“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam
Frank X. Panico and Xs in the Sky Films present “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam,” a film about a Catholic priest falsely accused and imprisoned for life.
Frank X. Panico and Xs in the Sky Films present “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam,” a film about a Catholic priest falsely accused and imprisoned for life.
June 21, 2023 by Frank X. Panico and Xs in the Sky Films
Editor’s Note: This is our first “video post” at Beyond These Stone Walls. This 44-minute documentary film was created by Frank X. Panico, an award-winning short filmmaker whose work has been featured on EWTN, NewsMax, Salem Now and multiple other venues. Here is Frank X. Panico:
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“Take no part in unfruitful works of darkness, but expose them.”
— Ephesians 5:11
I created this short documentary film because I believe that railroading, convicting and imprisoning a Catholic priest through lies and deceitful tactics is an unfruitful work of darkness. The railroaded Catholic priest I refer to is Father Gordon MacRae. This documentary film is entitled “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam.” It exposes the plight of a man of God wrongfully imprisoned.
When I learned of this true story, it drew me in. I have known Fr Gordon MacRae for less than a year, but after researching this story I feel that I have known him forever. I have studied every detail, and I have never personally vetted a subject of my films so extensively. There were many credible sources before me: The Wall Street Journal, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, The Media Report, The Catholic World Report, all bravely taking up the case of this wrongfully imprisoned priest against an avaricious tide of Catholic scandal and media coverage.
During production of this film, I often felt as though unseen spiritual warfare was in play. The evil one and his minions would have liked nothing more than for me to abandon this cause. I rejected such thoughts and came to know the truth. Father MacRae is an innocent man and the victim of a sham trial. I felt called to help someone who was absolutely falsely accused through a rogue communist-like legal system.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not the only reason I produced this film. I also found its subject matter to be intriguing and marketable. Not long after Tucker Carlson aired footage from the January 6th affair, an innocent prisoner caught in its net was released from prison just days later. I pray for the same result that this innocent man might be freed.
I am immensely pleased with the documentary, “Convicted for Cash.” Salem Now has picked it up so obviously they were pleased with it as well. As a daily communicant, I continue to pray at Mass for the well being and release of Fr. Gordon MacRae, a brother in Christ. Please view and then share Convicted for Cash by clicking on the link or the image below.
NOTE — NEWLY DISCOVERED EVIDENCE: In 2022, after Father MacRae had served 29 years in prison, compelling exculpatory evidence surfaced. It turns out that former Keene, NH sex-crimes Detective James F. McLaughlin was censured for “falsification of records” in another case nine years before MacRae went to trial. Previous Supreme Court rulings required that this be revealed to defendant MacRae and his legal counsel before trial. Instead, it was kept hidden. Since then, a Court has secretly sealed McLaughlin’s police file from further discovery. Nonetheless, news reports in New Hampshire reveal that the detective had a long history of police misconduct including allegations of falsifying evidence, threatening witnesses, tampering with tape recordings, selective investigation, and lying under oath. He briefly appeared on a list of dishonest police that is now also under judicial seal in New Hampshire.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report
Targeting Holy Week and Easter, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown released a grand jury report on unproven decades-old claims of abuse by Catholic priests.
Targeting Holy Week and Easter, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown released a grand jury report on unproven decades-old claims of abuse by Catholic priests.
April 26, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
In Baltimore, Maryland, excluding the rest of the state, there were 1,018 victims of gun violence in 2022. Of that number, 338 are classified as homicides in Baltimore City alone. There have been 80 additional homicides in the first three months of 2023. The State of Maryland currently has 74 unsolved cold case homicides. And yet, the Maryland Attorney General invested vast resources in a grand jury report released this year just as Catholics the world over prepared to honor Holy Week and Easter. The Wall Street Journal carried the story on Holy Thursday by journalists Scott Calvert and Jon Kamp headlined: “Baltimore Archdiocese Long Allowed Abuse of Children, AG’s Report Says.” The article opened with a paragraph now painfully familiar to U.S. Catholics:
“BALTIMORE — Scores of priests and other people affiliated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused hundreds of children over more than 60 years, and church officials often protected the perpetrators while keeping their crimes a secret, Maryland’s attorney general said in a new report.”
