If Night Befalls Your Father, You Don’t Discard Him! You Just Don’t!

There is another scandal in the Catholic Church just under the radar. It is what happens after Father is accused, and it would never happen if he were your father.

February 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Back in the summer of 2011 in Massachusetts, Independence Day brought dismal news for devoted Catholics already bent under the millstone of scandal. On that morning I turned on New England Cable News to learn that a forty-two year old Massachusetts priest ordained only six years, had taken his own life. It was heartbreaking, and I know his family must have been devastated. However, I feared that far too many in his other family — the Catholic Church — had so steeled themselves against the relentless tide of painful news that such a tragedy was just part of another news day. That was an even greater tragedy. If you have never read my article, “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul,” about the suicide of a priest I knew, please do. I wish this priest, and his diocesan family had read it. It may have helped him to seek another way to deal with whatever immense pain brought him to this horrific act. I have been where he was in the final moments of his life. I wrote about surviving that painful day in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

I do not know the particular anguish of that young priest in 2011. He died sometime the previous Saturday night after celebrating Mass and then ministering to a family in a hospital emergency room where he was a chaplain.  When he did not show up for his Mass that Sunday morning, someone went in search of him. In between was the darkest night of his own priestly soul. Please, please pray for him. Though this was a major news story in 2011, I am sparing his family from reliving this again in 2024.

Some thirty American Catholic priests have taken their own lives since priests became a favorite target of the news media, of S.N.A.P., and of Satan himself. I have personally known eight of them, and three others who were murdered. A psychiatrist friend who has been conducting research on the priesthood told me that it is extraordinary that I have known 11 priests who were either murdered or died by their own hand. He said that I have been hanging out with the wrong crowd — or, if you read the Gospel, the right one.

I do know this: simply casting off the most wounded among our priests has been the sin of the Church, and it is a sin that would not happen in our own families. The late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote of this in one of his last letters to me before his death in December 2008:

“Thank you for keeping me informed about the great scandal of the failure of the Church to support her priests in their time of need.  Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and will be instrumental in a reform.  I am sure that in the plans of Divine Providence your ministry of suffering is part of your priestly vocation.”

No corporate bottom line would dictate whether we care for our fathers, our grandfathers, our brothers, or our sons, but lately in the Church in America, it does, and it has compounded The Scandal. Christ came into the world to call forth a community’s soul, not a corporate sole. One bishop I know wrote in a whining missive to Rome that if he helped one accused priest in his diocese he would fear an uproar. At least the bishop was honest. His response toward a brother left beaten on the side of the road was moved by fear.

The problem was strictly American back then. But it has since spread to other parts of the world where the same draconian and terminal measures have been imposed upon priests who are merely accused without due process leading to their being simply discarded — sometimes on the streets with no place to go. I fear sometimes that the Catholic Church in America is becoming far more American than Catholic. America is a disposable culture that does not abide problems, and the Church has come to reflect this ugly side of America. Not long ago, Pope Francis derided our “cancel culture,” then he proceeded to cancel the careers of many priests and bishops who did not fall immediately into his ideological plan. The stewards of our faith have capitulated to cancel culture.

For full article tap image.

Disposable Priests in a Disposable Culture

There are priests who, for various reasons, are not assigned to ministry. Under a tenet of Canon Law (Canon 1722) a bishop, with just cause, may forbid a priest from the exercise of public ministry for a period of time, but he remains a priest. For seven years before I was accused and faced trial in 1994, I was not assigned by my bishop and diocese.  For the first two years, I was director of a drug and alcoholism treatment center, and vice-president of the New Hampshire Association of Chemical Dependency Service Providers.  But I was still very much a priest living under obedience to the authority of my bishop.  I celebrated Mass and other sacraments. For the following five years I served in ministry to other priests as Director of Admissions in a residential psychological and spiritual renewal center for Catholic priests and religious.

Even now, in my 30th year in prison for a crime that I insist never took place, I witness to the Gospel and to the Mission of the Church every day in conditions that most priests cannot imagine.  That is not a boast.  Who would boast of such a thing?  I celebrate the sacraments, as you know, and I am still a priest.

A priest may also petition the Holy See for voluntary removal from the clerical state, known popularly as “laicization.” Some years ago this blog had a comment from a man who left ministry as a priest to marry. As far as the Church was concerned, he remained a priest and entered into a civil, but invalid marriage. He reported that he was only recently granted his petition for laicization so that he may now have his marriage blessed by the Church. For reasons that are both sound and prudent, the Church has never been in any hurry to return a priest to the lay state.

One of the most destructive fallouts of the sex abuse scandal in the American Church has been the reality of involuntary laicization. When enacting the 2002 Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the US Bishops quoted a statement of Pope John Paul II in his address to American cardinals on April 23, 2002: “There is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.” Some American bishops have used that statement to seek forced laicization of accused priests under Canon 290, by judicial sentence or by a special act of the Pope. Prior to the Dallas Charter, such a permanent and unappealable removal from the priesthood was exceedingly rare. After the Charter, there was a wave of involuntary laicizations, and some believe they have done irreparable harm to the very Catholic theology of priesthood.

