Some people thought Fr. John Corapi’s response to being accused was woefully unlike that of Padre Pio. What if Padre Pio was accused today in America?
This is my 120th post on These Stone Walls, not counting a few re-runs and special announcements. A newer reader told me recently that 120 past posts are just too many to try to catch up with, so he wanted me to list my five favorite posts for him to read. That’s not so easy given that I wrote them all and don’t consider any to be masterpieces of Western literature. I approached the task more with a view toward the five posts I am most glad to have written. In that light, my first and foremost recommendation is also the subject of this week’s post: “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata: Sanctity on Trial.”
If you’ve already read that post, it forms the basis for this one so you might want to visit it again – perhaps to commemorate Saint Padre Pio’s Feast Day, September 23rd. It’s an account that explores the depths of Padre Pio’s suffering, and the immensity of love that the Church now has for him for having endured it all with heroic virtue.
Lest you wonder what my other four “glad I wrote them” posts are, it strikes me that none of them are my multiple posts about the scandal we have all lived in for the last decade (and much longer for me). Those were painful to write, but necessary.
No, the other posts I am most glad to have written are more hopeful and uplifting. They are “A Corner of the Veil” (12/02/2009) about the death of my mother during my imprisonment; “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed” (9/29/2010) about the balance between justice and mercy symbolized in Saint Michael’s scales; “The Paradox of Suffering: An Invitation from Saint Maximilian Kolbe” (7/28/2010) about my and Pornchai Moontri’s decisions to offer our days in prison as a share in the suffering of Christ – the most important thing we have ever done. Finally, “A Day Without Yesterday: Father Georges LeMaitre and The Big Bang” (6/30/2010) rounds out the five. That post got a “Ho-hum” from some readers, but through it I came to deeply admire Father Georges LeMaitre as a personal hero of both faith and science. It was even republished on a few Catholic science sites.
Many readers know by now that I share an important date with Padre Pio. September 23, the date of his death in 1968, is also the date that I was convicted and sent to prison in 1994 – seventeen years ago. I didn’t realize at the time that it was Padre Pio’s feast day. He wasn’t exactly on my mind as I was led in chains passed the TV cameras and jeering crowd to a prison-bound van. September 23 was the date upon which I last saw freedom, and for Padre Pio it was the date he last saw life on this Earth.
I don’t want to just re-write “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata” for this post. You can read it for yourselves, and I hope it reflects the immense spiritual respect and devotion I have come to have for Padre Pio. When I first came to this prison, he did not even enter into the sphere of what influenced me. I gave not a second thought to Padre Pio. I cannot really pinpoint when or how it happened, but he reached into these stone walls and gave me hope. It’s as though we share the deepest of friendships, but I could not begin to describe how and when we met.
His reaching out to me came first, then I researched his life and discovered the extent to which he suffered in our Church from the crushing weight of false accusation. I now embrace him not just as a friend and brother, but as a mentor and an icon of hope.
PADRE PIO DEFAMED
It was at the very beginning of this inquiry into the life of Saint Padre Pio that he sent an emissary to me. After Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote “A Priest’s Story” for The Wall Street Journal in 2005, Pierre Matthews traveled from Belgium to visit me in prison. These Stone Walls – the blog – had not yet been conceived of. Pierre had no idea of my growing devotion to Padre Pio when he described having met him and being blessed by him as a teenager in the 1950s at San Giovanni Rotondo.
After Pierre’s visit, suddenly Padre Pio was everywhere inside these stone walls. People started sending me images of him. Then in 2005, Bill Donohue at The Catholic League asked if I would write an article about the sex abuse scandal for The Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. The result was “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud,” the lead article in the November 2005 issue of Catalyst. When I got a hard copy in the mail, I was surprised to see that I shared the cover with “Padre Pio Defamed,” a Catholic League editorial exposing shameless attacks on Padre Pio in The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. I wrote of these articles in “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata.” It was my first real awareness that I shared something else with Padre Pio: the millstone of false witness.
