To: Brad Cloven
So this is where his spite and agitation come from...
To: NYer; Aquinasfan; eastsider; Polycarp IV; Desdemona; american colleen; Salvation; Coleus; ...
Kerry's lack of wealth wasn't all that separated him from his classmates. As a child, Kerry had been deeply Catholic, serving as an altar boy and toying with joining the priesthood. At St. Paul's, it wasn't easy for Kerry to keep his faith. On Sunday mornings, he would take a taxi into Concord for Mass -- and then have to return to attend two mandatory Episcopal services at school. In other words, every week, he was forced to remind his classmates of his religious affiliation. And, given his classmates' attitudes toward Catholicism, Kerry would probably have preferred to keep his faith to himself. When Bobby Kennedy attended St. Paul's in 1939, his mother, Rose, pulled him from the school after only a month because she couldn't stomach its anti-Catholic ethos. While that attitude atrophied somewhat, it hadn't entirely disappeared by the late '50s. Barbiero told me, "There were jokes about Catholics. I had more than one classmate tell me that 'those people' had their own clubs and own societies, and they weren't part of our society." Very interesting.
Does this explain Kerry's loathing of his own Catholicism?
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