The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton Read online

  Letter from American Consul General to Abbey at Gethsemani,

  Mott Collection, Northwestern University

  Copyright © 2018 by Hugh Turley and David Martin.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Authors Hugh Turley and David Martin/McCabe Publishing

  http://themartyrdomofthomasmerton.com

  Book Layout ©2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation/

  Hugh Turley and David Martin —1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1548077389

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have been written without the help of friends, university libraries and professional archivists.

  First of all, we would offer our gratitude to Dr. Paul M. Pearson, Director of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University for his assistance. In addition, there are many helpful experts at various institutions that contributed to this project including Fr. John Martin Ruiz, O.P., librarian at the Dominican House of Studies, Tara C. Craig, Head of Public Services, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Nick Munigan, library assistant, Charles Deering McCormick Library Special Collections, Northwestern University, Anne Causey and Penny White at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, Cate Brennan, Textual Reference Branch, National Archives at College Park, Maryland, Brother Lawrence Morey, archivist at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

  Our appreciation goes as well to Dom John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O. for permission to quote, Brother Dunstan Robidoux, O.S.B. for his advice, and His Excellency, The Most Reverend Rembert George Weakland, O.S.B. for always being available to talk with us.

  We thank Mr. William Francisco Say for permission to reprint letters and the Merton Center for permission to reprint photographs. By Arne Kislenko, from The Journal of Conflict Studies, The Gregg Centre for Study of War and Society, Summer 2004. By Permission of Gregg Centre, University of New Brunswick. By Alfred W. McCoy, from The Politics of Heroin; CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, copyright 2003, Lawrence Hill Books. Reprinted by permission Chicago Review Press. By George Weigel, from “JFK After 50 Years”, November 20, 2013, in First Things Religion and Public Life, by permission of First Things. Excerpt from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, by Thomas Merton, copyright , 1965, 1966 by The Abbey of Gethsemani. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  We would also like to thank Patrick and Kathryn Knowlton, John H. Clarke, and Mike Campbell, who made helpful suggestions on the manuscript and Alison Weir for sharing her book-writing and publishing experience.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part 1. The Thai Conclusion: Heart Failure

  Tragedy in Thailand

  The Thai Police Report

  What Happened? The Police Versus the Witnesses

  The False Document

  A Sham Investigation

  Police and Clerical Legerdemain

  Things Not Seen and Things Imagined

  François de Grunne

  Part 2. The Authorized Conclusion: Accident

  The Myth around Merton’s Death

  Building on the Myth

  The Catholic News Service’s Straw Men

  The Not-to-Be-Shown Photograph

  Michael Mott’s Authorized Story of the Death

  In Michael Mott’s Wake

  Part 3. The Enemies of Truth

  Murder by the Book

  Merton Was a Force for Peace and Truth

  The Press in Full Cover-up Mode

  Penn Jones: Covert Agent?

  Pope Francis and Thomas Merton

  The Logical Explanation

  The Forbidden Photos and the Six Trappists Again

  Conclusion

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  End Notes

  About the Authors

  Dedication

  To the following Benedictines:

  Father Celestine Say

  Sister Edeltrud Weist

  Father Egbert Donovan

  Father Odo Haas,

  whose voices can now finally be heard.

  Foreword

  From the first moment of the sudden, unexpected event almost a half-century ago, the death of the famous monk Thomas Merton has been enveloped in mystery. After doing the only serious investigation of the episode and its aftermath ever conducted, the authors have concluded that it would be more accurate to say that his death has been wrapped in falsehoods.

  The story of the authors’ dedication to the unraveling of the mystery of Merton’s death began in the early 1990s. Hugh Turley and David Martin were both living and working in the Washington, DC, area when, on July 20, 1993, the body of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was found in the back of the Civil War relic known as Fort Marcy Park, off the George Washington Parkway on the Virginia side of the Potomac River.

  Martin had been an intramural basketball rival of Foster’s, graduating two years before him from Davidson College in North Carolina. He was also a longtime student of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and he immediately noticed parallels in the extraordinarily incurious press coverage of the two deaths, how the press uniformly acted as virtual salesmen for the very difficult-to-believe official story rather than as proper watchdogs on the government. That led him to begin to conduct his own inquiry into Foster’s death, in the process of which his path crossed Turley’s.

  Turley was no more than a casual follower of the news at the time whose profession of magician took him all over the greater Washington metropolitan area and beyond. One day, sometime after the Foster death, his return route from a performance took him by Fort Marcy Park and he decided on a whim to go in and look around and see where Foster’s body had been found. It happened that Reed Irvine, the head of the conservative press-watchdog organization, Accuracy in Media, had also chosen that time to visit the park. Irvine had also viewed the media-abetted official story of the Foster death with great skepticism, and he proceeded to give Turley an earful. Turley’s political course from that time on was set.

