Priests are an endangered species.
Hardly a month passes without headlines of a priest
murdered in Africa.
Cameroon, Central African Republic, Nigeria and
South Sudan have all lost Catholic clergy this year due to violence.
Two years ago an ICIS jihadist stabbed and slit the
throat of an elderly French priest on his parish altar in Normandy.
Catholics are now praying to St. Oscar
Romero, canonized in October just 38 years after he was shot by an assassin as
he lifted the host in the act of consecration.
Scores
of missionaries in Latin America, Asia and Africa have lost their lives to
violence since Romero’s killing in 1980.
But what about Trappist monk Thomas
Merton, whose death 50 years ago this week (Dec. 10, 1968) in Bangkok, Thailand
is being marked by thousands of his devoted readers?
Was he murdered by CIA or other assassins for his
outspokenness against the Vietnam War, his critical stance on nuclear weapons,
on made-in-America racism, or his cry against capitalism’s empire-building by
way of global violence?
In
The Martyrdom of
Thomas Merton, an Investigation, Hugh Turley and
David Martin conjecture that the monk was struck in the back of the head by
either a pointed object or a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer while in
his room at the Sawangke Vivas center, 15 miles south of Bangkok.
Merton and other religious were staying at the
center while attending an international meeting of Catholic abbots.
The monk had returned to his room after giving a
speech earlier that morning and after eating lunch.
The authors call “preposterous” the
long-held explanation that Merton stepped out of the shower and then tried to
move a large floor fan with an apparently faulty cord and was electrocuted.
They describe Merton as lying on the floor, his legs
and arms straight, his palms facing down as if placed in a coffin.
Turley and Martin base their description on a photo taken by
Benedictine Fr. Celestine Say as Merton’s body lay on the floor, the fan still
atop his thigh and reaching to the opposite side of his lower waist.
Say of the Philippines and Benedictine
Archabbot Egbert Donovan of St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Penn. both shared
rooms close to Merton’s and were among the first to come upon his body, the
authors report.
Both found the death scene with the still-running
fan “suspicious,” the authors write, and Donovan urged Say to take a photo
before Merton’s body was moved.
“His
body had several cuts and burns,” according to an obituary in the
Kentucky-Standard of Bardstown Dec. 19, 1968.
A copy of Say’s photo is part of the
archives of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville,
Ken. and of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani
in Trappist, Ken., where Merton lived 27 years, Dr.
Paul Pearson said.
Pearson directs the Merton Center at
Bellarmine.
The original film, which includes two
photos of the death scene, is part of the John Howard Griffin archives in
Columbia University’s Butler Library.
Griffin was the first official biographer of Merton,
but was unable to finish the project due to ill health.
Neither photo appears in the book as the
authors failed to gain the permission of Fr. Elias Dietz, the Abbot of
Gethsemani, to reproduce them.
However they are described in great detail.
Whether Merton’s death was an accident or
a crime might well have been determined 50 years ago with an autopsy.
None was done.
Instead the Abbey was told by the U.S. Embassy that
according to Thai law if an autopsy was done, Merton would have to be buried in
Thailand.
The monks wanted him to be buried at Gethsemani.
But the authors say there was no such law, only an
invention of the embassy.
Though many people might have been glad
to see Merton out of the way, or at least relieved that his prolific outpourings
of essays and letters critical of the war – two written to President Lyndon
Johnson --had been halted, the authors have no proof of his presumed murderer.
But the curious reader may find intriguing their
descriptions of a Belgian Benedictine, who has seemingly managed to fall off the
face of the earth – and his abbey-- since the deed was allegedly done.
The monk, Fr. Francois De Grunne, was the last
person known to have been with Merton when he returned to his room after lunch.
A confession
A few years ago Matthew Fox spoke with
two CIA agents who were in Southeast Asia at the time of Merton’s death.
Fox asked them if they killed Merton.
The first replied: “I will neither affirm it nor
deny it.”
The second talked about how inundated with money they were
at that time in Southeast Asia and how there was no accountability whatsoever,
said Fox, a spiritual theologian and Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Northern
California.
“Any CIA agent who felt Merton was a
threat to the country could have had him killed with no questions asked,” Fox
said via e-mail.
He also reports this in his book,
A Way to God: Thomas
Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey.
More recently Fox met a third CIA agent and asked him
pointblank: “Did you guys kill Merton?”
“Yes,” the agent replied, adding:
“The last 40 years of my life I have been cleansing
my soul from the actions I was involved in in the name of the CIA in Southeast
Asia as a young man.”
For Fox that admission is proof the CIA
killed the monk.
“Merton died a martyr for peace – as did his friend,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the hands of the U.S. Government,” said the
former Dominican priest and author of 36 books.
Conjectures about Merton’s death may
still be rife when the centenary of his passing arrives in 2068.
A heart attack as suggested in the Thai police
report.
Electrocution from a faulty fan as in the most- quoted
death scenario.
Head wounds as a result of a fall.
These are all possibilities, Pearson noted.
“The cause of (his) death is uncertain.”
Commemorations of the 50th
anniversary of whatever death Merton experienced have been going on for months
across the nation and the world.
From Argentina to Britain, Canada to Poland and
across 12 American states exhibitions, Masses and services of remembrances have
been held or are planned.
Louisville artist Joe McGee wondered what
is it about Merton that “draws so many of us together like a magnet 50 years
after he left this Earth.”
The answer may be found not only in McGee and artist
Penny Sisto’s art works on display at Bellarmine, but also in many of the 70
books the monk authored.
Merton once said he would rather hoe
beans or pitch hay than write books.
He often disowned the main character in
The Seven Story
Mountain, his sensational autobiography written
at the Abbey and published in 1948.
But Fr. Daniel Walsh, his teacher and friend since
their days at Columbia in the late 1930s, said Merton loved when readers told
him the book “brought them closer to God.”
In his homily preached at Merton’s
funeral and available on the Merton Center website, Walsh speaks of the monk’s
lifelong search for God, which was at times “thorny,” but one in which he “never
wavered in his steadfast devotion to the God of his deeply religious faith.”
In return Merton “was given great gifts of mind and
heart,” Walsh said.
“His humility, patience and perseverance were the
added reward of his abiding faith.”
Walsh likened Merton’s spiritual and
intellectual gifts to those of John XXIII with whom he exchanged letters and
gifts.
The Trappist and the Pontiff shared the charism of
recognizing “the unity of spirit and person in all of us.”
Both
men understood that “the spiritual is primarily the work of God… not man,” Walsh
said, calling this truth “humbly satisfying to the people of God.”
Merton’s superior and friend, Abbot
Flavian Burns told monks at a Mass the day following Merton’s death that the
monk was ready for death.
The two spoke of death before Merton set off on his
Asia trip.
“The possibility of death was not absent from his mind,”
Burns said. “He even saw a certain fittingness in
dying over there amidst those Asian monks, who symbolized for him man’s ancient
and perennial desire for the deep things of God,” the abbot said.
Merton’s death at 53 while sad and
shocking was celebrated – and continues to be recalled – with the alleluias of
Easter.
Would that have been possible 50 years ago in the midst of
a terrible war had anyone suspected he had been murdered?
The question – like the search for God – continues.
© Patricia Lefevere and used with permission.