“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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 8/14/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 8/14/24

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord.

In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord.

August 14, 2024 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII solemnly defined as a dogma of faith the bodily Assumption into Heaven of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The precise words of Pope Pius are found in the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, “The Most Bountiful God,” defining what much of the Church already believed, and now holds as a matter of truth:

“We pronounce, declare and define it to be a divinely revealed truth that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

It was not without controversy. Pius XII thus became the first pope in a century to define a new dogma of faith. Five papacies earlier, in 1869, Pope Pius IX sought, cajoled, and in the end imposed, the doctrine of papal infallibility. In his book, Making Saints, former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward described the doctrine of infallibility as a “sheathed sword” (Making Saints, p. 314). He described it that way because, from the time of the doctrine’s inception in 1869, a declaration of papal infallibility has only been invoked once: a century later in 1950 when Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary to be an infallible tenet of faith.

This was not just a unilateral pronouncement from on high. Before defining the dogma in 1950, Pius XII sought and received an amazing response of affirmation from the “sensus fidelium,” the assent of the faithful from throughout the world. The Our Sunday Visitor Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine describes this beautifully:

“Infallibility in belief pertains to the whole Church. ‘The whole body of the faithful … cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (the ‘sensus fidei’) of the whole people when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent to matters of faith and morals.” (Lumen Gentium)

“To understand properly how the whole people of God is infallible in its sense of the faith (sensus fidei, sensus fidelium) it must be born in mind that the body of the faithful goes beyond limits both of place and, especially, of time. The People of God always includes those of past generations as well as those in the present moment. The former are in fact the vast majority, and it is easier to ascertain what they believed. It is that belief that marks the sensus fidelium and points infallibly to the truth." (p. 334)

To help in understanding this concept of the Universal Church that includes the faith of all generations past, see my post, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead” (linked again at the end of
this post). It is evidence of the ongoing connectedness of the faithful departed to the life of the Church.

I found this concept to be a stunning affirmation, not only of what we believe, but of why we believe it. The idea that infallibility includes the unwavering faith of the vast majority of the People of God taken as a whole over the span of millennia is mind-boggling truth.

The faith of the entire Church, from its birth at Pentecost to the present, points to a belief in Mary as Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the New Ark of the Covenant. Pope Pius XII strongly considered this before defining as infallible the Dogma of the Assumption in 1950. From the Chair of Peter, Pius XII sought the assent of the faithful in the present through his encyclical, Deiperae Virginis Mariae, to inquire whether Mary’s bodily Assumption should be defined.

As a result, an amazing number of petitions reached Rome from every corner of the Church. The petitions included those of 8,000,000 laity, 50,000 religious women, 32,000 priests, 2,505 archbishops and bishops, 311 cardinals, and 81 patriarchs of the Eastern Church. If this demonstration of assent had been able to span the entire life of the Church the result would have been immeasurable.

From the earliest days of the Church many considered the Assumption of Mary — centuries before it was defined as a tenet of faith — to be, in the words of Pius XII, “the fulfillment of that most perfect grace granted to the Blessed Virgin and the special blessing that countered the curse of Eve” — original sin. In the Eastern Church, a “Memorial of Mary” was already being celebrated on August 15 in the Fifth Century. It spread from the East and came ot be known as the koimesis in Greek and the dormitio in Latin, both of which mean the “falling asleep.” By the Eighth Century, belief in the bodily Assumption of Mary was widely accepted in both the East and West.

In the 19th Century, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote that both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary are implicit in her identification as the “New Eve,” a title given to Mary since the Second Century. Just as the Resurrection of Jesus was the essential element of His victory over sin and death, Mary shares that victory in her designation as the New Eve, and in the words of Jesus at the foot of the Cross as the spiritual Mother of all. Seeing His Mother at the foot of the Cross, Jesus said ot her, “Woman, behold your son.” And then to the Disciple John, “Behold your Mother.” It was an adoption arrangement (John 19:26-27).

Among the earliest titles of Mary is Theotokos, Greek for “The Bearer of God.” For the Scriptural foundation of this belief and its implications, see my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

“What Will Become of You?”

In the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:2), Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus at Mount Tabor. Both Moses and Elijah, according to Scripture, entered heaven in both body and soul. The appearances of Mary at Fatima, Lourdes, Tepeyac Hill in Mexico, and others all point to an understanding of Mary as existing still in that same form. I wrote of the details of one of these visits in “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

There is no saint of modern times with a stronger and more dedicated devotion ot Mary than Saint Maximilian Kolbe who seemed to live with a perpetual presence of the Immaculata in his field of view. Long before he was the Saint of Auschwitz and Founder of the Militia Immaculata, Saint Maximilian Kolbe was simply “Raymond,” a highly intelligent and gifted boy born into poverty in a rural farming community in Poland.

Like me, Raymond Kolbe was fascinated by the sciences of astronomy and cosmology and actually once built a working rocket as a boy. Also like me, he exasperated his mother at times. One day his frustrated mother scolded him, “Raymond! Whatever will become of you?” Filled with grief, young Kolbe went immediately to a local church and turned to the Mother of God with the same question. According to Kolbe’s own words as reported by my friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC in his wonderful book, 33 Days to Morning Glory,

“Then the virgin appeared to me holding in her hands two crowns, one white and one red. She looked at me with love and she asked me if I would like to have them. The white meant that I would remain pure, and the red meant that I would be a martyr. I answered, ‘yes, I want them.’ Then she looked at me tenderly and disappeared.”

Father Gaitley went on to describe that what was meant by “pure” in this sense was that Kolbe would never allow evil or dishonesty to take root in his heart. And it never did. On August 14, the date this is posted, the Church honors Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He also happens to be my own Patron Saint as well as that of my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and the Patron Saint of this blog. To the best of our ability, we follow in his spiritual footsteps, but his footsteps took him to an ultimate sacrifice. The nature of that sacrifice, along with Maximilian’s Auschwitz prison number 16670, now a badge of honor, is expressed on Pornchai’s T-shirt atop this section of our post. Our friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, described the footsteps of Saint Maximilian in brief but familiar prose in 33 Days to Morning Glory :

“In 1941, after decades of incredibly fruitful apostolic labors in Poland and Japan, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Before his arrest, his brother Franciscans had pleaded with him to go into hiding. He said he was grateful for their loving hearts but couldn’t follow their advice.

