Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

While some high-profile priests are maligned from both in and beyond the Church, The Catholic University of America published its National Study of Catholic Priests.

“You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?”

— Matthew 7:16

January 11, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

In 2005, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was interviewed on the NBC Today show about accusations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests — some sadly true, but some also sadly false. Citing the case against me as an example, he said, “There is no segment of the American population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

Catholic priests in the United States have long been under assault from the news media, from activist groups, and at times even from within the Church. As most readers know, I have been the subject of many published articles, but not because I have been accused. It is because I strenuously refute the accusations as false. Much evidence has amassed in support of that. For some reason, this poses a threat to some nefarious agendas built around the sex abuse crisis in the Church.

When accused priests defend themselves in online media, seeding articles with vile comments using fake screen names had long been a tactic of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an organization that sought not so much to support legitimate victims, but to maximize monetary awards and media condemnation. Its representatives terrorized Church officials with media manipulation whenever any accused priest is defended in the court of public opinion.

Despite all that, some standout news media have bravely produced articles and commentary against the tide of public vitriol about accused priests. The Wall Street Journal recently published its fourth such article about the case against me. The most recent was by Boston Attorney Harvey Silverglate entitled “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae.” This generated some excellent analysis by David F. Pierre, Jr. moderator of The Media Report. Those and other articles appear in our featured section, The Wall Street Journal.

I have much gratitude for Dorothy Rabinowitz, Harvey Silverglate, Ryan MacDonald, Bill Donohue, and David F. Pierre, Jr. for their valiant efforts to correct the public record. Without their truthful courage, I was at the mercy of nefarious means driven mostly by progressive political agendas and litigious greed. Most recently, however, even some bold Catholic writers have taken up the subject of Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.

The National Study of Catholic Priests

When I was first accused, my bishop and diocese published a press release declaring, without evidence, that I victimized not only my accusers, but the entire Catholic Church. That bishop’s successor later went on record to state his informed belief that I am innocent and should never have been in prison. Then his successor chose only to shun me, and to release my name on a public list of the “credibly” accused. He did this, he stated, for “transparency,” but that transparency has been highly selective.

My own experience leaves me with no trust at all that my bishop could, or would even try, to discern guilt from false witness in defense of me or any accused priest. Trust and distrust as the fallout from the scandal are now central issues in a recently published survey of 10,000 U.S. priests sponsored by The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. I highly recommend reviewing a report on the study results entitled, “The National Study of Catholic Priests: A Time of Crisis.” It was the largest study on the state of the priesthood in fifty years. Here is an overview of its parameters:

“Over the last two decades, the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has significantly eroded the trust between laity and clergy... Since the earliest days of the Dallas Charter there have been concerns that the bishops’ understandable eagerness to crack down on abusive priests was coming at the expense of due process protections for the accused: a de facto policy of ‘guilty until proven innocent.’ These concerns have been exacerbated by an expansion in the scope of the Church’s anti-abuse policies coupled with a perceived double standard in the way allegations against bishops have been handled in comparison to priests.”

Father Roger Landry, a columnist for the National Catholic Register, has an excellent analysis of The Catholic University of America study entitled, “Repairing the Relationship Between Priests and Bishops.”

The findings of the study are based on the responses of the thousands of U.S. priests who participated and submitted completed surveys. Given the difficult period of the last 20 years since the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter was enacted, some of these responses are surprising, and point to the depth of commitment, spiritual life, optimism and resiliency of most priests. Most priests reported a high level of satisfaction in their ministry. A stunning 77% of priests self-reported that they are flourishing in their vocation.

Among the results, however, are some big red flags: 82% of priests report living with a fear of being falsely accused and left with no defense; 45% of priests report that they experience at least one symptom of ministry burnout, while 9% described their level of burnout as severe, and characterized by high levels of stress and emotional and physical exhaustion. Reports of high stress came particularly from younger priests. (I will get back to this later) .

The biggest concern among priests is related to the toll and fallout of the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the sex abuse crisis in the Church. The sense of vulnerability among priests and their trust level for their bishops are the two most significant areas of negative fallout from the crisis.

In his NC Register column linked above, Father Roger Landry points to what I have called a disaster in the relationship between bishops and priests: the drafting and enactment of the 2002 “Dallas Charter” which imposed a draconian standard of “zero tolerance” and one-strike-and-you’re-out in response to any “credible” accusation against a priest. For an analysis of this standard of evidence, see my post, “The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests.”

Father Landry reports that the drafting of these policies in 2002 was done “hurriedly and under enormous pressure from the press, lawsuits and furious faithful.” Priests in the current study actually appreciated the efforts to respond to the crisis openly and with transparency. “But the priests surveyed gave stark testimony to the harms that have come from what the bishops in Dallas left out of balance.”

Guilty for Being Accused

The Vatican and Catholic hierarchy were unfairly maligned throughout publicity on “The Scandal.” At one point, SNAP partnered with the far-left, New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights to bring a crimes-against-humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Some of the false claims against me were employed to shame Pope Benedict on a global scale. The scheme was nothing more than a publicity stunt to embarrass the Church into maximizing financial settlements. Many of its claims, including those against me were exposed as a fraud. Journalist Joann Wypijewski exposed this story in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

Only in the Catholic Church is the highest echelon of governance blamed for the lowest level of misbehavior. Even in his later years, Benedict was demonized by German Catholics and others eager for any reason to blame him for the abuses of the past. Of interest, in the State of New Hampshire where I live more than 900 men between the ages of 20 and 50 have open lawsuits alleging systemic sexual abuse by State agents in the State’s juvenile detention facilities. Not one media outlet, not one victim group, not one of the victims themselves has blamed any of this on any present or former governor. This State carried out a witch-hunt in 2002 when the accused were Catholic priests. It is now confirmed that simultaneous to the witch-hunt was an active cover-up of the malfeasance of State agents.

As stated above, 82% of priests now report that they feel vulnerable to false accusations of sexual abuse that under existing policy will summarily end their ministry without due process. Compounding this fear, many report that they would be treated as guilty and left without support unless they could prove their innocence. Sixty-four percent said they would be left without support or resources to mount a defense, and almost half, 49%, think they would not be supported by their bishop. Father Landry added a sobering understanding of the reality:

“In most dioceses, when a priest is accused, he loses his home, his job, his good name — all within hours. He is removed immediately from his rectory and parish assignment, prevented from public ministry for the length of what is often an inexcusably glacial investigation, and required to dress like a layman. A press release is published in which the priest’s reputation is injured, if not ruined. He needs to exhaust his meager savings or beg and borrow money to hire a lawyer. Most excruciatingly, he has to linger for months or years under suspicion of being a sadistic pervert as well as a hypocrite to the faith for which he has given his life.”

Given the reality that most claims against priests are many years or decades old, establishing clear evidence is difficult if not impossible. So the bishops adopted what they called the “credible” standard. It means only that if a priest and an accuser lived in the same parish or community 20, 30, or 40 years ago, the accusation is “credible” on its face. No one in America but a Catholic priest could lose his livelihood, his reputation, sometimes even his freedom, under such a standard. I exposed one such case in “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.”

I am most appreciative to Father Roger Landry and the National Catholic Register for their bold and transparent analysis of what actually happens to an accused priest. By taking all the steps a diocese or bishop imposes above, such a priest is effectually silenced and unable to defend himself at all.

