Truth in Justice

TRUTH IN JUSTICE

by Ryan Anthony MacDonald

Throughout the last seven years of media coverage of the sexual abuse
crisis in the Catholic priesthood, scant attention has been paid to
the probability of false claims brought against innocent priests. As
one nationally known legal scholar has pointed out, when one
understands the role of the contingency bar in mediated settlements,
it becomes a virtual certainty that some priests have been falsely
accused for money.

One such case was profiled in a two-part series of articles.
(“A Priest’s Story,” April 27/28, 2005) by Dorothy Rabinowitz. A
member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, she won a Pulitzer
for her compelling disclosures about false witness and witch hunt
sexual abuse prosecutions in American courts of law. Her coverage of
the travesty of justice by which Father Gordon MacRae was convicted
and imprisoned in 1994 got the attention of numerous legal scholars
and civil liberties experts.

Conspicuously, however, Catholic news services and publications have
uniformly ignored this case, or, worse, have proactively refused any
reference to it. Some Catholic publications – such as NCR – were quick
to report some of the vast propaganda that surrounded MacRae’s life
sentence in 1994 – a sentence imposed after he declined three “plea
deals” to serve only one year in prison. However the overwhelming
evidence of fraud that has emerged from the background of this case
has been shunned by most Catholic commentators.

The National Center for Reason and Justice sponsors a website at:
www.GordonMacRae.net. It contains a comprehensive case history for
which I and others conducted substantial research. The late Avery
Cardinal Dulles wrote that the MacRae case “must come to light and
will be instrumental in a reform.” The late Father Richard John
Neuhaus, in First Things (Aug/Sept 2008) wrote that the case of Father
MacRae reflects “a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent
to justice.” Others in the American Church and Catholic media have
been silent. That silence is becoming a scandal of its own.

A careful reading of the detailed Case History published at
www.GordonMacRae.net reveals that the central accusers in MacRae’s
1994 criminal case originally accused another priest, Fr. Stephen
Scruton. As the claims evolved, it became clear that Scruton was a
central figure in the case, but one whose presence could not reconcile
with the accusers’ time frame. He was simply not in the claimants’
community until the youngest of them was 16. Nonetheless, Stephen
Scruton has never denied the claimed sexual involvement that MacRae’s
accusers originally attributed to Scruton. Before MacRae’s 1994
trial, Scruton fled the state to avoid a subpoena from MacRae’s
lawyer. Scruton refused to respond to all inquiries from MacRae’s
defense. Because he could not be located, the jury never heard his
name or the fact that he was accused by the same people who accused
MacRae. Evidence of a relationship between Scruton and MacRae’s accusers has
never been explained. This evidence includes a series of checks to
each accuser drawn from parish accounts and filled out and signed by
Rev. Stephen Scruton.

In November of 2008, 14 years into Father MacRae’s 67-year prison
sentence, Stephen Scruton was located in Massachusetts by an
investigator reviewing this case. Scruton was reached by telephone.
He was highly agitated and nervous when the investigator identified
his purpose for calling. A male voice could be heard in the
background clearly saying, “Steve, if this is something that will help
Gordon, I think you should do it.” Scruton reluctantly agreed to be
interviewed and a date was set for two weeks later. On the day of the
interview, Scruton refused to open his door saying only that he had
consulted with unnamed persons and now declines to be interviewed. A
summary was then mailed to Scruton outlining his presence in this
case, and asking him to reconsider his decision not to cooperate by
telling the simple truth. Within days of his receipt of that summary,
Stephen Scruton suffered a mysterious fall down the stairs of his
Newburyport, MA home, and died a month later at the end of January,
2009.

Father Scruton took the truth with him. He was buried in his priestly
vestments though there was no obituary, no traditional notification
from his Diocese (Manchester, NH) and no public notice of any kind.
Father Scruton’s unexplained presence in the case against Father
Gordon MacRae – along with a rather vast collection of other
exculpatory information – has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 15
years.

One expects the likes of The Boston Globe to look the other way when
faced by information that runs contrary to its Pulitzer endorsed
flogging of the Church and priesthood, but the silence of Catholics in
the media – with the rather courageous exception of the late Father
Neuhaus and First Things – is disturbing to those of us who assure a
wrongly imprisoned priest that the truth will set him free. First,
someone has to tell it.

***

Ryan Anthony MacDonald is an independent journalist writing from NY. A convert to Catholicism. he writes religious and legal commentary, and book reviews. He can be reached at macdonaldryan8@gmail.com.

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