| Author Quoted | Michael Serafian |
| Title Quoted | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/06/30 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : Michael Joseph. 1964 |
| Quotation | I just finished The Pilgrim by Serafian, on the Council. It is really a smasher, much better than the gossip columns of Xavier Rynne, much deeper, much more serious and much more sobering. I had not realized what a beating [Cardinal] Bea took at the last session and what this really represented. This curial thing is really disastrous, and it threatens the whole structure of the Church, and maybe, one thinks, this is providential "¦ I wonder if we are really going to have to get along without a structure one of these days. Maybe that will be good, but Lord it will be rough on most people. Maybe less rough on you and me, with all the welts we have acquired in the machinery. More and more I come to think we are living in one great big illusion. Centuries of triumphalist self-deception. The late Middle Ages, with all their sores, were more real "¦ Everything is all twisted up and the worst thing is the façade of smoothness over all the busted iron and the fragments of a building that has perhaps fallen in. But where it has fallen God will build and is building. The front is man's work and that will really cave in. Who worries about that? We must learn not to, and even, when necessary, give it a good shove. Mitres, croziers, rings, slippers, baubles, documents, seals, bulls, rescripts, indults "¦ Have a good time on your trip. |
| Quotation Source | The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1985, p. 82 |
| Letter to | Daniel Berrigan |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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