by Thomas Maier
The senator’s philandering did not cause Boston’s cardinal to intervene, as Cardinal William O’Connell had decades earlier when he warned Gloria Swanson to break off her affair with the family patriarch. (Despite his own adulterous behavior, Joe Kennedy Sr. repeatedly called on the church’s teachings and let his children know that “marriage is a contract for life.”) Instead in 1981, when Ted and Joan Kennedy announced their divorce shortly after Ted’s failed presidential bid, the Boston archdiocese issued a conciliatory rather than condemning statement: “Few American families today are free from the unfortunate experience of divorce. No one should make a rash judgment about a family tragedy which is surely marked by personal pain.” But as a divorced Catholic, Ted could not receive Communion, the most common sacrament shared by Catholics and the spiritual centerpiece of each Mass. Friends and colleagues knew that this estrangement from his church deeply bothered Rose Kennedy’s youngest son. For years, many American Catholics hoped the Vatican would liberalize its rules on divorce, though the hierarchy resisted change. The preferred route for dissolution of a Catholic marriage became annulment—technically the declaration that a marriage had never existed in the eyes of church but in practice. Annulments, like paid indulgences from a distant era, became the most tangible representation of the church’s internal contradictions. It put on display the church’s torturous view of modern sexuality, particularly concerning the role of women, and the humiliations and the stretching of truths inflicted upon its practitioners like an emotional rack. In effect, annulments allowed Catholics who had once married in good faith to claim that they hadn’t done so, to deny these marriages—despite their vows and often the existence of several children—rather than admit their error honestly and make a clean break.
When Ted Kennedy married Victoria Reggie in 1992, a divorced lawyer with two children, the modest private ceremony took place before a judge, not a priest. His new thirty-seven-year-old wife,Vickie, managed to get her first marriage annulled, but the senator had more difficulty in getting such an agreement from the church. His biographer, Adam Clymer, later reported that Joan Kennedy told him she hadn’t contested it, and that the senator received the church’s annulment only after admitting that “his marriage vow to be faithful had not been honestly made.” Not until shortly before Rose Kennedy’s funeral was Kennedy again in the good graces of the church and given permission to take Communion.
Joseph Kennedy II, by then the family’s most likely candidate for the White House someday, wasn’t as fortunate when his marriage ended in divorce. His wife, Sheila Rauch, bitterly contested his attempt to gain a church annulment, even though she wasn’t Catholic herself. Rather than settle privately, as other aggrieved women had done in the past with Kennedy men, Rauch went public with her outrage and wrote a tell-all book, Shattered Faith, about her marriage to a Kennedy that sharply questioned the church’s policy on annulments. The rancorous breakup of his marriage, along with the death of his brother Michael, proved more than Joe Kennedy II could bear. He dropped out of the race for governor in Massachusetts—once seen as a sure steppingstone to the White House— and apparently put an end to his career in politics.
ALONG WITH their private difficulties, the Kennedys increasingly became spokesmen for the loyal opposition in their church—the liberals who had once hoped for great things from Vatican II but now found themselves in public disagreement. For America’s most prominent Catholic family, this proved to be an uneasy position. In September 1994, during the middle of his most troublesome reelection campaign,Ted Kennedy distanced himself from the Pope’s decree that an all-male priesthood was an intrinsic part of the church and couldn’t be changed. “I count myself among the growing number of Catholics who support the ordination of women as priests,” Kennedy told the press. “I respect the fact that, as a matter of faith, others may not share my view on this issue.” Conservatives attacked Kennedy as a virtual anti-Christ of the left, as a man devoid of faith.“This completes the journey of Ted Kennedy,” fumed William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a group sponsored by ever-defensive Cardinal O’Connor in New York to root out anti-Catholic bigotry in the media. “He’s a man who’s been engaged in fighting the Catholic Church’s positions on a whole host of moral issues for the past couple of decades.”
Slowly and more deliberately,Ted Kennedy agonized over the abortion issue, far more than his brothers. Before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Kennedy voiced his objection to any modifications of the existing antiabortion laws.“Legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life,” he said. Kennedy seemed culturally ill at ease with the women’s movement and balked at their legislative agenda, which counted reproductive rights at the top of the list. If Ted agreed with any woman on this issue, it was his older sister, Eunice, who feared euthanasia of the unwanted. “I don’t believe in abortion on demand,” he said while campaigning for Senate reelection in 1970. “The day that we can solve the world’s population problem, the problem of browns in Central America, the problems of blacks in the ghetto, by aborting them, that’s unacceptable to me. How about the kids in the mental hospitals: they’re parasites on the environment. How about the old people in institutions: they’re cluttering up the landscape. Do you want to exterminate them, too?”
After the Supreme Court’s decision, however,Ted Kennedy altered his stance on abortion. He began to support federal funding for abortions and resisted any attempts by the Catholic Church and other opponents to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision. The rationale for his changed position was couched in the same separation of church and state language that his brother had used when faced with anti-Catholic prejudice in 1960. Ted’s nuanced position sounded like sophistry to many Catholics. To them, it was disingenuous to support abortion in the public arena when he supposedly didn’t believe in it privately.