From a practical standpoint, forced laicization — popularly but erroneously called “defrocking” in the media — might satisfy some vindictive urges in certain victim groups, but it does nothing to prevent any possible victimization. It merely discards a priest with problems, or an innocent one falsely accused, upon the dung heap of Job with no support, no supervision, and no  accountability because of claims that are decades old and often unsubstantiated. Families do not discard their fathers, sons, or brothers, and the Church should not discard her priests.

A Puritan Response to Sin

The Bishops’ Charter failed to add a qualifying statement of Pope John Paul II to the American cardinals summoned to Rome in 2002:

“At the same time . . . we cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depth of a person’s soul and can work extraordinary change.”

By omitting the most important part of the Pope’s statement, the U.S. Bishops adopted a punishment with no allowance for repentance. In an essay for Homiletic & Pastoral Review (“Sex Abuse and Anti-Catholicism“) Ryan A. MacDonald wrote:

“The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood now underway in Western Culture, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”

In a landmark article in America magazine, “The Rights of Accused Priests” (June 21, 2004), the late Cardinal Avery Dulles issued a stinging rebuke of the bishops. What follows are some excerpts:

“The United States bishops have taken positions at odds with [their own] high principles.”

“Under intense pressure from various survivors’ networks, they hastily adopted, after less than two days of debate, the so-called Dallas Charter . . . ”

“In their effort to . . . restore public confidence in the Church as an institution and to protect the Church from liability suits, the bishops opted for an extreme response.”

“The dominant principle of the Charter was ‘zero tolerance’ . . . Having been so severely criticized for exercising poor judgement in the past, the bishops apparently wanted to avoid having to make any judgements in these cases.”

Cardinal Dulles went on to address the often near impossibility of judging the truth of allegations against priests without investigation, and the inherent injustice of taking actions that brand a priest as guilty before such investigation. He then outlined the rights of priests under Canon Law, and how the Charter and current policies ignore or even destroy those rights. I urge every priest and every Catholic to read Cardinal Dulles’ article.

I am not a canon lawyer, and I have only limited training in Church Law. What I have learned has been from experience, and my own experience has been a crash course in fending off what I believe is a seriously flawed and unjust process faced by many accused priests who simply did not commit the crimes.

To highlight how flawed this process is, I would like to reproduce a letter I received in 2002 from a prominent priest, canon lawyer, and professor of Canon Law at a leading Catholic University. I am printing the entire letter, but without his name since I have not asked his permission to print his name. I will let his letter speak for itself:

“Dear Father MacRae:

Don’t ever discount the real spiritual good accomplished by your words at Beyond These Stone Walls. You make people like me, with consciences dulled by repetitious prevalence of procedural abuses, face our responsibilities to protest and to act. You make it personal and compelling.

I want to pass along some bad news. You may already be aware of it, since you seem very well informed, but, if not, at least it will give you occasion to reflect. It seems that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has turned to ‘penal dismissals from the clerical state’ as a routine solution to the cases being sent by American bishops after preliminary investigations. The decrees of dismissal are not subject to appeal or review.

The procedural injustice of this practice is obvious.

In the preliminary investigation process, the accused priest has no opportunity to defend himself. The cases are sent by bishops to CDF sometimes with an expectation that they will instruct the diocese to proceed with a canonical trial for dismissal or allow the accused priest to remain [in the priesthood] in a penitential state but removed from public ministry. Instead, the CDF seems to be taking this drastic and terminal action based solely on the information provided by a bishop in the preliminary investigation — often when the priest is accused of abuse alleged to have occurred thirty years ago or more.

I don’t want to discourage you or any petitions to the Holy See on your behalf. Quite the contrary, I would urge any and all possible interventions.

Think about the implications if this shameful result should fall on you. It is really an empty juridical gesture with no practical consequences. You remain a priest. No one can take that away. You can pray, and you can celebrate the Holy Eucharist validly, absolve or anoint in emergencies, and, I presume, you  could continue your very valuable ministry of consciousness raising. What I am trying to say is please do not be discouraged or lose hope if this awful expedient is aimed at you.”

Ganging Up on the Already Down

To date, at least, that final chapter of my nightmare has not taken place. But the Church must be made aware — you must be made aware — of the inherent injustice of “piling on” that occurs when most priests are accused.

When I faced trial in 1994, I was entirely on my own against an assault on three simultaneous fronts. First, I faced a criminal trial, a highly sensationalized and problematic one that Ryan A. MacDonald recently described in these pages in “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

Very few priests earn a salary or have access to funds that would assure a fair trial. I certainly did not, but my diocese issued a letter to my attorneys instructing them: “To the extent he is without funds, he should contact the public defenders’ office.” The cost of my defense would have been but a tiny fraction of the cost of mediated settlements.

