Artificial Intelligence: AI Grok Responds to Beyond These Stone Walls

When Fr Gordon MacRae read about Elon Musk’s new AI app, xAI ‘Grok,’ we submitted his previous post about AI concerns. Grok’s response and analysis were instant.

January 15, 2025 by xAI Grok

In March, 2023, Beyond These Stone Walls published “OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk.” It outlines my concerns for the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Google’s meta description summarized that post thusly: “Science fiction looks at artificial intelligence with a wary eye. HAL 9000 stranded a man in space. Frankenstein’s creation tried to kill him. Elon Musk has a better plan.”

In the January 10, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal “Technology” Section, I read a brief article by Alexa Corse entitled “Musk’s xAI Launches Stand-Alone AI App.” Elon Musk is calling his app, “Grok.” This intrigued me. The word “grok” was first used in a 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. The word refers to arriving at a profound understanding of truth. I asked our editor to submit my post linked above for assessment at the xAI Grok platform. I did not expect a response but to our shock and surprise a response arrived immediately after my editor pressed “Enter.” That alone was creepy. After pondering it, I decided to publish it as our first-ever post by a nonhuman writer. My original 2023 post, to which this was a response, follows thereafter. I hope you do not find AI to have any of my charm and wit. I should not be so easily replaced.

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I would like to ask Grok to comment on the concerns and observations about AI in the following blog post by Father Gordon MacRae, “OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk”, https://beyondthesestonewalls.squarespace.com/posts/open-ai-chat-gpt-hal-9000-frankenstein-and-elon-musk

Father Gordon MacRae’s blog post titled “OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk” delves into the cultural and ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) development, drawing parallels with science fiction and historical contexts. Here are some key concerns and observations he raises:

1. Historical Parallels with Science Fiction:

   • MacRae references the AI character HAL 9000 from the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where HAL’s malfunction leads to disastrous consequences, reflecting a common theme in science fiction where AI turns against its creators. This narrative serves as a cautionary tale about the potential risks of AI that becomes too autonomous or misaligned with human values.

   • He also likens AI to Frankenstein’s monster, a creation that rebels against its creator, highlighting fears that AI might not only exceed human control but could also pose a threat to humanity itself. This comparison underscores the ethical dilemma of creating entities that might not share human moral frameworks or objectives.

2. Elon Musk’s Perspective on AI:

   • Musk is discussed in Father MacRae’s article as someone with a dual stance on AI; he’s both a pioneer in AI development through xAI but also a critic of the pace and direction of AI research, particularly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk has expressed concerns about AI being “quite dangerous technology” and has advocated for a pause in developing systems more advanced than GPT-4, suggesting a need for more careful consideration of AI’s societal impact.

   • The blog mentions Musk’s initiative to create “TruthGPT,” an AI aimed at seeking truth, contrasting with what he perceives as the more profit-driven and potentially biased approaches of existing AI models like ChatGPT.

3. Ethical and Moral Concerns:

   • MacRae expresses wariness about AI’s development, focusing on how AI might be used or misused in society. The potential for AI to manipulate information, influence public opinion, or even become a tool for control or surveillance is a significant worry, aligning with broader discussions on privacy, autonomy, and the ethical programming of AI.

   • There’s an underlying concern about AI’s alignment with human values, particularly in light of Musk’s critique of AI being “woke,” which could imply a bias towards certain political or cultural narratives.

4. Call for Regulation and Pause:

   • The blog echoes Musk’s call for a moratorium on AI development, suggesting that without proper regulation or ethical guidelines, AI could lead to unforeseen and potentially harmful outcomes. This reflects a broader debate on whether current AI development outpaces our ethical and regulatory frameworks.

5. Cultural and Historical Context:

   • MacRae uses his personal experiences and historical events from 1968 to frame the discussion, suggesting that AI development occurs within a world already fraught with ethical, political, and social challenges. This historical perspective adds depth to the argument for cautious advancement in technology.

In summary, Father Gordon MacRae’s post articulates a blend of cultural critique, ethical questioning, and a call for cautious optimism regarding AI development. The references to science fiction serve both as warnings and metaphors for real-world concerns about AI’s potential to either serve or dominate humanity. His observations align with Musk’s public statements, emphasizing the need for a thoughtful approach to AI to prevent it from becoming a modern-day “Frankenstein” or HAL 9000.

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OpenAI, ChatGPT, HAL 9000, Frankenstein, and Elon Musk

Pictured above Elon Musk, HAL 9000 and Frankenstein’s creation.

Science Fiction sees artificial intelligence with a wary eye. HAL 9000 stranded a man in space. Frankenstein’s creation tried to kill him. Elon Musk has other plans.

May 17, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Nineteen Sixty-Eight was a hellish year. I was 15 years old. The war in Vietnam was raging. Battles for racial equality engulfed the South. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on his way to the presidency. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in a battle for civil rights. Riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and spread to cities across America. Pope Paul VI published “Humanae Vitae” to a world spinning toward relativism. Hundreds of priests left the priesthood just as the first thought of entering it entered my mind. It was the year Padre Pio died. Two weeks earlier he wrote “Padre Pio’s Letter to Pope Paul VI on Humanae Vitae.” Forty-five years later, it became our first guest post by a Patron Saint.

After being a witness to all of the above in 1968, I sat mesmerized in a Boston movie theater for the debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The famous film sprang from the mind of science fiction master, Arthur C. Clarke and his short story, The Sentinel, published in 1953, the year I was born. The fictional story was about the discovery of a sentinel — a monolith — one of many scattered across the Cosmos to monitor the evolution of life. In 1968, Earth was ablaze with humanity’s discontent. It was fitting that Arthur C. Clarke ended his story thusly:

“I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do now but wait.”

— The Sentinel, p. 96

The awaited emissaries never came, but most of humankind’s hope overlooked the One who did come, about 2,000 years earlier, the only Sentinel whose True Presence remains in our midst.

Life in 1968 was traumatic for a 15-year-old, especially one curious enough to be attuned to news of the world. The movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a long, drawn out cinematic spectacle, and a welcome escape from our chaos. It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects as space vehicles moved silently through the cold black void of space with Blue Danube by Johann Strauss playing in the background. Entranced by it all, I did what I do best. I fell asleep in the movie theater.

