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

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Some of Sigmund Freud’s map of the human psyche has been debunked in modern psychology, but Freud also knew well that some moral crusaders doth protesteth too much.

I have debated this post in my mind for days, arguing with myself whether I really wanted to write it. I have always dreaded offending people, and there’s just no way I’m going to be able to write this without someone feeling offended. But I also believe that simply not ever offending anyone is not a worthy goal for either a writer or a priest. I once asked a priest why he decided not to preach on the sanctity of life on “Respect Life Sunday.” He responded that he just doesn’t like offending anyone and someone is always offended when he preaches a pro-life homily. Sometimes, not offending anyone means avoiding ever speaking the truth.

It takes a degree of courage to point out the truth to ears that would rather not hear it. One newer reader of this blog has a recent example. Chris Tressa discovered Beyond These Stone Walls because Spero News reprints some of my posts. Spero News is sort of the online frontier. Like many sites, civil discourse takes a back seat to free flowing reader opinion. So Spero News  posts pretty much anything anyone wants to say.

We can’t really fault Spero News for this when standards for civil discourse don’t apply on many Catholic sites as well. Some of the comments posted on just about any subject in the Catholic Church by readers of the National Catholic Reporter  demonstrate the steep decline in online Catholic civility.

Spero News seems to have a lot of readers, but not a lot of comments. The relatively rare comments on my articles there are often printed and mailed to me. Some are very positive, but some are just outright attacks. I’m never offended, however. Invariably, the attacks are turned around by other readers and often backfire on their authors — who never identify themselves, by the way.

Sometimes this is even humorous. One writer identifying herself as an unnamed SNAP leader wrote in a comment that she finds it “despicable and deplorable” that an accused and convicted Catholic priest is given a voice online at a site called Beyond These Stone Walls. The sole comment posted in response made me laugh out loud:

“I clicked on that link and just spent several hours reading Beyond These Stone Walls. I found it to be riveting and uplifting. Thank you for telling us of this wonderful site.”

I don’t think that’s the response the SNAP writer hoped for, but Chris Tressa learned of BTSW in just that way. A man who leaves negative comments about priests throughout the Catholic online world posted a really toxic one on the Spero News reprint of one of my recent posts there. It was obvious that he didn’t actually read that post before spouting off, because he demonstrated in graphic prose the very points I set out to make. What was really of interest to me, however, was Chris Tressa’s comment in response:

“In one brief comment, the writer above used the term ‘pedophile priest’ five times, along with multiple variations of ‘child rape’ — all in just a few sentences of text. Who does that? To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘The man doth protesteth too much, me thinks!’ This sounds to me like classic reaction formation. Is it time to visit the shrink?”

From an analysis of typical comments in Catholic media, it might appear that a lot of people have ongoing and extremely negative views about Catholic priests. That may not be the case. What’s really going on is that a relatively small number of crusaders are “seeding” the Internet with their comments. If you take the time — and have the stomach for it — to track comments throughout the Catholic online world, and at mainstream media articles about Catholic scandal, you’ll see the same few screen names over and over.

They seem to be everywhere, and Chris Tressa ran into one of them. They are on a very personal crusade, but what makes this so personal for them? As Chris Tressa asked, “Who does that?” Is it because they are victims of sexual abuse? Perhaps so, but I know MANY adult victims of sexual abuse who are not crusaders. This prison and prisons everywhere are filled with men who were seriously victimized as children. A number of the readers and supporters of Beyond These Stone Walls  are survivors of childhood sexual abuse who resent the venom being spewed in their names.

But it’s also a fact that many of the most vocal crusaders at SNAP, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and Bishop-Accountability are not victims of sexual abuse. So what’s behind the nasty crusade of vilification and suspicion?

SNAP leaders offered to provide protesters with fake “Holy Childhood photos” to hold up for news cameras.

