Then years later, Pope Francis mentions Thomas Merton and Dorothy day, Lincoln and MLk during talk to Congress in DC. It was good to hear it in the Pope voice.  No media misquotes.  
No mention of St John Neumann, St mother Seton, St Tekawitha, St. Mother Drexel.

They want to make Thomas Merton a saint.  Wasn't there other scandals too involving Merton.

Merton was a modernist.  Got into transcendental meditation and weird stuff.

Thomas Merton (Fr. Louis) fathered a child before he was a Catholic while in England. Like many people, he lived a sinful life before his conversion. I have read his autobiography
Seven Storey Mountain which was written during his early years as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. Incidentally, he was a monk in the same monastery as Fr. Urban Snyder who would eventually teach in Econe in the early 70s and always remained on good terms with the SSPX. I digress though.

In my reading of his life and works, Thomas Merton's conversion seemed sincere.

I don't think Merton was a saint but I do believe that he was a man who got caught up in the terrible revolution that exploded in the 60s. He became active (although always from behind the scenes) in the social movements of the day and was very much anti-war. One priest told me that he was more an artist than a monastic and I think that is partly true. Another traditional priest said that he began as a good monk but did not end up well. That I also think is partly true.

Thomas Merton once stated (I paraphrase) that the progressives were worse than the "Ottavianis" because of their lack of cultivation...or something to that effect. His life in my opinion was a tragedy because I think if he would have been more disciplined of a thinker he could have offered the world much more than what he did.

I never understood his fascination with Buddhism and certainly do not defend it. Why couldn't he see in the rich Catholic tradition of the spiritual life the answers to modern man's confusion in an insane world?

**Read Michael Mott's biography of Merton to get a better idea of his life.

Taken from website.  The priest is now offering Latin Mass somewhere in Delaware.   Would a traditional priest even mention thomas Merton??? Father left out some other interesting facts about Thomas Merton.  Thomas Merton was a heretic who was into other religions.

Fr. Bartoloma's Mass (Updated with Sermon)

"Yesterday, as previously announced here, Fr. James Bartoloma celebrated a Solemn High Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Glassboro, NJ. The turnout was good (nay, excellent when one factors in the Eagles game), and the congregational participation was well-done as well. "

"Ecce, Father's excellent sermon:
Father James L. Bartoloma
20th Sunday After Pentecost
Solemn Latin High Mass
Our Lady of Lourdes in Glassboro, NJ
October 14, 2006
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the very popular Catholic writers of the last century was Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk from Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. His earlier writings are certainly more praise-worthy than some of his later writings.

After he became a monk and then was ordained a priest, his friends from Columbia University who corresponded with him and would also visit him from time to time. They struggled to comprehend why he had had a conversion from a kind of wild life style and skeptical outlook that they were accustomed, and especially why he would want to become a monk in a very strict order and a Catholic priest.

The Mass was a kind of sticking point too.

When Seymour Freedgood, one of Merton's agnostic, skeptical friends visited him and asked him about the Mass, Merton gave a very brief but thoughtful explanation. He said that the Mass is in many ways like a ballet. - Precise movements. - Precise gestures. It communicates but it does not tell a story like, for example, a movie would.

First and foremost, the Mass is the Church's public worship of Almighty God. Christ's Sacrifice is made present upon the altar, we join ourselves to the Lord and what He has done for us, and this perfect Sacrifice is presented to God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

The ceremonies of the Mass; all of the details, illustrate this on a variety of levels and in a number of different ways. Our Lord, at the Last Supper, gave us the essentials of the Mass, but never has the celebration of the Holy Eucharist in the Church meant trying to artificially recreate the Last Supper. God the Holy Spirit, over centuries and among different Catholic peoples and different Catholic cultures, has gently guided our public worship to take on a variety of forms.
We might be most familiar with the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite prayed in English in our home parish in the United States in the 21 st Century because that is what we know. But consider this, if you attended the Greek Divine Liturgy, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the Syro Malabar Rite, the Mekite Liturgy, the Coptic Liturgy, the Ambrosian Rite of Mass, or any of the many other forms of the Sacred Liturgy in the Eastern Church or the Western Church, the same reality takes place, albeit with a different expression, with a different form of worship.

If you are unfamiliar with those forms of the Sacred Liturgy that I just mentioned, it might be good to become aware of them. When we know the richness of our faith and know that there is more out there than what might be immediately accessible to us, it makes us more intelligent and appreciative Catholics.
In the areas of communication and public relations, one of the things that is agreed upon now is that communication is basically only about 30% verbal and 70% non-verbal. The words, spoken or read, are only one element of what is going on.

The Holy Mass, and today we think about the Traditional Latin Mass - before our eyes, communicates to us on a number of different levels. Sometimes people who love the Traditional Latin Mass are questioned and interrogated as to why they have an affection for it. - And we've heard all of the critiques and suspicions before, most of the time almost verbatim: The priest has his back to the people, we don't understand or speak Latin as we would the English language so why even bother with that language, the gestures and ritual are too complicated, etc. etc.

But remember that communication is done on a number of levels. And remember Thomas Merton's comparison of the Mass to a ballet. Persons who have an affection for the Ancient Roman Liturgy are "getting something out of it", finding a contemporary relevance within the ancient rites of the Church, and being instructed in the faith on a wide variety of levels.

The reverence of this worship can teach us the transcendence of God, the Latin Language (and it is not as complicated as people think, especially when we are fortunate enough to be literate and intelligent people who can follow along in a program or missal with a minimal amount of practice) is an expression of the universality of the Church and reminder that the words we pray have a precise and fixed meaning. The diminution of the priest's individual personality in this form of the Mass; not seeing his face when he is facing the altar and not hearing, so much his own voice, but rather his voice leant to Christ the Lord, praying and singing in a variety of chant tones, voice tones, and in a sacred language, reminds us that it is Christ the Lord who ultimately is the priest and victim at Mass. The human, ministerial priest is only his instrument and is not meant to be the object of our attention.

