Listen to Our Mother: Mary and the Fatima Century

The century since the Miracle of Fatima in 1917 saw an explosion of Marian devotion throughout the world. For me, one skeptic priest, resistance was futile.

Back in May, 2017, Mother’s Day in the United States was on the day after the 100th anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady of Fatima which occurred on May 13, 1917. There was a lot taking place in preparation for the observance of that day, but very little of it was available to me. Months earlier I received a wonderful letter from Annie Karto, a Catholic songwriter and music composer. She had composed a beautiful song entitled “Rise Up All People,” and she performed it in 2016 as part of a special Divine Mercy production that included a slide presentation. She wanted me to know that I was a part of that presentation and that she was dedicating the song to me. She wanted to send me a link to the video so I could hear it and see the presentation. I was most grateful to her but there was simply no format available to me in prison to make that happen.

For the previous 23 years, I had been living in what was widely understood here to be punitive housing. I was told that it was because I do not admit guilt. So for 23 years I just endured it. I endured it far longer than any other prisoner. For half of those years, Pornchai Moontri lived in a cell with me. As you know, some very important things took place in those years that were filled with grace personally inspired by Saint Maximilian Kolbe who pointed us always to the Immaculata.

During a Divine Mercy workshop in the prison chapel that year, one of the volunteers from the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy told me that Concord, NH has a Catholic radio station. I had no idea. The only radio available for purchase where I happened to be living was a small hand-held model manufactured by Sangean and sold to prisoners here for just under $50. It was a pricey item considering that there are many radios for a fraction of that price, but in prison we had no other options. I decided against the purchase because the world of concrete and steel where we lived blocked out most radio signals. So why would anyone here buy a radio? That was a question I was asking myself even as I filled out the order form to send to a friend who wanted to order one for me from a catalog of items approved for prisoners. At the time, I needed other things more than a radio. I had holes in my socks but for reasons I do not understand to this very day, a friend was insistent that I have a radio. So when my radio arrived, I installed two AAA batteries, tuned into the FM frequency that carried the signal for Ave Maria Radio, and heard nothing but disappointing static.

So in mid May 2017, the morning of Mother’s Day, the day after hearing all that static on my new radio, Pornchai and I went outside to the prison Ball Field. He was pitching for a baseball game that day, and I just wanted to walk the perimeter of the field. On our way there, after we had passed through several locked doors and barriers, Pornchai said, “Why don’t you bring your radio?” So I rushed back through multiple barriers, patiently waiting at each for unseen entities to buzz me through a multitude of electronic locks. I got back to our cell, grabbed the radio, and reversed the process of waiting at each of the locked doors.

I made it back to the Ball Field just as the last door was about to slam shut. I walked toward the back of the field, took my radio out of my pocket, and unraveled its earbud headphones. It was still tuned to the local Catholic station from which I heard only static the night before. At the moment it came alive in the Ball Field, I heard the voice of Teresa Tomeo say, “Our guest today is Catholic singer and songwriter Annie Karto to discuss her latest CD, ‘Rise Up All Peoples.’” And then I heard for the first time Annie’s now famous song. I had imagined that song in my mind many times, but never heard it. Months before, Annie Karto, produced a video for that song for a national conference on Divine Mercy, and the video included, among many images, a photograph of me from an article for the Year of Mercy entitled “The Doors that Have Unlocked.”

Having neither seen nor heard any of this before, I could only imagine it until that morning outside when I had the right receptor at just the right time to hear the music play. My friend, Pornchai Moontri was on the pitcher’s mound in a game when he stopped to wonder why I was standing mesmerized and immobilized at the far outfield.

Click or tap image to play Annie Karto’s 4-minute presentation of “Rise Up All People.”

Listening to Mary with the Right Receptors

When that was over, and Teresa Tomeo’s Catholic Connection had signed off for the day, I had another five minutes out in the field. I continued listening to a call-in show about Scripture. The first caller was a man who identified himself as a fallen away Catholic who is now a Protestant Evangelical. He said that he left the Church because of the Catholic focus on Mary as “a conduit of grace” which, he seemed to believe, is not supported by Biblical truth.

At that moment, my new radio just stopped working. It died two months after I received it. I tried everything to get it working again, but to no avail. I cannot return it, and given its limited use (outside only) I could not justify buying a new one. So now I just walk in the Ball Field in silence. But I have the strangest sense that I heard the things that I was supposed to hear when I had the right receptor to hear them. I do not know how the Catholic radio commentators responded to the Evangelical’s concern about Mary, but the answer came to me immediately. I was thunderstruck by it, and by how little thought I had ever given to this before.

The basis of religious authority for Evangelical Protestants is “Sola Scriptura,” Latin for “Scripture Alone.” The concept embraces not just Biblical authority, but also a deeply held belief in Biblical inerrancy. Both notions clearly support Catholic belief in the role of Mary in Salvation History. It’s a truth that I was once deaf to as well, because I did not employ the right receptors to hear it. There was a time as a younger priest inspired only by science, when I scoffed at notions such as Marian apparitions at Fatima. But I have come to understand that such things are highly valued in our life of faith, less by the events themselves and more by their impact on our spiritual history. I was a little slow in my heart to come to understand Mary in our life of faith as Catholics. I knew all that there was to know about her, but I did not know her. I did not “hear” Mary because I did not have inner receptors tuned to her. The deep reverence that Catholics hold for Mary, and the notion that she can be, and has been, an emissary from Heaven and a conduit of grace make total sense.