“He later explained why: ‘I have a mission to fulfill.’ That mission was fulfilled on the eve of the Feast of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven when, after he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner condemned to starvation, the impatient Nazis finished Kolbe off with a lethal injection. Thus, St. Maximilian died a martyr of charity and received the red crown from his Immaculata.”

Two hours before his arrest, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe penned what Father Gaitley called “the single most important theological reflection of his life. It was nothing less than the answer to a question that eluded him for many years, the question he had pondered over and over throughout his life was: “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?”

In the document, according to Father Gaitley, Kolbe raised a key point. In the appearances of Mary at Lourdes, Mary did not say to St. Bernadette, “I am immaculately conceived,” but rather she said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” It was thus clarified for Maximilian that through a special grace from God, Mary was in fact immaculately conceived in the womb of her own mother with no stain of original sin and that grace became her very identity by the as yet unseen merits of her Son. Understanding this means stepping out of conventional time and space for a moment into the mystery of the “nunc stans” the "Eternal Now" in which God dwells and in which He envisions all time and space as one. It is a difficult concept for our linear existence to ponder, but I have pondered it for my entire life.

Father Gaitley asks (p. 52): “Why does Mary make the grace she received at her conception her very name?” Clearly, Mary is not a divine being. Kolbe wrestled with this divinity problem for decades, and it ultimately led to a solution.

There are two Immaculate Conceptions, one created (Mary) and the other uncreated (the Holy Spirit). Before Mary, there was the uncreated Immaculate Conception, “the One Who for all eternity springs from God the Father and God the Son as an uncreated conception of love, the prototype of all conceptions that multiply life throughout the universe. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is the 'conception' that springs from their love. The Holy Spirit is the “Immaculate Conception” b e c a u s e, being God, He is without sin.

Is Mary then a personification of the Holy Spirit? The truth of this union between the Holy Spirit and Mary is found in a somewhat difficult passage in Maximilian’s own writings as reported by Father Gaitley:

"What type of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the ‘essence’ of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. This was true from the first instant of her existence. It was always true; it will always be true.” ( Gaitley, p. 53)

“In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves Himself, the very Love of the Most Holy Trinity ... . In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the depths of her very being” (Gaitley, p. 53-54)

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, henceforth all generations shall call me
blessed.”

— From the Magnificat of Mary, Luke 1:46-48

In “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God,” I explored a similar Marian theology, and from it I think I can finally make sense of what Saint Maximilian has proposed. Mary, Theotokos , the Bearer of God, is an eternal repository of the Holy Spirit. Both my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I owe her a great debt — not for saving us from Earthly Powers of destruction, because they actually mean little, but for preserving us in faith despite them.

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“Remember that those who ask for Heaven of the Immaculata will surely achieve it because she is unable to deny us anything nor is the Lord God able to deny her anything. We shall shortly know exactly what it will be like in Heaven. Surely in a hundred years none of us will be walking on this Earth. But what are a hundred years in the face of what we have been through? Soon, therefore, provided we are well prepared under the protection of the Immaculata.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe, 1941

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please spend some time in prayer and thanksgiving at the live feed of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s own Adoration Chapel featured below after all our posts at Beyond These Stone Walls.

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.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 8/7/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 8/7/24

One Nation under God: The Future of the U.S. Supreme Court

‘One Nation under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance by joint resolution of Congress in 1954. Today some forces want it gone, and God gone with it.

‘One Nation under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance by joint resolution of Congress in 1954. Today some forces want it gone, and God gone with it.

August 7, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Editor’s Note: We are revisiting a post originally published before the U.S. presidential election of 2020 and its many unresolved issues.

The title of this post should be recognizable to just about every resident of the United States over the age of fifty, citizen or not. It comes, of course, from the Pledge of Allegiance, an oath with a storied history. The idea for such an oath began with an editor of The Youth’s Companion, a magazine published in the United States from 1827 to 1912. The first official use of the Pledge was in a ceremony honoring Christopher Columbus on October 12, 1892 by a proclamation of President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican.

In 1954, by a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the words, “one nation under God” were added to the Pledge to wide popular acclaim. Now, 66 years later, some members of Congress refuse to include those words in any recitation of the pledge. Some decline to recite the Pledge at all. Rioting mobs are tearing down any statue that even looks like it might represent Christopher Columbus. The name of God is the prey of activist judges.

Thus comes the beginning of the end of “one nation under God,” and perhaps even of the nation itself. In the midst of all this chaos, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 leaving the administration of President Donald Trump with a third nomination to the nation’s highest court and a reshaping of the Court unprecedented in modern times. This mirrors the real priority of the election of 2016, a fact that I wrote about then in “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” It opens eyes now just as it did then.

There is a lot at stake in this upcoming election [and especially in the current administration that has vowed to radically reshape the Supreme Court along ideological lines through term limits and stacking the Court with additional justices.] If you find it a challenge to read such a political position from a Catholic priest, well, “For Zion’s sake I cannot keep silent. For Jerusalem’s sake, I will not rest” (Isaiah 62:1). At the heart of all this there are urgent considerations for human rights, religious freedom, and Catholic moral teaching.

At least consider the unfiltered voices of your fellow Americans that have not been strained through the sieve of the mainstream news media’s surrender to the deep political left. In 2020, the fourth year of the current President’s first term in office, the highly respected Gallup Poll conducted a broad scientific survey of the level of trust Americans invest in the institutions of government and civil society. This survey came in the midst of a global pandemic and the high anxiety of a highly contentious election year. The results are very different from what you are hearing from CNN or MSNBC.

Churches and organized religion ranked near the top in overall public trust with 42-percent reporting a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust. Only 28-percent reported having “very little.” The U.S. Military came out at the very top with 72-percent of Americans who report having “very high” trust and only 8-percent having “very little.” Despite all the bad news, the nation’s police also fared better than expected. 48-percent of Americans reported having “very high” trust while 33-percent reported “very little.”

Political institutions were the most interesting. In 2020, four years into President Trump’s first, and so far only term, 42-percent of Americans reported having a “very high” trust level for his office while 32-percent reported having “very little.” A look at the same Gallup Poll in the fourth year of Barack Obama’s first term revealed lower numbers with 32-percent having “high” trust and 35-percent “very little.” You won’t hear this on CNN.