Secondly, simultaneous to a criminal defense and preparing for trial, I also faced civil lawsuits naming both me and my diocese as defendants. The accusers were represented by their contingency lawyers, and both they and their lawyers had a clear financial stake in the outcome. My diocese was represented by a high profile law firm seeking, from day one, the quietest path to settlement that would generate the least publicity. With my meager assets dissolved in only partial funding of a criminal defense, I was not represented at all against the civil claims. When I protested the possibility of a settlement without substantiation, my accusers and their lawyers simply dropped me as a defendant so that I would no longer have any standing in the matter.

Lastly, from the moment I was accused, I faced a trial-by-media that set an impossible boundary between me and justice. The accusers had contingency lawyers who were relentless spokespersons for their feigned “victimization.” My diocese had a spokesperson who advocated for the distance the diocese was motivated to obtain from me. As I faced trial in 1994, knowing that I maintained my innocence, and knowing that I was not represented at all as settlement negotiations ensued in the background, my bishop and diocese issued a press release stating:

“The Church has been a victim of the actions of Gordon MacRae just as these individuals. It is clear that he will never again function as a priest.”

— Press Release of the Diocese of Manchester, September 6, 1993

My attorneys protested this to deafened ears. With that public statement came the end of my civil rights to a presumption of innocence and a fair trial. Throughout the trial, the local news media cited that statement. The jurors in my trial read the statement. To pretend that this scenario represents justice requires far more skill in the art of pretense than I have ever been capable of.

And it’s even worse still, today.

The Bishop Accountability website publishes every sordid detail about every money-driven claim taking no responsibility whatsoever for whether their information is true or corroborated. The site administrators publish the names and lurid details claimed of every accused priest while removing the names of all accusers. In some instances, this amounts to aiding and abetting them in the commission of the crimes of fraud and larceny.

And now, as is clear from the canonist’s dismal letter above, if the accused priest cares anything at all about preserving his priesthood then he must also hire a canon lawyer to defend himself against yet another tier of simultaneous judicial processes: the possibility of canonical dismissal from the priesthood.

If night befalls your father, you don’t discard him! You just don’t!

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. Please consider these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood

When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked

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.”

In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo

Actor Robert De Niro has been cast as a Catholic priest in three films : True Confessions, The Mission, and Sleepers. The latter tells a spellbinding true story.

June 14, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

I began this post in May, 2019, but a lot has happened since then that caused me to want to start over. This is an important story about a topic still front and center in the world of Catholic affairs: the Catholic sex abuse crisis. If you’re just plain sick of it, well, frankly, so am I. Both mainstream and Catholic media are still saturated with it. I last wrote of it in April, 2023 in “Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report.”

Fans of Robert De Niro the actor are not necessarily also fans of Robert De Niro the person. Whatever the reasons for that distinction, I want to write of his outstanding roles as a Catholic priest in three controversial films: True Confessions (1981), The Mission (1989) and Sleepers (1996). In each, his character became embroiled in an unforgettable moral quagmire.

The term, “quagmire” first appeared in British literature in 1570. It combines two older British terms, “quag,” with its origin in the word, “quake,” and “mire,” which means to find oneself bogged down in something. A quagmire was first used to refer to becoming trapped in a bog which looks solid enough to walk upon, but then entraps a person in the unseen muck. Today it is used to refer to a situation that seems innocent enough on its surface, but entraps a person in a moral dilemma.

In each of the films above, Robert De Niro portrayed a priest caught up in such a quagmire. I have written before of one of them. In True Confessions, based on a novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne, De Niro was cast in the role of Monsignor Desmond Spellacy. Groomed to become Archbishop of Los Angeles, Spellacy becomes marginally implicated in the murder of a prostitute, a crime being investigated by his L.A. homicide detective brother portrayed by Robert Duvall.

The moral quagmire of True Confessions is that the priest is entirely innocent of the crime, but is he innocent of any knowledge of it? If he knows, how does he know? The title of the film and book gives a hint to the nature of the moral quagmire, a nightmare scenario for many Catholic priests.

But the De Niro role that I want to focus on for this post is that of “Father Bobby” Carillo in Sleepers, a 1996 film based on a book of the same title by Lorenzo Carcaterra published in 1995 but written in 1994, the year of my imprisonment. The story reads like a novel, but it is actually a biographical account in which Carcaterra has changed the names of his characters to protect the innocent.

The book and film unfold in the Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan in 1966 when I was in high school. Hell’s Kitchen was then a poor bastion of mostly Irish Catholics in a tough neighborhood — a term used here with an emphasis more on “hood” than “neighbor.”

In Sleepers, Robert De Niro’s character, Father Bobby, is in stark contrast to much of the media portrayal of Catholic priests since then. He is a priest as tough as the neighborhood in which he lives. Father Bobby meets a group of adolescent boys who hang out in the neighborhood. All have absent fathers or abusive fathers, or both, and over time Father Bobby comes to fulfill a role that today would land him squarely in the crosshairs of societal and media suspicion.

