10/28/24

 Monday, October 28, 2024

MULS Oral history

1956 Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Luctuosissimi Eventus

1958 Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Pope, taking the name John XXIII

1965 Pope Paul VI proclaimed Jews were not collectively guilty of the Crucifixion

In bed at 10 after watching the James Carville documentary on CNN, awake at 3:45 and up at 4:05.  I let Lilly out at 6:20.  Again she was very slow in stepping outside after I opened the front door, very cautious.   

Prednisone, day 167, 5 mg., day 18/28.   Prednisone at 5 a.m.,  morning meds later in the morning.

Oral History Initiative.  I spent an hour and a half on a Zoom call with Jane Eddy Casper this morning, talking about life at the Marquettte University Law School, which started in 1976 when I arrived there after my discharge from the Marine Corps.   The years were historic and fraught, especially with the civil rights struggles, urban riots throughout the country, the Vietnam War and the resistance to it especially on college campuses throughout the country.  The disturbance in Milwaukee occurred on July 30-31, two months after my discharge from the Marines and one month before I started law school.  The Tet Offensive in Vietnam started on January 31, 1968, at the start of my second semester and Lyndon Johnson ended graduate school deferments two weeks later.  My classmates were allowed to keep their deferments until the end of the semester so there was a mad scramble to get into an Army or National Guard Reserve unit where the chance of being ordered to Vietnam was much less than than it was for those who were drafted.  My class lost somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of its members to service in the Reserves or to the draft.  In November of my first year, Nixon was elected and in 1970 he ordered US troops to invade Cambodia which led to widespread demonstrations around the country.  At Kent State University, 4 unarmed students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen patrolling the campus and I was asked to stand sentry duty at the law school because of credible bomb threats.   Student-faculty relations at the school were generally hostile.  I spent probably more than a full hour running off at the mouth about those days.  Were my descriptions useful for anyone?  Who knows?  The interviews, of which there are many, will be available in the Law Library archives for anyone studying or otherwise interested in the law school's history and can be accessed through the law library but won't be generally available online.  I don't know whether I can access all the interviews but I am told I will have access to my own.

Fatigued and not feeling very well this afternoon.  I took a long nap, after which I emptied the dishwasher and then watched more of 2001: A Space Odyssey which I started yesterday.  The movie is just short of 3 hours long.

Anniversaries thoughts.   Luctuosissimi eventus was Pius XII's encyclical about the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.  I note it because it reminds me of my college roommate Tom Devitt and me serving mass the the Hungarian immigrant Catholic church St. Emeric, at 17th and Highland Avenue, before we both stopped attending mass.

I note the election of Pope John XXIII because he was and is my favorite pope. One wonders how he would have responded to the birth control commission that he created but his successor Paul VI filled.  Pau VI bowed to the pressure of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła and rejected the recommendation of the commission to approve birth control pills as consistent with Catholic morality.  In doing so, he destroyed Catholics' faith in the teaching authority of the Church in America and Western Europe.  My hunch is that John XXIII would have followed his commission's recommendation.  Alas.

Re the Church's position on the responsibility of Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul VI was, as I recall, simply following the teaching of Vatican II in Nostra Aetate.