Priesthood Has Never Been Going My Way
Marking forty-one years of priesthood, twenty-nine of them in unjust imprisonment, the faith of this priest has been sorely tested, but he remains a man in full.
May 31 , 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae
In 1945, at the end of World War II and eight years before I was born, the film “Going My Way” swept the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Musical Score. The film about a Catholic priest trying to save a struggling urban parish was a huge box office hit. Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Father Chuck O’Malley, a spirited young priest sent as a last-ditch effort to revitalize the dying parish. Barry Fitzgerald won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the role of the elderly pastor, Father Fitzgibbon.
Bing Crosby’s Father Chuck O’Malley saved the day and the parish when he organized a neighborhood gang into a “bit rough around the edges” choir. Father O’Malley then composed a hit song and taught them to sing it. “Swinging on a Star” topped the charts and won the Oscar for Best Song. The young men saved the church while Father O’Malley saved them. The film also swept the Golden Globe and New York Film Critic awards.
Jump ahead 60 years. In 2005 another film about Catholic priests won the Academy Award for Best Picture and won The Boston Globe an ill-conceived Pulitzer for “Public Service.” That scornful film was “Spotlight,” a one-sided, jaded, cynical effort to smear the Church and priesthood with a broad brush as “slayers of the soul.” The critics and media were delighted, but not all the critics bought it. One of them, the brave journalist JoAnn Wypijewski, performed an autopsy on it. Though I never figured into the film, I had a strong presence throughout its autopsy in “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”
The sixty-year period in between these two motion pictures saw perhaps the greatest cultural swing the Western World has ever known. The media turned left and the left became its master. Then the Second Vatican Council radically altered the world’s view of the Church. Then Roe v. Wade happened and the not-yet-woke Church came down on the side of life. All the attacks hence were really about Roe v. Wade. Then the “woke” were born.
On June 5, 1982, as this rapid descent in the world’s view of the Church and priesthood was well into its decline, I was the sole candidate for priesthood ordination in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. Twelve years later, I collapsed under the weight of several other tragedies that unfolded all around me. It’s a story that I have never been able to make sense of. It has elements of the demonic, but here I still stand. Author Ryan A. MacDonald did some excavation of it and wrote much of it, but not all, in an eerie account entitled, “The Story Buried Under the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”
At the end of this post, we will link again to this and other posts referenced here, but I leave it up to you whether to read them. They leave most people, me included, just scratching our heads wondering how this could all happen.
But there is a “rest of the story” known, to date, only to one other, and that person has since passed from this life. In 1977 and 1978 I spent long hours with this story in the company of an old friend, Fr Benedict Groeschel. Before he became a founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, we were members of the same Capuchin province based in New York. Father Groeschel was aware of all that had happened, and he listened intently to its impact on me. In 1978 he and I together discerned the path that I must take. I’ll get back to that, but first back up a few years.
In the Eye of a Storm
Four years after high school graduation, I entered the novitiate of the Capuchin Order in 1974. I knew immediately that I was on the right path in life. I did not have much of a family life growing up, and the Capuchin emphasis on life in community drew me in. One of my friends in the Order grew up in an orphanage, and I admired how he treasured the accountability and support of a religious community that most others took for granted.
I was a very good student. Carrying a double major in both psychology and philosophy on a full scholarship at St. Anselm College nearby in New Hampshire, I thought I had the perfect balance of spiritual life, intellectual growth, and physical work. When I was not studying, I chopped firewood for long hours day after day. A lot of stress was vented, and some wounds long neglected began to heal.
I loved my community and developed many close friendships among its members. Two of those friendships were with classmates from the Island of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. We were the same age and college classmates. The three of us bonded and often studied together, and I learned a great deal about the home they left behind on the far side of the world. At that time, Guam was a mission territory for the Order and several members of our Capuchin province were assigned there. I began to discern signs that Guam may be where my future lies.
Then a tragedy struck that blindsided me and forever altered my path. Being far from home for long periods of time had an effect on my friends. One of them began to exhibit signs of extreme stress manifested in paranoia. One night he knocked on my friary door awakening me at 3:00 AM. He frantically asked me to come to his room. I went with him and found there a butcher knife impaled in his mattress with a typewritten note threatening his life.
My friend appeared very shaken, so I remained with him until dawn and then took him and the evidence to the room of our religious superior. My friend related what he knew about the incident. However, something in his tone and substance troubled me. Similar incidents occurred on two more occasions over the next week. After the second such incident, I told the local superior of my concern that my friend had done this to himself and needed immediate help.
Then it happened again. On the next day, I was summoned to the office of the superior. Accompanied by two other senior members of the Order, he accused me of plotting to murder my friend. I reiterated my concern that my friend was under extreme stress and had been doing this to himself. That only made matters worse. The superior had in his hands the ribbon from my typewriter where the threatening notes had clearly been typed — but not by me.
For the next two weeks I was confined to quarters and forbidden from speaking with anyone. I was also going through final exams for the year in that same week. I aced them, but to this day I do not know how. This happened in the Spring of 1977. At the end of two weeks, the local superior summoned me again. One priest on the formation staff was skeptical of the conclusions so he spent a few nights observing my friend. Then one night he saw him come out of his room, return with a knife, and plunge it with another note into his own mattress. My friend was then taken away in the night.
