Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s Grand Jury report on Catholic priests and sex abuse dates to the 1940s but hangs justice on the gallows of Salem, 1692.
As hard as this may be to read or hear, it must be understood. Common sense is now officially suspended when it comes to Catholic priests and sexual abuse. A moral panic has taken its place. It is especially painful – even catastrophic – when the Catholic media and the highest levels of Church governance suspend a search for truth and settle only for the fastest means to smother the fires of scandal. We have lost our way.
If that Pennsylvania Grand Jury report had been written in New Hampshire, I would be found in its pages with the most horrifying and lurid stories presented as credible and substantiated truth. The case against me began with a wild and irresponsible letter from a state social worker, Sylvia Gale, with information from an unnamed source within my diocese that I was a priest in Florida where I molested two brothers, one of whom was murdered and his body mutilated.
Another accuser – also John Doe – said that I held a gun to his head while forcing him to commit a lurid act. Continuing with this theme, the accuser at my trial, Thomas Grover, said in a police report that I pulled a gun on him and chased him through a Catholic cemetery as he ducked behind headstones dodging bullets. In another police report he seemed to forget telling that story and said that I chased him down the highway in my car while brandishing a gun out the window.
Thomas Grover’s brother, David Grover, said that I raped him repeatedly during overnight stays in my rectory when he was 12 years old (I arrived at that parish two weeks before his 18th birthday). Later, in another report, he said that at age 16, I took him to another parish where he was raped by the two unnamed parish priests. He said he went with me “because we had a positive relationship and he had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.” He apparently forgot age 12.
None of these events ever took place, but all of them were part of the prosecutorial fodder presented to a grand jury. Today, all of these claims have been fully debunked. No one but the most bigoted observer intent on indicting both the Church and priesthood still believes any of this.
In recent weeks since the emergence of that one-sided and agenda-driven PA Grand Jury report, some of my supporters have multiple times had to post information in my defense. Among the results of that effort has been this statement from an FBI investigator who was not part of my prosecution:
“In the course of my three-year investigation of this case, I have found no evidence to support that Father MacRae committed these crimes, or any crimes. Indeed, the only ‘evidence’ is the statements of the accusers themselves which has been convincingly discredited by their own family members and others.” FBI Special Agent Supervisor (Ret.) James A. Abbott.
Now consider what Catholic author David F. Pierre, Jr wrote in these pages in “Catholic Media Joins the Sex Abuse Pile-On.” The Catholic press has been echoing the sentiments of some our Church leaders who are less interested in the real and the unreal than they are in putting out the fires of suspicion.
In this, David Pierre has been nothing short of courageous. I know firsthand the tenacity necessary to stand before a tidal wave with an opposing point of view only to see it washed away in hysteria. Dave Pierre has written a two-part challenge to the PA Report that is stunning in its facts. Part one is “Pushing Aside Media Hysteria: We Uncover Pennsylvania’s Dishonest Grand Jury Report” (TheMediaReport.com Aug. 18, 2018).
I only saw a printed copy after we posted Dave’s guest post, but it left me with a haunting and disturbing sense of déjà vu. David exposed stories that in any other time would have raised questions about the report’s credibility and motives. Just think rationally for a moment about these claims:
- A priest washed out the mouth of a 9-year-old boy with holy water after forcing him into a sexual assault?
- Another priest sodomized a boy with a crucifix?
- Another priest sexually assaulted a boy multiple times on an airplane?
- Some 300 priests assaulted over 1,000 people and the Church knew it but did nothing?
Does any of this seem even remotely implausible? If these accounts are accepted without evidence, it is only because we have over time heard so many such sensational stories that the unbelievable has become the norm by which we believe. Most of you have grown up in the Catholic Church. Do we now settle for justice without reason, without evidence, built upon rumor and innuendo? As Mr. Pierre reveals, these stories never took place.
WHAT FATHER AMONG YOU?
Let me be clear that there have been real accounts of real victimization by priests who have set aside fatherhood to commit incest, one of the most destructive crimes known to manhood. We do nothing to learn and assess the nature of such an offense or to address recompense for the harm it leaves in its wake when moral panic becomes our loudest and only response.
It seemed the strangest timing, and it appeared in an equally strange place. A week before Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released his scathing 884-page report about Catholic priests going all the way back to World War II, New York Times columnist Emily Yoffe published “The Price of ‘Zero Tolerance,’” a term that she characterized as follows:
“For several decades, political leaders have embraced zero tolerance as a response to all social ills – crime, drugs, sexual violations… In every case, the indiscriminate rigidity of this deeply misguided approach has backfired. 70 million Americans now have a criminal record… sex offender registries created to stop monstrous serial predators now include 900,000 people…”
What made this so strange was that just a week later, the newspaper that carried it also heavily hyped a sex offender registry declaring a class of individuals to be “monstrous serial predators.” Few, if any of these individuals have ever had a trial, have ever been convicted, or have ever served a sentence. Most are dead. Those who are not dead were silenced.