The appearances of Mary in the Gospel are like bookends for the story of salvation. Her first appearance — in the Gospel of Saint Luke (1:26-56) — opens with an angelic declaration that is unprecedented in all of Sacred Scripture:

“In the sixth month the Angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.’”

— Luke 1:26-28

Scripture contains 326 references to angelic appearances between the fall of Adam and the Resurrection of Christ. This brief passage in the Gospel of Luke is the first and only place where an angel refers to a human person with a title instead of a name. And the title — rendered “full of grace” in its English translation — is fascinating.

The term appears in only one other place, the Book of Acts of the Apostles which was also authored by Saint Luke. It’s a reference to Stephen who would become Christianity’s first martyr: “Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). However, these English translations of the term fail to capture the full meaning the Evangelist intended. In Saint Luke’s original Greek, the terms have very different meanings.

In the case of Stephen, the original Greek words of Luke for “full of grace” were “plērēs charitos.” You can see in this the Greek roots of the word “charity.” But in the angel’s reference to Mary, a very different Greek term was used to convey the words, “full of grace.” It was a title much more than a trait. The Greek term Saint Luke used is “kecharitomēnē,” a far more revealing concept. It refers not just to a facet of her character, as in the case of Stephen, but of her essence. “Kecharitomēnē” refers to a prior action of God in which Mary was “graced” in the sense of her being a “vessel” in multiple tenses — past, present, and future — who is instilled with divine life, a soul that magnifies the Lord.

This does not mean that Mary was divine. It means that God prepared her from the moment of her conception. Some English translations use the term “highly favored one” instead of “full of grace” in the Angel’s greeting, but this in no way captures the truth of the Evangelist’s meaning which is far more profound than “favor.” It is closer to “innate holiness.” Saint Luke’s unique Greek title became the Scriptural basis for the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It points not to a trait of Mary’s character, but to a revelation of her lifelong holiness and unique place in Salvation History as the Mother of both the Redeemer and the redeemed — the new Eve.

In the angelic declaration to Mary (Luke 1:28) the next phrase is rendered in English, “the Lord is with you.” Its more proper sense is, “the Lord is within you.” Her Greek title, “Theotokos,” literally “Mother of God,” was defined at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431 and reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium (53). For the entire life of the Church, Mary has been venerated — not worshipped, but venerated — as the Mother of God. This is a theological truth that I described in “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Miracles of Fatima

I owe a debt today to the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, stewards of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I wrote of this debt, and of my all-too-human resistance to their great gift, in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare.” That debt was deepened in 2022. That is when the Church marked the 100th anniversary of our Blessed Mother’s first of six appearances to three small shepherd children in the village of Fatima, Portugal. She appeared to them in this little known, out-of-the-way village in Portugal as World War One raged on all around them. It was the time of what Pope Benedict XV (not XVI) described as “the suicide of Europe.” It was at this very time that Mary reentered human history to convey a message through the smallest of voices in a most insignificant place. Then it echoed with ever increasing volume across the century to follow.

I had never fully understood the apparitions at Fatima. My scientific mind with its natural skepticism had always been in the way, making real moments of grace hard won for me. But now I think, for the first time in my life, I understand what happened at Fatima commencing on May 13, 1917 and the 13th of each of five months to follow. And thanks to Fr Michael Gaitley’s book The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, I finally understand Fatima’s meaning in the context of faith and in the context of human history.

My understanding has also been greatly aided by a wonderful gift by a superb Catholic writer and friend of Beyond These Stone Walls, Felix Carroll. You have met Felix Carroll in these pages before. He is the Executive Editor of Marian Helper magazine, which has published two major articles about my friend Pornchai Moontri’s Divine Mercy conversion and my place in that remarkable story. Felix is also the author of the great Divine Mercy book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions with a chapter about the life of Pornchai.

As I was pondering how to approach a post about the Fatima Century, I quickly found myself wading into waters I am only now beginning to sound for spiritual depth. Knowing the facts is one thing, but knowing the necessary story under the story is quite another. The Spring 2017 issue of Marian Helper with a cover entitled “Fatima: 100 Years Later” filled in a lot of the blanks for me. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. Its centerpiece is an amazing article by Felix Carroll entitled, “Fatima. The Place. The Message.” I am simply in awe of his achievement. I urge you to visit Marian Helper and read Felix Carroll’s outstanding writing, his historical analysis, and the depth of his understanding of the message and miracle of Fatima — all in just a few very readable pages.

