On the Feast of Saint Padre Pio, Father Gordon MacRae marks twenty years of wrongful imprisonment with some thoughts from the sidelines of priesthood in America.
I am most grateful to Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, for “Travesty of Justice,” his courageous and outstanding guest post on These Stone Walls. It summarized accurately the 20 years of my imprisonment and the torrents that pushed me here. I call it “courageous” because I have no doubt that Bill Donohue will face ridicule, as he has in the past, for his exposure and unwavering defense of the truth.
I urge readers who have not already done so to join the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The broad brush tarnishing the image of Catholic priesthood in the last twenty years is a front in the culture war to silence a Catholic voice in the public square of the Western world.
This is not the first time Bill Donohue and the Catholic League have taken up this story. Back in 2010, he appeared on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on EWTN and urged viewers to read These Stone Walls. Now, writing just two weeks before I mark twenty years of wrongful imprisonment, two sentences jumped out at me near the end of Dr. Donohue’s post:
“MacRae arrived in prison on September 23, 1994. He did not know it at the time, but it was the Feast Day of Saint Padre Pio, himself the subject of false allegations of sexual abuse.”
Most TSW readers are by now aware of the role Saint Padre Pio has played behind These Stone Walls. I have written of him many times though my favorite is one I hope you will read anew and share with others to honor him as his Feast Day approaches. That post is “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata.”
I described in another post last year a startling revelation about Padre Pio from a fascinating article by Australian journalist, Paul MacLeod in the August/September 2012 issue of Inside the Vatican magazine. That article, “The Holy Face of Manopello,” explored that ancient image of the Face of Christ, and the findings of a book on the topic by Paul Badde entitled, The Face of God (Ignatius Press, 2010). In “The Last Days of Padre Pio,” I described a segment of Paul MacLeod’s article:
“Capuchin priest, Father Domenico de Cese, former custodian of the Shrine [of Manopello], was killed in a car accident while visiting the Shroud of Turin in 197 8. A decade earlier however, Father Domenico wrote of a rather strange occurrence. On the morning of September 22, 1968, Father Domenico opened the doors of the shrine and was startled to find Padre Pio kneeling in prayer before the image of the Holy Face. Padre Pio was at the same time 200 kilometers away at San Giovanni Rotondo, gravely ill, and near death.”
As I wrote in that post, it was Padre Pio’s his last known occurrence of bilocation, a phenomenon that, like his visible wounds, became a source of skepticism about Padre Pio both in and outside of the Church. The next morning – September 23, 1968 – Padre Pio died.
On that same morning 26 years later, I stood in court to hear that I am pronounced “guilty,” convicted of crimes from over a decade earlier for which there was no evidence because they never took place. The only evidence introduced at trial, beyond the accusations themselves, was the fact that I am a Catholic priest.
I was taken to prison that same morning, sentenced by Judge Arthur Brennan to more than thirty times what prosecutors offered had I pled guilty instead of innocent. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of this in “The Prison of Father MacRae,” Part II of an ongoing series. As Bill Donohue wrote, however, I was not conscious of the date of my imprisonment and its connection to Padre Pio. It was still eight years before Saint Pio’s 2002 Canonization by Pope John Paul II who has since joined Padre Pio among the Communion of Saints.
I was tempted to write just now that beyond the fact that my imprisonment based on false witness shares the date of Saint Padre Pio’s death and Feast Day, there are no further connections to be made. I share but a fraction of the cross Padre Pio bore in life, and few of the graces that sustained him. But digging just beyond the surface of our lives and crosses, I find that we have other facets of our respective stories in common as well. I wrote about some of our mysterious bonds of connection in “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata” in 2010.
THE HEROIC VIRTUE OF PADRE PIO
If it is heroic virtue to turn the other cheek, then Padre Pio and I have lived on very different planes of existence. Bill Donohue’s conclusion that the story of my alienation and imprisonment is one of “maliciousness, callousness, apathy, and cowardice” applies to the treatment of Padre Pio by others in the Church in far greater measure than any calumny I have endured.
Writing from the United Kingdom for the Catholic Herald (12 June 2014), Mary O’Regan recently penned “Fifty years ago Italy’s most famous modern saint was being treated like a criminal.” Her posting described that exactly fifty years ago in 1964, Padre Pio was personally restored to priestly ministry by Pope Paul VI.