Nancy Pelosi’s Congress Tipping Further Left

In the image above, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is seen dramatically tearing up the President’s 2020 State of the Union address. The lower House of Congress had capitulated to the progressive left and handed over unprecedented control to the newer members who self-identified as socialists. Their unofficial voice has been Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who announced in a news conference in 2020 that “We are confident that President Joe Biden can be guided further left.” [The decision not to run for reelection in 2024 made his turn left a moot point. With the current Vice President now running in place of Joe Biden for a second term, the threatened push to turn further left is no longer necessary because she is already much further left than the president Americans elected in 2020.]

Of interest, the 2020 Gallup Poll Trust Survey responded to this. Only 13-percent of Americans reported having “high” or “very high” trust in Congress while 48-percent reported having “very little.” American’s trust level in the Congress of 2020 controlled by Democrats was even lower than trust in the mainstream news media which was at its historical all-time lowest point. Newspapers earned the high trust of only 24-percent of Americans while “very little” trust came in at 35-percent. Television news fared even worse. Only 19-percent reported having “high” trust while 43-percent reported “very little” or none at all. You won’t hear this on CNN either.

The 2020 sharp leftward tilt of Congress toward socialism is of grave concern if it drags the Supreme Court along with it. President Trump’s 2020 conservative nominee had been met with threats by Congress to retaliate if Democrats remain in control and gain the Senate and the White House as well. The most vocal threat is that they will “pack the Court” by increasing its number and filling the additional seats with liberal judges. [That is no longer an idle threat. The present Democratic nominee for president has already identified it as an urgent goal.]

This would be disastrous for America. The first Supreme Court was seated with five justices in 1789. In 1837, Congress increased the number to nine. That number was arrived at to make political stalemates very unlikely. The nine-justice Court has been a fixture in Washington for nearly two centuries. One of the most vocal criticisms of the Court in recent years has been the presence of “activist judges” in the lower courts who “legislate from the bench.”

The Supreme Court’s most important responsibility is to decide cases that raise questions of Constitutional interpretation. This is called “Judicial Review” and it places the Supreme Court in a pivotal role in the American political system. It is the ultimate authority for applying the Constitution in the most important issues facing the country. It is disastrous if activist judges find their way onto the Supreme Court. Examples of “Legislating from the Bench” came in two cases before the modern Court.

In 1973, the Supreme Court did not find a right to abortion in the Constitution, and so it invented one and placed it there, usurping the role of Congress and the votes of the American people. This happened again in 2015 in “Obergefell v Hodges,” the same-sex marriage ruling. In the (5-4) split decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a blistering dissent accusing the liberal judges of placing a constitutional right to marriage in the Constitution when it simply is not there.

Sheldon Whitehouse and the Judiciary Committee

Shortly after [then-]President Trump announced his decision to put forward a nominee for the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, some in Congress and the Senate went into high gear to denounce it. The players knew very well what the real issue of precedent was. When President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy in his last months as President in 2016, a vacancy left by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, the Republican controlled Senate declined to consider it. The Republicans were in the right (no pun intended) on the matter of precedent.

The controlling authority in 2016 was the precedent that, since 1888, the Senate does not confirm a nominee in an election year with a divided government. In 2016, the White House was occupied by a Democrat while the majority in the Senate was Republican. The Senate Democrats know, but hoped you did not know, that it was Joe Biden himself who popularized this exception. As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, Senator Biden urged President George H.W. Bush to refrain from making a Supreme Court nomination during that election year because the “divided government” meant there was an “absence of a nationwide consensus.” Without such a consensus on constitutional philosophy, Senator Biden insisted, “action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election is over.”

A divided government was the case again in 2016 so the “Biden Rule” applied. It was not the case in 2020. Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself argued that in the final months of a president’s term in office, “the president is still the president,” and he has a constitutional mandate to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, had the most suspect response:

“Though we [n Congress] strongly believe this is a matter of the gravest importance for our nation, for life, liberty, and the pursuit of our agenda, it would be wrong to fill this with just a few months left of this presidency.”

Even overlooking the fact that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of our agenda” is not exactly what the Bill of Rights had in mind, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have concluded that the election is already over and your voices have already been heard. In “Ginsburg Succession Battle Shows Hypocrisy Is an Enduring Norm,” Wall Street Journal Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker was as put off as I was:

“The reason millions of voters swallowed their doubts about Donald Trump in 2016 was that they believed their voices had too often been ignored… It has been clear all summer that there is an emerging progressive consensus [in Congress] that considers the nation’s institutions, traditional values, and even its history to be fundamentally illegitimate.”

— The Wall Street Journal, Sep. 22, 2020

But no one left me more uneasy about the road ahead in 2020 than Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fox News Anchor Bill Hemmer asked him a pointed question (Sep. 22) about the obliteration of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s due process rights in the his confirmation hearing. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse responded that Kavanaugh had “a credible accusation” against him that overshadowed those hearings in what I could only conclude to be a sham trial. In welcoming the newly seated Justice Kavanaugh to the Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referred to that process as “a highly partisan show.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was guilty of no more than being accused. I, for one, can relate to such an albatross around my neck. The uncorroborated and unsubstantiated allegations were exploited by Senator Whitehouse and others on his committee in a vicious partisan display that voters have not forgotten.

What made these claims “credible” in the eyes of Senator Whitehouse? Sheldon Whitehouse spent his high school years at St. Paul’s School, an elite prep school in Concord, New Hampshire with historic ties to the Episcopal church. Its alumni list looks like a who’s who of Washington politics. The school has been the subject of multiple grand jury investigations for alleged sexual assaults by both students and faculty dating back several decades. I wrote about the fallout from this in “Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester.” If Sheldon Whitehouse were to be accused today, should that fact alone make the claims “credible?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh might be among the first to defend his due process rights.

So what sort of witch hunt were we in for when [then-]President Trump put forth the name of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for nomination in 2020? The fact that she is Catholic had already become an unconstitutional religion test applied by members of the Judiciary Committee in 2020. In 2018, a non profit progressive organization called “Demand Justice” spent $5 million building opposition to Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court. How much of this money paid for false accusations? The Wall Street Journal reports that when asked if the group donated to Senator Whitehouse, he responded, “hope so!” In “Questions for Senator Whitehouse,” (Review & Outlook, Sep. 22, 2020) the Journal concluded:

“Mr Whitehouse is trying to stifle the donations and speech of his political opponents. The least he can do is set an example by disclosing his own dark money network and its plans to undermine judicial independence.”

