How to Save the Catholic Church
Imbelli, Robert
reckon with this biography, and anyone who ignores it runs the risk of moving Merton scholarship in wrong or unpro- ductive directions. Mott has followed an appropriate her- meneutic. As far as...
...John Wu: Mei Teng which meansSilent Lamp...
...Trying to be fairer, at times I have been critical of The Seven Storey Mountain...
...Of course, one can only speculate...
...Again, he does not succumb to the temptation of letting biography become autobiography...
...It is no easy thing to retell a best-seller...
...For many readers Mott's handling of these relationships --confusing and complex though they be, yet important for understanding Merton -- may well be highlights of clarity and clarification in a book that reads well from beginning to end...
...The Seven Storey Mountain-Merton's bestseller autobiography which covers more than half his life--probably poses as serious a challenge as any to a Merton biographer...
...No review can do justice to Mott's careful and sensitive portrayal of both these incidents...
...The older Mer- ton and the younger Merton showed a gaiety and high spirits which were largely suppressed during the early years in the monastery, and I have tried to bring back the balance occasionally by includ- ing the laughter of a deeply serious man...
...As one who knew and admired John H. Griffin in life and would not want to dishonor him in death, I regret that the decision was made to publish what I can only judge to be an early rough draft--perhaps from tapes of his reading of the Merton journals...
...It is also, so the preface says, "the her- mit's life-story and Griffin's lucid syn- thesis of solitude...
...tomorrow victim to the anti-modernist paranoia propagated by the religiously sensitive but intellectually shallow Pope Pius X. The suppression of the Review and the extinguishing at Dunwoodie of the novel experiment in seminary education which it spearheaded serve Kennedy as potent symbol for the anti-intellectualism and clerical authoritarianism which formed the shadow side of the prodigiously im- migrant church in America...
...The title of the biography--intended to stress the importance of place to Metton and its influence on him--seems to me a bit artificial and contrived...
...More than that, Merton's judgments of himself are not sacrosanct: Mott does not hesitate to question them when it seems necessary...
...This is perhaps espe- cially true in the book that brought him instant fame: The Seven Storey Moun- tain...
...Further, the title gives no indication that the book is a biography and indeed the unwary browser in a bookstore might mistake it for a novel or a new edition of Seven Storey Mountain...
...The New York Review, published at St...
...BOW TO SATE TIIg CATH0UC CIUBCB Andrew M. Greeley and Mary Greeley Durldn Vikings, $16.95, 256 pp...
...Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, shone fora thousand bright days in the first decade of the twentieth century, seeking to reconcile "ancient faith and modern knowledge," only to fall feel sure, not Seeds of Contemplation (p.238), but New Seeds...
...Mott manages this well...
...Follow the Ecstasy purports tO be a "dialogue" between Merton and the late John Howard Griffin, the first appointed Merton biographer who was forced be- cause of ill health to give up the project...
...The subtleties of that human- ness have been captured by Mott in both its strengths and its frailties...
...The other chapters of the book, rang- ing from interviews with Joseph (Continued on page 565) 19 October 1984:563...
...Both are put in a context that make his presentation balanced and insightful...
...If this is a false judgment and this text was actu- ally intended as finished copy, one can only conclude that Merton fared better in a book by Michael Mott who never knew him than he would have fared at the hands of a very dear friend...
...Kennedy is moved to exclaim rhetori- cally: "What might have happened had the light struck at Dunwoodie not been so abruptly snuffed out...
...This means of course that there is a generous use of the journals (since it is especially in the journals that Merton analyzes self and motives...
...129...
...There are times when his self-criticism needs softening...
...Merton was one of those persons whom people instinctively like...
...Yet it might be con- jectured, with some plausibility, that the American church would have been far better prepared for Vatican II and would have endured the ensuing crisis of growth with far less trauma...
...Minor points: The most admired of Merton's books on contemplation is, I Catholic psyche then I THE NOW AND FUTURE CIOlgl THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING AN AMERICAN CATHOLIC Eugene Kennedy Doubleday, $13.95, 198 pp...
...For if Merton was his own best and most frequent critic, he was at the same time his own severest judge...
...Readers will especially want to see how Mott handles two crucial and complicated situations in Merton's life: his brief love affair with a young woman in 1966 and his long-time relationship as a monk to his abbot, Dom James Fox...
...As far as possible he allows Merton to interpret himself...
...Yet Mott is careful not to let his text become entangled in a catena of quo- tations...
...To the impress- ive list of Merton names and nicknames, (p.7) I would like to add the delightful Chinese name given him by Dr...
...Irenaeus's name does mean "peaceful," but in Greek not Latin (p...
...Robert Imbelli I N the most intriguing chapter of The Now and Future Church, Eugene Kennedy recounts, with the relish and poignancy of a good Irish storyteller, a too-little-known tale of the American church...
...The book is clearly Mott's, not Merton's: the author remains in control...
...He was very human, unaffectedly and endear- ingly so...
...It is his story about Mer- ton rather than Merton's story about him- self that we read, fleshing in details that were omitted in Seven Storey Mountain and clearing up many of the mysteries that Trappist propriety left obscure or unresolved...
...Mott writes, "Merton was not al- ways fair to his younger self...
...One could probably think of an eighth or ninth mountain...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 18
