Compassionate Fire
The letters of Thomas Merton and Catherine de Hueck Doherty
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edited by Fr. Robert Wild
$12.95 USD
128 pages — Trade Paperback, 5.5" x 8.5"
Ave Maria Press, 2009
ISBN 1-59471-216-6
Just after Thomas Merton's death in 1968, Catherine Doherty wrote to Merton's abbot: “In some strange mysterious way I never quite understood, [he] was in part my spiritual son.” The friendship originated when Merton worked at Friendship House in Harlem, and this volume of warm, candid correspondence traces nearly three decades of friendship through thirty-one surviving letters — fourteen written by Merton, and seventeen by Doherty. Doherty's previously unpublished letters are now brought together with those of Merton. The exchange reveals Merton's development from a young man searching for his place in God's plan, to a monk seeking God through solitude and work for social justice.
About Catherine Doherty
Catherine Doherty used her heritage as a Russian Christian as a matrix for responding to the needs of Christian life and work in the modern world. Her own personal pilgrimage led her to be “poor with the poor Christ” in the slums of Toronto and in Harlem; and later to the establishing of the world-wide Madonna House Apostolate. A dedicated wife and mother, Catherine was also a prolific writer of hundreds of articles, a best-selling author of dozens of books, a renowned national speaker, and a pioneer of social justice. Catherine Doherty's cause for canonization as a saint is now under consideration by the Catholic Church.
About the Editor
Fr. Robert Wild is a priest of Madonna House and lives as a poustinik. Having published a number of his own books, he helped in the editing of Catherine Doherty's early works and now serves as Postulator for her cause for canonization. Fr. Wild was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Buffalo in 1967, and had experience as both a Trappist and as a Carthusian before ordination.