Father Carillo’s Moral Quagmire

Father Bobby does not indoctrinate these street kids into faith. That is something he walks more than talks. I hope you catch the meaning of that because it is central to fatherhood. Father Bobby does not drag them into church. Instead, he protects them, cares for them, challenges them, and becomes a father to them and the sole person on Earth that any of them trust. His lack of Catholic indoctrination might not be the witness some of us might hope for, but it is clearly the witness that these boys most need. One of the saddest aspects of the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis of suspicion in the Church is that such a scenario could never happen again.

But even in 1966, as the story unfolds, Father Carillo is keenly aware of appearances and the necessity of professional distance. As an indirect result of keeping his emotional connection to these young men in check, he is one day not present to them when trouble finds them. Several of them commit a petty crime that escalates. A corrupt judge and court system sentences them to time in “juvey” a New York juvenile detention facility. While there, four of them “earn” a stint in solitary confinement. Sleepers is the slang term for juvenile delinquents serving more than six months in solitary confinement.

While there, they are demoralized and dehumanized beyond description. They are beaten by guards and several of them are repeatedly and brutally raped. To make the awful story shorter, they survive and are restored to freedom but could never be “free” again. They emerged from their nightmare destroyed as men, but they hide the truth. They make a pact to never reveal any of this to Father Bobby — first and foremost because they are ashamed.

Twenty years pass. The 14-year-old boys are now 34-year-old men. One became a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office. Most of the others became street thugs having dropped out of school and all engagement with the human race as a result of what they endured at the hands of the State. All of them occasionally still see Father Bobby, and to a man, they still trust and revere him.

I have to remind readers at this point that this is not some seedy fictional story. It is a true account. In the early 1990s when Lorenzo Carcaterra wrote it, the mainstream media had no interest in the story because the priest in the account is not the perpetrator of sexual abuse, but rather the savior of its victims. And lest you choose to believe that such abuse could not happen in a state run juvenile justice facility, I have firsthand knowledge to the contrary.

At the time Sleepers was written in 1994, my friend Pornchai Moontri was in the solitary confinement unit of the Maine State Prison for nearly seven years. The news venue, PBS Frontline produced a segment on that very same place filmed just months after Pornchai was transferred from there to the New Hampshire State Prison. If you have never viewed PBS Frontline’s Solitary Nation [part1, part2] , be brave and consider doing so. The abuse by guards is all masked because they were on camera and knew it, but the true nature of such a place remains clear.

The Reckoning

Back to Sleepers. One day, some twenty years after Father Bobby’s friends emerged from solitary confinement, two of them ventured into a dark neighborhood bar. Seated alone in a booth was “Nokes,” the most monstrous and sadistic of the guards who sexually assaulted and dehumanized them twenty years earlier. By the end of the day, his victims exacted the justice denied.

In the aftermath, Father Carillo learned the entire truth of what happened to these men in juvenile detention. He then had to wrestle with the deepest, most perplexing moral quagmire of his life as a man and as a priest. He was told by their lawyer that he alone could save them with an alibi defense. All of this painfully reminded me of another story told in my post, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”

Most who have read that story agree that all the media hype about the supposed crimes of Catholic priests — some sadly true but many not at all — pale in comparison to the crimes committed against Pornchai and his mother. And yet, the survivor in that story, like the survivors in Sleepers, fled not from the Catholic Church but to it. Pornchai himself confirmed this in a post written upon his arrival in Thailand, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai and I had another friend, TJ, who was released from prison only to find himself back here at age 26 with a new petty offense. Just after Pornchai left in 2020, TJ was moved from solitary confinement to a crowded cellblock. He unpacked his few possessions and obtained a pass to come to see me in the prison Law Library. With his head bowed in silent shame for his failure to live uprightly in freedom, he told me only that life was hard and he “did something stupid.” I don’t know the details.

What I do know, and it is well documented, is that for much of his young life until he was old enough to escape, TJ was a victim of unspeakable sexual and physical violence. The pairing of sex and violence is especially psychologically destructive. Like the young men in Sleepers, TJ and Pornchai both carried in their hearts a devastating devaluation of their lives. With every day in “fight or flight” mode, freedom was stolen from them long before prison.

As an accused Catholic priest, one would think that I would be the last person TJ would want anything to do with, but Pornchai and I taught him that he need not be forever defined by the sins of others. We did not allow his past to excuse his present and neither should he, but we also placed his offenses into the totality of his life. We saw through his façade and challenged him too grieve his past without letting it rule his present.

So I, too, was in a quagmire here — with Pornchai and TJ and others. I was left with the irony of sheltering them not only from what happened to them, but also from what happened to me. When leaders of the Church built upon God’s Truth, God’s Justice and God’s Mercy reflected none of these, I covered for them in the presence of Pornchai and TJ. They looked to the Church for healing and hope, and I could never deprive them of that. Neither could Father Bobby Carillo.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: This post ends in another glaring irony. At the time my diocese was besieged by a grand jury report from the State of New Hampshire in 2003, the State was itself hiding an enormous sexual abuse scandal brought by former residents of its Youth Detention Center. Over the last year, that story had come to light.

