NOTABLES: Persons of interest

Kennedy the Catholic
by Rev. Robert A. Sirico
President, Acton Institute

August 27, 2009

I only met Edward Kennedy once.

I had been invited to visit then-senator Phil Gramm, who was contemplating a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996. Having read some of my musings on the topic, Senator Gramm wanted to brainstorm about some innovative welfare-reform policies that would simultaneously make economic sense and really help the poor.

After we had chatted for some time in his office, a bell rang and Senator Gramm rose. “I need to take a vote. Walk with me and let’s continue this conversation,” he said.

As we walked down the corridor, I could spy familiar names on the various Senate office doors. We came to an elevator that would take us down to an underground subway connecting the Senate offices to the Senate chamber. It was a small elevator, no more than a large closet. Senator Gramm, an aide, and I tucked ourselves in and the door began to slide shut.

Just before closing, an arm came through to stop the door’s close. As it reopened, I found myself standing face-to-face with the Lion of the Senate, arguably the most prominent Catholic layman in the country, scion of the most prominent Catholic family, perhaps, in U.S. history.

Kennedy immediately looked me up and down, and then quizzically glanced over to Senator Gramm trying to figure out why his colleague was hanging out with a priest.

As Senator Kennedy stepped into the elevator, Senator Gramm welcomed him with his Southern tones, “Come on in, Teddy. We’ve called you here to pray for you.”

Without missing a beat, Senator Kennedy tossed a mischievous wink in my direction, nudging me with his elbow in Catholic camaraderie and replied in his Bostonian accent, “Uhh [there was that familiar pause of his], uhh, no Phil, Father and I have called you here to pray for you.”

There was laughter as the elevator door slid closed. It was my turn to speak so I decided to enter the spirit of the moment.

I stood erect, place my hand on Senator Kennedy’s broad shoulder and said, “Actually, senator, this is an exorcism.”

The laughter in that elevator, which spilled out onto the train platform, was electric, causing the by-standing senators to look in our direction and wonder what in the world would have Senators Kennedy and Gramm in such uproarious laughter with a Catholic priest.

And so, I had mixed feelings on the news of Ted Kennedy’s passing. A memory of a pleasant encounter, but knowledge that despite our common baptism, Senator Kennedy and I differed in some very radical ways on issues of public policy, economics, heath care, marriage, and, most fundamentally, on matters related to life.

James Joyce once remarked that the Catholic Church was “Here comes everybody,” and while I relish the experience of being part of a Church rather than a sect, a Church in which there are a host of matters on which faithful Catholics can disagree, I also recognize that there are some defining issues from which are derived the very sense of a shared identity.

From my own life and in my pastoral work, I understand that not everyone lives up to the demands of the faith all the time. Graham Greene’s famed “whiskey priest” in The Power and the Glory was the prototype of an essentially good, yet flawed man.

Yet there are some matters so grave that they go beyond mere flaws and work to diminish or even fracture an identity. I fear that this will be part of Ted Kennedy’s legacy, notwithstanding his other personal weaknesses.

What might the face of the Democratic party, indeed American politics, today look like if Ted Kennedy had, instead of reversing himself, maintained the unflinching stance of his late sister Eunice in her consistent defense of vulnerable human life — whether that of a mentally handicapped child or sister or an infant in the womb?

Instead, the senator took the dubious advice of certain Boston Jesuits to abandon that tradition and hence those most vulnerable.

Many will speak and write of the legacy of Ted Kennedy in the days ahead. For me, as an East Coast “ethnic” grandchild of immigrants, Kennedy’s death symbolizes several cogent moments in Catholic America.

It marks the passing of a generation that thought that being Catholic, Democratic, and pro–New Deal were synonymous. We now live in an age where many Catholic Americans are very happy to be described as pro-market and are suspicious of New Deal–like solutions — as, of course, they are entitled to be in a way that they are not on, for example, life issues. Senator Kennedy had it exactly the wrong way around.

Kennedy’s death also brings the Church face-to-face once again with the fact that there is a massive problem of basic Catholic education — catechesis — among the faithful.

So many Catholics — even some clergy — make an absolute out of prudential issues such as economic policy, while relativizing absolutes, such as abortion, euthanasia, and marriage.

