In Honor of Mom: A Corner of the Veil

The photograph above is the house where Father Gordon MacRae grew up just north of Boston. It is the home where his single-parent mother raised three sons and a daughter alone. The stone wall in the front was built by Father Gordon and his brother at ages 15 and 16. It still stands today.

Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae have met the challenge of honoring their mothers during a most difficult time in life, the latter through this moving 2009 post.

Note from Father Gordon: This post, which is dear to my heart, was first published in 2009 three years after my mother’s death. After I decided to repost it, Pornchai Moontri sent me some photos of how he has honored his mother in northern Thailand last month. For the first time in his life, Pornchai took part in the April celebrations of Songkhram, the Thai New Year, and Loy Krathong, the annual Water Festival and its ritual cleansing of the tombs of his mother and grandmother at a Buddhist temple in the village of his birth. (Note: Pornchai wants everyone to know that the shirt was a gift from one of his cousins!)

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When I was first sent to prison, my mother visited me weekly. She lived North of Boston, about a ninety minute drive from Concord, NH. She was usually brought here by my sister and her husband or by my younger brother. I was very concerned about how my imprisonment affected my mother. The mothers of most priests enjoy a sort of vicarious respect that they cherish with pride. My mother was visiting her priest-son in prison.

My mother was painfully aware that I could have left prison after only one or two years had I been willing to plead guilty to something that never took place. I knew she knew this. One day when we were alone during a visit, I took her hand and asked her if she was disappointed that I did not take a “deal” for the easy way out. She pondered this for a moment, squeezed my hand, and said,

“No, I would have been disappointed if you lived a lie. There’s no freedom in living a lie. I want you to fight for the truth.”

— Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, Father Gordon’s mother

I was very proud of my mother, for in those few simple words she, too, put herself and her pride aside for principle. A few days after our visit, my mother sent me a simple card. It was a quote from Winston Churchill, plain white text on a black background, “Never, ever, ever give up!” It was one of my treasures. The card spent several years on my cell wall, then disappeared one day, lost —as are many such things when I was moved from place to place in the prison.

In the years to follow, my mother became very ill. Her visits were fewer and further between. I witnessed the digression as she appeared in the prison visiting room one day with a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair — and then I saw her no more. Over the next two years, I could only speak with my mother by telephone. In the last year of her life, my mother and I could not speak at all.

It was a special agony to know that my mother was dying just seventy miles away. As her son and as a priest, I had lost any means to offer support for her except through prayer. I wrote to a priest-friend in Boston, Franciscan Father Raymond Mann, who graciously prepared my mother spiritually for death in my stead. I was most grateful to him, and to my sister and her family who cared for our mother every moment of her last years in this life. On November 5, 2006, my mother died.

Most of you cannot imagine being unable to see or comfort a loved one dying just seventy miles away. There is a barrier between the imprisoned and the free — almost as impenetrable as the barrier between the living and the dead. My duty as her son and as a priest would be carried out in silence in my own heart.

Redemptive Suffering

When I saw the Mel Gibson film, “The Passion of the Christ,” I was struck by the powerful, silent scenes in which Mary viewed her Son’s path to Calvary from a short distance, and yet could not touch him, could not speak to him. I felt as though I was living the reverse of those scenes, that I witnessed from the far side of an abyss the suffering and death of my mother, and could not be present.  It was as though I had died before her — already, but not yet.

I was angry. As her son and as a priest, being present to my mother in death was a sacred duty, but one denied to her and to me through the false witness of accusers and the enticement of money — an enticement that has played a far greater role in the Church’s scandal than our bishops and the plaintiff lawyers will admit. How could I not be angry?

“One of the great temptations I have had to face in prison is the impulse to keep a litany of losses. It is a naturally human response to injustice, but the resentment to ensue would be a spiritually toxic weapon of self-destruction.”

My first post on These Stone Walls was “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.” In it, I described something that occurred just six weeks after the death of my mother. I had been standing at the mirror in my cell shaving on the morning of December 23, 2006. I suddenly realized that the equation of my life had just changed, that on that very day I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else.

The sense of loss and futility was overwhelming until later that same day when I received in the mail an image of Father Maximilian Kolbe in both his Franciscan habit and his prison uniform. I have described in several posts my encounter with St. Maximilian Kolbe just at the point at which the equation changed — the point at which more of my life as a priest was spent in prison than in freedom. 