Having been asked by many readers to weigh in on this, I have been posting a statement about that now infamous Grand Jury Report on Catholic Priests. My statement appeared at The Wall Street Journal online and various other publications, but some of the Catholic sites that have been bludgeoning priests over this report have declined to publish it.
Last week, a reader in Canada asked me to publish the statement on These Stone Walls because, she said, it is the clearest thing I have read” on this topic. What follows is a somewhat more nuanced version of that statement.
What the PA Attorney General has done is an unconstitutional abuse of the Grand Jury system. A Grand Jury is convened for the purpose of weighing evidence and formulating charges for criminal prosecution. It is a strictly prosecutorial affair, and only the prosecutor’s side of the affair is considered. It is for good reason that legal observers often say, “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich” through a Grand Jury.
We have to read the small print in the media coverage of this report to learn that it is unlikely that any of the accused will face charges or a trial because the statute of limitations for charging them has expired. Pundits and victim advocates are blustering on cable news that this is a reason to change or eliminate statutes of limitations.
They are attempting to dupe you into taking their side in this. These victim advocates know that the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that revised criminal laws, like statutes of limitations, cannot be changed and then applied retroactively. A defendant has a Constitutional right to “fair notice” of the penalties of a crime before committing the crime.
The only statutes of limitations that can change and then apply retroactively to old cases are civil statutes that will allow for lawsuits in decades-old cases. That is the real target because this is now all about money. Thus far in the United States alone, $3.5 billion has been paid to those who claim to have been abused 20, 30, up to 50 years ago.
Remember the innocent and helpless 16-year-old who today says he was groped by Cardinal McCarrick. He is 63. In Pennsylvania, few, if any, of the accused Catholic priests, will face a trial to determine justice – guilty or not guilty – which in the normal course would follow a Grand Jury indictment.
Now, one of the most abused victims in this story is justice itself. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has convicted an entire class of people – Catholic priests – by taking a giant leap across all the ordinary vestiges of justice to let the one-sided account fed to a Grand Jury by prosecutors stand as the unabridged truth and final justice.
JUSTICE AT THE GALLOWS OF SALEM 1692
What Attorney General Shapiro has done (at taxpayer expense) is to try the prosecution’s case in the press because it cannot be legitimately tried in a court of law. There is to be no defense, no cross-examination of witnesses, and no witnesses at all except those that support the prosecution’s case.
It is the result of a trial that is supposed to be the final arbiter of justice in America, not the result of a Grand Jury. This is not a reflection of justice as it exists in 21st Century America. It is justice standing at the gallows of Salem, circa 1692. This report is shameful, one-sided, and unethical, and has all the makings of a rare, but classic American witch hunt.
For certain, there are real victims in this story, and my heart goes out to them. It always has. I know many, many victims of unspeakable childhood abuse. In this prison, I have lived among them for 24 years. Trust me on this – no one in the Attorney General’s office cares one iota about their plight.
And, as if this mockery of justice that once stood as a proud American ideal is not enough, at least one Pennsylvania Catholic bishop is taking the gallows of Salem 1692 a step further. The PA Report has redacted the names of accused priests to whom no defense has been afforded. Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik has announced, however, that he will voluntarily publish a list of their names. The Archbishop of Boston did the same in 2002. So did the Bishop of Manchester.
By taking this step, these bishops have created their own private “Megan’s Law” list. In the normal course, a sexual offender has to register with civil authorities and be shamed on such a published list only after being convicted of a crime in a court of law – either through a jury’s review of the evidence or a plea of guilty from the accused. Not many of the priests on the list will have experienced that version of justice.
In a published Letter to the Editor in The Wall Street Journal (August 22, 2018) Father James Connell from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee had this to say about what happened in PA:
“Is Pennsylvania the only place where the Catholic Church has behaved so horrifically? Hardly. Convincing documentation does not exist elsewhere as clearly as it does in Pennsylvania. Many more grand juries need to be impaneled and empowered to find and declare the truth.”
I think David F. Pierre, Jr. will agree with me that this is an especially scary thought. History has many examples of those who seek immunity from injustice by collaborating with it. If you read nothing else in this story, read a post of mine that will now seem hauntingly familiar. It’s a story forged from the same motives and carried out with similar result. It’s a story about history repeating itself: “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise & Fall of a Moral Panic.”
