Posted on 11/22/2013 8:51:04 AM PST by Kaslin
The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated is still fresh in the memories of those of us who lived through it. We all remember where we were when we first heard the news that he'd been shot and how we waited for word that he would survive. We remember the sound of news anchor Walter Cronkite's voice breaking as he delivered the news that the president was dead. But for millions of Catholics, it had a special meaning.
It was lunchtime, and I was in the girls' bathroom putting on lipstick -- a new privilege for a 16-year-old in Catholic school -- when one of my classmates rushed in to say the president had been shot. Everyone froze. One girl screamed. And then Sister Jean Patrice's voice came over the intercom asking all students to report to their homerooms immediately.
The halls filled with students pouring out of classrooms and the cafeteria, but even for Catholic school, the crowds were especially orderly. No one shouted, pushed or shoved. We whispered among ourselves as word spread. The president had been in Texas, I learned from one of the girls who worked in the school office. She had answered the phone when an anxious parent called, and she had been the one to tell our principal, who immediately turned on the small portable radio behind her desk.
When we were all settled in our homerooms, Sister Jean Patrice's voice came over the intercom again. She explained that the president was shot as his motorcade made its way through the streets of Dallas and was taken to the hospital, where he was in surgery. And then, without comment, she began the rosary, which we recited together, our hands folded on our desks. We were praying for the president's life and for his immortal soul.
He was our president, not just as Americans, but because we shared his faith. I imagined Jackie Kennedy, a rosary in her hands, intoning the same prayers we recited -- and millions of other Catholics around the world flocking to churches, lighting candles, praying to the Blessed Virgin to intercede with her Son to spare the president's life.
It is difficult today to imagine that being Catholic in the United States in 1963 still meant you were an outsider. Catholics were exotic. We worshipped differently -- in a dead language, Latin -- and many of us attended separate schools taught by women in strange outfits. We were thought to take our orders from Rome -- a charge that plagued Kennedy in his presidential campaign, despite his reassurances to the contrary. "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who also happens to be a Catholic," he said, promising that he did "not speak for my Church on public matters -- and the Church does not speak for me."
Had the president been shot because he was Catholic, I wondered silently as I prayed aloud. The idea seems preposterous in retrospect, but not then. The irony is that John F. Kennedy's death may have played as important a role as his election in reducing anti-Catholic sentiment in America.
On Nov. 25th, as the caisson on which the flag-draped casket bearing the president's body stopped outside St. Matthew's Cathedral, millions of Americans who never would have considered stepping into a Catholic church were invited inside for the first time. The three networks broadcast the entire Requiem Mass, which was celebrated by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston. Traffic stopped in every major city for five minutes. Church bells tolled, and virtually all Americans gathered around television sets throughout the country.
Who would not be moved by the singing of Franz Schubert's Ave Maria or Joseph Leybach's Pie Jesu? What had seemed foreign became intimately personal. All Americans, no matter what their religion -- or lack of one -- shared in the deeply moving ritual of the requiem. At that moment, we were all Catholics.
Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. once characterized anti-Catholicism as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." John F. Kennedy's life and death helped destroy that bias and may be one of his most enduring legacies.
Frankly, I think his legacy has been created from nothingness and hopeful wishing since his death rather than as an assessment of what he actually did.
I’m not saying his policies weren’t like Democrats’ policies of today, but this man was not and is not a god. Far from it.
I’ll leave it at that, but the attention given his demise is supremely overdone.
“but this man was not and is not a god” Amen. Thank you for stating that. This idol of worship of JFK by the American people is absolutely sickening.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:3
I remember that my own father had died the previous month at the age of 32. I remember thinking that I knew how Caroline and John Jr. were feeling.
Who?
This misogynistic gutter snipe helped with the murder of Marilyn Monroe. But that wasn’t enough he had to be the person responsible for the murder of 58,000 young men and women in Vietnam. I hope he burns in hell for all eternity!
Video for Christine Lavin's song "Sixth Floor".
FReegards!
JFK’s legacy.
From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
And isn’t it sad that fifty years later the majority of Catholics consistently vote for people whose ideologies so closely resemble that of Kennedy’s assassin.
The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted. Psalm 12:8
Less than 3-weeks before the JFK assassination, Roman Catholic President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated on November 2nd, with US backing and financial assistance. Did JFK know in advance?
I dunno, Gaffer. Kennedy passed through a tax cut which benefited the economy. He committed us to landing Americans on the moon. He gave some very powerful speeches (teleprompters weren’t invented yet) that inspired the average person to do their best. And he showed he had a pair when the Russians deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba.
Contrast that with the current Democratic Administration. They turn his “Ask what you can do for your country” around 180 degrees. They don’t inspire, they issue directives because ‘they won’. They cancelled NASA.
No, Kennedy wasn’t a god, and yes he had some personal failings (which weren’t widely known at the time), but he did OK.
I remember when he was campaigning in Allentown, PA. I was 5 years old, riding on my fathers shoulders. As he passed by, my father yelled out, “Hiya Jack”, and candidate Kennedy paused and shook my fathers hand. I was raised in a blue collar middle class household, and it was a big deal to him.
I find that statement the understatement (not the OK part) of this or the last century.
Thanks....I actually had to muddle my brain for a while to think about these two ideas.
Inspiration is a good thing if it is for a good cause and I cannot argue with it. But in the end it is a 'speech' and nothing more. The inspiration, if there was any, is another thing, but I'll give that an okay on principle.
As far as the "showing a pair" against the Russians, I beg to differ. He didn't 'Get' the outcome from sheer bravado. He had to give up the Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, albeit at a later date. But, we will never hear the truth of the sequence from the participants now - or ever.
Not so much as an event that sadly, changed America for the worse 50 years ago.
A needed gentle correction.
RIP JFK and C.S.Lewis.
Schlesinger was right, but the rest is baloney.
Maybe his speech writer deserves more credit than he, but he delivered speeches that inspired and challenged people to excel. That is sadly lacking in anything we hear today, indeed I would have to go back to Reagan to hear a speech of comparable caliber.
Now, I was only a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the headlines I recall reading about talked about “Kennedy Stands Firm, Kruschev Backs Down”. I don’t recall reading any discussion of ICBMs in Turkey at the time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.