For just the last four years of his life, his priestly ministry was fully restored after years of investigation into the false witness, gossip, envy, greed, and character assassination that so grievously wounded Padre Pio and cast him out of public ministry. Had any of this taken place today in America, could Padre Pio and the immensely powerful sensus fidelium about him survive it? I addressed that point in a comment I posted through a friend on Mary O’Regan’s article:
“Bravo to the Catholic Herald for this great story about one of the greatest saints of the 20th Century. The sad, sad truth is that had Padre Pio been so accused in America in the wake of
the US Bishops’ Dallas Charter, his priesthood would have remained in ruins, and his name could never have been redeemed. Unquestioned mediated settlements would have been handed out to his accusers, and it would have been open season on this great saint. It is not lost on me and on many that St. John Paul the Great canonized Saint Padre Pio in 2002, the very year the witch hunt against priests was launched in America and then spread through the Western world.”
Does that reflection of mine sound bitter? It shouldn’t, because it isn’t. I have no room for bitterness in any of this – not even after 20 years wrongly imprisoned. Does it sound angry? Of course it does! How could it not sound angry? It’s the same sort of anger I detected in those who fully investigated the whole truth about Padre Pio, and then wondered what to do with it.
A vivid example was cited by former Newsweek Religion Editor Kenneth Woodward in an extraordinary book, Making Saints (Touchstone, 1990). For a segment on Padre Pio for his book, Kenneth Woodward had asked Father Paolo Rossi, Postulator General of the Capuchin Order, “How do you plan to demonstrate his heroic virtue?” The response of Father Rossi had a tone of righteous indignation – not at the question, but at the answer – as he unveiled Padre Pio’s treatment from a prior generation of priests, bishops, and members of his own order:
“There are many things that people do not understand – and can’t – because they have not seen the documentation we have. But I can say this: people would better understand the virtue of the man if they knew the degree of hostility he experienced from the church, as well as from his own family of friars…. The Order itself was told to act in a certain way toward Padre Pio. So the hostility went all the way up to the Holy Office (now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith)…Faulty information was being given to the church authorities and they acted on that information.” (Making Saints, p. 188).
“Though he may have wrestled with the Devil and spoken to angels,” Kenneth Woodward observed (Making Saints, p. 189), “Padre Pio the stigmatist would be judged by his response to more mundane trials – inflicted, in his case, by his own brethren in the church.”
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
It is no small part of my dismay about what could have happened to Padre Pio had he been accused in 2002 America – and what is happening now to “Father Jim,” to me, and to many other priests so accused. At the highest levels, Church officials, and many of our brother priests, have come to equate being merely accused with being guilty.
Far worse, they have somehow allowed into the practice of Church discipline a new and distorted theology of priesthood that equates a priest’s ability to minister publicly with his identity as a priest. This is an entirely new practice in Church law, and in fact it is entirely contrary to Church law. Priests have been dismissed from the clerical state – forcibly laicized – because they cannot be assigned under the terms of the Dallas Charter.
This reduces the Sacrament of Holy Orders to its function, and removes all sense of its ontological transformation of the person of the priest. It seems the natural result of what “Father Jim” called “On the Fatherhood of Bishops with Disposable Priests.”
Bill Donohue concluded his guest post last week with two sentences that could easily fill my next ten posts on These Stone Walls:
“There are so many guilty parties to this travesty it is hard to know where to begin. At work is maliciousness, callousness, apathy, and cowardice.”
When I read this, I could not help but consider the response a few weeks earlier to the guest post by “Father Jim” mentioned above. One tenacious TSW reader took it upon herself to send a link to that post to the entire Board of Directors of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests (AUSCP), and to the Board of Directors of the National Federation of Priests Councils (NFPC).
These organizations of and for priests have shown few signs of awareness of the story of grave injustice perpetrated against “Father Jim” and other priests. The TSW reader wanted to make them aware that many of their brother priests are falsely accused, scapegoated without evidence, and cast out without anything to support such treatment. What this reader termed “McCarthy-era Blacklisting” is often based solely on claims by individuals who stand to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in unquestioned mediated settlements for making claims that – as in the case of Father Jim – are so old they could never be proven or disproven.
The reader sent this plea for their awareness to twenty-five priests serving on the AUSCP and NFPC national boards. Only one of the 25 priests responded. It was a brief statement that accused priests must wait to be “found guilty or exonerated” in Rome. It is simply erroneous that a claim of abuse that is thirty or forty years old – and brought against a priest decades after Church law has allowed in the past – can be either proven or disproven.
