Transfiguration Behind These Stone Walls

By Michael Brandon | Freedom Through Truth

August 6, 2014

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration.  It commemorates the day that Jesus took three of His disciples up on the mountain, believed to be Mount Tabor, and there, in an instant, was revealed in all His Glory before them, or at least as much as they could stand to see and live.

This happened just days after He had said to His disciples that: “There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

Transfiguration means a change in form or appearance, or a metamorphosis.  Metamorphosis means a major change in the appearance or character of someone or something.

In fact, we are all called to change our form or appearance, to be conformed to Christ in us.  Where Christ in His Transfiguration was actually changed and it was visibly obvious to the three disciples present, our transfiguration is more like a very slow metamorphosis and as that, might not be as obvious to those around us, as that of Christ was.

But, if we look with the eyes of faith, we can see the transfiguration or metamorphosis of people of faith all around us, as they seek to conform or accept being conformed into the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.

We are created in the Image of God, and so except for the presence of sin in our lives we should be able to see the Kingdom of God present in each other, because we are told and we believe that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

So, it seems appropriate to me at least, that on the Feast of the Transfiguration, we are reminded of how a couple of men have been transfigured, though that transfiguration is not complete yet, maybe not as dramatically as Jesus was on the mountain, but changed from the inside out none the less.

Around this time five years ago, Father Gordon MacRae, a priest, wrongly imprisoned in New Hampshire for sexual abuse that was contrived by a supposed victim to separate the Catholic Church from some of its money began writing the blog that is known as “Beyond These Stone Walls.”

I did not see the beginning of this blog, but came across it about a year later.  So, though I missed the beginning, I have not missed the point, I hope.  In the years that I have followed Beyond These Stone Walls, I have seen the transfiguration of Father Gordon MacRae, and his trusty sidekick Pornchai Moontri, as they have chosen to grow closer to Jesus Christ.

Noting their Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I have followed their lead, not because I am a sheep, particularly, but because I believe in it, and needed only a little prodding from brothers I have never met to take the step myself.

The Father Gordon MacRae who began this literary part of his own journey of faith is not the Father Gordon MacRae you read today, nor is Pornchai the same.  Both have been transfigured, and readers are the better for it, since we have before us a priest being a priest of God under very difficult circumstances, and a young man as his compatriot, who has fallen in love with our Lord and Saviour.

Father Gordon should never have been in jail, since he did nothing wrong, at least not in a legal sense.  But, I think that he, knowing that he is a sinner in need of the grace of God, knows like all of us, if we would be honest with ourselves and with our God, that our sin is so grave that we, in fact, deserve whatever befalls us, and that life is not fair, because the author of life has a plan bigger than our own personal comfort.

Pornchai, on the other hand might in some sense deserve to be in prison for crimes he committed, but there again, there is more to it than that.  Having read his story, I know that in the circumstances that I have read he was in, bearing in mind that whatever has been written is merely the tip of the iceberg, I might have done exactly what he did.  As well, I would likely have had the same feelings of abandonment, anger and hatred towards those who betrayed me.

But God conspired to use the evil around them to bring them together for His greater Glory, and so with their cooperation he is transfiguring them into His own Image and likeness.

Christ was and is perfect, so His Transfiguration could happen in a fraction of a second.  We, unlike him carry the stain of original sin, and of our own sin, and so ultimately transfiguration for us is a lifelong journey. But transfiguration happens in us more rapidly when we are committed to God’s plan for our lives, and when we do not let the stone walls in our lives keep us from the love of God for us, and which we are to share with our brothers and sisters.

Father Gordon and Pornchai have committed to do God’s will in a most unlikely venue, and that both blesses all who read Beyond These Stone Walls, and also encourages us, who most often are in better circumstances to amend our lives and conform ourselves to God’s plan for each of us.

If Father Gordon and Pornchai can tear down the figurative stone walls that surround them, even in the midst of literal stone walls, can we not do the same?  The stone walls in our individual lives, disease, unemployment, poverty, woundedness in our relationships are very real, but must they possess us, or can we take the example of Father Gordon and Pornchai to heart, and accept these trials as part of God’s plan for our own transfiguration?