News coverage of the recent grand jury indictment of former President Donald Trump by New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg has illuminated the grand jury process with lots of commentary by legal minds. You have likely heard it said that “a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich.” It means that a grand jury is an entirely one-sided prosecutorial affair. There is no cross-examination of witnesses, no testimony from the accused, often even no testimony from an accuser, and no defense of any kind. If the legal process stops there, as it did in the Maryland Grand Jury Report, accusations alone are the end of the road. Due process of law and the Bill of Rights are rescinded.
The WSJ article went on to point out that of the 156 alleged priestly perpetrators whose names came before this grand jury with accusations dating back to 1940, no one was indicted. Most of the subjects of the report are either long ago deceased or the statute of limitations has long since expired for any legitimate legal prosecution. Anyone who would dismiss this as “just a legal loophole” does not understand the U.S. justice system at all. These rules of due process were not adopted by the Founders to inhibit justice, but to protect it. Some allegations in the report stretch back more than 70 years with not a single claim that is less than two decades old. The report makes no effort to distinguish between allegation and proven conviction.
The WSJ article eventually got to the real agenda behind this story. On the same day the report was released, the Maryland legislature passed a bill that, if signed into law, will eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual abuse claims — not for criminal prosecutions, but solely for civil claims to result in deep-pocket lawsuits for monetary settlements. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown has orchestrated a great gift to the state’s tort lawyers each of whom will now stand to amass upwards of forty percent of every settlement or jury award. This is not about real abuse or real victims of abuse.
The legislation caps settlements or damage awards for private institutions at $1.5 million per claim. A lawyer who extorts such settlements could pocket up to $600,000 for each claim filed from hereon. Public institutions — such as public schools which receive a vastly larger number of abuse claims — are typically exempt from such legislation. The bill’s foremost target is the Catholic Church, an unjust reality that I once wrote about in a centerpiece article for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, entitled, “Due Process for Accused Priests” (July/August 2009).
How an Attorney General Becomes a Governor
The Maryland Grand Jury Report is a mirror image of a similar report published in 2018 by then Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro who, in 2022, was predictably elected Governor. I wrote of that report and its shocking historical precedent in, “Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Joseph Goebbels in ‘The Reckoning.’”
After its initial shock value, and after its political rewards were reaped, the 2019 Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report was widely exposed as a slanted and deeply unjust application of law. I expect the same will follow closer examination of the Maryland report. One journalist who has dismantled the credibility of the former is David F. Pierre, Jr., moderator of The Media Report and the author of four published books on the sexual abuse narrative in the Catholic Church. His most recent, The Greatest Fraud Never Told, is subtitled, False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church. Here is an excerpt:
“No other episode in the Catholic Church sex abuse story has more epitomized the reality of ‘groupthink’ mentality than the Pennsylvania grand jury report.... Attorney General Josh Shapiro stood before an enormous throng of national and international media to make the incredible claim that ‘over 300 priests’ in Pennsylvania had sexually abused ‘over 1,000 children’ in the last several decades while Church officials ‘did nothing’ and ‘covered it all up’.”
— The Greatest Fraud Never Told, p. 34
Dave Pierre went on to describe how ‘every action by Shapiro was a masterful stroke of public relations media exposure to enhance his own public profile’ as he prepared to run for higher office:
“Shapiro called a local poster company to create a new, official-looking seal to be placed behind him as he broadcast his grand jury report to the world. Whereas the official seal of his office displayed ‘Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’ along the top and ‘Office of the Attorney General’ along the bottom, Shapiro not only flipped them, but replaced the words with ‘Attorney General Josh Shapiro’ so everyone across the globe could now easily see his name behind his head as he stood at the podium.”
— The Greatest Fraud Never Told, p. 34
The Democratic Party has since thrown Josh Shapiro’s name out as a potential future White House contender. In just about every jurisdiction where a similar grand jury report was constructed and released to the public slamming the Catholic Church, the exploitation of an upward political trajectory was its unstated goal. David Pierre went on in his book to ask a most important question: “Were the claims from Shapiro’s grand jury report actually true?” “In a nutshell,” he wrote, “No, not at all.” He offers a simple explanation of what a grand jury is and does:
“A ‘grand jury report’ is simply a report written by government attorneys with a predetermined outcome. The folks in the [grand jury] are merely a formality, window dressing to make the entire matter legal. The jury does not actually investigate a case, question witnesses, or scrutinize all sides of a story. It simply listens to one-sided proceedings orchestrated by prosecutors. There is no fact-checking, no cross examination, and no due process.”