We may not see, hear, and comprehend every detail of the Traditional Mass as we would in our every-day, earthly interactions and communication, but this should then raise the bar for us a little bit. - Prompt us to see, hear, and comprehend with the eyes and ears of faith. In the Gospel, the official whose son Our Lord cured did not see his son at the precise moment when the sickness left him. He did not hear the joyful exclamations in the room when he was restored to health or the relieved words of the boy himself at the moment when he realized that he was well. He could not see, he could not hear, he was not even there. Yet - he believed. And when he hurried back to his son, believing, and then found out that it was at the exact same hour, at the precise moment, when Our Savior said to him, "thy son liveth". Then, he did see, he did hear, he did believe - with the eyes and ears of faith. With a heart open to the transcendent love of God. As the Risen Lord said to St. Thomas, "Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
This Sacred Liturgy should give us much to think about and prayerfully reflect upon. Even if you never attend another Mass in this Form for the rest of your life, hopefully this will have enriched your faith and sense of what it means to be Catholic.

It is far, far more than nostalgia. If all this Mass does today is bring back memories, or make those feel nostalgic who remember when this Form of Mass was nominative, in the early 1960's or 50's or before that; if all this Mass does today is bring back memories or make you feel nostalgic, then it is a complete failure.

Memories, even memories of religious experience are not meant to be ends in themselves. They are meant, rather, to be individual blessings that are woven into and have meaning for us in our present life.

The Traditional Mass, according to the Holy Father, is something that should be held as sacred by the entire Church. He writes in the Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificuм (which allows us to celebrate this Mass today) "what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too."
Our Holy Father frequently raises the issue about how we see our Catholic faith, especially in light of the many changes in the Church in recent times; the lens through which we look at the Catholic Church and our Catholic experience.

(You may not be aware of it, and even I don't even think about it a great deal, but right now, I am looking at you through contact lenses. Believe it or not I have very poor eyesight. If my contact lenses are new and clean, I can see through them very well and I don't even notice that they're there. But if they're dirty and worn, I can't see well and they irritate my eyes.)

When persons look at the Church, even their own Catholic experience, there is a starting point, there is a kind of lens through which they view. For some, sadly, it is a lens of rupture and division.

Pope Benedict, in an address that he gave to the Roman curia two years ago, speaks about this unfortunate lens of "discontinuity and rupture" and how it has harmed the Church. He even says, that "it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also [been] one trend of modern theology."
If you've ever heard expressions such as "this is old church while that is new church." Or "This is pre-Vatican II while that is Post-Vatican II." Or "we don't do that anymore" or even worse, "we don't believe that any more." Then you have been exposed to this kind of unfortunate lens and way of thinking that only harms the Church in the long run.

Pope Benedict therefore, proposes that the way we view our beloved Catholic faith, the lens through which we look, our starting point, should be one of continuity, organic development, and reform. He says that the Church, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of all times and places, should always be reforming herself but that this renewal cannot be one that ignorantly puts down or dismisses the past. Pope Benedict, in the same talk I quoted before says that this "renewal [must be] in the continuity of the one subject: [the] Church which the Lord has given to us. [The Church] is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God."

In our journey, our spiritual journey that we share with Catholics of all places and all times, times long past and times into the future known to God alone, we need reminders of these important and sacred truths.

May this Holy Mass, celebrated in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, not in 1950 or 1850 or 1550 or the year 550, but now in 2007, remind us of the timelessness and transcendence of the Holy Church. At this Mass, the ceremonies look basically the same as they would have in 1950, or 1850, or 1550 or 550. That should make us pause and be appreciative of what we are doing here today. But even more than that, what we are doing today and the worship that we are rendering to Almighty God, places us already, here and now, into the future life of heaven. That is something we should be prayerfully mindful of no matter what form of the Mass we attend next Sunday.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Michael E. Lawrence Posted Monday, October 15, 2007
Share
 

This priest - whom I know nothing about - said Merton's earlier writings were more praiseworthy than his later ones. What is wrong with that?

Also, to say Merton was a heretic is a bit of a stretch, no? Have you read any of his works and picked out the precise statements which he made in conscious rejection of the Catholic Faith? When did he become a heretic?

Reading his first book The Seven Story Mountain was the impetus for my full return to the church.   As I recall his next 2 were very good also but after that he seemed to have lost his way which is very sad because he had been an insightful man and wrote in a manner that we troglodytes could understand.

"Thomas Merton (1915–1968), a Trappist monk, was one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the 20th century. He was the author of more than 60 books, including the story of his conversion, Seven Storey Mountain, a modern spiritual classic. Yet Merton is a controversial figure. In the last year of his life, he wrote in his journal while traveling through Asia:

Last night I dreamed I was, temporarily, back at Gethsemani. I was dressed in a Buddhist monk’s habit, but with more black and red and gold, a "Zen habit," in color more Tibetan than Zen . . . I met some women in the corridor, visitors and students of Asian religion, to whom I was explaining I was a kind of Zen monk and Gelugpa together, when I woke up. (Asian Journal, 107)

A Trappist dreams of being a Buddhist monk? My grandparents recall an American impersonator named Lon Chaney (1883–1930) who was such a master at changing his screen identity that he came to be called "the man with a thousand faces." Fr. Thomas Merton was a man of a thousand lives. He was at one time a womanizer, a member of the Young Communist League, an English student at Columbia, a peace activist, an English teacher at St. Bonaventure University, and a social work volunteer. He was an orphan, the father of a child, a Catholic convert, a Trappist monk, a priest, a poet, a writer, and some describe him as a Zen Buddhist. It is difficult to distill the essence of Thomas Merton: He and his works are complex.