Father Kolbe’s sacrifice of his life for another made me realize the power that exists in sacrifice and especially in the sacrifice of unjust suffering.  I have come to know without doubt that suffering offered for another is redemptive of both. It’s a difficult concept for someone on the wrong end of injustice to grasp, and I struggled with it at first.  I began to offer my days in prison as a share in the suffering of Christ in the final weeks of my mother’s life.  It was all I had to give her.

Newfoundland

My mother, Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, emigrated to the United States from Newfoundland at age 22 in 1949.  The oldest of six, she was close to her three sisters and two brothers who remained in Newfoundland.  My mother was closest in age and in friendship to her sister, Frances, two years younger.

In 2003, my mother visited her childhood home for the last time. 

Even in sickness and in pending death, my mother never lost her Irish sense of humor. During the visit my mother sent me a postcard with a scene from a high cliff overlooking Saint John’s Harbour. She wrote the following message:

“Dear Gordon,

Newfoundland is simply beautiful. I am writing this while visiting Redcliff, a 200-foot sheer cliff where Newfoundlander mothers of old would take their most troublesome sons and threaten to heave them over the edge.

Wish you were here. Love, Mom”

She also sent me a terrific photograph of herself with her sister, Frances at Logy Bay, just north of St. John’s on the Avalon Peninsula where they grew up.

It was the only photo I had of my mother in her last years.  I put the photo away, and then lost it.  When my mother died, Pornchai helped me search our cell for the photo, but it was gone.  It’s difficult for prisoners to hold onto such things.  Prisoners’ cells are routinely searched — sometimes even ransacked in the process — and we have very little ability to preserve items we treasure such as photographs. The photo of my mother was lost.

In the July/August, 2009 issue of This Rock magazine (which later became Catholic Answers ), Father Dwight Longenecker has an interesting article, “Weird Things Happen.” He wrote of an experience in the Chapel of the Convent of Saint Gildard in Nevers, France as he prayed before the uncorrupted body of St. Bernadette:

“I kept silence there and noticed a beautiful fragrance of flowers. As I prayed, the fragrance grew stronger, and I felt transported by a presence that was beyond my understanding.”

Father Longenecker — who hosts the Standing on My Head blog — wrote of other phenomena that defy logical explanation in our repository of faith experience. He wrote of Padre Pio’s stigmata, apparitions of the Blessed Mother, healings in the presence of sacred relics. In a later issue of This Rock, Father Longenecker took some heat for what was wrongly interpreted as his dismissal of such experiences.

I found his article to be respectful and serious, with but one small flaw. Father Longenecker later questioned what, exactly, happened to him in that chapel before the body of St. Bernadette, and suggested that we need to be both believing and skeptical.

“Whenever a natural explanation for a seemingly supernatural event is available,” he wrote, “it is to be preferred”

But why should natural explanations preclude the miraculous? Naturally occurring events can be powerful catalysts of actual grace, and as such they seem miraculous. We have all had the experience of coincidence that is so unlikely, so personally shaking that it defies explanation. Who hasn’t picked up the telephone to call a loved one only to find that person already there calling you?

It seems a minor miracle when it happens, something inexplicable and astonishing, then the experience slowly diminishes as doubt and natural skepticism reinterpret the event for us. The task of getting on with life causes us to shrug off the experience over time. Sometimes the balance between belief and skepticism in the modern world can lean too heavily toward the latter.

I wrote of such an event in "A Shower of Roses" in October. While accompanying teenage Michelle through the last weeks of her life, I spoke of St. Therese, the Little Flower, who promised a shower of roses. Michelle, a day away from death, pointed at the ceiling where drifted a helium balloon with a vivid rose imprinted upon it. It left me stunned — for awhile, but in time the trials of life diminished the light of that event. How common are the signs and wonders that come to people of faith? Can we always see them when they arrive?

The Undiscovered Country

In Hamlet Shakespeare called death, “The Undiscovered Country.” I know many people who have suffered the death of someone they love. Think, in the midst of that suffering, of the incredible gift that it contains. Loss is not felt at all but for love, and love is a direct result of grace. It is what folds back a corner of the veil — what links the living to the dead. We have something very special to share with those whose physical life is lost to us: the grace of redemptive suffering, the hope of our prayers, the sacrifice of our trials.

