The Year of Catholic Death: 1968

I well remember '68. I ws still an Anglo-Catholic and firmly on the Left. My friends & I thought the Revolution had come as we watched Europe burn.

From Crisis

By Greg Cook

Although the Holy Catholic Church will persist until the end of time, there have been moments in time when it has seemed beyond hope of resuscitation. The year 1968 was one of those moments.

Although the Holy Catholic Church will persist until the end of time, there have been moments in time when it has seemed beyond hope of resuscitation. The year 1968 was one of those moments, so much so that we shouldn’t be afraid to call it “The Year of Catholic Death.”

1968 featured death in many guises: the death of sanity, as students and radicals rose up in bifurcated France, eldest daughter of the Church and bastion of the Revolution; the death of the old Mass, as many priests began celebrating facing the people and in the vernacular, coupled with the death of a proper understanding of the priesthood and consecrated religious life; the death of traditional morality, with the rejection of Paul VI’s greatest achievement, Humanae Vitae; the deaths of prominent Catholics Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Romano Guardini, and Padre Pio; and, on a personal level, the death of my Uncle Dan, due, in large part, to trauma experienced in Vietnam. 

Did the world in that year take after the Church, or did the Church go the way of the world?

On the one hand, we have the example of Padre Pio, who was faithful to Tradition until his death. Thanks to Gnocchi and Palmaro’s The Last Mass of Padre Pio, we know how the famous Italian Franciscan stigmatist and wonder-worker received permission to continue saying the Tridentine 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.

On the other hand, the same year saw the death of Thomas Merton. Regarding Trappist Merton: there is still a penumbra of mystery around his death, supposedly by an electrical accident. This was in Thailand at an interfaith meeting of monastics. 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 Fr. 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.

A third Catholic death shows a Church ambivalent between Tradition and the Revolution: Fr. Romano Guardini. I have a very soft spot in my heart and mind for 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. Who knows how the great teacher would have responded to the assault—exterior and interior—on the Church unfolding even at his life’s end.

A little further probing shows that misunderstanding about the priesthood in 1968 was widespread, both within and without the Church. The activist and Catholic Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) is currently having his legacy blackened by credible allegations of sexual abuse. In 1968, he undertook a fast to protest injustice against farm workers. He also spoke in numerous places, including New York City. In the New York talks, he mentioned how the Church and priests were involved in the farm worker movement: 

We have had priests with us before, during and after the strike. The priests of the California Migrant Ministry, Chris Hartmeier and Jim Drake, have been with us from the beginning. They took losses in their church because of the Migrant Ministry and the suffering they accepted was for the migrants and for justice. It was from them that we learned the importance of the support of the church in our struggle. The church is the one group that gives help and never qualifies it or asks for favors. 

What sort of things did the priests do? They helped disseminate union content: “I even went up in a plane with two priests,” said Chavez, “to broadcast to the strikebreakers from seven hundred feet up.” But Christ’s ordained ministers also performed mundane duties, according to Chavez: 

The priests and ministers do everything from sweeping floors to giving out leaflets. They developed a true worker-priest movement. In the field and in the center, a minister and a worker joined together. The importance of Christian teachings to the worker and to his struggle for dignity becomes clear. Now we have a Franciscan priest working full time with us.

Prominent activists from outside the Church also weighed in. Saul Alinsky, considered the mastermind behind “community activism,” was no stranger to the echelons of Catholic power. The title of a 1968 documentary about Alinsky says much: Saul Alinsky Went to War. The very first words of this documentary regard the contemplative life: 

I think that somebody who goes off in a monastery and starts praying for the salvation of mankind and doesn’t do a d**n thing but sits there and prays…I think that…according to my perception of God, that when that guy comes up for judgement, the judge is gonna sit there and say why you cruddy bas***d. 

Judging from the growing attrition of religious abandoning their communities and priests leaving the priesthood or engaging in political activism at home (the Berrigan brothers) and abroad (liberation theology), many Catholic religious and priests seemingly agreed with Alinsky.

Judging from the growing attrition of religious abandoning their communities and priests leaving the priesthood or engaging in political activism at home and abroad, many Catholic religious and priests seemingly agreed with Alinsky.

The Catholic faith of public figures was on display in 1968, particularly in the guise of the storied Kennedy family. Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), senator, Attorney General, and Catholic father of many children, was assassinated in 1968. 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 Sr. 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.

The last Catholic death I mentioned is my Uncle Dan. I was almost seven when he died. 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. He 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, next to other Catholic family members, where I go to pray on occasion.

It was a year of Catholic death. Of celebrities and brothers and teachers of the Faith.

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 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!

1968 witnessed a challenge to Church authority and a basic biblical principle: be fruitful and multiply. Pope Paul VI, the dithering Hamlet of the modern papacy, acted with resolve in publishing the encyclical Humanae Vitae, declaring that Catholicism considered contraception intrinsically evil. The revolt in the streets of Paris was mirrored among Catholic clergy and laity and the widespread public dissent against the teaching. Pleasure was paramount, not procreation. On top of that, in 1968 the “population expert” Paul Ehrlich thrust his theories about overpopulation into the world spotlight. He argued for population reduction, by forced means if necessary. Ehrlich (1932-2026) published his first book, The Population Bomb, in 1968. The public, Catholic and other, preferred to listen to Ehrlich rather than the pope.

That same pope, ironically, had declared a “Year of Faith” for 1967-1968, and it was during that time the Oath Against Modernism, required of clergy and others by Pope St. Pius X, was suppressed by Paul VI and a substitution made of much less stringency. In 1968, Pope Montini did present his Credo of the People of God, which was and is well-regarded but did not stem the tide of death of authority within the Church. It is probably not coincidental that in the midst of all this auto-destruction Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre resigned as superior of the Holy Ghost Fathers, a heretofore redoubtable missionary congregation primarily focused on Africa. Lefebvre felt he could not accept the changes desired by the society’s members who were appealing particularly to the Vatican II document Perfectae Caritatis (On the Up-to-Date Renewal of Religious Life).

Are things any better in society 58 years later? I think many people consider society even more off-kilter than it was last century. What about the Church? Commentators have been declaring her dead for centuries now. If she can survive a year like 1968, she can persevere through any storm.