George Weigel, who I believe considers himself a Catholic neoconservative, argues in First Things that had he lived past 1968, Thomas Merton might "have become one of the first Catholic neoconservatives."Though George stresses the conditional, he argues that Merton was ripe for following the path later trod by First Things founder, the late Richard John Neuhaus:

No one will ever know for sure where Thomas Merton would have ended up, ideologically speaking. But we do know that he was not altogether comfortable with the Catholic progressives of his own time, and we know that from his own hand. Merton and his old friend Robert Lax wrote each other a long series of what they called nonsense letters," crafted in a deliberately zany style but making serious points from time to time. Here, in that inimitable style, is Merton to Lax in 1967 on the subject of Catholic progressives:"I am truly spry and full of fun, but am pursued by the vilifications of progressed Catholics. Mark my word man there is no uglier species on the face of the earth than progressed Catholics, mean, frivol, ungainly, inarticulate, venomous, and bursting at the seams with progress into the secular cities and Teilhardian subways. The Ottavianis was bad but these are infinitely worse. You wait and see."Its hard not to see real prescience on Mertons part here. Todays progressive Catholic world seems to be coming unglued.

Hmmm...Doesn't seem to resonate with what I know of Merton, who may not have been so easy to characterize, then or in some imagined now. So, is this just co-opting the dead to fight battles among the living? Or trying to appropriate a saint adopted by the Catholic left for the Catholic right?H/T: RNS Roundup