  Irvine was also something of a midwife for Turley and Martin’s collaboration. With their mutual interest in the Foster case, Irvine and Martin were already working together, sharing insights and information, and Martin was on a panel for a program in Washington, DC, that Irvine had organized. The panel included, among several other people, the Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph of London, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who would later write The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, which contains perhaps the most incisive analysis of the Foster case yet rendered in popular book form. Turley was in the audience, and he introduced himself to Martin at the end of the program. He said that he had been particularly impressed by the following poem that Martin had written and recited:

  Solicitude

  Don’t you think that the family has suffered enough?

  Why must you stir up this mess?

  He wasn’t constructed of very strong stuff.

  He couldn’t put up with the press.

  He must not have been what he seemed to be.

  He could not have been very stable.

  That he might have been killed for his honesty

  Is just a romanti
c fable.

  We’ll fight for his right to be off in the head.

  What do you mean we offend you?

  If you should turn up mysteriously dead,

  This is how we would defend you.

  Martin, to date, has written 75 articles on the Foster case, many of them with ample research assistance by Turley. These articles appear on Martin’s web site, DCDave.com, including the six-part book-length series, “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” which focuses particularly upon the distorted press coverage of the event.

  Turley collaborated with the dissident witness in the case, Patrick Knowlton, and Knowlton’s lawyer, John Clarke, on the 20-page submission to the U.S. Court of Appeals three-judge panel that had appointed Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. The court ordered that submission—an analysis of the case that completely demolishes the government's conclusion of suicide—to be included in Starr’s final report on Foster’s death, over Starr’s strenuous written objections. It was the only time that an independent counsel had been ordered to include evidence of a cover-up to his own report. To this day, America’s press has completely blacked out the news of that part of Starr’s report. Turley, Knowlton and Clarke then wrote an in-depth, 500-page critique of Independent Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death, filed in various federal courts, and later published as the book, Failure of the Public Trust. These documents appear on their website with the descriptive web address, fbicover-up.com.

  The catalyst for the writing of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton was James W. Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Turley had begun to cultivate an interest in Merton only about five years before when he discovered a Merton book being read by one of the friars at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, where Turley regularly attends mass. The blurb across the top of the paperback version of Douglass’s book lays out his principal thesis, “He chose peace. They marked him for death.”

  The authors were surprised to learn from that book—whose “unspeakable” subtitle was drawn from Merton—what a powerful force that Merton had been for peace, both before and during the Vietnam War. Would not the same people who marked President John F. Kennedy for death have marked Merton, as well?

  A virtually countless number of books have been written that pick apart the official lone-nut explanation of JFK’s murder. In 1968, there were two other assassinations of major public figures who also chose peace, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Only around a half dozen books have been published that take serious issue with the official verdict in RFK’s murder and about half that number concerning MLK, Jr.’s assassination. To date, not one book or even a serious newspaper or magazine article has appeared that examines critically the bizarre story that Thomas Merton was killed during a conference near Bangkok, Thailand, by a faulty (Hitachi) electric fan.

  One of the major ironies we were to discover in the Merton death case is that James W. Douglass, himself, has been a party to keeping the lid on things, perhaps inadvertently. At a keynote address to the International Thomas Merton Society in 1997, he reported that a noted journalistic skeptic in the JFK case had traveled to Bangkok to investigate, and that man had come back with assurances that no foul play had been involved.

  Douglass, a theologian and former college professor, is clearly a very educated man, but his education has been very different from the real-life education that the authors have received in researching the Vincent Foster death case and other Deep State scandals. Douglass was perhaps not sufficiently wary of the very common phenomenon known as “fake opposition.” We have learned that it is never a good idea to take the word of one person, no matter how good he might appear on the surface, especially when that person is an American journalist.

  In The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton we identify four men who have been most instrumental in imprinting upon the public mind the wholly unsupported notion that Merton died from accidental electrocution—a conclusion that had not been reached by the investigating police in Thailand. Merton, with his trenchant observations about the propagandistic nature of the American press—observations that were far ahead of his time—would not have been at all surprised to learn that two of those men were professional journalists. We have identified a fifth man as a sort of “Hamlet” in the case, who privately counseled one of the four against writing things unsupported by the evidence, but he held his tongue publicly and withheld from his own public writing facts that did not agree with the accidental electrocution conclusion. That man was also a journalist, and what is worse, a journalist for Catholic publications who had covered the conference where Merton died.

  Perhaps Merton would not even have been as surprised to learn, as the traditional Catholic authors were, that the other two men at the heart of the promotion of the accidental-electrocution story were members of his own Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.

