The most common prayer request I receive is from anguished parents whose loved ones no longer practice their Catholic faith. The way back is a path often overlooked.
Awhile back, I wrote a post that most readers seemed to think was one of my dreaded science posts. So some who might have benefitted from it avoided it like the plague. I rather liked that post which often means that most others would not. So the response to it was really cool.
I don’t mean cool in its usual modern sense. My post got the digital cold shoulder, but maybe you will give it another shot for its message is an important one. The overlooked post is “Misguiding Light: Young Catholics Leaving Faith for Science.”
It describes what seems to have become a recognized phenomenon. Families raise their offspring as devout Catholics then send them off to college – sometimes even a Catholic college – only to discover that their faith in God and their Church has been replaced by science.
The most common prayer request that I receive from readers of These Stone Walls is a plea for my prayers for their loved ones – husbands or wives, brothers or sisters, occasionally even parents, but mostly adolescent and young adult children – who have drifted away from the faith into which they were born.
Parents anguish about this despite the fact that adolescent apathy and rebellion are as old as the human race. It is for good reason that Jesus told the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) to demonstrate our Father’s longing for our return.
A lot of people think that the word, “prodigal” refers to the resolution of that story, the return of the son, but it doesn’t. It refers to someone who is reckless, wasteful, someone who squanders his inheritance to become spiritually impoverished. It’s the perfect Gospel event for any parent who anguishes over a loved one’s loss of his or her inherited faith.
What I was trying to give to these parents in “Misguiding Light” was a little cerebral ammunition to help counter their sons’ and daughters’ religious exodus if it was based on a mistaken belief that science renders God obsolete. Trust me, it doesn’t.
In fact, there are a few paragraphs in that post that should be a “WOW!” moment for even the most science-inclined young person whose Catholic identity is in its death throes. This is why I write an occasional science post. It’s because developing some understanding of science, and adopting an attitude that religion and science are not an ‘either/or” proposition, helps build a bridge for dialogue.
THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS
Some of this parental anguish is also directed at the age in which we live. Many parents feel that they just cannot compete against the lure of a digital world into which their adolescent and young adult children are plugged in around the clock. It’s a trend that coincides with disintegrating families, the great polarization within our culture, and, most sadly of all, the diminishment of fatherhood and the role of men.
Ever since the tragic mass murder of 17 high school students by a fellow student in Parkland, Florida, we have noticed a distinct change in the traffic at These Stone Walls. For week after week since that day, the most read post here is not the one I write each week, but rather one I wrote six years ago: “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”
In the week after the Parkland tragedy, that post’s shares on Facebook and other social media shot up to 14,000. Someone reposted it as an article on LinkedIn Pulse where it was viewed 2,500 times in just a few days.
I think people are coming to know instinctually that our society is in trouble, and it is unclear whether the disintegration of the family unit is a symptom or a cause. I think it is both. Another recent post on These Stone Walls that skyrocketed in social media was “Finding Your Peace in Suffering and Sorrow.” It struck a nerve of social anxiety and was posted on social media nearly 10,000 times within three days after being posted.
That post cited an article by columnist Peggy Noonan entitled “Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson?” (The Wall Street Journal, Jan 27, 2018). Formerly associate professor of psychology at Harvard, Jordan Peterson has taught psychology at the University of Toronto for 20 years. Peggy Noonan cited an excerpt from his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
Professor Peterson’s reflection on the state of chaos in our culture is turning out to be an important social commentary worthy of our attention. While writing this post, I happened to stumble upon an interview with him by Fox News host, Tucker Carlson (March 7, 2018). The topic was the growing problem of disaffected young men left adrift by the disengagement of masculinity in modern culture.
Professor Peterson warned that fatherhood is waning because men and masculinity are targeted today in an ideological war that characterizes all men as potential abusers. The great mystery is why men are retreating from this battle. Jordan Peterson said that “It is very difficult to fight an ideological war.”
The media, and especially social media are today’s battlefield, and men are not showing up for the battle. A result is something for which Professor Peterson warns will have dire consequences for manhood. In schools across the continent, young men are not being educated so much as they are being indoctrinated into a radical feminist ideology about the value and meaning of manhood.