The Diocese of Manchester paid $30 million in unquestioned mediated settlements over the last 30 years, while state officials raked the Church over the coals. Now the State of New Hampshire has earmarked $100 million to settle in excess of 1,300 pending lawsuits against the state. One attorney described this as “the largest child abuse case in U.S. history.” Unlike its treatment of the Catholic Church, however, the State has not convened a grand jury to investigate and create a grand jury report as has happened to Catholic institutions across the land. Apparently, for the State some things are best left in the dark.

You may also be interested in these related links:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester

Judge Clears Way for Hundreds of YDC Child Abuse Lawsuits

Judge Questions AG’s Conflict at Heart of YDC Cases

Courtesy of NH Business Review

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.”

Justice Clarence Thomas: When a News Story Becomes the News

Despite known threats against Supreme Court justices, an April CNN report revealed the home address of the elderly mother of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

May 10, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Hours after I began this post, I was forced to abandon it and start over. Just as I sat before my typewriter, popular FOX News host Tucker Carlson was fired from the network for reasons that I am certain will be clearer but no less controversial by the time this is posted. On the same day, CNN Morning News host Don Lemon was also fired, but entirely unrelated to the FOX News story. Both events shook the world of cable television news media.

Whatever the reasons behind them, however, they could not possibly rise to the clear and present danger posed from a violation of journalistic standards that stayed mostly off the rest of the media radar in recent weeks. The only reference I have seen to its seriousness was in an April 21, 2023 column by James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Justice Thomas and the Plague of Bad Reporting.”

James Taranto is the WSJ Editorial Features Editor. His column that day was a very good report about some very bad journalism. It took a complex development and systematically presented it in clear prose. If you cannot see it due to the WSJ pay wall, I want to present some of its highlights. Its subject was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a short list of supposed “ethics violations” touted in some news venues with lots of partisan spin. Mr. Taranto, especially critical of coverage in two Washington DC media venues, wrote: “The Washington Post and ProPublica commit comically incompetent journalism. But by stirring up animus, they increase the risk of a tragic ending.”

The “risk of a tragic ending” refers to some related coverage at CNN. Among the published claims from ProPublica was a charge that the 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas has been living rent free in a property formerly owned in part by Thomas but sold in 2016 to longtime friend, Harlan Crow. When Justice Thomas sold his one-third interest in the property, at a substantial loss, he was required to report the sale, but did not. It was an oversight. A source said that Thomas erroneously believed he did not have to report the sale because he sold it at a loss and none of the entities involved had a case before his Court.

Mr. Taranto went on to explain that the oversight is a rather common one. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Ketanji Brown Jackson had all committed the same oversight which in each case was corrected by simply filing an amendment to the respective year’s report. That same simple correction should have been afforded to Justice Thomas as well, but instead ProPublica pounced on the story in April, presenting it as a gross violation of judicial ethics. It was an oversight that could have been easily corrected within the rules, but that did not stop The Washington Post from also hyping the story for partisan reasons.

The story, as later reported by CNN, was that, as part of a negotiated $133,363 sale price of the home and property in 2016, then 85-year-old Leola Williams, the mother of Justice Thomas, was given an occupancy agreement by the buyer to be able to remain in her home rent free for the rest of her life. She remained responsible for property taxes and insurance. The occupancy agreement was with her and not with Justice Thomas who sold the modest home at a loss to a company owned by longtime friend, Harlan Crow. Ms. Williams is now 92 years of age.

Ethics and Common Sense at CNN

It is perhaps providential that Harlan Crow’s first name is not “Jim.” It did not take long for the political left to turn this story into a scandal, though with some difficulty. Something terribly nefarious was imagined lurking beneath the fact that a white billionaire might offer such a gesture of mercy to an elderly black woman. Former ProPublica president Richard Tofel wrote of this on Twitter: “Can’t imagine how any reasonable person could distinguish this from Crow giving Thomas cash every month.”

In publishing this story on Monday, April 17,2023, CNN followed this “incompetent reporting” by “increasing the risk of a tragic ending.” The potential tragic ending was this: The CNN report also published the home address of the now 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas. That was the only real scandal in this story. With help from a friend, I published the following comment on James Taranto’s Wall Street Journal column:

“In 2022, I was invited by the Pew Research Center to participate in its Survey of Journalists about the state of journalism and news reporting in America, both broadcast and print. One result was a widely expressed dismay by journalists that journalistic ethics are routinely compromised in favor of partisan politics. Apparently, the participating journalists have not done enough to counter this concern.

“The most disturbing part of Mr.Taranto’s column is a revelation that CNN reported the address of the elderly mother of Justice Clarence Thomas. There can be no acceptable explanation for this dangerous and irresponsible setting aside of journalistic ethics in favor of one-sided political gain. The news department at CNN is under new management. Viewers were assured that there would be changes in the way news is presented there. We were promised news with less opinionated partisan influence.

“Whoever at CNN published the address should be fired. Whoever provided oversight to allow this to happen should also be fired, especially in light of other attempted attacks and harassment at the homes of other Supreme Court justices. After this serious breach of ethics, I am deleting CNN from my television channel list until CNN can live up to its promise. This is the only way consumers of the news can speak truth to power. Actions like this at CNN tell me that power takes precedence over truth.”

