On 2 October 1962, the community at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky began a novena for the second Vatican Council. A few days later, musing about Pope John talking to diplomats at the opening of the Council, Thomas Merton wrote in his diary that John insisted that the people of the world wanted peace and that God would judge severely rulers who failed in their responsibility. When his abbot told him to publish nothing more on war and peace, Merton got around the censure by circulating his anti-war writings in manuscript form using a Xerox copier. He endured the nonsense of his brother Trappists building a fallout shelter for themselves. “It is sickening to think,” he wrote, “that my writing against nuclear war is regarded as scandalous, and this folly of building a shelter