December 7 Clarification of Thought Program on Thomas Merton

“Why What You Think You Know About Thomas Merton’s Death is Wrong”

Speaker: Hugh Turley

Date: Friday, December 7, 2018 @ 7:30 p.m.

Place: Dorothy Day Catholic Worker: 503 Rock Creek Church Rd. NW, Washington, DC, 20010.

Hugh Turley will present what he and his co-author David Martin learned from their research of Thomas Merton’s death. Their book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, was published in March of this year, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Merton’s death. Merton died suddenly and mysteriously near Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968, the same year that two other major opponents of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated.

This presentation will examine the official documents from Thailand, the reports of eyewitnesses, and rare death-scene photographs that they have uncovered. This important evidence has been ignored by Merton scholars for 50 years. Turley and Martin also found documents that appear to have been fabricated in order to create a false explanation for Merton’s death.

Mr. Turley will discuss the origins of several false stories about Merton’s death, stories that have been repeated so often that they have become widely accepted as fact. Once the false information is exposed, the logical explanation of how Thomas Merton died becomes obvious.

More information is available here.

Hugh Turley, as a volunteer columnist for the Hyattsville Life and Times, is a winner of the National Newspaper Association award for best serious column, small-circulation, non-daily division.

For more info contact the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker: 202-882-9649