Claire Dion Has Fallen into the Hands of the Living God

Our great friend, Claire Dion, succumbed to cancer early on April 24, 2024. She passed peacefully in the presence of her family into the hands of the Living God.

April 29, 2024 by Father Gordon MacRae

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

— Colossians 3:3

It is rare that I publish more than one post a week. However, I could not let this opportunity pass to acknowledge Mrs. Claire Dion for her undaunted efforts over many years to help bring our posts to you every week. I wrote a tribute to Claire posted on April 3, 2024 entitled, “In a Mirror Dimly: Divine Mercy in Our Darker Days.” Claire played many roles in my life and in the life of our friend Pornchai Max Moontri in ways both innovative and heroic. I have spent much time pondering, in the past few days, how we could ever continue on without her.

But we must, and Claire would be the first to insist that we must. She was and is one of the most selfless souls ever to cross my path. A Mass of Christian Burial is to be offered for Claire on the day this is posted, April 29, 2024. The Mass will be at Saint Pius V Catholic Church in Lynn, Massachusetts in the very neighborhood in which I grew up. You may read all about Claire, and our hopes and fears for her in the winter of her life, in the post linked above.

But the memory I most want to cling to, and convey to all of you, is perhaps the most innovative thing she had done for us. It was late September of 2020 at the height of a global pandemic. After 16 years here as my friend, my roommate, and my family, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri was taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to begin the long and painful ordeal of deportation to his native Thailand. Prison life was beset by a panicked and draconian response to Covid, and it seemed much of the world had come to a screeching halt. Here is how I presented this story a few weeks ago:

The Divine Mercy Phone Calls

In 2020, Pornchai was held for five months in ICE detention at an overcrowded, for-profit facility in Louisiana. It was the height of the global Covid pandemic, and we were completely cut off from contact with each other. But Claire could receive calls from either of us. I guess raising five daughters made her critically aware of the urgent necessity of telephones and the importance of perceiving in advance every attempt to circumvent the rules.

Claire devised an ingenious plan using two cell phones placed facing each other with their speakers in opposite positions. On a daily basis during the pandemic of 2020, I could talk with Pornchai in ICE detention in Louisiana and he could talk with me in Concord, New Hampshire. These brief daily phone calls were like a life preserver for Pornchai and became crucial for us both. Through them, I was able to convey information to Pornchai that gave him daily hope in a long, seemingly hopeless situation.

Each step of the way, Claire conveyed to me the growing depth of her devotion to Divine Mercy and the characters who propagated it, characters who became our Patron Saints and upon whom we were modeling our lives. Saints John Paul II, Maximilian Kolbe, Padre Pio, Faustina Kowalska, Therese of Lisieux, all became household names for us. They were, and are, our spiritual guides, and became Claire’s as well by sheer osmosis.

Neither Pornchai Max nor I will ever forget Claire, but what we will both most remember with gratitude in our hearts and thanksgiving to the Lord for the graces bestowed to us through Claire is the clever and innovative story described above. It was unorthodox, but she saved the day for us both.

If you would like to post a prayer or thought about Claire, or condolence to her family, you are invited to do so at this site.

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Please pray for Claire and her family. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

In a Mirror Dimly: Divine Mercy in Our Darker Days

For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars

A Shower of Roses

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 a Mirror Dimly: Divine Mercy in Our Darker Days

Your friends behind and Beyond These Stone Walls have endured many trials. Divine Mercy has been for them like a lighthouse guiding them through their darkest days.

April 3, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Editor’s Note: In 2018, Mrs. Claire Dion visited Pornchai Moontri in prison and wrote a special post about the experience which we will link to at the end of this one. In the years leading up to that visit, the grace of Divine Mercy became for them both like a shining star illuminating a journey upon a turbulent sea. Divine Mercy is now their guiding light.

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I had clear plans for the day I began writing this post, one of many at this blog about Divine Mercy. But, as often happens here, my best laid plans fall easily apart. The prison Library where I have been the Legal Clerk for the last dozen years has been open only one day per week for several months due to staff shortages. During down times in the Law Library, I am able to use a typewriter that is in better condition than my own. So this day was to be a work day, and I had lots to catch up on, including writing this post.

I kept myself awake during the night before, mapping out in my mind all that I had to accomplish when morning came and how I would approach this post. Divine Mercy is, after all, central to my life and to the lives of many who visit this blog. But such plans are often disrupted here because control over the course of my day in prison is but an illusion.

Awake in my cell at 6:00 AM, I had just finished stirring a cup of instant coffee. Before I could even take a sip, I heard my name echoing off these stone walls as it was blasted on the prison P.A. system. It is always a jarring experience, especially upon awakening. I was being summoned to report immediately to a holding tank to await transport to God knows where. I knew that I might sit for hours for whatever ordeal awaited me. My first dismayed thought was that I could not bring my coffee.

It turned out that my summons was for transportation to a local hospital for an “urgent care” eye exam with an ophthalmologist. For strict security reasons I was not to know the date, time, or destination. Months ago, I developed a massive migraine headache and double vision. The double vision was alarming because I must climb and descend hundreds of stairs here each day. Descending long flights of stairs was tricky because I could not tell which were real and which would send me plummeting down a steel and concrete chasm.

So I submitted a request for a vision exam. My double vision lasted about six weeks, then in mid-February it disappeared as suddenly as it came. I then forgot that I had requested the consult. So two months later I made my way through the morning cold in the dark to a holding area where a guard pointed to an empty cell where I would sit in silence upon a cold concrete slab to await what is called here “a med run.”

