The Pope's Favorite American Radicals

By Virginia Cannon, The New Yorker

28 September 15

rowing up in a lapsed but deep-seatedly Catholic household, it was an article of faith that the co-religionists to watch out for on Sundays and days of obligation were the converts. They were the tiresome sticklers who insisted on attending early Mass, going to confession, and giving up something they actually liked for Lent. But, if you had be stuck with a couple of converts for the duration of Holy Week, a good pair to pick would have been Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, two of the four Americans (along with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.) whom Pope Francis singled out for praise on Thursday, in his address to Congress.

Why did he choose those Catholics instead of, say, Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American to be made a saint, or Kateri Tekakwitha, who was here first but was canonized later, or Frances Cabrini, of “another Martini for Mother Cabrini” fame? And why is it that more women than men come to mind? (Though let it be said that the only person Francis paused to shake hands with in the Capitol was John Kerry, perhaps as compensation for his poor treatment by the Church during the 2004 Presidential campaign. Of the celestial prospects of the three Catholic Supreme Court justices who chose not to attend the Pope’s address—Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—perhaps the less said the better.)

One explanation for Francis’s choice may be his fondness for people who have lived life raw and have complicated stories to tell. He seems to prefer their company to that of people who tend toward piety and entitlement—hence his decision to decline a Capitol Hill luncheon invitation in order to break bread with the homeless. Day would have joined him at that table. Merton would have done so in spirit.

Born in 1897, Day was a Greenwich Village bohemian, who had a daughter out of wedlock, campaigned for women’s rights, and wrote for the socialist press (and, once, for The New Yorker), until, at the age of thirty, she converted to Catholicism. She then concentrated her energies on the Catholic Worker newspaper, which she co-founded with Peter Maurin, and the Catholic Worker houses, which fed and sheltered the poor. Under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI she was already being considered for sainthood—not owing to her dedication to the poor but because she spoke out against abortion, having had one as a young woman and come to regret it. Francis didn’t mention that. He said simply that a nation is great when “it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work.” His comments thrilled Bernie Sanders, and sent Rush Limbaugh into a frenzy.

Merton was born in France, in 1915. He was the son of artists, who died when he was young, and he, like Day, led a boisterous early life, fathering a child while at Cambridge University before ending up at Columbia University, in 1935. He flirted with communism, frequented jazz clubs, and joined the staff of the college humor magazine, Jester, where he made a handful of lifelong friends, including the artist Ad Reinhardt and the poet Robert Lax (who later worked for The New Yorker, and also converted to Catholicism, eventually settling on the Aegean island of Patmos).

Merton’s conversion, in 1939, was the result of an intellectual journey—which, to the shock of his friends, led him, two years later, to a life of contemplation and extreme austerity, in the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. His life became one of withdrawal, but he wrote many books, including, at the age of thirty-three, an autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain.” Published in 1948, it was edited by another friend from Columbia, Robert Giroux (then at Harcourt, Brace), and became one of the most influential spiritual books of the past century, selling more than a million copies. (Merton also published a couple of poems in The New Yorker.) As Robert Ellsberg, the editor and publisher of Orbis Books, said yesterday on “Democracy Now,” Merton had an epiphany a few years later, which he said was like waking from a dream of separateness: “He looked around at all the people on the street and said there were no strangers, we are all human beings.” He began writing on the struggle against war, poverty, racism, and injustice.

That did not sit so well with the Trappists, but Pope Francis called him “a thinker who challenged the certitude of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between people and religions.” In fact, Merton’s interests turned toward Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, which he is credited with introducing to a wider audience in the West. In 1968, he went to Asia. One day in Bangkok, he gave a speech and, at the end, told the audience, “Now I will disappear.” That night, as he was stepping out of the shower, he touched an electric fan, and was electrocuted.

It’s tempting to imagine Merton and Day together, knocking back beers (Trappists are known for their brews) and marching for peace. However, according to Jim Forest, who joined the Catholic Worker movement in 1960, although the two corresponded, and Merton wrote for Day’s paper, they never met. In fact, they followed nearly opposite paths. If Day is a figure out of Hugo, Merton is out of Kerouac. Once she found Catholicism she stuck with it and led an engaged life, committing countless acts of civil disobedience, and was jailed many times. She died in 1980, at a Catholic Worker house on East Third Street. Merton continued his spiritual search, but his voyage was largely within, and he never engaged in confrontation.

Another key to Francis’s focus on the two converts may lie in Merton’s insight that, ultimately, there are no strangers, just fellow human beings. A good deal of the Pope’s address dealt with the refugee crisis and the status of immigrants past and present in this country. “When the stranger in our midst appeals to us,” he said, “we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past,” reminding the assembled leaders that “most of us were once foreigners.” People who make journeys in search of justice—in life as well as in the mind—are people we must value. They are the ones with stories to tell.

Boehner and the Belt

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

27 September 15

ravel day (domestic), which means that I’m a captive audience for a lot of talking heads on TV. Lots of talk about the Boehner resignation. It was especially excruciating to hear pundits going on about the soon-to-be-ex Speaker’s motivations for not just stepping down, but actually leaving his seat. Is there some rule preventing them from saying the obvious: his extremely lucrative career as a lobbyist can’t start until he’s out of Congress?

But anyway, if there are going to be retrospectives on his tenure, I’d give pride of place to his obstructionism to any and all attempts to rescue the economy as it threatened to plunge into the abyss. His immortal line will be this:

American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.

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