Christian Mantras?

I’m going to be a bit critical of Merton’s interest in and writings on Asian philosophy and religion, not because I don’t admire his brilliance, but because his commitment to orthodox Catholicism appears suspiciously attenuated by the end of his life. In the 1969 book Recollections of Thomas Merton’s Last Days in the West, Benedictine monk Br. David Steindl-Rast wrote that Thomas said that he wanted "to become as good a Buddhist as I can." When he flew out of San Francisco for Asia on October 15, 1968, he left with the expectation of religious discovery, as if his monastic life at the Abbey of Gethsemani was a spiritual precursor to the insights he would gain in the East. He wrote in his journal:

Joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around. . . . May I not come back without having settled the great affair. And found also the great compassion, mahakaruna . . . I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body. (Asian Journal, 4)

He writes as if his Christianity and his Buddhism had already become enmeshed into a new hybrid religion, with "Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny," and he expresses his desire never to return until he has found mahakaruna, the Buddhist notion of "great compassion." As a Christian, I admire Buddhist mahakaruna, but as a Christian I also know that one need not look beyond Christianity to find it. I wonder—and we shall never know in this life the answer—what "home" Merton was headed for that day in October.

Divine Comedy

Most of what we know of Thomas Merton’s life is taken from his wonderfully written, almost Augustinian, autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948. The work’s title alludes to Mount Purgatory in Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy, thus comparing his autobiography to an account of a personal catharsis. Like Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), Merton was a French-born writer who converted to Catholicism after a long and complicated intellectual journey. He was born in Prades, France, to parents who were both painters; his father, Owen, was from New Zealand and his mother, Ruth, was an American. In 1917, the family moved to Flushing, New York, where his brother, John Paul, was born. His father died when he was six, his mother died ten years later, and his brother died in 1943 while flying over the English Channel to the war.

In 1926, Merton returned to France where he enrolled in a boarding school, and in 1928 he moved to England. He traveled to Rome in 1933 and visited several of the city’s beautiful churches: the Lateran Baptistery, Basilica di San Clemente, Santa Costanza, Santa Pudenziana, and Tre Fontane, a Trappist monastery. The beauty of the churches and the richness of Christian history there made a large impression on young Thomas. He writes of visiting Sts. Cosmos and Damian, across the Forum, where he meditated on "a great mosaic in the apse, of Christ coming in judgment in dark blue sky, with the suggestion of fire in the small clouds beneath his feet" (Seven Storey Mountain, 108). He was moved, or rather displaced from his previous motto: "I believe in nothing." While in the "dark, austere old church" at Tre Fontane, Merton was too scared to walk over to the monastery, imagining the monks "were too busy sitting in their graves beating themselves with disciplines," but after pacing around the outside he left, thinking to himself, "I should like to become a Trappist monk" (Seven Storey Mountain, 114).

Bondage to Sin

After his time in Rome, Merton entered Clare College at Cambridge. He describes his life there as one of indulgence, drinking excessively, frequenting local pubs, and womanizing. Indeed, he fathered a child with a girl while he was at Cambridge, a detail of his life that Trappist censors removed from the original draft of his Seven Storey Mountain. Merton writes: "I labored to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust" (Seven Storey Mountain, 121). By 1935 he was back in America and enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied English. While there he began reading the works of such Catholic, Thomistic writers as Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). He met the Hindu monk Mahanambrata Brahmachari, who told him to read the Confessions of St. Augustine (354–430) and Thomas à Kempis’ (ca. 1380–1471) Imitation of Christ. He immersed himself in Catholic thought. On May 25, 1939, Thomas Merton was finally confirmed into the Catholic Church, and he considered a vocation as a Franciscan friar.

After revealing the details of his debauched days at Clare College to the Franciscans, however, he was no longer welcomed there, and after a brief time teaching English at St. Bonaventure University, Merton was accepted into the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky on December 13, 1941. He was, as he had once so casually remarked he would be, a Trappist monk. Once ensconced in his new life as a monk, his poetic and writing talents were discovered by a wide and appreciative readership. But along with his meteoric rise to fame, Merton’s relationships with his superiors remained turbulent; indeed one of his most antagonistic relationships was with the staunchly traditional abbot, Dom James Fox. In a recently discovered letter written to Dom Fox on Passion Sunday, 1954, Merton expressed his inner tensions with monastic life:

I am beginning to face some facts about myself. Yes, need for more of a life of prayer, greater fidelity, greater sincerity and simplicity in doing what God wants of me. Easy to say all that. It depends on getting rid of something very deep and very fundamental in myself. . . Continual, uninterrupted resentment. I resent and even hate Gethsemani. I fight against the place constantly. I do not openly allow myself—not consciously—to sin in this regard. But I am in the habit of letting my resentment find every possible outlet and it is such a habit. . . . I am not kidding about how deep it is. It is DEEP. (Gethsemani Abbey archives)

Merton became increasingly attracted to Eastern religion as his attachments to his own monastery grew more tenuous.

The Call of the Buddha

After meeting the Japanese Buddhist scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki (1870–1966), Merton began a zealous interest in Zen, keeping an active correspondence with Suzuki, eventually producing a collection of essays called Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968). In this work he compares Zen with Christianity, and in later works he began to highlight more and more what he believed to be commonalities between the two religions. His works display a certain inner antagonism—Merton was used to that—between viewing his growing interest in the East as a means of defending his own Western Christian tradition, and a need to supplement, if not fulfill, Christianity with Buddhism.