Pray for Father Gordon and for Pornchai that they will be faithful to the calling that God has put on their lives, but pray also that they will be an example to us of what faithfulness to God looks like, that we might follow their example.

A Kafkaesque Tale

By Richard John Neuhaus | First Things

Excerpt from That Evangelical Manifesto — August 2008

Among the many sad consequences of the sex abuse crisis are the injustices visited on priests falsely accused. A particularly egregious case is that of Father Gordon MacRae of the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. He was sentenced to sixty-seven years and has been imprisoned more than twelve years with no chance of parole because he insists he is innocent. I have followed the case for several years. Lawyer friends have closely examined the case and believe he was railroaded. The Wall Street Journal ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz published, on April 27 and 28, 2005, an account of the travesty of justice by which he was convicted. Now the friends of Father MacRae have created a website, www.GordonMacRae.net (now BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com), which provides a comprehensive narrative of the case, along with pertinent documentation. Bishop John McCormack, a former aide of Boston’s Cardinal Law, and the Diocese of Manchester do not come off as friends of justice or, for that matter, of elementary decency. You may want to visit the website and read this Kafkaesque tale. And then you may want to pray for Father MacRae, and for a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.

The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae

by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

Noted sociologist Dr. Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, investigated the unjust imprisonment of Father Gordon MacRae.

On September 23, 1994, Father Gordon MacRae was shackled and led out of Cheshire County Superior Court in Keene, New Hampshire. He had been convicted by a jury of sexual assaults that allegedly happened nearly twelve years earlier. The 41-year-old priest was sentenced to a prison term of 33 ½ to 67 years.

MacRae says he is innocent. So do those who have looked into his case. Count me among them. “I did not commit these crimes,” MacRae says. “In fact, no one did.” Pointedly, he maintains that he wasn’t the one on trial. “The priesthood itself was on trial. No evidence whatsoever was introduced to support the claims. My accuser committed a $200,000 fraud, the amount in settlement he received from my diocese.”

No one has covered this story better than Dorothy Rabinowitz, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. MacRae’s accuser, Thomas Grover, has a history of theft, drugs, and violence. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the ordeal that MacRae has endured. He provided not a single witness, even though the alleged offenses took place in populated areas; the places were so busy that it is unlikely that no one would notice if something were awry. Moreover, Grover was coached by professionals, people more interested in getting a priest than justice. His attorney put him in touch with a counselor who came in quite handy. She stood at the back of the courtroom during Grover’s testimony, away from the sight of the jury, instructing him when to feign crying. On cue, he cried loudly, often at some length.

At the trial, Grover said MacRae sexually abused him when he was 15-years-old during five episodes. Rabinowitz captures the essence of what was really going on. “Why, after the first horrifying attack,” she asks, “had Mr. Grover willingly returned for four more sessions, in each of which he had been forcibly molested? Because, he explained, he had come to each new meeting with no memory of the previous attack.” If this is not preposterous enough, the accuser said he had “out of body” experiences that blocked his recollection. Just as we might expect, Grover conveniently changed his story many times.

Before the trial, MacRae had twice been offered a plea deal, but he turned them down. Midway through the trial, he was offered another opportunity. It sounded reasonable: plead guilty and the sentence is one to three years; refuse and risk spending decades in prison. He refused for a third time. The trial moved forward and he was found guilty. The sentence was obscene: it was thirty times what the state had offered in the plea bargain.

Why do I believe MacRae is innocent? We have been writing to each other for years, and I have read his account many times. The clincher year for me was 2012: recently discovered evidence emerged showing how manipulative his accuser is.

Grover’s former wife and stepson say that he is a “compulsive liar,” “manipulator,” “drama queen,” and “hustler” who “molded stories to fit his needs”; he could also “tell a lie and stick to it ’till his end.'” When he was confronted with his lies, he would lose his temper and sign himself into the psychiatric ward at a local hospital.

