Dublin-born Bishop of Dallas recalls moment he heard of JFK shooting

Kevin Farrell was a 16-year-old attending a youth meeting at the Our Lady of Good Counsel church in Drimnagh in his native Dublin when he heard US president John F Kennedy had been assassinated.

Last Friday Bishop Farrell, the seventh bishop of the Catholic diocese of Dallas, read the opening prayer at the 50th anniversary ceremony to mark Kennedy's death at Dealey Plaza in the city's downtown area, just yards from where Kennedy was shot by a sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald.

"I could never have imagined it, never in my wildest dreams that I would be standing on the grassy knoll delivering that invocation," he told The Irish Times.

"You think back to that cold Friday evening in November when you heard the news in Ireland and this was where it all happened, where the United States lost its innocence."

Silence
In a moving prayer before a moment of silence at 12.30pm, the time Kennedy was shot, Bishop Farrell spoke, still with his Dublin accent, about "the cruel suffering that was born on this hill" and how the people of Dallas were "disgraced, scorned and ruthlessly judged" for the actions of one man. "I tried to point out that this was a lone person who pulled the trigger on that gun. He could have been in any other city in the United States. It was not representative of the city or the people," he said.

“Dallas was called the city of hate and the people were almost afraid for many years to tell somebody when they travelled that they were from Dallas. The response was: ‘Isn’t that the place where they killed Kennedy?’ People didn’t necessarily like Kennedy here but the city was unfairly judged.”

Shame
Friday's ceremony was the first time since Kennedy was killed that Dallas officially marked an anniversary of his death, reflecting the shame the city felt for so long. The bishop was a member of the committee that organised a ceremony designed at openly acknowledging what happened in November 1963 and trying to move on.

“This was the moment when we closed the chapter,” he said. “Dallas is a great and vibrant city, and we have got to get over that we were to blame for the shooting of Kennedy.”