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THOMAS MERTON: (1915 - 1968) American Roman Catholic monk and writer whose autobiography, The Sev...

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THOMAS MERTON: (1915 - 1968) American Roman Catholic monk and writer whose autobiography, The Sev...
THOMAS MERTON: (1915 - 1968) American Roman Catholic monk and writer whose autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, became a bestseller. Excessively rare, very fine content T.L.S. "Yours in XT. Tom Merton" on his Abbey of Gethsemani letterhead, 1p. 4to., Trappist, KY, Jan. 5, 1964, a superb, acerbic letter about the state of the Church to David, in part: "...I am not immensely interested in everything you say. I think you are one of the few people who are really in contact with what is most alive in the Church...There is such a terrific effort to be made to break through the crust that has gathered on the Church, esp. Rome, in two thousand years. When a little effort has been made, a tiny bit taken off the crust, there is a huge noise in all the press, universal acclamations, and a great cloud of dust, under cover of which the Curia people and their like busily restore what was done to the crust and we are back where we were before. It seems to me there is a most awful problem in this rootedness of the Church in perminated social structures and traditions...Even a lot of the activity has a character of inertia about it, it is so crude and so futile. I have no answers, except that we have got to stop first in all of our sin of handing down categorical answers to everything, in terms of absolutes, right from the word Go. We have got to have (institutionally) the humility to accept a lot of unverified possibilities as points of orientation in a period of uncertainty and crisis. The crisis comes in large part from our own ossification in absolutes...There is a lot of good going on in the liturgy, for instance, but with a kind of desperation, a lust for liturgical bliss, in all finality, at once, forever. What I do think has to be done is an enormous job on everybody's concept of the Church. This has barely even begun...I have read that Hochhuth play about Pius XII. It is a bad play, and all that, but he is intent and probably right in his attack on the awful papal image which Pius permitted and encouraged, and which is a matter of fact the approved pattern, accepted by most Bishops...But it is an abomination of desolation, this absurd, rigid, bedecked, petticoated, pseudo mystical father image. How can we live and breathe that kind of nonsense?...The news about the Dutch Cistercian on Carmel is exciting. It is of course top secret in the Order. Please keep me posted...May the Holy Spirit enlighten all your works and ways...". Pen docket from recipient at top right, else very good condition. $1,000-1,500