I want to confess something shocking to you. There was a time in my life when I doubted the legitimacy of Padre Pio’s Stigmata. I began religious life as a Capuchin, a member of Saint Padre Pio’s own order. As a friar in simple vows, I was studying psychology at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in Manchester, New Hampshire from which I graduated with honors in 1978. I spent much of the 1970s immersed in the latest theories of pop psychology, and I enthusiastically embraced its attempts to replace religion and faith with psychology’s “spirituality of today.” I was more interested at the time in studying Maslow and Freud than Aquinas and the Patristics.
One of my friends and mentors in the Capuchins back then was a much younger Father Benedict Joseph Groeschel who still corresponds with me to this very day. He wrote one day to congratulate me for a post on These Stone Walls.
Father Groeschel steered me back then more toward the Jesuits, in which my uncle, the late Father George W. MacRae was rather famous at the time, but I ended up studying to be a diocesan priest.
Today, I see the movements of pop psychology of the 1970s for the great frauds that they were, and see the immense harm they have done to faith, including faith in ourselves.
An example of the fraud perpetuated by psychology was recently published by Ryan A. MacDonald in “How Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison” at his blog A Ram in the Thicket.
In the sixties and seventies, reverence for heroic virtue gave way to the “me first” generation. I remember as a Capuchin novice arguing with my fellow friars that a spiritual conclusion about Padre Pio’s Stigmata was entirely unnecessary. Psychology could explain it away. At worst, he was a fraud, I said, an icon of the popular hysteria of people desperate for a sign. At best, he psychologically induced his own wounds. I was 20-something and knew everything, and became convinced that my own intellect reigned supreme. The sacred had little to say to me. My only defense today is a quote from St. Paul:
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”
In other words, I grew up, and stopped acting like a … well, you get the point! I look back at those times and thank the Lord for the crucible of lessons that cast out such idiocy from within me. I recognize intellectual arrogance today because the very first time I saw it, it was staring back at me from the mirror. Like King Saul said to David (1 Samuel 26:12) “I have played the fool and have erred exceedingly.” And as I wrote in my Pentecost post, “Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God“:
“He who troubles his household will inherit the wind, and the fool will be a servant to the wise.” (Proverbs 11:29)
I have been a servant to the wise ever since, and one of those whose cause I serve is Saint Padre Pio. Now if I could just be a little more like him in the face of false witness. I do not have his heroic virtue. I have only his example of it, and practicing any of it is costly to me.
WHY FATHER JOHN CORAPI DIDN’T MEASURE UP
After I wrote “Father John Corapi’s Kafkaesque Catch-22,” a lot of comments about his situation from other blogs were sent to me. Both admirers and detractors of Father Corapi seemed disappointed with his response to being accused. Some felt downright betrayed by his announcement that he was leaving ministry without a fight. A number of commenters, and some letters to the editors of Catholic newspapers and magazines, seemed unable to help comparing Father Corapi’s post-accusation demeanor with that of Padre Pio who suffered under similar and far more chronic accusations in his life and priesthood, and suffered them while also bearing the visible wounds of Christ.
The comparisons of the reactions of these two priests – a half-century and an ocean apart – have some built-in problems. I’d like to think that Padre Pio would respond today as he did back then – with heroic virtue. That’s going to be the bottom line. Padre Pio did everything with heroic virtue, and just how heroic it was is something I learned from a recently published book, Padre Pio Under Investigation by Francesco Castelli (Ignatius Press 2011).
This book is an exhaustive manual of how Padre Pio was physically, psychologically, and spiritually dissected by entities both inside and outside of the Church intent upon proving that his wounds were a sham – either intentionally inflicted or not.
Early on in the investigations, three conclusions took shape: first, the wounds were the result of “self-stigmatization” through external suggestion (a kind of hypnotic response); second, the wounds were unintentionally self-inflicted “through auto-suggestion” (the sort of idiocy I bought into in the 1970s); and third, the wounds were self-inflicted “through chemical and physical means.” (Padre Pio Under Investigation, p. 112). Like so many such investigations, the investigators drew the above conclusions and then set out to find evidence to support them and their own egos while ignoring evidence that did not. That sure feels familiar to me.
When the investigations failed to DISPROVE a spiritual basis for Padre Pio’s wounds, the real battle for his soul began. He became the subject of repeated, foul, and entirely false accusations of sex abuse and misconduct in the confessional and elsewhere. His most prolific accusers were Catholic priests and bishops who finally recanted, and ended up praying for Padre Pio’s intercession on their own deathbeds. The fact that Padre Pio was canonized by Pope John Paul the Great on June 16, 2002 – at the very height of the American Catholic sex abuse scandal – is to me a great vindication that heroic virtue prevails over false witness.