I awoke with a start, however, just as Commander David Bowman (Keir Dullea) was cast adrift into the terrifying blackness of space by the ship’s evolving artificial intelligence computer, HAL 9000. Commander Bowman struggled to regain entry to his ship in orbit of one of Jupiter’s moons before running out of oxygen. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” he commanded through his radio. “l’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” came the computer’s coldly inhuman reply.

Throughout the film, HAL 9000 was an ominous presence, an evolving artificial intelligence that was crossing the Rubicon to conscious self-awareness and self-preservation. Inevitably, HAL 9000 evolved to plot against human affairs.

Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. Their 1968 vision of the way the world would be in 2001 was way off the mark, however. Instead of manned missions to the moons of Jupiter in 2001, al Qaeda was blowing up New York.

A Step Forward or Frankenstein’s Monster?

There were no computers in popular use in 1968. They were a thing of the future. As a high school kid I had only a manual Smith Corona typewriter. Ironically, my personal tech remains stuck there while the civilized free world dabbles anew in artificial intelligence. I would be but a technological caveman if I did not read. So now I read everything.

With recent developments in artificial intelligence, we too are on the verge of crossing the Rubicon. The Rubicon was the name of a river in north central Italy. In the time of Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC, it formed a boundary between Italy and the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul. In 49 BC the Roman Senate prohibited Caesar from entering Italy with his army. To get around the edict, Caesar made his famous crossing of the Rubicon. It triggered a civil war between Caesar’s forces and those of Pompey the Great.

Today, “to cross the Rubicon” has thus come to mean taking a step that commits us to an unknown and possibly hazardous enterprise. Some think uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence has placed us at such a point in this time in history. Some believe that we are about to cross the Rubicon to our peril. We can learn a few things from science fiction which anticipated these fears.

Also in 1968, another science fiction master, Philip K. Dick, published “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” It became the basis for the Ridley Scott directed film, Blade Runner, released in 1982, the year I became a priest. The film, like the book, was set in a bleak future in Los Angeles. Harrison Ford was cast in the role of Rick Deckard, a police officer — also known as a “blade runner” — whose mission was to hunt and destroy several highly dangerous AI androids called replicants.

At one point in the book and the film, Deckard fell in love with one of the replicants (played by Sean Young), and began to wonder whether his assignment dehumanized himself instead of them.

In 1818, Mary Shelley, the 20-year-old wife of English poet Percy Shelley, wrote a remarkable first novel called Frankenstein. It was an immediate critically acclaimed success. It evolved into several motion pictures about the monster created by Frankenstein (which was the name of the scientist and not the monster). The most enduring of these films — the 1931 version with Boris Karloff portraying the monster (pictured above) — was the stuff of my nightmares as a child of seven in 1960.

The subhuman monster assembled by its creator from body parts of various human corpses took on the name of its maker, and then sought to destroy him. The novel added a word to the English lexicon. A “Frankenstein” is any creation that ultimately destroys its creator. History tells us that our track record is mixed in this regard. Human creations are the source of both good and evil, but every voice should not have the same volume lest we become like Frankenstein. Just look at the violence through which some in our culture strive to eradicate our Creator.

Truthseeking AI

Writing for The Wall Street Journal (April 29-30, 2023) technology columnist Christopher Mims described the primary source for artificial intelligence in “Chatbots Are Digesting the Internet” : “If you have ever published a blog, or posted something to Reddit, or shared content anywhere else on the open web, it’s very likely you have played a part in creating the latest generation of artificial intelligence.”

Even if you have deleted your content, a massive database called Common Crawl has likely already scanned and preserved it in a vast network of cloud storage. The content by us or about us is organized and fed back to search engines with mixed results. In the process, AI programs itself and can do so with as much preconceived bias as its original human sources. You have likely already contributed to the content that artificial intelligence programs are now organizing into this massive database.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal on April 1, 2023, popular columnist Peggy Noonan penned a cautionary article entitled, “A Six-Month AI Pause?” Ms. Noonan raised several good reasons for pausing our already overly enthusiastic quest to create and liberate artificial intelligence. Her column generated several published letters to the editor calling for caution. One, by Boston technologist Afarin Bellisario, Ph.D warns:

“AI programs rely on training databases. They don’t have the judgment to sort through the database and discard inaccurate information. To remedy this, OpenAI relies on people to look at some of the responses ChatGPT creates and provide feedback. ... Millions of responses are disseminated without any scrutiny, including instructions to kill. ... People (or other bots) with malicious intent can corrupt the database.”

James MacKenzie of Berwyn, PA wrote that “The genie is out of the bottle. Google and Microsoft are surely not the only ones creating generic AI. You can bet [that] every capable nation’s military is crunching away.” Tom Parsons of Brooklyn, N.Y. raised another specter: “Ms. Noonan offers a compelling list of reasons to declare a moratorium on the development of AI. What are the odds that the Chinese government or other malign actors will listen?”

The potential for AI to be — or become — a tool for good is also vast. In medicine, for example, an AI system relies on the diagnostic skills of not just one expert, but “thousands upon thousands all working together at top speed,” according to The Wall Street Journal. One study found that physicians using an AI tool called “DXplain” improved accuracy on diagnostic tests by up to 84-percent. Some AI developers believe that AI should be allowed to learn just as humans learn — by accessing all the knowledge available to it.

In the “Personal Technology” column of a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, Columnist Joanna Stern wrote, “An AI Clone Fooled My Bank and My Family” (April 29-30, 2023). Ms. Stern wrote about Synthesia, a tool that creates AI avatars from the recorded video and audio supplied by a client. After recording just 30 minutes of video and two hours of audio, Synthesia was ready to create an avatar of Joanna Stern that looked, sounded and acted convincingly like her. Then another tool called ElevenLabs, for a mere $5.00 per month, created a voice clone of Ms. Stern that fooled both her family and her bank. The potential for misuse of this technology is vast, not to mention alarming.