Classic Defense Mechanisms

We got a hint of the answer in the case of Dr. Steve Taylor, a Louisiana psychiatrist and member of SNAP who has been one of the more vocal advocates for an end to all civil rights for accused priests. Dr. Taylor has argued loudly for an end to any state respect for the seal of the Catholic confessional. Dr. Taylor was also the founder of a local chapter of SNAP. “We have faces now,” he bitterly exclaimed to legislators and news cameras while SNAP members held up the contrived “Holy Childhood photos” described in “SNAP Exposed” by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

Over the last three years, Dr. Steve Taylor has lost his medical license to practice psychiatry. He is now serving a sentence in a federal prison convicted on multiple charges of possessing child pornography.

Before he was sentenced to prison, SNAP founder Barbara Blaine and anti-Catholic author Jason Berry both pleaded for leniency for Dr. Taylor citing that his “problem” does not undo or overshadow all the good he has done. I had this solidly in mind when SNAP leaders vilified Bishop Robert Finn, charged with a misdemeanor for not reporting a priest fast enough when the priest was allegedly discovered with child pornography.

The crusade against accused priests that Dr. Steve Taylor was on has many of the elements of classic reaction formation, a concept first proposed by the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. His descriptions of human ego defense mechanisms and hysteria included this entirely unconscious phenomenon which he described as an attempt to cover up something unacceptable in oneself by adopting a stance in opposition to it. It is the formation of a reaction to an encounter with self. When something disdained is discovered there, defense mechanisms like reaction formation can develop into an elaborate ruse in which the thing feared in oneself becomes the thing attacked in others.

There are many modern examples. Congressman Mark Foley railed in Congress for bills targeting those who would sexually exploit young people. In 2006, Congressman Foley resigned after he was confronted with sending sexually explicit e-mail and text messages to teenage male pages working for the U.S. House of Representatives.

The televangelist scandals of the 1980’s involving famed TV preachers Jimmy Swaggart, PTL’s Jim Baker, and others also come to mind. Week after week, they railed against the licentiousness of the modern era while caught in their own sexual and financial scandals. Former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer mercilessly prosecuted officials caught in prostitution and other crimes before he was himself arrested in a prostitution sting. In the 1970’s, Covenant House Founder, Father Bruce Ritter testified before Congress to expose what he called the rampant exploitation of homeless youth on America’s streets only to leave the country when several of the very young people he claimed to be saving accused him of sexual abuse.

Debbie Nathan on “Sybil” and Hysteria

Much of what Sigmund Freud brought to the field of psychology and its understanding of hysteria has been debunked. One of the latest debunkings — and one of the finest — is a book by Debbie Nathan entitled Sybil Exposed (Free Press, 2011). Debbie Nathan serves on the advisory board of the National Center for Reason and Justice. (For full disclosure, I should tell you that this heroic organization endorses Beyond These Stone Walls and assists in sponsorship of my own defense).

Debbie Nathan is also the author (with Michael Snedeker) of an earlier landmark book, Satan’s Silence, which exposed the great fraud behind the ritual sex abuse stories of the 1980’s. Debbie Nathan continues this theme in Sybil Exposed, a riveting account of the fraud perpetrated in the story of Shirley Mason, known to the world as “Sybil.”  Debbie Nathan here exposes the truth behind the world’s most famous case of multiple personality ever brought to print and the silver screen.

Sybil, aided by an ambitious psychiatrist, claimed to have sixteen separate personalities brought on by a childhood traumatized by sexual and physical abuse. But Debbie Nathan exposed that it was all an elaborate hoax, a hoax that sold six million copies of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s 1973 book, Sybil. It turns out that neither the abuse nor the multiple personalities were real. In Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan has performed a great service to victims of the “hysteria prosecution” craze.