The former wife and stepson testify that Grover bragged how he was going to set up MacRae and “get even with the church.” What the stepson said is worth repeating at length:

“Grover would laugh and joke about this scheme and after the criminal trial and civil cash award he would again state how he had succeeded in this plot to get cash from the church. On several occasions, Grover told me that he had never been molested by MacRae…[and] stated to me that there were other allegations, made by other people against MacRae and [he] jumped on and piggy-backed onto these allegations for the money.”

Grover’s former wife, who acknowledges that he “never stated one word of abuse by [MacRae],” knew early on in their marriage that something was wrong. She had two daughters when they met, and both were frightened of him from the start. They saw him as a “sick individual who was obsessed with sex and teenage girls”; thus did they label him a “creep” and a “pervert.” They recall that he was “constantly eying” and groping them. When they woke up in the middle of the night, they would sometimes find him in their room, between their beds, staring at them.

When the trial was over, and Grover got a check for over $195,000 from the Diocese of Manchester, he photographed himself with $30,000 in cash. He bragged to his buddies, with bags of cash in his hands, that he had succeeded in “putting it over on the church.” That was in March 1997. In August, he took his former wife with him to Arizona where he blew it on alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and other vices. In a three-day gambling spree, he went through $70,000 and he even had a Nevada casino hunting him down for another $50,000.

Please keep Father MacRae in your prayers. We can never give up hope.

NH Detective James McLaughlin on a List of Dishonest Police

For 28 years Fr. Gordon MacRae said that NH Detective James McLaughlin falsified police reports. It turns out that he has been on a secret list for doing just that.

May 2, 2022 by Ryan A. MacDonald

Attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld have long asserted that police and prosecutor misconduct played a significant role in the spate of wrongful convictions that have badly stained our justice system. It seems that not a week goes by without a media story about a man or woman exonerated and released after being wrongly imprisoned for years or decades. At his acclaimed blog from prison, Father Gordon MacRae recently analyzed one such heart-wrenching account in “For the Lovely Bones Author Alice Sebold, Justice Hurts.”

According to Scheck and Neufeld, “in 64-percent of exonerations analyzed by the Innocence Project, professional misconduct by police or prosecutors played an important role in convictions. Lies, cheating, distortions at the lower levels of the system are excused at higher ones” (Actual Innocence, p. 225). A focus on policing in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has made police misconduct a lot harder to ignore. This is not about a bias against police. No one is more offended by a bad cop than a good cop. The vast majority represent their profession with both honor and honesty. But one did not.

Over 28 years of wrongful imprisonment at the New Hampshire State Prison, Fr. Gordon McRae has consistently asserted that the case against him was built on lies, cheating and distortion on the part of accusers aided and abetted by a dishonest police officer. Just as Barry Scheck predicted, those assertions have been ignored or explained away at higher levels of the justice system by judges with a clear bias in favor of police and against defendants — and this defendant in particular.

The last judge to preside over a Habeas Corpus petition to review new evidence and witnesses in the MacRae case allowed errors that I wrote about in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.” That judge, like too many others, was a career prosecutor before his appointment to the federal bench. He was honored by New Hampshire Magazine in 2003 as “New Hampshire’s Top Prosecutor.”

In addition to the new evidence and witnesses that this judge declined to hear, much of Father Mac Rae’s Habeas Petition that came before his court was about Keene, New Hampshire sex crimes Detective James McLaughlin and the shady tactics he employed to investigate, prosecute and convict MacRae in 1994.

Now it turns out that Detective McLaughlin was sanctioned for “falsification of records” in 1985, nine years before MacRae’s trial. Under a U.S. Supreme court precedent, prosecutors were obligated to reveal that fact to Defendant MacRae and his legal counsel. They did not. This is especially egregious because a central issue in this case has been the falsification of police reports and witness tampering. You might think that this priest wrongly imprisoned for the last 28 years should not be the one to write about this because he has a liberty interest. There has been no one so severely impacted by this story than MacRae himself, and he exposed it brilliantly in a recent post at Beyond These Stone Walls. If you care at all for the integrity of justice in America, read and share this riveting post by Fr. Gordon MacRae “Predator Police: The New Hampshire Laurie List Bombshell”

I have also composed a follow-up article on this troubling matter entitled “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.”

