Priesthood is in the news again. Pope Benedict has called for the year beginning on 19th June to be dedicated as a Year for Priesthood. We have our own on-going discussion on Catholica on the changing nature of priesthood today. Today it is our pleasure to present a thoughtful reflection put together by Dr Patrick Collins which looks at the maturation of views Thomas Merton had towards the nature of priesthood before he died. This reflection will be of great interest to priests who are reflecting on their roles today as it will be to lay people who are questioning what sort of priests we need today — or even if priesthood as we've known it for millennia is as relevant in our lives as it was in the past.

The early call to priesthood...

Thomas Merton's awareness of his call to the priesthood came not long after his baptism as a Roman Catholic at Corpus Christi Church in New York City in 1938. His mentor, Dan Walsh, called this potential vocation to Merton's attention in 1939. He said, "You know, the first time I met you I thought you had a vocation to the priesthood." (Reader 95 from The Seven Storey Mountain) Merton made a kind of pilgrimage to Cuba in the spring of 1940 and was very moved spiritually at the Basilica of Our Lady of Cobre. It was there that he prayed to become a priest. He invoked Our Lady: "you will ask Christ to make me His priest, and I will give you my heart, Lady." ( Reader 79, from The Seven Storey Mountain)

Merton first pursued his vocation to the priesthood through the Franciscan order. But, when he revealed to one of their priests his escapades of impregnating a woman while a student at Cambridge University, that friar discouraged Merton from pursuing a Franciscan vocation. Merton was crushed and felt this to be a sign that he did not have a vocation to priesthood. (Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984, p. 156 )

In the summer of 1941, after sensing that his vocation to priesthood had been blocked, Tom Merton talked with Catherine de Hueck Doherty about possibly coming to work with her among the poor in Harlem. Of that desire he wrote: "...the first thing to do is to feed the poor and save the souls of men, and in this sense, feeding the poor means feeding them not by law (which doesn't do a damn bit of good), but first of all at the cost of our own appetites, and with our own hands, and for the love of God. In that case, feeding the poor and saving them are all part of the same thing, the love of our neighbor..." (Catherine de Hueck Doherty 10.6.41 HGL 5) After writing so many words in this letter Merton declared one thing about his calling which would prove prophetic: "...my vocation is probably to go on finding out this same thing about writing over and over as long as I live; when you are writing about God, or talking about Him, you are doing something you were created to do, even if you don't feel like a prince every minute you are doing it..." (ibid., 6)

Doherty suggested to Merton that anyone asking the kinds of questions he was asking "probably wanted to be a priest." He was surprised and scared when she said this. "The priest business is something I am supposed to be all through and done with. I nearly entered the Franciscans. There was a very good reason why I didn't, and now I am convinced that Order is not for me and never was. So that settles my vocation." (Catherine de Hueck Doherty 11.10.41 HGL 7)

High views of priesthood...

In the previous year Tom had told his Columbia mentor, Mark Van Doren, of his high views of the priestly life: "To be a priest does not mean that you are necessarily perfect but that you are solemnly bound to a manner of life in which you observe all those things pertaining to perfection." (Van Doren, Mark 6.16.40 RJ 8) Merton was teaching at the Franciscan's St. Bonaventure College in Olean, New York at that time. For him is was "a sort of harmless hobby: about on the plane of stamp collecting. In any visible results it may have, as regards the Kingdom of God, it is just about as valuable as stamp collecting, too." Merton told Doherty that he realized this teaching was "strictly temporary,... a sort of harmless hobby...about on the plane of stamp collecting." "I don't know what it is that will help me to serve God better: but whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be here. Something is missing." (Catherine de Hueck Doherty, October 6, 1941 HGL 7)

During Holy Week, 1941, Tom Merton, at the suggestion of his Columbia teacher and friend, Daniel Walsh, made a retreat at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown in Kentucky. There he sensed a strong attraction to that strict and silent Trappist way of life. So Merton left St. Bonaventure College on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in order to join the Trappists in Kentucky. He wrote to Doherty that he was finally following his call: "You see, I have always wanted to be a priest..." The St.Bonaventure teacher explained that he now knew that he was not called to serve the poor in Harlem. The draft board was going to reclassify him for military service and he asked to be deferred to pursue a monastic vocation. Of this he wrote: "I don't desire anything in the world, not writing, not teaching, not any kind of consolation or outward activity: I simply long with my whole existence to be completely consecrated to God in every gesture, every breath and every movement of my body and mind, to the exclusion of absolutely everything except Him: and the way I desire this, by His grace, is the way it is among the Trappists... I am unshakably rooted in faith in this vocation: but there is the army [that] may try to kill it in me." (Catherine de Hueck Doherty 12.6.41 HGL 9-10)

