by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on August 10, 2011 · 5 comments
. . . My posts over the last few weeks have been some of the longest I have written for These Stone Walls. I thank readers for their forbearance and patience, and especially for sticking with these long but important posts. But I think you need a break, and I cannot look the other way while something very important for These Stone Walls is occurring on the Church calendar. Though August 14 is a Sunday this year, and the Sunday celebration takes precedence, it is also the Feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the inspiration behind These Stone Walls. August 9th is the Feast of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein, and a saint for whom I have great personal devotion. They died one year apart in prison at Auschwitz, but that is not the end of their story. It’s a story of the triumph of grace over great evil. Please read . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on August 11, 2010 · 8 comments
. . . Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on June 23, 2010 · 7 comments
. . . I learned that a donor heart had been found for Christopher. As I write this he is in the middle of an eight to ten hour heart transplant surgery at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital. The days and weeks to follow will be of critical importance for this young man. Your prayers are also of critical importance. Please pray for Christopher Warwick, for his new heart, for the heart’s donor, and for the Warwick family. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on December 2, 2009 · 16 comments
. . . Then the other prisoner was back! “This was in the book,” he said as he propped a photograph against my small TV screen. It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier – the photo I searched for in vain when my mother died. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday – at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister – their last photograph together found me. An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace. When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side – my mother on the right – on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on August 15, 2009 · 3 comments
. . . I thought you might want to know that Priests in Crisis just published my article, “From Crisis to Hope” on the occasion of their first anniversary. You can read it here . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on August 12, 2009 · 6 comments
. . . A man is left beaten by robbers [yes, from my perspective, the analogy holds.] A priest and Levite pass by in fear that helping the wounded man will leave them ritually impure under the law. The Samaritan becomes the only person free to obey the higher law, to be a neighbor to the discarded and stranded.
In his profound book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI wrote of this same parable . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on August 11, 2009 · 5 comments
. . . In his stunning and deeply moving book, People of Auschwitz, published in association with the United States Holocaust Museum, Auschwitz survivor and historian Hermann Langbein wrote:
“The best known act of resistance was that of Maximilian Rajmund Kolbe, who deprived the camp administration of the power to make arbitrary decisions about life and death.” In June, 1979, Pope John Paul II knelt on the floor of Cell 18 . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on July 25, 2009 · 3 comments
. . . Like most of the things I cling to for spiritual support, it just sort of showed up one day. I like to think it was handed down to me – in the way important things are handed down by brothers – by Maximilian Kolbe whose reverence for the Immaculate Heart of Mary guided him through life, and death, at Auschwitz. Even when my faith is so diminished and darkened by the prison around me that I believe in little, I believe that promise. Sometimes I can only believe that Maximilian believed – with the very fabric of his life. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on July 23, 2009 · 1 comment
. . . The story of the person Father Kolbe chose to be rippled through the camp. This story offered proof to Viktor Frankl that we can be as much inspired by grace as doomed by despair. We get to choose which will define us. Within days of reading Man’s Search for Meaning and learning of Father Kolbe’s sacrifice, I received a letter from out of the blue. . . .