New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name

By Brian Fraga | National Catholic Register

March 18, 2015

CONCORD, N.H. — Imprisoned for 21 years after his conviction for crimes he adamantly denies he committed, Father Gordon MacRae says he is “cautiously hopeful” that the federal courts will give him a new opportunity to prove his innocence.

“I know that Supreme Court decisions and precedents have made it very difficult for innocent defendants to have a case re-heard at this level. Most people who judge the justice system by TV’s Law and Order don’t understand the steep uphill climb,” Father MacRae told the Register in an email message Tuesday, after his attorneys presented oral arguments on behalf of his habeus corpus appeal at U.S. district court in Concord, N.H.

Father MacRae, whose story is told on the These Stone Walls blog, has been incarcerated in the New Hampshire State Prison since his September 1994 conviction on one count of sexual assault and four counts of felonious sexual-assault charges. Now 62, Father MacRae was a parish priest in the Diocese of Manchester, N.H., when the alleged victim accused Father MacRae of molesting him several times when he was a 15-year-old boy in the early 1980s.

In court documents, Father MacRae’s attorneys argue that “newly discovered evidence,” which include allegations that the accuser concocted his story for financial gain, establishes Father MacRae’s “actual innocence.” His lawyers argue that innocence should override any time limits or procedural bars that prevent a new hearing of the case.

The March 7 “hearing, for which there is no decision yet, was not a hearing on the merits, but solely on whether case law and procedure will even allow for a hearing on the merits,” Father MacRae said.

“Again, plea deals and the justice system work really well for guilty defendants, but for the innocent, not so much. It should be a grave concern to Americans that 97% of criminal cases are resolved by plea deals. Those who risk a trial risk their lives,” he added.

Turned-Down Plea Agreement

Father MacRae took that risk in 1994, when he turned down a plea deal that would have carried a maximum three-year prison term. Maintaining his innocence, he took his chances at trial, which ended in guilty verdicts after 10 days of testimony. In November 1994, a judge sentenced Father MacRae to an aggregate prison term of 33½ to 67 years.

In their appeal, Father MacRae’s current attorneys — Robert Rosenthal of New York City and Cathy Green of Manchester — contend that Father MacRae was denied his constitutional right to effective counsel, adding that his original lawyer’s conduct “undermined [his] own case, served the state mightily and assured the conviction.”

Rosenthal and Green also suggest that Father MacRae’s conviction occurred during the midst of a “moral panic that infected law enforcement, the public, media, judicial system and verdicts.” The corresponding era, the attorneys say, has since been widely recognized as fostering “a wave of unjust sexual-abuse accusations and convictions,” many of which have since been reversed and vacated.

“A dispassionate analysis of MacRae’s conviction reveals it to be just such a case — built on lies, overzealous police work and defense counsel’s actions that were wholly contrary to MacRae’s interests,” Rosenthal and Green said.

Diocese of Manchester

Meanwhile, Father MacRae said the Diocese of Manchester has not been in recent contact with him nor shown any support. In the early 2000s, Father MacRae said diocesan officials expressed concern that he had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced and even promised legal assistance.

“Then the 2002 Dallas Charter happened, and both mercy and justice went out of the world for accused priests,” Father MacRae told the Register.

Thomas Bebbington, director of communication for the Diocese of Manchester, told the Register that the diocese “has not been involved in any of the appeals filed by Gordon J. MacRae, nor has the diocese provided funding for these appeals or legal counsel.”

Said Bebbington: “Since this is a civil matter in which the diocese is not involved, we have no additional information to release. We continue to pray for all involved and for the vitality of the Catholic Church in New Hampshire.”

A central figure in Father MacRae’s new appeal in federal court is his accuser, identified in court documents as Tom Grover, who was 27 when he accused his former parish priest in Keene, N.H., of having molested him as a teenager. Father MacRae’s attorneys say Grover, “a drug addict and alcoholic, with neither a job nor prospects,” looked for a payday and sued the Diocese of Manchester, for which he won almost $200,000.

