the Gospel took shape in him, and became, along with his brilliant mind, his most visible gift of the Holy Spirit. Another young priest of that diocese noted that Father Law’s racial attitudes — shaped by his childhood in the Virgin Islands — were different from those of most white Mississipians. “He felt passionately about racial justice from the first moment I knew him,” the priest wrote. “It wasn’t a mere following of teaching, it came from his heart.”

I know many Mississippi Catholics today — including many who read Beyond These Stone Walls — but in the tumultuous 1960s, Catholics were a small minority in Mississippi. They were also a target for persecution by the Ku Klux Klan which was growing in both power and terror as the nation struggled with a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

An 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in “Plessy v. Ferguson” had defined the doctrine of “separate but equal” as a Constitutional nod to racial segregation, but in 1954 in “Brown v. Board of Education,” the Supreme Court based a landmark desegregation ruling on solid evidence that “separate” was seldom “equal.” Opposition to the ruling grew throughout the South, and so did terrorist Klan activities. In 1955, the murder of a black Mississippi boy, 14-year-old Emmett Till, rocked the state and the nation, as did the acquittal of his accused white killers.

This was the world of Father Bernard Law’s priesthood. Up to that time, the diocesan newspaper, The Mississippi Register, had been visibly timid on racial issues, but this changed with this priest at the helm. In June of 1963 he wrote a lead story on the evils of racial segregation citing the U.S. Bishops’ 1958 “Statement on Racial Discrimination and the Christian Conscience.”

One week later, the respected NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down outside his Jackson, Mississippi home. Both Father Law and (then) Natchez-Jackson Bishop Richard Gerow boldly attended the wake for Medgar Evers under the watchful eyes of the Klan. Father Law’s next issue of The Mississippi Register bore the headline, “Everyone is Guilty,” citing a statement by his Bishop that many believe was written by Bernard Law:

“We need frankly to admit that the guilt for the murder of Mr. Evers and the other instances of violence in our community tragically must be shared by all of us… Rights which have been given to all men by the Creator cannot be the subject of conferral or refusal by men.”

Father Law and Bishop Gerow were thus invited to the White House along with other religious leaders to discuss the growing crisis in Mississippi with President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Later that summer, Father Law challenged local politicians in The Mississipi Register for their lack of moral leadership on racial desegregation, stating “Freedom in Mississippi is now at an alarmingly low ebb.” Massachusetts District Judge Gordon Martin, who was a Justice Department attorney in Mississippi at that time, once wrote for The Boston Globe that Father Law…

“…did not pull his punches, and the Register’s editorials and columns were in sharp contrast with the racist diatribes of virtually all of the state’s daily and weekly press.”

Later that year, Father Law won the Catholic Press Association Award for his editorials. In “Freedom Summer” 1964, when three civil rights workers were missing and suspected to have been murdered, Father Bernard Law openly accepted an invitation to join other religious leaders to advise President Lyndon Johnson on the racial issues in Mississippi. When the bodies of the three slain young men were found buried at a remote farm, the priest boldly issued a challenge to stand up to the crisis:

“In Mississippi, the next move is up to the white moderate. If he is in the house, let him now come forward.”

Later that year Father Law founded and became Chairman of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations. Then the home of a member, a rabbi, was bombed. Then another member, a Unitarian minister, was shot and severely wounded. The FBI asked Father Law to keep them apprised of his whereabouts, and Bishop Gerow, fearing for his priest’s safety, ordered him from the outskirts of Jackson to the Cathedral rectory, but Bernard Law feared not.

Cardinal Law’s life and mine crossed paths a few times over the course of my life as a priest. I mentioned above that while attending Harvard University, Bernard Law found his vocation to the priesthood during visits to Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge. Many years later, in 1985, my uncle, Father George W. MacRae, SJ, the first Roman Catholic Dean of Harvard Divinity School and a renowned scholar of Sacred Scripture, passed away suddenly at the age of 57. I was a concelebrant at his Mass of Christian Burial at Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge. Concelebrating with me was Cardinal Bernard Law where his life as a priest first took shape.

In 2013, The New York Times sold The Boston Globe for pennies on the dollar.

On December 20, 2017, Cardinal Bernard Law passed from this life in Rome.

Oh, that such priestly courage as his were contagious, for many in our Church could use some now. Thank you, Your Eminence, for the gift of a courageous priesthood. Let us not go gentle into The Boston Globe’s good night.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I am indebted for this post to the book, Boston’s Cardinal : Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, edited by Romanus Cessario, O.P. with a Foreword by Mary Ann Glendon (Lexington Books, 2002).

You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Saint John Paul the Great: A Light in a World in Crisis

Pell Contra Mundum: Cardinal Truths about the Synod

Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

To the Kingdom of Heaven through a Narrow Gate

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.

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.”