Parade of Whoppers about Thomas Merton’s Death

What better measure could we find of a Deep State hit job than the lies that have been told about it? To take some prominent examples, the evidence could hardly be clearer that President John F. Kennedy was shot from the front, but the chosen patsy was behind him, so we are told that he was shot from the back. Robert Kennedy was shot from behind, but, in this case, the patsy was in front of him, so we are told that he was shot from the front. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot by a sniper concealed in the bushes behind a rooming house, which was behind the motel in which he was staying, but the chosen patsy in this case was booked into that rooming house, so we are told that the chosen patsy perched himself precariously on the rim of a bathtub beneath a bathroom window to shoot King expertly in the neck.

These murders all took place within the United States, and still the press and the authorities got by with foisting upon the public a number of falsehoods about them that are rather easily shown to be falsehoods by anyone with the enterprise to look into the matter. The Catholic monk and notable spiritual writer and antiwar leader, Thomas Merton, died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 53 while attending an interfaith monastic conference at a Red Cross meeting center in Samutprakarn, Thailand, a suburb of Bangkok, on the afternoon of December 10, 1968. It was the same year in which Bobby Kennedy and King were killed and the same president was in the White House, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The press had an excuse for their initial sketchy reporting of his death; it was a long ways away. But their reporting has not improved in the ensuing half-century,

Merton was last seen entering the cottage in which he was residing on the third day of the conference from about five minutes walking distance behind him by Fr. Celestine Say of the Philippines, whose room was the only other one on the first floor of the cottage. The time was just before 2 p.m., and Merton was in the company of Fr. François de Grunne of Belgium. There is nothing available from de Grunne as to what transpired in the cottage in the intervening five minutes before Say’s arrival, although the Thai police are known to have taken a statement from him. Say has written in letters that, from the time he arrived, he heard not a single sound from Merton, even though the walls to the rooms were only temporary netting, with sheets hung up to afford a modicum of privacy. Acoustically, the first floor was essentially one room with the exception of a full bathroom and a half bathroom. Say said that previously he could hear Merton walking in his bare feet in his room. The full bathroom, which had a shower facility, was off the parlor between the two bedrooms. The half bath, along the same wall, was entered from Merton’s room.

The conference was due to resume at 4:30 p.m. De Grunne came down at around 4:00 for several different stated reasons that contradict one another and discovered Merton lying on his back on the floor of his room and not moving. Merton was wearing what appeared to be the bottom half of shorty pajamas and a floor fan manufactured by Hitachi was lyng across his pelvis. His body was perfectly straight and his arms were down by his side, with neither hand close to the fan. From photographs taken by Say from two angles, before anything was moved, Merton’s left shoulder appears to be slightly under the horizontal rod of a wooden clothes rack, which is about an inch above his shoulder. There was a bleeding wound in the back of his head that was discovered later. He was clearly dead.

Rubbadubdub, Merton in a Tub

A bare-boned version of those facts is now on Merton’s Wikipedia page, which has been updated based upon the discoveries in The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, by Hugh Turley and the current writer, which was published on March 7 of this year. In the intervening half century a truly amazing number of stories have been told about how Thomas Merton died. The first of our examples comes from the home of the whopper, itself. Yes, I speak of the web site of the Central Intelligence Agency. Curiously, it is a clipping from the May 23, 1980, issue of the Catholic Review, the newspaper of the diocese of Nashville, Tennessee. The article’s title is, “Some speculate that Merton was killed.” Written by one Joseph Sweat, the second paragraph states:

Merton, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer, was electrocuted when he came in contact with an electric fan while bathing in a hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand. He was in that city to visit the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhists.

The article has the following quote from an anonymous “close friend” of Merton, “I have reason to believe some agent, perhaps an overzealous native of the region with only loose ties to the CIA, saw a golden opportunity to help the cause and tipped the fan over into Tom’s bath water.” The article continues, “The cursory investigation made by Thai authorities on that December day in 1968 shed little light on the subject. Their report listed the death as accidental and said simply that investigators were unable to determine whether the fan fell into the tub or Merton inadvertently touched it while getting out.”

