A Kennedy Plumbs life as a Catholic

Tuesday September 9, 2008

BOSTON (MA)
The Boston Globe

In book, RFK daughter explores contradictions

By Michael Paulson,
Globe Staff
September 8, 2008

HYANNIS PORT – Catholicism ran deep at the home of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.

Prayers before and after every meal, when a family trip was beginning, when something got lost. Bible readings after dinner. St. Christopher medals around the neck. St. Francis pictures on the wall. Virgin Mary statues in the corner. Mass schedules by the bedsides. And Mass every Sunday, until Bobby was killed in 1968; then it was daily.

“It was central to my upbringing – I mean, we woke up in the morning, and we were down on our knees, consecrating the day to Lord Jesus,” recalls Kerry Kennedy, 49, the seventh of the 11 children of the Kennedy couple. “And then before bed, we’d spend about 20 minutes with the entire family saying prayers together.”

But today, like many Catholics, Kennedy has a hard time reconciling her own views with some of the teachings and actions of her church; in fact, she often can’t. So Kennedy decided to talk with well-known Americans about their often complicated relationships with the Catholic faith; the result is a revealing book being released tomorrow.

The book, “Being Catholic Now,” offers an unusually intimate view of how much being raised Catholic shapes the identity of many prominent Americans, but also how much tension many feel with the institutional church.

“Don’t even let me go into Cardinal [Bernard F.] Law and that he has been rewarded with a princely title in Rome,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Kennedy, referring to the former archbishop of Boston, who resigned over the sex abuse scandal and now oversees a prominent basilica in Rome. “It is just appalling. I cannot deal with that, so I don’t.”

Bill O’Reilly, the FOX News personality, told Kennedy, “Cardinal Law is a villain. I got him removed from office in Boston. I pounded him relentlessly, because he was not doing what he should have for the protection of children in this country.”

And Anne Burke, an Illinois Supreme Court justice who was appointed by the American bishops to a board overseeing the church’s response to the clergy abuse scandal, was clearly infuriated by her up-close view of the church’s upper management.

“It’s the culture of the administration of the Catholic Church in the United States that permitted a climate of cover-up to go on for the past 50 years; it’s the same culture and it’s still out there today,” Burke said. “Things have hit rock bottom in the Catholic Church, and it’s going to get worse.”

But Kennedy finds praise too. Anna Quindlen, the columnist, has many disagreements with the church, but says, “as an instrument of social justice,nobody does it better.” Cokie Roberts, the journalist, says, “Catholicism is a place that gives me a solid sense of justice, hope, and love.” John Sweeney,president of the AFL-CIO, says, “My faith is always a source of strength for me.” And Martin Sheen, the actor, says, “The central mystery of Catholicism is so powerful. It’s simple. God becomes human. Go figure.”

Kennedy, who was born in Brighton, raised in Virginia, and now lives in New York, said she does not view her book, which includes interviews with conservatives and liberals, as an attack on the church. A human rights lawyer, Kennedy is raising her three daughters in the Catholic faith, attending Mass regularly, and teaching religious education at her parish, and she says the more she realized that other Catholics struggle with their church, the less isolated she felt.

“I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me – it was my sense of connection to the Almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing,” she said during an interview in Hyannis Port, where she and other members of the Kennedy family have summered for decades.

“And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values.”

Church officials have not yet seen the book, but a spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said in response to a description of the book, “A lot of Catholics are having lovers’ quarrels with the church.”

“It’s an institution they love very much, and they care for, and when there’s a disagreement, it can become a passionate disagreement, because they care so much,” Walsh said. “I find that comforting, that people will sit and argue the points, rather than think it isn’t worth discussing. There’s more hope if people have an honest intellectual struggle with what the church teaches – that’s been the history of the church, that people have struggled to understand our teaching better.”

Walsh also said that, on clergy abuse, “we all wish the church had recognized the terrible problem sooner. However, as we’re seeing that this problem crosses every group in our society, it’s hard to believe that any group can rival the church in the United States when it comes to dealing with it.”

And, on gender, Walsh said the church has a theological objection to the ordination of women, but that, beyond the priesthood, “women are at high levels in the church, as much, if not more, as they are in US society.”

Many of those Kennedy interviewed praised the Catholic church for imbuing them with a sense of spirituality and community and concern for justice. But Kennedy found multiple recurrent themes among many of the people she interviewed – concern about the role of women in the church, concern about the handling of the abuse scandal, opposition to the church’s teaching on birth control, and even frequent unhappy references to the way the specter of hell was used to discipline them when they were children.

Gabriel Byrne, the actor, who described himself as a victim of clergy abuse, recalled a nun holding a match to her finger to demonstrate “how your soul burns for all time.” Susan Sarandon, the actress, said, “I was told very early on by the nuns that I had an ‘overabundance of original sin.’ ” Comedian Bill Maher said that when he was 7, “a nun told me I was going to hell because I was leaning on the pew in front of me.” And O’Reilly recalled, “The nuns would onstantly tell me that I was going to hell.”

Kennedy said she is at odds with the church hierarchy over many issues abortion rights and women’s ordination among them. Her views do not make her extraordinary; polls suggest that an overwhelming majority of American Catholics support women’s ordination and that American Catholics reflect the general public’s split over abortion.

Kennedy is divorced from Andrew Cuomo, but said her divorce has not been an issue for her in Catholicism because she has not remarried; however, she said, she considers the debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights, such as her uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy, should be allowed to receive Communion “a terrible mistake” by “a few wayward bishops.”

But Kennedy also said that in her travels around the world as a human rights advocate, she concluded that in “virtually every country I’ve gone to, the Catholic church is on the cutting edge of social change.”

“I was witnessing the mighty spirit, and the tremendous capacity of this institution which was so much a part of my history, and my family, and my sense of spirituality, and my vision of social justice . . . and then coming back and hearing bishops who were protecting their turf instead of protecting children and playing Three-card Monte with the pedophile priests and blaming it on people who are gay,” she said. “So it was important to me to resolve that.”

Michael Paulson covers religion for the Globe. He blogs at boston.com/religion and can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com. A transcript of his interview with Kennedy and video from it can be found at boston.com.

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