Stress along the fault lines between bishops and priests that these policies have caused is also clear in the survey. There is a wide disparity between how bishops view themselves and how they are viewed by their priests. Seventy-three percent of bishops reported viewing priests as their brothers. Only 28% of priests reported that their bishops treat them that way.

The disconnect revealed itself in several other ways as well: 70% of bishops reported that they are spiritual fathers to their priests while only 28% of priests thought the same. Father Landry reported that the biggest disconnect relates to a priest who is struggling. Ninety-percent of bishops reported that they would be present to and supportive of a struggling priest while only 36% of priests thought that this is true.

The Double Standard

Also evident in both the survey and Father Landry’s analysis of it is the double standard created when bishops failed to hold themselves accountable to the same standards imposed on their priests. In 2002, as the Charter was being debated during the U.S. Bishops Conference at Dallas, Cardinal Avery Dulles published a landmark article in America magazine entitled “The Rights of Accused Priests.”

The article was cheered by priests but largely ignored by bishops. Cardinal Dulles cited a 2000 pastoral initiative of the U.S. bishops entitled “Responsibility and Rehabilitation.” It criticized the U.S. justice system for the establishment of one-size-fits-all norms such as “zero tolerance” and “one strike and you’re out.” Then the same bishops, in a media panic, imposed those same standards on their priests.

But none of it ever applied to accusations against bishops, a reality that Father Landry described as “a double standard that profoundly affected their relationship [with priests].” While deliberating adoption of the Dallas Charter, the bishops removed the word “cleric,” which could have included bishops, and replaced it with “priests and deacons.” Now 51% of priests report that they do not have confidence in their bishop while 70% report a lack of confidence in bishops in general.

In a 2019 apostolic letter, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis addressed some of the disparities with mixed results. Father Landry points out that investigations of bishops, even in allegations of past sexual abuse, “seldom involve the draconian measures experienced by priests.”

I have written of a glaring example in my own diocese. Citing a desire for “transparency,” and with no one pressuring him to do so, my bishop proactively published in 2019 a list of the names and status of 73 priests of this diocese who had been “credibly” accused over fifty years. Most are deceased. Weeks later, a New Hampshire Superior Court judge barred publication of information from a grand jury investigation which was the source for most of the Bishop’s list. Ryan MacDonald wrote of the reasons for that in “Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm On the Priesthood.”

Months after publishing his list, my bishop was himself accused in a civil lawsuit in the Diocese of Rockville Center, New York. He was unjustly caught up in the political fallout of former New york Governor Andrew Cuomo who generated the claims when he signed into law an exemption window in which old time-barred accusations can be brought forward after the statute of limitations had run. I defended my bishop in a widely read post, “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

Conservative Priests Face Greater Scrutiny

I mentioned above that I would revisit one finding of this report — that younger priests experience more stress than older priests. A separate research report on Catholic priests by the Austin Institute has documented that younger priests tend to be more conservative and traditional than older priests. That bears out from observations of our readers who find this distinction to be a positive development. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Vatican Correspondent Francis X. Rocca reported on this in “Catholic Ideological Split Widens” (Dec.19, 2022):

“U.S. Catholic bishops elected conservative leaders last month, continuing to resist a push from Pope Francis to put issues such as climate change and poverty on par with the bishops’ declared priority of opposing abortion.”

The bishops appointed by Pope Francis tend to mirror his priorities. His recent elevation of San Diego Archbishop Robert McElroy, a leading liberal among U.S. bishops, to the College of Cardinals is an example. There is thus a growing disparity in liberal vs. conservative views as newly appointed bishops are more liberal while priests newly emerging from U.S. seminaries are more conservative and traditional.

Since the 1980s, successive annual ordinations have grown more conservative. Each successive 10-year grouping in the ordained priesthood supports Church teaching on moral and theological issues more strongly than the one before it. Those ordained after 2010, as a whole, are most conservative. When seminarians and younger priests do not have their views of the Church and Catholic practice affirmed, stress develops and increases. Younger U.S. priests represent a generation disillusioned with ideas of progress and religious pluralism, and the abandonment of the Church’s prolife charism in favor of topics like climate change.

This leaves a widening chasm between Pope Francis, his Episcopal appointments, and younger priests in the United States. The Catholic Project study also reveals that almost 80% of priests ordained before 1980 approve strongly of Pope Francis while only 20% of those ordained after 2010 share that view. Is their priestly interest in respect for tradition a plague upon the Church?

Or is it the whispering of the Holy Spirit?

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: This brief essay from American Thinker by Attorney Franklin Friday is perhaps the best commentary on the future Church after the death of Pope Benedict XVI, and not only because I am in it. Please read and share this timely article: No Easy Road for Men of God.

You may also be interested in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm On the Priesthood

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

2021 Saw Challenges to Life, Liberty, Even Laughter

The Year of Our Lord 2021 in review: a second pandemic wave worse than the first, wide political divisions, many losses, some regrets and even a few funny moments.

December 29, 2021

As I conducted a reality check over this “2021 Year End” post, I felt rather hard pressed to put the word “laughter” in its title. I don’t know about you, but I did not encounter much this past year that caused me to even smile let alone laugh out loud. I considered just reposting our first post of 2020, “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.” It resonated with more readers than most subsequent posts, and not much has changed since then in the landscape of our lives. If anything, the climate feels worse.

But as the year wore on, I found myself laughing a little at life in spite of it all. Also in January 2021 I wrote, “Pandemic in Prison: When the Caged Bird Just Can't Sing.” It described how difficult it is to write a weekly post where I live, and how the seemingly never-ending pandemic turned “difficult” into a high-endurance obstacle course. That post's top image — created by our excellent volunteer graphic designer— made me laugh anew so I am using it to top this post about our year in review. It is also fitting, as you will read below, because this year two “Catholic” venues barred me from ever posting at their sites.

So given that I am the caged bird in question, the graphic above is a reminder that letdowns and obstacles should not suppress our ability to smile. However, canary yellow is not my color. I might have preferred a cardinal to a canary, but some might think that a bit pretentious. I also laughed when I proofread this post. I had mistyped “Year End” and referred in the first paragraph to my “Rear End” post. I want to put 2021 behind me, but I’m glad I caught the error.

Despite many obstacles, we published 52 posts in 2021. I wrote most of them while others were by our friends, Fr George David Byers in North Carolina, Fr Stuart MacDonald and Fr Tim Moyle in Ontario, Fr Andrew Pinsent in the U.K., Ryan MacDonald in New York, and two by Pornchai Moontri in Thailand.

My apologies in advance for all the links, but a year in review is just that. I want to profile the four posts you seemed to like the most. That short list will be interspersed with four others that I think deserve a second view. The criteria for your top choices will be an algorithm composed of the post's number of readers at the time it was posted, the number of times it was shared on social media, and the number of times it has been revisited during the course of the year.

My own choices have more to do with how much time was spent in reading, writing and research to produce some posts with limited resources made even more limited in this pandemic. By the way, at the expense of sounding political, have you noticed that “pandemic” is the word, “panic” with a “dem” inserted in the middle?