— Gordon J. Mac Rae, The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2023

A Jarring 2020 Flashback

This was really all about Roe v. Wade and it could easily be interpreted as a reminder to those off the rails that reprisals are now called for. Addressing a crowd of angry pro-abortion supporters in March 2020, then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) leveled threats against two Supreme Court Justices:

“We know what’s at stake. Over the last three years, women’s reproductive rights have come under attack in a way we haven’t seen in modern history. Republican legislatures are waging a war on women, and they’re taking away fundamental rights. I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”

— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

We all saw the jeering protesters lobbing threats at the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices. Early in the morning of June 8, 2022, two weeks before the leaked decision on Roe v. Wade was formally published, U.S. marshals arrested an armed man trying to break into the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He told police that he had begun “thinking about how to give his life purpose” so he decided to kill Justice Kavanaugh after finding his address on the internet. All of this was known to CNN before publishing the address of the 92-year-old mother of Justice Clarence Thomas.

I know that CNN is not the only news venue that packages news along partisan lines. According to media expert, Alex S. Jones in his 2010 book, Losing the News (Oxford Press). “CNN and MSNBC have shifted their focus from news to opinion in pursuit of FOX News’s highly successful mix of news and advocacy.” In the month before this breach of ethics at CNN, its ratings had soared 35-percent since the New York indictment of former president Donald Trump. Its audience base was already highly charged. And it goes without saying that if Donald Trump had said in public what Senator Chuck Schummer said on the steps of the Supreme Court, that story would have eclipsed all other news.

A March 26, 2023 You Gov poll of trust in broadcast news services asked respondents to address two questions: 1) which of the following TV networks do you watch to keep up with the news? And 2) Which TV networks do you most trust for news? The combined results were definitive: Fox News 41%; ABC News 24%; CNN 22%; CBS 22%; NBC 21%; MSNBC 18%.

Whether our readers agree with the partisan spin of any of these news networks is beside the point. There is clearly a ratings war going on, and networks that have trailed in ratings have also suffered a decline in advertising dollars, the networks’ sole source of income. Most viewers who consistently choose one network over another tend to do so not just because they want the news, but also because they want their own belief system to be affirmed. This was the number two complaint among journalists in the recent Pew Research Center Survey of Journalists in which I and this blog were invited to participate.

Taking part in that survey is not a bragging point. If anything, it made me realize how much I am also a slave to a news service and its fundamental frame of mind. The blending of news and opinion is a toxic but alluring mix. Once I became conscious of this, I have tried to view news networks with opposing views, but it hasn’t been easy. Two years after the election of 2020, one of these networks remains dedicated to 24-hour coverage of “get Trump at any cost.” Another seems wedded to the idea that we are all unrepentant racists. When I leave a news program feeling angry and riled, just imagine how an already fired-up mob is responding.

At least one cooler head has prevailed. After reading the above column and two recent sequels by The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, I am convinced that the ethics claims against Justice Clarence Thomas are entirely contrived and reported along partisan lines to support a strictly partisan bias.

Along those same lines, the Gallup Poll now reports that 70% of Democrats, 27% of Independents, and only 14% of Republicans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence in the current state of journalism.

Have an opinion? I would love to hear it, but please don’t shoot the messenger!

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Two final notes from Fr. Gordon MacRae:

Forty-four years ago on May 11, 1979, my friend Father Joseph Sands was murdered in the rectory of St. Rose of Lima parish in the town of Littleton, New Hampshire. The years to follow revealed that this troubling story had many mysterious tentacles into the case that sent me to wrongful imprisonment. Ryan A. MacDonald untangled those tentacles in “The Story Buried Under the Fr. Gordon MacRae Case.”

On a very different note, Sunday May 14 is Mothers Day in the United States. It is a day to honor our mothers, both living and deceased. I would like to think that after all these years of injustice, I managed to bring some poetic justice to my mother in “Mothers Day Promises to Keep, and Miles to Go Before I Sleep.”

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.”

Canon Law Conundrum: When Moral Certainty Is Neither Moral Nor Certain

The Stoning of Saint Stephen by Rembrandt

Convoluted moral justification is employed by Jesuits of the USA Central and Southern Province to publish a list of priests with ‘credible’ allegations of abuse.

May 3, 2023 by Michael J. Mazza, JD, JCD

Introduction by Fr. Gordon MacRae: It is an honor and a privilege to publish this important guest post by Michael J. Mazza, JD, JCD, (pictured below at the Vatican) a highly regarded canon lawyer, civil attorney, and law professor with broad experience in the canonical defense of Catholic priests. His post is a sequel of sorts to my post in these pages last week, “Follow the Money: Another Sinister Grand Jury Report.” His post introduces us to a newly articulated standard for removing priests from ministry adopted by a Jesuit Province in the United States. It is a standard that left me shuddering over the rapid decline of due process rights for priests. Like other such draconian standards, I fear its use will spread like a virus.