Epilogue

Jumping back to 2024, President Joe Biden and presidential candidate Kamala Harris have both announced a plan to form an exploratory committee to reform the Court through term limits, additional seats on the Court, and the same threats that would re-make the Supreme Court into just another political action committee. Joe Biden, the proponent of term limits for the Court spent 48 years in Congress. For those who care about the state of Justice in America, I believe this effort must be halted.

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. You may also like these related posts:

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/31/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/31/24

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

July 31, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

This post has been a long time in the making. It’s the result of an epiphany, a sudden realization of truth that radically changed my perception of what had previously been to me just a painful memory. Then I stumbled upon something entirely new. To convey this thunderous awakening, I have to first ask you to return with me to a time not long ago that was painful and confusing for us all: the rise of the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021. The virus, the masks, the closures, the lies, the “mostly peaceful” protests that were actually riots, the burning cities each night on the news, it was all just awful.

Then there was Covid itself. I had it twice, the first time in the month after my friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri, was taken away in the custody of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after 36 years in America and 15 years as my roommate. Prisons are not known for having empathy about the human side of things. There was not a single concern about what happens to Pornchai or where I go from there. For over 15 years Max lived in the bunk above me where we were engaged in an epic spiritual battle to reconcile his past and secure a future. Then at 0700 on the morning of September 8, 2020, he was gone. By 0900, a stranger was living in his place.

And as I struggled to regain my sense of autonomy and balance, dark forces chose that very moment to bring down this blog. The only means I had to communicate with the outside world. I had to set all this aside to focus my meager resources and attention on the biggest crisis at hand: how to help Max cope with the hellish vortex of being lost in ICE detention with little hope and no means to communicate at all.

I seem to never learn to trust, however. I instinctively lean back on to my own resources and rely on no one else. That was certainly not working and it was not going to work. Then our late friend Claire Dion revealed an ingenious plan. Pornchai Max and I could not call each other, but we both could call Claire. She cared very much for us, and being a retired RN, she put her ingenuity to work. She devised a plan that I described not long after her death from cancer this year. That post was “Claire Dion Has Fallen into the Hands of the Living God.” Here is our treasured photo of how Claire put us back together.

The ICE Follies

As you know, Pornchai Moontri was taken from Thailand at age 11 in 1985 and brought to America. This forced him into a devastating and traumatic life from which there was but one escape. So he fled from it, again and again, the last time leaving him all alone in this world, a homeless teen at age 14 in a foreign country with a language and customs he could not comprehend.

Fleeing the trauma of exploitation, Pornchai fell into life on the streets where he trusted no one. He would steal food to survive, and sleep in doorways, shelters, and sometimes on the floor in the home of a friend. One day he stole a few cans of beer from a store. Fleeing across the store parking lot in 1992, Pornchai was tackled and pinned down by a much larger man. He could not be in that situation again. He could not be someone’s victim. He snapped, and that man died over a few cans of beer.

Ironically, just as I began typing this post I received a message from “Melissa.” Nearly 40 years ago at age 12 she had been a classmate of Pornchai in the seventh grade in middle school in Bangor, Maine when he first arrived in the United States. Melissa’s comment was both caring and brave, and it struck me that the trauma to which Pornchai was subjected has echoes all around him and across the years. Here is an excerpt of Melissa’s comment:

“I met Pornchai in seventh grade. I remember him as a sweet boy who was always smiling. However, a ‘foreigner’ he was not going to be accepted into the ‘in crowd’ though I don’t recall anyone that didn’t like him. How could they not? He had a great disposition … . I was upset to learn of Pornchai’s arrest back in 1992 because I knew the kid never stood a chance. We had all heard about the abusive home in Bangor. Over the years I would check to see if he had yet been released and was infuriated to learn that he had not. He had stolen beer, was chased into the parking lot by a grown man who confronted him. Pornchai reacted as the scared, cornered boy that he was. It was a tragedy for both. However, this boy, barely a legal adult, was locked up and forgotten. His American dream was a living nightmare. He became Bangor’s forgotten son. America, Bangor, Penobscot County Courts, DCF, teachers … . We all failed him.”

Years later, Pornchai emerged from over a decade in solitary confinement. Then our lives converged, clearly by design. I drew the entire story of his life out of Pornchai including all the madness that had been inflicted upon him.

What sparked me to write this post in 2024 was something that I did not know until very recently. I stumbled upon a plea from Catholic League President Bill Donohue addressed to the White House in 2021 in the final days of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Dr. Donohue published this petition in the January 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League, under title “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee”:

We took up a very serious case at Christmastime, hoping to bring relief to a man who has paid his dues and has been through enough. We asked Catholics to appeal to President Donald Trump to release Pornchai Moontri from the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He deserves to be repatriated to Thailand.

We were encouraged by news that the embassy in Thailand was contacted by ICE just days after we made our request; Pornchai’s case showed movement for the first time. Right before Christmas we asked our email subscribers to redouble their efforts making one more push.

Bill Donohue has known of the plight of Pornchai for many years. It was Fr. Gordon J. MacRae — he is another victim of injustice — who brought Pornchai’s story to his attention. Pornchai rightly credits Fr. MacRae with mentoring him. More than that, MacRae brought him into the Catholic Church.

We explained why Pornchai deserves to be released.

Pornchai was born in Thailand in 1973 and was abandoned by his mother when he was two-years-old. She intended to sell him, but a young relative came to his rescue and brought him into his home. When he was 11-years-old his mother reemerged with a new husband; they took him to Bangor, Maine, against his will. His stepfather, Richard Bailey, immediately started raping him, and did so for three years. At age 14, Pornchai escaped (it was his second escape) and became homeless. When he was 18, he got into a fight with a much bigger man while he was intoxicated and took the man’s life during the struggle (he was so drunk he does not recall stabbing him).

While awaiting trial, Pornchai’s mother came to visit him in jail, warning him that if he disclosed to the authorities what his stepfather did to him, she would suffer the consequences. Fearing for his mother’s life, he prudently decided not to speak, even to the point of not defending himself in court. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Maine has no parole.