Life and Liberty Beyond These Stone Walls

By a wide margin, your choice for the most important post of 2021 was “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul” published on July 7. It remains the number one most widely read and revisited post of the year. The Catholic League e-blasted it to its members and hundreds of readers printed off a PDF of it to send to their bishops. Two U.S. bishops wrote to thank me for writing it. In twelve years of writing, that has never happened before.

I fear, however, that the major point of that post became shrouded in the heat of our bipolar politics. The U.S. bishops ended up avoiding any political fallout at their annual meeting in Baltimore by avoiding any real clarity on the subject after Pope Francis cautioned them not to politicize the Eucharist. But sidestepping the questions raised was also a political statement. The bottom line of that post is that our bishops have a sacred duty to care for the souls of all, including Catholic politicians who openly support a pro-abortion agenda.

Receiving the Eucharist while promoting abortion, sans repentance, places a soul in grave spiritual danger. On this, Scripture and Church law could not be clearer as laid out in that post and in Canon Law. In the aftermath of my post and the U.S. Bishops’ meeting, President Biden quoted Pope Francis claiming that he called Biden “a good Catholic” and told him to “keep receiving Communion.” That has not been verified, and whatever you think of Pope Francis, I do not believe it is accurate.

It is ironic that new state laws in Texas, Mississippi, and Arizona might now serve as a catalyst for a stronger defense of life from the U.S. Supreme Court while our bishops — who ought to be our collective guardians of morality on the right to life — shrunk from such an expectation. There was another pro-life post that I wrote earlier in 2021. It was widely acclaimed by many in the pro-life community who read it, but it was not otherwise widely read. Some may have been daunted by its detailed but important historical view. From my perspective, a nation that fails to understand history is doomed to repeat it. That post, published on May 19, 2021, was “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life.”

By a wide margin, your choice for one of the most important posts of 2021 was a boost to my spirit. Posted on September 22, 2021 it was, “A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America.” That post was shared over 5,000 times on social media and became a featured post at the National Catholic Register news aggregator, The Big Pulpit. It was also one of several of our posts this year chosen for promotion by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. If you are not yet a member, please subscribe to this much needed effort. More than any other Catholic organization in the cause of Religious Liberty, the Catholic League has our backs.

But alas, that September 22 post was followed just two weeks later with my being “permanently banned” from posting or commenting by the unnamed Moderator of the r/Catholicism community at Reddit which boasts nearly 130,000 members none of whom even know of the ban. Then, just another week later, the Catholic Media Association declined this blog’s membership after inviting Catholic blogs to apply. Writer and media critic, Ryan MacDonald wrote of this at our new “Voices from Beyond” menu item under the not-so-subtle title, “At the Catholic Media Association, Bias and a Double Standard.”

Should a Vocation to Priesthood Be Perilous?

The state of Catholic priesthood was the focus of twelve of my posts in 2021, and two more by our Canon Law advisor, Fr Stuart MacDonald. Now a doctoral candidate in Canon Law, Father Stuart’s expertise shined brightly in “Bishops, Priests, and Weapons of Mass Destruction” published to wide acclaim on May 26. Just two weeks later, we published my post about a controversial priest in “Catholics to Fr. James Altman: ‘We Are Starving Out Here.’”

Father Altman brought some much needed prophetic witness to the assault on priesthood that has emerged not only in our culture, but, sadly, also in some corners of our Church. The Internet footprint of that post was as broad as that of Father Altman himself. The post was read by thousands and shared on social media nearly 4,000 times.

Father Altman was set aside with his priestly faculties withdrawn by his bishop, not because of any moral failure or impediment, but because of his tone. He never spoke a word contrary to Church teaching. Since then, removing priests from ministry without just cause seems to have become fashionable and has taken a bizarre and tyrannical turn. In some dioceses, bishops are suspending priests who decline to be vaccinated on legitimate moral and conscience grounds — even those who have natural immunity from already having and recovering from Covid.

This all highlights something that Catholic League President Bill Donohue asserted in an appearance on NBC’s Today Show in 2005 in a discussion about my own case: “There is no segment of the U.S. population with less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

A twist in the matter of the rights of accused priests came up near the end of July when I wrote, “Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy About Fallen Priests.” Once accused of virtually anything, a priest has a very steep climb to restore his life and priesthood. Ryan MacDonald reframed the “Catholic Abuse Crisis” this year as the “Catholic Accuse Crisis.” I think it is a much more accurate term. Anyone who wants to be rid of any priest for any reason has found a potent weapon of Mass destruction. In no other venue in America can a person lose his good name, his housing, his livelihood based solely on an unproven 30-year-old claim brought for financial gain.

The bigger twist came this year, however, with my post, "Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo." I have no doubt that Bishop Libasci, Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire, is entirely innocent. Unlike any accused priest, however, he remains in office with his rights and priestly faculties intact.

A Long Farewell, but Not Goodbye

The first five months of 2021 were overshadowed by the immense trial of ICE detention for Pornchai Moontri. He was trapped in a huge, overcrowded warehouse filled with detainees who had illegally crossed the U.S. southern border. Sleeping seventy to a room, with overhead lights blazing around the clock and unbearable noise, Pornchai’s spirit was fraying while I did all I could to get him out of there. Finally, in early February, five months after leaving this prison, Pornchai was flown to Thailand. I wrote of this ordeal, and the triumph of his trust in Divine Mercy in “ICE Finally Cracks: Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”

This was the closing of one long chapter in our story and the beginning of another. All our carefully crafted plans for support and housing for Pornchai fell apart in the eleventh hour just a day before he boarded his deportation flight. My own trust in Divine Mercy and Divine Providence were heavily taxed by that point. Then, mysteriously from seemingly out of nowhere, in stepped Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, a Vietnamese missionary from the Society of the Divine Word. On the morning of Pornchai’s flight, Father John contacted me with an offer to provide support and a home for Pornchai upon arrival in Bangkok.

As a teenager in the 1970s, Father John was himself a stranded refugee, one of the infamous “Boat People” forced to flee Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Today he is a priest of heroic virtue, selflessly providing food and sustenance to Vietnamese migrant worker families scattered across Thailand with no ability to earn an income during the global pandemic. But the threads of the Tapestry of God kept intertwining beyond these stone walls.

As Advent began, Fr. Tim Moyle and the people of St. Anne Parish, one of the poorest Catholic parishes in Canada, reached out to me with an Advent project to assist Father John and his people half a world away. I wrote of this profound example of the Gospel of the Widow’s Mite (Luke 21:1-4) in “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.” The good people of Mattawa, Ontario made a great difference. There are many other parishes that are struggling less, and many other opportunities to make such a difference. Lent is coming. Just sayin’.

That post above was not the most read of the year, but for me it was one of the most important posts. It came into being because Fr. Tim Moyle in Ontario had been following Beyond These Stone Walls all year. He was deeply moved by our stories about Pornchai’s progress and his good fortune, brought about by Divine Providence, to become connected to the refugee work of Fr. John Hung Le, SVD.

We devoted nine posts in 2021 to Pornchai’s odyssey. Two of them were written by Pornchai himself who now merits his own Category under “Pornchai Moontri” in the BTSW Public Library. The several posts about him tell a deeply moving and magnificent story of suffering and Divine Providence that has gained notice all over the world. My own favorite among these posts is one I wrote on April 14. It was a real-life version of the Book of Tobit entitled "Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri." And there is a dog involved, and the story is beautiful.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: It is with profound thanks and admiration that I commend Fr. Tim Moyle and the good people of St. Anne Parish in Mattawa, Ontario for their sacrifice and mission of mercy this past Advent. And I hold in equal measure our readers who also responded to this Corporal Work of Mercy. It is not too late to visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page.

