Voices from Beyond
These Stone Walls is a Finalist for About.com’s “Best Catholic Blog”
These Stone Walls by Fr Gordon MacRae is a finalist in About.com’s Readers Choice for Best Catholic Blog. In justice, it should win, but there might be hell to pay.
These Stone Walls by Fr Gordon MacRae is a finalist in About.com’s Readers Choice for Best Catholic Blog. In justice, it should win, but there might be hell to pay.
February 21, 2013
How did such a thing happen? The Catholicism page of the media site, About.com provides an annual forum for readers to select the very best in Catholic media — everything from best Catholic book, newspaper, and television/radio, to best Catholic blog and other electronic media. This year, someone in the Catholic online world nominated These Stone Walls, the blog of imprisoned priest, Father Gordon MacRae for the category of Best Catholic Blog in an enormous field of worthy candidates. These Stone Walls became a Finalist, and at this writing, it has shot up to second place in a short list of five of the best Catholic blogs selected by readers of About.com. Readers may register a vote, once per day if they wish, at the Best Catholic Blog ballot right here.
Though of course dwarfed by the coming Conclave to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, the story of this honor bestowed upon an imprisoned priest and his writings is an important Catholic news story. For over a decade, accused Catholic priests have been vilified and bludgeoned without mercy in both the secular and Catholic media. Organizations such as SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, and VOTF, the Voice of the Faithful, have risen up seemingly for the sole purpose of denouncing the Church’s disciplines within the priesthood and priests themselves when they are accused of claims that usually date back 30, 40, or 50 years. There is rarely any evidence beyond the word of someone who stands to gain a windfall settlement just for making the claim.
The result has been a decade of irrational finger-pointing during which the Constitutional and canonical rights of accused priests have been obliterated in the court of public opinion. These groups, and the mainstream media’s unwavering commitment to giving their agendas the last and loudest word in all things Catholic, have teamed to demoralize priests and even turn them upon each other.
Ironically, Father Gordon MacRae provided a spellbinding example in a recent post at TheseStoneWalls.com published on the very day the Best Catholic Blog finalists were announced. In an article entitled “Giving Up Resentment for Lent,” the imprisoned priest once again called himself and his readers to take the high road in the face of adversity. He wrote of the painful recent experience of being denounced by priests of his own diocese. Displaying the very attributes that make These Stone Walls consistently stand out in the field of Catholic media, the vilified priest wrote of his Lenten challenge to channel anger and head off through prayer his all-too human feelings of resentment and retaliation — “A toxic mix, concocted for another but ending up in your own tea,” he wrote.
Father Gordon MacRae lives behind prison walls, and unjustly so if you have been paying any attention at all to this ongoing saga. He is the clear underdog in this contest, but his mere presence in it is not without precedent. In 2010, These Stone Walls was similarly honored by readers of Our Sunday Visitor as the Readers’ Choice for the Best of the Catholic Web. There is a good reason why people are noticing this site and reading it.
I can only imagine the hell to pay if These Stone Walls actually wins Best Catholic Blog at About.com. The Church might have to examine anew the sort of justice Catholics really expect when priests are falsely accused. SNAP and VOTF and other detractors might have to consider whether their own toxic voices still carry the day with the message that so convinced so many Catholics and their bishops a decade ago that the only way to protect children was to destroy Catholic priests.
The voting for Best Catholic Blog ends on March 19, just days before the Church enters Holy Week and our common reflection on the Crucifixion of Christ, the Universal Scapegoat. If there is any justice, These Stone Walls should win About.com’s Readers Choice for the Best Catholic Blog. So go there and vote, and don’t forget to take some time this Lent to read this excellent blog. It won’t be a penance, but it might just open some eyes and hearts.
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[Note from Ryan A. MacDonald, November 1, 2021: This post was originally published in 2013. The Catholic online world was spared and that lightning bolt above the Church never struck. Father John Zuhlsdorf at Fr. Z’s blog won the Best Catholic Blog Award with These Stone Walls coming in a close second place. That alone gave a lot of hope to Father Gordon MacRae that Catholics still have hearts of justice and mercy despite all the hype.]