The superior who later summoned me again told me only that his investigation was complete and that he concludes that I had nothing to do with these events except that I was a friend of the other Capuchin. “You should just forget about all this and keep doing what you’ve been doing,” he said. And it was over.
Father Benedict Groeschel
But it wasn’t really over. Because I was barred from speaking of the incident, no one else in the Province was told any of the truth of this story or its outcome, except the Provincial Council on which Fr Benedict Groeschel served. The rest of the Province knew only that my friend disappeared in the night and I had been a suspect. I was not able to learn anything of what had happened to my friend. To protect him from any further exposure, I spoke of this to only one person, Father Groeschel, a psychologist and respected member of the Province. I decided then that I could not remain in the Order. Among all the feelings of betrayal, injustice, and anger at the rush to judgment, I was first and foremost heartbroken.
When I learned that my friend had typed these notes on my typewriter while I was away, and then carried out these assaults upon himself just as I had feared, I was furious not at him, but at those who would not listen because their minds were already made up. I never saw or heard from my friend again, and never learned what was behind his pleading cry for help made through me. I also never learned what became of him.
I was 24 years old then. I am 70 now, and still carry this after all these years. I also had no idea, then, that such devastating false witness would be repeated in my life fifteen years later as a diocesan priest.
One year later, in 1978 under the direction of Father Groeschel, the Province had given strong recommendations in support of my decision to transfer to studies toward diocesan priesthood. I completed a Master of Divinity degree and a Pontifical degree in Sacred Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and was ordained on June 5, 1982.
The story about my friend stayed buried for the next 42 years. Then, in 2019, a previously unknown factor in it was revealed to me. A Capuchin priest from my former Province who came to this prison for Mass asked to speak with me. He told me that he remembered this incident and hoped that I did not. I told him that my life had been radically altered as a result of it. He said that he felt partially responsible. He had been pursuing a degree in Scripture studies at Harvard Divinity School in 1977, the same year as the events above. My uncle, a Jesuit, was a faculty member at Harvard at the time. One day they had a chance meeting.
After a class, my uncle approached the Capuchin priest and asked him if he and I were in the same province. He said that we were, and my uncle inquired about how I was. The events written above were just two weeks away in 1977. My uncle shared with the Capuchin that I had a difficult life growing up in a home and family devasted by the disease of alcoholism. My uncle was glad to hear from the Capuchin that I was flourishing there in community life. Two weeks after their discussion, the above story exploded in 1977. Forty-two years later that same Capuchin priest told me that he had shared that conversation with my religious superior in 1977. It was this that caused the superior then to jump to a conclusion that I must have been the one responsible for the acts of violence.
Gauging my reaction upon learning of this 42 years later told me how much the wounds left by this incident still festered. Everyone in this account — the Capuchin priest, my Jesuit uncle, even my accusing religious superior — all believed that they had acted in what they thought was my best interest balanced with that of my friend. The betrayal did not belong to any one person, but I was the only one in this scene who knew of its insanity and acted to save my friend. Forty-two years later, my anger still smoldered.
Complicating all this, the Capuchin who had come to this prison for Sunday Mass in 2019, died in his sleep just two days later. This was also the onset of the Covid pandemic and there has not been a Catholic Mass in this prison since. My own Mass offered in my prison cell has been the only Mass in this prison for the last four years.
The Haunting Echoes of the Past
In 1994, as you know, I was falsely accused again and faced trial with no evidence or corroboration in a case fabricated by a police officer who is now known to have a history of corruption, including the falsification of evidence. I wrote of this most recent development in “Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell.”
After being so accused again, echoes of how helpless and oppressed I was during the first such encounter were still with me. I became, perhaps understandably, despondent, and again I could reach out to no one. It was more than I could bear at the time, and I fell. You can read about this in a post that has hidden in plain sight since I wrote it in 2017. It is “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.” I could have added the words, “... for the Second Time.”
In September, 2022, I wrote a post in these pages that shocked readers around the world. It might have shocked them a lot more had they known of the cross of memories I had to face and set aside in order to write it when no one else could. It is a centerpiece of my priesthood, and my magnum opus. Had I not gone through everything described in this post, I would not have been wounded enough, or strong enough, or wise enough, to become for another the saving grace that Father Groeschel had become for me.
It was a story long overdue that had to be written so I manned up, set aside the past, and wrote it. It was about events in the life of my friend, Pornchai Moontri and it had many echoes of the past for me. It was, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”
On June 5, 2023, I mark 41 years of priesthood out here in the Oort Cloud, that distant region of space where, among our Solar System’s detritus, I encounter others cast out among the unwanted debris. Most of those I encounter here have had lives bearing far deeper wounds than my own.
Bing Crosby notwithstanding, priesthood has never been going my way. But I have done what was recommended in these pages recently in “The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost.” I have mourned what was lost. I have let it ascend. And I have surrendered to the life — and priesthood — that I am living now. I do not have the power to change any of its past. In the present, I surrender all to the Divine Will. It is the way to peace, and a path I recommend for anyone burdened with life’s wounds.
As, I mark 41 years of priesthood before the True Presence, in spite of all, the Lord has done great things for me, and perhaps even a few great things through me.
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for being here with me as I mark 41 years of the awe-full yet wonderful adventure of sacrificial priesthood. Please also visit one or more of these related posts:
The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost
How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night
The Story Buried Under the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case
The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner
And for those who hunger and thirst for justice ...
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.”