I just received this message from Fr. Tim Moyle writing from Mattawa, Ontario:

“Dear Father Gordon and Father John: I just wanted to drop you both a note to tell you that we have reached the $5000 mark in contributions from our parishioners in support of John’s missionary work in Thailand. We will forward the funds shortly after the start of the New Year to allow for any last minute contributions that have yet to be received.

My deepest appreciation to both of you for being so instrumental in focusing my parishioners needs on something beyond our local concerns. It has served as an excellent opportunity for them to appreciate the world-wide reach of our Church, as well as our obligation to support those areas in the world most in need of our assistance. I cannot think of a better Christmas gift to have presented to my community than to have their eyes opened to the realities of our universal ministry as Catholics so that they can truly live out their obligations to the least among us… a requirement for salvation for all who carry the names Christian and Catholic. Thank you so very much for becoming such effective ministers of God’s mercy and love. Wishing you both all the blessings of this festive season of hope.”

Many of our BTSW Readers also took part in this effort and added over $4,500 to the sacrifices of the people of Mattawa. $2,500 of this was earmarked by donors to be added to what was raised for Father John’s Refugee Assistance Foundation, and $2,000 was earmarked to assist with the special challenges faced by Pornchai Moontri while assimilating into his homeland after 30 years in a U.S. prison, 15 of them with me. I am beyond thankful for the response to this effort.

With Blessings for the New Year, Father Gordon MacRae

(Clockwise from upper left in the photos above: Saint Anne Church in Mattawa Ontario, Father Tim Moyle in Mattawa, Father Gordon MacRae in Concord NH, and Father John Hung Le SVD in Bangkok. All collaborating this season for an Advent of the Heart.)

Omertà in a Catholic Chancery — Affidavits Expanded

Silencing the truth is never in the service of the Church. For one wrongly imprisoned priest, the buried truth and uncovered lies have both been crosses to bear.

“Have no fear, for nothing is covered over that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What you hear in the dark utter in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim from the rooftops.”

Matthew 10:26-29

Editor’s Note: The following is Part 2 of a guest post by Father George David Byers, SSL, STD. Part 1, was “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church: Affidavits.”

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Last week here at Beyond These Stone Walls, I presented some examples of a plague of omertà that has arisen in recent decades in the Catholic Church in America. Omertà is an insidious code of silence that can too easily become a part of mob justice, influencing someone to set aside truth in deference to the mob’s preferred or demanded truth. Omertà empowered the mafia, but it has no place in the Catholic Church.

When fearlessly digging into truths that some want to be kept hidden and not shouted from the rooftops, other truths are also necessarily unearthed. Before delving into some truths in the form of some affidavits by courageous people revealed here in Part 1 of this post, I want to tell you a true story. It was revealed to me by the great Pornchai Maximilian Moontri who now dwells in the Kingdom of Thailand.

Pornchai has helped me to understand a truth that is nearly universal among those who have in fact been victims of sexual assault. The only thing that is as obnoxious to them as having been raped is to see their own sufferings capitalized upon by false accusers for money, and by clericalists who make themselves into heroes by paying out settlements with no evidence or due process of law. Priests are too often considered guilty just for being accused.

Pornchai conveyed the story of one day being in the cell alone with Father Gordon. They had been cell mates for about two years then. It was about a year before Father Gordon’s blog began. Father G was reading his mail and said to Pornchai, “This woman wants to know if I am safe here.” Pornchai responded spontaneously and with total sincerity: “Does she mean from us or from other priests?” Then the next letter Father G opened was from a priest of his diocese to whom he had written. The priest returned his letter with a note on the envelope: “Communication with you is neither prudent nor welcome.”

Prison, by nature, is often a violent place. As a child of 12 brought to the State of Maine from a foreign country, Pornchai became a victim of violent sexual abuse. Father Gordon wrote that shocking story in “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.” When Pornchai went to prison at age 18, he dealt with the prison violence in the only way he could. He vowed that he would never again be someone’s victim. So he understandably met violence with violence of his own. It landed him in repeated long years in solitary confinement. After 14 years, Pornchai was transferred to the New Hampshire prison.

(Not long after, PBS Frontline produced a feature about the very solitary confinement cell in which Pornchai had spent years. PBS Frontline “Solitary Nation” should not be missed.)

In New Hampshire, Pornchai ended up in a cell with a man accused and convicted of the very thing that destroyed his life. It did not take him long — with his innate alertness to predation — to discover that Father G had been falsely accused. Pornchai once told me this story that I held off writing until he was out of the prison system:

“One day, I got a notice from the prison mental health department that a new 2O-week program was beginning called ‘Interpersonal Violence.’ My friend Father G thought it might be an opportunity for me so I said I would go if he goes with me. So we both signed up for it. Prison is filled with needy young men who have really broken lives. Some of them look for safe, comfortable older prisoners who might buy them things and take care of them. The result is a sort of mutual exploitation and prisons are filled with this. One young kid, about 19, who was attending the program quickly tried to latch on to Father G without knowing anything about him. I was going to speak with him, but decided to wait.

“Over the next few sessions as I sat next to Father G, I was aware of how this kid was skillfully trying to gain his interest and maneuver his way into his life, but Father G was oblivious to it. Later that night I told him what I observed, but he had no idea what I was talking about. At the next session, Father G and I simply agreed to switch seats. In all his years in prison, Father G has been surrounded by people like this, many of them young drug addicts who would sell their soul for a few bucks for drugs. In all those years, Father G was never observed or even suspected of having any interest in them at all except to show those receptive to it a way out of their prison within a prison.”

The Egregious Double Standard of Justice

There is a lot more to Pornchai’s story of his years with Father Gordon MacRae in prison. As he came to trust Father G, he had a growing awareness of things changing for the better in his life. After a few years, Pornchai made a decision to become a Catholic. He was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday an event related beautifully by Felix Carroll in a chapter in his Divine Mercy Conversion book, Loved, Lost, Found.

In the years to follow, Father Gordon’s writing about Pornchai’s life garnered some attention in both the United States and across the globe, especially in Thailand where that story began. Thanks to Father Gordon’s writing, Pornchai’s tormentor was brought to justice 33 years after he brought destruction to this young man’s life. I am not certain we can actually call it justice, however.

In late 2017, Richard Alan Bailey was arrested at his Oregon home and indicted on forty (40) felony charges of sexual violence against Pornchai at ages 12-14. There was much evidence against him discovered in the form of police reports, school reports, social services battered child reports, medical reports, but none of it ever resulted in action. In September 2018, Richard Alan Bailey entered a plea of “no contest” but was found guilty on all forty counts in a Maine court. Bailey was sentenced to forty years in prison, all suspended, and 18 years probation. He will never serve a single day in prison.

Meanwhile, Pornchai was very much aware that in the neighboring State of New Hampshire, Father Gordon MacRae refused a plea deal that would have resulted in one year in prison, then was found guilty of five charges with no evidence at all and sentenced by a bitterly anti-Catholic judge to 67 years in prison. Pornchai was also aware that Father Gordon’s bishop and diocese stacked the jury with a pre-trial press release pronouncing him guilty of victimizing not only his accusers, but the entire Catholic Church.