About the only truth in the article is that the investigation by the Thai authorities did shed little light on the subject, but they did not list the death as accidental. They concluded, without performing an autopsy, that Merton died of “heart failure” and that he was already dead when he came into contact with the fan, which, coincidentally, happened to have “a defective electric cord installed inside its stand.” Furthermore, for what it is worth, Merton, earlier in the same Asian trip, had already visited the Dalai Lama where he lives in exile in India before arriving in Bangkok for the conference.

The Sweat article and others like it, and the reaction to them, are the subject of our book’s Chapter 11 entitled, “The Catholic News Service’s Straw Men.”

Speaking of straw men, check out this account from Andrew Young’s book, originally published in 1996 entitled An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America:

Merton was found electrocuted by a handheld hair dryer that had fallen into his bathwater.  This was especially suspicious since Merton was bald and would have had no reason to use a hair dryer.  He was found dead in the bathtub.

You have to wonder who writes these things. Where on earth could Sweat or Young have obtained such misinformation? Put another way, who could have written the poppycock that went out over the names of Joseph Sweat and Andrew Young? Could it be from the same source as the one used by Father C. John McCloskey, research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, DC? Here’s what he said in a review of Merton’s famous memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain:

Merton died on December 10, 1968, there in Thailand, when a fan fell into his bathtub and electrocuted him.

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It’s almost enough to make you believe that there must have been a tub of water involved in Merton’s death somehow, in spite of the clear evidence to the contrary, and we’re just getting warmed up. This is from a 2015 article in a New York state publication called The Highlands Current:

On Dec. 10, 1968, Thomas Merton was accidentally electrocuted as he stepped from the bathtub in his cottage at Suwanganiwas, the Red Cross Center in Samut Prakan, Thailand, having presented a paper at an interfaith conference of monastics there just that morning. It was 27 years to the day since he had entered the Abbey at Gethsemani, where his body was returned for burial.

In this case, the remarkable thing is how accurate it is with respect to all the details of lesser importance than the precise details of Merton’s death. He was in a cottage where and when they said he was. There just was no bathtub there for Merton to have been stepping from.

Here’s another one from the same script on a web page called Women of Grace:

On December 10, 1968, Merton was attending an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks in Bangkok, Thailand when he stepped out of his bathtub and was accidentally electrocuted by an electric fan.

Respected mainstream magazines are hardly immune from the Merton misinformation disease, either. This little nugget is from Forbes magazine:

Religious writer Thomas Merton died when a radio fell in the bathtub.

A radio? That’s as bad as a hair dryer, but you must admit that it does sound a lot more plausible than that a Hitachi floor fan that had been working perfectly well during the first two days of the conference somehow turned defective when no one was looking and then found its way across Merton’s dry, supine body.

Some sources just say that Merton came out of a bath, which, to me, suggests bathtub, but I suppose that it could be a shower bath. For instance, there is Biography.com:

On December 10, 1968, while attending an interfaith conference in Bangkok, Thailand, Merton stepped out of the bath and was electrocuted by an electric fan that had either short-circuited or had a break in the cord.

Biography also says that Merton was a journalist, when he really had no more use for that breed than I do. He should properly be described as a “writer.”

Then we have the “Thomas Merton” page on Religion Wiki:

Merton died in Bangkok on December 10, 1968 after touching a poorly grounded electric fan while stepping out of his bath.

One more example from that genre comes from a web site called The Famous People:

On 10 December 1968 Merton was to attend an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks when he came out of his bath to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire to get electrocuted and die a painful death.

Before leaving the oft-told story of the bathtub that never was, we must mention the man who might well be the most prominent living professed admirer of Thomas Merton. We speak of the media-darling Jesuit priest, James J. Martin (no relation to the present writer), editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine, America, out of New York City and consultant to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications. Martin most recently made the news when he attended the Roman Catholic-themed gala put on by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that scandalized a lot of traditional Catholics, showing up in his usual cassock and proudly reporting that his garb was mistaken by some as just a snazzy costume for the occasion. You can see by searching the Internet using the terms “James Martin, SJ, Thomas Merton,” that he has written quite a lot about Merton and with the same search on YouTube that he has had a good deal to say orally about Merton and his death, as well. This is from his 2006 book, Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints:

A cry was heard from his room and he was found in his bedroom, lying on the floor and grasping an electric fan.  Merton had come out of the bathtub, slipped on the tiled floor, and grabbed a fan to break his fall.  The fan electrocuted him and he died instantly.

