Thomas Merton and the Origins of the Thomas Merton Center
2020 has been a challenging year, spent out in the streets protecting Black lives and spent sheltering at home working harder than ever, in both reflection and action. In February, we launched the #DropColcom campaign against this local white nationalist foundation, and at the start of the pandemic, TMC staff and board collaborated with organizers city-wide to develop Pittsburgh Mutual Aid. Organizing with the statewide PA Poor People’s Campaign, we’ve demanded equitable solutions to the pandemic and trained election protection workers for November 3rd. Earlier in the year, TMC planned one of the first car-only rallies to decarcerate Allegheny County Jail and has continuously pushed for legislation to allow access to driver’s licenses in PA, regardless of immigration status. We’ve hosted White Accomplice workshops and an anti-racist book club, and welcome new participants in both in 2021. Meanwhile, we’re repairing the roof on our Garfield thrift store and looking for a new home for our offices and meeting space. For nearly 50 years the Thomas Merton Center has fought to break down the power structures limiting our planet’s and our communities’ ability to thrive. The world we have fought for since our inception is one without bombs, imperialist wars, or the war economy that scars the land with fracking and fossil fuels. We envision a green planet where people care for each other and the land that cares for us. Our work strives to center the dignity and human rights of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. We can’t do any of it without your support and the legacy of nearly 50 years of tireless dedication to justice.
The Thomas Merton Center was founded in 1972 by a group of Roman Catholics who felt their faith impelled them to oppose the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, and social and racial injustice. They looked to prior examples of faith-based activism like the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Marin, and its earliest members came from such Pittsburgh organizations as the Association of Pittsburgh Priests, CEASE (Catholics for an End to Asian Slaughter and Exploitation), and the Catholic Interracial Council, with Molly Rush and Larry Kessler serving as its first two directors.
The Center’s namesake, Thomas Merton, was a cloistered Trappist monk with an unusually restless and acute intellect and writing talent. Merton published not only books on spirituality but also essays in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper. He opposed the Vietnam War and American racism. He became, as one writer has put it, “a kind of ‘pastor’ to the peace movement of the early sixties.”
Merton had spent considerable time with the Dalai Lama and his last talk, delivered at a Bangkok conference, was entitled “Marxism and Monasticism.”
Merton remains relevant to the Center as someone who refused to “settle” in some spiritual comfort zone. He rebelled against an institutionally induced quietism, and insisted that conscience should force each person to “apprehend the truth, say it, express it in their lives.” Years later one of the Center’s first members, Father Jack O’Malley, characterized the organization’s role as, like Merton’s, “doing the witness, calling attention to a problem, educating people on issues.”
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