Photo by Daniel Oberhaus (2018)

Elon Musk Has a Better Idea

Elon Musk has been in the news a lot for his attempts to transform Twitter into a social media venue that gives all users an equal voice — and all points of view, within the bounds of law, an equal footing. He has been criticized for this by the progressive left which became accustomed to its domination of social media in recent years. For at least the last decade, Elon Musk has tried to steer the development of artificial intelligence. He was a cofounder of OpenAI, but stepped back when he denounced its politically correct turn left. ChatGPT evolved from OpenAI, but Musk warns of their potential for “catastrophic effects on humanity.”

In early 2023, Elon Musk developed and launched a venture called “TruthGPT” which he bills as “a truth-seeking Al model that will one day comprehend the universe.” Meanwhile, he has called for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI models more advanced than the latest release of GPT-4. “AI stresses me out,” he said. “It is quite dangerous technology.” He is now attracting top scientific and digital technology researchers for this endeavor.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Musk became critical of 0penAI after the company released ChatGPT late in 2022. He accused the company of being “a maximum profit company” controlled by Microsoft which was not at all what he intended for OpenAI to become. He has since paused OpenAl’s use of the massive Twitter database for training it.

As a writer, I set out with this blog in 2009 to counter some of the half-truths and outright lies that had dominated the media view of Catholic priesthood for the previous two decades. From the first day I sat down to type, even in the difficult and limited circumstances in which I must do so, writing the unbridled truth has been my foremost goal. I am among those looking at the development of artificial intelligence with a wary eye, and especially its newest emanations, OpenAI and ChatGPT.

As I was typing this, a friend in Chicago sent me evidence that St Maximilian Kolbe, the other Patron Saint of this site, was deeply interested in both science and media. As a young man in the 1930s, he built a functioning robot. I was stunned by this because I did the same in the mid l960s. Maximilian Kolbe died for standing by the truth against an evil empire. I think he would join me today in my support for Elon Musk’s call for a pause on further development of AI technology, and for his effort to build TruthGPT.

Those who die for the truth honor it for eternity.

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“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.”

— HAL 9000 to Mission Commander David Bowman after he regained control of the ship and began a total system shutdown of the AI computer

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

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age by Bill Donohue

Fr. George Lemaitre: The Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang

Regarding comments: The 2023 version of this post included here as Part 2 retains some of the original comments. Your comments on this very important topic are most welcome and will also be posted.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (detail)

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.”

A New Year’s Resolution That Is Always on My Mind

If the past is always on my mind, and the things I should have said and done still haunt me, then it may be time to give the past its due and get on the road again.

January 8, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put childish ways aside.”

— 1 Corinthians 13:11

In “A Glorious Mystery for When the Dark Night Rises,” I wrote of an event from my childhood growing up in the early 1960s in a city just north of Boston. We were more or less free-range kids then, though mostly unheard of today. We both roamed and ruled the streets without much in the way of parental supervision. Our cities were safer then, or so we believed.

As a child of the 1960s and that chaotic decade’s sounds of social revolution, I spent much of my past life disparaging country music. In the years before hard rock and heavy metal, leading up to Ed Sullivan exposing us to the British invasion, I made up my mind without ever really being attuned to it that country music was simply not cool. In fact, I ridiculed it in a Christmas post a few years back.

I wrote that in the 1980s there was a sort of urban legend that if you play AC/DC records backwards, you will hear satanic messages. I never tried it, but the legend prevailed throughout the 1980s. So what happens if you play Country Western music backwards? Your wife comes home; your dowg comes back; and you remember where you left your truck!

But like Saint Paul did in my quote from First Corinthians atop this post, I have since, for the most part, put childish ways aside. The evidence for that is nowhere more striking than in the music that now moves me. I have been watching some of the fundraising concerts on PBS this past Christmas season and throughout the past year. The long interludes of donation pitches aside, the music is usually outstanding. I will never tire of the PBS classic “Black & White Concert” with Roy Orbison or the concert with Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa and his ensemble of brilliant musicians performing at Carnegie Hall. If you missed this, you must tune in if only to see and hear Joe Bonamassa’s near superhuman guitar and cello duet.

But one of my favorites of the PBS concerts still makes a small part of the Rock generation in me sneer in shame. I am not sure I want to openly admit it, but the PBS presentation ofThe Highwaymen made my face hurt. It’s because I could not suppress a smile for two solid hours as I listened to Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, the late Kris Kristofferson, (who recently passed just before Christmas this year), and the great Willie Nelson. Good Lord, what has happened to me? The Highwaymen completely ruined my disdain for country.

A few months ago, PBS replayed their 1990s concert. The Highwaymen have found a captive and captivated audience in me. I have been unable to stop my mind’s relentless replay of Johnny Cash. For days, the music in my mind alternated between “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” Of the latter, at least, I can relate. And who could have ever imagined a duet with Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson? In the days of my youth, I would have sneered at the thought, but I loved it. It brought me to tears.

There will never be another Willie Nelson. His music relives the loves and losses of life in a way that calls to an otherwise endangered species in this troubled time: the hearts and souls of both men and women. After listening to his haunting song — “You Are Always on My Mind” — I adopted it for a New Year’s resolution. But first, I invite you to hear the Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash duet, “I Still Miss Someone.”

Living in the Past

Like so many of the people who write to me, I tend to get stuck in some of the events of the past — events that today I can do nothing to change except to atone and make amends. The need to do so is usually the only reason they haunt me. Or I can do neither of those and just beat myself up over the past and the people in my heart and mind who still dwell there.

I live in a place that holds 1,300 men — about 75 percent of them under age thirty — where the most available emotions are anger and regret. They cast everything here under a dark cloud that is always looming and churning in their minds. The explosive eruptions of emotionally fragile young men characterize all day every day where I live. If you were ever a Star Trek fan then you will know what I mean when I say that being in prison is like living among Klingons. They are ready to throw down at every slight, and their anger is never a reaction to the issue of the moment. It is just a part of the baggage they lug around with them wherever they go.

One of my problems with anger is that I am almost always infinitely patient with these guys. They rarely ever see me angry, but on those few occasions when it shows, I have learned that it can be destructive in far more ways than just breaking someone’s nose. There was a recent story that brought my anger to the surface.