Over the course of 30 years here, I have had five such medical “field trips.” That is an average of one every six years so there has been no accumulated familiarity with the experience. The guards follow strict protocols, as they must, requiring that I be chained in leg irons with hands cuffed and bound tightly at my waist. It is not a good look for a Catholic priest, but one which has likely become more prevalent in recent decades in America. During each of my “med runs” over 30 years, my nose began to itch intensely the moment my hands were tightly bound at my waist.

The ride to one of this State’s largest hospitals, Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, was rather nice, even while chained up in the back of a prison van. The two armed guards were silent but professional. My chains clinked loudly as they led me through the crowded hospital lobby. The large room fell silent. Amid whispers and furtive glances, I was just trying hard not to look like Jack the Ripper.

I was led to a bank of elevators where I was gently but firmly turned around to face an opposite wall lest I frighten any citizens emerging from one. As I stared at the wall, I made a slight gasp that caught the attention of one of the guards. Staring back at me on that wall opposite the elevators was a large framed portrait of my Bishop who I last saw too long ago to recall. I smiled at this moment of irony. He did not smile back.

A Consecration of Souls

The best part of this day was gone by the time I returned from my field trip to my prison cell. I was hungry, thirsty, and needed to deprogram from the humiliation of being paraded in chains before Pilate and the High Priests. My first thought was that I must telephone two people who had been expecting a call from me earlier that day. One of them was Dilia, our excellent volunteer editor in New York. The other was Claire Dion, and I felt compelled to call her first. Let me tell you about Claire.

As I finally made my way up 52 stairs to my cell that day, I reached for my tablet — which can place inexpensive internet-based phone calls. I immediately felt small and selfish. My focus the entire day up to this point was my discomfort and humiliation. Then my thoughts finally turned to Claire and all that she was enduring, a matter of life and death.

I mentioned in a post some years back that I grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, a rather rugged industrial city on the North Shore of Boston. There is a notorious poem about the City but I never knew its origin: “Lynn, Lynn, the City of Sin. You never go out the way you come in.” After writing all those years ago about growing up there, I received a letter from Claire in West Central Maine who also hails from Lynn. She stumbled upon this blog and read a lot, then felt compelled to write to me.

I dearly, DEARLY wish that I could answer every letter I receive from readers moved by something they read here. I cannot write for long by hand due to carpal tunnel surgery on both my hands many years ago. And I do not have enough typewriter time to type a lot of letters — but please don’t get me wrong. Letters are the life in the Spirit for every prisoner. Claire’s letter told me of her career as a registered nurse in obstetrics at Lynn Hospital back in the 1970s and 1980s. It turned out that she taught prenatal care to my sister and assisted in the delivery of my oldest niece, Melanie, who is herself now a mother of four.

There were so many points at which my life intersected with Claire’s that I had a sense I had always known her. In that first letter, she asked me to allow her to help us. My initial thought was to ask her to help Pornchai Moontri whose case arose in Maine. The year was late 2012. I had given up on my own future, and my quest to find and build one for Pornchai had collapsed against these walls.

Just one month prior to my receipt of that letter from Claire, Pornchai and I had professed Marian Consecration, after completing a program written by Father Michael Gaitley called 33 Days to Morning Glory. It was the point at which our lives and futures began to change.

Claire later told me that after reading about our Consecration, she felt compelled to follow, and also found it over time to be a life-changing event. She wanted to visit me, but this prison allows outsiders to visit only one prisoner so I asked her to visit Pornchai. He needed some contacts in Maine. The photo atop this post depicts that visit which resulted in her guest post, “My Visit with Pornchai Maximilian Moontri.”

The Divine Mercy Phone Calls

From that point onward, Claire became a dauntless advocate for us both and was deeply devoted to our cause for justice. In 2020, Pornchai was held for five months in ICE detention at an overcrowded, for-profit facility in Louisiana. It was the height of the global Covid pandemic, and we were completely cut off from contact with each other. But Claire could receive calls from either of us. I guess raising five daughters made her critically aware of the urgent necessity of telephones and the importance of perceiving in advance every attempt to circumvent the rules.

Claire devised an ingenious plan using two cell phones placed facing each other with their speakers in opposite positions. On a daily basis during the pandemic of 2020, I could talk with Pornchai in ICE detention in Louisiana and he could talk with me in Concord, New Hampshire. These brief daily phone calls were like a life preserver for Pornchai and became crucial for us both. Through them, I was able to convey information to Pornchai that gave him daily hope in a long, seemingly hopeless situation.

Each step of the way, Claire conveyed to me the growing depth of her devotion to Divine Mercy and the characters who propagated it, characters who became our Patron Saints and upon whom we were modeling our lives. Saints John Paul II, Maximilian Kolbe, Padre Pio, Faustina Kowalska, Therese of Lisieux, all became household names for us. They were, and are, our spiritual guides, and became Claire’s as well by sheer osmosis.

Each year at Christmas before the global Covid pandemic began, we were permitted to each invite two guests to attend a Christmas gathering in the prison gymnasium. We could invite either family or friends. It was the one time of the year in which we could meet each other’s families or friends. Pornchai Moontri and I had the same list so between us we could invite four persons besides ourselves.

The pandemic ended this wonderful event after 2019. However, for the previous two years at Christmas our guests were Claire Dion from Maine, Viktor Weyand, an emissary from Divine Mercy Thailand who, along with his late wife Alice became wonderful friends to me and Pornchai. My friend Michael Fazzino from New York, and Samantha McLaughlin from Maine were also a part of these Christmas visits. They all became like family to me and Pornchai. Having them meet each other strengthened the bond of connection between them that helped us so much. Claire was at the heart of that bond, and it was based upon a passage of the Gospel called “The Judgment of the Nations.” I wrote of it while Pornchai was in ICE Detention in 2020 in a post entitled, “A Not-So-Subtle Wake-Up Call from Christ the King.”