Tucker Carlson appeared stunned by this, and after a moment of silent reflection he said, “I agree entirely.” So do I. A part of that indoctrination for Catholic youth has been the growing, media-fueled dismissal not only of the value and role of manhood, but of fatherhood, of priesthood, of celibacy, and ultimately, of God. Men are acting in a way that elephants would never tolerate. They are just going gently into that good night.
For over two decades, young men have been paying the price for this father-absence. What is happening in schools across America is not just a matter of guns. Has anyone noticed that not a single adolescent girl has been the subject of mass killings in a high school?
WHAT YOU HEAR IN THE DARK
But before pursuing any further the dread of seeing our young abandon their faith, it might be more productive to take a hard look, not only at the forces that drive them away but also at what draws others to it. As often seems to happen when I want to explore such a thing, my roommate comes up with an answer even before he knows the question.
A few nights ago, Pornchai “Max” Moontri was watching a show on PBS-TV. The episode was about an early Australian prison. The history was interesting. As the Industrial Revolution got underway the galloping crime rate in Britain’s crowded cities created a demand for more and harsher jails (or “gaols,” Down Under).
With the loss of its American colonies in 1783, Britain no longer had a convenient place to send its criminals. Australia seemed a suitably distant and terrifying destination for the British system of exiling convicts as punishment. The first such prison colony was established in 1786 at Botany Bay in New South Wales, near Sydney, not far from where These Stone Walls is published.
Life in the prison colony was harsh. Pornchai was struck by the worst punishment of all, and the emptiest. It was solitary confinement in a pitch black cell with no visible light. It often led to madness. Pornchai was especially moved by the story of a prisoner who learned to maintain his sanity by throwing a small button into the darkness of his cell, hearing it bounce off the concrete walls. Then he would crawl around systematically on hands and knees in the dark until he found it.
Pornchai said that, two centuries later, he employed that same strategy to preserve his sanity during a grueling – not to mention cruel – three-and-a-half year stretch in solitary confinement after he went to prison at age 18. Deprived of all human contact, he focused on a pebble he found on the floor. In the darkness, he would throw the pebble and spend hours on his hands and knees systematically searching for it. He did this hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
As I listened to this, I recalled a brief story that Pornchai once wrote about solitary confinement in a “supermax” prison. He wrote it as an essay for an English Composition course while completing his high school diploma in prison in 2012. The teacher asked Pornchai’s permission to publish his essay. It was picked up by a prison reform site, SolitaryWatch.com and published as “Welcome to Supermax.”
Pornchai was sent from there to the New Hampshire prison where we met in 2006. Had he been there just a little longer, he might very well have been one of the case studies for a PBS Frontline production about solitary confinement in that supermax prison. This was an especially dark time for Pornchai, though it is today made less so by the hope and faith he has discovered.
On the same day this is posted, March 21, marks 26 years since the day of his offense. He was a homeless 18-year-old on the streets alone in a country and culture that was utterly foreign to him. The reasons for this will become part of a future post.
On March 21, 1992, Pornchai was intoxicated as he walked into a Bangor, Maine supermarket. Chased into the parking lot, he ended up in an altercation with a much larger man who tried to stop him. In his intoxicated state, the struggle became intense. The next morning, he awakened in a jail cell, charged with the murder of 28-year-old Michael Scott McDowell for whom he now prays intently, and asks you to do the same. It was 26 years ago.
LET THEM SEE YOU BELIEVE
I used to wonder what exactly it was that brought Pornchai Moontri from the madness of solitary confinement to a life of faith. He has suffered a lot, more than anyone I know, and the utter rage that life had built within him was a formidable foe when we first met. How does someone come from such an experience to a life of faith as a devout Catholic convert while others born into it just let it fade away?
Pornchai triggered a long internal pondering on the night he told me the story of searching in the dark for a pebble for hours on end in solitary confinement. He said that anything that gave even the slightest meaning and purpose to his prison brought some welcome sanity to an otherwise empty and soul-destroying existence.
It’s one of the great mysteries of life that the evil inflicted on a person by others can be drawn out to actually become a catalyst for faith. So what was it that opened Pornchai’s heart and soul to hear something in his darkness? I asked him that question. It turns out that it wasn’t something that he heard, but rather something that he saw.