After theological studies in his monastic community, Father Louis Merton was ordained to the priesthood at Gethsemani Abbey by Louisville's Archbishop John A. Floersch on May 26, 1949. As ordination neared the monk expressed his quite exalted and elated thoughts and feelings about the upcoming event to Mark Van Doren. Merton's view at that time of the greater importance of ordination over religious vows would surely change over the coming years. "I know the priesthood is going to be something tremendous. A kind of death, to begin with. But that is good. The whole business about Orders has been striking me as something much more important than religious vows. The question of sacramental character comes in, for one thing. Then you become public property. At the same time you are mystically more isolated in God. The combination is quite baffling. … Anyway, the priesthood will end up by giving me a completely social function. Perhaps that was what I was always trying to escape. Actually, having run into it at this end of the circle, it is making me what I was always meant to be and I am about to exist. … As soon as I put on the vestments of a subdeacon and stood in the sanctuary I was bowled over by the awareness that this was what I was always supposed to wear, and everything else, so far, had been something of a disguise." (Van Doren, Mark 4.8.49 RJ 23)

On the day of Father Louis' ordination, Merton's close Columbia University friend, Robert Lax, commented that Merton, on that day, looked much younger than his age. He was playful and joyful after the ceremony. (William Shannon, Silent Lamp, NY: Crossroad, 1992, p. 140) Merton himself sensed that he had finally fulfilled his promise at the Church of Our Lady of Cobre in 1940. (Thomas Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 1984, p. 251)

Moving beyond his pious views of priesthood...

During the 1960's, Monk Merton moved beyond some of his earlier and more pious views of the priesthood. He became more realistic about what it is what it is not to serve as priest. As he wrote to Daniel Berrigan in 1962: "I find I have reached the stage where I involuntarily wince when I come upon another poem by a priest called 'Vocation.'" (Daniel Berrigan, Mar.10.62 HGL 73) Again in a 1964 letter to the Jesuit poet, the Trappist seemed to find many of the post-conciliar concerns about priestly reform of diminishing concern and interest to him. "What is the Society doing about aggiornamento? Do you have a vocation problem? Are you doing something new about religious formation? I don't know, perhaps those questions do not really matter as much as they seem to. I am not totally convinced of the importance that is attributed to them." (Berrigan, Daniel 9.19.64 HGL 85)

Thomas Merton, the monk and the priest, had grown into a quite different sense of his priestly and monastic vocation when he wrote in 1962 to Abdul Aziz, a Pakistani Sufi Muslim: "I believe my vocation is essentially that of a pilgrim and an exile in life, that I have no proper place in this world but that for that reason I am in some sense to be the friend and brother of people everywhere, especially those who are exiles and pilgrims like myself ... My life is in many ways simple, but it is also a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though I were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the Love and Protection of Him Who guides me." (Abdul Aziz 6 4, 62 HGL 52)

Another of the Trappist's correspondents in those years who shared his fears and concerns for the state of the priesthood was Father Ronald Roloff OSB, a monk of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN. Roloff was experiencing the tensions of trying to be a monastic and at the same time to serve in a parish. The Trappist encouraged the Benedictine to always put his monastic vows first and to avoid the busyness of becoming a religious businessman. This reflects a significant change of view from the time of his ordination when he placed priesthood ahead of religious vows. "I would say that the great problem for the Black Benedictines in parish work is more or less a universal problem of all priests today in America: getting themselves (and even to a greater extent than other priests) disengaged from the futile routine and paperwork and "public relations" gags and all the rest of the trivialities that have entered the life of the priest in America in proportion as he has become a business man and an operator like other business men and operators... "Here I think it is most important for the spirit of conversatio morum [sic] to operate, not just picking the Benedictine priest up by the hair of his head and depositing him in a desert cave, but delivering him from the waste motion and the burden of nonsense and triviality that seem to become, so easily, an 'essential' part of priestly life. I am sure there must be a thousand tasks that are supposed to be important and which if everybody faced it, are a pure waste of kind. I am just speaking of the kind of waste motion we get into here, also, even though our life is supposed to be streamlined. It isn't..." (Roloff, Ronald OSB 10.21.62 SC 152)

