Chris McDonnell, UK
christymac733@gmail.com

Previous articles by Chris   Comments welcome here

January 24, 2018

Fifty years on

Some people regularly keep a diary or journal, noting down thoughts and feelings, friendships and memorable occasions.

They are largely private collections that are not written with the intention of being shared. They are reflective notes of a personal journey.

The name of Thomas Merton has cropped up in these weekly articles on a number of occasions. He too was a writer of journals throughout his life and the events he chronicled give us a fascinating insight to his life as a Trappist monk. We have his journals for, after years after his death, they were published in seven volumes.

The last of those volumes, 'The Other Side of the Mountain', covers his final two years, 1967-68. Writing in late January of '68 he made this entry. 'It is already a hard year, and I don't know what else is coming but I have a feeling it is going to be hard all the way and for everybody'.

How prescient was that remark, given the events that followed. Now 50 years later, it is worth gathering some thoughts on that year and their consequences.

At the end of January, the war in Vietnam was already in its third year and casualties were rising. On January 30th the Vietcong struck at the heart of the South, in the capital city known then as Saigon. It became known as the Tet Offensive. It was to become the turning point of that terrible war. In the months that followed the Peace Movement in the States gathered strength as protests against the war grew.

The Spring brought a further bitter blow when the Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The night before his death he spoke these words in a church in Memphis

"We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountain top . . .I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land." It became known as the 'Mountain Top' speech. A great man, a Nobel peace prize winner, who lost his life,  shot on a hotel balcony the next day, April 4th. He was born on January 15th 1929 and now there is national date for commemoration on the 3rd Monday in January, which this year happens to fall on his birth date.

The long, hot summer of '68 was a time of high political activity, for the election of a President was due in November. One of the candidates engaged in the campaign was Bobby Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F Kennedy. On June 5, 1968, he was in California when he was fatally shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after winning the California state presidential primary.  He died the next day in hospital.

The counter-balance to the social unrest in the US was the student unrest in the European Universities. It is said that one such protest, during a lecture being given by Professor Ratzinger at Tubingen, was at the root of his change of heart after Vatican II and the divide that resulted with his friend and mentor, Hans Kung.

But it was at the end of July that the impact of 1968 was to hit the Church when the encyclical Humanae Vitae - Of Human Life was published by Pope Paul VI, dated 25 July 1968. Subtitled On the Regulation of Birth, it re-affirmed the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church regarding married love and responsible parenthood, rejecting the option of contraception within married conjugal life. It was the spark that ignited a fire, the consequences of which we still experience these fifty years on.

The so-called 'Prague Spring', 5 January 1968 – 21 August 1968, was brought to an abrupt halt with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces in late August.

In November, Richard Nixon was elected 37th President of the US, later being forced to resign in 1974 over the lies of Watergate.

Merton's prediction became personal when he died in an accidental electrocution in Bangkok in December. He was only 53.

Apollo 8, the second manned spaceflight mission in the United States Apollo space program, was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, and return safely home.

------