When Pornchai and I first became roommates in early 2007, we had already become friends. But he was still too close to the traumas of his previous life to cope with any of the higher virtues such as trust or hope.
In the cell where we lived then, his bunk was above mine. The only other “furniture” in the cell were two concrete stumps. His stump was closest to the cell door which meant that I had to pass behind him to get in and out of the room. He could not sit on his stump at all because of this.
Because of the traumas he endured at the hands of men, he could not bear to have a man pass behind him unseen. So when Pornchai was in the cell, he was always on his top bunk sitting in a corner from where he could survey the entire room. I did not know this at first but suspected it to be the case, and I found it to be profoundly sad.
On Sunday nights when I wanted to offer Mass in that cell, I had to wait until very late after the final prisoner count at about 11:15 PM. Only then could I take out the necessary items for Mass without arousing suspicion and calling undue attention to it. By then on most nights, Pornchai was fast asleep.
Though we were friends, His inner proximity alarm would still awaken him whenever I moved about the cell. He said that on those Sunday nights when I thought he was asleep, he was actually laying there up above me in the dark watching. At first, he said, the ritual of the Mass was very confusing to him, but after a while…
“I saw the reverence and started to believe that you really believe in what was happening in the Mass. It was the first time in my life that I was ever in the presence of a man who was a true believer in anyone or anything but himself.”
It was then, he said, that he started to sit on his concrete stump and let me pass by behind him unnoticed. It was the onset of trust. Pornchai started lying awake on Sunday nights just to watch me offer Mass, and it gave him peace. Then one Sunday he asked if he could stay down there with me for the Mass.
I told Pornchai then the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, his giving his life to save another prisoner, and the story of why I keep his image on the dim, dented mirror in our cell. It was
because of this that, when These Stone Walls came into being in July of 2009, Pornchai wanted my first post to be “Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.” A year later, Pornchai “Maximilian” Moontri became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday.
I know it sounds simplistic, but before your loved ones come to the shallow grave that is their investment in this world alone, let them see you believe. It may seem a small thing now, but it’s for eternity. Believe, and let them see you believe.
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. You may also like these other posts in anticipation of Holy Week:
Mary Flannery says
Thank you for the encouraging post. Many of the young people in my life have given up their Faith. I live far away from them so I keep posting religious posts on FB. They live in a country that has become virulently anti-Catholic. My favorite thing to post is to highlight little-known Catholic priests, brothers or sisters working quietly away for the good of humanity, those who will never be headlines, in an effort to combat the prevailing cultural Marxism in Government and Media which seizes on every opportunity to rake the Church over the coals over and over without acknowledging any good done, free schools, hospitals etc. This country is Ireland. Pray for Ireland.
PLCatholic says
We could win young people to the faith and help them save their souls if we did something we should all be doing anyway. Shouldn’t we Defend God’s Papacy
TomD says
It should be noted that Jordan Peterson may have had an attempt made on his life. On March 5th of this year he gave a speech at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. A woman tried to gain entry to the lecture hall; when she was unable to do so she broke a window and fled the scene. When she was apprehended she was found to be carrying a garrotte! Peterson later tweeted “What terrible things are going through the mind of someone who brings a garrotte to a demonstration?” Indeed, something is very wrong with our society when the views of a Jordan Peterson are viewed as something that must be literally throttled to death.
malcolm harris says
In Pasternak’s book “Dr. Zhivago” there is a passage in which the hero reflects that in a Communist society freedom only exists in concentration camps…..in other words the only way to be free is to be imprisoned. Strangely this reminds me of Fr. Gordon. We on the outside think we are free, but we are not as free as we think. Today’s materialistic world can lead us away from God, and separated from His grace, we easily become the slaves of sin. So in today’s world I have to ask….. just who is free?
Monica Harris says
You know, reading your fantastic post again, Father MacRae….now I see that it was actually watching you say Mass that led Pornchai Max to trust you (and later, Jesus Christ.)
So….it reminded me of Cardinal Sarah’s book “God or Nothing”.