Then we have this description of the death from him in an article for Loyola Press:

A few weeks later on December 10, 1968, at an ecumenical conference in Bangkok, on a warm day while taking a bath, he slipped in the bathtub, grabbed an electric fan and was electrocuted.

It’s almost enough to shake one’s faith in the word of Fr. Martin, SJ.

The Shower-Fan One-Two

The standard explanation for Merton’s supposed electrocution by a faulty fan, though, is that he was emerging or had just emerged from a shower when he grabbed the lethal fan (that curiously ended up on top of him, but they don’t usually tell you that). The names of the writers who have told that story would rival in number the names on a page of a telephone book (for older readers familiar with what those are). We shall just hit the highlights of those writers, and what better place to begin than with…James J. Martin, SJ? This is from the December 10, 2008, issue of America magazine:

Forty years ago today, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and perhaps the most popular American Catholic writer in history, stepped out of a bathroom shower during a visit to Bangkok. Slipping on the wet floor, he grabbed a poorly wired fan for support and was electrocuted.

One really must wonder if he is going to repeat that story on the fiftieth anniversary of the death coming up this December, or perhaps he will tell the story that he told on YouTube in 2012:

He takes a shower.  On his way out of the shower, he slips, grabs a fan, and is electrocuted.

Notice that in his previous telling, Merton was completely out of the shower, not coming out of it, but one must gather that the wet floor and the fan, in either case, were right there in the bathroom, which, as we have pointed out, is not where he was found dead. He was found in his bedroom. The bathroom with the shower, we repeat, was separated from the bedroom by a small parlor.

Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, is the home of the Thomas Merton Center. On the university’s web site one can find an article entitled “A Brief Overview of Thomas Merton’s Writings and Spirituality.” The author of that piece is Fr. George Kilcourse, Director of the Thomas Merton Centennial and Bellarmine professor of theology. In that article, Fr. Kilcourse makes the following statement:

[Merton] had just presented his paper, “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives,” at the Bangkok conference and returned to the cottage where he was staying at a Red Cross Center. Faulty wiring electrocuted him as he directed a fan’s air flow after his shower.

Notice that there’s no wet floor causing Merton to slip and grab the faulty fan in this case. There were no known witnesses, so no one knows how that fan ended up on top of Merton, but these two Catholic priests would have you believe that they do, even though what they “know” is quite different.

Here are some more variations on the shower/bath theme, and in almost every case the writer engages in the purest speculation, which he or she represents as a presentation of known facts:

“…he went back to his room, took a shower and in doing so accidentally electrocuted himself,” - Esther de Waal, A Retreat with Thomas Merton, 1992

“Merton took a shower around 1:30 in the afternoon and, in an attempt to move a large fan, was electrocuted…” Lawrence S. Cunningham, Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision, 1999

“…accidentally electrocuted by a fan while stepping out of his bath.” Lexington Herald Leader, 2014

“…returned to his room; took a shower; bumped into an old upright electric fan; and was accidentally electrocuted…” John Dear, Thomas Merton Peacemaker, 2015

“He took a shower and, afterwards, slipped on the wet bathroom floor; he grabbed a rotary fan for balance and was electrocuted.” Paul Elie, “Thomas Merton and the Eternal Search,” The New Yorker Magazine, March 5, 2015

“…electrocuted by a fan while getting out of a bath.” John L. Allen, Jr., Crux, Nov. 9, 2015

“…he died by an electric shock when he touched a live wire in a bare floor lamp…on December 5th. He had been taking a shower before an evening conference….” Fr. Jacob Restrick, OP, Sister Mary Baruch the Early Years, 2015

“He had taken a bath and with wet feet walked across a terra cotta floor to pull an electric fan over to his bed. The fan had a faulty wire, it shocked him, then fell over him…” James T. Baker, Under the Sign of the Water Bearer, 2015

That centennial year of Merton’s birth, 2015, was a very bad year when it comes to credible writing about his death. As it happens, though, the champion of scholarly irresponsibility concerning his death, or at least rivaling James Martin, SJ, came from the year before. The writer is Linus Mundy and his book is Simply Merton: Wisdom from His Journals:

In 1968 he traveled to the East, met with the Dalai Lama, and participated in a monastic renewal conference in Bangkok, where he died through an accident.  He was electrocuted coming out of the shower in his bedroom, apparently slipping and grabbing onto a large, stand-up fan with faulty wiring.

