A friend and faithful reader, Bill Wendell, alerted me today that Fr. Benedict Groeschel died on this date in 2014. This is the last of three posts I wrote about him.
Saint Therese of Lisieux, a Doctor of the Church, left this life at the age of 24. She left behind A Story of a Soul, the most read spiritual biography of all time.
The innocent in prison live in an incubator of dark dreams and nightmares. A recent terror was a confrontation with an evil presence that evoked an Angelic Advocate.
On September 29, the Church honors the three named angels of Sacred Scripture, the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and on October 2, the Guardian Angels.
For half the 20th Century, Saint Padre Pio suffered the wounds of Christ. All of them, including the cynicism of doubt and the tyranny of false witness.
Father Gordon MacRae's post about Saint Padre Pio at Beyond These Stone Walls this week exposed an assault by The New York Times slandering Padre Pio's good name. Father MacRae responded to the slander sparking an interview between Catholic League President Bill Donohue and The Catholic League Communications Director. (youtube.com/watch?v=qUlPQ4z8U4Q) The published video is about 6.5 minutes and well worth hearing.
Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe, Patron Saints behind Fr Gordon MacRae’s blog, have an obscure thread of connection that magnifies witness, sacrifice, and fatherhood.
This pastoral memoir uses one man’s homecoming as a meditation on trauma that outlives prison, the long afterlife of war and abandonment, and unfinished fatherhood.
Freedom from stone walls and iron bars brings no freedom from a prison of the mind. Pornchai Moontri now faces a tempest within and I still walk with him from afar.
Father James Valladares, PhD, a friend to Father Gordon MacRae and this blog, is a priest, psychologist, and noted author from Mumbai, India and Adelaide, Australia.
Jonathan Grover died from opiate addiction before his 49th birthday. His role in the case against Fr Gordon MacRae left unanswered questions, but now gains clarity.
A right of defense for accused priests is supported on paper in the Diocese of Manchester, but in this case it has been suppressed and obstructed at every turn.
In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord: ‘Be it done to me according to thy word.’
At the canonization of St Maximilian Kolbe, Pope John Paul II was gifted with a portrait of the new saint by Fr James McCurry, a friend of Beyond These Stone Walls.
WSJ: “Senator Rand Paul deserves credit for digging into the truth about the destructive Covid response and the effort by Dr Fauci to stifle dissent and hide the record.”
At the end of July, 85 years ago in 1941, Father Maximilian Kolbe stepped out of line at Auschwitz. His gift of noble defiance has spread throughout the known world.
A decade after the priesthood scandal broke the hearts of many Catholics and the optimism of many priests, Fr. James Valladares reminded us all of the gift of Hope.