"It is first something that has to be done because now we can do it. And there was a tiny bit of escalation in Viet Nam—because we can do that too”…

[Dancing in the Water of Life: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. 5 (San Francisco: Harper, 1997): 324-5]
NASA photo: www.nasa.gov/image-articl...

"But what is the meaning of this space business? I am afraid I am still not too convinced there is point to it... But what does it mean? I wonder if anyone really knows, or even asks.

"All this I went into as a deliberate exercise of the new 'worldliness'-.. to be able to see these things without defensiveness and criticism, though also without ga-ga optimism. This is the world I live in and I am part of it. Why act as if I had a better world of my own to offer as an alternative?

"[W]atched on TV the meeting in space of Gemini 7 and Gemini 6. Actually what was shown was a series of maps and "simulations" but I was watching at the time when 6 began catching up to 7 over the Indian Ocean and got within a few feet of 7 beyond Hawaii... A fantastic thing!..

Quote—Turning toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton Volume Four, edited by Victor A. Kramer (San Francisco: Harper, 1996): 71-2.

Photo—Thomas Merton Center Collection, Sub-section F.2a, nn-0021. Copyright © Merton Legacy Trust. Not to be used without written permission.

"‘she sends her servants to proclaim from the heights of the city: Come eat of my bread, drink of the wine I have prepared. Desist from folly and you will live. Walk in the way of Truth’...

O God, that I may listen and believe and see things in their true perspective, and trust in wisdom…”

"picked up where I had left off this morning before Prime. These were the first words I read in the finished house (after a brief introduction to explain why they are quoted). From Proverbs: 9:1-15… ‘Wisdom has built her house, she has set it up with seven pillars, ...prepared her wine,...

I walked down the path to see it well. It was splendid. I interrupted reading Isaac of Stella's Fourteenth Sermon on God's light and His joy in His creation."

Photo: "Comet C2023 P1 Nishimura before dawn" by Manolo Gómez, Wikimedia Commons.

(that is not light yet) makes one suspect the sun will rise. Precisely the _point vierge_ [virgin point]! This great sweep of pure silent light points to the sun that will come—it takes a good area of sky right out over the valley in front of the hermitage...

Thomas Molnar wrote in opposition to Merton’s statement. Witness to Freedom follows Merton’s open letter with his published response to Molnar that Worldview published in the November issue alongside Molnar’s letter: web.archive.org/web/20240620...

Worldview magazine of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs published Merton’s open letter in September 1965: web.archive.org/web/20240621.... It was published in one of Merton’s volumes of correspondence, Witness to Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux): 88-92.

Schema 13 was promulgated by Pope Paul VI at Vatican II as “Gaudium et Spes,” on the closing day of the council, December 7, 1965. Merton hoped that in promoting the gospel in the modern world, it would strengthen declarations made in “Pacem in terris,” Pope John XXIII's final encyclical.

Other names: Jim Forest, Martin Corbin, Tom Cornell, Eileen Egan, Howard Everngam.

Scan: merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/ite...

A transcript can be found on page 312 of All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, ed. by Robert Ellsberg (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010).

Day references the writer Karl Stern. Merton had written praise of Stern’s Flight from Woman. Day mentions that another writer, Caroline Gordon Tate, liked it as well. Most others mentioned in the letter are peacemakers connected to the CW. Of those mentioned, only Jim Douglass is still living.

..This directive Merton received from his own Abbot in April of 1962." The condemnations of modern war from the popes of the time & Vatican II later gave Merton a theological justification from the teaching authority of the Catholic Church for the stance he took on modern warfare and atomic weapons.