The Injustice Against Father MacRae
By Rod Dreher | The American Conservative
May 11, 2013
Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ, who has been following for years the tragedy of the trumped-up sex abuse charges against Father Gordon MacRae, has a blood-boiling update on the MacRase case today.
Excerpt
In due course there would be the civil settlement: $195,000 for [alleged abuse victim and key state witness] Mr. [Thomas] Grover and his attorneys. The payday—which the plaintiff had told the court he sought only to meet expenses for therapy—became an occasion for ecstatic celebration by Mr. Grover and friends. The party’s high point, captured by photographs now in possession of Father MacRae’s lawyers, shows the celebrants dancing around, waving stacks of $50 bills fresh from the bank.
The prospect of financial reward for anyone coming forward with accusations was no secret to teenage males in Keene, N.H., in the early 1990s. Some of them were members of that marginal society, in and out of trouble with the law, it fell to Father MacRae to counsel. Steven Wollschlager, who had been one of them—he would himself serve time for felony robbery—recalled that period of the 1990s in a 2008 statement to Father MacRae’s legal team. That it might not be in the best interest of a man with his own past legal troubles to give testimony undermining a high-profile state prosecution did not, apparently, deter him. “All the kids were aware,” Mr. Wollschlager recalled, “that the church was giving out large sums of money to keep the allegations from becoming public.”
This knowledge, Mr. Wollschlager said, fed the interest of local teens in joining the allegations. It was in this context that Detective James McLaughlin, sex-crimes investigator for the Keene police department, would turn his attention to the priest and play a key role in the effort to build a case against him. The full history of how Father MacRae came to be charged was reported on these pages in “A Priest’s Story,” April 27-28, 2005.
Mr. Wollschlager recalled that in 1994 Mr. McLaughlin summoned him to a meeting. As a young man, Mr. Wollschlager said, he had received counseling from Father MacRae. The main subject of the meeting with the detective was lawsuits and money and the priest. “All I had to do is make up a story,” Mr. Wollschlager said, and he too “could receive a large amount of money.” The detective “reminded me of my young child and girlfriend,” Mr. Wollschlager attests, and told him “that life would be easier for us.”
Eventually lured by the promise, Mr. Wollschlager said, he invented some claims of abuse. But summoned to a grand-jury hearing, he balked, telling an official that he refused to testify. He explains, in his statement, “I could not bring myself to give perjured testimony against MacRae, who had only tried to help me.” Asked for response to this charge, Mr. McLaughlin says it is “a fabrication.”
Along with the lure of financial settlements, the MacRae case was driven by that other potent force—the fevered atmosphere in which charges were built, the presumption of innocence buried. An atmosphere in which it was unthinkable—it still is today—not to credit as truthful every accuser charging a Catholic priest with molestation. There is no clearer testament to the times than the public statement in September 1993 issued by Father MacRae’s own diocese in Manchester well before the trial began: “The Church is a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae as well as the individuals.” Diocesan officials had evidently found it inconvenient to dally while due process took its course.
Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. A veteran of three decades of magazine and newspaper journalism, he has also written three New York Times bestsellers—Live Not By Lies, The Benedict Option, and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming—as well as Crunchy Cons and How Dante Can Save Your Life. Dreher lives in Baton Rouge, La.
Priests, Good and Bad
October 27, 2018
Excerpt
Whatever fate Francis and his bad bishops face in this life though, it won’t amount to anything compared to what one good priest has had to endure now for 25 years. I speak of Fr. Gordon MacRae, who was imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit by a left-wing kook of a judge. Worse than the judge however, was the Keene, NH detective, James McLaughlin, who was all too eager to smear him with false witnesses. Add to that, lots of psychobabble recovered memories and greedy plaintiff’s lawyers, ending in one of the great frame-ups in the history of American justice.
