Paths I Crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Paul Haring | CNS

In strange ways, injustices I have known as a prisoner and a priest intersected the lives of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell who died just ten days apart.

February 8 , 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pope Benedict XVI passed from this life at age 95 on the final day of 2022. Ten days later, Cardinal George Pell died of cardiac arrest at age 81 while recovering from routine surgery at a hospital in Rome. Both of these men were giants in the Church as the many tributes to them from around the world make clear. They were also targets for much vitriol and injustice. It was in this targeted injustice that my path crossed with that of both men.

In “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae,” a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by famed Boston criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, he cited a ground-breaking book by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board entitled, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness, and Other, Terrors of Our Time. Ms. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of writings about unjust sex abuse prosecutions that generated a spate of wrongful convictions of innocent people in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of her subjects in the book and subsequent writings spent decades in prison. I am one of them.

One of the tragically misguided prosecutions cited in the book is that of Margaret Kelly Michaels, then a 24-year-old nursery school teacher in New Jersey. Charged with multiple counts of child molestation in a witch hunt atmosphere, Kelly was innocent of the heinous crimes, none of which actually took place. The charges were fantastical and false, but the child abuse terror of the time resulted in easy convictions with no valid evidence.

The nature of the evidence in Kelly’s case was chilling. The prosecution’s child psych expert — who had no real expertise at all — fashioned a theory that young children who say that no sexual abuse happened actually mean the opposite. A vigilante jury bought that theory and convicted Kelly Michaels. At age 24, she was sentenced to 47 years in prison.

After failed appeals having nothing whatsoever to do with truth or justice, Kelly’s fate seemed sealed in wrongful imprisonment until Dorothy Rabinowitz began writing about it. Then New York civil rights attorney Morton Stavis came out of retirement to take the case pro bono. In her book, Ms. Rabinowitz revealed that Mr. Stavis sought the aid of a New York-based left-leaning legal think tank, the Center for Constitutional Rights that he himself founded. The CCR wanted nothing to do with this case. As Ms. Rabinowitz explained:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the politically progressive views held by many at the center. In the 1980s, as today, there was a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse was to undermine the battle against child abuse. It was to betray children and other victims of sexual predators.”

No Crueler Tyrannies, 17-18

The charges against me stem from the same time period, filtered through the same progressive political opinions, and hyped by the same prosecutorial mindset that to be accused of such things is to be guilty. It is the cruelest of tyrannies that even our Catholic bishops have cowed in fear under that progressive steamroller as priests so accused are discarded without defense. This was articulated in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”

The heroic attorney Morton Stavis was not defeated by the progressive disdain for his effort from his own tribe at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He did not live to see his victory in this case, but he had put together a small team of righteous defenders who eventually prevailed by exposing the truth and winning Kelly’s freedom. One of these defenders was Robert Rosenthal whose prior legal briefs on my behalf are still on display at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

Kelly Michaels went on in life to marry a judge. She eventually recovered — to the extent one can — from the tyranny of wrongful imprisonment. She has corresponded with me in freedom, imparting as much hope for justice as she can by urging me to never give up. I haven’t, but I will be 70 on my next birthday and like Job, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25).

Vincenzo Pinto | AFP

Benedict’s “Crimes against Humanity”

However, reading Dorothy’s book was unfortunately not my final encounter with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Clinging to the progressive view that to be accused of sexual abuse is to be guilty, the Center for Constitutional Rights allowed itself to be duped and used by SNAP, the activist group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. I wrote a post some time ago that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of this organization's campaign to destroy any due process for Catholic priests. The post was, “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

Prior to writing that post, David Clohessy and SNAP manipulated the Center for Constitutional Rights into bringing a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican at the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. It was a shameless publicity stunt that had no hope of success, but was filed only to shame Pope Benedict and bring attention to SNAP.

