| |
THOMAS
MERTON ON ECCLESIAL REFORM AND RENEWAL
This is the second installment of Fr. Collins’ essay.
See the November 16 Vineyard for the first part.
by Rev. Patrick W. Collins, Ph.D.
For the Church to be authentic, according to Merton,
it had to contribute to the forward thrust of humanity
because it is the continuation of the Incarnation. He
wrote of this in late 1961 and early 1962. To the extent
that the Church stands in the way of being a matrix for
the humanization of persons and cultures, it may foreshadow
the end of Western Christianity. His sense of the human
was grounded in the biblical understanding of persons
as the object of divine mercy and special concern on
the part of God. In some mysterious sense the Church
is “the spouse of God” and “an epiphany
of divine wisdom.” But he judged that the institutional
Church was, in some ways, far from such an agent of divinization.
Rather than being a “body of perfections to be
salvaged” it was too often one of “infidelity
and imperfection.” He criticized efforts to stress
the value and supreme importance of Western Christian
cultural heritage, which has become in some ways a religion
of abstract formality without a humanist matrix (HGL,
541-2). A large part of the Church’s infidelity
to the Gospel lay, Merton thought, in its over-identification
with the secular order, thus losing its real Christian
center. “Centuries of identification between Christian
and civil life have done more to secularize Christianity
than to sanctify civil life” (HGL, 649).
On the eve of the Second Vatican Council which began
in the fall of 1962, Thomas Merton wrote to Catherine
de Hueck Doherty saying that, while he was tired of all
of the complaining about the state of the Church, he
realized that the Church was experiencing “a terrible
spiritual sickness, even though there is always that
inexpressible life.” And then he added his own
complaints: “What is wanted is love. But love has
been buried under words, noise, plans, projects, systems,
and apostolic gimmicks... We are afflicted with the disease
of constant talking with almost nothing to say... People
like to get around the responsibility by entering into
a routine of trivialities in which everything seems clear
and noble and defined: but when you look at it honestly
it falls apart, for it is riddled with absurdity from
top to bottom....” (HGL, 19).
During the summer of 1962 the monk, in a letter to an
English friend spoke of the Church’s graces and
its need for renewal and reform. “What can I tell
you about the Church? In a sense it is true that one
only comes in with blinders on, blinders one has put
on and kept on. One has to refuse to be disturbed by
so many things. The Church is not of this world,
and she complacently reminds us of this when we try to
budge
her in any direction. But on the other hand we also are
of the Church and we also have our duty to speak up and
say the Church is not of this world when her refusal
to budge turns out, in effect, to be a refusal to budge
from a solidly and immovable temporal position.. You
will have the grace to see through all that is inconsequential
and unfortunate in the Church” (HGL, 397-399).
Merton’s advice in the face of difficulties with
the Church was born of his spirituality. Church
reform must flow from the spiritual renewal of the members
of
the Body of Christ [bold added]. “Be true to the
Spirit of God and to Christ. Read your Prophets sometimes,
and go through the Gospels and St. Paul and see what
is said there: there is your life. You are called to
a totally new, risen, transformed life in the Spirit
of Christ. A life of simplicity and truth and joy that
is not of this world” (HGL, 397-399).
Monk Merton in June of 1962 held out some hope that
the Council would help the Church become more than a
kind of ark into which one scrambles to escape life’s
flood. Sometimes, he admitted “one can also be
tempted to wonder if the ark itself is going to leak
or even founder. But God is the one to worry about that.” He
spoke at that time for the first time of the Church as
the People of God, a metaphor that would come to dominate
the ecclesiological visions of Vatican II. He told a
lay woman entering the Church that she would find that
she would have some serious work to do because the Council
would show how important is the contribution of the laity,
the People of God. “The Church is not just an institution
for the benefit of priests and nuns, with lay people
around to fill in the background. The coming Council,
may, we hope, give light and direction on these things” (HGL,
110).
During the first session of the Council, while Thomas
Merton continued to express his concern about not “feeling
snug in the Church” as an institution - largely
due to its “continual complicity with secular interests
for purposes of gain for the Church” - he spoke
glowingly of the holiness of the Church from a spiritual
perspective - “the communion of saints in the Holy
Spirit” (HGL, 580).
By the end of the session, he judged that the discussions
were not radical enough. “The great problem is
the fact that the Church is utterly embedded in a social
matrix that is radically unfriendly to genuine spiritual
growth because is tends to stifle justice and charity
as well as genuine inner life” (HGL, 581). Christianity,
he feared, “has become a complex and multifarious
thing. It takes Chuang Tzu to remind us of essential
elements of the Gospel which we have simply ‘tuned
out’" (HGL, 723). He thought that Christianity
had, over the years, done exactly what they had accused
the Jews of doing: “finding an earthly fulfillment
of prophecy in political institutions dressed up as theocracy...
so perhaps we will be humble enough to dig down to a
deeper and more burning truth” (HGL, 432).
After the second session of Vatican II, Thomas Merton
saw signs of hope in the conciliar discussion of collegial
governance in the Church. This was based upon faith in
the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the entire Church,
Head and members of Christ’s Body, the People of
God. He wrote with some tongue-in-cheek no doubt: “Let’s
throw out the skeleton for good and all and take off
for nowhere with that Vagabond (that notorious illuminist,
the Holy Spirit).” This notion Merton found expressed
especially in the Russian orthodox notion of sobornost,
i.e., the doctrine of the Spirit acting and leading the
whole Church into the truth. “Collegiality is a
step in that direction,” he believed (HGL, 104).
By the summer of 1964, as the third session neared,
Merton found himself discouraged and disillusioned about
the Church’s inability to address important public
issues of reform and renewal such as justice, war and
peace. The Church seemed “paralyzed by institutionalism,
formalism, rigidity and regressions. The real life of
the Church is not in her hierarchy, it is dormant somewhere” (CT,
192). To Daniel Berrigan, SJ, he wrote: “It is
of course not God’s will that a religious or a
priest should spend his life more or less in frustration
and defeat over the most important issues in the church...
I realize that I am about at the end of some kind of
a line. What line? What is the trolley I am probably
getting off? The trolley is called a special kind of
hope... I don’t need to be on the trolley car anyway,
I don’t belong riding in a trolley... As a priest
I am a burnt-out case, repeat, burnt-out-case. I am waiting
to fall over and it may take about ten more years of
writing. When I fall over, it will be a big laugh because
I wasn’t there at all... Where we are all going
is where we went a long time ago, over the falls. We
are in a new river and we don’t know it” (HGL,
83).
|
