Posted on 03/12/2012 2:25:37 PM PDT by NYer
There was something awful about the year 1968.
I was but a lad at the time, merely seven or eight years of age, but almost everything on the T.V. terrified me. Terrible reports from Viet Nam, (where my father was at the time), the Tet Offensive nightly reports of death and casualties (was my daddy one of the ones killed?). Riots and anti-war demonstrations in America’s cities and college campuses. The first stirrings of militant feminism. A second hideous year of hippies with their “summer of love” nonsense, which was just an excuse for selfish, spoiled college kids to get high, fornicate and think they were some how doing a noble thing. There was the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, later that year also of Robert Kennedy, the riots and burning cities that followed King’s assassination. I remember my mother who was teaching on the South Side of Chicago have to flee for her life and finally be rescued by and escorted out by police. There was the ramp up to the yet more hideous Woodstock festival that would happen the following year. 1968 was a terrible year, a year that I do not think we ever recovered from. It popularized the sexual revolution, drug use and lots of just plain bad behavior. In the Church sweeping changes were underway and this added to the uncertainty of those times. Even if one will argue they were necessary changes they came at a terrible times and fed into the notions of revolution. And then the whole revolt against the magnificent and prophetic Humane Vitae, thus ushering a spirit of open dissent that still devastates the Church.
1968 was a terrible year. When I mention that year and shake my head, I often get puzzled looks. But I stand by my claim, 1968 was a cultural tsunami from which we have not yet recovered.
Thus my interest was peaked when I saw an article by James Cardinal Stafford also singling out that year also for being a year of intense darkness. I’d like to share some excerpts of the Cardinal’s article. He focuses particularly on the devastating effects of angry and open dissent set loose in August of that Year by theologians and priests who rebelled against Humanae Vitae. In that decisive moment the Cardinal sees that the violent revolution raging outside the Church decisively entered within her and that we still real for this today.
English historian Paul Johnson dubs 1968 as the year of “America’s Suicide Attempt.” It included the Tet offensive in Vietnam with its tsunami-like effects in American life and politics, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee; the tumult in American cities on Palm Sunday weekend; and the June assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Southern California. It was also the year in which Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical letter on transmitting human life, Humanae Vitae (HV). He met immediate, premeditated, and unprecedented opposition from some American theologians and pastors. By any measure, 1968 was a bitter cup….
The summer of 1968 is a record of God’s hottest hour. The memories are not forgotten; they are painful. They remain vivid like a tornado in the plains of Colorado. They inhabit the whirlwind where God’s wrath dwells. In 1968, something terrible happened in the Church. Within the ministerial priesthood, ruptures developed everywhere among friends which never healed. And the wounds continue to affect the whole Church. The dissent, together with the leaders’ manipulation of the anger they fomented, became a supreme test. It changed fundamental relationships within the Church. It was a Peirasmòs [i.e. a trial, a test of faith] for many.
During the height of the 1968 Baltimore riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I had made an emergency call to [an] inner-city pastor…He described the view from the rectory while speaking on the phone…his parish was becoming a raging inferno. He said, “From here I see nothing but fire burning everywhere. Everything has been set ablaze. The Church and rectory are untouched thus far.” He did not wish to leave or be evacuated. His voice betrayed disillusionment and fear. Later we learned that the parish buildings survived.
Memories of the physical violence in the city in April 1968 [following the king Assassination] helped me to name what had happened in August 1968 [in the explosion of dissent against Humanae Vitae]. Ecclesial dissent can become a kind of spiritual violence in its form and content.
What do I mean? Look at the results of the two events. After the violent 1968 Palm Sunday weekend, civil dialogue in metropolitan Baltimore broke down and came to a stop. It took a back seat to open anger and recriminations between whites and blacks. The…priests’ August gathering [against Humane Vitae] gave rise to its own ferocious acrimony. Conversations among the clergy…became contaminated with fear. Suspicions among priests were chronic. Fears abounded. And they continue. The Archdiocesan priesthood lost something of the fraternal whole which Baltimore priests had known for generations. 1968 marked the hiatus of the generational communio….Priests’ fraternity had been wounded. Pastoral dissent had attacked the Eucharistic foundation of the Church. Its nuptial significance had been denied. Some priests saw bishops as nothing more than Roman mannequins.