— The Greatest Fraud Never Told, p. 35
How Grand Jury Reports Defeat Justice
Multiple states have had grandstanding prosecutors harboring political ambitions propelled forward with sensationalized grand jury reports that singled out the Catholic Church and priesthood as some sort of special arena of historical child sexual abuse. But as my title implies, we should follow the money for an understanding of what drives this.
New Hampshire, the state from which I write, has been no exception. In 2003, a grand jury report here caused much damage to the state of due process for priests accused when the local Catholic bishop waived the rights of all the accused without their knowledge.
But when a New Hampshire attorney general went on to apply the same to a grand jury report on a local prestigious prep school with an alumni list that looks like a Who’s Who of Washington insiders, a local judge blocked publication of that grand jury report. In so doing, the judge acknowledged that a similar grand jury report on my diocese, the Diocese of Manchester, should never have been published regardless of a Bishop’s signature waiving our due process rights.
NH Superior Court Judge Richard B. McNamara explained why in his Order entitled, “Re, Grand Jury, No. 217-2018-CV-00382.” This is a story that I wrote about in a widely read 2019 post, “Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester.”
The following are pertinent excerpts from Judge McNamara’s Order:
“The grand jury is one of the oldest institutions of Anglo American law, and to some extent, one of the most problematic. The United States Supreme Court recently rejected the traditional view of the grand jury as an arm of the courts, describing it as a separate institution that has not been ‘textually assigned’ to any of the three branches of government described in the federal Constitution.
“The original purpose of the grand jury was not only to increase the number of criminal prosecutions but to enhance the King’s authority and indirectly to increase revenue for the Crown which received the property forfeited by persons accused of crimes. But by the 17th Century, English grand juries had begun to act as an institution that could shield the innocent from unfounded charges. By the time of the American Revolution, English law characterized the grand jury as one of the principal protections against arbitrary government prosecution.
“Yet by the middle of the 19th Century there was no longer a consensus regarding the value or appropriate function of the grand jury.... The late 19th Century concern that grand juries were inquisitorial procedures that pose a threat to individual liberty was reflected in language that the Constitution did not require states to institute felony prosecutions by grand jury and suggested that the earliest grand juries were little more than a mob.
“The prevailing view of the federal courts is that grand juries have no common law authority to make accusations against individuals falling short of an indictment... A grand jury report that does not result in an indictment but references supposed misconduct results in a quasi-official accusation of wrongdoing drawn from secret ex parte proceedings in which there is no opportunity available or presented for a formal defense.
“The Florida Supreme Court described a grand jury report finding a public official guilty of wrongdoing without affording him a trial as ‘not far removed from, and no less repugnant to traditions of fair play, than lynch law.’ (Report of Grand Jury, 93 So. 2d 99, 102 (Fla. 1957).
“In the public mind, accusation by report is indistinguishable from accusation by indictment and subjects those against whom it is directed to the same public condemnation ... as if they had been indicted. An indictment charges a violation of a known and certain public law, and is but the first step in a long process in which the accused may seek vindication through exercise of the right to a public trial, to a jury, to counsel, to confrontation of witnesses against him, and, if convicted, to an appeal. … A [grand jury] report, on the contrary, is at once an accusation and a final condemnation. Its potential for harm is incalculable.
“[This] Court respectfully disagrees with the [2003] decision to approve the [New Hampshire] Diocese-OAG Agreement [which] fulfilled none of the traditional purposes of the common law grand jury. Rather than investigation of crime, the report is a post hoc summary of information the grand jury considered, but did not indict on.
“Mark Twain famously said that a lie is half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. In an internet age, he might have added that the lie will forever outrun the truth as search engines become ever more efficient. An allegation of wrongdoing or impropriety based upon half-truths, illegally seized evidence or rumor, innuendo or hearsay may blight an individual’s life indefinitely.
“Accordingly, the Court DENIES the Office of the Attorney General Motion. The Attorney General may not produce any report that contains any material produced to the grand jury through subpoena or testimony or that is characterized as a ‘Grand Jury Report.’”
— Presiding Justice Richard B. McNamara August 12, 2019
Just two weeks before Judge McNamara issued that Order and published it, Bishop Peter A. Libasci of the Diocese of Manchester, of his own accord, published a list of 73 priests who had been accused and condemned in the 2003 Diocese of Manchester Grand Jury Report. Most of the priests on the list were long since deceased. None of them were afforded constitutional due process. Bishop Libasci cited “transparency” as his motive for publishing this list.
The motive of Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown for releasing his one-sided report as Catholics observed Holy Week and Easter seems clear. What is less clear is the legal basis for such a report and especially for widely publishing it. The Maryland Attorney General’s Grand Jury Report should be seen in light of all of the above.
