| Author Quoted | Michael Serafian |
| Title Quoted | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/07/01 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : Michael Joseph. 1964 |
| Quotation | One book you must read if you have not already is The Pilgrim by Serafian, about Pope Paul and the Council. Thesis that Pope Paul's curial instincts took over and he sacrificed Bea and the Johannine drive to the conservative pressures against them, then went on pilgrimage as a surrogate for the non-achievements of the second session. In a way it is a curious parallel to The Deputy, though not of course as rough. What impresses me is that wherever we turn we come back to this baroque image of the Papacy, more than an image, an idol, of which curial power is an essential element. The conservatives see it better than the liberals. The thing is now so constructed that perhaps the Papacy has come to depend to a great extent on machinery like that of the H. Office, and the Office crowd is serenely convinced that it has to arrogate to itself all the powers of the Pope even against the Pope himself, becoming in the end the real seat of infallibility. This means of course that infallibility becomes organized and to some extent anonymous (no longer a charism but an institution) and of course that means one thing: totalism and the monolith. |
| 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. 218 |
| Letter to | W. [Ping] H. Perry |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
(If there is a link above showing up as a number, click it to open another window with a full text version.) |