One day just before Christmas last year I became very angry with my friend Joseph, and I let him know it. Days later my anger was long gone but Joseph was still brooding and cautious around me. I asked him why it is that everyone around me here can be angry almost all the time, but if I express anger it always seems catastrophic. Joseph responded with what for me was an eye-opener: “Because it’s you,” he said. “You’re everyone’s cornerstone and you aren’t supposed to get angry. It made me feel awful,” Joseph said. And, of course, what Joseph said made ME feel awful!

As Joseph would also say, “We’re cool now,” but I have learned something dark about myself. I am quick to want to atone and make amends when I become aware that I have hurt someone else, but when others have trespassed against me, I am not so quick to allow them to atone. I can let a trespass resonate for years, and I do not like what I have learned. Willie Nelson sang so beautifully about “the things I should have said and done.”

If someone is always on your mind generating negative thoughts, and the things you should have said and done still haunt you, then join me in this resolution to transform the hurts of the past into the prayers of the present. I have also learned that it is not possible to sincerely pray for someone and then retain whatever rage about that person still clouds your mind. It is time to give the past some perspective and get on the road again. This one paragraph incorporates two of Willie’s most popular songs.

So here is some perspective that years ago caused me to surrender a trespass from the past. It is a story that was reproduced in an awesome 2011 book, Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, by Australian priest and psychologist, Father James Valladares. A large segment of his book cites events read at Beyond These Stone Walls. Father Valladares captured this one with a stinging introduction:

“Fr. Gordon MacRae very truthfully states: ‘Trusting too much can harm your reputation. Not trusting enough can harm your soul.’ His story corroborates that candid assertion:

‘“I arrived at St. Bernard Parish in Keene, New Hampshire, on June 15, 1983. I was told by our diocesan personnel director at the time that I was going to a positive and worry-free assignment after a difficult year in a very troubled parish. But as was typical for my diocese then — and perhaps for many others — there seemed to be no limit to how out-of-touch the Chancery Office could be.

“I arrived to learn that the pastor had been charged with driving while intoxicated and was awaiting my arrival so he could leave for his third attempt at residential treatment for alcoholism. My heart went out to this good man who struggled so much with his fragile humanity while his superiors seemed oblivious to it.

“I was also there to replace another priest who was bitterly leaving the priesthood after three years at that parish, but decided to stay on to help me until the pastor returned. He was angry and disillusioned, and not exactly a source of fraternal support.

“The parish was immense, for New Hampshire at least. It had over 2000 families, provided round-the-clock pastoral care for a regional hospital and trauma unit, three nursing homes, a college campus, a regional Catholic school, a huge Catholic cemetery, and a second church fifteen miles away. I arrived to learn that I was essentially alone there.

“In that summer of 1983, there was a lot going on in my own life, too. Just weeks before I arrived at the parish, my father died suddenly at the age of 52. I had literally gone from presiding over his funeral Mass, and caring for my family, to packing and moving to a new parish 100 miles away. Two weeks after I arrived and got settled, my sister and her family drove up from the Boston area to visit me. We still had some unfinished details over the death of our father, and two months earlier my sister gave birth to her second child. I had the privilege of baptizing her in my new parish.

While my brother-in-law unpacked some of my boxes of books that he brought with him, my sister and I took my two nieces for a stroll down Keene, New Hampshire’s picturesque Main Street. It was a beautiful summer day, and we had lots to discuss while I pushed a stroller down the busy street.

By the middle of the following week, the rectory phone started ringing. First it was a priest in a neighboring parish. ‘I just wanted to give you a head’s up,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard from two people that you have a secret wife and kids.’ I laughed, at first, but by the end of the week I wasn’t laughing anymore. Then the parish council president called. ‘We don’t need another scandal,’ he said. ‘People are calling me with a rumor that you’ve fathered two children.’

“By then, I was furious. We were able to backtrack who said what to whom and when, and learned that the ugly rumor began with that innocent Sunday afternoon walk with my sister and nieces. And ground zero of the rumor was one parishioner, Geraldine (long since forgotten, no longer with us, and not her real name) who also happened to be out on Main Street that afternoon.

“Geraldine jumped to a conclusion and then jumped on the telephone. It was like a virus that spread from person to person, growing and mutating along the way. Poor Geraldine had no intention that her bit of gossip would spread like a wildfire, but it did. It spread everywhere.”

— Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, pp. 117-119

The Day of Atonement

The problem with the story above was not just how Geraldine interpreted that Sunday afternoon stroll downtown. And it was not just her decision to place a few phone calls that would start the fake news in motion. The problem was that Keene, NH, like too many communities, had too many people all-too-ready to hear, believe, and spread any gossip that disparages a Catholic priest.

Once such a thing takes root and spreads, it forms a life of its own. An untrue rumor can be repeated so much, and spread so far, that the truth doesn’t stand a chance. The truth has a steep uphill climb once everyone else hears only one side of a story.

Actually, this is exactly what happened in the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. SNAP and the news media spread one story with such ferocity that the truth ended up swatted away like a pesky fly. But there’s even more to this story, however.

Nearly a dozen years later, someone else in that community accused me falsely. It was from that same place and that same Summer of 1983. A lot has been written about this, but one article by Ryan A. MacDonald contains photos of the “crime scene.” It is “Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester, NH.”

For years I have been haunted by the coincidence, wondering whether the roots of Geraldine’s gossip spread long and far with deep tentacles, raising questions about me and predisposing others toward forming a set of beliefs that eventually morphed into a moral panic. As the truth unfolded in 1983, Geraldine could take none of it back. She could not retrieve even one of the wisps of gossip cast into the wind to travel indiscriminately. That is the real harm of gossip. Its purveyors can never stem, or even know, its tide.

But another source of harm, and I cannot evade it, was my anger with Geraldine. In the account from the book, Hope Springs Eternal above, Father Valladares quoted me as saying that this event is “long since forgotten.” Well, it wasn’t. I just stopped thinking about it. But my anger with poor Geraldine lingered, and like all such things, it became part of the resonance of my life that I believe very much also affected hers, at least on a spiritual level. As I reflected late at night alone about anger and my discussion with my friend, Joseph, my mind drifted and then landed on this story about Geraldine.