A lot of people, primarily lawyers and claimants, will profit greatly from this latest official state government travesty of justice, but it should not be the basis for whether or how you exercise your faith, or your membership in this Mystical Body that we call a Church. It should also never be the source of your own determination of any priest’s guilt or innocence.
This story is, as David F. Pierre Jr. has described it, The Greatest Fraud Never Told.
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To our readers: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. Next week at Beyond These Stone Walls it is our privilege to welcome an internationally known expert in Canon Law on due process crisis in the priesthood. It is an excellent sequel to this post.
You may also be interested in these related links that beg to be read and shared:
Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Joseph Goebbels in ‘The Reckoning’
Grand Jury, St Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
In the Live Free or Die State, Justice Has a Ray of Hope
For this wrongly convicted priest, The Wall Street Journal, The Media Report and the Catholic League have breathed new life into a dying pursuit of truth and justice.
For this wrongly convicted priest, The Wall Street Journal, the Catholic League and The Media Report have shined new life into a dying pursuit of truth and justice.
March 22, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The acclaimed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in 1953, the year I was born. “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” was one of his best-known poems. The death he railed against within it was his father’s and not his own. I, for one, have never feared death. For persons of real faith, death is not the dying of the light, but rather light’s rebirth. I have much more feared the dying of the truth. It is that alone against which I rage.
I turn 70 years old on April 9th this year. Friends in the real world tell me that 70 is the new 50 but my arthritic knee and recently dislocated shoulder do not agree. Prison is a sort of twilight zone of distorted time. I was 29 and a priest for only one year when my fictitious crimes are alleged to have taken place. I was 41 when first accused and placed on trial for them. After I three times refused to plead guilty and serve one year in prison, Judge Arthur Brennan imposed a sentence of 67 years. As it stands, I will be eligible for release at age 108.
I will not, of course, outlive this sentence. That is why my friend, Father George David Byers and I had a recent phone conversation about what happens if and when I die here. It was prompted by my ambulance ride to Concord Hospital last summer with a cardiac event that turned out to be pericarditis — inflammation of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounds the heart. I am told by one physician that it is now a suspected side effect of the mRNA Covid vaccine.
As a child, my mother often reminded me of the necessity of always having clean underwear lest I am run over by a car and my family might be embarrassed. The cardiac event was not really scary so much as inconvenient. What passed through my mind while chained up in the back of that ambulance was how much I had yet to do, how much I had yet to write, and how unprepared I am for death because the truth may die with me. I never even gave a thought to my underwear. Sorry, Mom.
A part of my concern, and that of Father Byers, is one of the other heartaches of life in this prison. I have no access to the Sacraments, and neither does anyone else here. The private Mass in my cell late on Sunday nights is the only Mass offered here for at least the last three years. A Capuchin priest who voluntarily came here for Mass for over 25 years died in 2019. A priest from the Portland, Maine diocese used to come here monthly to visit me and hear my confession. Then all visits were shut down for two years due to Covid. I just learned that he died in 2021. He was my age.
In the annals of both Church and State, this all sounds horrible, I know, but it does have some ironic moments. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu was interviewed on FOX News last month. The rumor is that he might be preparing a run for the White House. He made a big deal about being governor of a State whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” Ironically, my ambulance ride took place just days after Charlene Duline published her feisty article about me titled, “Dying in Prison in the Live Free or Die State.”
But death was not meant to be for me that night in July, 2022. My condition was treatable over the next several months, and I have mostly recovered. I have also once again adjusted to the reality that my release from prison was also not meant to be. At least not then, and at least not that way. So I had to get back to the hard work of seeking justice. It was either that or surrender to its absence.
New Hampshire Politics
That said, I have a plea for our readers. Please do not write to Governor Sununu asking for my pardon. The State cannot pardon someone who is not guilty of the crime in the first place. New Hampshire has not pardoned a prisoner since the Civil War, and will certainly not break that hallowed tradition for an imprisoned Catholic priest as the nation gears up for a presidential election with this state’s Governor as a likely contender. The pardon process brings far more heat than light anyway. In going on 29 years here, I have never seen it succeed for anyone.
The Democratic National Committee just stripped New Hampshire of its “First in the Nation Primary” awarding the first event to South Carolina. Since 1920, New Hampshire has held onto the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Since then, candidates campaigning for votes have attracted tremendous amounts of attention and money to New Hampshire every four years. Critics have charged that this was out of proportion with the state’s numbers, racial diversity, and fundamental political importance.
