| Author Quoted | Rolf Hochhuth |
| Title Quoted | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1963/12/13 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1964 |
| Quotation | As to Hochhuth: yes, I have read the play [The Deputy] and have dashed off some notes on it which George Lawler says he wants to include with some other notebook excerpts in Continuum. I am sending you a Xeroxed copy of the notes "¦ As to the play, I think it is awful: at least to read. Hochhuth strikes me as somewhat sick, not that I blame him for that. However, the question he raises is an important one, and though he has been grossly unjust to Pius XII (after all, there is no hint whatever of the real greatness of the man in the play), yet I think that the Vatican is at fault, and the hierarchy too, for favoring that kind of abominable and moss-grown concept of authority and of obedience. Here Hochhuth has something to be said for him. When such a temptation is presented to him, how can one blame him for taking it? There has been so much sickening nonsense about Pius XII, and such obviously interested efforts to promote him as a saint, that no one can blame this man for saying he does not agree. |
| 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. 651 |
| Letter to | Gordon Zahn |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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