Over the next decade, Kennedy’s camp explained to reporters how the senator’s position had “evolved” after the Roe vs. Wade decision; in 1994, a spokesman declared that “no one has been a stronger voice on a woman’s right to choose than Kennedy.” Once the favored son of the Catholic hierarchy in Massachusetts,Ted Kennedy now provoked their wrath with what one local bishop called “the weakening of your personal convictions.” In 1998, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a document that contended Catholics could not hide behind the rhetoric of church and state separation on the abortion issue. “Catholic public officials who disregard church teaching on the inviolability of the human person indirectly collude in the taking of life,” it charged.
As a chief architect of the abortion statement, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law pointed a finger at Kennedy and his Senate colleague John Kerry. “Both senators in my state are Catholic and wrong in the way they approach abortion,” the cardinal pronounced, “. . . only I am right.” His words carried a moral certainty that would have doomed earlier Irish Catholic politicians in Boston but now could be essentially shrugged off. “Senator Kennedy has great respect for Cardinal Law and the Catholic conference (of bishops), but he continues to support a woman’s right to choose,” said a Kennedy spokesperson, rolling out the boilerplate. Many pro-choice Roman Catholic politicians in America who followed Kennedy’s example faced condemnation at the Sunday lectern. At the same time, because of the abortion issue, traditional Democrats who were Catholic became, as religion writer Peter Steinfels noted, “pariahs in their own party’s ranks.”
After having switched sides in this national debate on abortion, Ted Kennedy became a prominent, sometimes courageous pro-choice advocate. During the 1984 campaign, he went out of his way to join Governor Mario Cuomo of New York in defending vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who was attacked by Archbishop John O’Connor for her pro-choice position. As the first woman on a national ticket, Ferraro said that although she didn’t personally approve of abortion as an Italian-American Catholic, she believed Americans should have the
right to decide for themselves whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. At a fundraiser for a group called Coalition of Conscience,Kennedy insisted that a line could be drawn between private morality and public policy, adding that not “every moral command should be written into law.”The senator seemed offended by O’Connor’s thinly veiled support of the Republican president, Ronald Reagan. Though defending O’Connor’s right to speak out against abortion, Kennedy cautioned that “we cannot be a tolerant country if churches bless some candidates as God’s candidates—and brand others as ungodly or immoral.”
At this conclave,Ted Kennedy once again became a disciple of his brother’s 1960 Houston speech, invoking its teachings on the separation of church and state. He affirmed his belief in an America envisioned by John Kennedy “where no religious body seeks to impose its will on the general populace and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an attack against all.”The following year,Ted Kennedy expanded on these views before conservative evangelists at a religious broadcasters convention hosted by the Reverend Jerry Falwell. “Virtually no one now maintains that religious values have no place in public life,” Kennedy said in agreement with the television preacher. But without a firm civic standard separating government from religion, Kennedy added, no one’s faith would be safe.“Depth of feeling or clarity of scriptural command cannot be the determining factor,” Kennedy proclaimed. “The Bible cannot be the balance wheel of our social compact.”
AS SO OFTEN in their history, the Kennedys embodied the transformations among Catholics in America, even if now the church’s hierarchy was not in accord. A 1993 Gallup poll showed Catholics supported many practices related to sexuality that the church opposed or regarded as sinful. Large percentages of Catholics believed birth control was acceptable (84 percent), agreed that divorced Catholics should be permitted to remarry (78 percent), favored the ordination of female priests (63 percent), that abortion should be tolerated (58 percent), and half of all respondents agreed that premarital sex or homosexuality was not always wrong. The church’s sexual constrictions also were eroding the immigrant church in America, which had provided a means of social ascendancy for each wave of newcomers and was a traditional bedrock of political support for the Kennedys. As late as the mid–1960s, before the Pope’s Humanae Vitae encyclical, Bobby Kennedy found a common bond in the Catholic symbolism of bread-breaking at Mass with Cesar Chavez and the Mexican immigrant farm workers on strike against the grape-growers. By the end of the century, however, some historians of the church noted how many Hispanic immigrants to the United States were leaving their Catholic faith for evangelical Protestant religions, often citing birth control as a reason. “Those willing to risk the dangers of immigration are predisposed toward modern values in the first place,” wrote Alan Wolfe, director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College,“and when faced with a choice between limiting family size to escape poverty and remaining with the church, they opt for a new religion.”
The Kennedys themselves seemed caught in the widespread divisions within American Catholicism. Though some older relatives privately agreed with the church’s hierarchy, the Kennedys in public office came to represent those Catholics favoring reforms on these sexual concerns. For example, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, as a political candidate, quietly supported a woman’s right to choose on abortion, though her mother, Ethel, adamantly opposed it.“I’m clearly Catholic and the church is not in favor of abortion,” Kathleen explained.“But it’s not something that I want to speak about loudly.” In trying to find some elusive middle ground on abortion in the mid-1990s, Patrick J. Kennedy, the senator’s son elected to Congress in Rhode Island, voted to ban the second- and third-trimester surgical procedure called partial birth abortions by opponents. His press spokesman said Kennedy felt the procedure “too extreme”—though he still considered himself a pro-choice supporter. More than ever, the Kennedys were allied solely with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in a way that appeared to be abandoning the ethnic Catholics, including many Irish-Americans, who abided by the Pope’s moral instruction. Increasingly, these old John Kennedy Democrats of the 1960s flocked to the “family values” rhetoric of the Republicans.