Pornchai says that Father G “led by example” when explaining to him that bitterness and resentment over past wounds, however deep, are “like a toxic brew that you put in your own tea, and then drink to your own spiritual peril.”

On that Divine Mercy Sunday when Pornchai was received into the Church in 2010, it just happened to be a day that Bishop John McCormack offered his annual Mass at the Concord, New Hampshire prison. He Confirmed Pornchai in his faith and gave him First Eucharist, but never spoke a single word to Father Gordon. In the prison chapel sacristy after Mass, Pornchai shook Bishop McCormack’s hand. “You have a good friend,” said the Bishop who had read the accounts of Pornchai’s life. “You have a good priest,” Pornchai responded.

Father Gordon saw to it that Pornchai came into the Catholic faith with eyes open about the meaning and power of both sin and grace. “If these events had not happened to me,” Father Gordon said, “Pornchai and I would have never met.” He challenged Pornchai to rise above resentment, and it was in the rising that they both found grace. This was a story, however, in which the insidious practice of Omertà, that evil code of silence that I wrote about here last week, has played a destructive role. In First Things magazine in 2008, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote:

“The Bishop and the Diocese of Manchester do not come off as friends of justice, or, for that matter, of elementary decency. You may want to read this Kafkaesque tale then you may want to pray for Fr. MacRae, and for a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”

— A Kafkaesque Tale

Affidavits Expanded

In my first installment of this post, “A Code of Silence in the U.S. Catholic Church,” I revealed two affidavits prepared by a New Hampshire lawyer and a senior executive of PBS which produces the award-winning investigative news program Frontline. The affidavits were entirely independent from each other. They describe meetings with former Diocese of Manchester Bishop, the late John McCormack. To recap, the following are the most pertinent statements in these affidavits:

From the Affidavit of Attorney Eileen A. Nevins:

“In June of 2000, I met with New Hampshire Bishop John McCormack at the Diocesan office .… During this meeting with Bishop McCormack and [Auxiliary] Bishop Francis Christian, they both expressed to me their belief that Father MacRae was not guilty of the crimes for which he was incarcerated.”

From the Affidavit of Leo P. Demers:

“During October 2000, I met with Bishop John McCormack at the Diocesan office in Manchester, New Hampshire .... The meeting with Bishop McCormack began with him saying, ‘Understand, none of this is to leave this office. I believe Father MacRae is not guilty and his accusers likely lied. There is nothing I can do to change the verdict.’”

Fortunately, Mr. Demers prepared careful notes immediately following his meeting. They provide a most helpful context for what was going on in the background in the Diocese of Manchester at the time. The transcript is fascinating, and I begin it here with the initial telephone call to Auxiliary Bishop Francis Christian at the Manchester Chancery office:

LEO DEMERS: “I am calling from WGBH-TV in Boston ... I am concerned that Fr. Gordon MacRae was being considered as a feature story for Frontline here on PBS. Since you are the only person left in the Chancery Office who was there at the time of the accusations and trial ... I would like to meet with you to discuss the matter.”

[Note from Father Byers: Just four months earlier, but unknown by Mr. Demers, Bishop Christian attended a meeting with Bishop McCormack and Attorney Eileen Nevins. At that meeting, as per the affidavit of Attorney Nevins above, Bishop Christian was quite clear in his view that Father MacRae was not guilty. Did something happen in the interim? Given his stacking of the jury in his 1993 pre-trial press release, was he intimidated by someone in the news media? Read on … ]

BISHOP CHRISTIAN: “This is not my responsibility. I have nothing to do with that. You will have to speak with Bishop McCormack.”

LEO DEMERS: “But you were part of what happened at that time and would have firsthand knowledge of all that occurred. Bishop McCormack was in Boston when all this happened.”

BISHOP CHRISTIAN: “You will have to speak with Bishop McCormack. He is the one who is responsible. I can arrange for you to have a meeting with him.”

LEO DEMERS: “I would rather meet with you.”

BISHOP CHRISTIAN: “Bishop McCormack handles all such inquiries. You will have to call him yourself or I can arrange a meeting with him for you.”

[ Note from Father Byers: Mr. Demers noted that he would be in Israel and the Middle East for the next two weeks. His notes indicate that a meeting was scheduled with Bishop McCormack for October 13, 2000, and that Father MacRae knew nothing of this planned meeting. He writes that upon arrival at the Chancery he was escorted to Bishop McCormack’s office. The Bishop spoke first: ]

BISHOP McCORMACK: “I don’t want any of this to leave this office because I have struggles with some people in the Chancery office that are not consistent with my thoughts, but I firmly believe that Father MacRae is innocent and should not be in prison.”

[Note from Father Byers: Mr. Demers then wrote in his notes: “This knocked the wind out of my sails. It seems to me that the wrongful imprisonment of Fr. Gordon is ongoing. Those concerned with this matter could be subpoenaed by a court of law or by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).” The transcript continued: ]

LEO DEMERS: “You know why I am here. I assume Bishop Christian has informed you of our phone conversation and my desire to speak with him. You are a busy man. Bishop Christian has firsthand knowledge of the events surrounding Fr. MacRae’s incarceration.”

BISHOP McCORMACK: “He was tried and found guilty.”

LEO DEMERS: “With all due respect, your Excellency, I was there and you were not. There was nobody present representing the Manchester Diocese.”

BISHOP McCORMACK: “I mentioned to you that I believe he is innocent. I plan on meeting with him when I visit the prison during the coming Christmas season and I will discuss this.”

LEO DEMERS: “You said that your hands were tied because of your belief in his innocence. How can you help him?”

BISHOP McCORMACK: “I want to do what I can to make his life more bearable under the circumstances of prison life. I cannot reverse the decision of the court system. What can I do?”

LEO DEMERS: “It is not a flawless judicial system. Many innocent people fall through its cracks. Correcting an injustice is a formidable task and Fr. Gordon does not have the resources to even begin the process.”

Epilogue: The Spin

The promised Christmas meeting with Father MacRae in prison never took place. On February 15, 2002, Bishop McCormack, Bishop Christian, and Father Edward Arsenault held a press conference to release the names of all priests of the Diocese who were “credibly accused.” Father MacRae was not on that list. (That scene is depicted in the graphic atop this post with, left to right, Father Edward J. Arsenault, Bishop Francis X. Christian, and the late Bishop John B. McCormack at the podium.)

Over the course of the next year, many “confidential” memos passed between Bishop McCormack, Father Edward Arsenault, and various attorneys for the Diocese. Father MacRae was privy to none of them. Father Arsenault, who oversaw all lawsuit settlements for the Diocese, had an egregious conflict of interest in that he was simultaneously Chairman of the Board of the National Catholic Risk Retention Group providing oversight of insurance settlements for Catholic institutions across the country. At some point, he took over communications with Father MacRae on behalf of the bishop.