In 2017, at the behest of Fr Michael Gaitley and Felix Carroll, I wrote an article about the journeys of both me and Pornchai Moontri into the Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The article was, “Behold Your Son, Behold Your Mother!” Felix told me that it “ lit up the Marians’ website as never before.” It was not me and Pornchai who got the attention of so many people. It was her. It is no mystery in our troubled time that so many are finally coming to listen to our Mother. After writing the article I received this brief reflection from an Evangelical Protestant college student:

“I finally get it! I am a college student and a lifelong Protestant. I never understood the Catholic connection to Mary until I read this. Thanks to this I finally understand Mary and her place in the life of faith.”

+ + +

Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Please honor our Mother by sharing this post. You will behold her place in history as never before by reading and sharing with others another amazing post written for Beyond These Stone Walls and LifeSite News by Craig Turner entitled:

“How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis”

The 100th Anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima can be seen through a lens of history. Journalist and historian Craig Turner presents a fascinating view of the Fatima Century.

July 12, 2017 by Craig Turner with an Introduction by Fr Gordon MacRae

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Priest and Prisoner in the Light of Divine Mercy

Fr Seraphim Michalenko, Fr Michael Gaitley, Fr Gordon MacRae, Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll and Pornchai Moontri share the stage in a wondrous Divine Mercy drama.

As a young man, I depended far too much on my own resources. I recognize today in the humility of hindsight that they were never quite up to the task. But back then, I knew everything. What a dumbass I have since become! I now know nothing, and cannot write a single word except in the light of Divine Mercy. My life’s path recalls the words of Dante Alighieri as he opened his epic literary masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. His story begins in a dark forest on Good Friday in the year 1300:

“When I had journeyed midway upon our life’s path, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the way that does not stray. How can I say what wood that was, that savage forest which even now in recall renews my fear? So bitter death is hardly more severe! But to tell the good I found there, I will also tell of the other things I saw.”

— Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto I

In my post two weeks ago, “Wrongful Convictions: The Other Police Misconduct,” I told of some of the other things I saw — a forest of dark things like corruption and deep injustice surrounded me once. Like Dante, I cannot tell of these — though they must be told — without the light of a profoundly wonderful grace I discovered amid all that suffering.

In many posts over time, I have told snippets of the story of Divine Mercy, of how it entered midway upon my life’s journey, and of how it dramatically transcended my prison walls. I have never before put it all together in a post, and I cannot pretend to do so now because it would fill a book. Perhaps one day, if I have the tools to do so, this story will become a book. For now, however, all I have is this humble blog.

What prompted this retelling of my Divine Mercy journey is the death of Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, who on this Earth became a driving force in the beatification and canonization of St. Maria Faustina and the promotion of her famous Diary. My friend, Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll, published a moving eulogy which included this paragraph:

“Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, the world-renowned expert on the life and spirituality of St. Faustina — the man who smuggled photographic images of the pages of St. Faustina’s Diary out of Communist-occupied Poland in the 1970s and later documented her beatification and canonization miracles — died Thursday, February 11, 2021, from illness related to Covid 19. ... Side by side with Blessed Michael Sopocko, Pope St. John Paul II, and St. Faustina herself, Fr. Seraphim stands as a central figure who helped make the Divine Mercy message and devotion the greatest grassroots movement in the history of the Church.”

— Felix Carroll in "Rest in Peace, Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC"

A few years ago, well into his eighties, Father Seraphim ventured from his home at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for a drive of several hours to Concord, New Hampshire. He came to offer Mass in prison, and to interview Pornchai Moontri and me about the substance and source of our Divine Mercy journeys as we passed through the dark wood of prison.

My story, which I have told before, begins in 1988. Father Richard Drabik, MIC was Provincial Superior of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, a post from which he wrote the Preface for Divine Mercy in My Soul, also known as the Diary of Saint Faustina. You will find his Preface at the beginning of every copy of this mysterious book.

A few years later when he concluded his term as Provincial, Father Drabik was recruited to be a spiritual director for the Servants of the Paraclete Renewal Center for priests in New Mexico where I once served as Director of Admissions. Father Richard became my spiritual director for several years, and the finest one I ever had as a priest.

Grace Follows Even the Darkest Night

I will never forget the moment Father Richard stopped by my office one night early in April, 1993 to tell me that he would be leaving that week for Rome to take part in the Beatification of Sister Maria Faustina by Pope John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday. Father Richard invited me to write a private intention to be placed on the altar for the Mass of Beatification. Then I promptly forgot all about it.

Saint Faustina was later canonized by Pope John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2000, a saint canonized by a saint. Now that I think of it, the saints who have had the most influence on my life as a priest and as a prisoner, and ultimately also on Pornchai Moontri’s life, were canonized by Pope John Paul II. Besides Saint Faustina they include Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Padre Pio, and the Beatification of Mother Teresa.

I know the latter two do not retain their Earthly titles, but I cannot imagine calling them anything else. These influencers now also include Saint John Paul II himself who left a giant footprint on both the Church and my life as a priest.

I knew nothing of Saint Faustina when Father Richard made his request, and if he ever spoke of Divine Mercy in our sessions, I retained none of it. If memory serves, I did most of the talking in spiritual direction. I hope I have since learned to listen as well. Father Richard, like many at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, is still in contact with me. I hope he might be reading this.