But the time we are in now is different. On the cover of that November 2005 Catalyst, right next to the article exposing detractors of Saint Padre Pio, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was quoted from an episode of NBC’s “Today” Show (10/13/2005)in which he was talking about me:
“There’s no segment of the American population which has less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest. And there are 42,000 of them. And most of them are good men.”
I AM NOT PADRE PIO
It’s not quite fair to contrast Father John Corapi’s response to similar events – or mine for that matter – with Padre Pio’s. I cannot speak for Father Corapi, but as I wrote above, I am not Padre Pio. I have none of his heroic virtue, little of his faith and courage, and only an inkling of the surrender he had to practice every day for fifty years trapped in the prison of San Giovanni Rotondo, bearing his wounds, while repeatedly being shut off from ministry during investigations in which he lived under a dark cloud. But live he did, and even under that cloud he continued to draw the reverence and spiritual pleas of millions across the globe.
In a sense, however, the time in which Father John Corapi and I faced accusations is also not so different from Padre Pio’s. Some of the same dynamics are at work by people with their minds made up and intent on finding evidence to support their bias while suppressing everything that refutes it. Common sense is finally telling the Church in America – lulled into a pop psychology of victimhood propelled by people who have pocketed an outrageous $2.6 billion in settlements – that some claims against Catholic priests are frauds that should not be acquiesced to. Some experts have said that up to fifty percent of them have been frauds.
Controlling this information has been a lot like the investigations into Padre Pio. In his report on “SNAP Exposed,” for example, Bill Donohue cited the leaders of BishopAccountability as contributing to SNAP’s distortions of today’s priesthood scandal while suppressing the rights of priests accused. I have a first hand example of this. BishopAccountability has published all the dirt they could find about me, but when writer Ryan A. MacDonald published two investigative reports challenging much of that dirt, the leaders of BishopAccountability refused to even acknowledge his efforts to have them publish his conclusions. They had their story and didn’t want anything else in print.
I wonder how Padre Pio would respond to the orchestrated attacks on priests by fellow Catholics in SNAP, VOTF and BishopAccountability. I suspect that he would content himself with the fact that God knows all truth, and he would offer Mass for them. I cannot tell you in words how bitterly distasteful that prospect is at this moment because I am rightfully angry with these people. But there really is no way around it. I’ll never have Padre Pio’s virtue or faith, but I do have his example. Saints do not exist just to intercede for us. They exist primarily to give us example.
So I am going to offer Mass for David Clohessy and Barbara Blaine of SNAP, and Anne Barrett Doyle and Terrence McKiernan of BishopAccountability. They may even be the first to bristle at the thought, but I invite you also, in the spirit of Saint Padre Pio, to pray for the opening of these closed minds and darkened souls. They have responded to their own wounds with a campaign of bitterness that never ends. It has become their religion.
After reading “The Truth About SNAP” by Bill Donohue in the September 2011 Catalyst, I believe that nothing will move them from such bitterness but prayer. I will offer Mass for them on the Feast of Saint Padre Pio, September 23rd, the completion of my seventeenth year in prison for crimes that never took place.
The September 2011 issue of Catalyst also has an endorsement of These Stone Walls by The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I am very moved by it and I hope TSW readers are as well. Here is the comment by Catalyst staff:
“This issue is loaded with news about attacks on the Church stemming from the professional victims’ lobby. If you want to read about a priest who has persistently maintained his innocence, and is sitting in a New Hampshire prison, check out his Internet site, www.TheseStoneWalls.com and read about the plight of Fr. Gordon MacRae. You can decide for yourself whether he was treated fairly.”
It was an endorsement that was nice to see, but on the same day I saw it, I also came across an old, undated issue of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s “Immaculata” magazine. It was published in the early 1980′s, some forty years after Saint Maximilian’s imprisonment and execution at Auschwitz that I described in “Saints and Sacrifices.” The entire, undated issue of “Immaculata” is dedicated to Padre Pio.
