Where were you on November 22, 1963?  Perhaps you are too young to remember that fateful day; maybe you were not even born yet. But for those of us now relatively aged, the event that happened forty years ago this week remains seared on our psyches.

That, of course, was the infamous day on which John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The graphic events that inexorably unfolded in Dallas that day have long since become part of American history. Like so many others of a certain seniority, I long ago internalized the dreadful sequence of happenings connected with this death.

For a time, however, I thought the wrong man had been shot. I had spent that day in Liverpool, sent off from my monastic retreat in Northern Wales on a mission to a parish church. On arriving back home to St. Beuno’s College in St. Asaph, I was greeted in the corridor by a colleague who asked if I had heard the news. In reply to my ignorance he announced: “Kennedy has been shot.”

For me it was a shock to think that my spiritual director, Father Kennedy, had been killed. Why would anyone wish to shoot such an inoffensive and loving man, I wondered? This English Jesuit priest seemed not to have any enemies at all, much less someone who would kill him.

When I realized my mistake, I began to grieve for the American president with whom I had most identified. Jack Kennedy was not much older than I and came from the same Boston Irish Catholic background as I. My father had known his father well enough for him and my mother to be invited to Jack’s wedding in 1953. Besides, Jack Kennedy struck me as a thoroughly attractive man, handsome, articulate, a person of style and, I believed, substance.

In the days after his death, by way of special permission I was allowed to watch television along with my colleagues at St. Beuno’s. We saw dramatic scenes of the  events leading up to the state funeral and felt the range of emotions that Americans at home were then feeling. Horror, pity, sorrow, fear and other feelings flooded my heart. I also felt some frustration at being so far away from home when events of such importance were taking place there.

My Jesuit colleagues at St. Beuno’s had come largely from European countries for a year of spiritual training in Wales. Natives of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, along with some half dozen natives of England, they formed an international community along with a few of us Americans.

The grief that they all felt at the death of Kennedy moved me deeply. It was as if they had lost a friend, this American president with whom they had identified as a person who expressed many of their ideals. The experience of loss bound us together as a more closely knit community, united in an uncommon loss. They, too, could weep that an American hero had been struck down in the prime of his life.

Jack Kennedy had been formed in part by his own experience of Europe. In addition to saying “Ich bin ein Berliner,” with some justification he could have said he was an Englishman or a Frenchman. During some of his growing up years he lived in London and his first –  – highly critical –  –  book was called “While England Slept.” His frequent trips to the continent gave him a familiarity with other European countries.

His wife Jacqueline was well known for her love of French language and culture. On a state visit to France, her husband proudly identified himself as the man who had brought Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.

St. Beuno’s was located at the margins of this European world. But it was in a climate of solidarity and ancient national friendships that we watched the news together. I realized more intensely that week than ever that we belonged to an international religious order, brothers who had suffered a common loss.  

Until the last few years I still found it too painful to watch television replays of the awful events of that November 40 years ago. The loss that we suffered as a nation continued to stir melancholy feelings in me.  But time has its way of healing and I no longer feel the sting so intensely now. From the vantage point of four decades’ distance the assassination does not stir the same pain in me that it did for so long..

Of course, I still regret the wounds inflicted on us all by the assassin. His deadly action robbed us of a leader who gave hope to much of the world. The emotional impact  may have grown weaker with the passage of so many years, but his terrible death continues to reverberate in my memory as one of the most searing public events of my lifetime.

Richard Griffin