A week or so after inviting me to write my intention for the Mass of Beatification in Rome, I had forgotten all about it. Father Richard stopped by my office again on the night before his departure and reminded me of it. I was especially busy with God only knows what. I told him I would bring it to him in ten minutes. I then grabbed a piece of note paper and quickly wrote this spontaneous prayer:

---

“I ask Blessed Faustina’s intercession that I may have the strength and courage to be the priest God wants me to be.”

---

I sealed my intention in a small envelope and brought it to Father Richard. I watched him tuck it into a pocket of his jacket, and thought no more of it. The Beatification of Saint Faustina was presided over by Pope John Paul II on Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, but it was not yet called that. It was on the day of St. Faustina's Mass of Canonization, on April 30, 2000 during the Great Jubilee Year that Pope John Paul II declared in his homily that from hereon the Second Sunday of Easter will be the day of Divine Mercy.

But none of this meant anything to me. Today, it means everything to me. By the time Father Richard returned from Rome after the Mass of Beatification in 1993, I had been arrested on false charges from the distant past, and taken away. In 1994, after refusing multiple “plea deal” offers to plead guilty and serve one year in prison, I was sentenced to a term of sixty-seven years. That story is conveyed in the post cited above.

I spent the next twelve years in the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno. I heard from no one. I communicated with few. In all that time, I somehow retained an identity as a priest. Because I maintained my innocence, I spent all that time in punitive prison housing with eight men sharing each cell. An officer in that unit saw that I had a typewriter so he asked me to volunteer to type some inventory forms for him each week. After a few weeks he asked me if I wanted something in return. He meant extra food. I asked for the use of an empty storage room for one hour on Sunday nights to offer private Mass.

A Summons to Divine Mercy

It was not what this Sergeant expected to hear. He said he would have to present the unusual request to his own supervisor. Holy Week was coming up, and I hoped I might have an approval by Easter. It came a week too late. My first Mass in prison was offered in a storage closet on April 30, 2000, which I only later learned was the first official Divine Mercy Sunday and the day Saint Faustina was canonized.

That was year six, midway in my twelve years in darkness. Six years later, I was visited in prison by Father James McCurry, who is today the Minister Provincial of the Franciscan Friars Conventual of the Our Lady of the Angels Province. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he had also been a vice-postulator for the cause of sainthood for Saint Maximilian Kolbe who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. Father McCurry learned of me from some other priest. He was in the area and thought he would arrange a visit.

His first words in the visiting room, after introducing himself, were, “What do you know about St. Maximilian Kolbe?” I knew little beyond the fact that he offered his life to save that of another prisoner in the horror of Auschwitz. We talked about that but our visit was brief. He had to catch a plane. He said he would be sending me something. A week later, a small biography of Saint Maximilian arrived along with a card depicting him in both his Franciscan habit and his Auschwitz uniform.

By that time, I had been moved to slightly better prison quarters, perhaps thanks to the Sergeant who was impressed that I asked for a place to offer Mass instead of extra food. I put the image of Saint Maximilian on the battered steel mirror in my cell. Through tears, I realized that on that same day I was a priest in prison a day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. The darkness I felt was overwhelming. I would eventually write multiple posts about the impact this Saint has had on our lives, most notably “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

Shortly after Saint Maximilian arrived on the mirror in my cell, Pornchai Moontri was sent here after fourteen grueling years lost in and out of solitary confinement in a Maine prison. I was bitter and he was broken. All hope had virtually died in our lives. Providence moved Pornchai from one place to another here, and then he ended up living with me. In his moving recent guest post, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You,” he recounted the day he first walked into my cell and saw the image of Saint Maximilian on the mirror. “Is this you?” he asked.

From that moment on, we were caught up in the grasp of Divine Mercy. As you know, Pornchai became a devout Catholic and was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. Knowing the importance of this conversion for him, I was compelled to set aside all the bitterness of false witness and wrongful imprisonment that I carried like a crushing cross in my own Calvary. Confronting the brokeness of Pornchai meant also confronting my own in the light of Divine Mercy, and it salvaged my life as a priest.

Pornchai Moontri was featured, as you know, in a profoundly wonderful book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions, by Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll. Father Seraphim Michalenko brought the book to Thailand where he presented a retreat to Divine Mercy Thailand. He read them the chapter about Pornchai, and a future, long since thought to be hopeless, was born for him.

We were also invited to take part in a series of 33-Day retreats in Father Michael Gaitley’s “Hearts Afire” program beginning with “33 Days to Morning Glory.” As a result, dozens of other prisoners followed us on this path and many were converted. I will link to the most moving of their stories at the end of this post.

And Divine Mercy has not let up — not even for a moment. I just learned that in 1994, the year I was sent to prison, Relevant Radio host, Drew Mariani, produced a film along with the Marians entitled, “Time for Mercy.” Late last month, some 26 years later, Drew Mariani interviewed me in prison. The interview is available at our “Special Events” page.

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please continue to celebrate Divine Mercy this year through these additional posts with inspiring true accounts of how Divine Mercy has impacted our lives:

Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind by Michael Ciresi

I Come to the Catholic Church for Healing and Hope by Pornchai Moontri

Behold Your Son! Behold Your Mother! by Fr Gordon MacRae

Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane

The Agony in the Garden, the First Sorrowful Mystery, is a painful scene in the Passion of Christ, but in each of the Synoptic Gospels the Apostles slept through it.

