"I believe in . . . the holy catholic church."

I recently had new reasons to ponder what all "catholic"
could mean in the Apostles Creed. I was doing research for a paper and
evaluating those of others written for the International Thomas Merton Society
conference in Chicago last month. The restless writer's conversion to
Catholicism was among the most celebrated of the last century, a point
conference-goers took for granted. Trying to make sense of his conversion from
the margins, as it were, I asked this: to which Catholicism--to which kind of
Catholicism--did Merton convert?

With little time at the conference and even less space here,
I chose and choose to pick up on a distinction, or a dual definition, that has
stayed with me 60-plus years since I sought and accepted tutelage from Jesuit
father Walter J. Ong of St. Louis. Let me pass it on anew.

In numbers of books and articles, including in America (April 7, 1990), Ong presented
two images relating to two definitions. Think of "catholic" as a compass and/or
as yeast. Ong questioned why the Latin--western, Roman--church borrowed the
Greek word katholikos instead of the
Latin vernacular universalis, whose
meaning more westerners favor. Ong did not disagree with the concept of the
"universal" church, but he found it limiting--in part because it intends to
limit. Its fuzzy etymology "suggests a compass to make a circle around a
central point." It is inclusive because the drawn circle includes everything
within it. Fine. But "by the same token it also excluded everything outside"
and is subtly negative.

When the hell-raising young convert Thomas Merton turned and
saw the gates of the monastery close behind him, he wanted to exclude the world
he had known. Thousands of pages of his letters and writings make clear his
intention. Yet through the decades--as Merton involved himself in radical
social action from within the hermitage at Gethsemani and became "Father
Interfaith" in his embrace of Hindus, Buddhists, other kinds of Christians and
anyone else spiritually embraceable--he was being "catholic" in Ong's other
sense.

Katholikos is
"unequivocally positive. It means simply "through-the-whole" or
"throughout-the-whole." A bit riskily, Ong ventures that perhaps the Latin
entered the Greek church because katholikos
"resonated so well" with Jesus' parable in Matthew 13:33: "The reign of God is
like yeast," a "limitless, growing reality" that affects everything but does
not convert everything into itself. It does not spoil the dough; it makes it
more nourishing. The church catholic is to "interpenetrate" cultures not on its
own terms but interactively.

That, Ong could argue, is why Merton and his Catholicism(s)
led him to interpenetrate cultures of mysticism, poetry, social action, other
religions, learning and world affairs. At the Merton conference, these
represented interpenetrations showed how after his conversion Merton was
Catholic in both senses: of the church both universalis
and katholikos. This vision did not
let him rest until his last moment, and it's why he still stirs others.