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"Thomas Merton, whose writings I detest, was a Communist prior to his conversion to Catholicism. Now I am wondering if he was really part of the plot described here. It would not surprise me at all. For some reason I could never fathom, he is held in great esteem by the post Vatican II Church. And he was a great buddy of.... none other than our infamous Milwaukee archbishop Weakland."

Even years ago when his stuff was really popular with progressive Catholics, I could never get excited about it. As the Fundamentalist friends I had at the time would say, "I felt a check in my spirit." He just felt PHONY. He could have been, and probably was "sincere," but what he wrote wasn't what the Church was teaching, and green as I was at the time, I could see that.

Wasn't it Weakland who discovered Merton's body, after he met with that fatal "accident"?

When I read a biography of Thomas Merton, I was very struck by several things - his closeness to the political activists of the 1960s, some of whom had links to several intelligence communities - his links to the Buddhist community, which might have merely been an interest on his part, but which also again links to the international Communist movement in South East Asia - and Merton's strange and sudden death. The accident which killed him looked exactly like the means used by various agencies to put people out of the way.