Cardinal Shehan later reported that on Monday morning, August 5, he “was startled to read in the Baltimore Sun that seventy-two priests of the Baltimore area had signed the Statement of Dissent.” What he later called “the years of crisis” began for him during that hot… August evening in 1968….Its unhinging consequences continue. Abusive, coercive dissent has become a reality in the Church and subjects her to violent, debilitating, unproductive, chronic controversies.
The violence of the initial disobedience was only a prelude to further and more pervasive violence. …Contempt for the truth, whether aggressive or passive, has become common in Church life. Dissenting priests, theologians and laypeople have continued their coercive techniques. From the beginning, the press has used them to further its own serpentine agenda. (These are excerpts, Click HERE for the full article).
Yes, a terrible year, 1968. And we have yet to recover. Discussion in the Church has often retained its painful, divisive, and, as the Cardinal notes, “spiritually violent” tendencies. Bishops are excoriated by the right and left in the Church, and even by priests, who promised them obedience and respect. In effect, Bishops are treated more like elected officials, than the anointed leaders and fathers they are. And whatever imperfections the bishops have individually and corporately, this does not excuse our treatment of them as though they were simply elected officials accountable to us. We are neither docile nor loving and supportive of them. And when we have concerns about the course they set, we do not speak to them, or of them, as Fathers, but we lay them out as though they were political enemies. Discourse in the Church which should be marked by charity and a family love is, instead, modeled on angry and protesting political discourse, the acquisition of power and the hermeneutic of suspicion and scorn.
And this is true not only in our treatment of Bishops but also of one another. Catholics who are passionate about the family, the life issues and the sexual issues go to one side of the room, and Catholics passionate about the social teachings of the Church to the other. And from their sides they both hurl blame, venom, scorn, and debate who is a true Catholic and who really cares about what is most important. We do this rather than appreciate the work that each of us does in essential areas and we fail to understand that the Church needs two wings to fly.
The easiest thing in the world is to get Catholics fighting and divided. And we take the bait every time. The media knows it and so does the President. Shame on them for doing it, but shame on us for being such an easy target.
And to a large extent it all goes back to those angry August days back in 1968 when priests and laity took the violence and discord of that awful year and made it the template for Church life; when there emerged a kind of spiritual violence, and discord, when there developed a hermeneutic of suspicion; and when there was an embracing of a distorted ecclesiology of the Church as a political entity rather the Body of Christ.
Perhaps such tendencies were decades in coming, but, as Cardinal Stafford notes, there was something about that hot and fateful August of 1968, something in that awful year slouched into the Church and grew like a cancer. It is still too much with us today and it is has infected us all. Somehow it’s still August, the scorching heat wave lingers, and the hazy air reminds us of the summer of our discontent, that awful and fateful year of 1968. Usquequo Domine…usquequo? (Ps 12:1)
This song says, I need you, you need me. We’re all part of God’s Body. Stand with me, agree with me, you are important to me, I need you to survive.
“There were riots in Paris, and Charles de Gaulle fled to his country estate until things calmed down. There were riots and terrorism in Germany and Italy. The anti-war protestors and hippies in America had their counterparts all over Europe and the West.”
Spain was spared this until Franco’s death, at which point they over-compensated for the freakishness he spared them from. Now they’re at the bottom of the pile in terms of culture or faith - like Italians, ethnic Spaniards are contracepting themselves out of existence; like Americans, they’re being replaced by Hispanics.
Well, they are dying: just not fast enough. And even the laggards in the Boomer generation have another years of public life to go. That generation split down the middle, however, and the progressives had fewer children. On the other hand, they came to dominate in academia and the media and even the mainstream churches.