Appalled by what the reader interpreted to be a cowardly shunning of the plight of “Father Jim” and hundreds of other priests so accused, she did some research on the published agenda of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests while all of this has been going on. She sent me several pages printed from the AUSCP website (www.uscatholicpriests.org). Here is what she wrote:
“The heads of some of your brother priests, a fraternal bond that too many of them now renounce, are buried in the sand. While you have languished in prison unjustly for all these years, a fate that in the current climate could befall any of them, I could only shake my head in disgust at the lack of any hint of concern for priests in your position and that of Father Jim. So I am sending you this list of the pressing agenda items and goals of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests over the last three years. This is printed directly from their website:
Establish a task force to develop an archive of problematic translations in the New Roman Missal.
Affirmation of the values of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative and partnering with it.
Ask USCCB to request ordination of married men as priests to meet pastoral needs.
Support the honoring of workers’ pensions in full as a moral commitment (a moral commitment that seems not to apply to their accused and scapegoated brother priests).
Promote Collegiality in the exercise of authority at all levels of the Church.
Support the ordination of women to the permanent diaconate.
Support the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (to which the AUSCP Board issued a gift of $1,000 to offset expenses incurred in the Vatican’s investigation of the LCWR.)
SO, WHAT MIGHT PADRE PIO SAY?
Do the priests of North America truly believe these are the most pressing issues facing priesthood today? From the perspective of twenty years in prison for a nonexistent crime, the best that I could say to the above is that among my brothers, there seems to be little sense of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Padre Pio would see this all very differently. In the same paragraph in Bill Donohue’s “Travesty of Justice” in which he wrote of my going to prison on the Feast of Saint Padre Pio, another sentence was quoted from an older post of mine:
“I lifted the cross willingly – though perhaps more like Simon of Cyrene than like Christ – but I lifted it.”
I remember writing that in a TSW post – more than once, actually. I have been unsure of where the thought came from, however, and why I wrote it. I hadn’t been able to find anyone else writing as a priest who used such an analogy. Aren’t we supposed to be “alter Christus,” after all, not “alter Cyrenian”?
Then, while writing this post, I came across something I had never seen before. It’s in a 1919 letter from Padre Pio to his friend and former Provincial, Father Benedetto. It contains an imagery for which Padre Pio was later criticized by some of his detractors among brother priests and friars:
“You, too, help with your prayers this Cyrenian who bears the cross of many.”
It was a reply to a letter from Father Benedetto to Padre Pio in which the former Provincial wrote in response to the discovery of Padre Pio’s wounds,
“Justice has nothing to vindicate you, but…you, as a victim, owe on behalf of your brothers what is still lacking in the passion of Jesus Christ.”
It was for this one letter that Vittorio Messori wrote in the Forward to Padre Pio Under Investigation (Ignatius Press, 2008):
“In this journey we will in turn be helped by the many hidden Cyrenians who in silence offer up their suffering and their lives, and by the extraordinary ones, those whom the Lord sometimes elevates on the hill – as in the case of Padre Pio, this humble and quiet friar, the great Cyrenian of our time.”
Editor’s Note: Please be sure to watch Gloria.TV’s coverage of Father MacRae’s story:
Also, a continued thanks to TSW readers for their generosity in responding to Ryan MacDonald’s appeal to help with the legal costs, at the Federal level. We haven’t reached our goal yet, so please share this link to Ryan’s news alert post!
Father Gordon MacRae says
I was read this opening to a letter penned by Opus Bono and wanted to share this with you on this post about Saint Padre Pio, as this story is about him:
“It was his darkest hour. The walls of his cell closed in about him. The flickering light from a tiny candle weakly cast his shadow ahead of him.
“Slumped over his hard cot, his body was now in complete agony. His legs had grown weak, his knees ached from the hours spent pleading, kneeling, suffering. With every breath now came low groans and sobs.
“It had been years since Father had been forced into this prison in his monastic home. And yet it was here, under stringent confinement, that this priest-sinner’s greatest mission was about to unfold.
“One day the world would hail him as saint. One day the world would acknowledge that the allegations against him were horrible lies. One day few would believe his own brother clergy and superiors meted out such unjust punishments and sanctions.