His attraction to Buddhism was growing at a time when the Church was beginning to admit the commendable elements in other religious traditions. Pope Paul VI’s (r. 1963–1978) decree Nostra Aetate declares that:

The Church therefore has this exhortation for her sons: Prudently and lovingly, through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, and in witness of Christian faith and life, acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual and moral goods found among these men, as well as the values in their society and cultures. (3)

And in his Mystics and Zen Masters (1967), Merton celebrates this message, stating that, "The Christian scholar is obligated by his sacred vocation to understand and even preserve the heritage of all the great traditions insofar as they contain truths that cannot be neglected and offer precious insights into Christianity itself" (65). He continued to discuss the commonalities between Confucianism and the traditions of his own Benedictine order.

One Toe over the Line

But where do his ideas become suspect? Does he stray from Catholic orthodoxy? These are difficult questions to answer concisely, but it is clear in his writings that Thomas Merton was more of a spiritual seeker rather than a spiritual settler. His ideas evolve and change often, and his immersion into Eastern religion often appears more like replacement than rapprochement. Merton’s intellectual and physical pilgrimage to Asia was, as he suggests, at least ostensibly an attempt to deepen and supplement his own religious life. He writes that "we have now reached a stage (long overdue) of religious maturity at which it may be possible for someone to remain perfectly faithful to Christian and Western monastic commitment, and yet to learn in depth from, say, a Buddhist discipline and experience" (Asian Journal, xxiii). He continues to assert that the Western Church is in need of such a Buddhist influence to be improved, to help the Church in its "long overdue" renewal.

In order to facilitate this "renewal" based on Buddhist tenets, Merton turns to Zen ideas of self-inquiry and non-duality. In one passage in his Mystics and Zen Masters, Merton quotes Buddha’s comments to Ananda, wherein he says, ". . . you must be your own lamps, be your own refuges" (218). He admits how different this statement is from the Christian belief in one’s "total self-surrender and a complete dependence on Christ," but his growing attraction to Buddhism brings him to defend the Buddha’s assertion by reinterpreting it.

Merton argues that Buddha is "by no means telling them to rely on themselves ‘instead of’ on ‘grace’" (Mystics and Zen Masters). According to him, Buddhists are "to rely on nothing but ‘the truth’ as they experience it directly" (219). But what Buddha is saying here is precisely what Merton insists he isn’t. Buddha, in his first sermon in the Deer Park, had already denied the possibility of a personal ego, and he had rejected any truth other than the lack of truth—what the Western tradition calls the "liar’s paradox." The Buddha’s assertion is exactly what it appears to be: We can rely on nothing but ourselves and our own discovery of our lack of self and truth to become enlightened. These two positions, the Buddhist reliance upon self and the Christian reliance on Christ, are not as reconcilable as Merton suggests.

No Absolutes

Merton holds that there are common truths held by both Buddhism and Christianity, so it is natural for us to ask what these truths are. He suggests, for example, that Zen brings a person to "attain to an authentic personal experience of the inner meaning of life" (Mystics and Zen Masters, 219). To illustrate this point he quotes the founder of Zen (‘Chan" in Chinese), Bodhidharma (sixth century), who said:

A special tradition outside the scriptures
No dependence upon words and letters;
Direct pointing at the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s own nature and the attainment of Buddhahood. (qtd. in Mystics and Zen Masters, 15)

What Fr. Merton obscures from this saying is that its principle contradicts Christian notions of truth. What the Zen founder is saying, as a member of the Lanka Mind-only School of Buddhism, is that man’s enlightenment is precipitated simply by the realization that he is already enlightened. That is, our attachment to a self, to a non-self, and to the reality of reality, is in the end an illusion that masks the reality that we are already enlightened. This is why Zen refers to enlightenment as an "awakening," experienced like a "thunderclap." Zen Buddhism, as Fr. Merton understood well, was influenced by Daoism, from which Buddhism largely derives its doctrine of non-duality. In fact, one of Merton’s favorite thinkers was the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, whom he wrote about in his The Way of Chuang Tzu (1969).

In the Daoist model there are no opposites, no absolutes. In the abstruse opening of the Daodejing (also called Laozi), it is said that "The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way, and the name that can be named is not the constant name." The implication here is that the Way is a state of non-duality: Since it includes Way and non-Way, and name and non-name, it cannot be identified in human language, which is confined by categories. Fr. Merton appreciates this notion of non-duality because it collapses the distinctions of subject and object; as he writes, "Zen is the ontological awareness of pure being beyond subject and object. . ." (Mystics and Zen Masters, 14, emphasis in original). This Daoist ideal inherited by Zen is, for Fr. Merton, consistent with Teilhard de Chardin’s (1881–1955) concept of "convergence," or the evolutionary progress of man toward a converging with the love of Christ in what he termed the "Omega Point." Merton compared the Daoist/Zen idea of non-duality to Christian mysticism, insisting that this concept is "not philosophical, not theological," hoping, it seems, to render the idea innocuous vis-à-vis Christian belief (Mystics and Zen Masters).