Father Michael Gaitley also wrote of it in a book titled You Did It to Me (Marian Press 2014). We were surprised to find a photo of Pornchai and me at the top of page 86. Both my post above and Father Gaitley’s book were based on the Gospel of Matthew (25:31-46). It includes the famous question posed in a parable by Jesus: “Lord, when did we see you in prison and visit you? And the King answered, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:39-40)

That passage unveils the very heart of Divine Mercy, and as Father Gaitley wrote so eloquently, it is part of a road map to the Kingdom of Heaven. It was Claire who pointed out to me that she was not alone on that road. She told me, “Every reader who comes from beyond these stone walls to visit your blog is given that same road map.”

The God of the Living

In Winter, 2023 Claire suffered a horrific auto accident. While returning home from Mass on a dark and rainy night a truck hit her destroying her vehicle and causing massive painful tissue damage to her body, but no permanent injury. I have been walking with her daily ever since. Miraculously, no life-threatening injuries were discovered in CT or MRI scans. However, the scans also revealed what appeared to possibly be tumors on her lung and spinal cord.

At first, the scans and everyone who read them, interpreted the tumors to be tissue damage related to the accident that should heal over time. They did not. In the months to follow, Claire learned that she has Stage Four Metastatic Lung Cancer which had spread to her spinal cord. The disruptions in her life came quickly after that diagnosis. I feared that she may not be with us for much longer. This has been devastating for all of us who have known and loved Claire. I was fortunate to have had a brief prison visit with her just before all this was set in motion.

Claire told me that on the night of the accident, she had an overwhelming sense of peace and surrender as she lay in a semi-conscious state awaiting first responders to extricate her from her crushed car. Once the cancer was discovered months later, she began radiation treatments and specialized chemotherapy in the hopes of shrinking and slowing the tumors. She is clear, however, that there is no cure. Claire dearly hoped to return to her home and enjoy her remaining days in the company of her family and all that was familiar.

As I write this, Claire has just learned that this will not be possible. Jesus told us (in Matthew 25:13) to always be ready for we know not the day or the hour when the Son of Man will come. I hope and pray that Claire will be with us for a while longer, but I asked her not to call this the last chapter of her life, for there is another and it is glorious. Just a week ago, Christ conquered death for all who believe and follow Him.

In all this time, Claire has been concerned for me and Pornchai, fearing that we may be left stranded. I made her laugh in my most recent call to her. I said, “Claire, I am not comfortable with the idea of you being in Heaven before me. God knows what you will tell them about me!” I will treasure the laughter this inspired for all the rest of my days.

This courageous and faith-filled woman told me in that phone call that she looks forward to my Divine Mercy post this year because Divine Mercy is her favorite Catholic Feast Day. I did not tell her that she IS my Divine Mercy post this year. Now, I suspect, she knows.

“Now we see dimly as in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part, but then I shall understand fully even as I am fully understood.”

— St Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:12

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please pray for Claire Dion in this time of great trial. I hope you will find solace in sharing her faith and in these related posts:

My Visit with Pornchai Maximilian Moontri by Claire Dion

A Not-So-Subtle Wake-Up Call from Christ the King

Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

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.”

Pornchai Moontri: A New Year of Hope Begins in Thailand

Pornchai Moontri arrived in Thailand in early 2021 during a global pandemic and after a 36-year absence. Life has been a daily struggle, but hope is on the horizon.

January 3, 2024 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Editor’s Note: Pornchai Moontri is now the Asia Correspondent for Beyond These Stone Walls. The image atop this post depicts the route for a high-speed passenger and cargo rail that will have a depot in Pak Chong, Thailand where Pornchai is now living. His most recent post, which we will link to again at the end of this one, was the very moving “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

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Sawasdee Kup, my friends. When Fr Gordon MacRae asked me to write the first post of 2024 at Beyond These Stone Walls, I was excited. But when I asked him what I should write about he said “Just write whatever comes to mind.” Now I am just totally nervous! This was during a phone call to Thailand from the little barred room where we once both lived in Concord, New Hampshire. Being there was supposed to be a punishment, and in many ways it lived up to that expectation. But in spite of it, there were also very special things that happened there. I learned the ways of Divine Mercy there, and was touched by it. We conversed with St. Maximilian Kolbe and our Blessed Mother there, and they answered us.

It was from there that Father G helped to win my freedom and from there that he walked with me every day through the daily torment of ICE detention and deportation. Every day for 150 days trapped in crowded ICE custody during a pandemic, I would wake up and ask the Lord if this might be the day I will be free. Then at night I would go to bed asking for the grace to cope with yet another day. Father G reminded me that this is how we live now — in union with the Suffering of Christ.

After 29 years in prison and over five months in ICE detention, I finally arrived in Thailand on February 9, 2021. I thought I would burst with excitement, but in reality, I was filled with fear. Because it was in the middle of the Covid pandemic, the Thai government required me to stay alone, with no human contact at all, in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Bangkok for fifteen days. I have to say it was a lot nicer than all my other stays in solitary confinement.

Back in 2005, after several years in the prison version of solitary confinement, I was moved to an over-crowded prison in New Hampshire and many years of never, ever being alone. After that, the sudden aloneness of a Holiday Inn hotel room felt scary. But in a daily phone call, Father G walked with me through that trial as well. His contacts here arranged to have a Samsung Galaxy smart phone placed in the room before I arrived. You would laugh if you saw me trying to figure it out. I had never before seen one. It was like an alien device to me.