This is done in the face of clear, binding teachings from John Paul the Great, who said that no other right is safe unless the right to life is protected, or, as Pope Benedict wrote recently in Caritas in Veritate, that life issues must be central to Catholic social teaching.

This also marks the passing of a certain type of cultural Catholicism — Northeast, Irish and increasingly Italian, concerned with obtaining political power while maintaining an identification with the Church, yet happy to relinquish the substance of the faith if it gets in the way.

Indeed, today such cultural Catholics have dispensed even with the identity aspect and are often outright hostile to the Church of their baptism.

I would like to think that the letter, reported to have been ten pages, that Ted Kennedy wrote and asked President Obama to hand to Pope Benedict early in the summer renders an account of his life before God and the Church.

I certainly pray he died at peace, reconciled with the Church of his fathers, and in God’s merciful grace. And I shall pray for his eternal beatitude.



Head chef in the cafeteria
By Brad Miner

August 28, 2009


Miner was a literary editor of National Review, and is now senior editor of The Catholic Thing.


When I think of Edward M. Kennedy (“Teddy” early on before the more respectful “Ted”), I first think of Terry Malloy, the character played by Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” Kennedy’s brothers got title shots (one was champ), but, like Terry, Teddy got a “one-way ticket to Palooka-ville!” Did he think, I coulda been a contender? Oh yes.

But unlike Terry, Teddy was no bum, and, despite some astonishing missteps, he got to hang out with the punchy Palookas in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, that Gleason’s Gym of blow-dried heavyweights, the United States Senate.

Indeed, he became the longest-serving senator in Massachusetts history, second-longest in the current Senate (after Robert Byrd, for whom nearly everything in West Virginia is named), and the third-longest since Vice President John Adams pounded the gavel at the Senate’s first session on March 4, 1789.

This is remarkable, since in the aftermath of July 18, 1969, the oddsmakers were wagering Kennedy’s political career had sunk as low as his Olds Delmont 88 (and, lest we forget, Miss Mary Jo Kopechne) into that dark Chappaquiddick tidal pool. Mr. Kennedy was thirty-seven when his career died. He announced that he would not seek re-election to the Senate in 1972.

He was reborn when he was re-elected in 1972. Polls overcame his decision to retire to private life, and he never looked back.

Questions about his character became moot, and, mirabile dictu, there being no legal consequences following the Chappaquiddick Incident, he found a certain peace in knowing that in congressional wheeler-dealing – as opposed to presidential politics – he was free to be himself without fear of rejection by the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – ever.

Well, he did take a half-hearted shot at the presidency in 1980, but after that he was Senator-for-life. And the Nation’s Preeminent Catholic Politician.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, Ted Kennedy had not been a staunch advocate of abortion rights. Quite the opposite. As Anne Hendershott wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, two years before Roe Kennedy “was still championing the rights of the unborn.”

But as his thinking evolved (he earned a 100 percent pro-choice rating from NARAL), you could pretty much take the Church’s position on a given moral issue and reliably predict that Kennedy’s advocacy would be in opposition to it.

Same-sex marriage? Kennedy votes yea. Pro-life candidates for the Supreme Court (Rehnquist, Bork, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito)? Kennedy votes nay. (In fairness, he did support Antonin Scalia in 1986.) Adultery? Well, let’s not forget that Miss Kopechne (She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in stories about Teddy’s death), whom Kennedy said he was escorting to her hotel, had left the party where they’d been without either her purse or her room key. Divorce? He left his first wife in 1983. [In fairness, by all accounts, Kennedy abandoned his womanizing after he married Victoria, who appears to have provided him much-needed domestic stability, private discipline and good sense.]

All this may be entered – and surely is – in the Book of Life against his salvation, but there were things about the man that even his most vocal opponents found endearing.

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) described Kennedy as “like a brother to me,” and John McCain (R-AZ) called Kennedy a “skillful, fair, and generous partner.” He worked with George W. Bush on No Child Left Behind. Upon hearing the news of Kennedy’s death, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “No one could have known the man without admiring the passion and vigor he poured into a truly momentous life.” All true.

