As little children, they went to mass each week, and every day in the summertime. "We always had a rosary on our beds; and then, of course, [Mother would] hear our bedtime prayers and do our catechism with us," said Patricia, the sixth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, in her mother's memoir, Times to Remember. They thanked God for the food on their table, and at Sunday dinner they discussed the sermon they'd heard that morning. Priests and nuns were regular guests at meals -- and house-guests, too -- in Hyannis, as caught up in the sailing and tennis as the children themselves. The Kennedys were sons and daughters of privilege; their milestones -- baptisms, weddings, too many funerals -- were marked in church by America's highest bishops. Teddy, the baby, received his first holy communion from Pope Pius XII in Rome, telling reporters afterward, "He patted my head and told me I was a smart little fellow." Archbishop (soon to be Cardinal) Richard Cushing performed Jack's wedding. That prelate, with his broad Boston -- Irish accent, presided over Jack's funeral and helped with Bobby's, too. He barely kept his composure at the first; he wept openly at the second.
As the children of Joe and Rose grew and had their own children, they struggled, as do so many American Roman Catholics, with how to love their ancient church and remain modern, progressive citizens of the land that had given them so much. Some in that generation, and many more in the next, openly decried church teachings and supported birth control -- and, when it became law, abortion. Divorce plagued the family; squabbles with Rome about annulments, remarriage, and intermarriage were fought in public. And in 2002, the Kennedys -- along with more than 60 million other American Catholics -- experienced the pain and revulsion of the sex scandals that started in their own city, Boston, and reverberated throughout the country. Teddy had maintained his parents' habit of cordial relations with the local hierarchy: a priest friend recalls dining with Teddy, his second wife, Vicki, and Cardinal Bernard Law in Hyannis some time before the scandal. But on the day Cardinal Law resigned, Teddy's comments were chilly, brief, and designed to rebuke: "Cardinal Law made the right decision," he said. "Today is a new day." Yet until the day he died, Kennedy considered himself deeply and unquestioningly Catholic.
Amid all the eulogizing, the death of Edward Moore Kennedy presents an opportunity to reflect on the peculiar nature of American Roman Catholicism and the epochal changes -- in piety, in practice, in politics -- that have shaken those Catholics through three generations. Born at what Bobby's eldest child, Kathleen, calls "the apex of Catholic power over Catholics," Teddy and his siblings sit at a pivotal point in American religious history, not so much reflecting the American Catholic story as embodying it. Before the Kennedys, Catholics were locally powerful, but nationally suspect. After the Kennedys, Catholics were Americans, and Americans saw Catholics (more or less) as themselves. "The first American experience of the meaning of Roman Catholicism was the three-day funeral of JFK, culminating in the requiem mass, after which the whole country had its grief assuaged by the Catholic liturgy," says James Carroll, a former priest and author of Practicing Catholic. "The whole nation was Catholic for a weekend."
The ascension of the Kennedys to national political power in the 1960s coincided, not accidentally, with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which put great new emphasis on freedom and social justice, yet left modern American Catholics without sensible guidance on personal questions having to do with sex, marriage, and the role of women. It fell to Teddy, the only one of the brothers to live a whole life, to wrestle publicly with the tensions those reforms created for believers -- and, eventually, between the restless American laity and the hierarchy who preached to them. The boy who took communion from the pope was denounced from the pulpit, 35 years later, for supporting Roe v. Wade. The man whose recklessness caused the death in 1969 of Mary Jo Kopechne, and whose carnal appetites created indelible images of personal excess, also championed some of the most important social reforms -- on immigration, health care, and apartheid, and on behalf of people with AIDS, disabilities, and cancer. Teddy's faith was unique only in that its contradictions were writ so large; in private, he was a thoughtful, irreverent, rebellious, and devout Catholic, like so many Irish-Americans of his age. "There's a kind of interplay between faith, poetry, religion, and imagination that's part of the Irish tradition," says the priest Gerry Creedon, who knew Kennedy well. Creedon often visited Kennedy at his Washington, D.C., home to celebrate mass during his illness, and what struck him was the joy Kennedy expressed in his devotion: "When we would come to pray at the eucharist, he wasn't offering prayers of petition, he was offering prayers of gratitude. I was wondering if I would be as trusting and appreciative of God as he was in that circumstance. That kind of generosity of spirit -- he always [impressed] me as someone who doesn't carry grudges and lets go of them quickly."