Eight months after my mother’s death, I learned that her beloved sister, Frances, died in Newfoundland. She died on July 10,2007, but I did not learn of it for several days. Prisoners cannot be reached by telephone, so it was July 14th when I received my sister’s letter about the death of my aunt. The next day, July 15th, was my mother’s birthday, the first since her death the previous November. Late that night, I prepared to offer Mass in my cell for the souls of my mother and her sister. Pornchai Moontri was with me for the Mass and told me this week that he remembers this story very well.

Just as Mass began, a prisoner came to my cell to borrow a book. I was irritated. Couldn’t he wait? I had to pull a foot locker from under my bunk and rummage for the book. I found the book and handed it to him, and he left.

I turned back to the Mass, and a moment later there he was again at my door. He walked into my cell and plopped something right onto the corporal I had laid down for Mass. Pornchai and I were both stunned.  It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier — the photo we searched for in vain when my mother died. It’s the photo above. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday — at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister — their last photograph together found me

An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace.

When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side — my mother on the right — on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land.

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Please share this post in honor of Mother’s Day. You may also wish to visit the posts linked herein:

A Shower of Roses

St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror

Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

New evidence unmasks a myth that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope:” and a shocking failure of The New York Times to tell the world of the Holocaust.

These Stone Walls might seem a strange place to be reading this story, but in a way it might make sense. Too many Catholic writers today seem to fear The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream news media. It’s a subtle fear that I laid out in “The Catholic Press Needs to Get Over Its Father Maciel Syndrome.” There are courageous exceptions, of course, and notable among them are Bill Donohue of The Catholic League and David F. Pierre of The Media Report. Both have repeatedly and forcefully called The New York Times to task for its distortions of news pertaining to the Catholic Church. Nowhere have these distortions been more evident than in the Catholic sex abuse scandal, a drama I have lived every day for the last 18 years. It’s also a drama that leads the late 20th Century litany of anti-Catholic agendas in the news. I gave several examples in a post entitled “Catholic Scandal and the News Media.”

Running a close second in that litany is the story of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. You have all read or heard the claims that Pope Pius XII was silent, at best, during the Holocaust, and at worst secured an accommodation with the Third Reich that saved the Catholic Church at the expense of the Jews. It’s not at all true, but the truth has had an uphill climb against the pervasive story, told again and again, that Pope Pius XII failed to confront Hitler during his systematic genocide of over six million European Jews and millions of others. You’ve heard the story of this supposed silence in a slanderous media sound bite that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope.” Next to the “pedophile priest” propaganda, it is probably the most often used and abused modern anti-Catholic slur. But simply put, it is a lie.

Newly emerging evidence reveals that the entire story was the result of an organized propaganda effort sponsored by the Soviet KGB to discredit Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church. It’s a shocking story, the stuff of Tom Clancy novels and wild conspiracy theories, but it’s also true, and I’ll unravel that truth in a few moments. It is truly bizarre, but not nearly as bizarre as another anti-Catholic Nazi plot I described in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.” It’s a very good background to this post.

When The Grey Lady Turned Yellow

Though falling at the end of my title, my story begins in the pages of The New York Times, and a context for the “Hitler’s Pope” story. I have long wondered what the Times and the rest of the American mainstream news media did to confront Hitler and the Holocaust. The American press was at its peak of global influence during World War II. Many U.S. newspapers, and most notably The New York Times, had foreign correspondents and news bureaus at their command. The Pope did not command a global news outlet with anything close to the power and impact of The New York Times.

So what exactly was the Times’ role in uncovering and reporting on the Third Reich’s extermination of twelve million people including over six million Jews? I found the answer in a 1999 book by Susan E. Tifft & Alex S. Jones entitled, “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times (Little, Brown). Susan E. Tifft is a former associate editor of Time Magazine. Her co-author (and husband), Alex S. Jones, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning media reporter for The New York Times from 1983 to 1992. At the time they published The Trust, they shared a chair in communications and journalism at Duke University.

The story of The New York Times’ reporting on news of the Holocaust begins with ad revenue. According to Tifft and Jones, the Times slashed its space devoted to news far more severely than its space devoted to advertising during World War II:

“In 1939, 60 percent of the paper had been taken up by news; in 1944 the figure had fallen to below 50 percent. That, coupled with an advertising rate hike . . . sent the Times ad revenue soaring to its highest level since 1931.”

