ARTICLES

Milosz on Catholicism

Correspondence to Thomas Merton in 1967

Milosz: The "Mass in English [is] a mistake. Think of millions who feel deprived of something, like myself: immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italians in Germany and France, Spaniards--workers all over Europe, Mexicans in this country. And the chasm between Latin America and the U.S. will be deeper. Why to 'protestantise' the Church in those aspects which are the least valid? Why not leave the Mass in Latin in those countries which are used to it.... If the Mass should be in the vernacular now, when in Europe and Northern America literacy is a rule, then Latin in the epochs when the majority was illiterate was a monstrosity."

Merton's response: "As for the new liturgy: these are people around I suppose who would be ready to assassinate, morally, anyone who admitted that he did not like English in the liturgy. I am not saying I like it or don't like it. We have some of the readings in English in the High Mass, and that is ok except the translations are terribly trite. But when I find monks wanting to throw out Latin altogether I hesitate. After all, our Latin liturgy is pretty good and holds up year after year, and the chant is, as far as I am concerned, inexhaustibly good. I defy them to replace that with anything one tenth as good."

Milosz: "Maybe I am wrong but it seems to me the Roman Church aspires now to the situation of Protestantism, which cannot be worse. My prediction--and I wish I were wrong--is that the number of homeless religious minds will be rapidly increasing."

Merton: "Anything you may be tempted to think about the Church, I think myself, and much more so as I am in constant contact with all of it. The boy scout atmosphere, the puerile optimism about the 'secular city,' and all the pathetic maneuvers to be accepted by the 'world,'--I see all this and much more."


On Pope John Paul II

The papacy is a rock on which the pure can take shelter. But sinful people press in upon it from all sides, morally suspect, crazed, grinding their hips to rock music, open to delirium, crime, and television. From the point of view of the Church, there are entire armies of them, embraced by a universal licentiousness: homosexuals, lesbians, women who have had one or more abortions, men who are responsible for those abortions one way or another; women and men whose means of livelihood are their genitalia; everyone who sleeps with someone outside a Church-licensed matrimonial union; divorced men and divorced women. Isn't that enough? But there are also the uncounted millions of men and women who don't adhere to the ban on contraceptive devices. I compare the papacy, not the Church, to a rock. For where, on which side, are we--we who are not baptized in the Roman rite? Don't we recognize ourselves in those enumerated categories? And don't we look upon the teachings of the Vatican with respect and humble envy as something that is too elevated for us ordinary mortals?

The Pope in white, powerful, attractive image of man above the earth, above our monkey-like masses mired in lusts. Were he a dried-out old man, the image would not exert such power; but he is a strapping man, he belongs to the crowd of the passerby, while, at the same time, he does not belong. He returns in dreams. Would it be worthwhile, as an American writer has suggested half jokingly, to shoot him, so that a modern Pope would take the place of this conservative, a Pope who would permit contraceptives, would rescind the celibacy of priests, introduce divorce, grant equality to women by giving them the right to become priests? John Paul II as a "sign of refusal." They have already wanted to get rid of him; and we know who. (A Year of the Hunter, 1994)


On the Pope's visit to America

The newspapers were generally more favorable than the television commentators, whose progressive glibness in defense of dissent ought to shame dissenting Catholics...That same day, when the Pope flew from San Francisco to Detroit, one of the participants in a television discussion, a Jesuit professor of theology from Berkeley, spoke out in clear opposition to the papal teachings. According to him, there is no right to deny participation in the Eucharist to people who have obtained divorces and entered into non-Catholic marriages. I am curious about what the bishop whose diocese includes Berkeley will do. In compliance with the papal admonition administered to the three hundred bishops in Los Angeles, he ought to apply sanctions. But that would mean publicity, notoriety. So most likely he will do nothing. (A Year of the Hunter, 1994)