And, given the family tragedies he endured, one may admire his determination to push on. Plus (politics aside) he was probably our history's most successful Senator.

All Catholics should hope that in the end he received the Sacrament of Anointing, and God’s mercy, and that his soul is with Jesus. Still, as Elizabeth Scalia once wrote about Sen. Kennedy, “the quiet altruism of a public man is always overshadowed by the noise of his sins.”

And those were very public sins, many of which he defended as a Catholic, and the question for the faithful is this: Who other than Edward Moore Kennedy did as much to debase the public understanding of our faith? Or gave, in the technical sense of the term, grave public scandal?

Well, there were the pedophile priests and their ecclesiastical enablers, but when Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Rudy Giuliani and other dissident Catholic politicians, all of them likely excommunicated latae sententiae (and unrepentant to boot), receive Holy Communion at papal Masses during Benedict XVI’s American visit, less discerning Catholics may be forgiven for supposing that political positions which contradict the Magisterium are nonetheless canonically acceptable.

One notes in the encomia that flowed freely after Sen. Kennedy’s death how often writers have referred to his support of “Catholic values.” Even his most ardent admirers would not dare assert that he championed Catholic teaching.

And when I think of Edward M. Kennedy and his legacy, I picture him as the chef de cuisine of cafeteria Catholics everywhere. He was the man most responsible for cooking up, sometimes abetted by clerical sous chefs, the corned beef and cabbage that is served, steaming in over-seasoned political broth, as American Catholicism. His sins were scarlet, but are past. The scandal, however, lives on.

And I recall with both pleasure and pain the image of John Paul II shaking his finger at the beret-wearing, Nicaraguan leftist heretic, Ernesto Cardenal. It’s a pleasant image made painful by my inability to recall any American Catholic priest, bishop, archbishop, or cardinal ever publicly scolding Ted Kennedy.

That said, may he rest in peace.


I am relieved that this occasion has somehow broken the unwritten taboo that nothing but good must be said about a man who has just passed away - and that much of the honest expression is coming from reputable Catholics.

Benedict XVI may still issue a statement in time for Kennedy's funeral, but that he has not done so, so far, tells me that he does not want to commit public hyprocrisy for the sake of the convention that a dead man must somehow be immune from criticism.

History will eventually decide what Kennedy's actual concrete achievements were in terms of legislation that benefited all Americans, as opposed to broad-net entitlement programs that encouraged welfarism.

I do not doubt that Edward Kennedy was loving and charming and a good man to those he loved - and to others who shared his views.

And I will not even hold Chappaquiddick against him, because it sort of confirmed what the public really suspected about him at the time - that he was much inferior to his older brothers in terms of intellect, and probably, character. He was caught cheating at Harvard, after all.

Perhaps he saw his singleminded dedication to his work as a Senator as his way of making up somehow for whatever it was he fell short of at Chappaquiddick. If he eventually came to be the 'lion of the Senate', it was because of longevity, and from all accounts, honest industrious homework on the bills he sponsored. If only he had applied the same standards to his assessment of his political enemies!

But what I cannot forget about him was his relentless and consistent partisan nastiness - personal and often wrongful because false attacks, rather than merely arguing against their positions - against anyone whose views were different from his ultra-liberal reflexive mindset.

In the past 20 years that I have been in the United States, I have hardly seen or heard him on TV except excoriating Republicans and conservatives for not being the bleedingheart liberal that he was, and vilifying in the nastiest ways possible those he had reason to take down politically, from Robert Bork to Condoleezza Rice, Sam Alito, John Roberts, and George W. Bush (and most of his appointees to anything).

All I have seen of him was a man who was 100% sure that only he and his way were right, to the point of intolerant meanness for those who thought differently and were not his personal friends - the very embodiment of demagoguery and ideological bigotry! That was his public face to anyone who was not a Democrat or a liberal - because of course, they greeted his every 'lion's roar' with cheers of approbation.

He finished his memoirs before he passed away, and the book is due to come out next month. I hope that the terrible death sentence under which he had to write it helped him to reconsider that partisan sanctimony and acrimony.

And I am sincerely glad that a Catholic priest came to give him the Last Sacraments.