No "Us" for "Him" to Save

The deeper implication in Daoist thought is that there can be no such thing as an ultimate anything, and this includes an ultimate good, an ultimate truth, and an ultimate God. Daoist and Zen notions of non-duality have little to do with mysticism as Fr. Merton insists, but rather seek to describe a larger ontological paradigm. For a Daoist and Zen Buddhist, any one thing necessitates the existence of its opposite, and thus an ultimate truth must co-exist with ultimate untruth, and ultimate good must co-exist with ultimate evil. In the end, both Daoism and Zen deny the existence of any dualities, and ultimately anything, in order to deny such necessities. The sixth patriarch of Zen, Huineng (638–713) expressed this concept well in his famous saying:

The Boddhi tree is not like a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing.
Fundamentally not one thing exists:
Where then is a grain of dust to cling? (qtd. in Mystics and Zen Masters, 19)

Huineng is here denying the reality of Buddhism itself: The Bodhi (enlightenment) tree does not exist; the mirror (mind) does not exist; and grains of dust (thought) do not exist. This Zen view denies the "I/Thou" relationship between man and God; that is, Christianity affirms the kind of duality (i.e., distinction of identities) rejected by Daoists and Zen Buddhists. If, as Daoism and Zen Buddhism suggests, there are no distinctions between beings or things, then there would be no need for Christ’s Passion, for there would be no "us" for "him" to save.

Zen or a Savior—Not Both

Merton wrote in his Zen and the Birds of Appetite that the "real way to study Zen is to penetrate the outer shell and taste the inner kernel which cannot be defined. Then one realizes in oneself the reality which is being talked about" (13). He calls his reader to enter deeply into Zen in order to discover a certain reality. In essence, he calls his reader to do what he did, to turn his gaze eastward to Daoism and its Zen descendant. When asked if he felt that "turning away from traditional Christianity toward the East" would cause "an eventual turning back to a different form of Christianity, one that might even be more genuine," Merton replied, "Yes, I think so" (Thomas Merton: Preview of the Asian Journey, 53-54). Merton viewed Zen as a necessary step in the Church’s march toward Christ, and so he urged Christians to turn to Zen.

Not all of his readers agree with his views.

Pope Benedict XVI has expressed serious concerns regarding the appropriateness of approaches such as Merton’s. In fact he predicted that Buddhism, with its "autoerotic" type of spirituality, would replace Marxism as the principle antagonist of the Catholic faith, for the very non-dualist ideas it espouses deny the Christian belief in a Creator who is separate from His creation. The transcendence that Zen Buddhism offers is one of non-distinction, a state free from, as Benedict notes, the imposition of religious obligations. In the end, to turn to the ideas of Zen is to turn away from any need for a personal savior. We save ourselves in Buddhism, but only Christ saves in Christianity.

May He Rest in Peace

It would be unfair to call Merton an unfaithful Catholic, or to insist that he became a Buddhist before his death. In his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he explained:

I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot "affirm" and "accept," but first one must say "yes" where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jєωιѕн, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it. (133)

Nevertheless, some of his ideas are dangerous. His later writings (see "Read with Caution," page 9) are more confusing than helpful, for they conflate and confuse Buddhist and Christian teachings. One example of that confusion is seen in a popular icon sold in many Christian and Buddhist stores that depicts him sitting in the lotus posture in Zen meditation. The night before his death, Merton told John Moffitt that, "Zen and Christianity are the future." This is precisely what the Holy Father has expressed grave concerns about.

Just before he left for Asia, Merton participated in a "dialogue session" at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, where he opened with the troubling statement: "What I want to do today is to give you some kind of account of the mischief I expect to get into in Asia" (Thomas Merton: Preview of the Asian Journey, 30). He then asserts that there is no danger in conflating Catholicism and Buddhism. Just after making this claim, Merton continues, "And it is perfectly possible to . . . [pause], and I think Catholics should. I think if Catholics had a little more Zen they’d be a lot less ridiculous than they are. . . ." (Thomas Merton: Preview of the Asian Journey, 33). His writings, like this comment, leave a lot to be discerned within the ellipses.

SIDEBARS

Recommended Merton Readings

These works represent the early era of Merton’s monastic life, and his views are still quite orthodox. These books are beautifully written; they are what made Thomas Merton Thomas Merton.

The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948
The Tears of the Blind Lions, 1949
Waters of Siloe, 1949
Seeds of Contemplation, 1949
The Ascent to Truth, 1951
Bread in the Wilderness, 1953
The Sign of Jonas, 1953
The Last of the Fathers, 1954
No Man is an Island, 1955
The Living Bread, 1956
The Silent Life, 1957
Thoughts in Solitude, 1958
Read with Caution

By 1966 Merton’s writings begin to turn East toward Chinese and Japanese religious traditions. Starting with Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, his books begin to criticize the West and find answers in the East. Following are only a few examples of his more questionable works.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966
Here Merton begins the part of his life that is critical of the West. While his criticisms of Western materialism and pragmatism ring loudly, especially in today’s world, one senses here a new interest in Eastern religion—and here is where his works become most problematic.

Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967
This is Merton’s first plunge into Eastern thought and religion. Its strength is its mostly cogent description of Chinese Daoism and Zen Buddhism, but one begins to discern Merton’s attitude shifting toward his later developed notion that Eastern religion is a necessary supplement to Catholicism.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968
By now Merton is swimming in Zen—this work is a comparative consideration of Buddhism and Christianity. Beautifully expressed, but his overall goal is to erase the lines between two very distinct religious beliefs.

The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1969
This is one of Merton’s most problematic works: It valorizes the relativistic teachings of Zhuangzi, the Zhou dynasty Daoist. Here is Merton’s final interweaving of Eastern and Western thought.

The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1973
Here we find his final writings, and they are full of cathartic angst. At the end of this journal one senses that Merton has knowingly wandered from clear Church teaching. While in Bankok, a Dutch abbot asked him to appear in a television interview, for "the good of the Church." But Merton writes that, "It would be much ‘better for the Church’ if I refrained."