Now that the Democratic Party has rearranged that schedule, the New Hampshire Governor pledges to buck the edict and hold the State’s primary first anyway. The nation’s eyes will all be on New Hampshire as this dramatic standoff unfolds in 2024. I do not wish to be a part of its background entertainment.
There are many in U.S. prisons who are wrongfully convicted. By Christmas, 2021, after more than 28 years into my imprisonment, I resigned myself to the seemingly impenetrable fate that this State imposed upon me. Then, unexpectedly, I received a message on the first day of 2022 that there is a possible new path to restore justice. I outlined it in one of my first posts of 2022 and will link to it again at the end of this one. The post was, “Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell.”
Defenders of the Truth
Back in 2012, just a few years after I began writing from prison for an earlier version of this blog, Australian priest and writer, Fr. James Valladares, Ph.D., published a book about procedural justice for priests who had been accused. He predicted that the priesthood scandal that spread from the United States poses the greatest threat to the traditional Catholic understanding of priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. That prediction was certainly supported years later by findings described in my recent post, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”
Father Valladares titled his 2012 book, Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast. Nearly one-third of the book is about this blog and its revelations about the phenomenon of falsely accused priests. There is much within its pages that will be very familiar to long-time readers of this blog. In addition to my own earlier writings, the book strongly profiles the work of Ryan A. MacDonald, David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report, Bill Donohue at the Catholic League, and especially Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal.
Most readers of this blog know that one of the most formidable sources for exposing and resuscitating the truth has been The Wall Street Journal. The nation’s largest, most influential newspaper published two major articles in my regard in 2005, another in 2013, and a fourth in 2022. The first three were written by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on the WSJ Editorial Board. The fourth, written in 2022, was “Justice Delayed for Father MacRae” by Boston civil rights and criminal defense attorney Harvey A. Silverglate.
One observer noted that The Wall Street Journal has devoted more column space to this story than to that of any Nobel laureate. I do not know how to respond to that except with gratitude. I would not be writing today if not for the courage of Dorothy Rabinowitz and the Journal’s unrelenting pursuit of truth and justice.
Among our newer features on this blog is a page dedicated to the coverage of this story. It begins with a brief but compelling five-minute video interview with Dorothy Rabinowitz that should not be missed along with the full text of each of the WSJ articles on this story collected in one place. The page is entitled, The Wall Street Journal on the Case of Fr. Gordon MacRae.
While perusing that page, you will note that two of the WSJ articles are followed by commentary from David F. Pierre, Jr., founder and moderator of The Media Report. David is a Catholic layman and a journalist in his own right. He literally took on Goliath when he began writing and publishing against the tide of media narratives claiming without evidence that the Catholic Church has been some sort of special locus of child sexual abuse.
Since then, David has published four books laying out his Herculean accomplishments to expose the whole truth of the story behind the scandal that other media would not cover. David, like the Biblical David, is a man of great courage and integrity. In coming months, we plan to create a BTSW Library page collecting his posts written for this blog, and highlighting each of his books. His most recent post was The Media Report: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.
Finally, and by no means least among the heroic efforts of media figures, the truth owes a debt to Dr. William Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Under his leadership, this organization dedicated to religious liberty — the largest in the world — has been relentless in its support of the truth. This includes the truth about the case against me. In coming weeks I plan to present a post highlighting the importance of the work of the Catholic League on the frontlines of Religious Liberty, and increasingly endangered rights in our culture.
In the Acknowledgments section of his 2012 book, Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, Father Valladares cited each of the persons I have mentioned in this post:
“Ms. Dorothy Rabinowitz, Mr. Harvey A. Silverglate, Mr. Ryan A. MacDonald, Dr. William Donahue, Mr. David F. Pierre, Jr., all of whom I have never met, but whose candid, forthright, persuasive writings have served as an added impetus in the pursuit of this vital research.”
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Next week in these pages: “A Holy Week Retreat at Beyond These Stone Walls.”
Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please share this post, and please visit our newer pages in honor of those who have so honored us by shining new life into my pursuit of truth and justice:
The Wall Street Journal on the Case of Fr. Gordon MacRae
The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse
David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report
Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast
Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell
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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
The Media Report: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused
David F. Pierre, Jr. is a widely acclaimed author on the Catholic abuse story. One of the cases presented in his book, entitled above, is that of Fr. Gordon MacRae.