Father MacRae was never told of the above affidavits and did not know of Bishop McCormack’s statements about his belief in MacRae’s innocence and wrongful incarceration. A major sticking point in the various subsequent exchanges from the Bishop’s office was a demand that Father MacRae cease all contact with Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal, submit to the Diocese a list of the names of everyone with whom he has discussed this matter, and agree in writing to limit all future contacts only to those approved by Diocesan officials. He was also asked to agree to appeal only his sentence and not his conviction, and to allow Father Arsenault to choose his legal counsel. Father MacRae rejected those conditions.

After The Wall Street Journal published an explosive series of articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Father MacRae case in 2005 and again in 2013, Father never again heard from any official of his diocese with the exception of letters described below.

In 2008, Bishop McCormack wrote in a letter to an advocate of Father MacRae denying that he ever stated a belief that Father MacRae is innocent and should not be in prison. In 2009, Father Edward Arsenault became Monsignor Edward Arsenault and assumed a $160,000 per year position as Executive Director of the St. Luke Institute in Maryland where Bishop McCormack served on the Board of Directors. In 2015 he went to prison for embezzlement and forgery. Among the documents he is now suspected of forging were letters to the Holy See about the MacRae case.

Monsignor Arsenault was subsequently dismissed from the clerical state by Pope Francis. He has since changed his name to Edward J. Bolognini.

Bishop Peter A. Libasci, the current Bishop of Manchester, has, to this day, not once allowed Father MacRae to speak of this case in his own defense. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote of the unconscionable statements in this regard by the diocesan spokesman in “The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae.”

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Please share this post and review these related posts:

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald

The Trials of Father MacRae — The Wall Street Journal

Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Father George David Byers, SSL, STD is a parish priest in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, a chaplain to law enforcement, and a Missionary of Mercy appointed by Pope Francis for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, a position the Holy Father has extended to the present day. Father Byers writes at the faithful and bold Catholic blog, Arise! Let Us Be Going!

From the BTSW Editor: Ryan A. MacDonald has a new post at A RAM in the Thicket that impacts both Father Gordon MacRae and this blog. Please read “At the Catholic Media Association, Bias and a Double Standard.”

Monsignor Arsenault served two years of a four-to-twenty year sentence with the remainder suspended. He is depicted here shaking hands with his prosecutor from the NH Attorney General’s Office after accepting a plea bargain.

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

Silencing truth is never in service to the Church. No priest should ever have been sacrificed on the altars of tort lawyers, insurers, or a predatory news media.

(Pictured above: The Chancery Office of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire.)

November 10, 2021

Editor’s Note: The following is Part 1 of a two-part post by Father George David Byers, SSL, STD, parish priest, chaplain to law enforcement, an accomplished theologian, and a Missionary of Mercy appointed by Pope Francis for the Year of Mercy, a position extended by the Holy Father to the present day. Father Byers writes of how a code of silence has inhibited justice in the case of Fr. Gordon MacRae.

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This post has spent a long time being written. I first wrote it, or rather one quite like it, a decade ago for my now retired blog, Holy Souls Hermitage. Its purpose now is to bring the abuse crisis full circle. It is about an ongoing abuse of power in the Church. It is about the replacement of one abuse with another.

The same abuse of power in which youngsters were abused is the same abuse of power in which guilty priests were moved from parish to parish with omertà, that evil code of silence. It is also the same abuse of power which, when caught out today, will feign heroism by throwing merely accused priests out of the priesthood or into prison with no presumption of actual innocence. It is the same abuse of power which will cover up actual innocence for the sake of self-referential self-congratulations, ad infinitum.

It is this self-referential element in the Church that Pope Francis once said he wants to bring to its knees in repentance and conversion to our Lord Jesus Christ. Just because actual cases of contemporary sexual abuse have wound down to zero, as they have today, does not necessarily mean that anything has changed. Until the abuse of power changes, it is all the same. It is manifested in omertà.

Omertà is a mafioso term with its origin in 13th Century Sicily. It refers to a code of silence practiced by the mafia, a highly organized crime syndicate with a strong hierarchy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it spread to the United States. Of interest, the original meaning of omertà was connected to “humility.” To practice a code of silence required the humility to set aside one’s own truth in deference to the organization’s preferred or demanded truth. It has no place in a Catholic setting.

The Late John Brendan McCormack

Four years after Father Gordon MacRae was convicted in a sham trial and sent to prison, Auxiliary Bishop John Brendan McCormack of the Archdiocese of Boston was appointed by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to serve as Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire. Complicating this story somewhat, Bishop McCormack passed away in a Manchester, New Hampshire Catholic nursing home just weeks before I began to write this article. From his prison cell, Father Gordon offered Mass for him. Father Gordon had some concern about the timing of this post, but the truth has its own life and must not be buried with anyone.

Bishop McCormack became a part of the code of silence practiced in his new diocese, but there were signs that he may not have been an entirely willing one, at least, not at first. Back in Boston, Bishop McCormack had been instrumental in seeking the administrative laicization of Boston priest and notorious abuser, Father John Geoghan. Later, Geoghan was brutally murdered in prison, in part due to the publicity that his dismissal from the clerical state brought about.

In 1998, at the time of Bishop McCormack’s appointment as Bishop of Manchester, he received a letter from Mr. Leo Demers, a senior official from WGBH-TV in Boston, a flagship production house for PBS public television. Mr. Demers revealed that he was present for much of the 1994 trial of Father Gordon MacRae. He expressed concern that this was not a fair trial and any dismissal from the priesthood could not justly be based upon its outcome.

Bishop McCormack responded that he was unfamiliar with the case, but is aware of no plan in the diocese to seek Father MacRae’s dismissal. He pledged to begin an investigation of the matter to determine what, if anything, he could do. There were also some media rumblings at the time. An organization known as the National Justice Committee worked with FOX News to review Father MacRae’s trial, but prison officials blocked these contacts. A Fox News representative appealed to then Governor Jeanne Shaheen, now U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) who responded:

“I understand your organization’s interest in the matter of Gordon MacRae, now an inmate in the NH prison, but I will not interfere with the decision not to allow media access to Mr. MacRae.”

— 1999 letter of Gov. Shaheen

The Wall Street Journal

It is likely that a file on the case was then sent from FOX News to The Wall Street Journal. Later in 1999, a correspondence ensued between Father MacRae and Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on the WSJ Editorial Board who opened an inquiry on the case. The Diocese of Manchester suddenly became much more interested in the fate of Father MacRae. Then, in 2000, Bishop McCormack was approached by New Hampshire attorney Eileen Nevins who also had been present throughout the MacRae trial. Ms. Nevins later produced the following sworn affidavit:

Affidavit of Eileen Nevins, Esq:

1. “My name is Eileen A. Nevins and I am an attorney licensed to practice in the State of New Hampshire and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

2. I met Reverend Gordon MacRae in the early 1980s when he was an associate priest assigned to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish in Hampton, New Hampshire.

3. On or about 1994, while still a law student, I became aware of charges of sexual misconduct filed against Gordon MacRae. I contacted his . . . attorney, Ron Koch, to offer my assistance in doing any legal research that may assist Father MacRae in New Hampshire.

4. Upon acting in a clerk capacity for Attorney Koch I became firmly convinced that the charges against Father MacRae were false and brought for financial gain.

5. I believe now as I believed during his trial that the charges against him are false and have assisted him however possible in obtaining further legal assistance to address the wrong against him. My belief is based on personal knowledge of the case against Father MacRae acquired during the investigation prior to his trial and my ongoing pursuit and review of the investigation into his situation subsequent to his trial and incarceration.