Thomas Merton: the hermit who never was, his young lover and mysterious death
John Cooney, former Irish Times religious affairs correspondent, concludes his profile of the great Catholic mystic and bestselling author, suggesting his death was ѕυιcιdє

Mon, Nov 9, 2015, 12:52 Updated: Mon, Nov 9, 2015, 14:41
John Cooney
1
 
John Cooney: “In the light of the astonishing failure of writers to examine seriously the ѕυιcιdє possibility, my conclusion, therefore, is that Merton regretted giving up Margie and was so eaten with remorse that she had married someone else, he no longer felt it worthwhile living”
 
AddThis Sharing Buttons
 
In 1965, aged 50, Thomas Merton became the first ever hermit of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, which had been founded by French Cistercians of the Strict Observance in 1848, the year of revolutionary change in Europe. Merton’s appointment marked a new phase in his commitment to contemplative life, which should have grounded him even more within the abbey’s cloistered walls near the rural village of Bardstown. Instead, three years later the world’s most famous literary monk died prematurely in absurd circuмstances in faraway Thailand, while on a speaking tour of East Asia as a celebrity itinerant guru during the closing weeks of the twentieth century’s year of “brutal” revolutions. (1)
This article will examine the last years of Merton’s life and accounts of how he met his end. His official biographer, Michael Mott, concluded that Merton’s death was by electrocution on December 10th, 1968, caused by one of three factors: ѕυιcιdє, murder or an accident. Mott opted for accidental death, without fully ruling out assassination, but dismissed, however, ѕυιcιdє on the grounds that there was neither motive nor circuмstance for this. (2)
For all Merton’s restless insecurity and constant depression, the bestselling author was a key member of the enclosed community, known as Brother Louis, assigned by his abbot to teach students preparing for the monastic life as Master of Scholastics from 1951 to 1955 and later as Master of Novices (probationers) from 1955 until 1965. Nonetheless, still striving for complete contemplative solitude, he often complained he felt in the wrong place, like “a duck in a chicken coop”, and badgered Abbot Dom James Fox to institute a full-time hermitage. This was granted on August 17th, 1965, when Fox’s council of advisers approved a new novice master and voted for Merton’s transfer to a selected hermitage, built almost a mile from the monastery amid wooded, hilly grounds. Three days later, when giving his farewell address, Louis urged colleagues to respect his wish for complete isolation. Freed of mundane monastery matters, he then walked up to the hermitage on Mount Olivet. However, after only a week he complained that they had made no efforts to find out how he was getting on.
The middle-aged Merton resembled a well-fed Friar Tuck and was no longer the pale, ascetic Father Ludovicus of his ordination day. Now bald-headed, he looked like Pablo Picasso. Merton worried about breathlessness, checked his blood pressure whenever he could and had an unsettled stomach. By September 1963 he was increasingly hospitalised, suffering pains in his left arm and his neck caused by a fused cervical disc. These hospital visits exposed him to newspapers, magazines, radio and television reporting tumultuous world events such as the assassination of President Kennedy and the race riots in Birmingham, Alabama involving Dr Martin Luther King. Voicing his support for King’s civil rights movement and reading John Howard Griffith’s Black Like Me, Merton commented: “What there is in the South is not a negro problem but a white problem,” an observation that still holds true today.
Merton was attuned to the reality that the world had changed considerably since he entered Gethsemani in 1941. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were warning Merton’s generation “the times they are a changin’”. Western society was undergoing sociocultural turmoil caused by the sɛҳuąƖ revolution. The monolithic, medievalist Roman Catholic Church which had wooed Merton into its triumphalist ghetto was calling an end to the Constantinian era at the reforming Second Vatican Council, 1962-5. To Merton’s discomfort, the council was followed by pendulum years of internal divisions between progressives and conservatives. Abbeys and priories became half-empty in the biggest exodus since the Reformation. The numbers of monks, as well as diocesan clergy, declined steeply, because the Augustinian view of celibacy being a higher state than marriage lost appeal and sense to young people. In the US alone in 1968, 11,000 religious opted out. (3)
Monasticism was not immune from this turmoil. The promulgation of the Decree on Religious Life, Perfectae Caritatis, (Of Perfect Charity), fostered adaptation to “the signs of the times” (4). Many institutes replaced traditional habits with modern attire, and reinterpreted obedience to a superior as a consultation between adults. Merton blamed the “drop-out phenomenon” on Abbot Fox, a second World War marine and Harvard Business School graduate. He introduced machines to make cheese that shattered the quiet of Gethsemani to Merton’s fury: Merton, not being able to drive a car, preferred doing physical labour to mechanisation. Fox, a cradle Catholic whose forebears were from Co Leitrim, conspired with Dr Gregory Zilboorg, a psychotherapist and convert to Catholicism, to confirm his view of Merton as a neurotic prone to spiritual injury because of his unconscious quest for celebrity (5). For all their differences in outlook and temperament, Fox and Merton retained the traditional role of a monk’s obedience to his autocratic abbot; and it was touching to visit their graves side by side in the Gethsemani grounds. Unlike Fox, Merton remained culturally a European rather than an American.
By 1967 Perfectae Caritatis was a household name at Gethsemani (6). Merton’s long-term advocacy of proper structure and discipline in a monastery was ruffled by this spirit of relaxation but he argued against the traditional concept of novices and postulants being “brainwashed” – what he called “spiritual infancy”: he no longer accepted that blind obedience meant true obedience.
A romantic convert to the monarchical, medievalist Rome of Pius XII under which his writings on peace were censored, Merton warmed to the more democratic tone of Pope John XXIII, applauding his encyclical Pacem in Terris. But this new openness in Rome did not convince the Abbot General, Dom Gervais Sortais, who in May 1963 categorically refused Merton’s request to publish a banned piece on the immorality of nuclear warfare now that the encyclical said what he had written in Peace in the Post-Christian Era. “At the back of his mind obviously is an adamant conviction that France should have the bomb and use it if necessary,” Merton said of Sortais, an admirer of president Charles de Gaulle. “He says that the encyclical has changed nothing in the right of a nation to arm itself with nuclear weapons for self-defence, and speaks only of ‘aggressive war’” (7).