Like so many Catholics with a sentimental, cultural kinship to the church,Ted Kennedy and his family still considered themselves practitioners in good stead. On occasion, they looked back at the past, at a time when the Kennedys and their fellow Irish Catholic immigrants were still pariahs in American society. They were proud about how JFK overcame anti- Catholic bigotry in the 1960 election and, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. later wrote, fondly remembered “the droves of nuns and priests and lay brothers who marched from the rectories, convents and priories to campaign for Uncle Jack with the fervor of the Crusades.” This third generation of Kennedys was made mostly of “traditional” Catholics who attended Mass weekly and asked for God’s grace before dinner. Their commitment to so many different forms of public service—from human rights advocacy to journalism to environmental causes—seemed to be an effort to live up to the family’s legacy and, at times, a form of penance for failing it.“What it’s all about is carrying out service to others, primarily God, than to family and country, but that doesn’t always mean that we live up to those principles,” explained Robert Jr.“I went through a long period where I was knowingly living against conscience.”
Whether a Catholic in name only or by true devotion, Ted Kennedy attended Mass, received Communion and knew all the prayers. And he could say to his Jesuit friend, the Reverend Robert Drinan, with evident sincerity, that he regretted there were no priests in his family.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Looking Backward and Forward
FOR DECADES, IRISH-AMERICANS had focused so much on being absorbed into American society and proving their commitment to their adopted country that they did not concern themselves much with the tiny island nation on the other side of the Atlantic. “When the Irish came to America, [politics] was the only way they could get jobs,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend recalled learning from her grandmother, Rose, as an article of faith.“There was terrific discrimination against the Irish.”
To many, the Kennedys were the apotheosis of that struggle. By the end of the twentieth century, Irish-Americans had melded into every facet of American society without restriction—virtually eradicating any hyphenated ethnic reference from their identity. Their religion, if still a target for subtle bigotry, no longer barred them from the corridors of power or social status. The Kennedys even had their name on a building at Harvard, an unthinkable proposition for an Irish Catholic in the 1920s. Yet, as with all immigrant families, the Kennedys’ actions begged a broader question: Does being accepted in America ultimately mean a loss of faith and one’s own culture?
Now that the long Irish struggle for acceptance was won in America, their descendants seemed willing to look back in a way that their forebears never dared. In the United States, where some forty million people claimed Irish heritage, a surge of popular culture dedicated to Irish themes emerged over the next decade—from Frank McCourt’s bittersweet memoir Angela’s Ashes to the step-dancing Broadway revue of Riverdance to melodramatic Hollywood films about Ireland’s recent history. This homogenized generation of Irish-Americans, the lightest possible shade of green, turned to Ireland for a bit of self-discovery. The Kennedy grandchildren journeyed to Ireland as teenagers and young adults, first as a curious idyll to see the sights and perhaps the old Kennedy Homestead in Dunganstown. Over time, though, their interest developed as impassioned advocates of the emerald isle’s causes.
“I am delighted so much of the Irish legacy has percolated down through my bloodlines and family culture,”wrote Robert F.Kennedy Jr. for a book called May the Road Rise to Meet You, its title referring to the traditional Irish blessing. He and other young Kennedys talked about how their family’s experiences in America mirrored the Irish hatred of oppression, their admiration of moral a
nd physical courage. In a 1998 speech in Dublin about racism, Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island said the Irish “more than anyone, should be able to identify with those who have been downtrodden and struggled and spat upon and stepped upon and who are the outcasts of society because that’s the history of Ireland.”
Although gossip columns followed every move of the Kennedys in the United States, few of their actions in Ireland rated attention by the American media. The same tabloids that kept singing the Camelot tune, presenting the Kennedys as American royalty, seemed to have no idea how many Britons despised this family for their views on Ireland. The Irish connection among the Kennedys was much stronger than perceived generally, and certain historical events that were downplayed or ignored, such as JFK’s 1963 trip to Ireland,were given elevated status in family lore.“The fact that the president went to Ireland was very significant,” explained Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. “All my brothers and sisters have gone over, and my mother’s sister married an Irish man. So my particular family has spent a lot of time in Ireland. My sister Courtney married an Irish man. The Smith family clearly, because their mother was the ambassador to Ireland. So I’d say there’s a fairly strong connection.”
Despite their quintessentially American demeanors, Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children heard the stories of Ireland from Honey Fitz, their mother and their father’s host of Irish cronies.“They grew up with all the talk of Ireland,” explained Dorothy Tubridy. “The grandchildren are very staunchly Catholic and in their sense of being Irish—and that influence stays with you no matter how far you wander.”