— The Trust (p. 207)

During that period, the Times’ ad revenue had increased from $13 million to $15 million while what it spent on gathering and reporting news decreased from $3.9 million to $3.7 million. Still, at the height of World War II, The New York Times had 55 overseas correspondents, more than any other American newspaper. Owner, Arthur Sulzberger determined that these foreign ambassadors of the Times “should be ‘well-educated attractive Protestants,’ not Jews” (p. 209). This had implications for how and where in the Times the dismal news of Nazi activities throughout Europe was presented, especially in regard to Hitler’s persecutions of the Jews:

“Like his late father-in-law, [Arthur Sulzberger] did not want the Times to be viewed as a ‘Jewish paper.’ But in his single-minded effort to achieve that end, he missed an opportunity to use the considerable power of the paper to focus a spotlight on one of the greatest crimes the world has ever known. (p. 215)

“These personal and professional strains converged with increasing power during the Holocaust . . . [C]rucial news stories were frequently buried inside the paper rather than highlighted on page one. A July 2, 1944 dispatch citing ‘authoritative information’ that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported to their deaths and an additional 350,000 were to be killed in the next three weeks received only four column inches on page twelve, while that same day a story about Fourth of July holiday crowds ran on the front page.”

— The Trust (p.217)

The criticisms of Pope Pius XII and his supposed inaction have been widely exposed in the American news media among newspapers that had scores of correspondents reporting from Europe during World War II. And yet, most of their editors at home simply did not believe the accounts of atrocities coming out of Europe. News of Hitler’s Final Solution was downplayed in the American news media, and the reason for it was utterly scandalous. Susan Tifft and Alex Jones explained why:

“The Times was hardly alone in downplaying news of the Final Solution. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, other major dailies, including the New York Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, like the public at large, disbelieved reports of Jewish genocide in Europe or suspected they were exaggerated in order to attract relief funds.”

— The Trust (p. 218)

During World War II, The New York Times was considered a media flagship. It enjoyed unprecedented power on the global news stage as the preeminent American newspaper. The Times’ superior foreign reporting capabilities gave it the power to set the agenda for other newspapers, many of which took their cue from the Times’ front page. In a post entitled “Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz,” I described what happened in Europe when the bishops of Holland, under the authority of Pope Pius XII, publicly challenged the Third Reich’s deportation of Jews to the death camps. This information was right at the fingertips of The New York Times and its teams reporting from Europe. The Times was in a unique position to inform the world of the horrors of the Holocaust, but it held back. Susan Tifft and Alex Jones concluded:

“Had the Times highlighted Nazi atrocities against Jews, or simply not buried certain stories, the nation might have awakened to the horror far sooner than it did.”

— The Trust (p. 218)

In the Spring of 1945, just before Germany’s surrender, General Dwight Eisenhower assembled an l8-member press delegation to inspect Dachau and Buchenwald. It included the owners of The New York Times with this result reported by Tifft and Jones:

“Despite the powerful effect of such experiences by the owners of The New York Times. readers detected no change in the coverage of Nazi barbarism. The front-page story on the liberation of Dachau never mentioned the word. ‘Jew.’ A week later, Cy Sulzberger’s story about Russian estimates of the death toll at Auschwitz appeared on page twelve, with no indication that most of the victims were Jews.”

— The Trust (p. 237)

The Pope and the KGB

In “The Beatification of Pope John Paul II: When the Wall Fell,” I wrote of a fictional story about the late great Pope from a terrific novel by Tom Clancy entitled Red Rabbit (G.P. Putnam, 2002). In typical Tom Clancy fashion, he told a riveting but wild tale of how the Soviet Union saw Pope John Paul II as an ominous threat to its leadership and legitimacy in the early 1980s. In Clancy’s tale, the Soviet Politburo gave a secret nod to a KGB plot to eliminate the Pope.

In the convoluted story — which defied rational belief — the KGB feared that the administration of President Ronald Reagan would not look kindly on their assassination of a Pope, so some plausible denial was needed. The KGB engaged the Bulgarian secret police to hire a Turkish mercenary to assassinate the Pope right before the world’s eyes in Saint Peter’s Square. The techno-thriller that emerged from this frame of a plot was Tom Clancy at his very best. Reviewers liked the book, but some dismissed its plot as revisionist history and Catholic paranoia.