In 2000, his mother attempted to leave her husband; they were living in Guam. That is where she was beaten to death. The only suspect was her husband, but there was no evidence to convict him. Subsequently, many things changed.

In 2005, Pornchai was sent to a New Hampshire State Prison. That is where he met Fr. MacRae. Five years later, Pornchai became a Catholic; he soon became a fan of the Catholic League.

In 2018, after new evidence emerged — advocates for Pornchai pursued Bailey — and justice was finally done. Bailey was convicted on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai.

On September 11, 2020, Pornchai, after serving his full sentence, was released at age 47 to the custody of ICE for deportation to his native Thailand. He is still in custody, with no end in sight.

Pornchai has served his time and has suffered enough. He should now be set free.

— William Donohue, PhD, Catalyst, January 2021

A White House Intervention

When Bill Donohue published the above, and Catholic League members sent it to the White House, Pornchai had already been held by ICE in an ICE detention facility in Gena, Louisiana for five months. It was the peak of Covid contagion and he was living 70 to a room with no protection and lights blazing around the clock. Despite my daily assurances that we were working hard to get him out, he was showing signs of extreme stress and depression. While I was shielding Pornchai from false hopes and promises, I was unaware that others were also shielding me about their own efforts. I thought I was a lone ranger doing my best each day to reach out to anyone who would take a call from a prisoner — and they were few — to plea for relief from Pornchai’s plight. The Covid pandemic had the world locked tightly in its grip and the riots across America were evidence of how tightly wound our world had become. Pornchai believed that he would remain trapped in ICE until the Covid crisis was over and that could take years. So in the meantime, I asked Pornchai to try to reach out to others who were also trapped in ICE, but even less fortunate than himself. He did exactly that, and ended up saving 17-year-old Trepha, a Vietnamese teen who ended up in the same ICE facility as Pornchai, but surrounded mostly by young men from Latin America. Trepha had stowed away on a container ship departing Vietnam and then his unplanned world tour ended in Mexico.

Smugglers took what little money Trepha had saved and then led him across the Rio Grande and locked him in the trunk of an abandoned car. When Border Patrol agents found him, they made no distinction between migrants from Latin American countries and those who had come from abroad. Pornchai protected Trepha by keeping him away from the Central American gangs at Gena and then tasked me with reaching out to the Vietnamese Consulate to try to get Trepha returned home. I still hear from him on occasion. He is back in Vietnam with his grandmother and has promised me that he would not undertake any more world tours. In December 2020 we posted “An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump” asking for an intervention to move Pornchai’s relocation along despite the Covid pandemic and its international restrictions. What I did not know at the time I wrote that post was that Catholic League President Bill Donohue also reached out to the White House greatly magnifying our voice.

I learned of this only recently, three years later in 2024. I stumbled upon some fascinating paperwork from my friend Fr George David Byers in North Carolina who had been helping me then behind the scenes in this blog. Father George printed a few pages of a BTSW traffic report showing visitors to this site and what they were seeing in December 2020 and January 2021. I did not make much sense of it then, so I just put it aside out of sight and out of mind. Three years passed and I discovered it again just weeks ago. I could see that many of the site views were from ICE Headquarters in New Orleans and then in January 2021 from Homeland Security in Washington and then finally from the White House. This was the culmination of the interest of thousands of Catholic League members who intervened to assist Pornchai Moontri.

Then, upon discovering the above, I went to the prison law library where I work. I keep there a collection of the many issues of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I began to look through them, and then found one breathlessly in the January 2021 edition entitled “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee.”

It did not just move the needle, it moved a mountain. Just two weeks after its publication Pornchai was aboard a Korean Airlines flight bound for Seoul along two plainclothes ICE officers who accompanied him. From there they boarded a connecting flight to Bangkok. The flight was 23 hours.

It turned out that the ICE officers read a good deal about Pornchai and as a result treated him very well. In fact, they saved the day. Upon their arrival after midnight in the Customs area at Bangkok International Airport, an exhausted Pornchai found himself surrounded by Thai police who were waiting for him. They demanded to know why he was being deported from the United States. The two ICE officers quickly intervened telling Pornchai not to answer. The ICE officers said that Pornchai had done nothing wrong, that he was being repatriated to his native country in cooperation with the Thai government and was entirely a free man. The Thai police went silent. Pornchai had never seen anything like it. Much later Pornchai wrote of his arrival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai learned from me this week that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, and likely also then-President Donald Trump, were instrumental in a worldwide effort to restore him to freedom. He marveled at this, and so do I. “The Hand of God was on them both,” I told him, “and on you as well.”

“I could not see that then,” said Pornchai, “it took a priest and two presidents, but I see it now.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a riveting and timely new book that I hope to soon review in these pages. It is Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization defending individual Catholics and the Church against defamation. No one in the U.S. Catholic Church has done more to assist me and Pornchai Moontri than Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Join forces with us at www.CatholicLeague.org.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/24/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/24/24

God, Grant Me Serenity. I’ll be Waiting

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is much more than a few verses on the walls of a Twelve Step program. It’s a vital petition to recover from spiritual wounds.

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is much more than a few verses on the walls of a Twelve Step program. It’s a vital petition to recover from spiritual wounds.

“Forgiveness is to give up all hope for a better past.”

For the last several years where I live, greeting cards of any sort have been banned. It was somehow determined that some people on the “outside” found a way to separate the card stock on which greeting cards are made, and then insert narcotics between the layers of the card. I hear that there were machines that could detect all this, but the cheaper and more expedient way of dealing with it was to simply ban all cards from friends and families of prisoners. This was a morale bombshell especially around Christmas which is already sanitized to be virtually unrecognizable in prison. The draconian measure has been resolved a bit, but not for the better. We now get no mail at all. We receive only a photocopy of any mail that you send while the original is shredded. Bah, humbug!

The word “draconian” is an interesting word. Some people spell it with a capital “D” because it’s one of those words that came into English from the name of an actual historical person. Though technically the capital isn’t necessary, the word refers to the application of harsh laws such as those codified by Draco, a legislator in the city-state of Athens, Greece in the Seventh Century, B.C. Draco was notorious for imposing the death penalty for both serious and trivial crimes, thus giving rise to “draconian,” a rather uncomplimentary word named after him. When I explained all this some years ago to my friend, Pornchai-Max, he said, “maybe in a thousand years, going off on long, boring explanations about history will be called ‘gordonian.’” HMMPH! He lives in Thailand now and out of my reach, except by telephone.