At the Home Page on the little screen, I typed in “Beyond These Stone Walls.” I did not expect anything to happen, but suddenly there it was! For eleven years I could only imagine what this magical blog looked like. I remember the Psalm, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” I think people on the Space Station could have seen my smile when Father G appeared on my screen and I heard him speaking.

I had stumbled upon a video documentary interview that he once told me about. But now I was seeing and hearing it. It was 2:00 AM and I was exhausted from jet lag and the 24-hour flight to Bangkok, but I wanted to hear it all. Just like old times, however, Father G put me to sleep! That was the end of day one in Thailand. You can read the rest if you want in one of the first posts I wrote from here: “Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand.”

Photo by Diana Robinson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)

The Lion Kings

Then came the hard adventure of adjusting and thriving as opposed to just living. That was the challenge Father G gave me. “I don’t want you to just survive. I want you to thrive.” Well, that has been a harder challenge, easier said than done, but I haven't given up on it. Neither has Father G.

Sometimes I felt like Simba in The Lion King. Banished from the kingdom and trying to find his way in a strange land separated from all he knew, Simba could only imagine his father’s voice. For a time after my arrival in Thailand, I was living with Father John Le, SVD and some members of the Missionary Society of the Divine Word. Father John, who is now the local superior for the Thailand province of his Order, became a very good friend to both me and Father Gordon.

Father John manages a Vietnamese Refugee Project in Thailand. On my last day in hotel solitary, he showed up to pick me up. People being deported can take nothing but the clothes they are wearing, and mine were meant for Concord, New Hampshire, not Thailand where the temperature was about 114 degrees Fahrenheit and super humid.

Father G and our friend Viktor Weyand had some U.S. funds sent for me ahead of time, so Father John took me shopping for clothing more suitable to Thailand. He took me to the biggest and busiest shopping mall in Bangkok where I had a panic attack from being around so many people. I heard of this happening to other former prisoners. One day a few months later, Father G challenged me to go back to that mall. I could walk to it from Father John’s SVD house where I was living then. It was a sort of personal triumph that I went back there and just walked around for a couple of hours.

I did not buy anything, but it helped me not to panic so much around crowds of people. Language was also a problem. I look Thai and have a Thai name, but no one could understand me or why I looked so confused when they spoke to me. It was embarrassing and I could not explain the long traumatic story that led up to this moment.

Over the next few months, I had the great honor of helping Father John with food distribution when visiting the Vietnamese refugee communities he serves in Thailand. One of these visits took me to the far Northeast of Thailand about nine hours drive with Father John to the place where I was born and where my mother’s little house still stands unoccupied. I lived there with my aunt and cousins until I was eleven and was taken from Thailand. My mother was later murdered. Father G told that awful story in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” I cannot bring myself to read it, but I lived it.

On one of the refugee visit trips north, Father John and I ended up staying at that house. There were lots of memories, many of them painful. Some of my mother’s things were still in the house which was left unoccupied for over 20 years. I have traveled back there a few times to work on my mother’s house and make it habitable, but it became clearer to me that I cannot live there. I had been gone for too long. The family I thought I remembered no longer remembered me. With help from Father G and Father John, I had to accept that I no longer have the family I thought I had in Thailand.

Father G and Father John are my family now, and Chalathip, a retired teacher and benefactor of Father John’s refugee work. She also took me in. She convinced Father G that I must relearn Thai, and cannot do so while living with four priests who spoke only Vietnamese. Chalathip lived just a short walk away on the same street as Father John’s SVD Community house and she offered me an empty apartment on her second floor.

Father John and Father G speak often and Father G still calls me every morning. He calls at 6:00 PM which is at 6:00 AM for me. I never imagined that someone’s guidance would become so important to me. For much of my life, the only voice I listened to was my own. That did not always go so well. I have learned that family is not always just the blood that runs though our veins. It is where our heart is. I am blessed with the example and fatherhood of two priests who live selfless lives and work tirelessly for others. They are, to me, The Lion Kings.

Independence Day Delayed

Back in 2006 or so, at just about the time Father G and I met, I was told by two immigration officials that I would have to be deported back to Thailand when my sentence was over. I worried about this for months back then, and I could see only doomsday scenarios in my future. I settled in my mind on my imagined “Plan B.” It was built on hopelessness. My “Plan B” was to wait until my sentence was almost over, and then in the last days of it, I would destroy myself. I saw no other way and I did not know how to ask for help and, really, I believed that there was no one I could ask. God? Who’s he? I was proud then even though I had nothing in my life to be proud about.

Father G knew about my eventual deportation, and he kept wanting to help me prepare for it. I had not heard Thai spoken since I was eleven in 1985 so by twenty years later my Thai was all but gone. Through a Thai language publisher in San Francisco, Father G got some Thai instruction books and CDs donated to the prison library and he arranged with the librarian for me to go there twice a week to study Thai. I had the added handicap of never having learned to read and write Thai as a child.

People who have no hope don’t usually prepare for the future. I did not believe I had a future. I only had a past. But Father G was relentless. He began to poke around in my past and the dark corners of my mind where I never let anyone look. He managed to get the whole story of my life out of me. Then he convinced me to let him write about it. He told me that people in Thailand would see it, and someone there would reach out to help me. I told him that I did not need anyone's help. I did not want anyone's help. Father G saw right through that lie.

He saw other things as well. He became the only person who ever looked out for my best interest, so I surrendered control of my life to him, but he told me to surrender only to God. I tried that, and ended up becoming a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. I could not believe the whole Divine Mercy thing at first but I believed that Father G believed it so I gave it a try. My mother was murdered by the evil man who took me from Thailand, but Father Gordon told me that the Mother of Jesus would be my Mother as well. She put me into the Hands of the Living God.