Since Fr. MacRae refused to knuckle under to the New Hampshire kangaroo court, he will likely die in prison. Yet he keeps his faith and dignity alive in a wonderful testimony on the power of true faith in the Gospel.
Apparently, everybody in New Hampshire knows about this disgrace, but no one in either party will do anything about it. If you live there, you might ask Governor Sununu or his opponent Molly Kelly, why no pardon for this innocent man? This case also looks like a textbook example of what the U.S. DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is supposed to investigate. If you know the new guy there, you might also mention it. I also have a few legal ideas of my own.
But the best thing anyone can do is pray for this brave man. And pray for the many decent priests that still serve; the wolves are many and the good shepherds few.
Read the entire article here.
The Parable of the Prisoner
By Michael Brandon | Freedom Through Truth
September 14, 2014
There once was a little boy, born in a far off land. While he was still very young, his mother left him and moved to a distant country, and he was placed into the prison of abandonment. And the Father wept for His little beloved.
The little boy was taken in by family, but was put to work at a very early age, and so received no formal education. He was placed in a prison of ignorance. And the Father wept for His little beloved.
After many years, his mother returned with her husband from a distant country and took the little boy away with her to the distant country where he did not know the language, the customs or any of its people. He was placed in a prison of fear and confusion. And the Father wept for His little beloved.
His step father was an evil man and sexually abused him. Though he tried to run away he was brought back to the home of his step father, where he was continually abused. He was placed in a prison of revulsion and anger.
Finally, he escaped and lived on the streets until one night he was involved in the death of another man. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. He was first in a prison of remorse, sadness, and hatred, and then was placed in a prison of the body. And the Father wept for His little beloved.
He was moved from prison to prison from cell to cell. So, added to the prisons of his life thus far, his circumstances had placed him into a prison of loneliness. And the Father wept for His little beloved.
But, unbeknownst to him, another man had been sentenced, for crimes that never happened, to the prison where he was finally settled. This man was a Catholic priest, and even though he himself knew the prison of abandonment, he did not allow it to define his life and so he befriended the young man from the far off land, and led him to relationship with Jesus Christ. And the Father leaped for joy to see His little beloved on the path to freedom, the path for which He had sent His Son to bleed and die, and then to rise again.
As time passed, the young man and his priest friend consecrated themselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. They also discovered two very dear friends among the saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Padre Pio.
Under the protection of Our Holy Mother, the Blood of Jesus Christ and with the intercession of their dear friends the saints, the prison walls of both of their lives have been disintegrating, because they cannot stand against the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.
This parable, like all parables is meant for each of us to ponder for we too have been placed in the prisons of our emotions by our circumstances, whether we were misled by others, or consciously took paths that led to these prisons. How we came to be in the prisons of our lives is far less important than how we can leave them behind.
You see, some of these prisons, the prisons of our minds are prisons that we have willingly entered in the hope of escaping the other prisons of our lives. But, exchanging one prison for another or adding another prison to our already tortured lives is not the answer.
Whatever the question, the answer is Jesus Christ. He was and is the perfect gift from the Father to you and to me, because He took on all our prisons and allowed them to be nailed to the Cross with Him. He returned them to their rightful place, Hell, and then He rose again from the dead.
Unlike most parables, this one is based on the true story of Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and his mentor and best friend Father Gordon MacRae.
So, unlike most parables this one is before us every day for us to ponder, pray on, and then to accept the love of Christ, and the love of His Blessed Mother that has been bringing salvation to both Pornchai and to Father Gordon.
Let the Father leap for joy at your acceptance of His Son as your Saviour. Let the Father leap for joy as you give your heart to Jesus to repair and heal, and to Mary to love you as only a perfect mother can.
And turn to Beyond These Stone Walls and read as the parable continues to unfold.
First published by Michael Brandon at Freedom Through Truth, September 14, 2014.