Though I was aware of the charge, it was only after the International Criminal Court dismissed it that I learned that I was an unwitting pawn in this debacle. Journalist Joann Wypijewski, a reporter of courage and high integrity, wrote of it in her blistering review of the movie “Spotlight,” a film about The Boston Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the sexual abuse scandal. The following is an excerpt of her bold article, “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film”:

“The film’s advertisement for SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, faithfully represents the Globe’s affiliation. It elides SNAP’s belief that wrongful prosecutions are a minor price to pay in pursuit of its larger mission, something [The Boston Globe] did not much concern itself with either as it collected its Pulitzer for service in the public interest; something even the Center for Constitutional Rights disregarded in 2011 when it joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

“Liberals who cheer this sort of thing ought to ponder whether they have any principles at all ... . The CCR brief failed ... but to CCR’s shame, Father MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief, with respect to allegations of videotape (that is, child porn), which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”

I was frozen in place by grief upon first learning of this. I knew that the charge had no substance. I also knew that in her WSJ investigation, Dorothy Rabinowitz confronted NH Detective James McLaughlin who first contrived the charge. Cornered, he finally admitted, “There was never any evidence of pornography.”

This did not stop SNAP and CCR from including it in a falsified brief before the International Criminal Court. There was no repercussion for the attempt at fraud upon the court. Even now, as recently as a few months ago, biased NH reporter Damien Fisher— whose wife Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher has ties to my diocese — repeated the pornography allegation without even mentioning that it had been widely discredited, including by the dishonest detective who first raised it.

All the claims that Pope Benedict XVI enabled accused priests and failed to protect victims are of a kind with the above story. In the end, it was never any of this that really made him a target. It was his orthodoxy, his fidelity, his clear-minded exposure of Catholic truths. None of this could ever successfully be assailed, so instead they smeared him with a weapon straight from hell: false witness. Let that sink in.

The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

In the same manner that Kelly Michaels reached out to me upon her exoneration, it was because I had been so falsely accused that I reached out to Cardinal George Pell during his 400 days of unjust imprisonment. Having come to recognize signposts of dishonesty in such a case, I was certain that Cardinal Pell had been falsely accused. But because of prison rules barring direct contact with other prisoners, I could not contact in prison directly.

A friend, Sheryl Collmer, a Tyler, Texas writer for Crisis Magazine and other venues, was my intermediary. I know that pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this case it was perhaps a bit less deadly. There have been few really proud moments during my imprisonment, but my ability to detect and expose the truth in support of Cardinal Pell was one of them.

As a result, I found this excerpt in his published Prison Journal Volume 2 (Ignatius Press 2021). It was written from his prison cell:

“Friday, 2 August 2019: By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl Collmer, a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog, Beyond These Stone Walls, written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, ‘Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?’

“Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

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

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday, your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’

“Fr MacRae recounts extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windshuttle, editor of the quality journal Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ (See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell,’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019).

“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama's White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men.

“As Fr MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in 2015] . Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019. No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

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

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from the BTSW About Page], ‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice]’”

Addendum

You may see — from Cardinal Pell’s last citation above — where Dorothy Rabinowitz got the inspiration for the title of her book, No Crueler Tyrannies. Once free from his wrongful prison sentence, Cardinal Pell was restored to his rightful position in Rome. From there, he reached out to me again in ways that I only learned about posthumously. He wrote to a mutual friend that he plans to refer to my situation in talks he is slated to present in Rome and Australia. He never got to present them.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Cardinal George Pell Faced Down a Hostile World” (January 13, 2023), Fr Raymond de Souza wrote that “His faith even during wrongful detention, was the crown of an inspiring Catholic life.” Reading his Prison Journal, I have no doubt been so inspired.

It is my prayer, and perhaps not even a necessary one, that Pope Benedict and Cardinal Pell both now stand in the Presence of God where they behold the fruition of all the graces bestowed upon them, and hopefully now upon us through them. We have not heard the last of them.