It turned out that the story wasn’t fiction at all. In 2010, files released by the East German secret service confirmed that the KGB ordered the attack on the Pope and carried out the plot just as Tom Clancy described it. Though much of the mainstream media downplayed the story, the KGB recruited the Bulgarian secret police who in turn hired a Turkish mercenary, Mehmet Ali Agca, to shoot Pope John Paul, hitting him four times at point blank range. This Pope, however, was made of some tough material, and he survived, thwarting the KGB plan.

It turns out that this wasn’t the first time the KGB targeted a Pope for assassination, though in the first instance it was character assassination. All is not what it seems to be in the scandalous charge that Pope Pius XII was silent about the wartime atrocities of Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Edward Pentin, Rome Correspondent for the National Catholic Register had a fascinating two-part series in September revealing new evidence about how the myth of “Hitler’s Pope” actually began with Joseph Stalin.  Part 1 and Part 2

In Part 1 of the series, “Ex-KGB Chief: Pius XII Was Framed” (NC Register, Aug. 26 – Sept. 8, 2012), Edward Pentin reported that Rolf Hochhuth’s famous 1963 play, “The Deputy” was used by Soviet intelligence as part of a wider plot to frame the Pope. In 1968, the play was described as the “slander of the century” by famed British reporter, David Frost.

Part 1 of Pentin’s story begins with Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of the Romanian intelligence service who described in detail how the Soviets framed Pope Pius XII as an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer in a propaganda campaign known as “Operation Seat 12.” The story is revealed in an upcoming book with famed Holocaust author, Ronald Rychlak entitled Disinformation. In his introduction to the book, former CIA director, James Woolsey wrote that the book, “will change forever the way you look at intelligence, foreign affairs, the press and much else.”

If Edward Pentin’s articles are accurate, it will also change forever the way you look at the mythical and scandalous accounts of Pope Pius XII during World War II. According to Part 2 of Edward Pentin’s series, entitled “Pope Pius and the Myth of ‘Hitler’s Pope”’:

“The Kremlin’s attempt to frame Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope was rejected by that contemporary generation that bad lived through the real history and knew who Pope Pius XII really was. The Kremlin tried again in the 1960s, with the next generation.”

The irony of the KGB propaganda war waged to assassinate the character of Pope Pius XII is this: If all contemporary agendas were put aside, and the verdict of Jews in the generation during and after the War ruled the day, then the true picture of Pope Pius XII emerges from the rubble of war. It is the picture of a courageous hero whose stand against Hitler directly saved the lives of 860,000 Jews, more than any other figure — religious or otherwise — in World War II Europe. Not least among many tributes to Pope Pius and his wartime advocacy for the Jews of Europe was this one by Rabbi Israel Zolli, Rome’s Chief Rabbi during World War II:

“There is no place of sorrow where the spirit of love of Pius XII has not reached . . . There are no barriers, no distinctions. All sufferers are children of God in the eyes of the Church . . . No hero in history has commanded such an army; none is more heroic than that conducted by Pius XII in the name of Christian charity.”

Now The Grey Lady Fades

It is no longer a mystery to me why The New York Times and other news media spread far and wide the myth of “Hitler’s Pope.” They eagerly embraced without question a Kremlin propaganda campaign to frame Pius XII as a scapegoat for silence in the face of the Holocaust. The Times had an opportunity during Hitler’s reign that the Pope never had — an opportunity to expose a horrible truth to the world. According to Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, other agendas — self-serving political agendas — controlled the news and buried that truth. If the Kremlin had its “Operation Seat 12” to defame the Pope, “Operation Page 12” seemed to be a parallel plan at The New York Times. It’s a moral legacy that cannot ever be erased as long as the Times and other news media scapegoat someone else for that silence.

Media slurs against priests and popes have helped to derail a Catholic moral voice in this increasingly secularized public square, but it’s time to stand against the lies. If you like this post, then send it to others. E-mail it, post it to your social networks, ping it, tweet it, and help further this truth — because it IS the truth.

And if you are feeling simply defeated from the electoral voice of America, that’s a luxury we may not have. Western Culture stands at a precipice, and will continue its descent until its imminent fall becomes clearer to all — perhaps in four more years or so. There remains future hope, so declaring defeat is not an option. Truth must always be cultivated in the face of lies, and no election results can stifle it. The truth belongs front and center, and has no “Operation Page 12.”

Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being

Overcoming many obstacles, Pornchai Moontri, Alberto Ramos, and seven other prisoners receive their high school diplomas in a model prison education program.

“The beginning of Wisdom is the most sincere desire to learn.”

— Wisdom of Solomon 6:17

In a recent post on These Stone Walls, I described some of what has gone terribly wrong with America’s enormous, ever-growing, and grossly expensive prison system. “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men” made a crystal clear connection between the diminishment of fatherhood and the growth of prisons in Western Culture. It is especially evident in America which has more young men in prison than all 28 nations of the European Union combined.

In America, a dark cloud is rising in a dismal and growing trend to embrace the privatization of prisons for profit. Charles Dickens and George Orwell working together could not have conceived a more devious plan to keep young men in the dark wood of error away from any hope for a future, and then profit from that. The darkest tenet of prisons for profit is that they require their host states to guarantee that their prisons will remain at least 90% full.

In the midst of that debate, however, something is happening in the New Hampshire State Prison that has proven itself to be a lifeline for a growing number of young men determined to survive their own failures and emerge from the dark wood of error. Within these stone walls, this prison operates a special school district known as Granite State High School. The program grants both a GED high school equivalency and a far more arduous path for prisoner-students determined to prove themselves equal to the challenge: a fully accredited high school diploma earned course by course, credit by credit, over the course of several years.

In the world in which most of you live, a high school diploma is a necessary stepping stone. In this world, it is a milestone, and perhaps the most visible evidence of rehabilitation. To earn a high school diploma in prison, a prisoner must first expand his own boundaries, stake them out, reclaim his life and his mind from the many dark forces of prison life, and stand firmly on his own two feet in resisting a gang-culture vying every day for control over young minds in prison.

Against all this, a student in prison must go to school every day, complete homework every day, pass exams, write papers, and be a full-time student while living in the chaos of prison life. He must do this semester after semester, motivated by little more than the desire to learn and the hope that there is a world beyond prison in which education is a tool for building a better life. It is a goal that for many prisoners exists only on faith. There is no more effective measurement of the emergence of a man from the dark wood of error than the sheer drive required to overcome all these obstacles to earn a high school diploma in a prison environment.

Two people you know of — one of whom you will get to know better today — have done just that. Pornchai Moontri and his friend (and mine), Alberto Ramos, have completed high school in prison and will graduate this month. Pornchai needs no introduction to readers of These Stone Walls. His own story about the special challenges he faced was told in a riveting post, “Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”

A Man in Full

You have met Alberto Ramos as well. I mentioned him briefly in “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.” Alberto and I went to prison within a year of each other. The shocking part of this story is that Alberto went to prison at the age of 14. Alberto shot and killed a 19-year-old man in a drug and gang-related confrontation that spiraled out of control in a dark city alley in 1995. At the time, Alberto had already lived “on the streets” for two years since being thrown out of his single-parent home at age 12. At 14, Alberto was the youngest person in New Hampshire to be convicted of murder with an adult prison sentence — 30 years to life.

Because he was only 14, Alberto spent his first four years in solitary confinement. When he turned 18 in 1998, he was transferred to the New Hampshire State Prison. It was there, one year later, that Alberto and I first met. He was 19 years old, and had already been in prison for five years. No one can tell the story of Alberto’s life up to that point better than Alberto himself. He did just that in an essay he gave me two years ago, and which I have kept for all this time. I have his permission to publish it here with the same title he gave it:

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Where Did My Inner Child Go?

By Alberto Luis Ramos

My story is one like the rest, but I will let you decide that for yourself. Both my parents were born and raised on the beautiful Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. As for myself, I am a first generation mainland American born in Philadelphia, PA, the birthplace of our nation. At the end of the day, I can honestly say I do not have a place I call home. We moved so many times that I even hate being asked, ‘So, where are you from?’ I would rather not be asked. I’m not from anywhere.

I only met my father once as a very young boy, and I have only a vague memory of him. He had other children with other mothers and I do not know my place in his family. It must have been last place. Today, I do not even know if he is still living.

I know what my mother looks like, but I do not know my mother at all. Some people think I became a man when my mother kicked me out of her home when I was 12. ‘It’s him or me,’ was the ultimatum her boyfriend gave her, and she needed him more than me. I was always running away from home anyway. This part of my life is nothing next to all the shit I’ve seen and heard.