David F. Pierre, Jr. is a widely acclaimed author on the Catholic abuse story. One of the cases presented in his book, entitled above, is that of Fr. Gordon MacRae.
October 19, 2022 by David F. Pierre, Jr.
A Message from David F. Pierre, Jr.:
“When I published my book Catholic Priests Falsely Accused over a decade ago, I never thought that the contents would still reverberate today and that the chapter on the case of Fr. MacRae would especially impact its readers. Since the book was released, there have been numerous additional revelations further vindicating Fr. MacRae — as Beyond These Stone Walls has compiled — and I consider the chapter just one piece of many chronicling the many important aspects of the case.”
The case of Father Gordon J. MacRae — from the Diocese of Manchester (New Hampshire) — falls into a category all its own. No single case in the Catholic Church abuse narrative has been more feverishly debated. The case has bitterly polarized observers for several years. There are those who maintain the priest’s guilt and those who forcefully assert his innocence.
Since 1994, Fr. MacRae has been incarcerated in the New Hampshire State Prison for Men. On September 23, 1994, a jury convicted the priest of repeatedly molesting a teenage boy during counseling sessions and elsewhere. A judge later sentenced the cleric to 67 years in prison.
Fr. Gordon vehemently asserts his innocence and claims that he is falsely accused. With the help of outside supporters, an old typewriter, and the use of traditional postal mail, Fr. MacRae authors BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com from his small prison cell. Fr. MacRae utilizes the blog not just as a forum to assert his innocence. He also posts thoughtful spiritual and theological commentary. BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com is truly a compelling venue on the Internet.
What are the facts in this controversial case? Those who believe Fr. Gordon’s guilt is demonstrable gesture to reams of court documents and articles available at an anti-Church watchdog site. However, as with so many other cases, there is an alarming opposite side to Fr. MacRae’s narrative that has not been widely told.
The criminal conviction of Fr. Gordon in 1994, which would catapult him to his sentence of 67 years in prison, rested on the uncorroborated testimony of one individual. The man’s name is Thomas Grover [who at this writing is 55 years of age]. Amazingly, two of Thomas’ brothers and two other men — known to the Grover boys — also accused Fr. Gordon of molesting them. Yet only the claims of Thomas Grover would be the subject of an actual criminal trial.
It is certainly a matter of debate whether the justice system yielded a fair trial for Fr. Gordon. Although the accuser Grover had a lengthy juvenile and adult criminal history of “theft, assault, forgery and drug offenses,” the presiding judge, the Hon. Arthur D. Brennan, did not allow the priest’s defense to present this as evidence. Had the judge allowed this important information, the jury may have examined Grover’s claims a bit more critically.
Indeed, Thomas Grover’s accusations were quite untenable. According to the court testimony of Grover, Fr. Gordon repeatedly sexually assaulted him about a decade earlier during four different counseling sessions in 1983, when he was fifteen years old. Asked at trial why he would repeatedly return week after week to counseling sessions at which he had been previously attacked, Grover testified that he had “repressed” the memory of the experience after each assault. He claimed that he had an “out-of-body experience” which resulted in him completely forgetting the fact that he had been victimized during the previous visit.
In addition, according to trial testimony, when Grover attended a drug treatment center in 1987, he told a counselor that his father had abused him. Grover did not cite the priest as an abuser. In fact, the accuser identified the priest by name to his counselor in only one instance. Grover wrote Fr. MacRae’s name on his discharge contract indicating that the priest would be his sponsor in sobriety. She reported that Grover went on in therapy to accuse so many people of sexually abusing him that the staff thought “he was going for some kind of sexual abuse victim world record.” But he never accused Fr. MacRae.
In a previous deposition under oath, Grover made more bizarre claims about Fr. Gordon, one of which was that the priest had chased him with a car. “And he had a gun,” the accuser added, “and he was threatening me and telling me over and over that he would hurt me, kill me, if I tried to tell anybody, that no one would believe me. He chased me through the cemetery and tried to corner me.” However, at Fr. MacRae’s trial, the prosecution did not call a single witness to corroborate the public spectacle of a priest with a gun in a car chasing a boy through a cemetery.
As the trial progressed, even the prosecution could see that Thomas Grover had serious credibility problems. In the middle of the trial, after Grover’s flimsy appearance, the prosecution offered Fr. Gordon a plea bargain in which the priest would agree to serve only a maximum of two years in jail in exchange for an admission of guilt. It was not the first time the prosecution extended such a generous deal. On two other occasions before the court case — six months before trial and again a week before trial — the state offered plea deals to Fr. Gordon, both of which would ask that he serve no longer than three years in prison. The prosecution would have loved to have seen the priest take the offers.