It seems so long ago now, but a few years back I wrote a post that stunned some TSW  readers out of the doldrums of a long nap in the Garden of Gethsemane where, sooner or later, we will all spend some time. That post was “Pentecost, Priesthood, and Death in the Afternoon.”

It was about one of our friends, a middle-aged prisoner named Anthony, and his discovery of having terminal cancer. Anthony was one of the most irritating and obnoxious individuals I had ever met. He was the only prisoner I have ever thrown out of my cell with a demand that he never return. Very few people have had that kind of effect on me, but Anthony was masterful at it.

But then Anthony discovered that he was dying. As an unintended result of our “falling out” he believed that he could not come to me. He was Pornchai Moontri’s friend but the story of his impending doom was my comeuppance. I cannot forget the day that Pornchai told me, “You have to help Anthony. He is going to die and he doesn’t know how.” After a long sleep when the priest in me had succumbed too much to the prisoner, that was my awakening in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Over the next 18 months, Pornchai and I took care of Anthony for as long as we possibly could before handing him over to the prison version of hospice from where we would never see him again. But before that happened, Anthony became a Catholic, was received into the Church, and had a transformation of spirit that, in the midst of death, proclaimed an incomparable stress on life.

Pornchai and I were eyewitnesses to how all the things that once took priority in Anthony’s life just fell away. He became, in the end, like “Dismas, Crucified to the Right” of the Lamb of God. It seemed so ironic that it was his impending death that opened up for Anthony a world of faith, hope and trust that overcame all other forces at work in his life. In the end, I no longer, recognized the man I had once so disdained.

Not long after leaving us, Anthony died in the prison’s medical center where a small group of hospice volunteers took turns being with him around the clock. I once wrote of Anthony’s death, and of an event that shook our world back then, but it’s a story worth telling again. I told it at a brief memorial service for Anthony that was attended by about sixty prisoners, twice the normal for such things.

At the service in the prison chapel, those attending were invited to speak. So Pornchai nudged me and said, “Tell them about the book.” I told those in attendance that Anthony left this world having committed a second crime against the State of New Hampshire: an unreturned library book. The rest of the story generated a collective gasp.

The Library where I work has a computer system that tracks the 22,000 volumes from which prisoners can select and check out books. When a prisoner is released from prison without returning a book, an alert would come across the screen a week later to give us a last chance to find and retrieve a book left behind.

I had no knowledge that Anthony ever checked a book out of the Library. I never saw him there, and he never asked me for a book. But a week after he died, this appeared on my screen:

“Anthony Begin #76810 — Gone/Released — Heaven Is for Real”

The Agony in the Garden

Heaven is for real, but for it to be a reality for us required an Exodus from the slavery of sin and death. That second Exodus commenced in the Garden of Gethsemane, and in the course of it, God exacted from Himself the same price — the death of His Son — that he imposed upon Pharaoh to bring about the first Exodus.

The Biblical account of Jesus and His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane opens the Passion Narrative of the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the Gospel of John (18:1), the place is simply referred to as “across the Kidron Valley where there is a garden.” John, writing from a different tradition, cites only the betrayal by Judas there whereas the other Gospels precede that betrayal with the agony of Jesus at prayer.

Almost immediately preceding this in each of the Synoptic Gospels was the Institution of the Eucharist at what has been famously depicted by Leonardo Da Vinci as The Last Supper. This was the decisive turning point in Salvation History:

“Drink of it, all of you, for this is the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink of it anew with you in my Father’s Kingdom.”

— Matthew 26: 28-29

Following this in the account of Saint Luke, Jesus addresses Peter about the spiritual warfare that is to come:

“‘Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.’ And [Peter] said to him, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.’”

— Luke 22:31-34

Peter’s “readiness” for prison and for death will soon become an issue. From here the scene moves to the Mount of Olives where Jesus went to pray “as was His custom” (Luke 22:39).

Only the Gospels of Matthew and Mark name the place “Gethsemane.” Once there, Jesus withdrew from His disciples to pray. As you already know, the suffering and death he now faced would be set in motion by the betrayal of Judas who provided “the more opportune time” that Satan awaited when the Temptation of Christ in the desert failed (Luke 4:13), a scene depicted in “To Azazel: The Fate of a Church That Wanders in the Desert.”

Jesus, fully human in his suffering by God’s design, recoils not only from the image of suffering he knows to be upon Him, but also by the weight of the Apostolic betrayal just moments away. The betrayal by Judas is intensified by the dreadful weight of humanity’s sin for which Jesus is offered up as the Scapegoat — the Sacrificial Lamb of God — for the sins of all humanity.

For Hebrew ears, the account of Jesus at Gethsemane is a mirror image in reverse of a scene that occurred at this very same site 1,000 years earlier. It was a story not of a son obedient unto death, but of a son who betrayed his father. It was the agony of King David and his flight from his son, Absolom, and his traitorous revolt. As David learned that his trusted counselor, Ahithophel, had betrayed him in league with Absolom…

“David went up the ascent of the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went, with his head covered and walking barefoot, and all the people who were with him covered their heads and went up, weeping as they went. David was told that Ahithophel was one of the conspirators with Absolom.”