6. In June of 2000, I met with New Hampshire Bishop McCormack at the Diocesan office in Manchester, New Hampshire to discuss the possibility of the Diocese offering some financial assistance to obtain an appellate relief.

7. During this meeting with Bishop McCormack and [Auxiliary] Bishop Francis Christian, they both expressed to me their belief that Father MacRae was not guilty of the crimes for which he was incarcerated and that Bishop McCormack would consider offering some financial aid to assist with a legal defense.

8. In follow-up correspondence with the Bishop, I stated that it was my understanding that the Diocese would now consider financial aid to retain an attorney to assist in [Fr.] Gordon’s appeal.

9. I had been working with Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal and she recommended Attorney Robert Rosenthal to assist with the appeal.

10. Due to the unforeseen events of clergy abuse scandals in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the Bishop subsequently failed to act on his offer of assistance. It is my understanding that Bishop McCormack has transmitted Father MacRae’s case to the Vatican for disposition.”

Signed and sworn by Eileen A. Nevins, Esq. 18 October 2005.

Falling Towers and Fallen Hope

Father MacRae knew nothing about the above affidavit or the meetings it described until years after it was issued in 2005. In the interim, there were many setbacks and disappointments. After two years of gathering evidence from prison and submitting reams of documentation to The Wall Street Journal, the imprisoned priest learned that all had been destroyed along with The Wall Street Journal offices in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

He would have to start over, and he was not certain that he could. Meanwhile, a series of correspondence began between Father MacRae, Bishop John McCormack, and the Diocesan Moderator of the Curia and Delegate for Ministerial Conduct, Father Edward J. Arsenault.

Without ever telling Father MacRae of his stated belief in his innocence, Bishop McCormack and Father Arsenault appeared to make their offer of legal assistance contingent upon the priest’s assent to curtail his contacts with Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal. This effort to sever any media contact was clear in a series of confidential memos between the Bishop and Father Arsenault. These memos were later released as part of an Attorney General grand jury report in the diocese in 2003. (In 2019, Father MacRae described this report and its consequences in “Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester.”)

The internal memos and the Bishop’s correspondence also set other conditions. Father MacRae was asked to agree to allow the Diocese to choose his legal counsel. He also had to agree that he would appeal only his sentence and not his convictions. Father MacRae refused these conditions, and then the matter went silent. The account of what transpired at this time was stunning. It was revealed by Ryan A. MacDonald in “The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence.” It was a classic example of omertà.

However, Attorney Nevins was not the only one with an affidavit. Enter Leo Demers, the PBS executive who earlier wrote to Bishop McCormack in 1998 with a concern about the fairness of Father MacRae’s trial. He, too, was summoned to a meeting with Bishop McCormack in 2000, six months after the Bishop’s meeting with Attorney Eileen Nevins. At the time, Mr. Demers was Director of Engineering for WGBH-TV in Boston which produced, among other PBS programming, the award-winning investigative journalism program, Frontline. This affidavit and the dialogue that follows is an eye-opener:

Affidavit of Leo P. Demers, Jr.

“The purpose of this affidavit at this time is to convey the context and substance of a meeting by me with Bishop John McCormack during which he expressed his belief in the innocence of the charges against Fr. Gordon MacRae that led to his conviction and subsequent imprisonment for the past twelve years.

1. My name is Leo P. Demers, Jr. and I have been a broadcast engineer in New England since 1962. I am a practicing Catholic.

2. I first met Reverend Gordon MacRae in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s when he was a Franciscan Friar in Novitiate training at the former St. Anthony’s Capuchin Friary in Hudson, New Hampshire.

3. During 1994, I visited Father MacRae in New Mexico where he was working in ministry. At that time Father MacRae informed me that criminal charges of sexual misconduct with a minor had been filed against him in New Hampshire.

4. I believe now, as I testified under oath during the sentencing phase of his trial in Keene, New Hampshire, that the charges against him are false.

5. During October 2000, I met with Bishop John McCormack at the Diocesan office in Manchester, New Hampshire. At the time, my employer, the WGBH Educational Foundation, wanted to produce a segment of Frontline. This production would have resulted in a national story about Father MacRae. Auxiliary Bishop Francis Christian arranged the meeting with Bishop McCormack.

6. I had contacted assistant Bishop Francis Christian from my office at WGBH to inquire about the story because he was the only person in the Manchester Chancery Office who was present during the time of the accusations against Father MacRae. Bishop Christian wanted nothing to do with my inquiry regarding Father MacRae but did offer to arrange a meeting with Bishop McCormack.

7. The meeting with Bishop McCormack began with him saying, ‘Understand, none of this is to leave this office. I believe Father MacRae is not guilty and his accusers likely lied. There is nothing I can do to change the verdict.’

8. I have recently learned that Bishop McCormack submitted an expert report to Rome. This report purportedly concludes that Father MacRae’s trial was fair and his sentence just. Further, this report avers that no avenue of appeal is available to Father MacRae. Since I have been in contact with various professionals representing Father MacRae, who are actively involved in investigating his case and prosecuting an appeal, I believe any expert opinion submitted by the Diocese of Manchester to be subject to challenge and serious defect.

9. I am motivated to submit this affidavit, obviously in disregard of any confidentiality requested by Bishop McCormack, because I cannot accept the inconsistency between Bishop McCormack’s statements to me regarding Father MacRae’s innocence and his submission of an expert report to the contrary that is in clear opposition to his stated belief.”

Signed and sworn by Leo P. Demers, 13 February 2005.

Those with Ears to Hear but Hear Not (Ezekiel 12:2)

Anyone familiar with all that remained hidden in this story might readily understand the hesitance of Auxiliary Bishop Francis Christian to be involved in that meeting with Leo Demers. It was Bishop Christian who penned a pre-trial press release of the Diocese which had the effect of stacking the jury against Father Gordon:

“The Church has also been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals have been. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

Editing out any mention of mere allegations serves to mask the complete lack of any evidence behind this case. This point was made in yet another affidavit, that of FBI Special Agent Supervisor James Abbott, now retired. He had one of the more spectacular FBI careers in the Bureau’s history. David F. Pierre, Jr., Moderator of The Media Report, performed a public service when he analyzed and summarized the vast documentation on this case available at the website of the National Center for Reason and Justice. David F. Pierre’s summary is available at The Media Report under the title, “Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest.” Among that evidence is an affidavit of Special Agent James Abbott who concluded:

“In the entirety of my three-year investigation of this matter, I found no evidence that MacRae committed these crimes or any crimes. Indeed, the only ‘evidence’ was [Thomas] Grover’s stories that have since been undermined by his family and others who surrounded him at the time he made his claims.”

There is a very necessary Part 2 to this post that will hopefully be forthcoming soon. There is much more to this story, and to the practice of omertà that fueled it. Fortunately — or perhaps not so much for those bent on blindly assuming this priest’s guilt — the Holy See has not seen fit to remove him from priesthood. At one point, officials there asked for copies of the affidavits contained herein. That speaks well of them. Perhaps omertà is not as widespread as some believe.