There is no evidence anywhere that Father Maximilian Kolbe ever knew of Padre Pio. But this issue contains evidence that Padre Pio was well aware of Father Maximilian Kolbe and the sacrifice of his life for a fellow prisoner. In the issue, a friar in Saint Maximilian’s community wrote to Padre Pio. The young friar had dreamed about a glorious ministry in some far off land, but his provincial assigned him instead to minister to a local chapter of Father Kolbe’s Militia of the Immaculata (MI). Padre Pio’s advice was to embrace it, and to do what the M.I. prescribed: to make an offering of each day to the Immaculate. Who am I to argue with such advice? I have long since put aside any doubt of Padre Pio.
From the Spiritual Counsels of Padre Pio:
“That which comes from Satan begins with calmness and ends in storm, indifference, and apathy.”
“The field of battle between God and Satan is the human soul. It is in the soul that the battle rages every moment of life. The soul must give free access to the Lord so that it be fortified by Him in every respect and with all kinds of weapons; that His light may enlighten it to combat the darkness of error; that it be clothed with Jesus Christ, with His justice, truth, the shield of faith, the Word of God, in order to conquer such spiritual enemies. To be clothed with Jesus Christ, it is necessary to die to oneself.”
(Excerpts from the booklet, “Padre Pio Counsels,” National Center of Padre Pio, Norristown, PA)
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I have added you to my daily Mass intentions and I have been making people aware of your plight and that of Fr.Menna. God bless you and know that I will keep praying for you! God bless you always.
Dear Fr. MacRae,
I’ll have to add an N. to mine. Thank you for this post about Padre Pio. I just became aware this past year that he was also falsely accused and it’s so hard to understand how people can do this to good priests. Padre Pio is one of my favorite saints and I have been asking him to intercede for you. I stayed up late Sunday night so I could write my post while you said Mass (I figured it would give it a little “boost”. Lol)
I guess there are 3 Mary’s commenting on your site and posting about you now
New Hampshire’s new Bishop (Peter Libasci) starts serving December 8th and I’m praying that he will be open to looking at your case with integrity and unbiased eyes. I will be sending you a letter about this within the next week. I read Ryan MacDonald’s recent article and was, once again, taken by surprise by what he has discovered regarding your case. A real eye opener!
Hopefully they haven’t closed the field yet and you are still able to enjoy your walks. The leaves are just beginning to change and I hope you get the chance to enjoy the foliage.
God bless you, Father.
I wish, Jamil. It would be great if more Catholics were reading TSW. I will pray for you.
I was good friends with an Archbishop who had the PRIVILEGE of going to Confession to Padre Pio. I always thought Padre Pio was so harsh. The Archbishop said that the first thing Padre Pio said to him after the blessing was: “I don’t like red buttons.” He had a good sense of humor but I think there was more to that statement. What I never understood, back in the 60′s when I started reading books about him, was that his own CONFRERES did not defend him. All they did was complain about the noise coming from his cell in the middle of the night. Their sleep was interupted. Little did they know that the devil was causing it while St Pio was praying out loud to get the devil OUT of his room. Once St. Pio required stitches. I ofen think if those brother Priests and Religious would have surrounded his cell and prayed, Padre Pio may have suffered fewer attacts from satan. In a way, St. Pio was “beaten up” up not only by the devil, but also by his community. Thank you Father Gordon for your post. It lifted my spirit high. St. Pio, there is another Priest in a cell, Father Gordon. Please pray for him. Lift him up.
I first came to this site because of my interest in wrongful conviction in our broken justice system. Now I keep coming back here like a moth drawn to a really bright light. I am not a Catholic, but your account of Padre Pio, like everything else on These Stone Walls is fascinating. Are the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics reading this? They should be.
Dear Father G,
Your post filled me with joy because it highlighted the practical step we can each take when faced with anger and disappointment over wrong doing and unjust attack. As soon as we become aware of such feelings prayer should be our FIRST resort because it is the equivalent of putting out a spot fire. The devil gambles on the fact that we will not do so and be overwhelmed by the eventual conflagration that will occur if we forget to humble ourselves in prayer . The old saying’there but for the grace of God…” is so true. When feeling the bitter hurt and pain of injustice and false accusation the normal and perfectly natural response is anger as you have owned to yourself but you have also given eloquent witness to the right way to deal with this and like the saints you admire you too are setting a powerful example and wasn’t this the way Jesus said we should evangelise by our own individual and collective witness to His word?