Editor’s Note: Please share this post. You may also wish to read these other accounts from the Pennsylvania justice story:
- The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek
- Will Fr Charles Engelhardt’s Prosecutor Take a Plea Deal?
- Trophy Justice: The Philadelphia Msgr William Lynn Case
- The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone
Fr. Gordon J. MacRae says
This came from former PA U.S. Attorney Fred Thieman: “The grand Jury report focuses on what happened decades ago rather than in changes of practice that I have seen and been involved in over two decades. I question the wisdom of the entire process in constitutional terms. I don’t think the grand Jury report provides ample basis for anyone to draw conclusions from older evidence and state them as current fact until the evidence has been examined and tested.”
Fr. Thomas J. Hennigan says
I attempted to explain the fact that the PA Grand Jury report is full of lies and biased and all the other things you have mentioned here, also an unconstitutional use of the Grand Jury system on Catholic publications such as OnePeterFive and Chruch Militant among others. I also pointed out that the fact that bishops were dishing out huge sums of money to bogus victims without having made any real investigation, much less the case being tried, and that the accusations were 20, 30 and 40 years old and going back to the 1930s, based on what David Pierre and Bill Donahue have written to debunk the whole rubbishy PA Grand Jury report. What I got were comments like “you must be another one of that predator priests”. Michale Voris, the flamethrower at Church Militant holds that 45% of American priests are gay. How does he know? Has he thoroughly investigated the life of 40,000 priests or done a serious survey? Of course not. If homosexuality the male population is at about 2%, it seems to me to be totally off the wall to hold that 45% of priests are gay.
There was an article in Crisis Magazine which says that Reconciliation Rooms ought to be banned, as the author considers them an occasion for predator priests to abuse little boys. He also states that somehow no priest should ever be allowed to be alone in the presence of anyone else. I was at a parish in the diocese of Waterford and Lismore in Ireland and on entering the sacristy and leaving it, I was told that I would have to sign in on a log book the time I arrived and left, that due to the fact that some priest or a few of them abused altar boys. Others say that they would never want their child or adolescent to be alone in the presence of a priest. I asked one of them if they send their children to public schools, because the amount of sexual abuse of minors in them is about 100 times that of Catholic priests, or would they allow close family members to be alone with their children because this is the group which commits the greater part of sexual abuse.
There seems to be a kind of puritanical wave coming over American Catholics thanks to the media furor even more so among Catholic media outlets than secular ones. If the bishops lost the confidence of their priests due to the application of the zero tolerance madness via the Dallas Charter, which excluded bishops and in the drafting of which it appears that McCarrick had a big say. They accepted the “fact” that the problem was “pedophilia”, despite the fact that the statistics given by the John Jay Report indicated the problem is homosexuality. The bishops are now in a bigger bind now because not only their priests have turned against them due to the injustices they have meted out to them, but also the laity due to the alleged cover-up of the McCarrick case. Pope Francis has been of no help to any of them because he thinks the problem is clericalism and the whole People of God are at fault.
Bob Chatelle, National Center for Reason & Justice says
The National Center for Reason and Justice believes in the innocence of Gordon MacRae and have been sponsoring his case for many years. Read his blog post about the current moral panic.
Schola Fri. says
Cardinal Dulles wrote in 2005: “Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform. Your writing, which is clear, eloquent, and spiritually sound will be a monument to your trials.”
Praying for the reform within each of us in One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. Amen.
Charlene says
Father Gordon, I am sending this post and others to the Attorney General of PA. I will try to put it on his FB page! He desperately needs to read this and to give it some thought as he seeks more deceased priests to destroy. What a man! I should pray for his soul, but it will be with much difficulty!
Thank you, Father Gordon, for keeping the faith and your priesthood intact. You have never forgotten that you are first and foremost one of God’s own. Those who have persecuted you will have an eternity to repent!
Fr.Stuart MacDonald says
Posted by Catholic League President William Donohue
Dear Attorney General Underwood:
Your decision to launch a grand jury investigation of Catholic dioceses— to the exclusion of all other religions, private non-sectarian institutions, and public sector entities—is manifestly unjust and indefensible. Are you saying that the sexual abuse of minors is peculiar to Catholic institutions?
Would you convene a grand jury on criminal behavior, focusing exclusively on black neighborhoods? Then why are you singling out the Catholic Church for an investigation of sexual misconduct? Because a grand jury probe of Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania turned up old cases of abuse? Imagine what a grand jury investigation of the public schools would find about current cases of abuse! Will you launch one?