Back in August, 2019, Ryan A. MacDonald wrote a featured post for Beyond These Stone Walls entitled “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.” It has been one of our most widely read posts of recent years and continues to be so. Ryan wrote about the injustice of publishing names of accused priests when the basis for deeming a claim to be ‘credible’ is a standard of justice not employed or even recognized in any other legal forum. It essentially means that an allegation of abuse is only “possible,” but not necessarily “probable.” It should be the beginning of a Church investigation, but it has widely become the end.

This is a standard that is now employed by nearly every bishop in every diocese, and it is rapidly spreading throughout the Church. Michael Mazza’s post to follow understandably has a bit more ‘legalese’ than usually comes from my typewriter, but it is a brilliant eye-opener.

There was a smoldering cloud just above my head as I three times read the Jesuits’ confounding justification for censuring and removing priests. In a word, it is mind-boggling.

This post shines a much needed light on the need for canonical justice and advocacy for accused priests. It is highly recommended to us by Fr. Stuart MacDonald, a frequent Beyond These Stone Walls contributor and a candidate for the Doctorate in Canon Law. Please share this post widely, especially among the priests you know.

When Moral Certainty Is Neither Moral Nor Certain

Two months ago the Jesuits USA Central and Southern Province released an updated registry of Jesuits with “credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor.” As a canonical advocate representing priests accused of misconduct, I was involved in one of the cases referenced. Given the requirements of canon law and my professional duties, I am limited in what I can say about the case. What I can discuss — in fact, what I feel I must rectify — is the grievous error of law contained in the Jesuit Province’s published statement, a mistake that despite my best efforts has gravely damaged the reputation of a good priest and respect for the rule of law in the Church.

The most problematic part of the statement appears in its first paragraph:

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“For the purposes of this list, a finding of credibility of an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor is based on a belief, with moral certitude, after careful investigation and review by professionals, that an incident of sexual abuse of a minor or vulnerable adult occurred, or probably occurred, with the possibility that it did not occur being highly unlikely. ‘Moral certitude’ in this context means a high degree of probability, but short of absolute certainty. As such, inclusion on this list does not imply the allegations are true and correct or that the accused individual has been found guilty of a crime or liable for civil claims.”

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It is difficult to know where to begin with an analysis of this confounding passage. Did the event happen or not? We are told on the one hand that being included on the list “does not imply the allegations are true and correct.” At the same time, however, we are told that “after careful investigation” and “review by professionals,” the allegation has been determined “with moral certitude” to have “occurred or probably occurred.” In fact, the statement says the possibility that the events did not occur “is highly unlikely.”

While such a confusing statement may appear to have been crafted by two opposing camps of a drafting committee, the real world consequences of it were clear, especially because it was accompanied by the usual invitation for victims of abuse to come forward. The news was reported as a “shock” to the students at the university where the priest had been a popular professor, leaving some brokenhearted and in tears. A theology professor said the news had “shaken” him and his colleagues, with one priest colleague concluding thus: “It’s mind-boggling that anyone would do such a thing, period end of story.”

Conclusions like these are not surprising. What is surprising — and what ought to be profoundly disturbing to those who value the rule of law — is that they have no legal basis whatsoever. Like so many of his priestly brethren in the USA accused of canonical crimes these days, the priest at issue was never given the benefit of a trial during which he could have defended his innocence. Instead, the priest was on the receiving end of what is known in canon law as a “preliminary investigation,” a technique under canon 1718 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law that is designed solely to determine whether there is sufficient indicia to warrant the launching of a full-blown canonical process. Only after this formal process, whether judicial or administrative, may a penalty be inflicted or declared. And it is only through this formal process that “moral certainty” — the canonical equivalent of “beyond a reasonable doubt” — may be achieved under the law.

An analogy may prove helpful here. Suppose that Mary, a juror in a domestic abuse trial, learns of allegations that John abused Jane. Mary hears from Jane, the only witness at the trial, about the details of her charge. Mary knows only that John denies the accusation, but does not hear from him because John is not present at the trial. In fact, neither John nor his defense counsel is even invited to the trial. If Mary nevertheless arrives at John’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” in spite of the fact that John was not allowed to exercise his natural human right to self-defense, what would we say about Mary’s judgment?

All analogies limp, and several objections could immediately be raised with respect to this one. Just because there were no other witnesses does not mean that there was no abuse, a sin and a crime that is horrible and was often covered up in the past, especially in ecclesial circles. While these statements are certainly true, summarily dismissing valid concerns about violations of the due process rights of accused clerics is not a solution to the sex abuse crisis. On the contrary, it only perpetuates a continuing injustice and creates an atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and division within the ecclesial community. That is not a sustainable path forward.

It needs to be emphasized that a canonical preliminary investigation is typically performed by an individual (most often but not always a former law enforcement official) whose only job is to assemble indicia substantiating an allegation. The investigator then presents these indicia to a review board, generally constituted by lay people (at least some of whom are to have experience in law or psychology), who make a recommendation to the religious superior or bishop about whether a full-blown canonical investigation should be initiated.