The tight control held over Merton by Abbot Fox, who notably turned down his request to accept a speaking invitation in post-Hiroshima Japan on the grounds that a monk was wedded to his monastery until death, ended in 1968 with Fox’s surprise resignation. The new abbot, Flavian Burns, a disciple of Louis, approved an Asian trip for his mentor which included meeting prominent Zen and Buddhist figures such as the Dalai Lama and Japanese writer DT Suzuki. Merton’s extra-mundum moorings were loosening. There is a revealing photograph of Merton drinking Schiltz beer with Richard Sisto at a picnic on Gethsemani lake just days before he headed off to India. This was a lifestyle recalling his drinking days in the Rendezvous student pub in Cambridge.
One of the most repeated pieces of misinformation is that Merton met his end in Bangkok after flying on December 6th in first class from Singapore, where he booked into a penthouse apartment in the Orient hotel. The end, in fact, came at a conference cottage in Samutprakarn, some 20 miles from the Thai capital, on December 10th after he addressed fellow monks at 10.45am on Marxism and Monastic Perspectives. Looking stressed, he retired for a shower. That afternoon he was found lying on his back with a five-foot fan which had landed diagonally across his body. Mott reconstructs Merton coming out the shower, slipping and drawing the fan sharply towards him for support. The wiring was faulty, giving him a shock which was sufficient in itself to kill him as he cried out. It is quite possible the shock also gave him a massive heart attack, though this was a secondary cause of death.
Mott’s observation that Merton’s feet were “oddly curled up” suggests the electric shock occurred at the moment of death and not later, thus supporting the electrocution theory, although it is possible that the “massive heart attack” did not kill him instantly. Without an autopsy these questions are unanswerable. In cases of electrocution, an autopsy looks for indications of cardiac arrest accompanied by burn marks on the soft tissues. Where very high voltages were involved, the burn marks would extend to the bones, those of the hands, the ribs and the vertebrae. Such marks might still be distinguishable even at this distance in time, but medical evidence alone would be unable to distinguish between accidental death and ѕυιcιdє, although other disciplines might well be able to.
It is regrettable that Abbot Rembert Weakland, the conference organiser, waived an autopsy in a rush to transfer the body back to Gethsemani on a US military plane along with the bodies of US service personnel killed in Vietnam. Only this year, Fr John Eudes Bamberger confirmed he identified Merton’s body in spite of the disfigurement caused by 240 volts of electricity that operated the defective fan (8). Would it help to clear up ongoing doubts about how Merton died if the current abbot general, Eamon Fitzgerald, a Dubliner and former abbot of Mount Mellary in Waterford, and Fr Elias Dietz, the youthful abbot of Gethsemani, exhumed Merton’s remains for an autopsy?
More significantly, Bamberger has recently revealed that Abbot James asked him to engage Merton about an affair he was having with a young nurse. This came about when Merton, then 53, was recuperating from a debilitating back pain in a Louisville hospital. He fell in love with 19-year-old Margie Smith. It was a situation which was obviously provoking an acute inner crisis in Merton who was perceived to be in a mid-life fling with a young woman. On Saturday, June 11th, 1966 Merton, by now back at Gethsemani, arranged to “borrow” the Louisville office of his psychologist, Dr James Wygal, to meet Margie, where they drank a bottle of champagne and became intimate.
This was reported to Fox by the brother who had driven Merton to Louisville. On Monday evening of June 13th, Merton was horrified to learn that James knew of his guilty secret. Merton feared a telephone conversation with Margie from the monastery on Sunday morning of June 12th would be “the worst!!”.
“The day after our initial discussion about his relationship,” writes Bamberger, Merton wrote to him “to give his reflections on our talk”. On June 12th Merton broke off the affair and recommitted himself to his vows.
Roughly a month later, on July 12th, Merton still could not get Margie out of his mind. “There is no question I love her deeply ... I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s, and it haunts me ... I could have been enslaved to the need for her body after all. It is a good thing I called it off.”
Merton remained in contact with Margie even after this. He saw her again on July 16th and wrote: “She says she thinks of me all the time (as I do of her) and her only fear is that being apart and not having news of each other, we may gradually cease to believe that we are loved, that the other’s love for us goes on and is real. As I kissed her, she kept saying, ‘I am happy, I am at peace now.’ And so was I.”
But Merton was not at peace. On December 2th, a cold grey day, he tried to call “M” but couldn’t get through. Despite good intentions, he continued to contact her by phone whenever he left the monastery grounds. On January 18th, 1967 he wrote that “last week” he and two friends drank some beer under the loblollies at the lake and should not have gone to Bardstown from where he phoned Margie from a filling station. Although he was conscience stricken for this the next day, he wrote, “Both glad”. Author Robert Waldron declined to call it “an affair for it was true love” lasting about six months. “Evan after they had decided to separate, Merton continued to write about her in his journals, still dreamt about her, and still called her by phone, called her even when she was about to depart for Hawaii on her honeymoon.”
Merton wrote in his last journal, The Other Side of the Mountain, that he burned all of Margie’s letters, while not even glancing at any of their contents. “We can only imagine what ‘M’ thought when she read this seemingly cold-hearted, if not brutal, entry” for August 20th, 1968, Waldron observed. Waldron adds: “Merton’s burning M’s letters would certainly have pleased Abbot Fox, for in the ‘sacred game of love’ the winner is not ‘M’, not Merton, but Abbot James Fox, who was the true winner in what Merton, perhaps cynically, came to call ‘the crap game of love’.”