Then everything changed. All my problems were still there, my doubts, my mood swings, my painful past. And I was plagued with nightmares. But now there was a spark of something new. One day, Gordon sat me down and challenged me that if I want to let God in, I had to abandon all thoughts of “Plan B,” so I did.

The largest religious belief in most Southeast Asian countries is Theravada Buddhism. It began in India around the Sixth Century BC and arrived in Thailand and Cambodia in the first century AD as the primary religion and philosophy of life. Like most abandoned children in Thailand, I was handed over to a Buddhist monastery for a time as a young child. When I was taken from Thailand at age eleven, all that happened before then was forgotten. So I came to God as an empty vessel.

The Train to Singapore

After a year or so in super-hot, super-crowded Bangkok, Father John and Chalathip and Father G talked about bringing me to a property Chalathip owns in the city of Pak Chong in the mountain region of central Thailand. I have lived there since. I attend Mass at St. Nicholas Catholic Church, one of three Catholic churches right here in Pak Chong, a city of about 225,000.

There are two homes on the large property. I live in the smaller one. The picture above this section is the view from my bedroom window. Pak Chong is much cooler than Bangkok, and I see Father John often because he stops here and stays with me on his way to and from his Order’s headquarters in Nong Bua Lamphu where I was born. My greatest wish and prayer is that Father G will be free, and be able to come here and stay.

Father G recently wrote about “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” He explained how some 30,000 young Thai men applied for work in Israel because there are few job opportunities in Thailand since the pandemic. I have to work — even if it is without income which has been the case since I arrived in Thailand. So I landscaped the entire property in Pak Chong and now it is a sort of oasis. Chalathip decided to start a small business here and rent the large house out as a vacation rental that I can manage while living in the smaller house.

Pak Chong is just a few kilometers from the Khao Yai National Park, Thailand’s oldest and largest park and game preserve. It still has tigers and elephants in the wild. No one ever sees the tigers. They do not want to be seen. l repair the larger house as needed and as funds permit to make it ready for vacation rentals. In December 2023 I had our first guests, a small group that came here for an overnight to explore Khao Yai National Park. There is a lot still to be done before this small business is ready to run.

The economy here is only slowly opening up. The largest industry in Thailand is tourism, and that had been shut down for three years. Father G has been studying a promising development that will very much impact Pak Chong and the rest of Thailand. China, to our north, leads the world in shipping and transportation by high-speed railway, a technology developed in China and Japan. China recently signed a treaty with Laos — which is between Thailand and China — to construct a high-speed railway from the City of Kunming in the South Chinese Province of Yunnam running all the way to Vientiane, the Capital of Laos on the Laos-Thailand border.

Thailand did not want China to build and operate its railway system, so the Chinese agreed to provide the high-speed rail technology while Thailand builds it. It will stretch from Vientiane in Laos in the north all the way to Bangkok in the south. The hopeful news is that a major depot on the trade route and passenger rail is being built right here in Pak Chong. Father G had me take the photos of its construction above.

It is a 2.5-hour drive from Pak Chong to Bangkok, but the high-speed railway traveling at 240 kilometers per hour will reduce the travel time to just under one hour.This is promising news for Pak Chong which is situated right on that route, and for the Thai economy and its major industry, tourism.

Father G created a map of the route which is expected to be completed in Pak Chong in 2026. Once it reaches Bangkok, the Thai Capital, China plans to pick up completion of the railway again and extend it all the way down the Malay Peninsula. When complete, the high-speed rail will extend from Kunming, China through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia, and finally connect with Singapore. Father G said that a major depot on the route will exist right where I have settled in Pak Chong, and that may be an act of Divine Providence. I hope so.

Umm, did I just mention “Hope?”

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We found this June 2023 article “Phase 1 of high-speed rail ready ‘by 2026’” in the Bangkok Post.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae :

Our Tool Fund Project for Pornchai and Father John Le’s Refugee Program are still active at our “Special Events” page. Pornchai, Father John and I are deeply grateful to donors who contributed this past year.

You may also like these related posts by Pornchai Moontri:

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

Father John and I caught this giant Mekong River catfish one day. I had to hold it down before it could swallow Father Jonah ... Umm, I mean Father John. We put it back in the river where it swam away after giving me a rather nasty look. I will never swim in that river again.

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.”

Pornchai Moontri: Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Photo by Megan Coughlin (CC BY-ND 2.0)

When Fr Gordon MacRae wrote about a tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, he interviewed me for that post. I never imagined we would one day face the same tragedy in Thailand.

October 26, 2022 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Sawasdee Kup, my friends. I greet you from the central Thailand city of Pak Chong. If you are wondering where Father G has been, nothing has changed. He is still right in the prison cell where we both lived for many years. As you know, there is a lot going on in his life at the moment. He has hard decisions to pray about and a lot of writing to do. I expect he will resume writing to you here next week.

I am most fortunate to be able to speak with Father Gordon daily. He calls me from his cell (it used to be our cell) at 0800 each morning which for me is 7:00 PM. I have been following very closely the posts by Ryan MacDonald, Harvey Silverglate, David F. Pierre, Jr., and Catholic League President Dr. Bill Donohue in the last few weeks. I laughed when I read Ryan’s comment about a local reporter refusing to see any of Ryan’s news about Father G saying, “My mind is made up.” I know Father Gordon better and longer than anyone. My mind is made up too.

