UNITED STATES
These Stone Walls
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald of A Ram in the Thicket.
A troubling back story in the trial and lawsuits against Father Gordon MacRae has been in open view for two decades, but overlooked by both Church and State.
In an article I wrote last September entitled “Judge Arthur Brennan sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison,” I aimed a spotlight at the glaring injustice of the 1994 prosecution of Father Gordon MacRae. Last week in these pages, Fr. George David Byers aimed another spotlight at a Church hierarchy morally paralyzed by litigation. A full and transparent view of justice now requires unveiling a related story in the background of the troubling case against Father Gordon MacRae. It’s a story, as the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus once described in the pages of First Things magazine (June/July 2009), “of a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice.”
This account begins in tragedy. Shortly after noon on Friday, May 11, 1979, Peter Linsley, 35, and Jane Linsley, 28, both of Concord, New Hampshire, walked unannounced through the open door of the rectory at Saint Rose of Lima church in Littleton, NH, a town of (then) about 5,400 in the north of that state. A year earlier, in May, 1978, Peter Linsley was discharged from the state psychiatric hospital after he was declared no longer a danger to himself or others. He previously entered a plea of innocent by reason of insanity to a charge of aggravated assault on a police officer in July, 1977.
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