“If you want a more just, more peaceful world, I encourage you to be a public peacemaker through the words and actions of the nonviolent Jesus, and in the spirit of Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigans and other practitioners of active nonviolence.”

Here are quotes from Thomas Merton, a few weeks before he died, about those engaged in “active nonviolence”:

“I am mad at my friends who are going around burning draft records. I think they are nuts…. They are ruining the whole thing they are trying to help….You have to get to a sort of meeting point where everybody can more or less agree.” [“Signs of Hope” by Gorden Oyer—page 108]

“Most activists do not go in for naked violence yet, but they will.”

“Non-violence has become all fouled-up and is turning into a sort of semi-violence.”  (Thomas Merton – Thomas Merton in Alaska – page 108 and 109)