Today I know that this is not when I became a man. Today I understand that the experience of being a boy alone on the street made me feel more like a child than ever, and today I know that all my anger and hostility just masked the fact that I was deeply hurt. My friend, Pornchai Moontri taught me this. Stripping away all the anger to get at the hurt was an ordeal, but we are friends because we traveled down the same road at the same time to face our hurt. I owe a lot to Pornchai.

I heard of a book once, Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Well, everything I ever needed to know — or thought I needed to know — I learned on the streets. In a short time those streets took ownership of my life and took the place of my family and my home. By the age of 14 I wasn’t just in the gang culture of the streets. I was instructing my peers in the finer points of mere survival because I thought mere survival was all we can expect in this life. In my life on the streets, I settled for mere survival. I learned how to fight because I knew from instinct that kids on the street who know how to fight usually don’t have to fight. Violence was a daily reality in my life and world, and I could not escape from it. I could not be a child. I just didn’t know how.

Then one night I was in an alley. It was June 28, 1995. I had gone two days without sleep while getting high. I was 14 years old and had a confrontation with a 19-year old in this dark alley. Three shots fired and an order of carelessness, and two lives were destroyed. My act took his life, and hurt many other people.

I was 14 then. I am 32 now. The ensuing 18 years have been in adult prison, but that surely isn’t what defines being a man. I guess I cannot define when I became a man without naming the time I was a child. But that eludes me. I was never a child.

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The Beginning of Wisdom

I remember vividly the day Alberto and I met. He was 19 years old and five years in prison when he asked to audit a class — Introduction to Psychology — that was available to prisoners in a short-lived prison college program through a local community college back in 1999 – 2001. Halfway through the semester, the instructor had to drop the course. Because I had a degree in that field, I was asked by the prison programs director to take the class for the remainder of the semester. I was a prisoner teaching other prisoners, and it was foreign territory to me. I walked into a class full of prisoners to talk about behavior modification with less than 60 minutes notice to prepare. I hadn’t even seen the textbook.

Sitting in the front row, middle seat of that cramped classroom sat Alberto Ramos who rather liked the previous instructor and rather resented the sudden change. He wore his prison uniform, but like many young men facing years in prison both behind and before them, he also wore rage, and suspicion, and skepticism, and loss, and defiance. He wore the streets that sent him here. But behind all that — to borrow a worn-out phrase — he wore the audacity of hope.

Seventy percent of the young men coming into prison do not have a high school diploma. It is a failure of societal proportions in an age of no child left behind. The difference an education can make in the life of a prisoner is massive. Study after study has shown that earning a high school diploma in prison cuts recidivism rates by up to 50%.

Having arrived at the beginning of wisdom, it is that which carried Alberto from the dark wood of error to the point of becoming a man. If he cannot define that moment, I can offer only this. Alberto Ramos became a man when he embraced a future beyond his past; when he gave up the stagnation of the present to look down that road less traveled; when he set out in that direction knowing not where it leads, but went there anyway.

This is why we must never give up hope for another human being. There are miracles before us, and now we have met two of them. Alberto Ramos and Pornchai Moontri are not just men, they are men who conquered the lowest depths, and climbed the highest peaks. Despite all, they are men in full.

And they are educated men with much to offer the world which must one day release them from all the prisons they have known to live in their true home: a place called freedom.

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Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part Two

See Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part OneAs a young priest in 1982, I was only vaguely familiar with the name Maximilian Kolbe. I remember reading of his canonization by Pope John Paul II, but Father Kolbe's world was far removed from my modern suburban priestly ministry. I was far too busy to step into it.I didn't know that nearly two decades later, Father Kolbe's life, death, and sainthood would be proclaimed on the wall of my prison cell. I also didn't know this would help define the person I choose to be in prison.Being a Jew and not a Catholic, Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning, said nothing about Maximilian's sainthood or any miracles attributed to his intercession. Instead, Dr. Frankl was moved by the profound charity of Maximilian, which defied the narcissism of our times.For those unfamiliar with him, the story is simple.The prisoners of Auschwitz were packed into bunkers like cattle. To encourage informants, the camp had a policy that if any prisoner escaped, 10 others would be randomly chosen for summary execution.At the morning role call one day, a prisoner from Maximilian's bunker was missing. Guards chose 10 men to be executed. The 10th fell to the ground and cried for the wife and children he would never see again. Father Kolbe spontaneously stepped forward and said,

"I am a Catholic priest, and I would like to take the place of this man."