What’s particularly egregious about that one is that the inset quote of the two sentences are Mundy’s, and he claims to be quoting the estimable Ursula King from her book, Christian Mystics. As it happens, she has written two books with that short title, Christian Mystics: The Spiritual Heart of the Christian Tradition in 1998 and Christian Mystics: The Lives and Legacies Throughout the Ages in 2001. One can only deduce from his bibliography that he is using the earlier of the two books, but she says the same thing about Merton’s death in both books, which is just the first of the two sentences in Mundy’s quote. Mundy supplied the shower-in-the-bedroom passage on his own, which he had to have picked up from somewhere else.

Giving these writers and several others that we mention in our book the benefit of the doubt, what they likely do not know is that the story that Merton was wet from a just-completed shower originated with Merton’s secretary at his home Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, Brother Patrick Hart, in a postscript to The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, published in 1973, which Brother Patrick co-edited. The one possible exception is the Notre Dame emeritus professor of theology, Cunningham, because he, like Brother Patrick, uses the spurious time of 1:30 p.m. for the shower, when Merton was actually still in the main building finishing his lunch. Brother Patrick had written 2:30 p.m. in an earlier draft, but moved it up an hour when America magazine editor, John Moffitt, who had been staying in the same cottage, after reading the draft (which we have in our possession), persuaded him that the time of Merton’s death was closer to 2:00 p.m. than the original 3:00 p.m. that he had written. This is another matter that we discuss in some detail in our book.

Here is the key passage as finally published, which Brother Patrick created from his own imagination. (“Louis” was the religious name that Merton was given upon his admission into the abbey.)

Father Louis returned to his cottage about 1:30 and proceeded to take a shower before retiring for a rest. Standing barefoot on the terrazzo floor he apparently had reached for the large standing fan (either to turn it on or pull it closer to the bed) when he received the full 220 volts of direct current. (This is normal voltage for Bangkok.) He collapsed on the terrazzo floor and the large fan tumbled over on top of him.

He is right that Merton was barefooted and that the current was 220 volts, which is the standard in most of the world, but that is a long way from what is normally considered “high voltage,” which is 35,000 volts or greater. As electricity transmitted over lines and not from a battery, it was almost certainly not direct current but was the typical alternating current in households in most of the world. Brother Patrick’s key fabrication, however, is the shower, which Merton absolutely did not take. There’s no mention of a shower from any witness nor in the Thai police report or in contemporary news reports. Until changes were made reflecting the discoveries in our book, Wikipedia said that Merton was “stepping out of his bath” when he encountered the fan, and used a Time magazine article of a week after the event as its source. However, that article, about the death of Protestant theologian Karl Barth and Merton, who both died on December 10, says nothing about any sort of bath. Brother Patrick is the man who, in effect, added water to the Merton death recipe, and he did it almost five years after the event.

The man who really gave currency to Brother Patrick’s shower story, carefully not attributing it to him or to anyone, was Michael Mott with his 1984 authorized biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. His key passage, which is on page 567 of his ponderous though popular tome, is surprisingly equivocal: “What seems the most likely reconstruction is that Merton came out of the shower either wearing a pair of drawers or naked. His feet may have been wet still from the shower.”

Mott had to have known that what he wrote was false. He had seen the death scene photograph with Merton in his shorts and he certainly knew that the shower story originated with Brother Patrick Hart. The various shortcomings in the Mott account will be the main subject of my presentation next week at the Thomas Merton Symposium in Rome at the Pontifical Antheneum of St. Anselm, “What We Know about Thomas Merton’s Death.”

David Martin

June 7, 2018

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