by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on October 26, 2011 · 12 comments
. . . I was sitting in a county jail awaiting sentencing to prison. I was cut off from everyone. My Diocese would not even accept my collect calls. My own lawyers told me I had no choice. What meager assets I had were exhausted on the first trial. So, post-trial, I entered into what I called – then and now – “a negotiated lie.” It was a lie that was extorted from me, but the lie was not mine alone. If you’ve read my post, “The High Cost of Innocence,” you know that even then the pressure never ended. Prison itself has any number of sanctions to further punish those who do not admit guilt. I spent five years confined to a cell housing seven other prisoners because I would not admit guilt. The notion that men in prison always claim to be innocent is a myth. There are dire consequences for such a claim. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on June 15, 2011 · 4 comments
. . . dded to that uproar were the tactics of a now disgraced and disbarred state prosecutor. Former Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong was more interested in throwing “gasoline on the fire,” according to USA Today, than gathering evidence. He ignored the complete lack of evidence, not to mention the accuser’s constantly changing story, and vowed to continue his prosecution even after the case fell apart. This prosecutor suppressed exculpatory evidence, hid it from defense lawyers, and held repeated news conferences to keep the momentum of judgment going in the court of public opinion. Co-opting some Duke faculty into pre-trial condemnation of the accused was a tactical advantage for prosecutor, Mike Nifong. The result was a trial-by-media that should sound hauntingly familiar to Catholics reeling from the Church’s own sex scandal. . . .
. . . I don’t think there is anyone in the online Catholic arena who is not aware that the highly popular and respected Father John Corapi has been placed on administrative leave. At least one bishop with truth and justice in his heart – and a good deal of courage – wrote of the Father Corapi case on his blog, Abyssus Abyssum Invocat (“Deep Calls to Deep”) on March 22. Bishop Rene Gracida, Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Corpus Christi, republished Father Corapi’s statement of defense, and reminded us all that “Father John Corapi is innocent and remains innocent until… he should be proven guilty.” No one truly knows who to believe in any case of “she said, he said.” We tend to believe the person we know and disbelieve the person we don’t. Absent clear evidence, however, Father Corapi must be presumed innocent and must be treated as such. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on January 26, 2011 · 6 comments
. . . 20-year-old Cornelius Dupree was arrested for the crime in 1979, and sentenced to 75 years in prison. In 2004, he was set to be released on parole until he refused it again because it required that he submit to a sex offender treatment program which in turn required an admission of guilt. The 20-year-old turned 51 in prison before being exonerated and released. On a national scale, only two other exonerated men spent more time in prison than Cornelius Dupree. Jamie Bain was one of them. I wrote about Jamie in . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on October 27, 2010 · 17 comments
. . . It’s ironic that this same priest is often angry with me because he doesn’t think I am angry enough. I assure you, he’s wrong on that score. But being angry and feeling let down does not excuse me from doing the right thing. It does not excuse me from fidelity to the Gospel, fidelity to the Church, and fidelity to my own sense of right and wrong. At the end of the day, I am still wrongly imprisoned, but I have the freedom to choose the person I’m going to be while wrongly imprisoned. When I began this three-part post three weeks ago, I set out to write the nature and scope of the injustices that took place in my diocese. Now that it comes down to it, I can’t. It feels too much like vengeance. There is far too much at stake for me to settle for something so unfaithful as vengeance. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on September 29, 2010 · 9 comments
. . . The feast was originally called Michaelmas meaning, “The Mass of St. Michael.” The great prayer to Saint Michael, however, is
relatively new. It was penned on October 13, 1884, by Pope
Leo XIII after a terrifying vision of Saint Michael’s battle
with Satan. . . It’s an important prayer for the Church, especially now. I asked Suzanne to place a permanent image of Saint Michael on These Stone Walls as well.
I know the enemies of
the Church lurk here, too. There are some who come here not
for understanding, or the truth, but for ammunition. . . . I once scoffed at the notion
that evil surrounds us, but I have seen it. I think every
person falsely accused has seen it. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on April 14, 2010 · 9 comments
. . . Perhaps NBC sensed the line of decency was breached a few weeks ago when it apologized to The Catholic League and the world for a scandalous and libelous smear against Pope Benedict XVI on its affiliate news channel, MSNBC. We owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Donohue and The Catholic League for not letting this one pass. It is also no coincidence that the lurid stories of priestly sex abuse and papal complicity rose to a frenzy in the U.S. in the same weeks that tax-payer funded abortion was being argued in the Obama health care bill. Writer and art historian Elizabeth Lev made this same point in a brilliant essay on PoliticsDaily.com entitled “In Defense of Catholic Clergy (Or Do We Want Another Reign of Terror?)” Ms. Lev cited English statesman, Edmund Burke’s 1790 commentary on Catholic witch hunts during the French Revolution: “What would Edmund Burke make of the headlines of the past few weeks …? In 1790, Burke answered … ‘It is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of those they are going to plunder.’ What would he think of the insistent attempt to tie [a] sexual abuser to the Roman pontiff himself through the most tenuous of links … as the present sales of Church property to pay settlements swell the coffers of contingent-fee lawyers and real estate speculators …?” . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on March 9, 2010 · 5 comments
. . . As a result of availability bias, humans tend to replace their beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs simply because a proposition has been repeated in the media and presented as widely believed. We are subjected to subtle cues of social pressure every day in marketing that convince many people to purchase things they don’t really need. We also face subtle cues and social pressure in the daily bombardment of news stories that cause many people to believe something based solely on its prevalence in the media. It is indeed possible that Michael Jackson and many Catholic priests became the subjects of classic, media-fueled availability bias. . . .