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Note from Fr. Gordon Mac Rae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also wish to visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

From Down Under, the Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

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Francesco Sforza | Osservatore Romano | AFP

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

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

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

Stones for Pope Benedict and the Rusty Wheels of Justice

Following revelations about possible deliverance after 28 years of wrongful imprisonment, hope is hard to come by, but it was not so for Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

February 9, 2022

“This prisoner of the State remains, against all probability, staunch in spirit, strong in the faith that the wheels of justice turn, however slowly.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, “The Trials of Father MacRae,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013

When this blog was but a year old back in 2010, my friend and prison roommate, Pornchai Moontri, was received into the Catholic faith. He was 36 years old and it was his 18th year in prison. Everyone who knew him, except me, thought his conversion seemed quite impossible. Pornchai does not have an evil bone in his body, but his traumatic life had a profound effect on his outlook on life and his capacity for hope. There is simply no point in embracing faith without cultivating hope. The two go hand in hand. We cannot have one without the other.

To sow the seeds of hope in Pornchai, I had to first reawaken hope from its long dormant state in my own life as a prisoner. I am not entirely sure that I have completed that task. It seems a work in progress, but Pornchai’s last words to me as he walked through the prison gates toward freedom on September 8, 2020 were, “Thank you for giving me hope.” I wrote of that day in “Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

A decade earlier, back in April of 2010, Pornchai entered into Communion with the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday. On the night before, he asked me a haunting question. It was what I call one of his “upside down” questions. As he pondered what was to come, his head popped down from his upper bunk so he appeared upside down as he asked it. “Is it okay for us to hope for a happy ending when Saint Maximilian didn’t have one?” Pornchai had a knack for knocking me off the rails with questions like that.

Before responding, I had to do some pondering of my own. Our Patron Saint lost his earthly life at age 41 in a Nazi concentration camp starvation bunker. His death was followed by his rapid incineration. All that Maximilian Kolbe was in his earthly existence went up in smoke and ash to drift in the skies above Auschwitz, the most hopeless place in modern human history.

Retroactive Guilt and Shame

What I am about to write may seem horribly unpopular with those harboring an agenda against Catholic priests, but popularity has never been an important goal for me. In recent weeks, the news media has trumpeted a charge launched by a commission empowered by some Catholic officials in Germany. The commission’s much-hyped conclusion was that Pope Benedict was negligent when he did not remove four priests quickly enough after suspicions of abuse forty-one years ago in 1981. Some of my friends have cautioned me to stay out of this. Perhaps I should listen.

But I won’t. At what point do we cease judging men of the past for not living up to the ideals and politically correct sensitivities of the present? Merely asking that question puts me in the crosshairs of our victim culture, but it also forces me to ask another. Go back just another forty-one years and you will find yourself amid the hopelessness of 1941 as the children of Yahweh suffered unspeakable crimes in Germany and Poland. Where do we draw the line of historic condemnation? Should the German Church stop with Joseph Ratzinger in 1981?

The condemnation of Pope Benedict called for by some media and German officials today should be seen through the lens of history. It is a part of our hope as Catholics and as human beings that neither Pope Benedict nor the German people would act today as they did — or allowed to be done — forty or eighty years ago. The real target of such pointless inquiry and blame was not Pope Benedict, but rather hope itself.

I think we have to be clear in our response which should include something about the splinters in our eyes and the planks in the eyes of those pointing misplaced fingers of blame. Perhaps the moral authority that chastises Pope Benedict today in Germany doth protesteth too much. A new book by historian Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 marshals a plethora of facts and critical skills of historical writing to portray the postwar “country’s stubborn inclination toward willful delusion.”

Thank you for indulging my brief tirade. Catholic League President Bill Donohue also came to the defense of Pope Benedict by shedding some light of historical context on the matter.

Hope Is Its Own Fulfillment

But back to Father Maximilian Kolbe. On the day of Pornchai’s Baptism, I responded to his question. I told him, “YOU are Maximilian’s happy ending!” Eighty-one years after his martyrdom at Auschwitz, the world honors him while the names of those who destroyed him have simply faded into oblivion. No one honors them. No one remembers them. God remembers. Their footprint on the Earth left only sorrow.

St. Maximilian Kolbe is the reason why I was compelled to set aside my own quest for freedom — which seemed utterly hopeless the last time I looked — in order to do what Maximilian did: to save another.