However, the attorneys say there was no corroborating evidence and not a single witness to the alleged sexual abuse, “though it was to have happened in busy, populated places.” Rosenthal and Green say Grover has since admitted to friends and family that he lied about the alleged molestation and that he has confessed to perjuring himself at trial.

“Grover’s addictions continued after trial, and his rap sheet continues to grow, with charges of all sorts of things, from traffic infractions to violent crimes in at least three states and Native-American jurisdictions,” Rosenthal and Green wrote.

State’s Response

However, Richard Gerry, the warden of the New Hampshire State Prison, who is named as the defendant in Father MacRae’s appeal, has moved to dismiss the appeal as untimely.

Through his attorney, Gerry said the appeal does not address the nature of the evidence presented at the priest’s 1994 trial, the performance of the prosecution or defense counsel or the fairness of the trial itself. Father MacRae’s attorney’s statements that they have new evidence to prove innocence, Gerry said, are “not new,” and any claim of actual innocence “is suspect at best.”

The petition, Gerry’s attorney said, “is almost entirely based on attacking the credibility of the victim … determinations made by the jury two decades ago. His newly discovered evidence provides nothing more than additional avenues of attack on cross-examination through witnesses of whom he was well aware at the time of trial.”

To date, the New Hampshire state courts have not looked favorably on Father MacRae’s post-conviction petitions. The New Hampshire State Court denied his direct appeal in June 1996. In April 2012, Father MacRae filed a petition for relief with the Merrimack County Superior Court, arguing that his defense lawyer at trial refused to conduct critical discovery, failed to object to the prosecution’s expert testimony and “literally” provided the state with the defense case before trial. However, the court never held a hearing on those issues and denied the petition in July 2013. The New Hampshire State Supreme Court subsequently declined to review the lower court’s decision.

Financial Assistance

Father MacRae said the state court system’s refusal to hear his case was “very frustrating, and it could happen again.” He said donations to his defense fund helped his case get a new hearing in federal court.

“Yes, in fact, the hearts and generosity of others are the only reason we got to this point,” he said.

Father MacRae has also been assisted by journalists and organizations that have taken up his cause.

Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz’s critical articles on the conviction led to renewed efforts to review the case. The Boston-based National Center for Reason and Justice has endorsed Father MacRae’s effort for a legal review and investigation. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and other organizations have also expressed support.

In 2007, Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus asked the priest to write a “new chapter in the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison.” The result, Father MacRae said, is his blog, These Stone Walls.

Register correspondent Brian Fraga writes from Fall River, Massachusetts.

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The above article was first published in the National Catholic Register on March 18, 2015.

Priests, Good and Bad

By Frank Friday | American Thinker

October 27, 2018

Excerpt

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Whatever fate Francis and his bad bishops face in this life though, it won’t amount to anything compared to what one good priest has had to endure now for 25 years. I speak of Fr. Gordon MacRae, who was imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit by a left-wing kook of a judge. Worse than the judge however, was the Keene, NH detective, James McLaughlin, who was all too eager to smear him with false witnesses. Add to that, lots of psychobabble recovered memories and greedy plaintiff’s lawyers, ending in one of the great frame-ups in the history of American justice.

Since Fr. MacRae  refused to knuckle under to the New Hampshire kangaroo court, he will likely die in prison. Yet he keeps his faith and dignity alive in a wonderful testimony on the power of true faith in the Gospel.

Apparently, everybody in New Hampshire knows about this disgrace, but no one in either party will do anything about it. If you live there, you might ask Governor Sununu or his opponent Molly Kelly, why no pardon for this innocent man? This case also looks like a textbook example of what the U.S. DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is supposed to investigate. If you know the new guy there, you might also mention it. I also have a few legal ideas of my own.

But the best thing anyone can do is pray for this brave man. And pray for the many decent priests that still serve; the wolves are many and the good shepherds few.  

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Read the entire article here.