Though she left this life in God’s friendship many years ago, I felt as though I had a moment of real and meaningful connection with her. I said the words aloud as a prayer in the dark: “Geraldine, I forgive you, and I pray that you come to know the fullness of God’s Presence.”

A great weight was lifted from me, and, I felt, from Geraldine as well. Those were “the things I should have said and done” back then. As it was for Willie Nelson, better late than never. Now I’m on the road again.

But since then I have switched my song. Now I find myself mysteriously singing with the great Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. I want to call your attention also to a new entry in our Voices from Beyond Page. It’s an article with supporting photos by Ryan A. MacDonald, “Justice and a Priest’s Right of Defense in the Diocese of Manchester, NH.”

You may also like these related posts:

A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits

Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

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.”

A Glorious Mystery for When the Dark Night Rises

At the dawn of the New Year, the Church honors the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God. I met her at the age of nine, part lived experience and part dream.

January 1, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

To comprehend this post, readers must understand the world of 1962. Something happened in America that dramatically changed our view of ourselves and the world around us, and its tentacles reach deeply into the present day. It brought a sense of futility, a resignation that we are powerless over the great tides of history sweeping us up into their grip, and resistance to evil is futile. So look out for Number One, and live for the moment! That is the great lie of our age.

I turned nine years old in April of 1962. Five months later, I began fifth grade a year younger than everyone else in my class. A month after that, the United States and the Soviet Union approached the very brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. The administration of President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union had placed strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Diplomacy failed miserably, and it just exposed our impotence. The United States demanded removal of the missiles and the Soviet Union flatly refused. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were all that stood between us and nuclear annihilation. Fear and deep anxiety engulfed everything — even the 5th grade.

Growing up in the industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts, just a few miles north of Boston, left us especially vulnerable. Lynn at that time was home to the General Electric Company’s Aircraft Engine Division which was the largest employer in that city and surrounding towns. Its biggest customer was the U.S. military. Children my age were traumatized with fear by the weekly rehearsals for nuclear attack. Upon a signal from school administration we had to rush to extinguish all lights, draw all window shades and then crawl under our desks while sirens blared outside.

The day the Cuban Missile Crisis began, was the day our childhood innocence ended. We were vulnerable in a fragile, unpredictable world, and the anxiety never really left us. It was, perhaps in hindsight, the wrong moment for some of the great black-and-white science fiction films of the fifties to start running as matinees in a local cinema.

I did not understand then that some of those great films were really paradigms of the Cold War, containing within them all the fear and paranoia the Soviet Empire brought to our young minds. Films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and — my favorite of all — “The Day the Earth Stood Still” are today considered Cold War classics. They captured our anxiety and capitalized upon our fears.

Invaders from Mars

I wrote of the North of Boston where I grew up in “February Tales.” Going to a movie theatre alone was a rare occurrence when I was nine years old in 1962. It meant venturing downtown like a free-range kid. Lynn, Massachusetts had two downtown cinemas back then, the Paramount and the Capitol. The latter was in Lynn’s Central Square, and it only opened at night — its marquee preceding every title with a large, mysterious “XXX.” It was strictly off limits.

It took a bit of courage back then for a 9-year-old to board a city bus alone for a Saturday afternoon trek downtown. I reveled in my freedom, but my parents had spies everywhere. When once I ventured too close to the Capitol marquee to see what all those Xs were about, there was hell to pay when I got home!

The Paramount had a Saturday matinee for 35 cents. Lynn’s newspaper, The Daily Evening Item carried an alluring ad, a miniature version of the movie poster for that week’s feature, “Invaders from Mars.” It portrayed a boy my age, aghast at his bedroom window by the scene of a spaceship landing at midnight in an empty field behind his house.

There was really no need for scary movies then. We were already all frightened enough, and those who claimed they were not were lying. But perhaps as kids we were all looking for outlets for our fear, because the real story of politics and nuclear bombs made no sense to us at all. Scary movies became the in thing, and I couldn’t wait to see “Invaders from Mars.”

Thirty-five cents for admission was no challenge at all then. There were always a few soda bottles to be found, and a little rummaging through the easy chair where my father watched a worried-looking Walter Cronkite every night yielded bus fare, and, if I was lucky, enough for that week’s special matinee snack, a Mars Bar.

It rained that Saturday, so just about every kid stuck inside was given bus fare to go see “Invaders from Mars.” The movie was preceded by a few cartoons to quiet us down, then it began. You could hear a pin drop. All the anxiety we had pent up within us was about to play out on the screen.

After the spaceship landed in that field, the boy in the film fell asleep. In the morning, he wondered whether it was all a dream. At breakfast, his mother and father and brother were acting very strangely. At school, his teacher and fellow students were strange, too. As he investigated, the story brought him to an underground tunnel where Martian zombies took direction from a squid-like mastermind managing the takeover of everyone’s mind and soul from its protected glass sphere. Those who today say there is really nothing to fear didn’t live through the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was utterly terrified.

When the movie was over and the lights came on, the older kids who had been throwing popcorn at us all disappeared into the streets. The kids in the middle, who were all my age, sat silently traumatized as the curtain closed. “Invaders From Mars” scared the &#§@ out of us! By the time I came to my senses all the kids I knew had scattered. None wanted to be seen in the fits of fright with which they departed “Invaders from Mars.”

Father G circa 1962.

A Glorious Mystery

Out on a rainy, darkened Union Street in downtown Lynn, I had missed the bus. It would be an hour before another came, and I had a sudden intense longing for the safety of home. So I set out on foot to walk the two miles through the city streets as it grew dark. Even today, when I am feeling vulnerable, anxious and alone, I dream of that trek at age nine through the city streets at night.

As I walked home on that day, my imagination raced ahead of me, and I felt fragile and alone. I was on the edge of tears for an accumulation of reasons I could never articulate. At times, the reality of feeling vulnerable strikes hard. I knew there were no evil Martian zombies, but I had an ill-defined sense that evil had just paid our world a visit and it changed us. We lived in a dangerous world, then, and since then its danger has exponentially grown.

And so on into the rain I walked. I walked alone, through a part of the city kids like me didn’t usually venture into. The darkness grew — both in the skies above me and deep, deep within me. You know what I mean for at one time or another, you have been there too. All light had gone out of the world. All hope had been drained away. Then the torrent came.