The story of Sybil was also a fraud on the American courts. The two decades from 1980 to 2000 saw multiple cases of “victims” claiming to have trauma-induced repressed and recovered memories of sexual abuse. Many men — including some Catholic priests — went to prison on those fraudulent claims. Some are still in prison. Writer Ryan MacDonald wrote of how the “psychological trauma” fraud played out in my own case in “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”

But “reaction formation,” one of Freud’s signature theories about hysteria and ego defense mechanisms, has survived all the debunking. One of the most advanced modern psychology studies demonstrating the power of reaction formation (Adams. Wright & Lohr, 1996) was on the topic of homophobia. It pointed out the difference between a moral belief that society should not promote homosexuality as a social good, and a more personal belief that society should persecute homosexuals. They are not one and the same. The 1996 study found that people who cross the line between a moral opposition and a moral crusade are often “protesting too much” a tendency in themselves that they find unacceptable.

Reaction formation also influences our views about what constitutes prejudice. Political or religious opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, is often — and wrongly — interpreted as active persecution and outright bigotry. I have known gay rights activists who interpret any opposition to their political goals and social agenda as religious persecution and a denial of their civil rights. This is the second way reaction formation is manifested. People who see all disagreement as judgment, condemnation, and persecution may really be passing judgment on themselves. I have read repeatedly that the Catholic Church “condemns gay people.” This is simply untrue.

Reaction Formation against Prejudice

American society since the 1960s has been especially conscious of any appearance of racial bias or prejudice, and has widely endorsed strong norms condemning prejudice. If Americans are led to believe that they may hold unacceptable prejudiced beliefs, or if they even believe that others are seeing them in this light, “they may respond with exaggerated displays of not being prejudiced” (Adams, Wright and Lohr, 1996).

The debate that surrounded same-sex marriage may have been an example of that response. When concerns were raised that same-sex marriage laws are an example of legislation and social reform by judicial fiat instead of by a democratic process, gay rights activists typically, and wrongly, dismissed the objection as bigotry. The media has given strength to that interpretation by underwriting it, and many Americans have withdrawn or silenced their opposition to same-sex marriage because of a politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced.

A striking example of how the fear of appearing prejudiced creates reaction formation is something that occurred in the Episcopal church in New Hampshire. The World Wide Anglican Communion has been in a state of civil war since the 2003 election of Bishop Gene Robinson. At the time he was nominated as bishop, he was a divorced, openly-gay man in a relationship with another man. This has played out in New Hampshire almost perfectly parallel to the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, but never the two shall meet.

And yet I have no doubt whatsoever that if Gene Robinson was not a gay man — if he was simply a heterosexual divorcee living with another woman, he would never have been a candidate for bishop in any U.S. Episcopalian diocese. This seems an example of a group so wishing to demonstrate its lack of prejudice that a new standard for its episcopacy was created. Bishop Robinson was not elected bishop in spite of being openly gay, but because of it. The global Anglican Communion has been torn asunder by this one example of reaction formation. Yet I have read repeatedly that one of the goals of “reform” groups like Voice Of the Faithful is to foster an American Catholic church that mirrors the Episcopal church and its “sensitivity” to politically correct American values. Thanks, but no thanks.

In New Hampshire, Bishop Gene Robinson campaigned for the passage of a same-sex marriage law. Once it was passed, he and his partner were among the first to enter a same-sex marriage in this state. Then he checked himself into rehab. Then he got divorced. Finally, having torn the entire Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder, he retired.

This same politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced has also radically altered the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. When the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was commissioned to study the causes and contexts, both the researchers and the bishops were left with a conundrum. The results were clear that this was not a crisis involving pedophilia as it is clinically defined — though that did exist on a much smaller scale. The problem was predominantly, and clearly, claims of homosexual predation of adolescent and young adult males during the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s. There is no greater evidence of the power of reaction formation than when an entire institution would prefer the term “pedophile scandal” to “homosexual scandal” even when the facts say otherwise.

Truth and honesty are truly golden things, and most of you, in your own heart of hearts, know them when you see them. We are in a culture, however, in which the views of many are manipulated by the agendas of a few. But sometimes the few are themselves manipulated by the quirks of their own psyches. Be wary of crusaders. Freud and Shakespeare both knew the truth about them. Sometimes they doth protesteth too much.