— 2 Samuel 15:30-31

And, as with Judas 1,000 years later, Ahithophel hanged himself when the consequences of his betrayal weighed upon him.

In Saint Matthew’s account of the Gethsemane scene (26:37), Jesus left His disciples and brought Peter, James and John with Him to the place of prayer. Note that Peter, James and John witnessed Jesus raise the daughter of Jairus from death (Mark 5:37) and they were also witnesses to His Transfiguration in the presence of Moses and Elijah that I wrote of during this Lent in “Turmoil in Rome and the Transfiguration of Christ.”

In the Gospel of Luke (22:31ff) Jesus is alone and apart from the others as He prays in agony in the face of death: “Father if you are willing, remove this chalice from me; nevertheless not my will but yours be done.” I cannot tell you how often I have prayed that same prayer in the last 25 years. I pray it still.

In the Gospel, God answers the prayer of Jesus, not by removing the suffering, for His suffering is to be our Exodus, but by strengthening Him to endure it. And He will endure it unto death:

“There appeared to him an angel from heaven to strengthen him. And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground.”

— Luke 22:43

In each of the Gospel accounts, Jesus returned to His disciples to discover that they have all slept through His agony. None were there to console Him except the angel sent from heaven while humanity slept.

Consoling the Heart of Jesus

The Gospel of Saint Mark presents a more vivid account of the inner suffering that betrayal and death brought to the heart of Jesus. Mark describes that Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled” (Mark 14:33). The Greek of Mark’s Gospel used the terms έκθαμβεῖσθαι and άδημονεῖν which vividly express in Greek the depth of distress and anxiety that came upon Him. The comfort the angel brings is reminiscent of Psalm 42:

“Why are you cast down O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”

— Psalm 42:12

The coming betrayal by Judas marks the climax of the ministry of Jesus who has left hints throughout the Gospel of Mark:

“And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly.”

— Mark 8:31

“The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”

— Mark 9:31

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles, and they will mock him, and spit on him, and scourge him, and kill him, and after three days he will rise.”

— Mark 10:33-34

So how do we, His disciples by Baptism and by the fidelity we claim, how do we console the heart of Jesus at Gethsemane? For the answer, I am indebted to Father Michael Gaitley, M.I.C. for his profound book, Consoling the Heart of Jesus which was the text for a six-week course offered here by the Marians of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy.

Like many, I believe I learn the most from Sacred Scripture when the circumstances of my life force me to live it. So picking up this book for the first time, I asked myself, “How can I console Jesus, who is happy in Heaven, while I am stuck in this hellhole called prison?” That’s what Pornchai Moontri called it in these pages in his post, “Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood.”

Father Gaitley has an answer called “Retroactive Consolation” that comes from the theology of Pope Pius XI and the Dominican theologian, Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. whom Father Gaitley quotes:

“During his earthly life and particularly while in Gethsemane, Jesus suffered from all future acts of profanation and ingratitude. He knew them in detail with a superior intuition that governed all times… Thus his suffering encompassed the present instant and extended to future centuries. ‘This drop of blood I shed for you.’ So in the Garden of Olives, Jesus suffered for all, and for each of us in particular.”

— Consoling the Heart of Jesus, P. 394

So, if His suffering is projected into the future, how can our consolation of Him at Gethsemane become retroactive into the past? What will awaken us from our sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane? Jesus Himself provides that answer, and it has something to do with our story about Anthony that began this post. It is laid out powerfully in the Gospel of Matthew:

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and care for you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’”

— Matthew 25:37-40

Now

“Arise. Let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

— Matthew 26:46

+ + +

Editor’s Note: Please share this Holy Week post with your contacts on Facebook and other social media. To prepare for a meaningful Holy Week and Easter, you may also like these other posts from along the Way of the Cross at Beyond These Stone Walls :

A Personal Holy Week Retreat at Beyond These Stone Walls

The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’

Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands

Simon of Cyrene at Calvary: Compelled to Carry the Cross

Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found

Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb

Fr Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy

Midway in our Consoling the Heart of Jesus retreat in prison, Fr Seraphim Michalenko, Director of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy, fulfilled Hebrews 13:3.

Some strange and interesting things are happening behind These Stone Walls this summer, and it’s a task and a half to stay ahead of them and reflect a little so I can write of them. In too many ways to describe, we sometimes feel swept off our feet by the intricate threads of connection that are being woven, and sometimes revealed.

I wasn’t even going to have a post for this week. I spent the last ten days immersed in a major writing project that I just finished. I knew it would be a struggle to type a post on top of that. I also had no topic. Absolutely nothing whatsoever came to mind. So I decided to just let readers know that I need to skip a week on TSW. Yet here I am, and it’s being written on the fly as I struggle to type it and get it in the mail in time.