Thomas Merton

In the following month Merton again made a similar observation to Roloff, a comment somewhat typical of many monastics: "There is something about the very fact of assuming the burden of priestly greatness and dignity which must have been one of the reasons why the Desert Fathers fled from bishops." (Roloff, Ronald 11.13.62 SC 155)

By 1965 Father Louis Merton was more convinced than ever of the futility of much of what goes on in the active priestly life and ministry: "Yes, you are right that the Catholic clergy are usually so caught up with tasks and rituals that they do not have time or interest to get involved in deeper contacts with those who are not members of the Church. The great trouble today is that with the increase of communications and the greater number of people there is so much to be done that few have time to do anything properly, at least in the West." (Abdul Aziz 11 7, 65 HGL 62)

In 1966 the monk wrote to Ludovico Silva, a poet from Venezuela, about the difficulties in the priesthood which were causing stress in the life of his former Gethsemani novice, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua: "You have no idea how difficult and complex a task he [Ernesto Cardenal] has taken upon himself, to be a poet and a priest at the same time and in a society that is completely fed up with priests. He is just beginning, and the task of being two people is still difficult. Only when one realizes that one cannot be two people, can one be two or many people, that is everybody. No priest and no poet is really mature until he is everybody. But who is everybody? One lets go a little, and one begins to disappear in everybody, and then one wakes up and begins to defend a limited identity once again. An uncomfortable existence. This discomfort is not necessary for those who identify themselves completely with a Church (like the ordinary priest) or a party (like the Communists)" (Silva, Ludovico 1.17.66 CT 228)

A crisis of identity and a crisis of authority...

That same year, 1966, in the light of Vatican II and the post-conciliar period of reform, Thomas Merton was clearly feeling himself some of these great strains which priests were experiencing in their relationships with bishops and superiors. Priests seemed to be experiencing both a deep crisis of identity and a painful crisis of authority. One such priest, William Dubay of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, became the focus of the monk's correspondence about the troubles in the priesthood. W. H. "Ping" Ferry of The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara had discussed the challenge DuBay had made to his archbishop, James Cardinal McIntyre, and mentioned to Merton Dubay's proposal to establish a priests' union. In his response the monk shows his awareness of the limitations of superiors in their relations with priests. He sees this relationship with superiors to be part of the reason for clerical immaturity. And the proposal for a priests' union seemed to him to be a symptom of such immaturity...

"...even in the Council it was spelled out that the relations with ecclesiastical Superiors were not what they should be, and it was also said, in traditional terms, that the Superiors ought to get down to the business of mending their ways. The trouble is of course that they can't. They don't see the problems the way subjects do, especially if they have been in a Chancery Office for years, twenty, thirty, forty, some of them. And think of those characters who have been in the Vatican since they were teenagers practically. They just have no idea what the score is, and they don't know how to look squarely at the problems of subjects, especially they do not and cannot understand the difference between the real problems of creative initiative and the neurotic kid problems that, in fact, they generate in subjects and unconsciously like to perpetuate. The relations of Superiors and subjects, in religion and in the secular clergy, are very often completely puerile, centered on artificial and illusory problems which are almost deliberately kept going because they create an illusion of important decisions being made. All this nonsense could be avoided with a minimum of maturity. "...the Superiors are never going to solve it themselves. On the other hand, the Superiors respond only to pressure. And we cannot get higher Superiors to bring pressure on lower Superiors, they are all in cahoots like a gang of thieves, and all support one another in tricky procedures, secret power plays, cheating, etc. etc. Hence the only thing to do is to bring pressure from the secular arm so to speak... "In my opinion, I think that the risks of this approach should be studied objectively... Personally, I think that it will do a great deal of harm to the Church, if it is not handled with extreme tact and care... But I think nevertheless, theologically and biblically, we have to ascertain whether the Church is the kind of body that can stand such a thing as a priests' union without getting into schism. I think that the fact that they start out uncritically making no distinction between a labor union and a 'priests' union' shows that there is danger of being wrong from the beginning, because, however you look at it, the relation of a priest to his bishop is not that of an employee to an employer. Hence the problems that arise between them, and the very real question of the priest's rights, need to be expressed in a different form... "My frank opinion on this is that instead of forming a priests' union and causing public pressure with a lot of noise in the press, priests should form a kind of private association for settling their problems in the more or less 'regular' way, and it would be understood that instead of appealing to outside pressure they would make it understood that if they continued to get the runaround they would simply get out, get secularized, and use their talents in some other way where they would be less obstructed. The need of priests is considerable these days, but is presented in artificial statistical sort of language which is really bypassing all issues. Yet it scares the bishop. If they realize that they are just not going to have any decent priests left, and that they will be stuck with aged cranks, creeps, seventy-year-old infants and so on ... they may think things over." (Ferry, W. H. 1.26.66 HGL 223-225)