There has nonetheless been a grave injustice here. Whatever one might conclude about the case against Father Gordon MacRae, he has never been allowed a defense — not in his trial, not in any appeals, and not at all before the one person charged with the defense of truth: his bishop. Bishop John McCormack retired and now has passed away. Father Edward Arsenault became Monsignor Edward Arsenault, then went to prison for financial misdeeds. Now he has a new life and a new name, Edward J. Bolognini.

In 2011, Bishop Peter A. Libasci became Bishop of Manchester. Whatever story he might have inherited about this matter, he has never allowed himself to hear a single word from the imprisoned Father Gordon MacRae speaking in his own defense. Whether he has reviewed any of the vast evidence of fraud in this case is entirely unknown, but that would require an open mind.

In July, 2021, Bishop Libasci was himself accused of sexual abuse stemming from his ministry as a priest in the Diocese of Rockville Center, New York in 1983, the same year as the accusations against Father MacRae. Ironically, from his prison cell, Father MacRae has presented a spirited and rational defense, linked below, for why the case against his bishop is not “credible” at all.

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Editor’s Note: Next at Beyond These Stone Walls Father George David Byers will present Part 2 of this article. Father George David Byers holds a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and Rome, and a Doctor of Sacred Theology degree from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.

Please share this post. You may also wish to read the following:

Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

The Trials of Father MacRae by Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ

The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

Shunned by some Catholic media, wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae appears prominently in the Prison Journal of Cardinal George Pell published by Ignatius Press.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald author of “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?”

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October 13, 2021

I was incensed recently to learn of the treatment one of Fr Gordon MacRae’s most important recent posts received from a purportedly Catholic online venue. His eye-opening post, “A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America,” was typed, as he described it, “ten minutes at a time here and there” on whatever typewriter wasn’t already in use in the prison library where he works. He had to type half on one machine and the rest on another. He finished it seconds before a deadline for getting it into the mail on time.

And it was a blockbuster, shared to date about 5,000 times on Facebook alone. Some 800 members of Linkedin read it. Over the next week, thousands came to it from around the Globe, including many thousands in the United States. Many who read that post learned of Father G for the first time and were aghast at the story it told.

Then the heavy hammer of jaundiced Catholic judgment fell. With the help of a friend outside, that post was shared at the r/Catholicism community at Reddit which boasts some 129,000 members. A multitude of positive comments poured in, and then suddenly stopped. On September 28, Father MacRae received this message read to him in prison from his Gmail inbox. It was from the unnamed r/Catholicism moderator at Reddit:

“You are permanently banned from participating in r/Catholicism. You can still view and subscribe, but you won’t be allowed to post or comment. Due to the nature of your participation, we cannot permit you to continue participating in the r/Catholicism community.”

This suppression of a much respected voice in the public square is shameful and merciless. I cannot see any difference between this and recent decisions at Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon to cancel voices that do not stick to an established media narrative. The fact that this suppression was done in the name of a self-described Catholic community is an outrage, especially given the conditions under which this priest has to write.

Fr Stuart MacDonald, JCL, the Canon Law advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls, attempted to engage the r/Catholicism moderator with a statement that, despite his imprisonment, Fr MacRae is quite widely considered to be innocent of his charges, has not been dismissed from the clerical state, and has earned the respect of thousands of Catholics including priests and bishops.

Father MacDonald’s intervention was simply ignored.

The Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

Now contrast this treatment with that from another prominent Catholic voice in the public square, that of Cardinal George Pell. Formerly the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, Cardinal Pell had been appointed by Pope Francis to serve as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy of the Holy See and the Vatican Council of Cardinals, a body of eight close advisors to the pope.

Then, like Father MacRae, Cardinal Pell was tragically accused of “historic” sexual abuse alleged to have occurred decades earlier in Australia. Also like Father MacRae, he was convicted in a sham trial without evidence despite a multitude of inconsistency and fraud surrounding his trial. This, too, was a case shamelessly tried in the media before it ever got to a court of law. The 78-year-old prelate was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on March 13, 2019. It was, as was the Father MacRae trial, a case of prosecutorial “Trophy Justice.”

On November 3, 1170, King Henry II raged in public against Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The latter had rightly challenged the King’s claim to ultimate authority over Catholic affairs and the discipline of priests. When the King asked aloud, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” four of his guards took it upon themselves to murder Becket during Mass in the Canterbury Cathedral.

Not that much has changed in a thousand years. Unlike most other Catholic journalists, I am no longer going to make any reference to the “abuse crisis” in the Church. It is now the “accuse crisis” in the Church. Any priest can be “gotten rid of” by a mere accusation of uncorroborated sexual impropriety dating back decades. It is, as Father MacRae described in a stand-out article at Linkedin, “A Weapon of Mass Destruction: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.”

Many thinking people long suspected, and now know without a doubt, that Cardinal George Pell was entirely innocent of the claims against him. Following a first failed appeal, he served 13 months in the harshness of prison in solitary confinement before sanity returned to Australian justice. Finally, in a unanimous 7-to-0 decision, he was exonerated by the Australian High Court. The victory was not just his alone, but that of the entire Church too long held hostage by the “accuse crisis.”

During his time in prison, Cardinal Pell kept a journal that today has been hailed as a masterpiece of prison writing in the ranks of Saint Paul of Tarsus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Father Walter Ciszek, and Saint Thomas More. Archbishop Charles Chaput described the Pell journal with clarity:

“Two lessons emerge from this astonishing work. The first is the length to which a hate-filled judicial process will go against an innocent man. The second is the power of a good man’s endurance in the face of humiliation and poisonous deceit.”

— Archbishop Charles Chaput

Echoing that long before even hearing it, Father MacRae wrote from his own prison cell his first of several articles about this story in defense of Cardinal Pell. He said he wonders today if Cardinal Pell was even aware of his first post about the state of Australian justice: “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial and So Is Australia.”

Today back in Rome, Cardinal Pell might understandably have every reason to want to distance himself from the grave injustice that befell him, and from the “accuse crisis” in the Church that ensnared him and paved the way for his wrongful conviction. In this, he was not alone. I don’t think there was anyone, except perhaps the Cardinal himself, who pondered and prayed over this injustice more than the wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae. So what a shock it was to him when he learned that while in prison Cardinal George Pell had pondered his plight as well.

The following is an excerpt from Prison Journal Volume 2 by George Cardinal Pell (Ignatius Press, 2021):

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From the prison cell of Cardinal Pell - Friday, 2 August 2019:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australian media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr MacRae recounts the extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].

"The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.

“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from BTSW ‘About’],

‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”

— George Cardinal Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 58-60

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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post from Ryan A. MacDonald. After the harsh condemnation Fr MacRae received from rCatholicism at Reddit, he and we were grateful to learn that a recent article from Beyond These Stone Walls received a commendation in the October 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The citation was for “exposing with clarity the double standard applied when priests are accused.” The article receiving the citation was: Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

You may also like these other posts from Ryan A. MacDonald:

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

You may also wish to see our new feature on the BTSW Menu: Voices from Beyond.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Readers may recall that Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL, is the volunteer Canon Law advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls. He was also the subject of a post in July, 2021 entitled “Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests.” Father Stuart has since received the approval of his bishop to commence a doctoral degree program in Canon Law. We want to congratulate Father Stuart in this important development and the recognition of his expertise for which we hope to soon be a beneficiary. Please keep Father Stuart in prayer as he pursues this exhaustive program in addition to his parochial ministry.