Are you aware that the New York Archdiocese has an Independent Compensation and Reconciliation Program that is designed to deal with such issues? Are you aware that it was Cardinal Timothy Dolan who employed this initiative to uncover allegations against Theodore McCarrick, resulting in his resignation as a cardinal? Do you know of a single minister, rabbi, or public school official who ever outed one of his own colleagues for such offenses?
I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
William Donohue, Ph.D.
President
Dave Pierre says
Wed, Sep 5, 8:46 PM (18 hours ago)
Father, your new piece on the PA report is excellent.
I am also very grateful and humbled by the encouragement and promotion of my work.Thank you very much!
One thing I noticed … “Fr. James Connell from Milwaukee” is not just some regular parish priest. He is a VOTF-friendly priest who is part of the “Catholic Whistleblowers” group. http://www.catholicwhistleblowers.com/profiles.html
I wrote about the group soon after it formed:
http://www.themediareport.com/2013/06/05/catholic-whistleblowers/
Please keep me in your prayers, Father!
I really appreciate it.
Oremus,
Dave
Jmjt says
.. Dominus flevit..
The pa gj report: began by aj Kathleen Kane, picking up from phila Seth Williams (both convicted felons now) & the present aj Shapiro (who included mostly women at hearing, while most abuse cases were of young men (& of them very few true pedophiles).. Serving the lgbqt lobby to avoid the truth…
But all of them: Kane, Williams & Shapiro using victims and abusers to advance their careers… 2 have ‘advanced’ to prison, one who hopes to ‘advance’ to the governors office…
Hopefully they will be able to follow fr g’s example & serve the Lord humbly…
Til then the Church is purified, bishops have a chance to experience what many priests felt after the charter, priests learn the value of the Crucifix, the Gospel is proclaimed… St Michael the Archangel battles vs those spirits prowling throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Gerard Martin says
Dear Fr. Gordon, just forwarded this email to a couple of priest friends, and my own brother, with this caption: “This is one fantastic, informative – and dare I say – inspirational article.” To be truthful, I was waiting for your sharing with serious anticipation. You are seemingly “a voice crying in the wilderness” but a strong voice to be sure. I added to my own post: “hopefully our dear bishops will also read it.”
So whoa! We need to get a hold of yourselves! All “sides.” Everyone needs to take a sanity breather! Everyone wants perfection! The sexual events did not occur yesterday, last week, or w/I years!
Upon prayerful reflection, I suggest there are at least three, absolutely necessary steps to coping with, and eventually being Christ-like and healing for all those wounded by a “present-day” sexual scandal. (Accusations re actions 20/30/40 years ago is hardly “present day,” except the accusations.) This includes not only victims and the guilty, but equally the falsely accused, and well as the Church itself. These steps are: Confrontation, Conversion, Compassion.
Confrontation.
By all means, all immorality needs to be confronted – from any form of human abuse, whether with youngsters or adults; from conception to natural death. So, yes, let’s openly confront. But even confrontation should have an end goal, not just the humiliating and condemning.
One of the biggest accusation against the Church is “Cover up!” But I say, neither did the Church broadcast laity’s sins – e.g. swindling, lying, adulteries. The Church never asked or gave an adulterer the penance or obligation to take out an ad in the Monday paper revealing his/her failures. The Church never demanded that speeding or tax evasion, stealing or beating someone up – all crimes – needed to be revealed by the penitent. What was asked was contrition and purpose of amendment. It was the process of “second chances.” The Church has always held anyone’s sinfulness in confidentiality, whether within Sacrament of Reconciliation, or simple counselling, or spiritual direction. After all, why would anyone want to keep coming to a priest, deacon or bishop if all is subject to pursued disclosure in response to accusations of “cover up?”
Two Spirits enter all pain….
So, again, yes, let’s confront, but let’s have a redeeming possibility to it. If all confrontation seeks is punishment, the Gospel has been short-changed.
Conversion
If the end goal of confrontation isn’t conversion of a sinner or an imperfect Church, then, for all the tension, clamor and demands, there’s nothing redemptive about it. It’s a “now” demand for satisfaction and nothing more. Conversion is concerned with this or that sinful individual turning from a weakness – or the temptation to be weak – to mustering together, by God’s strength and assistance, a strength and consistent determination to overcome past failures. Conversion is about embracing and being faithful to a loving Lord who cares. Without openness to another’s conversion, there is no movement to peace and personal – or Church – healing. The Church is trying to prove its being converted by its “transparency,” but there’s not the slightest hint of willingness to be merciful/rehabilitating/redeeming to the sinful priest. The falsely accused is ordered into the identical sink hole. To this extent, the Church itself needs conversion.
