Thomas Merton?

[Ahimsa]

I was checking out Catholic Culture , and I noticed that it listed Thomas Merton as a Catholic writer who tended “to undermine the teachings of the Magisterium of the Church on faith, spirituality and morals.” I knew that Merton had some trouble with his superiors, but I didn’t know he was viewed with suscipicion by some Catholics.

 

[Leo44]

Mertons writings were a source of income for his order (Trappists) so they let him leave the monistary, travel and experiment with other (eastern) religions. I’ve not heard that he taught against the church in any way, but it may be true. I do think he got very confused near the end of his life.

 

[Cherubino]

"At this point I am making a public renunciation, in my own name at least, of all tactical, clerical, apologetic designs upon the sincerity of your unbelief. . . I think this apology is demanded by the respect I have for my own faith. If I, as a Christian, believe that my first duty is to love and respect my fellow in his personal frailty and perplexity, in his own unique hazard and need for trust, then I think that the refusal to let him alone, to entrust him to God and his conscience, and the insistence on rejecting them as persons until they agree with me, is simply a sign that my own faith is inadequate.

“My own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound to search the existential depths of faith in its silences, its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In these depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything. It is a kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt, when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division between believer and unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an unbeliever more or less.”

From “Apologies to an Unbeliever” by Thomas Merton

 

[BLB_Oregon]

I cannot think of anyone immune to being “viewed with suspicion by some Catholics.” I am afraid that a fair number waste their suspicions on the innocent. I daresay that even more may be using their suspicions to ward off the prophetic.

Be that as it may, I don’t have direct knowledge of what the charges are against Thomas Merton’s works. I have heard these allegations as rumors, but have not read what charges were raised or what specific works were alleged to be problematic, except that it was some of the later ones. If he did produce work that went outside the faith, is hard to believe that the Trappists currently allow it to be published.

What I do know is that some of what he wrote has had a profound and positive impact on how I understand our faith. I read it over and over, and yet it continues to evoke a new gratitude for the love of God and a new appreciation for all the ways I find to deceive myself.

 

[BLB_Oregon]

“At this point I am making a public renunciation, in my own name at least, of all tactical, clerical, apologetic designs upon the sincerity of your unbelief. . .Everybody is an unbeliever more or less.”

From “Apologies to an Unbeliever” by Thomas Merton

You aren’t going to comment on this passage? I don’t find it to be outside the faith. After all, the sin of the Pharisees was to believe that they possessed God, and not the other way around. Would that not be as impossibly foolish in us as it was in them?

I suppose that many are convinced that they would have skipped with joy all the way from the boat to Jesus if he came walking to them across the sea. I am thinking, though, that most of us are fairly certain we would take on at least as much water as did Peter.

Merton is not saying a person should not believe, or even that they shouldn’t try. He’s saying that a person should not be asked to give up searching for the truth in order to be confined to doing it comforting lip service in order to support some false pretense of faith.

After all, if faith is in having all the answers and knowing all about it, then what is hope?

 

[Cherubino]

BLB,

If you really want to know the mind of Merton, then there’s really no substitute for his private journals. I was in the Trappists from 1959-65 and left for reasons I dare not discuss on this board.

But I can tell you that he had such nicknames as “enfant terrible” and “troubemaker.” He was openly critical of both the Order and the institutional Church, and he certainly did have his run-ins with the censors, especially the Order’s Abbot General, Dom Gabriel Sortais.

In the 50’s and early 60’s Merton clashed repeatedly with Sortais. Merton wrote of Dom Gabriel’s refusal to permit the publication of a Merton piece on Teilhard de Chardin: “The decision means little to me one way or the other, and I can accept it without difficulty. Less easily the stuffy authoritarianism of Dom Gabriel, who cannot help being an autocrat, even while multiplying protestations of love. I rebel against being treated as a ‘property,’ as an ‘instrument’ and as a ‘thing’ by the Superiors of this Order. He definitely insists that I think as he thinks, for to think with him is to ‘think with the Church.’ To many this would seem quite obvious. Is it not the formula they follow in Moscow?”

On another occasion, he wrote: “I have been for the past few days anxious and disturbed because the Abbot-General is on his way…There will be ‘les explications.’ What I fear is the arduous labor of trying to bridge the gap between us without simply pretending that I agree with him. To obey at once him and my own conscience, without being disobedient or servile…I must trust God and not resist authority even when it is authoritarian.”

Was Merton exaggerating? Here is the text of a letter translated from the French that Dom Gabriel sent him: "I know very well, my son, that you do not pretend to be the only one speaking out about the problem of atomic war…I merely want to emphasize clearly the difference between the two orders: the teaching order, that belongs to the hierarchy and to those delegated by the hierarchy for that purpose; and prayer, which belongs, among others, to the monk, or rather, to which the monk belongs.

“You will understand then, that I am not asking you to be indifferent to the fate of the world. But I believe you have the power to influence the world by your prayers and by your life withdrawn into God much more than by your writings. And that is why I do not think I am doing harm to the cause you are defending by asking you to give up publication of the book you have prepared and to abstain from now on from writing on this subject of atomic warfare and the preparations for it, etc.”