In all the anguish of the last two years as deliverance and freedom slowly came to Pornchai Moontri, the clouds of the past that overshadowed him began to lift. My prayer had been constant, and of a consistently singular nature: “I ask for freedom for Pornchai; I ask for nothing for myself.”

I am no saint, but that is what St. Maximilian did, and it seemed to be my only path. But since then that 2013 quote atop this post from The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz has once again become my reality. As you know if you have been reading these pages in recent weeks, a frenzy of action and high anxiety has surrounded the recent release of the New Hampshire ‘Laurie List,’ known more formally as the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. If you somehow missed the earthquake that struck from Beyond These Stone Walls in January, I wrote about it in Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell. 

I am most grateful to readers for making the extra effort to share that post. It was emailed by Dr. Bill Donohue to the entire membership of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It indeed came as a bombshell to me and to many. Just as the frenzy began to subside, Ryan MacDonald stirred it up again in his brilliant analysis with a very pointed title: “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

I am not entirely sure that “destroys” is the right term to use, but I understand where he is coming from. To survive twenty-eight years of wrongful imprisonment means relegating a lot of one’s sense of self to the ash heap of someone else’s oppression. Many of those who spend decades in prison for crimes they did not commit lose their minds. Many also lose their faith, and along with it, all hope.

I have to remind myself multiple times a day that nothing is a sure thing anymore — neither prison nor freedom. I keep asking myself how much I dare to trust hope again. To quote the late Baseball Hall of Famer, Yogi Berra, this all feels “like deja vu all over again.”

Deja vu is a French term which literally means “to have seen before.” It is the strange sensation of having been somewhere before, or having previously experienced a current situation even though you know you have not. It is a phenomenon of neuropsychology that I have experienced all my life. About 15 percent of the population has that experience on occasion.

A possible explanation of deja vu is that aspects of the current situation act as retrieval cues in the psyche that unconsciously evoke an earlier experience long since receded from conscious memory, but resulting in an eerie sense of the familiar. It feels more strange than troublesome. I have a lifelong condition called Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) which makes me prone to the experience of deja vu, but no one knows exactly why.

When Disappointments of the Past Haunt the Present

This time, my deja vu is connected to real events of the past, and the origin of my caution about current hope is found there. If you have read an important post of mine entitled “Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester,” then you may recall this story. In 2003 and 2004, the New Hampshire Attorney General conducted an intense one-sided investigation of my diocese, the Diocese of Manchester. When it was over, the former Bishop of Manchester signed a blanket release disposing of the privacy rights of priests of his diocese.

In 2021, when I wrote the above post, New Hampshire Judge Richard B. McNamara ruled that the 2003 public release of one-sided documents should have been barred under New Hampshire law because it was an abuse of the grand jury system and it denied basic rights of due process to those involved.

At the time this all happened in 2003, a Tennessee lawyer and law firm cited in a press statement that what happened in this diocese was unconstitutional. I contacted the lawyer who subsequently took a strong interest in my own case. He flew to New Hampshire twice to visit me in prison. I sent him a vast amount of documentation which he found most compelling. After many months of cultivated hope, he sent me a letter indicating that he would soon send a Memorandum of Understanding that I was to sign laying out the parameters under which he would represent me pro bono because I have not had an income for decades.

I waited. I waited a long time, but the Memorandum never came. Without explanation or communication of any kind, the lawyer and the hope he brought simply faded away. Letter after letter remained unanswered. It was inexplicable. It was at this same time that Dorothy Rabinowitz and The Wall Street Journal published a two-part exposé, A Priest’s Story, on the perversion of justice that became apparent in their independent review of this matter. Those articles were actually published a few years after they were first planned. This was because the reams of supporting documents requested and collected by the newspaper were destroyed in the collateral damage of the terrorist attacks in New York of September 11, 2001.

Then in 2012, new lawyers filed an extensive case for Habeas Corpus review of my trial and imprisonment. It is still available at the National Center for Reason and Justice which mercifully still advocates for justice for me. However that effort failed when both State and Federal judges declined to allow any hearing that would give new witnesses a chance to testify under oath.