Regarding Bobby, Gene McCarthy speculated that he had provoked Sirhan by his demagoging about Israel. McCarthy hsd reason to be bitter. The Kennedy machine had been lying through its teeth about McCarthy’s record. Sad to say, but we are probably better off that Bobby was removed from the scene.
The think that provoked McCarthy into going against the war was that he knew that Johnson was not telling the whole truth. Lyndon was far too optimistic in public. If he had been more guarded, Tet could have been played better.
It’s no secret that forty years is an amount of time that features prominently in the Bible.
I partly feel that the election and reign of Obama, which may very well be the end of our country and western post-Christian “civilization,” starting exactly forty years after the upheaval of the 1960’s (which is often, as done in this article, narrowed down to 1968) is no coincidence.
The North Vietnamese Winter/Spring Offensive of 1968 was actually a massive defeat, as I myself perceived at the time merely from reading newspaper and magazine accounts. The attack on the embassy was a complete failure, and all of the attackers were killed. However, those who failed to look beyond the images on TV may have experienced cognitive dissonance.
In 1968, MLK had not only been under FBI surveillance for years, but on camera he was seen prophesizing his death the night before it happened. Is it surprising that when he was shot, that his followers suspected the government had something to do with it?
Could be. I was never a supporter of his, so I can't speak for them. However, the facts about the FBI surveillance came out later. The initial news reports--that he had been shot by a white man in a white suit who was driving a white car headed south--deeper into white-dominated Dixieland--might have contributed to the anger of the rioters.
In 1968, RFK stood to challenge the ruling Democratic party establishment when he was struck with a fatal shot which originated at point blank range from his rear. In spite of witnesses and a coroner’s report that placed Sirhan Sirhan to the front of him at all times, the LAPD harassed witnesses and withheld contrary evidence of a likely multiple-shooter scenario in order to arrange a quick one-person conviction in court. Is it surprising that outraged RFK supporters would gather to protest outside the convention hall in Chicago?
I'm not an RFK assassination buff, but I recall at the time that Sirhan seemed clearly to have done the deed--he had the pistol in his hand. I don't recall hearing any conspiracy theories about the assassination until much later. And although some of the protesters outside the convention hall in Chicago may have been RFK supporters, they were led by hard-core leftists--Tom "we are all Viet Cong" Hayden, Jerry "kill your parents" Rubin, David Dellinger, a self-proclaimed "non-Russian Communist," and the like.
In any case, the public turned away from this angry crowd of malcontents and elected Richard Nixon, who spoke for “the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.”
That’s true. And history is nothing but accretions. Sometimes it can become necessary to knock off a few, but it’s simply not possible (or desirable) to go back to some imaginary “pre-accretion” time.
The Roman rite was actually already receiving the care that it needed. There were a few parts which, over the centuries and mostly as the result of monastic practice, had gotten out of their proper order or were somewhat unclear. And it was good to try to focus people on the Mass when they were there. I remember when so many people were busy praying the Rosary during Mass that, between the beads hitting the backs of the pews and the background hissing of lots of old ladies saying the prayers, you could barely hear the priest even in the spoken parts. “Active participation” was simply intended to mean that laypeople should stop doing their private devotions during Mass and focus on the event; it didn’t mean they should be clapping, dancing in the aisles, or distributing Communion...
I actually didn’t even have any objection to the introduction of the vernacular for parts of the mass. When I was a kid in New York, we did something called a “dialogue mass,” which was basically just where the people made the responses of the altar boy and most (although not all) of the mass parts were spoken out loud by the priest. This was done in both Latin and English. The English was simply a correct translation of the (very beautiful) Latin original of the Old Mass. All this was before the Vatican II.
I grew up in East Texas in what might be called a mission church, because prior to the East Texas oil boom, there was not a Catholic church between Dallas and Shreveport. No dialogue mass but we did use the missalette with alternating pages in Latin and English. No rosaries during mass. My first encounter was this when I was working in the Rio Grande Valley and went to a Mexican Church where all the widow ladies insisting on sitting up front and causing such a din that, as you say, I could not hear the priest. They did not even pause during his sermon! So I went to the next town where there was an Anglo church.
bumpus ad summum
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