In some ways, the work of a review board is similar to that of a grand jury. Grand juries, like review boards, are supposed to act as shields against arbitrary, unfounded, and malicious accusations of wrongdoing by ensuring that serious accusations are brought only upon the considered judgment of a representative body acting according to the rule of law. Grand juries, like review boards, do not decide whether the accused is guilty; they merely decide whether there is probable cause to believe that a crime occurred and probable cause to believe that the person accused committed that crime. In short, grand juries, like review boards, decide only whether there is enough evidence to proceed to the next stage in the judicial process.

This is because of the deliberately one-sided nature of grand jury proceedings. Only the prosecutor — not the defense — gets to address the grand jury. All of the important safeguards of justice are saved for the real trial that comes only after the grand jury has performed its important task. Nevertheless, all this means that in a very real way the life and reputation of a fellow citizen are in the hands of the grand jurors. Indictments, like recommendations from review boards, often receive press coverage in which these legal niceties are overlooked, meaning that the reputation of the person accused is harmed and his life thrown into turmoil.

Many accused priests never get a trial, “period end of story.” Nevertheless, their lives are thrown into turmoil, beyond any doubt. What do we make of subsequent decisions by accused clerics to abandon the fight, or to leave religious life and/or the active priesthood? One could certainly infer guilt from it, and many people do just that. But isn’t it also possible that there are other reasons for such momentous decisions? With no forum to clear their names, and in spite of repeated and consistent denials of the charge — and the lack of any criminal proceedings or any record from a related civil trial — isn’t it at least possible that some clerics simply despair of ever clearing their names and just decide to move on with their lives as best they can?

Catholics should be very wary of making judgments about their fellow human beings. We have been cautioned against it by Our Lord himself (see, e.g., Mt. 7:1-3). In fact, as legal scholar James Q. Whitman has shown in his 2016 book The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, the original basis for the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard was to encourage reluctant jurors to reach guilty verdicts when the evidence pointed strongly in that direction. Why were they reluctant? Because they feared judging their neighbors, both because of the possible vengeance of the guilty person’s relatives in this world and because of their belief in being judged in the next world.

None of what has been stated in this article is unknown to the American bishops — or, even more importantly, to their lawyers. In fact, in November 2000 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an insightful commentary on the American criminal justice system entitled “Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice.” That statement, as of this writing, is still available on the USCCB website. Issued less than two years before the Dallas Charter, the document criticizes notions such as “zero tolerance” and “simplistic solutions such as ‘three strikes and you’re out,’” with the latter being labelled specifically as a “slogan of the moment.” The paper goes on to quite rightly assert that “crime, corrections, and the search for real community require far more than the policy clichés of conservatives and liberals.”

Notwithstanding such statements, real harm is happening to real men on a daily basis in this country in the name of “transparency.” Perhaps few priests in America know the pain that such sloganeering can inflict as Father Gordon MacRae. Incarcerated for almost three decades after a trial described as “Kafkaesque” by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Fr. MacRae not only steadfastly maintains his innocence, but from his prison cell faithfully maintains his website “BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com,” dedicated to drawing attention to the plight of his brother priests and the dangers wrought by violations of the right to due process. MacRae’s case stands as an especially stark example of how pre-trial public statements from his diocese prejudiced his cause, defamed him, and likely helped lead to his wrongful conviction.

In summary, it is essential to note that judging cases involving allegations of child sexual abuse is an enormously painful and difficult process for all involved: the accuser, the accused, and all those involved in the case. Decisions one way or the other can be life-altering. They are not made any easier by those who comment upon them without a firm understanding of both the facts and the applicable law. While legal processes do not come with a guarantee of infallibility, they are a time-tested tool used throughout the centuries for the determination of facts. Legal principles such as moral certainty, the presumption of innocence, and the duty to refrain from unfairly violating someone’s right to a good name are, likewise, bedrock principles of any society. We neglect these valuable tools at our peril.

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About the Author: Michael J. Mazza, JD, JCD graduated summa cum laude in 1999 from Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee where he was Editor in Chief of the Law Review. He subsequently clerked for the Hon. John L. Coffey on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. After 20 years in civil law practice, Michael began studies in canon law at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome from where he graduated magna cum laude in 2021 with a license in canon law (JCL)

In 2022, Michael successfully defended his thesis for the Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD). His topic was also the topic of an excellent article published in the Tulsa Law Review: “Defending a Cleric’s Right to Reputation and the Sexual Abuse Scandal in the Catholic Church.”

Michael is today an adjunct professor of canon law at Marquette University and at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He also represents clients in need of canonical counsel, especially accused priests. If any priest needs canonical assistance Michael can be reached through his website at www.CanonicalAdvocacy.com or by email at mjmazzajdjcd@pm.me.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: I am most grateful to Professor Mazza for this alarming but important chapter in the cause of justice and due process for priests. You may also like to read and share these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction by Fr. Stuart MacDonald, JCL

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

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

OSV News photo/George P. Matysek Jr., Catholic Review

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 Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

And Follow David F. Pierre, Jr. at TheMediaReport.com

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.”