Now, in 2022 in light of this new ray of hope, some of the people involved in Beyond These Stone Walls have expressed frustration with my caution and apparent pessimism. I have not been as enthused as they have been over the hope arising from the current situation. Hope for me has been like investing in the stock market. Having lost everything twice, I am hesitant to wade too far into the waters of hope again.

I know only too well, however, that hope at times such as these is like that which both Pornchai Moontri and I once found in our Patron Saint. I wrote about it in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

So in spite of myself, I am now aboard this new train of hope and must go where it takes me. That, for now, is the best that I can do. My prayer has not changed. I ask for nothing for myself, but I will take whatever comes.

I thank you, as I have in the past, for your support and prayers and for being here with me again at this turning of the tide. I will keep you posted, but it won’t be quick. Real hope never is.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please visit our newest addition to the BTSW menu: The Wall Street Journal. You may also wish to visit these relevant posts cited herein:

Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell

Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest

Padre Pio Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment

Amid reports on scores of men wrongly imprisoned, a California FBI investigator’s study concludes that at least half the claims against Catholic priests are false.

“IF YOU LET ‘EM GET AWAY WITH THIS, YOU GIVE ‘EM THE ETERNAL RIGHT TO DO THE SAME DAMN THING TO ANY ONE OF YOU!”

That memorable line was delivered with blunt force by actor Joe Don Baker portraying the famous anti-corruption sheriff, Buford Pusser, in the 1973 film, “Walking Tall.” Buford stood shirtless before a packed courthouse, the lacerations of his brutal scourging by local thugs still glistening with blood, while a corrupted judge pounded his gavel charging Buford with contempt. The entire courtroom, and the viewing audience, also gasped with contempt, but their contempt was not for Buford Pusser.

A part of me was hoping that Cornelius Dupree, Jr. would shout something similar to Buford Pusser’s declaration early this month as he stood before cameras in front of a Dallas courthouse with Innocence Project founder, Attorney Barry Scheck. Cornelius Dupree has now been free for a decade, to the extent a man can be free after 31 years in prison for a sex crime he had nothing to do with. During those 31 years he passed up two opportunities for parole because they required that he admit to being a sex offender. Cornelius Dupree served more time for a crime he didn’t commit than any of the 41 wrongfully convicted and exonerated prisoners in Texas alone since 2001.

20-year-old Cornelius Dupree was arrested for the crime in 1979, and sentenced to 75 years in prison. In 2004, he was set to be released on parole until he refused it again because it required that he submit to a sex offender treatment program which in turn required an admission of guilt. The 20-year-old turned 51 in prison before being exonerated and released.

I have also been forced to pass up parole, and for the same reasons.  I would have to enter a required program and openly admit guilt not only to crimes charged, but to everything I have merely been accused of.  I would not even be eligible for that program until about the age of 80, forced to recall fictitious events alledged to have occurred when I was in my twenties.  This is a story I wrote about in “Why this Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison.”

On a national scale, only two other exonerated men spent more time in prison than Cornelius Dupree. Jamie Bain was one of them. He walked out of prison after serving thirty-five years for a rape crime that DNA evidence proved he did not commit and had nothing to do with. These two men are among hundreds exonerated nationwide after being wrongfully imprisoned for sexual offenses. 

Cornelius Dupree exonerated after 31 years in prison.

Study Suspects Thousands of False Convictions

The National Center for Reason and Justice is a Boston-based organization formed to defend those wrongfully convicted of such crimes.  NCRJ exists not only to sponsor a defense for the wrongly convicted but also to educate the public about the great damage done by wrongful convictions, not only to the individual wrongly sent to prison, but to the justice system itself.  NCRJ sponsors my defense despite the fact that to date no judge would agree to hear the evidence or witnesses.  The NCRJ maintains a page entitled, “Father Gordon MacRae.”

If you don’t think this is really a problem, spend some time at the site of the National Center for Reason and Justice. I think this site will convince you. Why should you be concerned about this? Well, Buford Pusser provided THAT answer. I woke up one night in prison muttering his very same words. I think the court I was standing before was the court of public opinion, and it wasn’t my body that was lacerated, but my name and my priesthood and the entire Church.