But Fr. Gordon was adamant. He would not plead guilty to charges that he maintained were false. “I am not going to say I am guilty of crimes I never committed so that the Grovers and other extortionists can walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars for their lies,” the priest asserted.
The trial progressed, and although Thomas Grover’s testimony may have seemed hard to believe on the surface, the accuser was effectively theatrical during his appearance. He railed against the priest for “forcing” him to withstand the agony of a trial. In addition, during Grover’s testimony, the accuser’s therapist — retained by the man’s contingency lawyer — reportedly coached her former patient while sitting in open view inside the courtroom. Apparently directed by the therapist, Grover became emotional at strategic moments during his testimony. Courtroom witnesses have reported that when Grover was confronted with difficult questions, the therapist would gesture to her patient that he should cry. Grover would then become emotional and dramatic, often leading the judge to call a recess.
Meanwhile, Judge Brennan purposefully ordered the jury to “disregard inconsistencies in Mr. Grover’s testimony.” To the shock of Fr. Gordon, the jury returned with a guilty verdict in less than 90 minutes.
At Fr. Gordon’s sentencing, the prosecution efficiently utilized accusations of abuse charges by other men. Stomach-turning stories of child pornography also impacted the jury. An angry Judge Brennan railed against the convicted priest. He berated the cleric for his “lack of remorse” over his crimes. (Lost on the judge was the fact that the priest forcefully maintained his innocence and had rejected three different plea offers.) Building upon his rage, the judge added, “The evidence of your possession of child pornography is clear and convincing.”
There was one problem, however. “There was never any evidence of child pornography,” the lead detective on the case later admitted to The Wall Street Journal.
Under New Hampshire prison guidelines, Fr. Gordon will never be eligible for parole unless he admits guilt. As with the case of Msgr. McCarthy (Chapter 6), Father Gordon’s narrative highlights the zeal with which some detectives will seek a prosecution, despite the claims presented to them.
The criminal case against Fr. Gordon actually began when one of Thomas Grover’s brothers, Jonathan, approached Keene, New Hampshire, Detective James McLaughlin with the claim that Fr. Gordon had abused him years earlier. However, Jonathan did not just accuse Fr. Gordon of abuse; he accused a second priest as well — Fr. Stephen Scruton. However, as Detective McLaughlin further examined Jonathan’s claims, he realized that Fr. Scruton did not even serve at the parish of the alleged abuse until years after Jonathan claimed that the acts took place.
With this startling discovery of fact, many detectives would have concluded that Jonathan was not being truthful. There would even be more reason to doubt Jonathan when two of his brothers came forward to claim similar abuse by the two priests. But rather than dropping the investigation altogether and issuing charges against Jonathan for filing a false report, McLaughlin continued his crusade by simply scrubbing the existence of Fr. Scruton from future investigations altogether. [It was at this point in police reports that Detective McLaughlin gave the Grover brothers a copy of Fr. MacRae’s resume “to help them with their dates.”]
In the course of trying to nab Fr. MacRae, McLaughlin initiated a couple of attempted “stings” to get the priest to admit to the alleged abuse. One was a letter claiming to be from Jonathan Grover that “recalled” several sexual escapades and declared that the “sex between us was very special.” Fr. Gordon replied to the letter by saying that the letter writer must be an imposter, because no such acts ever took place. McLaughlin also attempted a number of secretly recorded phone calls to try to bust the priest, but none of them yielded anything incriminating. The calls were an utter failure, by all investigative measures.
Fr. Gordon would have been out of prison long ago if he had accepted the plea deals and admitted guilt. Instead, in staunchly maintaining his innocence, he will likely live in a prison cell for the remainder of his life.
In recent years, even more evidence has surfaced to support the claim that Fr. Gordon was falsely accused. One of the priest’s accusers (not Thomas Grover) has reportedly recanted his claims. In early 2011, a document surfaced in which the accuser plainly acknowledges that fraud was committed against Fr. Gordon and the Catholic Church. According to a New York investigative writer, the document says:
“I was aware at the time of the trial, knowing full well that it was bogus and having heard of the lawsuits and money involved, and also the reputations of those making accusations … whom I went to school with. It seemed as though it would be easy money if I would also accuse Fr. Gordon of some wrongdoing. … I believed easy money would come from lawsuits against MacRae. I was at the time using drugs and could have been influenced to say anything they wanted for money.” [Signed statement of Steven Wollschlager]
So despite the tempting opportunity of a high-stakes payout, the man refused to go along with what he saw was a gross money-grubbing scam.