Anyway, back to mail call. Of course, every prisoner loves mail, but when it comes to replying to it all, I get a D+ at best. A part of my excuse is that I can purchase only six Smith Corona typewriter ribbons per year, so that means having to handwrite most mail. So I find myself writing much of the same things over and over. It’s especially difficult to respond to overseas mail because the prison commissary sells only U.S. First Class 73¢ stamps, and has a purchase limit of twenty per week. Writing overseas takes three of them which costs much more than a day’s pay here. So some of my mail tends to pile up until I am able to respond.

I am so very sorry for this, but prison is one reality I wish I could change, but can’t. I hope it doesn’t discourage you from writing. Sometimes I try to incorporate responses to letters in some of my posts, and hope that readers can detect some of their letters between the lines. As an example, this excerpt is from a letter received just before Christmas last year from an Ohio reader (but still in a pile in my cell):

“Dear Fr MacRae: I first learned about you when I read the book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions [by Felix Carroll]. I am always so inspired by other people’s conversions! When I read the chapter about Pornchai Moontri I was very touched by his story and remarkable conversion and, frankly, I was shocked by your story. I became very concerned when I looked you up online and found your blog and read some of your articles… It did not take me long to have your blogs come right to my inbox and I gobble up everything you write. You inspire me to want to be a better follower of Christ and to accept the things I cannot change in my life.”

The writer added, in a paragraph later, “You are doing so much good despite what was done to you. Your light is still shining.” On the same day, I received another letter from a reader in the U.K. in which he wrote that my posts remind him of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous Letters and Papers from Prison. Talk about pressure! This resulted in a post by me on my birthday, “Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

I had long been aware of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous Lutheran pastor condemned to prison in Hitler’s Germany because of his writing. Both of the letters described above made me think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer although the first one never mentioned him. He never knew in life the profound impact that his writings from prison would have on others for generations to come.

I once read a superb interview with Eric Metaxas by Kate Bachelder in The Wall Street Journal entitled “The Death of God Is Greatly Exaggerated”. In it, Eric Metaxas

“recalls how in 1939 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting safely in New York at Union Theological Seminary. He elected to return to Germany, what Mr. Metaxas calls ‘the great decision.’ What would animate someone to leave comfort and security for the depraved Nazi Germany, where he would surely be arrested for supporting the Jews?”

The Serenity Prayer

There is an answer to that question, but first let’s get back to the pre-Christmas letter cited above from an Ohio reader. She mentioned that my posts inspire her “to want to be a better follower of Christ and to accept the things I cannot change in my life.” You might instantly recognize the latter half of that sentence as a reference to what is now commonly known as “The Serenity Prayer.”

It’s one of the most iconic prayers in common use in Western culture, and a portion of it adorns the walls and literature, of every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the world, as well as most other self-help endeavors based on the Twelve Steps of A.A. The prayer was written in 1926 by Lutheran pastor and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, but most people know it only by the few verses adopted by A.A. Here is its original form:

God, grant me
Serenity to accept the things
I cannot change;
Courage to change the things
I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enduring one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship
as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
and not as I would have it.

Trusting that You
will make all things right
if I but surrender to Your will;
That I may be
reasonably happy in this life, and
supremely happy with You in the next.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, 1926

Courage to Change the Things I Can

The famous prayer begins with a request for the grace of serenity, but in my current location, as it was in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison, there is little of it to be found on the outside. I received a letter from a reader recently who told me of the imprisonment of his wife of some fifty years. It is not a physical prison, but it is no less of a prison than the one I am in. Having lost and buried their own son from cancer, she finds herself in a prison of distrust and resentment over the losses of the past. It’s the sort of prison that has so many of us under lock and key.

“Forgiveness is to give up all hope for a better past.” I began this post with that quote, but I do not know its origin. A fellow prisoner whose mother died while he was in prison, stood in my doorway one morning to tell me that someone sent him that quote. It made me realize how much serenity requires the grace of surrender for the events of the past. It’s a real challenge where I am, but it’s a real challenge wherever any of you are too. Dare we hope? Dare we believe? Both take serenity, courage, and wisdom in the present moment. Our crosses of the present cannot be an excuse for retreating into the past.

The prisoner whose mother died spoke with me at length about the death of his mother, and about the painful letting go that it required of him with no opportunity for goodbye other than from within his own heart. I gave him a copy of “A Corner of the Veil,” about the death of my own mother during my imprisonment. But it’s really about more than that. It’s about my own letting go of the things I cannot change. The prisoner kept that post and read it several times. He said that he was profoundly affected by my challenge not to reduce the present to a litany of losses in the past.

Through this discernment, he made a decision to reconsider one part of his past: his Catholic faith that he long ago had abandoned. Through the loss of his mother, he opened himself to the one thing he has left to share with her, a faith that spans a bridge between his life and hers. He later attended Father Michael Gaitley’s “33 Days to Morning Glory” retreat when it was offered in this prison.

The wounds of the past surface in times of loss. Like the wife of the reader mentioned above, the struggles and wounds of life accumulate into a litany of loss until it is life itself that we now distrust. Sometimes it is life itself that requires our forgiveness. To do so, then, is to surrender all hope for a better past because such a hope is futile. No matter how you spin it in your heart and mind, no matter who you blame for it, no matter how long you have lived with it, you will never have a different past. Eric Metaxas alluded to this in his WSJ interview:

“One of my favorite Bible verses is Philippians 4:6” ‘Be anxious about nothing.’ Nothing. Now what does that mean, ‘nothing’? It means ‘NOTHING.’ [So] ‘Rejoice in the Lord always.’ That’s a command.”

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Both Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in prison. And yet the entire world today is shaken up by the wisdom that emanated from their prison writing.

Over the decades here in my own imprisonment, I have been tempted by the prospect of simply giving up on the present and retreating into the past. On the night before writing this post I had a long talk by telephone with my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in Thailand. He also spent 30 years in prison for a crime set in motion by someone else. When I told him about this post he reminded me of something said in a homily by the late Father Bernie Campbell, a Capuchin priest who offered Sunday Mass in this prison for decades. Pornchai told me that Father Bernie once said in a homily that “life is like toilet paper. It goes by a lot faster toward the end of the roll.” We both laughed at the truth of that.