The Trappist's proposal of a "private association" for priests to deal with superiors was a more reasonable approach than the concept of a priests' union. In places like the Archdiocese of Chicago such a tactic was taken with success in the formation of the Association of Chicago Priests as they dealt with the authoritarian style of John Cardinal Cody during the 1970's. Two months later, in 1966, Thomas Merton wrote to "Ping" Ferry with further expressions of opposition to Dubay's unionizing approach to ecclesiastical superiors: "...the kind of collision course with authority that he advocates is not going to get anywhere really. The whole situation is already vitiated with politics that his ideas will only make it ultra-political. The whole source of the authority problem in the Church is precisely that Superiors act too much as politicians and manipulate subjects for purely institutional ends. Dubay's course seems to point to an even worse kind of institutionalism in the long run." (Ferry, W. H. 3.11.66 HGL 225)

During 1968, the final year of life for Thomas Merton, Father Louis was offering what some in officialdom might have considered subversive advice to an anonymous priest who could not decide whether to stay in or to leave the active ministry. To a Father D., the monk wrote something of the way he himself had come to understand and to live his own monastic and priestly vocation from his hermitage in the woods: "Couldn't you be a sort of underground priest' in lay clothes, saying Mass in private homes among people you are at ease with, and perhaps also serving some tiny community, some convent, and helping out with shut-ins, people who are forgotten, who suffer, etc.? In order words it seems to me that in this Post-Conciliar period you might be called to a kind of hidden service in the sort of unofficial and informal life you desire. In short, be like a layman, live like a layman, but do some priestly work or service along with it. "I don't see that you have to stop being a priest just because the routine machinery of parish organization is bugging you. All the more reason to get out of the ordinary patterns and yet to be a priest nevertheless, and work in a quiet, relaxed relationship with people you can relate to without too much difficulty. After all, you are always going to have to relate to people. See your priesthood not as a role or an office, but as just -part of your own life and your own relation to other persons. You can bring them Christ in some quiet way, and perhaps you will find yourself reaching people that the Church would not otherwise contact." (Father D. 3.14.68 SC 371)

The final words of Thomas Merton about priesthood to be found in his published letters are these short and cryptic remarks made in his characteristic and usual "unusual" style of correspondence with Robert Lax during the month of June shortly before his death: "Brothers is all agog over the tempo. Was here a phalanx of novice masters a big drag onodious passatemp was come to the hermit box for a speech. 'You might as well all leave the clerical' I suggested with a wry leer. Was cheered wildly for this." (Lax, Robert 6.22.68 RJ 185)

At the time of his early and sudden death in Bangkok, Thailand on December 10, 1968, Thomas Merton had surely shifted considerably in his sense of and reflections upon the Roman Catholic priesthood since the exalted experience of his ordination in May of 1949. And so had many of his brother priests around the world!

Dr Patrick W Collins 27/05/2009

Fr Patrick W. Collins PhD lives in Michigan and has long been very supportive of our endeavours here at Catholica. Fr Collins retired from active ministry earlier last year but one suspects that "retirement" is the inappropriate descriptor. It's more like a change of direction as to how he continues his ministry. On his own website (www.vatican2.org/patrickcollins/) he describes himself as "author, preacher, musician and university professor. He senses that his principal vocation is to contemplative living — out of which his various ministries flow. In addition to numerous books and articles, Fr. Collins has produced forty-five TV programs, and a number of videos, among them Thomas Merton: Man, Monk, Myth with Music. Fr. Collins presents various kinds of retreats, missions, and workshops, including what he calls 'spiritual concerts' which combine texts and tunes for spiritual insight and growth. This approach gives a feelingful dimension to the meaning of the words and connects head with heart, reason and imagination. He calls it "Music with a Message."

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©2009Patrick W Collins

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