In 2005 and 2013, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dorothy Rabinowitz profiled the case of Fr. Gordon for a trio of eye-opening articles for The Wall Street Journal. After months of studying court documents and combing through testimonies, Rabinowitz concluded that Fr. MacRae was clearly a victim of fraud and was wrongly convicted.
Sadly, under intense public pressure from events of the past decade, Church officials have essentially abandoned Fr. Gordon. Despite the fact that evidence possibly indicating innocence continues to surface, Church officials have kept their distance from the incarcerated cleric. While Church officials have publicly supported the prosecution of Fr. Gordon, there are reports that privately they admit that the cleric may have been falsely accused. For example, in 2011, two signed statements surfaced which claim that Bishop John McCormack, the longtime head of the Diocese of Manchester, has privately stated that he believes Fr. Gordon is innocent.
One such statement comes from a man who once worked at a television station that was to profile Fr. Gordon’s case. It quotes Bishop McCormack as saying to the man, “Understand, none of this is to leave this office. I believe Father MacRae is not guilty and his accusers likely lied. There’s nothing I can do to change the verdict,” Bishop McCormack said, according to the statement. [See Fr. George David Byers, “Omertà in a Catholic Chancery: Affidavits Expanded”]
The man submitted his statement about Bishop McCormack’s remarks because he believed there was a glaring injustice in the inconsistency between the Bishop’s public actions and his private statements.
Should the case against Father Gordon MacRae be reviewed? Considering the totality of the evidence, especially that which has surfaced in recent years, the answer is, “Yes.” Justice demands it.
In addition, recent developments and emerging information will likely result in appeals of Fr. MacRae’s case. Stay tuned.
David F. Pierre, Jr. is the country’s leading observer of the media’s coverage of the Catholic Church abuse narrative and is the author of four books. His most recent is The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church. David has been heard on National Public Radio (NPR) and cited in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and many other media outlets. He is the creator and author of TheMediaReport.com, an educational cooperative to chronicle and monitor the mainstream media’s coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse narrative. He lives with his wife and family in Massachusetts.
Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound
Editor’s Note: In a 2012 article for Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Rev. Michael P. Orsi, research fellow in Law and Religion at Ave Maria School of Law, wrote an extended review of David F. Pierre’s book cited above. His review is titled “Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound.”
The following is an excerpt from that review:
Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories by David F. Pierre, Jr., Mattapoisett, Massachusetts: www.TheMediaReport.com
“David Pierre is one of the country’s leading observers of the Catholic Church abuse narrative. In Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, the Fraud, the Stories, he presents case studies backed by hard data which clearly demonstrates some of the injustices foisted on Catholic priests and the Church. ...
“A sure way to ameliorate the injustices perpetrated against priests and to rehabilitate the reputation of the Church would be to re-examine the cases of those priests found guilty due to false or dubious abuse claims filed against them. The widely reported case of Fr. Gordon MacRae, of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, would be a good place to start. Pierre outlines it in his book. It is quite obvious that Fr. MacRae did not receive a fair trial according to the facts cited in a piece published in The Wall Street Journal.
“MacRae’s accuser, a fifteen year old boy, had a lengthy juvenile record and presented doubtful evidence in trial testimony. The judge even went so far as to order the jury to ‘disregard inconsistencies in Mr. Grover’s (his accuser) testimony.’ Father MacRae, protesting his innocence, refused a plea bargain deal of two years in prison. Now he is serving a 67 year sentence. His own, now retired, bishop believes him to be innocent. What a moral boost this would be for the nation’s priests and for the Catholic laity ... to have this case reopened!”
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BREAKING NEWS: Just as this post went to print, David F. Pierre, Jr. and The Media Report published “Twice Is a Charm? Wall St. Journal Again Profiles Stunning Case of Wrongfully Convicted Priest Fr. Gordon MacRae.”
To learn more about the rampant fraud, dishonest grand jury investigations, and career-building prosecutorial misconduct behind the Catholic Church abuse story, please consult these additional books by David F. Pierre, Jr. and The Media Report. Father Gordon MacRae also urges readers to subscribe to The Media Report.
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.
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.”
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 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.”
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.”
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 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.”