What brought on this frenzy to get something posted on this mid-summer day? Well, first of all I awoke this morning and looked at the calendar, and realized that the post date I decided to skip is also the Memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It commemorates the apparition of our Blessed Mother to Saint Simon Stock, founder of the Carmelite Order, in the year 1215. She promised a special blessing to those who would wear her scapular. According to the explanation of this Memorial in the Daily Roman Missal, “Countless Christians have taken advantage of Our Lady’s protection.”

“Protection.” It seems a strange word to describe what we might expect from devotion to Mary. Most TSW readers remember my post, “Behold Your Mother! 33 Days to Morning Glory” about the Marian Consecration which Pornchai Maximilian and I entered into on the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013. Felix Carroll also wrote of it — with a nice photo of us — in “Mary is at Work Here” in Marian Helper magazine. [Flash Version and PDF Version]

Throughout that 33 Days retreat leading up to our Consecration, I was plagued with the creepy feeling that this was all going to cost us something, that maybe Pornchai and I were opening ourselves to further suffering and trials by Consecrating to Mary the ordeals we are now living. What we have both found since our Marian Consecration, however, has been a sort of protection, a subtle grace that seems to be weaving itself in and around us, permeating our lives. Exactly what has been its cost? It has cost us something neither of us ever imagined we could ever afford to pay. The price tag for such grace is trust, and where we live, that is a precious commodity not so easily invested, but very easily taken from us.

I am amazed at the number of TSW readers who have written to me about their decisions to commence the 33 Days retreat, and commit themselves to Marian Consecration. I received a letter this week from Mary Fran, a reader and frequent correspondent who is completing her 33 Days retreat with her Marian Consecration on the day this is posted, the Memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. She is going into this with just the right frame of mind and spirit. I hope she doesn’t mind, but here’s an excerpt of her letter:

“This is a very good retreat. I will be sorry to see it over. I have the Consecration Prayer typed out on pretty paper in preparation for the big day. A new beginning. A new way of life. Under new management.”

The truth is, Mary Fran, that it will never be over. But I like your idea of a life “under new management.” The concept seems to have a lot less to do with what Marian Consecration might cost in terms of trials to be offered, and more to do with what graces might be gained to endure them when they come. I’m not sure of why or exactly when it started, but after receiving the Eucharist since my own Consecration I have begun to pray the Memorare, a prayer attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux that best expresses our confidence in Mary as repository of grace and, therefore, protection:

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto you, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To you I come, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen.”

Trust Is the Currency of Grace

In a post last month, “Father’s Day in Prison Consoling the Heart of Jesus,” I wrote a little about how much of a daily ordeal our prisons can sometimes be. Near the end of that post, I quoted a brief dialogue between Father Michael Gaitley, author of Consoling the Heart of Jesus, and Father Seraphim Michalenko, Director of The National Shrine of The Divine Mercy. Their discussion is worth expanding a bit for this post. In fact, it was part of this week’s assigned reading in our Consoling the Heart of Jesus retreat in which we are at the midway point behind these prison walls. So here is a little more of that conversation:

“Father Gaitley: ‘And we want to console Jesus in the best possible way … and the best way to console Him is to remove the thorn that hurts His heart the most, the thorn that is lack of trust in His merciful love … and the best way to remove that thorn and console Him is to trust Him.’

”Father Seraphim: ‘And how do you LIVE trust? What is its concrete expression in your daily 1iving? … The way you live that trust is by praise and thanksgiving, to praise and thank God in all things. That’s what the Lord said to St. Faustina.’”

— Consoling the Heart of Jesus, p. 95

It struck me just today that the new trial asked of me in Marian Consecration is to imitate her trust, her famous fiat to the seemingly impossible: “Be it done to me according to Thy word.” Such trust is not an easy thing to embrace when the world turns dark, when freedom is taken by forces beyond our control, when fortune fades, when health fails, when loved ones are lost, when love itself is lost, when evil seems to win all around us, when depression, the noon-day devil, wants to rule both day and night.

That almost seems to sum up prison, and as such we are all destined for the trials of life in some form or another. We are all destined for some form of prison. So many readers have asked me for an update on our friend, Anthony, of whom I wrote recently in “Pentecost, Priesthood, and Death in the Afternoon.” Anthony is in prison dying of cancer. Several weeks ago, he could no longer bear the pain he was in so he was moved to the prison medical unit for palliative care. He came to the prison chapel for Mass the following Sunday, and the one after that. He was not there at Mass last week, and it is very possible we will not see Anthony again in this life.

Though he is but 200 yards away locked in another building, prisons pay no heed to the bonds of connection between human beings in captivity. Once Anthony was moved elsewhere, we may not visit him, inquire about him, or even hear from him. That is one of the great crosses of prison, and the welfare of that person and his soul is something about which we can now only trust. We can only be consoled by what YOU have done in our stead. When I last saw Anthony, he smiled and said, “I have gotten so much mail and so many cards I feel totally surrounded by God’s love.”

Father Michael Gaitley summed up nicely the road out of this dense forest of all our anxious cares:

“So the best way to console Jesus’ Heart is to give him our trust, and according to the expert [Fr Seraphim Michalenko] the best way to live trust is with an attitude of praise and thanksgiving, the way of joyful, trustful acceptance of God’s will.”