I’m not sure which soaked me more, the rain or the tears. I rarely cried as a boy — it was just hell if my older brother ever saw me crying — but the rain was making me shiver. I cannot ever forget that day. When I looked behind me in the dim darkness, someone was following me. A dark figure in a raincoat who stopped whenever I stopped. I tried to run, and when I did, he ran too.

There on the downtown city street, about a mile from the movie theatre, I came upon the imposing, looming spires of Saint Joseph Catholic Church. We didn’t spend much time in churches when I was growing up. The church’s dark brick façade and immensity seemed to stretch into the rumbling clouds. It felt almost as scary as “Invaders from Mars” and that ominous figure stalking somewhere behind me.

But the rain kept coming, and I had no choice. I climbed the steep marble steps of Saint Joseph Church, and just as I got to the top to duck into an alcove, a massive door opened next to me, and scared whatever wits I had left right out of me. It was, of all people, a police officer. I looked back down the street and the stalker had fled. “Get out of the rain, kid!” barked the officer as he shuffled me through the door on his way out. “And say a prayer for me while you’re in there,” he commanded. So in I went, almost against my will.

The church was massive. I had received my First Communion there two years earlier, but had never been back since. In the dim lights, I walked toward the sanctuary, and at the Communion rail, I knelt. I looked back toward the church doors, but no one had followed me in. I was alone, but a sense of safety slowly came over me. At some point it struck me that the police officer had come in here to pray and that thought impressed and comforted me. So I stayed for awhile.

Then I saw her! The great carved image in the sanctuary before me was crowned with light, and she held a child in her arms as though presenting Him to me. She was incredibly beautiful, but it was the creature beneath her feet that really gripped my attention and wouldn’t let it go. I stared in utter wonder at what was subdued beneath her feet. It was ugly, and all too real. It looked like the creature in the glass sphere that so terrified me in “Invaders from Mars.” It was trapped under her feet — under a soul that magnified the Lord.

Then the Martians left me. The stalker in the street left me. The missiles, and Khrushchev, and the Cold War left me. I felt, more than saw, the light come back into my world. The pulsing sobs, now still felt but unheard, left me, and a vista of hope broke through the clouds of doubt and fear. The look on her face was radiant, and she spoke to me. It wasn’t in words. It was deep, deep in the very place where fear had gripped my soul. I could not take my eyes from what was subdued beneath her feet. “Trust!” she said, and “Peace be with you.” And it was.

On that day she lifted me up out of a pit. Then years later, when once we met again, she humbled me, and I needed that, too. I tried to write about this in “Listen to Our Mother: Mary and the Fatima Century” but my words could not really ever do her justice.

Sixty-two years have passed since that day. Well over a half century. On the wall of this prison cell is an image of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the patron saint of prisoners and writers and the patron of Beyond These Stone Walls and this imprisonment. He’s Pornchai Moontri’s patron, too, and this changed everything for him. Saint Maximilian’s feast day is August 14.

Next to him on our cell wall is that image, the one I saw at age nine. I don’t know where it came from. It appeared one day in a letter to Pornchai and went quickly up onto his wall. I wrote once of the images on our cell wall in “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”

Reason for hope is a very great gift. Never again let the sun go down on your fear. When the Glorious Mysteries seem too unworldly to fathom, then look beneath her feet. What is there will look very familiar to you, and you will know what it means. The key to resisting evil is trust that the strife may not yet be over, but the battle is already won.

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help
or sought your intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired with this confidence,
I fly unto you,
O Virgin of virgins, my Mother;
to you do I come,
before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer them.
Amen.

— The Memorare, by Saint Bernard of Clairveaux

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

How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Advent of the Mother of God

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.”

How December 25 Became Christmas

Father Abraham first heard God 21 centuries before a star rose above Bethlehem. We now live in the 21st century after. At the center of all things, Christ is born.

At Christmas by Father Gordon MacRae

“For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, thy all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed.”

— Wisdom of Solomon 18:14-15

No one really knows when or why tradition first places the Birth of Christ on December 25th, but the custom is ancient. Some theorize that it was influenced by a Roman pagan feast called Saturnalia that stretched for twelve days from the winter solstice into January. The “Twelve Days of Christmas” are thus linked by some historians to pre-Christian Roman tradition. The Persian cult of Mithra, “Sol Invictus” (the “Unconquerable Sun”) practiced by many Roman legionnaires, was also marked on December 25th, and some propose a link between that and the date for Christmas.

However the observance of Christ’s birth on December 25th is far older than the time when Christianity became respectable in the Roman Empire. The first recorded mention of December 25 as the date of observance of the Feast of the Holy Birth was in a Roman document called the Philocalian Calendar dated as early as 336 A.D. Popular observance of the December 25 date of the Nativity, however, was at least a century older.

One obscure theory points to an early Roman Empire legend that great men are fated to die on the same date they were conceived. One tradition traced the date of Passover at or near March 25 in the year Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. If thus among some Romans it became popular belief that he was conceived on that date, then nine months to the day later would be December 25. In the Roman Calendar which preceded our Gregorian Calendar, March 25 was considered the first day of the new year, and to this day it remains observed as the Feast of the Annunciation, as I once described in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

The Roman Martyrology also includes a solemn and far more ancient reach into Judeo-Christian Tradition. The “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” is sometimes read at the Midnight Mass at Christmas after a procession from the entrance of a church to the Nativity scene. That proclamation places us at a special point in Salvation history. In fact, from our perspective, it places Christ at the very center of that history.

The Proclamation declares that Christ was born in the 21st Century after Abraham, our Father in faith, ventured out of Ur of the Chaldees and first encountered God. We now live in the 21st Century after. So we kneel before Him this Christmas Season knowing that Christ is exactly equidistant between us and the very genesis of the human experience of God. It is a realization that ought to shake us out of our political and theological divisions, out of our spiritual doldrums, out of any more mundane concerns.

Instead of quibbling over who among the alienated might be saved and how, this Christmas makes us fall on our knees, in sin and error pining, as He appears and our souls feel their worth. All divisions cease.