“And yet, on this day, in that lonely cold stark cell, as he gazed upon the small wooden cross hanging on the dark wall, he cried out, “Why? Lord, Why!”
“Suddenly the room began to glow, and he saw Jesus looking down from the cross on His suffering priest-son and he heard Him say:
Carol Hall says
Fr. Gordon – I look forward to reading TSW by you. It is the only way I can have contact with you!! You are in my prayers always. You are a martyr for your faith and the truth will set you FREE!! PRAYING THAT YOUR RELEASE WILL BE VERY SOON!! POPE FRANCIS SHOULD INTERVENE FOR ALL FALSELY ACCUSED CLERGY!!
Dineen Muniz says
Fr. Gordon,
I was struck by your post today..I feel the need to make people aware of not only your unjust incarceration ..but for all priests who feel unsupported.What have we done to our priests? All in the name of passing the buck..literally..when did it become easy to turn our backs on the innocent? Sorry state of affairs..not only for our priests .Buy our Church..I am now in Poland and have prayed for you at the chapel of Maximllian Kolbe..also at his cell in block 11 in Auschwitz. I lifted you up I n prayer at Our Lady of Czestochowa and Divine Mercy.
God Bless you Fr. Gordon!
May you find Love and Mercy today.
Dineen Muniz
Walt Trachim says
Hi Fr. Gordon,
It’s been a while since I posted comments here. I figure more often than not I don’t have to. Others speak more eloquently than me, and it is frequent that I find someone who has already beaten me to the punch. But I’m okay with that.
For some reason this post struck a nerve with me. Not in a negative way; it just gave me cause to think. It got me to consider how little I really know about the life of Padre Pio as well as the obstacles constantly placed in his way. In spite of all of that, Our God lifted him up every minute of every day. I must admit that I have a hard time wrapping my head around that, but perhaps I’m not supposed to be able to do so. And that’s surprisingly okay because I know that a day will come, not of my choosing, where I will be given the grace to understand.
And about Simon of Cyrene…. It occurs to me that people of faith – a good number, in fact – find themselves in a position much like the one Simon found himself in when he came face-to-face with Jesus when they are put in a position where they have to do what is right, usually at some level of personal cost or sacrifice. For some, the price is low. For others, it is ridiculously high. For a few, it is incalculable. I have gotten the impression since I’ve been reading your posts that you certainly are one of those who are in the last category. And I can’t help thinking that you’ve been hit way too many times.
That said, yours is an example of great faith. You keep it even in the face of unimaginable obstacles. It is an example worth keeping up with, under any circumstances.
As always, please remember me in your prayers. They are deeply appreciated.
Lynda says
I am thinking of and praying for you on this the 20th anniversary of your flagrantly unjust incarceration. The fact that the courts have not freed you yet when the evidence is incontrovertibly in favour of your not being guilty of the alleged offences has me bewildered – what on earth is going on?? Why hasn’t any politician, lawyer, journalist brought this clear miscarriage of justice to the public prosecution office and Minister for Justice, and have the appropriate court hear this case as a matter of extreme urgency as regards a profound miscarriage of justice to a person still imprisoned on what on the evidence before the trial court was clearly insufficient to ground a verdict of guilty? Sorry, but I (as a trained lawyer) cannot understand how your lawyers have not got a habeus corpus order from the courts long ago. There is no more urgent case for a court to hear – than that of a person who’s clearly (on the evidence adduced before the trial court) been wrongly convicted and sentenced, and is still in prison on foot of that sentence.
Blessed Michael the Archangel, intercede for you against the evil forces at work here.
Thank you for your continuing great witness as a priest who is accepting unjust suffering for the good of souls.
God bless you always.
Your sister in Christ, Lynda
Carol Hall says
I agree with Linda. You should have been RELEASED MANY YEARS AGO, especially with all the proof of your convector being a LIAR by his OWN FAMILY. Then bragging about the MONEY HE RECEIVED from the church. THIS IS REPULSIVE and makes me suspicious of a lot of times the church asks for money for certain charities etc. I DON’T WANT MY MONEY SPENT on PAYING OFF FALSE ACCUSERS!!
Mary Jean Diemer says
Hi Father Gordon!