During an interview that formed the book, he was asked about young male initiation rites in his native Guinea. He participated somewhat unwillingly, as he thought the ritual a “ruse” and a “hoax” in the animist culture in which he grew up. He said:
“Father and I were already convinced that the Mass was the only moment that transforms man on this earth. My own initiation therefore lasted merely three days…”
So, Pornchai Max’s witness of quiet Mass in your cell started his transformation and rebirth “in water and the Spirit”.
I am so happy you are able to say Mass again, despite the stony prison walls, because you are still God’s priest.
Claire Dion says
Dear Fr. Gordon This post touched my heart as I am one of those who have asked you to pray for loved ones. I know first hand how teaching by example can bring a person to Christ. During one of my visits with Max he told me that you had never asked him to become a Catholic but by example you touched his soul. Reading this post gave me comfort and helped me understand how deeply my loved ones can be touched more by what I do than by what I say. I also want to mention how each week you help me grow in my faith by your example of what you accomplish under the worse conditions. When I read what Father Andrew Pinsent said about what you have accomplished “Fr Gordon MacRae, through his widely-read blog These Stone Walls, has done more than almost anyone I know in recent years to draw attention to Fr Lemaire” I believe that you are doing God’s work by being open to His love and grace. I read every post and never fail to be inspired. Sending hugs to you and Max.
Father Peter Lechner, s.P. says
Fr. Gordon,
Thanks for the excellent apostolic and humanitarian work you are using “These Stones Walls” for – for example, helping parents who are trying to help their children with faith. (I am in Vietnam now, working with a small group of Vietnamese priests of our Congregation, preparing for future sP ministry here).
Fr. Pete Lechner, s.P.
Carol Hall says
Helen – you wrote everything word that I was thinking!! Max meeting and finally coming to trust someone ( Father Gordon) was the best conversion he could receive. Max life changed after seeing Fr. G. do his late nightly Mass. Max witnessing so much faith in God from Fr. G., has shown him that this is what he needed to better his life. It was then, he wanted to become a Catholic and practice our faith. What a wonderful awakening that happened to Max!! GOD BLESS Fr. GORDON and MAX. I pray for both of you every night in my prayers!!
LOVE Carol in Ohio
Father Gordon J. MacRae says
All of these comments, at least the eight so far, have just been read to me. I find them all to be profoundly moving, and I am hearing something very special from you. What I’m hearing is that you get it. Only those who are spiritually in tune with the Opus Dei, the works of God, can understand that being in such dire circumstances requires a fiat. I think I would be dragged into this kicking and screaming had God given me the choice. Like Jonah, I would have fled far from Nineveh. Instead I got swallowed up by this monster called unjust imprisonment. I have to keep fighting that. I must! In justice by its very nature must be shouted out.
But I think my fiat came only a few nights ago after I wrote this post. As you will see when I can finally tell the whole story, Pornchai’s life was set upon by the Evil One, and I have stood between them. Laying in my bunk sleepless one night it struck me like lightening that I am living the life of Maximilian Kolbe, though I am not at all worthy of it. My life is being consumed for the salvation of another and I find myself giving my unconditional fiat to that. But like that very last graphic says, “Mary is at work here.” I am certain of it. I can feel it in my soul.
I want to thank you all for sharing this post. Please share it widely for this is a very important story and there is much more it yet to come. With love and blessings from us behind these stone walls, Father Gordon MacRae.
Vickie Green says
I shared your “Misguided Light” post back when I first read it with a friend whose son has lost his faith and says it is because science and faith contradict each other… He may not be ready to hear it yet, but some day I trust he will. Thank you for your weekly posts – they give me much food for thought and inspiration as well. You, Max, and all the people you mention or introduce to us here behind These Stone Walls are in my prayers!
God Bless and keep you!
Kelly says
I have spent many hours in the “classroom” of Father G finding his insights spiritually priceless and it has truly been a vehicle for the Holy Spirit to work in my life more fully. I even enjoy the science posts especially the celestial “lessons” ! Unlike a previous poster, I do not think that God had to imprison Father G to elicit his “fiat” for the benefit of many, but rather Father’s G’s DAILY fiat is the very light that illuminates the Truth to those near (like Max) and those of us who will probably never meet face to face.