I thank God for your courageous witness and continue to keep you in my prayers
God Bless
PS . Since another Mary is now posting I am just using the initial M
On August 1, 1218, the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Peter Nolasco, St. Raymond of Penafort, and King James I of Aragon, requesting them to found a religious order for ransoming Christians imprisoned by Muslims. On August 10, 1218, the Mercedarian Order was legally constituted by King James I of Aragon in Barcelona, Spain, and was approved by Pope Gregory IX on January 17, 1235. The Mercedarians labored to free Christian captives of the Muslims, offered to serve as substitute prisoners, and often did.
The apostolate of the Mercedarians inspired a new devotion to the Blessed Virgin as Our Lady of Ransom, who is the patroness of the Order. Today, September 24, is her feast day. And, Father Gordon, may Our Lady of Ransom intercede for you, so that despite being unjustly deprived of freedom, you may know real liberty in heart, mind, and soul through her Divine Son, Our dearly beloved Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8, 32)
Yesterday was September 23rd, a life-changing call for you in 1968, a humbling start.
A priest here in Akron was charged very recently with an event from back in the early 1970′s. He was gone from the Parish in an instant. No one even knows what the charge was or who made it, except that it had to do with child abuse.
Fr. Gordon
Perhaps you words are having a positive effect and priests are no longer prepared to accept false accusations.
I think you will be pleased to learn that an Irish Mill Hill Missionary priest has taken a High court action against the Irish National broadcaster RTE and its programme ‘Mission to Prey’ broadcast in May of this year. During the programme it was alleged that Fr Kevin Reynolds had raped a 13 yr old Kenyan girl in 1982 and fathered a child by her. Fr Reynolds agreed to take paternity tests which have revealed he was not the father of the child. It seems likely that the judge will award substantial damages to Fr Reynolds as RTE have not yet filed a defence.
I sincerely hope that if that is the outcome of the case, those who commissioned and produced this programme will be held fully accountable
Dear Fr MacRae, I am thinking and praying for you especially today on the 17th anniversary of your unlawful incarceration. I am trying to spread awareness of your case and the phenomenon of falsely accused priests, in Ireland. Thank you for what you are giving to other Catholics and all the world.
Father Goron,
Once again thank you so much for your words of wisdom. You are living proof that “you are a Priest forever”. Only God can make something good out of something awful. What happened to you is awful, and I’am so sorry Father. But God, seems to be working through you to Shed light on the injustice that is being done to you innocent Holy Priests, you are truly blooming where you’re planted! May God bless you Father MacRae, you remain in prayer
St. Pio pray for us!
Cheralyn
Don’t you find it strange that Fr. Corapi was dismissed with cries of “Padre Pio” would never act like that. Yet, Fr. Frank Pavone can fight his bishop and demand incardination and no one accuses him of “un-Pio like” behavior. How come?
Fr.Gordon,
I am humbled having been a connecting link between Padre Pio’s personal blessing, in 1954, and meeting you, 50 years later, in the
prison’s visitors room. You made me aware of this unique grace granted to me, to you.
Every day I ask Padre Io that you may keep guiding us, we, your flock and pray for God’s mercy for our brethern having falsely
accused priest and priests incarcerated for cause.
Fr. Gordon,
I was thinking of you as I read about this murder today. Notice at the bottom the 15 and 4 yr maximum prison time. My prayers go out to you and all involved.
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Police officer Manuel Ramos didn’t talk to prosecutors who were considering charges against him in the death of a homeless, mentally ill man who died after a violent fight with police — but in the end, according to a district attorney, his own voice may have done him in.
As Ramos snapped on a pair of latex gloves and leaned over a confused Kelly Thomas, prosecutors say, his body microphone and surveillance tape captured an angry threat: “Now, see my fists? They are getting ready to `F’ you up.”
Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas called the statement the “turning point” from which a routine July 5 police stop spiraled into an explosion of violence that eventually involved six police officers and left Thomas unconscious and in a pool of his own blood. He was removed from life support and died five days later.