Compassion
So what’s clearly required – absolutely needed – is the healing salve of compassion.
Unfortunately, today the process of correction/healing/peace is stuck/stagnated in confrontation. The Church itself is clearly stuck in quagmire of defending itself – instead of saying – no, we’re not perfect! Neither are our all priests or bishops yet in the fullness of sanctity. But like you, dear laity and others – we are truly sorry, we repent, we are learning, and we will stay on the journey to be about the Lord’s compassionate forgiveness.
Finally, it is imperative to at least ask the question re the place of the devil in all of this. Sure he is involved in any and all sin from the beginning. But my question is about the vehemence and unwavering consistency of bitterness and the casting all alleged sinners into the eternal fire of hell. Such may well be an initial reaction – and maybe understandably – but that such endure without any abatement is not a healthy spiritual sign at all, certainly it’s not of God. The devil’s initial temptation – which Teresa of Avila says is like “a noiseless file,” i.e., hardly noticeable/nameable, has come to fruition. Satan gloats that he has something major against the Church. As long as the Church avoids/hides away from preaching/enacting forgiveness – even in the toughest of wounds – Satan wins. GM
Louis says
The point is not confronting immorality, but stopping predation. Immorality stays in the confessional; predation is in the external forum and requires external intervention to come between the predator and the prey.
M says
Hi Father G
Clear as crystal but sadly people everywhere have stopped listening and thinking. They seem like reeds blown every which way.
Thank you for your enduring fidelity, courage and beautiful writing.
Guy Sudano says
Hi Father McCrae-thank God for your words on the Media Report site.
Coming from you, they are meaningful and powerful.
I’ve been going crazy trying to convince Catholic Media-radio esp., about how ridiculous the Penn state abuser report is, but they keep beating themselves and us with the “Mea Culpa” whip.
Even they don’t seem interested in any contrary research that has been done-
We all know, there are going to be some real victims and abusers, but we who have done our homework know that, to name almost half of the priests in a single diocese in the report, is insane.
Please let me know how you are-
Thank you again-
Guy
Liz says
Thank you, Father, for this excellent post…a couple of good people on my FB page liked it which I was happy to see.
Sigh. Even here in Nebraska I just heard that the Attorney General here wants the bishops to turn over every record of any “claim” of abuse in the past 40 years. I fear that many of the states are going to do as Pennsylvania. God have mercy on us.
Many prayers for you and Pornchai. Please pray for our bishop and Bishop Emeritus Bruskewitz. These are two good and holy bishops, but they are being treated badly.
Johanna Donovan says
Dear Father Gordon,
I think this is the first time I’ve gone on your site, read the day’s entry and not seen immediate replies. Thank you for this week’s entry. I think we all need a reality check which is not to take away from the fact that the corruption which has slithered into
the Catholic Church must be aired and eliminated.
You and our two parish priests have been much on my mind these past weeks because I have so much respect for all three of you. A terrible injustice has been
visited on you for 25(?) years but for the whole of your priesthood, really, if one
reads the entire story and there is no doubt in my mind that you are all three suffering the inevitable backlash of the present situation.
My prayers for all of you are redoubled.
Johanna
Claire says
Another interesting and truthful post. Another post that breaks my heart when I see what happened and continues to happen to you. I hope that by my “sharing” and spreading the word it will help you find justice. Sending hugs and prayers dear Father Gordon.
Always YOUR fan, Helen says
Father Gordon…. Praise God for YOU. The post this week is so needed and yet, so appalling. Each and every time I read you, I just want to sob for your pain. I cannot believe the amount of suffering you are experiencing. It is emphatically unreal to me, and yet, there you are.
Father, I have so many feelings and am having such a hard time expressing any of it.
I can’t understand why, what IS constitutional in our country is being avoided like the plague. Why? I’ve read, recently, that the political runners, this coming November, will be working hard to stop religion in all of it’s different arenas. I wonder if that is what Philadelphia is all about, this past week. Maybe the fight to end religious beliefs will take place in the very first place where America started?
I’m stumped, Father Gordon. And, more than that, I feel incredibly helpless. What all of your readers, me included, would love to see more than anything…is some sort of justice for you. I do hope that you know in your heart how you affect your readers, but then, that doesn’t suffice. You’re suffering…and stuck, holding onto the Lord when His time comes to free you. In the mean time, He surely is using you. That, in itself, angers the one who put you there.
(sigh)
God bless you and Max…and continue to strengthen you until you are FREE!