Originally published on Forbes.com Nov 22nd, 2013
I remember Sr. Jane Aloysius, who was the music expert at St. John the Baptist grammar school in Fairview, NJ, sitting at the piano and playing the tune to Harrigan but having us second graders substitute K-E-N-N-E-D-Y for H-A-R-R-I-G-A-N. The excitement about possibly having a Catholic president was a little confusing. In Fairview NJ in the early sixties, it was not all that obvious that we were living in a majority Protestant country. The specialized history books used in parochial grammar schools did not help.
Early modern European history was an inversion of what is in popular culture with the Spanish being the good guys and the English being the bad guys, but from 1776 on Catholicism and Americanism marched hand in hand. They didn’t have to make stuff up. After all, two Catholics did sign the Declaration of Independence and Catholics participated in the country’s wars out of proportion to their percentage of the population. Of course, there was quite a bit left out – like convent burning, the Know-Nothings, and the San Patricios.
It would have been great if Sr. Jane could have just stuck with music, but parochial schools were lean organizations. She also taught sixth grade, which was disastrous. Adulthood tended to present a uniform face to kidhood in the early sixties, but Sr. Jane cracked the facade as you could hear parents mumbling about the Franciscans not knowing when it was time to put them out to pasture. Sixth grade was fairly chaotic as Sr. Jane frequently fell asleep during class and found it challenging to keep us under control. So it was, that fifty years ago, that we were told that something really horrible had just happened, but she wasn’t going to tell us what it was until we quieted down.
Not really that far away, my sister was in a sixth-grade parochial school classroom in Brooklyn. She heard the announcement come over the public address system, but there was a lot of static, so she told the kids to wait till things were clearer. She actually has a much more vivid memory of the announcement a bit more than a year earlier that President Kennedy was challenging the Russians on the missiles in Cuba. She pulled down the map to show the kids where Cuba was and nearly said “Holy ****”, when she saw how close it was to Florida.
A nun openly swearing in front of a class borders on the inconceivable in that period. She was only nineteen, but the kids would not have known that. Close call. Our brother was on an aircraft carrier that ended up being part of the blockade. He has amusing photographs of helicopter crewmen urinating on Russian subs that were finally forced to come up for air. Now that we know that the subs had nuclear torpedoes and the skippers had fairly sketchy rules of engagement, it is not quite as amusing.
To some people like my good friend Tom Cahill, November 22, 1963, is the before and after moment in American history. He wrote early this morning:
On the morning of November 22, 1963, I was a 26-year-old reporter/photographer with “Texas Co-Op Power” magazine in Austin. I was excitedly gathering up my huge Speed Graphic camera and gear and making plans to photograph Pres. and Mrs. Kennedy at a Democratic Party fund raiser in Austin that evening. I had a White House press pass and a friend of then Vice-Pres. Lyndon Johnson was going to set-up a photo-op for me.Needless-to-say the Kennedys never made it to Austin that night and what happened to the President changed the course of world history and definitely changed my life as is it did many others globally. All these years later, like many people, I am still traumatized by The Assassination.
Tom Cahill, however, is sui generis. A life-long peace activist, he was among the twenty or so Americans who acted as human shields in Iraq. As far as I can determine he was the only US Air Force veteran among them.
For a more representative understanding of how the Kennedy assassination might have been a defining moment in American Catholic consciousness, I turned to David O’Brien, retired Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He wrote to me that on that fateful day he was:
A graduate student at the University of Rochester, experiencing my own entry into American centers (U of R with Yankee Protestant and secular faculty and amazingly smart and engaged New York Jewish fellow grad students) after a lifetime of Catholic family, friends and schools through Notre Dame.
The problem with asking one of your old professors questions is that you can end up with more required reading. After plowing through The American Catholic Revolution – How The 60’s Changed The Church Forever by Mark S. Massa, S.J., I concluded that it was not November 22, 1963 that profoundly changed American Catholics. It was a year later, when the priests stopped turning their backs to us and speaking Latin with a sprinkling of Greek and started expecting us to pay attention and understand what was going on. Ad deum qui latificat juventutum meum. I challenge you to find somebody more than a couple of years younger than me that can reel that off from memory.
Then there was Anti-Catholicism In America – The Last Acceptable Prejudice, also by Father Massa. That tells the story of post-war anti-Catholicism beginning with Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power in 1947 and perhaps culminating with the statements by the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom – “The Peale Group” in honor of its convener – Norman Vincent Peale – in September of 1960. The group stated that “actions and policies of the Catholic Church have given Protestants legitimate grounds for concern about having a Catholic in the White House”. It was quite a drama that was perhaps turned by Senator Kennedy’s eloquence:
The hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor’s bills, the families forced to give up their farms – an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. These are the real issues which should decide this campaign.
It turns out that Dr. O’Brien actually had given me the answer I was looking for:
It could be seen as the climax of American Catholic history in the sense that his Presidency, his inaugural with Cardinal Cushing, and most of all his murder and the national mourning that took place with the integration of Catholic and American rituals and symbol–the whole country, together, experiencing the grief amid symbols, and ceremonies, American and Catholic, that were now fully our own- together-
In 1850 Irish Catholics were the most despised white people in the United States. Attitudes began to shift in the subsequent decades. On the deadliest day in American history, September 17, 1862, at Antietam, Meagher’s Irish Brigade went into battle chanting “Clear The Way” in Gaelic. They left 540 men on the field and the beginning of the end of pervasive anti-Catholic prejudice. Following Doctor O’Brien’s logic, it would seem that three bullets a little more than a century later finished the job. There really should be a better way for minority groups to work their way into the mainstream.
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Afternote
It is not my fault that the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination comes a couple of days after the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, but, nonetheless. I promise not to stray from the tax reservation for quite a while after this. By the way, the San Patricios were deserters from the United States Army who formed one of the toughest battalions in the Mexican Army during the Mexican War. They are still remembered as heroes in Mexico and Ireland. In the United States, not so much.