I was so very struck by the reader at the beginning of this post who wrote that this blog reminds him of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. The letter caused me to return to Bonhoeffer’s writings. Reinhold Niebuhr, who composed “The Serenity Prayer” was on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York where he had a profound influence on Bonhoeffer at the time he arrived at “the great decision” that Eric Metaxas described. The great decision was to return to Germany because “He who believes does not flee,” no matter the cost.

Both men also had a very great influence on my late friend and mentor, Father Richard John Neuhaus. Along with Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father Neuhaus urged me to write and was instrumental in my starting this blog in 2009. His own great decision to pave a path from Lutheranism to Rome by becoming a Catholic and a priest — took great courage and wisdom.

You do not have to read very far into Bonhoeffer’s words and actions to see Reinhold Niebuhr’s “the courage to change the things that I can” reflected there. I think serenity itself was more of a challenge. Bonhoeffer freely chose to return to Nazi Germany from the comfort of Reinhold Niebuhr’s New York seminary knowing — very much like Father Maximilian Kolbe — that his own moral compass would not permit him to cease writing the truth.

And like Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Bonhoeffer wrote knowing, and fearing, that the truth would land him in a Nazi prison, but he wrote that truth anyway. Finding serenity along such a path is an immense spiritual challenge, and its only source is grace — and the conditions in which such grace is found are often surprising.

True courage does not mean the absence of fear. It means to do the right thing, to act morally, in spite of fear. There are some things which have terrified me — decades in prison being one of them— but terror alone was not sufficient cause to take up an easier cross. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and for Maximilian Kolbe, prison was no obstacle to grace.

The powerfully riveting book by Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2011) presents Bonhoeffer’s very life as a profile in courage. His writings and actions led inexorably to the sacrifice of his life on April 9, 1945, eight years to the day before I was born. Just imagine then the irony of my own introduction to prison. Standing in court facing prison on September 23, 1994, I was forced to be silent while prosecutor Bruce Elliot Reynolds asked Judge Arthur Brennan and my jury to disregard any good I have ever done, because “for some people, even Hitler was a nice guy.”

Over the years between his imprisonment and his execution by hanging upon the orders of Hitler himself, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his Letters and Papers from Prison. When what he wrote was posthumously published, those who knew him found some of it shocking. One of his most pointed criticisms of his own church during those years in prison was its tendency to limit faith and the requirements of faith to the “otherworldly,” focusing on the next life at the expense of this one. Though that is a part of all faith — certainly Catholic faith — we are now in this life, “taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, and not as I would have it.”

It was in the unjust imprisonment imposed upon him through the corruption of others that Dietrich Bonhoeffer found the core of his Christology. It could be summed up in three words: “life for others.” And it was in that same circumstance that Maximilian Kolbe discerned that “Love alone creates,” the center of his life in Christ that drew him toward surrendering his life that another may live.

In both men, in the struggles between courage and wisdom, in the midst of great suffering, trial, and loss can be found inspiration for the greatest challenge and adventure of our lives, that most essential part of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer: “God, grant me Serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post as an example of “the courage to change the things that I can.” You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Eternal Life Matters: Spiritual Survival in Trying Times

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/17/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/17/24

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President of the United States. If the progressive woke earthly powers had their way, Donald Trump may have been the last.

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President of the United States. If the progressive woke earthly powers had their way, Donald Trump may have been the last.

July 17, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Over the fifteen years that I have been writing a weekly post for this blog, the month of July has always been a bit of a disappointment. As many readers know, there is no air conditioning where I live. Residing on the top floor of a four-story dormitory setting where 24 grown men must share one bathroom with two toilets, the stifling heat, lack of activity and seasonally subdued reader attention have all combined to strip away much of my enthusiasm to write in July.

So I chose an older post as a summer rerun for this week. July is also often a slow news time. I chose this post just before the events of July 13 when a political rally for Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania exploded in news across the globe. I had wrestled with whether I should rethink my choice for this week’s post.

After I first wrote it a few months before the 2020 election, I was assailed in messages from a few readers for having the audacity to write of him without the usual vague sense of vitriol that so much of the rest of the media utilizes for all things Trump.

“Vitriol” is an interesting word with a strange etymology that results in nearly opposite usages. It refers to bitter or corrosive feelings about someone or something. In chemistry, vitriol is another name for sulfuric acid which can corrode metal. But in another usage it refers to having the properties of glass, transparent and resilient.

I hope you don’t have the impression that I like Donald Trump, or that I now endorse him for president. Priests should probably refrain from such things even though we all have opinions like everyone else. What I do like is the idea of Donald Trump, of the fact that a non-politician with no apparent appreciation for Washington, DC politics-as-usual can be elected president against overwhelming odds. Only in America!

What I do not like, at all, is a mindset that has grown in U.S. politics that is mercilessly set against him. If you turned on MSNBC News anytime of day or night before the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania you would witness exactly what I mean. Even MSNBC has lightened up just a bit, but only because it is politically insensitive to attack a presidential candidate who has just been shot.

I support the right of U.S. citizens to resist a domineering woke agenda that seeks to nullify your vote with its own prejudice by denouncing Donald Trump at every turn. It is for voters, and not the elite of Washington politics, or the entrenched progressive news media, to decide this coming election. Every possible subversive effort has been employed to confiscate your will and turn your vote against this man. It is not right and it is certainly not American. And when all the lawfare and rhetoric failed to circumvent the will of the people and steal this election, the unthinkable happened. Those subversive earthly powers utilized a delusional young man with a rifle and a bullet to ultimately do what all the pundits could not do.

Donald Trump survived — seemingly miraculously — and now it seems that the rest just enters into history. History is the real subject of this 2020 post that I have chosen to rewrite and update for this 2024 summer rerun:

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his research into the power of “availability bias,” a sort of groupthink in which a proposition is widely accepted as true merely because it has been repeated in the media. Kahneman’s research challenged the long-held view that people make decisions rationally, based on their own self-interest. His research demonstrated that groupthink can result in irrational decisions that are contrary to self-interest.