In 2004, a report was published under the title, “Study Suspects Thousands of False Convictions.” It examined 328 cases of exoneration including 120 sexual assault exonerations. In 90 percent of those cases, defendants were convicted based on misidentification of witnesses. Many of the wrongful convictions — about 25% of them — involved coerced confessions or “plea deals” because the accused had little or no hope of acquittal, or lacked the resources to fight the claim. 

This happens in too many cases against Catholic priests.  When I was accused, my Diocese issued an immediate press release declaring my guilt so that financial settlements could begin negotiations.  In 2002, when the bishops adopted the Dallas Charter, this became standard operating procedure.  Any priest accused in America is now barred from presenting himself as a priest and immediately banished from Church property, often without income, in claims that are usually decades old.  This is an important reality.  In a 2003 column in The Wall Street Journal, Deputy Editor Dan Henninger commented on accusations against pop star Michael Jackson:

“… Mr. Jackson, like Kobe Bryant, was able to mount a defense equal to the accusatory powers of the state. Not everyone can do that. When Michael walked, I wondered if any of the many convicted Catholic priests similarly charged were in fact innocent but found guilty because they couldn’t push back against the state’s relentless steam roller.”

A little time spent at The National Center for Reason and Justice will demonstrate that “relentless steam roller” really does characterize exactly what happens when state prosecutors try a case of sexual abuse or sexual assault without actual evidence. And when the defendant is either a pop star or a Catholic priest, all eyes are on the prize for prosecutors. Just consider my response to Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal :

Michael Jackson is acquitted.

“As a priest without the means to push back in equal measure to Michael Jackson, I must point out some factors you overlooked. Imagine how steeply uphill Michael’s battle would have been if twenty years passed between the alleged crime and the state’s prosecutorial steam roller rumbling into action for a trial.

“Imagine the state having to prove nothing while Michael Jackson’s defense tried in vain to prove that something alleged to have happened two decades earlier never happened at all. Then imagine Michael struggling to proclaim his innocence while the institution he served denounced him and his attempts to defend himself, seeking only the path of least resistance to settle with his accusers and rid themselves of liability at the expense of due process.

“Imagine all of this, and you will have captured the scene faced by many similarly accused Catholic priests.”

A Measure of Truth

David F. Pierre, Jr. is author of a new book, The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church. David Pierre is also host of The Media Report. Some years ago, David Pierre forwarded a link to an article of his on The Media Report entitled: “Special Report: Los Angeles Attorney Declares Rampant Fraud; Many Abuse Claims Against Catholic Priests are ‘Entirely False.’” The report was described as a “bombshell” in David Pierre’s article. It was also sent to me by several BTSW readers.

The report cited in David Pierre’s article was submitted to the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Attorney Donald H. Steier who compiled his investigation along with the aid of a retired F.B.I. agent working with him. His stunning conclusion was:

“About ONE-HALF [emphasis his] of the claims made in the clergy cases were either entirely false or so greatly exaggerated that the truth would not have supported a prosecutable claim for childhood sexual abuse.”

What is most stunning today is how little the Church and the news media have considered the weight of that report.  David Pierre also cites in his newest book (page 27) Wall Street Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz, who commented in 2005 on the nature of the case against me:

“People have to come to understand that there is a large scam going on with personal injury attorneys, and what began as a serious effort has now expanded into a huge money-making proposition.”

— Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ

As I prepared for trial in 1994, trial-by-media was already underway in its condemnation of the accused. Any person who has faced false accusations in a public trial will tell you of the role played by the media in stacking the deck against him. As I proceed in my reading of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell, now exonerated and sadly deceased, abuse by media of his due process rights is a central factor.  It is all horribly, even traumatically familiar to me.  But Cardinal Pell also provides a model for sacrificial suffering and the faith and trust necessary to endure.  For that, I am thankful to him.

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You may also like the related links that appear in this post:

Why this Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison

The Greatest Fraud Never Told by David F. Pierre, Jr.

And for a doubly sad cautionary tale of real victimization but misidentification and wrongful conviction:

For The Lovely Bones Author Alice Sebold, Justice Hurts

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