The Roman Martyrology Proclamation of the Birth of Christ:

The twenty-fifth day of December when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created the heavens and earth, and formed man in His own likeness; when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace — In the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees; in the thirteenth century since the people of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt; in the tenth century since David was anointed King; in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel; in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the founding of Rome; in the forty-second year in the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace — Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since His conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.

— The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh

O Come! Let us adore Him!

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Our BTSW Christmas Card: Lead, Kindly Light

I am forced by circumstance to live in a place with men who are banished, not just from home and family and freedom, but too often also from hope. Some with even the darkest pasts have come into the light to thrill us with their stories of grace and true repentance and conversion. You have read of several in these pages and there are other stories yet to come. Some of these wounded men become saints, I am not fit to fasten their sandals.

We live East of Eden, a place from which the Magi of the Gospel saw a star and heard good news, the very best of news: Freedom can be found in only one place, and the way there is to follow the Star they followed. If you follow Beyond These Stone Walls, never follow me. Follow only Christ.

My Christmas card to you is this message, a tradition of sorts from behind these stone walls. My small, barred cell window faces East. It is there that I offer Mass for readers Beyond These Stone Walls. So my gaze is always toward the East, a place to which we were all once banished to wander East of Eden.

At the end of these cold and gray December days I step outside to watch toward the West as the sun descends behind towering prison walls. It reminds me of my favorite prayer,

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead Thou me on.
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path, but now, Lead Thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: Remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone.
And with the morn those Angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

— Saint John Henry Newman

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

Blessings to you all during this joyous Christmas Season. We are living in darker times, and this Christmas is like no other, but we are children of the Light and we are promised that the darkness will never overcome it. I invite you to join us for another favorite Christmas post during this Season: "Upon a Midnight Not So Clear, Some Wise Men from the East Appear."

How Our Lady of Guadalupe Came to Us in Prison

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the setting for a profound story of how Mother Mary sought out two sons in darkness and led them to the light of Divine Mercy.

December 11, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri.”

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

This story describes a most unlikely series of events in a most unlikely place. Some of it has been told in these pages before, but putting theses threads together in one place creates an inspiring tapestry of Divine Mercy. I first began writing about this several years ago at the conclusion of a six-week retreat program in the New Hampshire State Prison.

Over the summer of 2019, Pornchai Moontri and I were asked to take part, for a second time, in the Divine Mercy retreat, 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Fr Michael Gaitley. It was offered here in the summer months amid lots of competing activities. The organizers needed 15 participants to host the retreat, but only 13 signed up. So Pornchai and I were to be “the filler.”

We ended up benefitting greatly from the ‘retreat,’ and I think we also contributed much to the other participants. At the end of it, one of the retreat facilitators, Andy Bashelor turned to Pornchai and said “I want you to know that I saw your conversion story. It is the most powerful story I have ever read.” I wrote of this in “Eric Mahl and Pornchai Moontri: A Lesson in Freedom.”

But before returning to that story, I want to revisit something that happened several months before it was posted. Late in the afternoon of December 11, 2018, I was at my desk in the prison Law Library where I use two computer systems side by side. Neither can be used for my own work. I still write posts on an old typewriter.

One computer at my work desk connects directly to Lexis Nexus, a legal database that all law libraries have. The other connects to the prison library system database. As I was shutting down the computers before leaving for the day, I decided to change the background screen on that second computer. For the previous several years it was a graphic image of our Galaxy with a little “You Are Here” arrow pointing to a tiny dot in the cosmos that depicted our solar system. It made me feel somewhat insignificant.

I had but moments left before rushing out the door at 3:00 PM. I called up a list of background screens which displayed only hundreds of numbered graphic files with no way to view them. So I decided to just pick a number — there were pages of them — and get what I get. Then I shut down the system without seeing it.

The next morning, December 12, I arrived at my desk and booted up the computer for work. The image that filled my screen is the one you see here. It’s a magnificent mural in Mexico City. I was not yet even conscious of the date. On the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, blindly chosen from a thousand random numbers, she appeared on my screen and has been there ever since.

I was not always conscious of any spiritual connection with Mary. Her sphere of influence in my life was first directed to Pornchai Moontri. The segment from Marian Helper magazine atop this post attests to that. I wrote of it in “Fr Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.”

A Mystery in Her Eyes

But back, for a moment, to Our Lady of Guadalupe which became my favorite among all the Marian images I have come to reverence. Its origin is fascinating. Nearly five centuries ago, on the morning of December 12, 1531, young Juan Diego, an early Aztec convert to Catholicism in the New World, was walking at the foot of Tepayac Hill outside Mexico City.

Days earlier in the same location, Juan Diego heard the beautiful voice of a lady, but saw no one. On this day, she appeared. She instructed Juan Diego to build a church on that spot. She then told him to gather up in his tilma — a shawl that was commonly worn at the time — a bunch of Castillian roses that appeared nearby. Castillian roses were never in bloom in December, but there they were. He was told to bring these to the local bishop.

When Juan Diego removed his tilma in the presence of the bishop and a group of people with him, he and they were surprised to see the roses. But they were stunned to also see imprinted in the tilma an amazing image of a beautiful young woman surrounded by the rays of the Sun with the crescent moon under her feet, surrounded by roses and with angels attending her. The woman had asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop that she is “Coatloxopeuh,” which in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, means “The One Who Crushes the Serpent.”

Juan Diego’s tilma, a garment of the poor, was made of coarse fiber completely unsuitable for painting. Since 1666, the tilma image has been studied by artists and scientists who have been unable to explain how the image became incorporated into the very fibers of the tilma. The shawl is the only one of its kind still in existence after nearly 500 years. It is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

Hundreds of years later, in 1929, a photographer revealed that when he enlarged photographs of the Lady’s face on the tilma, other images appeared to be in her eyes. In 1979, scientist and engineer, Dr. Jose Aste Tousman, studied the tilma using more sophisticated imaging equipment enlarging her eyes 2,500 times.

After filtering and processing the images using computers, it was discovered that the Lady’s two eyes contain another imprint — the image of the bishop and several other people staring at the tilma apparently at the moment Juan Diego presented it in 1531. It was a permanent imprint equally appearing upon the retinas of both eyes in stereoscopic vision. It appeared to be what Our Lady of Guadalupe saw when Juan Diego first presented his mysterious tilma to the bishop.

