MERTON'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH:
Thompson, August Louis, Fr., 1926-2019
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Descriptive Summary
Record Group: Section A - Correspondence
Dates of materials: 1963-1968
Volume: 22 item(s); 38 pg(s)
Scope and Content
Statements by Fr. August Thompson that spoke of racism in the south within the Roman Catholic Church may have influenced some of Merton's writings on the subject, particularly some statements made in Seeds of Destruction.
Biography
Fr. August Thompson was an African-American priest who was serving at St. Charles Church in Ferriday, Louisiana, at the time of writing to Merton. He was interviewed by John Howard Griffin for an article for Ramparts magazine about the experience of being a black Catholic priest and the effects of racism on the Catholic Church. He ran into some trouble with his bishop, Charles Pasquale Greco, of Alexandria, Louisiana. The bishop disputed many claims of institutional racism by Thompson, and was even angrier that the Church was given a bad image publicly on this issue. Thompson met Merton in 1963 and corresponded with him for a number of years.
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Related Information and Links
See also the "Flanagan, James T." file; and see also an unabridged version of the 26 April 1968 letter published in Signs of Hope, pp. 152-3.
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If the person in correspondence with Merton has full text records in the Merton Center Digital Collections, there will be a numeric link to them below.
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