The story starts with the matriarch, Rose, who bequeathed her children an ostentatious intimacy with the rites and sacraments of traditional Catholic devotion. Another priest friend of the family remembers an encounter with Rose near the end of her life: "She had had a stroke at the time; she was in a wheelchair. I remember we prayed a decade of the rosary, and she was in her own way praying and responding to us." Rose prayed the rosary every night of her life; she sent her children to Catholic schools; she encouraged them to go on prayer retreats. In one story from Rose's autobiography, 16-year-old Ted is downstairs at Hyannis, regaling his father with schemes of how he'll win sailing races that weekend. His mother walks into the room, just home from mass, and gives her son the news: she's arranged for him to go on retreat that day. "Yes, Mother," young Ted replies. "I'll be ready to go." Joe turns to a friend who is there, his eyes misting, and says, "He's a good boy." As adults, Rose's children kept up their Catholic practice (except Kathleen, nicknamed "Kick" and shunned for marrying an Anglican). JFK, among the most secular of the children, never missed mass -- even on the trail, "when no voter would know whether he attended services," according to Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen's 1965 book. Bobby and Ethel taught their 11 kids what their daughter Kathleen calls a "pervasive" Catholicism: "We had holy-water holders in every door of our house. We said prayers before and after every meal. We went to Roman Catholic schools. On Sundays, we put on our white gloves and shined our shoes. Women wore the mantillas. If we did something good, we got a gold star in heaven." Ted eulogized his mother in 1995, saying, "She was ambitious not only for our success but for our souls... She sustained us in the hardest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us."
Eunice and Sargent Shriver practiced what may have been a more potent flavor of the faith, influenced by Sarge's childhood in Baltimore, the center of orthodoxy at that time. Both of his parents went to mass daily, their son Timothy says. Sarge could recite the Baltimore Catechism by heart, and frequently did. Their home was "layered with crucifixes and madonnas and other very Catholic sort of statuary. It was not congregational and stark. It was Catholic." Even in the months before her death, when she was too ill to go frequently to mass, Eunice had in her bedroom, says Timothy, "at least -- I'm not exaggerating -- 30 separate images of the Blessed Mother, and I mean 30. I don't mean seven that looks like 30."
Rose's piety was not formulaic. "There is a strong tradition in Catholicism of questioning authority," says Kerry Kennedy, Bobby and Ethel's seventh child and author of Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning. Her cousin Timothy echoes this: "If you're not Catholic, it's hard to understand because, to the outsider, it looks like a rank-and-file, authority-driven, conformity-based adherence religion. The actual experience of most Catholics -- and, in particular, European Catholics -- is not either/or. It's both/and. We were taught independence and adherence; to respect our consciences and authority; to follow and to lead."
This quality, of being able to rebel and submit at the same time, is a helpful lens through which to view the Kennedys. It explains the success Bobby and Teddy had crusading for social reform from within the political system. It explains why the Kennedys have a special fondness for priests who went against their bishops on issues such as Vietnam and El Salvador. It explains how Ted could tell The Boston Globe in 1994, "I count myself among the growing number of Catholics who support the ordination of women as priests" -- despite the Vatican's refusal to consider it. It also explains how Ethel, at 81, continues to go to mass each day, yet regularly walks out when she doesn't like the sermon or the priest who's preaching it.
In his 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, John F. Kennedy was implicitly talking about this ideal: he was confident that he could take a stand against his church if necessary. "Whatever issue may come before me as president," he said, "I will make my decision in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise." That speech -- written by Sorensen and vetted by a Jesuit priest and friend of Cardinal Cushing named John Courtney Murray (who would write much of the document defining religious freedom for the Second Vatican Council) -- was a watershed moment for Kennedy and for members of minority religions in America. It helped him win the election. JFK's political philosophy dovetailed neatly with a theology of conscience that would be developed fully several years later at Vatican II: true religious liberty meant allowing private beliefs to remain private, as long as they did not interfere with the public order. In a civil society, obedience to law had to trump adherence to doctrine when the two were in conflict. "Conscience" was the vehicle with which the individual navigated this treacherous terrain.
Ted, who idolized Jack, believed firmly in the separation of religion and politics. He was never interviewed on the subject of his faith. He never publicly connected his church's teachings on social justice to his policy crusades on behalf of "the least of these," a tack he could have easily taken, as Barack Obama has done. Tim Shriver remembers dining with his uncle in Washington and saying something complimentary about the way George W. Bush connected with people on the level of faith. "Jesus Christ, Timmy!" the senator exploded. "This is what Jack fought so hard against."
In 1983, Ted gave his own version of the Houston speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. A Washington Post reporter discovered that the Moral Majority had sent Kennedy a membership card -- despite his being one of their targets at the time. Responding to the reporter's request for comment, Falwell's spokesman Cal Thomas jokingly invited Kennedy to come on down. Kennedy called his bluff. "I told Falwell, and he turned two or three different colors," recalls Thomas. The senator arrived on the appointed day with an adviser and his daughter, Kara, and they all had dinner at Falwell's house. The speech, remembers Thomas, "criticized those who attacked Falwell and conservative Christians. It was incredibly well balanced."