Every time I see the coldness (for lack of a better word) of priests to the plight of you and other priests, I wonder what their reaction would be if they suddenly found themselves in the same position? You would think they would experience outrage instead of passing the buck (Rome) or trying to make it go away (money. It is almost like it has become a job rather then a calling.God has blessed you Father because you have the true priesthood and are following in the footsteps of the Lord who suffered the greatest suffering for his false accusation. The priests who turn the other way are following in the footsteps of the Pharisees.Jesus many times said to them “woe to you” The Church is in for a big shake up I think.Prayers for you always and all that are with you! Love you dear friend! Jeannie
Jeannie says
It is always humbling to come here and comment, because to write from one’s own perspective limits the full expression of empathy or of gratitude for your perspective.
I become ever more convinced that John the Baptist could not recount for us his time in prison, or if he did we have lost it, but you are bringing it to us.
Granted, this was the cousin of our Lord who knew from the womb his mission and never once flinched from it, but he was fully human and was unlikely to have known that his wandering in the wilderness would end with an unjust imprisonment that would be at such variance with his whole life.
And yet we know that he expected suffering and knew that he had to yield his whole life in order to be the herald for Our Lord. It is all too easy to see in him a man so devout and so dedicated that no human frailty would have existed for him, but that is too easy. That way we don’t have to even consider trying to empathize, sympathize or associate our paths with his.
You came along, Father and reshape that vision of the Baptist. The cold, unwelcome, seemingly impregnable forces of a prison turn out to yield to God’s love. YOu think that you do it awkwardly, unsure of your ability and yet, that very uncertainty is a huge and terrible suffering that offers a faint echo of the uncharted waters that a human Christ, previously allowed to wander the villages unassaulted and loved by many, would feel as he knelt in Gethsemane, suddenly receiving the full weight and sorrow of all the sins of the world, aware that his human form would imminently be undergoing an assault upon it that he’d never experienced.
I came to your site tonight because my very little sorrow, an emotional pain that God allows me, as I’m far too weak to suffer anything really heroic I suspect, drove me to hear a voice of someone taking up the cross without the gift of prophecy to see his path clearly.
You truly are like Simon the Cyrene since he too would have taken up the cross all unwilling, but obedient, probably self-conscious, bewildered, angry…only to be transformed into a faith he’d never even dreamt existed after the privilege of sharing the cross with Christ.
I realize that any severe pain that I’ve felt in life, sometimes as a result of willful bad choices and sometimes as a result of unexplained physical illness, were all opportunities to approach Christ’s pain and to attain some means to empathize, however imperfectly.
It is difficult to praise you when I know that you squirm at the thought of receiving it, but there is a nobility and a dignity in your writing that represents humanity at its best, a humanity that has been absent from the public square and nearly all bodies of leadership, both lay and clerical, for the last 60 to 70 years.
In these stone walls there is a voice of mankind that speaks to a world that is starving for truth, love…and of course, God.
God bless you, St Padre Pio, Simon…and may God lead back the many whose blindness stems from indoctrination fed to them by a global movement to stamp out our faith once again.
Fr. Stuart MacDonald says
Dear Fr. Gordon,
Compliments on another wonderfully thought-provoking post. The imagery of Simon of Cyrene is beautiful. We need to remember that because of Simon’s sacrifice, his sons, Alexander and Rufus, were converted to the faith (why else would Mark mention his children unless, at the time of writing the Gospel, they were well known in the Christian community, Simon presumably having died by then.) I have commented before, dear Fr. Gordon, that just as Simon’s actions gave rise to grace, so, too, your imprisonment will be like the blood of martyrs — seeds of faith. Speaking of martyrs, imagine the grace to bear fruit from the brutal persecution of our brothers and sisters in the faith of Iraq and Syria.
You are too true in mentioning that St. Padre Pio, if he were living today, would fall victim to the same viciousness and blindness which plague many in the Church. He would be out of ministry and no one would give a damn. But he would still be a saint! Small consolation, I know; the more important one nevertheless.
Your point is well made that the current praxis of the Church in dealing with those accused, or worse, of sexual abuse of minors confuses Sacred Orders with their function. A cleric who does not hold an ecclesiastical office is no less ordained, or I dare say no less useful, than a pastor, vicar general, or residential bishop. Goodness, how many clergy seminars and retreats have we attended in the last decades where they drone on that the priesthood is about ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. Boy, are they eating their words these days.
