Cardijn’s Red Hat

What would Thomas Merton say to a Franciscan’s charge of patriarchal clericalism?

In March 1925, a Belgian priest boarded a train to Rome, certain he was heading toward his own downfall.

At forty-two, the son of a Schaerbeek coal merchant had spent six years building something his own bishops put on trial. His movement, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, brought together factory girls and apprentice machinists in back rooms, without a priest present, to talk about their work, struggle with the Gospel’s demands, and make their own decisions. Belgian church leaders called it divisive. At a tribunal led by Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, Bishop Louis Picard said the movement was breaking apart the unity of the Mystical Body.

Joseph Cardijn had every reason to fear the outcome. Fifteen years before, on 25 August 1910, Pius X condemned Marc Sangnier’s Le Sillon in Notre charge apostolique. The issue was not heresy, but that a lay movement tried to act outside church authority. Sangnier’s followers were told to dissolve their national group and reorganize under local church control. Their mistake was trying to govern themselves as baptized laypeople.

Cardijn went into the papal audience still holding onto that same forbidden hope.

Pius XI heard him out and said: “Here Pius XI listened to him and said, “Here at last is someone who comes to speak to me about the masses.” He made it clear that without the working class, the Church is not truly the Church of Christ. Cardijn returned home with the Pope’s blessing, and the tribunal ended. The three verbs had been built in their back rooms were three verbs. See. Judge. Act. It ran through the JOC into the Young Christian Workers, into the Christian Family Movement, into Latin America. John XXIII wrote it into Mater et Magistra on 15 May 1961, at paragraph 236: one reviews the concrete situation, one forms a judgment on it in the light of Christian principles, one decides what can and should be done. Cardijn himself sat at the Second Vatican Council and pressed it into the documents on the laity. On 22 February 1965, Paul VI made him a cardinal. He was eighty-two.

A man who spent his life insisting that baptized people are not just spectators was given a red hat and a titular church. He died as a prince of the Church on 24 July 1967.

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One life, one problem made clear. That’s why this method fits the question we’re facing.

Michael H. Crosby, OFM Cap, opens a hard passage in Finding Francis, Following Christ (Orbis Books, 2007):

“The Roman Catholic Church has its own story, an understanding of itself as the only vehicle of salvation, superior to all other ways. In the Catholic Church, this “Romanism” is grounded in a deeper “ism,” which is ideologically nurtured day in and day out: patriarchal clericalism. Clericalism connotes the conscious or unconscious concern to promote the particular interests of the priesthood (with its power, perks, and prestige) over all others in the church who are merely baptized. The patriarchal form of this clericalism limits all such power, perks, and prestige to males alone. This is justified by the ideologically grounded conviction that this divide is divinely sanctioned. It is further expressed in rituals and rubrics that sanction the divide canonically (all of which have been written by the clerics themselves). “Among its chief manifestations,” Donald Cozzens writes, “are an authoritarian style of ministerial leadership, a rigidly hierarchical worldview, and virtual identification of the holiness and grace of the church with the clerical state and thereby with the cleric himself.”

How would Thomas Merton respond? He would not judge, but instead use three verbs.

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What the eye truly sees

In my first year of graduate school in 1972, my patristics professor went to the chalkboard and wrote: patriarchy breeds clericalism, which breeds hierarchy, which breeds imperialism. He turned and said, “Welcome to the Roman Catholic Church.” Even fifty-four years later, I still remember that moment.

Merton had witnessed it from within, and long before.

What makes Merton more than just a commentator is that he first tried to become a Franciscan. It wasn’t because of Bonaventure, as some say. He was inspired by Étienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Dan Walsh at Columbia, who studied Duns Scotus, and Father Edmund Murphy at St Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan. Merton applied to the friars in 1940 and was accepted. Legalism entered the equation. He was advised to withdraw, so he did.

Note what he did next, because it is the part usually left out. Refusing the clerical form of the Franciscan life, he took the lay one, joining the Third Order of St Francis. Then he taught English at St Bonaventure College in Olean, New York, until he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani on 10 December 1941.

He spent twenty-seven years there, living inside the system Crosby describes. His abbot read his mail, and censors reviewed his manuscripts. On 20 January 1962, Dom Gabriel Sortais, the Abbot General of the Cistercians, told him to stop writing about nuclear war. The order reached him on 27 April. His book Peace in the Post-Christian Era was suppressed and did not appear until 2004, thirty-six years after his death. Merton followed the ban to the letter but found a loophole. He could not publish, but he could use a mimeograph. In June 1962, he made about 170 copies and sent them to Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Jim Forest, along with the 111 Cold War Letters he had been sharing the same way.

Here is someone sharing what he experienced, not just what he read in books.

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The instant the claim unraveled

Merton would focus on Cozzens’s last point: equating the Church’s holiness with the clerical state, and with the cleric himself. That belief broke for him on a street corner.

On 18 March 1958, in Louisville at Fourth and Walnut, Merton suddenly realized he loved the strangers around him and could not be separate from them. What he wrote afterward was not about comfort, but about breaking down barriers. He described waking from “a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.” Then he wrote a line that sounds more like doctrine than emotion: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men.”

He had been in the monastery in a system that told him his position brought him closer to God, but he wrote in his journal that this was an illusion. Crosby’s phrase, merely baptized, describes a difference Merton had already broken down from the inside.

He also used his own sharpest tool to examine this issue. In New Seeds of Contemplation, the false self is not evil, but a kind of wrapping: a person covers himself with experiences like bandages so that something invisible becomes visible. If you remove the bandages, nothing is left underneath. For Merton, clericalism is this process carried out by an institution, then given rules, laws, and funding. This is an even tougher judgment than Crosby’s. A false self cannot be fixed; it can only be let go.

