From a longer unpublished piece:
The Year of Catholic Death: 1968
The facts of life = death. Nineteen-sixty-eight featured death in many guises: Vietnam and the Tet offensive; the death of sanity as students and radicals rose up in bifurcated France, eldest daughter of the Church and bastion of the Revolution; death of the old Mass as many priests began celebrating facing the people and in the vernacular; the death of traditional morality with the rejection of Paul VI’s greatest achievement, Humanae Vitae; the death of my Uncle Dan in large part from trauma experienced in Vietnam; the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Romano Guardini, and Padre Pio. And in the midst of death, the birth of my youngest brother.
· RFK, Bobby, Senator, Attorney General…Catholic father of many children. Was he the one who could have bridged the gap and joined together tradition, liberalism, youth, and justice? Or is the buzz about his rebirth as a spiritual visionary (as opposed to a hard-fisted politician) just so much Catholic Democrat nostalgia, like those pictures of the California Brown family with Jerry in his Jesuit garb? Was he a harbinger of celebrity Catholicism? For instance: Martin Sheen arrested at an anti-nuclear demonstration; Susan Sarandon portraying Sister Helen Prejean; Dorothy Day seated at a protest, with menacing police goons towering over her; or Pope John Paul II, greeted like a rock star at World Youth Day.
· Regarding Trappist Merton: There is still a penumbra of mystery around his death, supposedly by an electrical accident. Two words will make anyone suspicious: Rembert Weakland. He was involved with reporting the incident and caring for Merton’s body. I suspect Merton’s death was a case of God intervening before Father Louis (his name in religion, remember?) slid any further down the slippery slope of an indifferentism-false-ecumenism-all-paths-lead-to-God syncretic chute straight down to hell. Another Catholic celebrity casualty.
· I have a very soft spot in my heart and mind for Fr. Guardini (1885-1968). I have never read one of his books without profit. Yes. Occasionally I come across something that might give me pause, but more often there are penetrating insights into liturgy, relationship to God, or human society and nature. His book, Sacred Signs, inspired me to write a Verse Companion to it. Who knows how the great teacher would have responded to the assault on the Church unfolding even at his life’s end?
· We know how Padre Pio received permission to continue saying the Mass without change. I think one reason he remains a popular saint is because of his uncompromising ministry. There is a genuine cult of Padre Pio; no such cult exists for Paul VI, the epitome of wishy-washiness. The Franciscan friar’s hard words to penitents were spiritual surgery of a kind we rarely see anymore. Instead we see too many souls perishing for lack of that same surgery while Church priests and bishops offer the placebo of false compassion to those with spiritual cancer.
How many have died in mortal sin—enmity with God—because of the shepherds who assist the wolves?! How many have confused the false freedom of America with the ordered freedom of God?
The last Catholic death I mentioned is my uncle Dan. When he died I was almost seven. I remember him, but from a child’s perspective, augmented by some details revealed to me by my mother and grandfather. He was never an altar boy. Didn’t seem particularly devout. Service in the infantry in Vietnam changed him. He died with a gun. There must have been a charitable interpretation of his last moments, because he is buried in hallowed Catholic ground.
It was a year of Catholic death. Of celebrities and brothers and teachers of the Faith.
It was also the year of non-Catholic birth, because my youngest brother was born that June.
Soon the Church’s calendars would change. The unfinished Tower of Babel would return, a multitude of tongues—not of fire, but of dust—clamoring for attention from an indifferent world, passing by the dying remains of Latin, despised mocked and reviled Latin, supposed enemy of understanding and participation, the guardian preventing the young from cavorting at the carnival of liturgical options. But stealthily, some Latin survived, and at the behest of America. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. Novus ordo seclorum: new order of the ages. Annuit coeptis: [He] favors [our] undertakings. Those crafty freemasons knew what they were doing!
Even in that year of Catholic death, 1968, the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave and carrier of freemasonic ideals expressed in Latin, was preparing for a celebration of itself in only eight short years. What a year and date for a Yankee Doodle Dandy firecracker baby to look forward to: turning fifteen on the nation’s two-hundredth birthday. But it was not to be the year I might have envisioned.
The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, Revised Edition, edited by Neuner and Dupuis, SJ (NY: Alba House, 1982, sc, 1981 imprimatur).
The Estranged God: Modern Man’s Search for Belief by Anthony Padovano (NY: Sheed & Ward, 1966, cloth, 1965 imprimatur).
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton (Garden City, NY: Image, 1966, pb, 1966 imprimatur).
The New Man by Thomas Merton (NY: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961, cloth, imprimatur).
Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1949, cloth, imprimatur).
(NY: Capricorn, 1963, pb).
Other books pictured include Merton’s No Man Is an Island, Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude, and Bread In the Wilderness.
An excellent evaluation of Merton’s writing can be found at Catholic Spiritual Direction: Pt. I, and Pt. II.