Fr. Gordon MacRae’s Blog

• Come, Sail Away! Pornchai Moontri and the Art of Model Shipbuilding
  . . . The art of woodcarving and model shipbuilding were honed in Pornchai during his years in a Maine prison. Pornchai was 18 years old when sent to prison with a sentence of 45 years. The first five were a blur of despair, violence, and trouble for Pornchai. Then he met Mike Tribou, a fellow prisoner and carpenter who offered to teach Pornchai his skills w […]
• New on These Stone Walls: Loose Ends and Dangling Participles
  . . . Another reader wrote that she liked "Saints and Sacrifices," but pointed out that it was my third post in 12 weeks about Adolf Hitler, and I'm "beginning to sound a bit like the History Channel." OUCH! There's a strange irony in that. There's no character in history that I loathe more than Hitler. The irony is that as […]
• Looking for Lunch in All the Wrong Places
  . . . "Hey, try this!" Every so often, some heavily tattooed, muscle bound ex marauding-biker-gang member shows up at my cell door, spoon in hand, to insist that I try his latest culinary creation. If it's really awful, and I say so, I get an exasperated "ARE you SERIOUS?!" as though I'd just disparaged the Mona Lisa or declared […]
• The Year Behind These Stone Walls
  . . . Then I walked through three locked gates outside, passed a guarded check-point, then across the long, walled prison yard, up three flights of metal grate stairs, through three more locked doors, then another guarded check-point, then finally down the long infirmary corridor to the staff member's office. In the dream, I felt my heart beating faster […]
• Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz
  . . . 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 deport […]
• A TSW Announcement: Happy Birthday Charlene!
  Charlene Duline celebrates her birthday this Friday. Charlene scans my posts each week and e-mails them to Suzanne in Australia for publication on TSW. She also reads me your comments and puts up with all my mistakes, and with me. I could not add much to what I wrote of her a year ago in [...] […]
• Roman Polanski, Father Marcial Maciel, and the Eye of the Beholder
  . . . Since his 1977 conviction for child sexual assault, Roman Polanski has won three Academy Award nominations and a 2002 Oscar for Best Director. Meanwhile in our own backyard, Catholics are now pitted against Catholics. Bishops are bullied into shunning their priests. Cardinals are sniping at each other in public, and the mere taint of association may co […]
• The Paradox of Suffering: An Invitation from Saint Maximilian Kolbe
  St. Maximilian Kolbe solved the paradox of suffering by offering his own life as a share in the suffering of Christ.  This post is an invitation to that great adventure. A few weeks ago, after posting “The Exile of Father F. Dominic Menna,” I received a message from an Oregon man who described himself as “just [...] […]
• Hot Town: Summer in the Slammer
  . . . The summer of 1969 had other worries and trials as well. Because of a tragedy in my family - which I will write about one of these days - I had to find a full time job at sixteen. I had one that I thought was secure. It was in a machine shop, but I was laid off just as that summer began. I took the only job that I could find, and it turned out to be th […]
• A TSW Summer Re-run
  . . . “A Corner of the Veil” is about the death of my mother, Sophie Kavanagh MacRae, during my imprisonment. Tomorrow, July 15, is her birthday so this post in her honor is my choice for a summer re-run. I would much appreciate a prayer for her as well. . . . […]