In our daily call, Father G has told me about all that has been happening, but he has just never been at the center of his own focus on life. In recent weeks he has spoken with me every day about a tragedy that happened to some of the people of my home Province of Nong Bua Lamphu in Thailand. Like many people here, I have been shaken by this, but Father Gordon brings it up with a broken heart every time we speak now. He told me that the whole world was in mourning.

If you missed that news, it is an awful account. The small Thai village of Uthai Sawan in the north east of Thailand is near Phu Viang, the village where I was born. It is a part of Nong Bua Lamphu Province where Father John Le and his Order, the Society of the Divine Word, have their Thailand headquarters and a treatment center for Thai children with HIV. We are all deeply sad over what happened in Nong Bua Lamphu on October 6.

People in Thailand do not generally own guns. It is extremely rare that there is a murder here that involves a gun. The only people with guns are police officers. On October 6, 2022, a recently fired police officer named Panya Kamrab brought a 9mm handgun and a knife into a preschool daycare center in Uthai Sawan where he murdered 24 children ages two to five. Then he killed several adults and his own wife and child before turning his gun on himself. On that day, 36 people died at his hands.

Mr. Kamrab was 34 years old and a former police officer in that same community. He had lost his position due to his possession and use of methamphetamine drugs, but in the autopsy after his rampage there were no drugs found within him. The mayor of Uthai Sawan said that methamphetamine abuse is rampant. “The drugs are cheap and everywhere in society,” he said.

Uthai Sawan is a small rural farming community in the far Northeast of Thailand near and very similar to the place where I lived as a small child. Like my ancestral family, the people there are mostly farmers raising rice and sugar cane for market. The innocence of that community is now torn, and recovery will take a very long time.

It Takes a Village

In Thailand, the Monarch, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, is the Head of State while Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha is the head of government. The Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and other senior members of the government all traveled to Uthai Sawan where the tragedy took place and promised compensation for the mourning families. The King told the families that their deceased children will receive Royal patronage and the King would pay for their funeral expenses. The Thai government has responded as well as possible, but there is no Ministry to Mend Broken Hearts.

In many rural Thai families, it is common for children to be raised by grandparents and extended family while parents travel in search of better paying jobs to support them. That is what happened in my family as well. But the world is different now. There are other influences. The people of Uthai Sawan blame drugs as the cause of this madness. They say that cheap narcotics have overwhelmed many adolescents and young adults holding more of an influence over them than their families can.

Drug abuse is a scourge on the world. Though no drugs were found in Panya Kamrab after the killings, he was known to struggle with methamphetamine. He had been scheduled to appear in a local court on drug charges set for three days after his rampage.

This tragedy is almost a mirror image of the senseless killings in Uvalde, Texas that Father Gordon wrote about in June this year in “Tragedy at Uvalde: When God and Men were Missing.” When he asked me back then what might have driven 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos to his rampage in Uvalde, I told Father G:

“I did not care about anyone either; and then someone cared about me. If I did not find God, and you, and acceptance, and Divine Mercy, I might have stayed on a road to destruction. It was all I knew or expected. Hatred left me when something came along to replace it. Do you remember your Elephants post? It makes total sense. The one thing missing from my life and the lives of those two kids in America was a father. Without one, a decent one, a kid is at the mercy of dark forces and his mind just breaks.”

The “Elephants post” I mentioned was one Father G wrote for Fathers Day in 2012. It opened my eyes and the eyes of many others and it began a serious conversation about the crisis of manhood and fatherhood in our time. That now famous post was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

Father G says it has been showing up a lot since the tragedy at Uvalde. It is not a surprise to me that some people in the U.S. are just now discovering that wonderful story. I was there when Father G wrote it in our cell on his typewriter for three hours on a Saturday afternoon. I was amazed at what came out of his mind on paper. He used to often give me his finished post to read, and I admit that sometimes I had to force my eyes to stay open, but not for that post. I thought it was fascinating.

Of Elephants and Men

I think we can learn some things about manhood from elephants. In Thailand, they are considered sacred. Their family units never succumb to outside pressures because elephant parents - and especially fathers — do not walk away from their instinct to protect, guide and teach their young. Elephants have long been revered and honored, and in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, they play a significant role in traditional religion.

I was taken away from Thailand as a Buddhist child and 36 years later I returned as a committed Catholic. I think you already know that a lot of suffering and loss were surrendered to Divine Mercy in that conversion. In Thailand, the small minority of Catholics and the large majority of Buddhists live and work side by side in harmony and mutual respect. Both have impacted our culture. All my ancestors were Buddhist as are 97 percent of the people of Thailand. In Buddhist traditional stories, the white elephants of Thailand were heralded as manifestations of God.

What does this have to do with the tragedies at Uvalde, Texas and Uthai Sawan, Thailand? Father G told me this wonderful true story in our phone call today:

“South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was known as ‘The Elephant Whisperer.’ He spent his life working to save endangered species and became known for his ability to communicate with and rescue traumatized and injured elephants. He managed the 5,000 acre Thula Thula Reserve in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa.

“On March 2, 2012, [just three months before Father G wrote his post on Elephants and Men] Lawrence Anthony had a fatal heart attack. Then something extraordinary happened. The two elephant herds in Thula Thula walked from different directions for 12 hours to the house where Mr. Anthony died. They stood vigil at the compound for two days, apparently in ritual mourning. Then they disappeared again into the wild.

“No one can explain how the elephants knew of Mr. Anthony’s death. Then, for each of the two consecutive years following his death, elephants returned on that same date and time to mourn him.”

This is what has happened in recent weeks in Uthai Sawan in far Northeast Thailand. From the King of Thailand down to the youngest, smallest citizen, the Thai community has come to mourn from near and far the tragic loss of its beloved children.