  Together, these men erected a virtual brick wall preventing the truth from getting out about what happened on that fateful afternoon in Thailand on December 10, 1968. With The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton, we have broken down that wall.

  Participants at Bangkok conference with Merton as identified by Fr. Celestine Say, who took this photograph on the day of Merton’s death. Left to right:

  Very Rev. Maxime Thong, Prior, Cistercian Abbey of Phuoc-Son, Thu-Duc, South Vietnam

  Rev. Jean Leclercq, Abbey of St. Maurice, Clairvaux, Luxembourg

  Rev. Thomas Merton, Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, United States

  Rt. Rev. Abbot C.P. Tholens, AIM Secretariat, Slangenburg, Holland

  Sister Marie de la Croix, Cistercian Abbey of Notre Dame de Lourdes, Seiboen, Jurenji, Japan

  Rev. Paul Gordon, Secretariat, AIM, Beuron, Germany

  Sister Beda Kim, Fatima Hospital, Taegu, South Korea

  Rev. Mother Rosemarie Enriquez, Prioress, Immaculate Heart of Mary Abbey, Vigan, Ilocos Sur, Philippines

  Two thousand years ago the death of a Christian martyr was a supreme affirmation not only of faith, but of liberty. The Christian proved by martyrdom that he had reached a degree of independence in which it no longer mattered to him whether he lived on earth and that it was not necessary for him to save his life by paying official religious homage to the emperor. He was beyond life and death. He had attained to a condition in which all things were “one” and equal to him.1

  –Thomas Merton

  Introduction

  The Trappist monk Thomas Merton might well have been the most significant Roman Catholic thinker and writer of the 20th century. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold over 600,000 copies in its original hardcover edition and, in one version or another, has remained continuously in print. Its Kindle edition, as of this writing, has 644 customer reviews with an average customer rating of four and one half out of five stars. Amazon reports that the book has been published in over twenty languages and has influenced a wide range of readers from Graham Greene to Eldridge Cleaver. The National Review also includes it in its list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century.

  Altogether, Merton authored more than 70 books and almost as many books have been written about him. Wikipedia lists 28 biographies alone.

  The International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS), formed in 1987, has 46 chapters in the United States and there are 19 chapters and affiliated societies in other countries. The ITMS has four-day conferences on a biennial basis at various sites. Two of the first 13 conferences were in Canada; the rest were in the United States.

  Merton was in apparent good health and at the height of his productive powers when he died suddenly and mysteriously while attending a monastic conference, on December 10, 1968, near Bangkok, Thailand. He was 53 years old. Up to now, no one has examined the circumstances of his death systematically, critically, and what is most important, honestly. That is our purpose here.

  Initial research

  We began to research the details of Merton’s dea
th in 2012 by contacting Father John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O. (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, also known as Trappists), to ask for his help. Fr. Eudes’s name and email address had been given to Hugh Turley as someone who knew Merton. Fr. Eudes had lived at Merton’s home abbey, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Turley wrote in an email:

  I am interested in the details of the death of Thomas Merton. Can you advise me if your community has any official records of Thomas Merton’s death? Is there a death certificate? A record of who first found his body? Who determined the cause of death? Is there a police report or investigative records from Thailand? Was an autopsy performed to determine the cause of death? If any official records exist within your community, could you advise me how to proceed?

  Fr. Eudes replied,

  I am the one who examined Merton’s body when it arrived back from Thailand. He had burns over the right side of his face from the fan that fell on him when he grabbed it. It was enough of a burn that the Abbot of Gethsemani who also viewed the body could not identify him. There was a Korean nun who is also a physician also at the meeting when Merton died. She examined him after his death and was convinced he died from the short-circuited fan. I read her report. The two monks who discovered Merton with the fan still running and lying where it fell on him found it was short-circuited when one tried to remove it and got a good shock. That pretty well covers the information I have. I wrote a short note after seeing the body. I think it is preserved in Bellarmine University Library in the Merton collection. 2

  The only document that Fr. Eudes offered was the note that he had written on the tag that was attached to Merton’s coffin when it arrived at Louisville, about 50 miles north of the abbey. The short note said only that he and Abbot Flavian Burns identified the bloated and swollen body of Fr. Louis.3

  “Father Louis” is the name that Merton was given when he was ordained to the priesthood in 1949. Fr. Eudes did not actually answer any of our questions. We didn’t realize it at the time, but he was no longer at the Abbey of Gethsemani. He might have directed us there, but as we shall see, that approach was not likely to have been very fruitful, either. Eventually we found the answers to our original questions, and along the way we discovered that some key things Fr. Eudes had told us turned out to be inconsistent with the evidence.