The threat of groupthink, though not in so many words, was at the heart of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a future totalitarian society in which human will is controlled by established norms. Since Orwell wrote his landmark novel, studies have shown that decision-making groups often fall victim to groupthink, a phenomenon that excessively demands group concurrence and condemns dissent. Members blindly convince themselves that the group’s position is correct by suppressing all evidence to the contrary. It sounds very familiar.

We have heard a multitude of examples in recent months. Some of our leaders have embraced the groupthink, for example, that Covid-19 is easily spread among Catholics at Mass but not at all among mass protesters, plunderers, and rioters in a “woke” demand to cleanse history. Any dissent from the approved doctrine is met with group condemnation.

History would call this “The March of Folly.” My favorite among the many historians I have read is Barbara Tuchman, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize. And my favorite among her books is The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. In it, Dr. Tuchman analyzes four turning points in history that illustrate a group’s actions against self-interest.

Her choices for this analysis were: (1) the Trojan War; (2) the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes (I wrote of this one in “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican”); (3) the loss of the British loss of the American Colonies by King George III, and (4) the United States’ folly in Vietnam. Barbara Tuchman’s Introduction contains a wise caveat that should be the hallmark of every historian:

“Nothing is more unfair than to judge men of the past with the ideas of the present.”

— The March of Folly, p.5

Were Barbara Tuchman alive in some distant future, I wonder if she might add a fifth turning point: The folly of 2020, the point at which America turned on itself by destroying its monuments to history, committing on a national scale the same unfair judgment of the past that Tuchman described above.

History must be clearly understood by every generation lest it repeat itself. When the Third Reich came to power in 1939 Germany, it was all about amassing power by convincing the people that certain of their neighbors, and certain of their neighbors’ ideas, were dangerous. Books were burned. Monuments were destroyed by fired-up mobs. Businesses were looted and burned to the ground. The past was stripped away from the present.

An Independence Day Address at Mount Rushmore

The usual critics were loudly vocal, but not exactly truthful, about President Trump’s speech on the eve of Independence Day 2020 before a crowd gathered at Mount Rushmore. The memorial features the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The impressively massive sculpture was carved into the granite rim of Mount Rushmore 500 feet above the valley floor. Each face is 60 feet tall. The monument was begun in 1927 and completed in 1941 as the United States entered World War II.

The rhetoric surrounding President Trump’s appearance there has been astonishing. The vile disparagement that took place among much of the U.S. news media is evidenced in these headlines:

“At Mt. Rushmore, Trump Uses Fourth of July Celebration to Stoke a Culture War”

— Los Angeles Times

“Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message”

— New York Times

“Trump Pushes Racial Divisions, Flouts Virus Rules at Rushmore”

— Associated Press

“At Mount Rushmore, Trump Exploits Social Divisions, Warns of ‘Left-Wing Cultural Revolution’ in Dark Speech Ahead of Independence Day”

— Washington Post

“What really struck me about the speech... was that [Trump] spent more time worried about honoring dead confederates. [He] spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”

— Senator Tammy Duckworth at CNN

The claims from Senator Duckworth seemed the most puzzling of all. Even The New York Times, no fan of this President, reported that Mr. Trump “avoided references to the symbols of the Confederacy.” In a later article, the Times added, “[Trump] avoided specifically mentioning anything related to Confederate monuments!” He never mentioned any of the “dead confederates” cited by Senator Duckworth who appears not to have actually heard the speech.

During the presidential primaries of 2016, some of the same media reported on Senator Bernie Sanders’ visit to Mount Rushmore. Of the monument itself, Mr. Sanders was quoted: “It really does make one proud to be an American.” When Mr. Trump spoke there on the eve of Independence Day 2020, a CNN reporter characterized it as a speech “in front of a monument to two slave owners on land wrestled away from Native Americans.”

Somehow between 2016 and 2020, Mount Rushmore — and America itself — became a symbol of oppression to the media left. So did Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal’s assessment was vastly different, however.

In “Trump at Mount Rushmore,” a lead editorial of July 6, 2020, editors commended the President for delivering “one of the best speeches of his presidency”:

“Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity. He highlighted the central idea of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’ As he rightly put it, ‘These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom’ that included the abolition of slavery.”

In a published Letter to the Editor on July 6, 2020, one Wall Street Journal reader wrote that after following all the anti-Trump Facebook rhetoric about the Mount Rushmore speech, he conducted a little experiment. He posted an excerpt of the speech on Facebook, but without attribution. The passage was:

“We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, General George Patton, the great Louis Armstrong, Alan Shepherd, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali. And only America could have produced them all. No other place.”

The passage merited a barrage of Facebook “likes” from the same people who had been condemning the President’s Mount Rushmore speech — obviously without ever actually hearing or reading it.

The Emancipation Memorial

Another debate has been raging over a longstanding Washington, DC monument in Lincoln Park known as the “Emancipation Memorial.” The monument was dedicated on that site in 1876 by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery. His widely celebrated autobiography described his life as a slave in the South, as a fugitive in the North, and as a prominent African American orator, journalist, and antislavery leader.

In later life Frederick Douglass worked for full civil rights for African Americans while holding several U.S. government positions. Despite his dedication of the Emancipation Monument, he had misgivings about its design. The current controversy over the monument unearthed a previously unknown letter in which Douglass wrote that the former slave depicted there, “while rising, is still on his knees.”

Two Letters in The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 2020) captured the opposing views of the controversial monument. One writer knew its history. The other judged it solely by impressions of the present when separated from its history. I leave it to you to decide which expresses the monument’s original meaning:

WSJ READER 1: “The image shows a clear hierarchy of power — Abraham Lincoln with elegant clothes dominating Archer Alexander [a former slave] wearing only a piece of cloth... No back story, facts or prestigious titles you wave in our faces will convince people to see ‘emancipation’ there. What might have been questionably allowed in 1892 isn’t acceptable now.”
WSJ READER 2: “The scene depicted actually happened. Admiral David Dixon Porter accompanied President Lincoln to Richmond to accept the surrender of the Confederacy, and recounted the story in his 1885 memoir. Lincoln was recognized by hundreds of newly freed slaves who crowded him. When one fell to the ground at his feet, Lincoln said, ‘Do not kneel to me. You must kneel only to God and thank Him for your liberty. Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to all others. It is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years.’ It was Admiral Porter’s account that inspired the statue’s design. Little more than one week later, Lincoln was assassinated.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important and timely post. We also recommend these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

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

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”