In the years I lived in America, I thought that we gave up our dead too quickly, and returned too quickly to the day to day drama of our own lives. The Buddhists of Thailand believe that the souls of their dead linger for a time in the place where they lived. The time of mourning is a faith experience that is shared with them. As a Catholic, I too have been touched by death and those I loved in this life have lingered in my heart for the passing of many moons.

Father G taught me that no one can pass through life alone. The human village is essential, and faith is essential to the human village. No one should be lost. No child should be left behind. No one should go it alone now in this world of madness and distraction. We must all hear and heed the Word of God to Cain in the Book of Genesis: “Listen to the sound of your brother’s blood crying out to me from the Earth.” (Genesis 4:10)

Please pray for the parents of Uthai Sawan and for Thailand.

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Note from Pornchai Moontri: Thank you for reading and sharing this post, for supporting my best friend, Father G, and for making me part of our family of believers. You may also like these related posts:

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

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: I thank Pornchai Moontri for stepping in for me with this moving post. While Pornchai was writing this, I was invited to write an article for the project, False Allegations Watch. My article, which was just published is “Did police misconduct turn a false allegation into a wrongful conviction? — Fr Gordon J. MacRae.” Visiting and sharing this article with others lets the project Editor know that this is an important story.

Please also visit our SPECIAL EVENTS PAGE to consider a new Corporal Work of Mercy from Beyond These Stone Walls for a cause that is dear to my heart. I will be back here next week!

“Stay sober and alert for your opponent the devil is prowling like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him steadfast in your faith for you know that your brethren throughout the world are undergoing the same trials.”

— 1 Peter 5:8-9

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Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, A Year in Freedom

Pornchai Moontri marks one year since his return to Thailand after 36 years away, and one year in freedom after 29 years in prison. Divine Mercy has won this day!

February 23, 2022 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Sawasdee Kup, my friends. The photo that you see below is my first moment in freedom in Thailand after a 36-year absence and 29 years in prison since age 18. As many of you know, the last 16 of those years were in the company of Fr. Gordon MacRae. Without him, none of the rest of this post would ever have taken place.

In the photo, that’s me on the left. It was the 24th day of February in 2021. I think I was the only person in Thailand to wear a pair of western jeans that day. It was all I had, and it was a very hot 40-degrees Celsius which is about 104-degrees Fahrenheit and extremely humid. The three people with me are (L to R): Khun Chalathip, a supporter and benefactor of the Divine Word Missionary work in Thailand; Yela Smit, co-founder of Divine Mercy Thailand and the person who worked with Fr. Gordon to prepare for my return; and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD who you already know well. Father G is not in the picture, of course, but he was still very much present.

There are many others who made this picture possible. Because of Beyond These Stone Walls, an international effort formed to move a mountain. This included Yela Smit and Father John Le in Thailand, my legal advocate Clare Farr in Australia, Viktor Weyand in Michigan, Dilia E. Rodríguez in New York, Fr. George David Byers in North Carolina, Charlene Duline in Indiana, Bill Wendell in Ohio, Claire Dion, Carol Slade, Judith Freda, and Samantha McLaughlin in Maine, and Mr. Narongchai at the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington. All made a mighty effort to bring me home. Many of you contributed to my support in the great challenge of starting life over. I do not have adequate words to thank you all.

After the above photo was taken, I had my first meal in a Thai restaurant, and then we went shopping for clothes. Father John took me to the biggest, busiest shopping mall in Bangkok where I had to fight off a panic attack. It was a very long time since I was in the presence of so many people, and in a city as huge as Bangkok. It felt overwhelming.

Father G and I had talked a lot about what my first moments of freedom might be like, but living them was another matter. So many competing feelings rushed through my mind: excitement, terror, gratitude, terror, happiness, terror. It is not easy to describe how freedom feels after spending 60-percent of my life in a U.S. prison. Did I mention terror?

Samsung to the Rescue

The photo above was my first “selfie.” It was taken when I figured out how to use the camera on a smart phone. There is a little rosary and cross hanging from the mirror. That was made for me out of foil candy wrappers by a 19-year-old Honduran young man who I helped during five awful months in ICE detention. From the moment I arrived in Thailand, everything I did, saw, or touched that day and the days to follow was completely new to me. I feared that I will never be able to fit in. During these 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room alone for the first time in 29 years, Father G called me every day. For the rest of my life I will always remember that first phone call. It was the morning after my arrival.

We spoke about my first anxious night in that room. It was small, but still about three times bigger than the 60-squarefeet where I lived with Father G. I could not see anyone during my two weeks in quarantine, but our friend, Yela, left a Samsung Galaxy smart phone in the hotel for me. I looked at it like it was left behind by space aliens. It took me a while to figure it out, but I somehow managed to find Beyond These Stone Walls.

I wish you could have felt my heart thumping with excitement. This blog that had been so much a part of our lives, reaching out from a tiny prison cell to the whole world, was now right in front of me. I realized with deep emotion that I am now seeing it while Father G never has. It struck me that almost everyone I will meet in Thailand in coming days will already know about me. Then I found Father G’s Documentary Interview and listened for the next two hours as he talked while I fell asleep. “Just like old times,” I thought, but don’t tell him I said that.

One year ago, on February 24, 2021, Father G wrote about that first night in Thailand and my embarrassing encounter with a 21st Century toilet. It was “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” I remember thinking that this Samsung smart phone that now connects me to the world is a miracle, and that BTSW was an even greater miracle. I felt for the first time that I am not among strangers. I am home, and Father G came with me.