When it comes to the idea of being the only way to salvation, the late Merton had moved on. In Calcutta in October 1968, two months before he died, he told an interfaith group that we are already united, but we imagine we are not, and what we need is to recover our original unity. On 2 December 1968, he stood before the reclining Buddhas at Polonnaruwa and said he was “jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things.” Everything is emptiness, and everything is compassion. He died eight days later, on 10 December 1968, twenty-seven years after he entered Gethsemani.

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Where he would pause and slow the argument

Judge is the risky verb. Cardijn’s insight was to give people what the Church had taught them to avoid. Merton’s point is that anyone using it should stay within the situation themselves.

He would not let priesthood turn into clericalism. He loved the Mass deeply, as shown throughout The Sign of Jonas. The problem, he would say, is when a role becomes an identity—when someone stops serving and starts claiming ownership. Crosby, a Capuchin, would agree. Francis was never ordained a priest and called the brothers minores, meaning the lesser ones. The Franciscans became clericalized within a generation of his death, which is a classic example of this problem. Merton would see Crosby’s chapter not as an outside attack, but as the Franciscan tradition doing its real work.

He would present the strongest opposing argument, which comes from the opening story. Cardijn was not saved from clericalism by laypeople, but by the highest cleric. The local hierarchy put him on trial, but the Pope overruled them and protected a lay movement that the bishops wanted to control. Someone who supports the hierarchy would say this proves that a teaching office outside local pressure keeps the Church from breaking apart, and Cardijn’s trip to Rome is the evidence. This argument is important and should be taken seriously. Merton would do so, but he would also point out that the same office that saved the JOC in 1925 silenced him on nuclear war in 1962. A system whose protection depends on who is in charge is not real protection—it is a gamble.

He would pause at the word “breeds.” My professor’s chalk line matches Merton’s argument; in his later work, Merton traces the same path from religious domination to the machinery of war. In his essay “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), he makes this point more clearly than most summaries do. Eichmann was examined and found sane. That is the real horror—not a man without conscience, but someone functioning well inside a legitimate system. Still, the word breeds describes a process, and a process happens outside us, letting the person with the chalk avoid blame. Merton titled his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. The word guilty is the key.

He would ask what criticism does to the critic. Anti-clericalism can create its own kind of clerical group, with its own status—the pride of seeing through things; its own rewards—the satisfaction of diagnosing problems; and its own followers—the people who have not yet understood. Just turning an ideology around does not make it something new. In 1966, Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote to him, saying the monastery was an escape from history and that he should leave. Their letters, published as At Home in the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Ruether, edited by Mary Tardiff, OP (Orbis Books, 1995), are the closest we have to Merton being questioned on this issue. He agreed with her on many points, but he did not leave. He believed that living on the margins is a real place to stand, not just a way to hide, and that someone who leaves in anger has not escaped the system—they have just moved it somewhere else.

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The final verb

Merton’s answer to Jim Forest on 21 February 1966, when Forest was burning out in the peace movement, is the most useful thing he ever wrote to anyone holding a true and exhausting critique:

Do not depend on the hope of results. … Concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

In Cardijn’s method, act is never just a personal matter, and Merton is not giving anyone an excuse to do nothing. He is describing how action can last when it meets an institution that refuses to change. Four things follow from this.

1. Make the diagnosis specific. Seeing clericalism as a general theory explains everything but changes nothing. But if clericalism is the reason a parish council has no control over its own budget, that is something you can work on this year.
2. Reject the inner version of clericalism—the part of us that wants power, perks, and the pride of being the one who pointed out the problem.
3. Stay, and look for the opening. Merton followed the ban but still mimeographed his book. He could have either obeyed completely or left, but he chose a different way.
4. Let go of deadlines for change. If you hold onto a critique for fifty years and expect it to have worked by now, it can become bitter.

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Cardijn died as a cardinal. It’s easy to see this as the system winning, silencing its critic by promoting him.

But look again. The three verbs made their way into the Council and out into the world, still alive in places where no priest is in charge. Cardijn was honored, but his method became independent.

That is more or less what Merton accepted, and it is both everything and nothing at the same time.

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Sources

• Michael H. Crosby, OFM Cap, Finding Francis, Following Christ (Orbis Books, 2007).
• John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 15 May 1961, §236.
• Pius X, Notre charge apostolique, 25 August 1910.
• Stefan Gigacz, The Leaven in the Council, chapter 2, on Le Sillon, the Mercier tribunal and Cardijn’s March 1925 audience: https://theleaven.com.au/2-lamennais-le-sillon-la-joc/
• Joseph Cardijn: biography, ordination, JOC founding, elevation 22 February 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cardijn
• Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); New Seeds of Contemplation (1961); Raids on the Unspeakable (1966); The Sign of Jonas (1953); The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973).
• Patricia A. Burton, “Forbidden Book: Thomas Merton’s Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” The Merton Annual 17, on the Sortais order of 20 January 1962: https://merton.org/ITMS/Annual/17/Burton25-57.pdf
• Daniel P. Horan, OFM, The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton: A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing (Ave Maria Press, 2014); reviewed by Br Nicholas Alan SSF, The Merton Journal 22.1 (Eastertide 2015), 39–41: https://thomasmertonsociety.org/Journal/22/22-1AlanRevHoran.pdf
• Donald Grayston, “Thomas Merton in Asia: The Polonnaruwa Illumination,” on the visit of 2 December 1968: https://thomasmertonsociety.org/Edge/Grayston.pdf
• Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Ruether, At Home in the World, ed. Mary Tardiff, OP (Orbis Books, 1995).
• Thomas Merton to James Forest, 21 February 1966, in The Hidden Ground of Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985).