So I would suggest that it was Merton’s tragedy that Dom Fox did not remain Abbot to keep him under strict control and prevent his drifting back to his drinking and womanising days. On November 19th, 1963, some three years before he met Margie, Merton had revealingly written that his dormant sɛҳuąƖity was stirred by a beatnik visitor who claimed to be a relative but turned out to be a nymphomaniac who “gave me a wild time – a real battle, at times physical, and finally when I got away alive and with most of my virtue intact (I hope) I felt shaken, sick and scared” (9).
Again, revealingly, in 1965 Merton confessed: “I suppose I regret most my lack of love, my selfishness and glibness (covering a deep shyness and need of love) with girls who, after all, did love me, I think, for a time. My great fault was my inability really, to believe it, and my efforts to get complete assurance and perfect fulfilment. So one thing on my mind is sex, as something I did not use maturely and well, something I gave up without having come to terms with it. That is hardly worth thinking about now – 25 years since my last adultery.”
Curiously, Merton saw the movie, War Nurse, four times in Cambridge and came away with a fascination for girls in nurses’ uniforms!
Merton was “a destroyed person” because of his failure to marry Margie, according to John Dear, in his study of Thomas Merton Peacemaker, in 1968, the “brutal year” of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the arrest of Daniel Berrigan and the Catonsville Nine, the police brutality at the Democratic convention in Chicago and the election of Richard Nixon.
In the light of the astonishing failure of writers to examine seriously the ѕυιcιdє possibility, my conclusion, therefore, is that Merton regretted giving up Margie and was so eaten with remorse that she had married someone else, he no longer felt it worthwhile living.
Fr Paul Quenon, who was in charge of recording Merton’s conferences at Gethsemini, has recalled that “when an audio tape arrived from Bangkok, it was with great anticipation that I put it onto the tape deck, eager to be one of the first ones to hear it at the monastery. What I heard at the end was utterly astonishing. At the point he finished the talk he then announced that there would be a break – and what I heard was ‘Meanwhile, I will just disappear.’ SNAP .... tick, tick and it went on for several minutes, with nothing further until silence. I knew how clumsy tape operators can be but the coincidence was nothing short of ominous. (9)
“The clumsiness of the tape ending seemed at one with the clumsiness of the whole death incident and was frustrating. With him something had been broken off that seemed like it should go on indefinitely. There was so much more to come from where so much had come already…”
Bamberger, once more, offers a revealing insight when he recalls being invited to join Merton at his newly constructed hermitage with a Hindu monk from India. “The discussion proceeded in a friendly climate that Merton was adept at creating. However, his contribution at times was too sympathetic and yielding, giving the impression he had no objections to certain Hindu beliefs that are clearly unacceptable to Catholic teaching.” After the Hindu monk left Bamberger chided Louis for giving a false impression about Catholic teaching. Merton replied: “Sometimes you have to go along with these guys.” This kind of accommodation did not seem honest to Bamberger or even productive in the end.
Prof Peter Savastano attributes Merton’s untimely death to the fact that he was very much a product of his time. The mystique of the Catholic Church which Merton joined in 1941 was lost with the introduction of the vernacular. He missed the Latin Mass and the Gothic chants. He might have joined Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in protest at the loss of the Tridentine Mass.
Savastano is convinced that Merton’s openness to other religious traditions and to the contemporary social traditions of his time were strong indications that he would have continued to grow in his religious and social worldview to include a concern for women’s civil and human rights. He believes that had Merton lived, he would possibly have left the Catholic Church and the Cistercians.
Lay Anglican theologian Noel Coghlan insists that Merton made a considerable contribution in the evolution of Christian spirituality at an important time of deep and profound turmoil. Adrian Hastings, in his History of English Christianity, 1920-1985, says Merton generated “a wider movement of Catholic enthusiasm” principally by writing “the most exciting and influential religious autobiography of its generation, perhaps of this century”. Charles R Morris, in American Catholic, The saints and sinners who built America’s most powerful church, said Merton “introduced a highly personalised form of Catholic spirituality”.
One amazing event took place in Mexico where a bishop consulted a Belgian Benedictine abbot on how to deal with the problem of clerical celibacy and had him psychoanalyse 50 monks, 30 of whom were judged to be misfits who were told to go back to the world. Had Merton been subject to psychoanalysis, would he have been classified as a misfit and not been allowed admission to Gethsemini?
However, the fact is that he was and his writings made Gethsemini wealthy. When attending the Centennial Conference at Bellarmine University, I was impressed by the range of specialist publications on and by Merton, but I intervened in a session to express my reservation that there was a danger of Merton studies becoming too monographic for the general public. It was not until I was in the maritime tranquillity of Rhode Island after the conference that I reviewed the Merton literature with journalist Linda Gasparello: Merton was the guru American Catholics were looking for in the 1960s. Only too aware of his weaknesses, Merton had sought refuge in Gethsemani to get away enough from temptation. His escape from the world ceased with his return to the world of celebrity touring. Perhaps in the run up to the fortieth anniversary of Merton’s death in 2018, the International Thomas Merton Society will commission a new official biography to update Mott. John Cooney, a former religious affairs correspondent of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, is the biographer of John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland (O’Brien Press, Dublin, 1999) cooneyjohn47@gmail.com
This article first appeared in the September 2015 issue of Doctrine and Life
Notes
1. Merton linked the Algerian-born novelist Albert Camus, who died in a car accident in January 1961, in his imagination with the discovery of a dead rat in the city of Oran by Dr Rieux in The Plague to his finding a dead mouse in the hermitage
2. Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Houghton Miflin Company, Boston, 1984.