When I read this blog, I often think how kind it is for Father to take the time and prayerful consideration to conscientiously sanitize his very brutal reality into spiritual wisdom that can only be taught by one living the Way of the Cross. Like Simon of Cyrene who didn’t volunteer for the job to help Christ carry the cross but still walked so close to our Lord that the Precious blood and sweat literally fell upon him. This grueling walk with Christ can never be pursued or requested, but only responded to….and that is the daily living of faith through the good and the bad that has made Father G a channel of grace for others.
Tom says
Great article! Give my best to Pornchai…I think of you guys often and you are in my prayers
Tom
Lupe says
Father, that was a beautiful post. So helpful and what a perfect image. I am sure that the intense suffering of Pornchai (and your own) will pour grace and faith into many, many souls. I keep thinking of the grace it took for Pornchai to hunt for that button over and over instead of letting himself go mad. My God, how inscrutable your ways. This is the kind of account that reminds me again and again that I do not understand righteousness at all.
Mary Jean Diemer says
Hi Fr. Gordon!
What a beautiful message of hope you have given us here! Thank you!
We all have someone that needs to see us believe in Him! May it be done according to His Will!
Sending love and prayers to you and Max and all in there. I pray for those that have made it out especially Scooter, that they will not lose heart in what they have gained in the Lord.
Suzanne Formanek says
I always look forward to Wednesdays, knowing that I’ll hear from you!
Today’s post is particularly moving, in part I’m sure, because my children have turned away from the Faith. But perhaps more importantly, the article prompted me to ask you a question: Father, if God had asked you outright to accept this “pastoral assignment” would you have given your FIAT? Even with His paternal reassurance, “Just trust me”, would you have said, “Yes”?
Knowing that you wouldn’t, He used another method and dear Max, and countless others, including myself can thank Divine Providence that He involved a particular judge, guaranteeing that you couldn’t be “reassigned.”
The Lord achieved His purpose and got your “yes” eventually and thanks to the suffering you have endured and witnessed in your parish prison, the Lord has been able to release countless others from their particular prisons.
Thank you and blessings!
Suzanne Formanek
Pat Gubala says
Making the Ninevah 90 prayers and Total Consecration with Fr. Richard Heilman
Praying for you and Max everyday…. your posts leave me speechless, please pray for us.
Ave Maris Stella
Hail, bright star of ocean,
God’s own Mother blest,
Ever sinless Virgin,
Gate of heavenly rest.
Taking that sweet Ave
Which from Gabriel came,
Peace confirm within us,
Changing Eva’s name.
Break the captives’ fetters,
Light on blindness pour,
All our ills expelling,
Every bliss implore.
Show thyself a Mother;
May the Word Divine,
Born for us thy Infant,
Hear our prayers through thine.
Virgin all excelling,
Mildest of the mild,
Freed from guilt, preserve us,
Pure and undefiled.
Keep our life all spotless,
Make our way secure,
Till we find in Jesus
Joy forevermore.
Through the highest heaven
To the Almighty Three,
Father, Son and Spirit,
One same glory be. Amen. posts leave me speechless, you know I am praying for you and Max everyday.
Helen says
This post, Father Gordon, will surely shed streams of Heavenly Light to parents, like me, who plead with the Lord to ‘catch’ their kids.
I used to get daily messages from Weeping Madonna site, in Australia, of approved messages that the mystic receives from either Mary or Jesus. However, for whatever reason, they stopped. I’ve checked their site but no longer are they there. One day, out of the blue I received the following message:
24th November 2017
“My little one, once the door of the heart is opened, even if it is the smallest degree, I can begin to enter in. Keep praying for these people who carry such deep wounds and trust your Good Shepherd to lead them to pastures green. I call you again this day to be My hands, My feet, My heart of holy love.”
Not only did this message give me great hope and peace, I can now see how this conversion actually took place in Max. The Lord found a crack in Max’s heart, and the rest is history. What a story…. and thank YOU Max!! Thank you, Father Gordon, for writing about it. And, may I say thank you for praying the Mass in your cell?
This is an outstanding story…I don’t want it to end but am glad it did the way that it did.
God bless you, Father Gordon, Max and all who love you. I am honored to read these pages each week and, of course, never know how to write back. I know what my heart and mind feel and think but my hope for you both is freedom. God bless Those Miraculous Walls.
Praising God for you,
Helen