I only note with sadness that you are incorrect on one point in your post. You state, “At the highest levels, Church officials, and many of our brother priests, have come to equate being merely accused with being guilty.” Unfortunately, Father, that is no longer true. Now it IS merely enough to be ‘accused’. A survey of canonical literature in academic journals of the last few years reveals a disturbing and marked shift in vocabulary and tone. Before, academics went to pains to use correct canonical phrasing — that those found guilty of a crime are not suited for ministry etc etc. Now, academics don’t even try to hide it. The new normal is that an accusation makes a priest unsuitable for ministry, plain and simple. Even if he is not guilty, the bad publicity means that he is no longer held in esteem by the faithful. Therefore, removing him from ministry is not a punishment, it is merely an unfortunate circumstance of the times in which we live. Or so the twisted logic goes. Is it any wonder that federations of priests are concerned with trivialities? They’re deathly afraid of the reality of ecclesial life today. It’s like we’re all Alice living in Wonderland.
We must, indeed, Father, continue to offer our sacrifices pro bono ecclesiae, you, in an extraordinary way. I continue to pray for you every day, poor as my prayers are. Courage, Father: you inspire many.
in Domino,
Fr. Stuart
Father Gordon MacRae says
As I have written in the past, it is rare that I am able to reply to comments, but all the comments are read to me and printed and sent to me. I am very grateful for Father Stuart’s comment, which provides much light on the situation I describe in this post. I am alarmed that the praxis no longer requires equating being accused with being guilty, but now merely being accused is sufficient enough to bar any priest from the exercise of ministry in public. I believe that the canonization of Saint Padre Pio by Saint John Paul the Great has within it a prophetic message for the Church and priesthood. In the Holy Father’s homily at that canonization Mass, he never mentioned Padre Pio’s stigmata or the stories of bilocation and miraculous healing. Pope John Paul spoke primarily of Padre Pio’s suffering, and today we know that the source of that suffering was from the calumny, suspicion, judgment, and condemnation he received from within the Church. It is also prophetic that he was canonized in 2002, the year of the fall of many priests. The Judas Crisis in the Church and priesthood was followed quickly on its heels by the Caiaphas Effect. At the very time Padre Pio was acknowledged as belonging to the Communion of Saints, so many other wrongly accused priests were slandered and set before the wolves. Thank you, Father Stuart for this wisdom and clarity. With fraternal blessings, Father Gordon
Lupe says
Father G
Do what Padre Pio did – pray to the Holy Face, who never takes his eyes off of you. I am so glad you are able to remain faithful to grace in this terrible injustice. I think you are suffering for the sake of the Church and for priests. When I visited the shrine of Padre Pio in Pietrelcina, there is a stations of the cross. The 5th station portrays Simon of Cyrene as Padre Pio himself.
Keep the faith. For the rest of us!
Barbara Ellen says
In my opinion, many of the agenda items of the Association of U.S. Priests are almost unbelievable in their twisted objectives and their superficiality.
Most holy and Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of priests; and St. Pope John Paul II, pray for us, especially for all holy priests such as you, Father MacRae!
HELEN says
AMEN!
HELEN says
God bless You, Fr. Gordon….
I certainly agree with You…a brave man is Dr. Bill Donohue, and God bless him and continue to bestow upon him, the Spirit of boldness. We surely need it in these dark and troubling times.
Father, I was covered in ‘goose bumps’ upon reading YOUR words regarding Padre’ Pio. A few weeks back, I discovered a way to become one of his spiritual children, for which I longed for years, since learning of him, but, never knew this could still become reality, since he’s physically gone from us. Since then, I have been confronted, everywhere, it seems, with quotes, photos, prayers or comments about him. I can’t help but wonder if these aren’t directly from him??!!??
On that very note, Fr. Gordon, and in awe of Your coincidences with him, I will do a special novena to him for YOU. (Although I lift You in prayer, every morning since first meeting You, some years ago). Something is a stirring, it seems. I almost feel as though he is so proud of You… He’s got Your back. YOU have a friend in him.
I wish there was something I could do, tangibly, for You. I feel STUCK. What can a mere person do to help out a martyr who is sinking in the quick sand of politics? Please help me to know…if You know.
God bless, comfort, strengthen You, and thank You, again, for Your wonderful posts…faithful and giving love to our Jesus. May He continue to hide You in the deepest recesses of His Sacred Heart, hiding You from the enemies of Your soul.
In His love,
Helen
Jeannie says
YOu all are so beautiful, thank you so much for what you all wrote this week, it is such a testament to the indescribable beauty of souls that answer God’s grace.