Pictures of Freedom

Father G and I still speak by telephone each day. He calls me with his GTL tablet from the same prison cell where we both lived. Sometimes it is for just ten minutes and sometimes longer. Every time I tell him about what is going on in my life now, he says the same thing: “Send me photos! We need photos.” Now I can see the reason for that. He suggested that the best way to tell the story of my first year in freedom is with photographs and links to what he and I have both written. So here goes!

Free at Last Thanks to God and You

I wrote this post just a few weeks after my arrival. I was living then in the Divine Word Community House with Fr. John Le and some members of his Order in Nontha Buri. Father G and Father John spoke often. It is with deep gratitude that I thank both of them. No one knows how difficult it is to re-enter society after almost thirty years in isolation. On the day I arrived at Father John’s home, he and Yela had a photo taken with me in the presence of the One most responsible for bringing me there. So that photo is posted above.

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

Just a week later, Father Gordon wrote this amazing post after talking with me. It turned out that the headquarters for Father John’s Community in Thailand were located in the Province of Nong Bua Lamphu in the Northeast of Thailand, about a nine hour drive from Bangkok. That was the place of my birth and the place from where I was taken at age eleven. Just a few kilometers from a special home and clinic operated by Father John’s Order for Thai children, the Aunt and cousins I lived with as a child were still there. It was a most painful but also joyful reunion.

I spent my first night there in the unfinished home my mother was building before she was killed on the Island of Guam in 2000. All her things were still there. The next morning, I visited and prayed at her tomb for the first time. I was so thankful that Father John was with me. Though most of Thailand practices Buddhism, and so did I as a child, I am now a Catholic, and I asked Father John to bless my mother’s tomb. I will be going there again in April for Chakri, the annual Buddhist Water Festival when family members clean and honor the tombs of their loved ones.

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

Father Gordon has told me many times that this was his favorite post of my first year in freedom. He told my story combined with the story of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael from the Book of Tobit. There is a mysterious dog in the Tobit story, and during this same journey my dog, Hill, adopted me. This was a very special post. Hill and I have had similar lives in which we both got battered around a bit. He started following me as soon as I first arrived in the village of Phu Wiang (Poo-vee-ANG) just as a dog followed Tobias in the company of Raphael in the Book of Tobit. Whenever I return there, Hill comes running and howling as I give him a special treat. Then he never leaves my side.

Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand

Father G helped me to write this post which describes my long and difficult adjustment. In the photo above, Father John and Khun Chalathip, who took on the task of helping me to learn Thai again, brought me to a day of prayer at an Oblate retreat in Bangkok. Much of this post was written while I was there. Back at the New Hampshire State Prison, the Lieutenant of the unit where I lived saw it and had it posted on the wall outside his office. He asked the 300 prisoners there to all read it and he included it in a prison newsletter. Father G says that they especially liked this last paragraph and wanted other prisoners to read it:

“Sometimes I get impatient with myself. I wish I could be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I go anywhere or do anything. After 29 years “inside” I am now out of prison but I still have to get prison out of me. The name, Thailand, after all, means ‘Land of the Free’.”

Pornchai Moontri: Citizen of the Kingdom of Thailand

Every Thai citizen is presented with a Thai National ID at the age of 16. But I was not in Thailand then and never received it. So returning at age 48 with my citizenship not yet fully established was a burden for me. There have been times in my life when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I made multiple trips up to the village of my birth to visit with my family and my dog, Hill. Each time, I applied for my Thai ID and each time I was told that it is still pending.

In late October, much to my relief and Father G’s as well, I was summoned to Phu Wiang. I told Father G that I was buying a new dress shirt for the ID photo. Surely they could not turn me away with this beautiful new yellow shirt. Father G scoffed, but I had faith. (Now that’s a twist!) But this time I was successful and I wanted all of you to see my Thai ID. So Father G had my ID number blocked out and posted it.

This was my birthday reunion with my cousin and his family. He was eight years old and I was eleven when we lived as brothers. Now he is an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. While being with him and his family at the Gulf of Thailand, the struggles of the past just evaporated for a time.

A Year in Photos

One of the things that I looked forward to was swimming. I had not been immersed in water for thirty years. I lived with my cousins as a child, but 36 years had passed before I saw them again. On my first visit with them, they took me to a lake. I was not sure I even still knew how to swim so they put some little flotation devices on me. I did not even know how to get into the water the first time. When Father G saw the picture of me floating he wrote, “This is what freedom looks like.”

Visiting with my Aunt and cousins during the rice harvest was humbling for me. I am no stranger to hard work, but they feared I would be too unaccustomed to the relentless Thai heat so they gave me the easy job of collecting bundles. It was a great blessing to be with them during this most important time.

When Father G wrote about our Advent project with Father Tim Moyle and Saint Anne’s Parish in Mattawa, Ontario, and Father John Le here in Thailand, I got to experience first hand what it means to take part in a Corporal Work of Mercy. Visiting the Vietnamese refugee families with Father John and helping to distribute food is an unforgettable experience for which I am most thankful. I greatly admire Father John’s ministry in Thailand, which Father G has described at our Special Events page.

Here in Thailand, far beyond those stone walls, my heart aches that Father G is still behind them. I thank you for continuing to visit him in prison by reading these posts. I will always be indebted to you all for your acceptance of me, your kindnesses toward me, and the support of your prayers. I know that I would not have experienced this year in freedom without you. Father G will always be a part of my life and so will this wonderful blog.

May God bless you. With love to you all from me and Father G and from Hill too!

Pornchai Maximilian Moontri with his dog Hill. The tattoo on his arm is from a portrait of his Mother etched on his arm by an artistic prisoner after Pornchai learned of her death. It was his only means to memorialize and mourn her.