In the 10-minute long beating, Fullerton police officers pinned Thomas to the ground so hard that he had trouble breathing. Prosecutors say he was shocked four times with a Taser, kneed in the head, punched in the ribs and bashed eight times around the face with the butt of a stun gun as he cried out for his father and begged for help.
Ramos, a 10-year veteran of the Fullerton Police Department, was charged Wednesday with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. His lawyer disputed Rackauckas’s account, saying Thomas violently resisted arrest.
Cpl. Jay Cicinelli, a 12-year veteran, faces involuntary manslaughter and excessive force charges. He pleaded not guilty. The four other officers were not charged but remain on paid administrative leave because the FBI has launched a criminal civil rights probe and an internal investigation is
The coroner concluded that the cause of death was mechanical compression of the thorax, which made it impossible for Thomas to breathe normally and deprived his brain of oxygen, Rackauckas said. Other injuries to the face and head contributed to the death, he said.
Cicinelli, who arrived later, kneed Thomas twice in the head and used a Taser four times on him as he screamed and yelled in pain, Rackauckas said. Cicinelli hit Thomas in the face eight times with the Taser, he said.
“His numerous pleas of `I’m sorry,’ `I can’t breathe,’ `Help Dad’ (were) all to no avail. Screams, loud screams, didn’t help,” the prosecutor said.
As the beating continued, Thomas didn’t respond. “When Kelly didn’t scream in response to these blows it should have indicated to Cicinelli that Kelly was down and seriously hurt,” he said.
Rackauckas said it was the first time he had filed charges against officers for excessive force leading to death.
Ramos faces a maximum of 15 years to life in prison if convicted on the charges. Cicinelli faces a maximum penalty of four years.
Theresa
Sarah, thank you for re-emphasizing that part of the piece. How beautiful that is. It’s such a daily struggle to love ones enemies. There was a website a couple of years ago to pray for politicians who were our enemies. I chose Nancy Pelosi as I really disliked her. It’s no big deal; I say a Hail Mary for her daily, but I noticed after awhile that when I heard people say unkind things about her that I bristled. It had actually softened me to her. Now I am struggling to pray for some my mom’s caretakers who are being excessively cruel to her in a revengeful sort of way. (I actually wanted God to smite them! Then I realized that it is not fair. Let God judge them, not me. Okay, I still sometimes want Him to smite them, but I’m trying!) Anyway, those people from SNAP and BishopAccountability who act in such an odious manner, probably had rotten childhoods not unlike so many of the prisoners and others who act like that. We just don’t know. All we can do is pray. I think of St. Maria Goretti and especially her mother forgiving St. Maria’s killer. It’s the mother part that gets me. I cannot imagine doing that. I’m looking forward to St. Padre Pio’s feastday and his intercession. Fr. Gordon, you will be in my prayers in a special way tomorrow.
Fr, I am praying for you, and all Priests. I know NOTHING happens outside of the perfect divine will of our heavenly Father. The road to heaven is a very narrow road, few who find it. I pray I am one of them, only through the cross can we make it to our eternal home. Thank you for the words of faith that you share within those walls, you encourage me to persevere in the faith.
God bless you, Kim Layton
Greetings in Christ, Fr. G.
There have been a number of times when I’ve read something on this blog that strikes like lightning to my soul.
But this:
“I cannot tell you in words how bitterly distasteful that prospect is at this moment …I’ll never have Padre Pio’s virtue or faith, but I do have his example…So I am going to offer Mass for David Clohessy and Barbara Blaine of SNAP, and Anne Barrett Doyle and Terrence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.”
…is the most spiritually powerful, profound and Christ-like reflection that I’ve ever read on TSW.
Praying for you, all priests (and Pornchai too!) daily.
May God bless you and strengthen you in virtue.
What I find amazing about Father MacRae, and I think it speaks eloquently to the tragedy of his plight, is that he has not lost his priestly identity. I think it would have been easy without the support of fellow priests and the external supports of a parish, the celebration of the sacraments in their proper setting, etc… to let go and slide into a humdrum sort of existence. He doesn’t dress as a priest and he doesn’t, I presume, regularly hear people call him “Father”. But, he is a priest! He knows who he is and what he is about. He looks at the world, the church and all manner of situations in life as, I think, Christ would from the cross. I’m sure that it’s hard, very hard, to not, by times, feel bitter, or angry, or discouraged. But, however much he feels weighed down by his own humanity, it is quite clear that he has a goal and a purpose that gives meaning, a very profound meaning, to an existence many would regard as pitiable. I think of the disciples on the road to Emmaus feeling disillusioned, their hopes shattered. Many could look at Fr. MacRae’s situation and feel as those two disciples did. They would be wrong to do so! There is a greatness about Fr. MacRae that is unmistakable. God forbid that he should have to spend even one more day in prison. That said, I do believe that he and this cross he bears are a real gift to the Church.
