Pope Francis addressed Congress and all of the United States earlier today. I laud House Speaker Boehner for this initiative.
The Holy Father lauded Thomas Merton for his “capacity for dialogue and openness to God” as well as his “contemplative style.” I always pay attention when people speak of Merton.
A century ago, at the beginning of the Great War, which Pope Benedict XV termed a “pointless slaughter”, another notable American was born: the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. He remains a source of spiritual inspiration and a guide for many people. In his autobiography he wrote: “I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers.” Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.
That inner dialogue is suggested here. Loving, yet hating: when we admit, we can begin the dialogue, become practiced at it, and engage it even when we think of the other as the enemy.
Catholic Sensibility 