Sixty-three Years Ago

Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

Pope Leo XIV asked us to pray a daily rosary in October for peace.  His timing is not random. October is the month of Our Lady of the Rosary. 

Sixty-three years ago, however, October was also a momentous month for the Catholic Church and the world.    On October 11, 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened.   Less than a week later, on October 16, the Cuban Missile Crisis started.  Watch President Kennedy's address on the Crisis here.  The U.S. and U.S.S.R. narrowly avoided nuclear war, thanks to the better judgment of Vasili Arkhipov.   A Vice Admiral in the Soviet Navy, he vetoed his colleagues’ vote to launch a nuclear torpedo after U.S. forces dropped depth chargers near his submarine.  Pope John XXIII played a crucial role in ending the Crisis.  This irrevocably impacted the Second Vatican Council and Catholic Social Teaching. 

Shortly before his death, Pope Saint John XXIII published a groundbreaking encyclical letter on April 11, 1963: Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth).  It was the Church’s first document addressed to “all people of goodwill” (not solely Catholics).  The message was clear: We’re all in this together. The Church is now casting a global net.  Globalism is a “sign of the times”.  In 1962, Marshall McLuhan said, in his book The Guttenberg Galaxy, today’s world is a “global village”.  This “global village”, he said, is a world of “arduous interfaces”.  Yet, the Pope noted that people “are becoming more and more conscious of being living members of the universal family of mankind” (Pacem in Terris, 145). 

John XXIII called for a new “statecraft” aimed at human development.  If we want peace, he said, we must face the problem of “uneven development”.  “Peace is the effect of righteousness” (Isaiah 32:17).  Attainment of the Common Good is the sole purpose of public authority (Pacem in Terris 53-55).  Pacem in Terris applauded to the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as an “act of the highest importance”.  

On December 7, 1965,  the Second Vatican Council made this prophecy: “For unless animosity and hatred are put aside, and firm, honest agreements about world peace are concluded, humanity may, in spite of the wonders of modern science, go from the grave crisis of the present day to that dismal hour, when the only peace it will experience will be the dread peace of death” (Gaudium et Spes, 82).  Say a daily rosary for peace.