"Despite his close identification with pacifist groups, Merton preferred not to label himself a pacifist and never rebuked those who had reluctantly resorted to violence in self-defense. He also accepted the possibility that just wars may have occurred in earlier times, when the technology of warfare didn't inevitably cause numerous noncombatant casualties, and might still occur in the modern context in the case of oppressed people fighting for liberation. But, as he wrote Dorothy Day in 1962, the issue of the just war 'is pure theory. . . . In practice all the wars that are [happening] . . . are shot through and through with evil, falsity, injustice, and sin so much so that one can only with difficulty extricate the truths that may be found here and there in the 'causes' for which the fighting is going on.'

"Neither did he insist that a Christian was obliged to be a conscientious objector, yet the highest form of Christian discipleship, he was convinced, required the renunciation of violence: 'The Christian does not need to fight and indeed it is better that he should not fight, for insofar as he imitates his Lord and Master, he proclaims that the Messianic Kingdom has come and bears witness to the presence of the Kyrios Pantocrator [Lord of Creation] in mystery, even in the midst of the conflicts and turmoil of the world.' What he found valuable in the just-war tradition was not its acceptance of violent methods, but its insistence that evil must be actively opposed. It was this that drew him to Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and groups involved in active nonviolent combat for social justice.

"While his vocation made an active role in the peace movement impossible, through correspondence and occasional face-to-face visits Merton played a pastoral role among peace activists that was perhaps even more important than his public role as an author, and one in which he could communicate without having to worry about getting his words past the censors.

"For all his respect for peace activists, however, he was aware that engagement in any movement, however justified its concerns, was not without danger. He retained a vivid memory of equivalent activities from his student days at Cambridge and Columbia. 'I have the feeling of being a survivor of the shipwrecked thirties,' he noted, 'one of the few that has kept my original face before this present world was born.'

"There was always the danger in any movement, including those with a religious dimension, of its participants becoming zealots, thus losing contact with conscience and their own perceptions and instead being carried along by group-defined attitudes and ideology in which critical thought is supplanted by slogans, rhetoric, and peer group pressure. As Merton wrote in Seasons of Celebration, one had to be 'on guard against a kind of blind and immature zeal — the zeal of the enthusiast or of the zealot . . . who "loses himself" in the cause in such a way that he can no longer "find himself at all." Such a person is "alienated by the violence of his own enthusiasm: and by that very violence he tends to produce the same kind of alienation in others." '

"If the deadening influence of ideology was one problem, he found that the absence of compassion crippled many protest actions. Those involved in protest tend to become enraged with those they see as being responsible for injustice and violence and even toward those who uphold the status quo. Without compassion, Merton pointed out, the protester tends to become more and more centered in anger and, far from contributing to anyone's conversion, can easily become an obstacle to changing the attitude of others."