In Christ and His Church,
Michael
Fr MacRae,
Padre Pio’s spiritual weapon was the rosary which he prayed unceasingly.The period of the 60′s,70′s,80′s saw a decline in it’s use and the results are obvious today.
St Faustina had a vision of the Mother of God of Priests which is for today especially for Priests falsely accused.You will find it in St Faustina’s diary. (Dairy # 1585)
God bless you,Elizabeth.
Father…………thanks for the wisdom and insight !!!!!!
Michael S.
You may or may not be a saint, we cannot say, but how you behave over time determines your influence. Father Corapi is hoping that if he keeps on message and continues to adore Christ and revere the Catholic church, he will influence others to come back to the church as he did before this situation. It’s a very precarious track, but no doubt he has prayed as earnestly as you have and hopefully he will continue to humbly and daily ask God to guide him. I speculate that maybe his earlier thought to be a contemplative is now going to be a path for him through God’s grace, but like you, I’m just trying to make my way and ‘hear’ better what my path is.
Thank you so much for showing all the contortions and setbacks and insights and resolve and doubt. This IS the path of faith, the rockiest course that exists, but also the most rewarding, both here and eternally.
I so support and bless you and Pornchai for offering up your time in prison. I was actually listening to Father Corapi’s auditory copy of the book he wrote for his seminary thesis on John Paul II and suffering. Like Father Maria Escriva he mentioned that even the smallest stress could be offered up and it becomes gold.
Susan Conroy, who spent 11 years as a close friend of Mother Teresa, working with her for a time in Calcutta, and through her learning of St. Therese of Lisieux and translating several books by her or related to her, also spoke of counseling her own beloved father. He had a break and the bone was actually poking against the skin of his upper arm. He is a man of stoicism and so when he said, “I think I know how Jesus felt”, he must have been in agony. Susan told him to offer it up to God and he would probably do good for more souls through than than with one hundred rosaries. It DID make it better. Father Corapi pointed out that this phenomenon occurred because people can often not do or bear for themselves what they will do and can bear for others. It is part of why God so loved us I think, because we have that capacity, through Him.
To descend to pedestrian terms, You’re doing just fine, Father. The heart, ever increasing child like faith and insights that inspire your columns may not get Dorothy’s Pulitzer, but I’m pretty sure that even the smallest smile that God shines upon you makes the Pulitzer nothing at all next to such divine joy.
God bless you
Dear Fr. Gordon,
I thank you for sharing all that you have in this post and the one from last year about Padre Pio and all he had to endure after receiving the stigmata. Your opening question about if he were a priest today makes one stop and think- I do tend to think he would have exhibited the same heroic virtue as he did back then. Unfortunately he probably would have to endure even more unfairness in how things were dealt with.
From all you have told us, this great saint has remained close to you in a number of ways~glad for your sake that he has; he is such a powerful intercessor.
As for your own heroic virtue or that which you think you lack, you have more than you realize~ just writing as you do for TSW takes a certain amount of heroic virtue. I pray Padre Pio continues to intercede for you and obtains the grace and strength needed to be a priest behind those stone walls.
Continued prayers as always.
Father, you can add this article to your “best” list! How I can relate to much of what you wrote. It wasn’t easy coming of age in the sixties and seventies.
I often ask Padre Pio what he would do if he was alive today. More importantly, I ask him what I should do. So far, he hasn’t answered me, but I always get the distinct impression from him that he is exasperated with me. I don’t blame him; I exasperate myself!
Dear Fr. Gordon,
I am new to your life story and can only be heavy hearted over this sad situation. Padre Pio has been a long time spiritual friend to me and I know that he and Our Lord are working through you. May you and all your readers be strengthened with God’s love .