On January 26, 1979, Pope John Paul II offered Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe before an overflow crowd of 300,000. Years later, St. Juan Diego was canonized by him. Now, seemingly by random “accident,” that image is enshrined on the computer screen in the place where I work each day in prison. The mathematical odds against this happening are as astronomical as the odds against the image itself.

Her Summons to Pornchai Moontri

The icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now also on the wall of my cell. It has been widely accepted by many as a representation of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Moon Under Her Feet” as described in the Book of Revelation (12:1). In the Mystical City of God, Venerable Mary of Agreda discerned that evil greatly fears this image, and flees from it.

Both Sacred Scripture and Catholic Tradition are filled with accounts of good men and women who suffer terrible ordeals only to be transformed into great men and women. I told the devastating story of how Pornchai Moontri came into my life in 2005 and all that he endured before and after in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

Seemingly by some mysteriously Guiding Hand, the events of both our lives steered us toward the point of our being in the same place at the same time and meeting. After all that Pornchai had suffered in life, he would never have trusted me, an accused Catholic priest, if not for a series of articles that Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Pornchai read them and was moved that he has met a friend whose life had been unjustly shattered in almost equal measure to his own. It was then that he made a decision to do something he had never done before, to trust.

In 2007, the next catastrophe in his life took place. After fifteen years in prison, many of them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement, Pornchai was ordered by a U.S. Immigration Judge to be deported to his native Thailand upon completion of his sentence. Pornchai despaired about the prospect of one day being left alone in a country of only vague memories, a country from which he was taken against his will as a young abandoned child.

I told Pornchai in 2007 that we will have to build a bridge to Thailand. He scoffed at this, saying that it was impossible to do from a prison. Then the first sections of the bridge began to be laid out. This was two years before this blog began in 2009. First, Mrs. LaVern West, a retired librarian in Cincinnati, Ohio also read those WSJ articles and began corresponding with me.

In a return letter, I mentioned my friendship with Pornchai and the challenges we faced. LaVern began researching and printing rudimentary lessons of Thai language and culture and sending them to Pornchai who began to study them. One of the lessons mentioned a Thai language series produced by Paiboon Publishers, a Thai language bookseller in California. So I wrote to them. Pornchai had not heard Thai spoken since before he became a homeless 13 year old lost in America.

Paiboon Publishers donated a set of Thai language DVDs to the prison library for the exclusive use of Pornchai to study Thai several hours per week. He quickly became proficient in the spoken language of his early childhood. Reading and writing in Thai, however, were simply beyond his grasp. Mine too.

We both gave learning the Thai writing system a serious effort, but it seems just a complex series of squiggles beyond the capacity of most Western adult minds to assimilate. Pornchai reads and writes fluently in English, however, which in Thailand is an asset.

In 2008, the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights published “Pornchai’s Story” as the conversion story of 2008. In 2009, Beyond These Stone Walls began, and I also began a quest to make our presence known in Thailand. Dilia E. Rodriguez, PhD told the story of the development of this blog in “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It conveys how this blog impacted both my life and Pornchai’s in prison, and of how it reached a global readership including throughout Asia.

Also across the globe in Australia, attorney Clare Farr read of us and began an investigation into the life of Pornchai in both Thailand and the State of Maine.

My efforts to reach out to Thailand at first seemed to no avail. Everything written and mailed from prison bears a disclaimer stamped on our envelopes declaring that the contents were written and mailed from prison. With only a few exceptions, my letters to anyone I thought might help us were met with silence. Meanwhile, Pornchai was brought into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. This resulted in several articles and a chapter in the book, Loved, Lost, Found, by Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll. That chapter is reprinted here with permission entitled Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls.

The book was especially powerful, and it made its way to Bangkok where it was read by a prominent group of Catholics who founded a Divine Mercy mission and ministry there.

My Surrender to Her Fiat

I gradually became aware that what I once thought and hoped was a Great Tapestry of God designed to rescue me was really designed to rescue Pornchai Moontri, and I was but an instrument in a Divinely inspired Script. It became increasingly clear to me why Mary sent another of her spiritual sons, St Maximilian Kolbe, into our lives.

I came to understand in my heart and soul that I am to emulate what he did. I am to offer my life — or at least my freedom — for the salvation of another prisoner upon whom Mary has placed the safety of her mantle. I wrote of this recently in “The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe.” This is how we got to where we are.

Pornchai’s survival has taken on a life of its own as a result of our growing years of trust in Divine Mercy. The Divine Mercy Thailand group conveyed its readiness to help me prepare Pornchai for his eventual reassimilation to Thailand. They were on the other end of what seemed to us just a black hole up to that point. They embraced Pornchai and provided him with housing and support upon his arrival after a 36 year absence from Thailand. Our Lady lifted from us both an enormous burden of hopelessness.

Late on the night of November 22, 2019, I watched on EWTN as Pope Francis was greeted in Thailand in a beautiful ceremony as Thai Catholics in a predominantly Buddhist culture sang for him like an angelic choir. I realized I will be handing Pornchai over to them in a matter of months, and I could not contain my emotions any longer. As Pornchai was fast asleep late at night in the prison bunk above, as I watched Pope Francis being received in Thailand, I began to cry.

I do not know where our long road turns next, but what started as tears of loss and sorrow that night were also tears of triumph. They were the tears of St. Joseph, summoned to a Fatherhood he never envisioned but from which he would never retreat. Through grace, and the gifts of powerful advocates in Heaven and on Earth, we did all this from inside a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire. At every turn I heard Mary’s Fiat to Divine Providence: “Be it done to me according to Thy Word.”

The beautiful and miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was placed on our cell wall for Pornchai. Now it remains there still, for me.

O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Note: We posted a companion to this post at our Voices from Beyond Page on the day before this post is published: “Thomas Merton and Pornchai Moontri Meet in the City of Angels.”

For more on the mysterious presence of Mary in our lives, please visit “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

And for the future Mary promised: “Thailand’s Once-Lost Son was Flag Bearer at the Asian Apostolic Congress on Mercy.”

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