— Consoling the Heart of Jesus, p. 96

Opening Impenetrable Doors

At the end of “Dostoevsky in Prison and the Perils of Odysseus,” I wrote, “the hand of God is somewhere in all this, visible only in the back of the tapestry where we cannot yet see. He is working among the threads, weaving together the story of us.” Some readers liked that imagery, but it’s also true. It really happens and is really happening in our lives right now. I have experienced it, and Pornchai has recently experienced it in a very big way, but only with eyes opened by trust. Here’s how.

In the months after Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I first met, United States Immigration Judge Leonard Shapiro had just ruled that Pornchai must be deported from the U.S. to Thailand upon whatever point he is to be released from prison. The very thought of this was dismal, like stepping off a cliff in dense fog with no safe landing in sight. Pornchai had only a “Plan B”: to make certain that he never leaves prison.

I was deeply concerned for him, and tried to put myself in his shoes. How does a person get literally dumped into a country only vaguely familiar with no human connections whatsoever? How would he live? How could he even survive? So I told him something so totally foreign to both of us that I shuddered and doubted even as I was saying the words. I told him he has to abandon his “Plan B” and trust. Trust me and trust God. What was I saying?! I wasn’t even sure I trusted at all.

Three years later, Pornchai became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday 2010. A lot of people don’t realize that this was completely by “accident.” And it caused me to worry even more about his future. Thailand is a Buddhist nation. Less than one percent of its people are Catholic. I wondered how becoming Catholic could possibly serve him in a country and culture from which he was already completely alienated and in which he must somehow survive.

Pornchai didn’t even know that the time he was choosing for his entry into the Church was Divine Mercy Sunday. What he had originally planned was to surprise me by telling me of his decision to be Baptized on my birthday, April 9, which was a Friday in 2010. It was, in his mind, to be a birthday present. Some present! I wasn’t even trusting that this was a good idea.

So Pornchai went to talk with the prison’s Catholic chaplain, Deacon Jim Daly to help arrange this. The Chaplain asked a local priest to come to the prison for the Baptism, but he was only available to do this on Saturday, April 10. I stood in as proxy for Pornchai’s Godparents, one in Belgium and one in Indianapolis, while Vincentian Father Anthony Kuzia Baptized and Confirmed Pornchai.

The next day was Divine Mercy Sunday, and it just so happened that Bishop John McCormack was coming to the prison for his annual Mass that day. So just the night before, I explained to Pornchai about Saint Faustina, Divine Mercy, why Pope John Paul II designated the Sunday after Easter to be Divine Mercy Sunday, and how this devotion seemed to sweep the whole world. Pornchai thus received his First Eucharist and was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, and Whoever planned this, it wasn’t us!

Then because I mentioned that fact on TSW a few times, it got the attention of Felix Carroll, a writer for Marian Helper magazine. Felix then asked if he could write of Pornchai’s Divine Mercy connection for the Marian.org website in an article entitled, “Mercy – Inside Those Stone Walls.”  The response to that article was amazing. From all over the world, people commented on it and circulated it. Felix wrote that “the story of Pornchai lit up our website like no other!”

So then in the eleventh hour, Felix Carroll pulled a book he was just about to publish. It was supposed to be about 16 Divine Mercy conversions, but Felix changed the titled to Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions, and added an expanded chapter about Pornchai Moontri’s life and conversion. The chapter even mentions me and These Stone Walls, though I really had very little to do with Pornchai’s conversion. Pornchai and I received copies of the book, looked at each other, and simultaneously asked, “How did this happen?”

The Needlepoint of God

The book went everywhere, including into the hands of Father Seraphim Michalenko, Director of the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy and the person I quoted on the issue of trust in this post. Father Seraphim became an instrument for the threads God was weaving for Pornchai. He sent the book to another contact, Yela Smit, a co-director of the Divine Mercy Apostolate in Bangkok, Thailand. The result was simply astonishing, and the threads of connection just keep being woven together. I wrote of this incredible account in “Knock and the Door Will Open: Divine Mercy in Bangkok Thailand.”

In that post, I wrote of how I undertook responsibility for easing Pornchai’s burden by trying to find him connections in Thailand only to be frustrated every step of the way. Then, in spite of myself, in the back of the tapestry where we cannot yet see, those threads were being woven together miraculously, and trust found a foundation in the dawn of hope. Suddenly, through nothing either of us did or didn’t do, the cross of fear and dread about how Pornchai would survive alone in Thailand was lifted from him.

Pornchai and I went to Sunday Mass in the Prison Chapel last week. The priest who is usually here is away for a few weeks so we heard it would be someone “filling in.” It was Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, 84 years old and the man who opened the doors of Divine Mercy for Pornchai in Thailand where God has accomplished some amazing needlework. Father Seraphim was accompanied by Eric Mahl who also has a chapter in Felix Carroll’s Loved, Lost, Found, and who has become a good friend to me and Pornchai. They both returned that evening for a session of our Consoling the Heart of Jesus Retreat. Pornchai was able to meet with Father Seraphim for a long talk. He has seen firsthand the evidence of Divine Mercy, and it all happened behind the walls of an impenetrable prison.