Some days have more ‘history’ to them than others, today’s July 16th being one of them. As I just wrote, it is the memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and the vision to Saint Simon Stock of the scapular in 1251.
As though to corroborate that, this was also the last of 18 appearances of Our Lady to Saint Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto at Lourdes. As the saint later confessed, the Virgin Mary was ‘more beautiful than ever’, even though the crowds were so great, Bernadette could not get close to the grotto, and saw Our Lady from across the River Gave. She did not appear to Bernadette after that, promising her happiness not in this life, but the next.
On a more sombre note, July 16th also saw the world’s first detonation of a nuclear bomb, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists weren’t sure what would happen, and even they were ‘blown away’ – metaphorically speaking – by the multi-coloured, apocalyptic scene, as the sky lit up, and the force of the shock wave rolled over them from miles away. Brigadier-General Thomas Farrell described it thus:
The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined
For reasons that are unclear, the test was code-named ‘Trinity’; Oppenheimer claimed John Donne’s poetry as an inspiration, but perhaps at some unwitting level he was aware of the eschatological Rubicon they had crossed. As the scientist whispered, or at least thought. of a quotation from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
This was also the day in 1969 that the Apollo 11 rocket took off from Earth for its purported mission to the Moon. John F. Kennedy promised to get a man on the Moon before the decade was up. I won’t go into questions about the whole ‘Moon landing’ thing here, but may raise them sometime in a subsequent reflection, perhaps even with a guest author.
Thirty years later on this day, in a more earth-bound aircraft, John F. Kennedy, Jr. crashed his Piper Saratoga into the Atlantic Ocean, nose-first. He, his wife Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren, were killed instantly on impact. It seems Mr. Kennedy was not rated to fly ‘instruments only’, and the conditions were sub-optimal, leading to spatial disorientation. When you’re up in the air, it’s hard to tell what’s down, up or sideways just by looking out the window. The wreckage and their bodies were discovered by divers, and were cremated, which is allowed by the Catholic Church to which they all confessed to belong. Kennedy’s remains were scattered over the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, which is not permitted. The eulogy was delivered by Uncle Ted Kennedy, about whom the less said, the better – de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est and all that – but like all aphorisms, there are exceptions. The Kennedys have had their tragedies, but one wonders what might have been had they taken their Faith more seriously or, perhaps more veridically.
And, finally, for now, it was on the memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 2021 that the ironically-titled Traditionis Custodes was issued by the current Magisterium, limiting permission to pray and attend the ‘Traditional Latin Mass’, using the Missal of 1962 promulgated by Pope Saint John XXIII. There were rumours that an even more restrictive document would be issued on this anniversary but, so far, I have not seen anything, Deo gratias.
We trust that Christ is the Lord of History, and will guide all things to His good will and purpose. Be still and know that I am God. (Ps 46:10)