Two weeks later, he alone was still alive among the 10 prisoners chained and condemned to starvation. Maximilian was injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, and his remains unceremoniously incinerated.For the unbeliever, all that Maximilian was went up in smoke. Viktor Frankl shared some other corner of that horrific prison. The story of the person Father Kolbe chose to be rippled through the camp. This story offered proof to Viktor Frankl that we can be as much inspired by grace as doomed by despair. We get to choose which will define us.Within days of reading Man's Search for Meaning and learning of Father Kolbe's sacrifice, I received a letter from out of the blue.Conventual Franciscan Father Jim McCurry had been in an airport in Ireland when he heard an Irish priest nearby mention that he corresponds with a priest in a Concord, New Hampshire prison. Father McCurry said he was on his way to visit his order's house in Granby, Massachusetts and would arrange to visit the Concord prison.Weeks later, Father McCurry and I met in the prison visiting room. When I asked him what his "assignment" is, he said,

"Well I just finished a biography of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Have you heard of him?"

Father McCurry went on to say that he was involved in Father Maximilian's cause for sainthood. He had met the man whose great grandfather life was saved by Father Kolbe.A few years later, Father McCurry arranged a Father Maximilian Kolbe exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum. It was then that he sent me the card depicting Father Maximilian clothed in his Franciscan habit with one sleeve in his prison uniform. I keep the card above my mirror in my cell.I can never embrace these stone walls. I can't claim ownership of them. Passively acceding to injustice anywhere contributes to injustice everywhere. Father Maximilian never approved of Auschwitz.One can't understand how I now respond to these stone walls, however, without hearing of Father Maximilian's presence there.

Above my mirror, he refocused my hope in the light of Christ. The darkness can never overcome it.

What hope and freedom there is in that fact! The darkness can never, ever, ever overcome it!Please share with me your comments below in the comments area. 

Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part One

How I came to be in this prison is a story told elsewhere, by me and by others. How I "met" Father Maximilian Kolbe 60 years after he surrendered his life at Auschwitz is a story about actual grace. In his Catholic Catechism, Jesuit Father John Hardon defines actual grace as God's gift of "the special assistance we need to guide the mind and inspire the will" on our path to God. Sometimes, it's very special.My first three years in prison are a blur in my memory. There is no point trying to find words to express the sense of loss, of alienation, of being cast into an abyss that was not of my own making -- a loss that could not be grounded in any reality of mine.About 1,000 days and nights passed in the abyss before what Father Hardon described as "special assistance" crossed my path.Someone, somewhere -- I don't know who -- sent the prison's Catholic chaplain (a layman then) a book entitled Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, M.D. Somewhere in my studies, I heard of this book, but only a prisoner can read it in the same light in which it is written. The chaplain called me to his office.  He wanted to know whether he should recommend this book, but didn't have time to read it.  He wanted my opinion.It had been three years since anyone had asked my opinion on anything.  I didn't read Dr. Frankl's book so much as devour it.  I read it through three times in seven days.  As a priest, I often preached that grace is a process and not an event. It is not always so.  I was meant to read Man's Search for Meaning at the precise moment that it landed upon my path. A week earlier,  I would not have been ready.  A week later may have been too late.I was drowning in the solitary sea of deeply felt loss.  I was not going to make it across.   My priesthood and my soul were dying.  The book, as I have come to call it, is Viktor Frankl's vivid account of how he was alone among his family to survive imprisonment at Auschwitz.  This was an imprisonment imposed on him for who he was: a Jew.There is a central message in this small book.  A profound message, so clear in meaning, that it has within it the hallmark of inspired truth.   Like Saul thrown from his mount, I remember sinking to the floor when I read it.

"There is a freedom that no one can ever take from you: The freedom to choose the person you are going to be in any set of circumstances."

This changed everything. Everything! You will see how later.  At the very end of his book, Dr. Frankl revealed the name of his inspiration for surviving Auschwitz. He wrote of Sigmund Freud's cynical view that man is self-serving. And a man's instinctual need to survive will trump "quaint notions" such as grace and sacrifice every time.   For Dr. Frankl, Auschwitz provided the proof that Freud was wrong.

That proof is Father Maximilian Kolbe.

To be continued in Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part TwoPlease share your thoughts below in the comment area.