The Environmentalist Monk Who Inspired Pope Francis

March 30, 2016
By Nick Fouriezos
OZY

Browsing through a New York City bookstore in early 1941, influential editor Robert Giroux bumped into Thomas Merton, an old college pal from his days on The Columbia Review. Merton told Giroux that The New Yorker wanted him to write a piece about Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky where he had “made a retreat.”