Whew...
That’s powerful...
Thanks for posting this. -It’s a great read. This is the sort of man who should be leading the Church.
The Roman Catholic Church missed a golden opportunity to demonstrate moral leadership. It comes off as hypocritical to condemn abortion and adultery and then bury an individual that embodies everything the church is against. It has many wondering about the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
I may be wrong but I thought that Ted Kennedy’s first marriage had received a Catholic Church annulment — that the Kennedy annulment that was “taken back” was re the marriage of Robert Kennedy’s son Joe.
Finally a priest who does not pull punches about the Kennedy burial. I felt like standing up at the computer and cheering.
It seems to me there is no particular official position. A Roman Catholic who happened to have notoriety died, and he had a Roman Catholic funeral.
Or have I missed something here?
I wish this Priest could become the Archbishop of the Diocese that includes Washington, DC.
From my post to God’s ear to Pope Benedict XVI?
ping
Thanks! This was fantastic. I’m going to forward this to my Catholic friends.
In his statement on Kennedy’s marriage and annulment I think he is confusing Sheila Rauch Kennedy’s sucessful appeal of her annulment from Joseph P. Kennedy II.
As to the rest, no argument from me.
Can't say I blame her for doing this...she had three children with this man, and him having the marriage "annulled" after its being fruitful demeaned her into the role of concubine all those years, not his wife.
Make this man pope!!
Oh man, what an amazing article. I hope the higher-ups in Kennedy’s diocese read this.
ping
"But regardless of how one views the whole question of Catholic politicians and abortion, there is an even more objective reality at play here: Mr. Kennedy lived the last years of his life in what most Catholics would have to preceive to be an objective state of mortal sin. To be fair, he made a petition to have his first marriage to his wife, Joan, annulled. Whether an annulment was granted regarding that marriage no one seems to know. But I do know that Sheila Rauch Kennedy appealed the rather quick annulment that Joseph P. Kennedy, II, received from the Archdiocese of Boston, taking her fight all the way to Rome; and the Roman Rota, the court at the Vatican that decides appeals to annulment cases, ruled that Joseph Kennedy’s marriage to Sheila Rauch was valid and could not be annulled. Sheila Rauch, who remains a faithful Catholic, went on to write a book about her experience fighting the annulment of her marriage, in which she catalogs the culture of corruption that existed in the Archdiocese of Boston, where money could buy anything, including an annulment; and she anticipated, in a veiled way, how that corruption would eventually come back to explode to the detriment of the Church; as it did some years later when it became public that Cardinal Law and his predecessors had, for years, covered up the sexual abuse of children by many of their priests. The Archdiocese of Boston has consistantly refused to say whether Ted Kennedy's first marriage to Joan was properly annulled and declared invalid, leaving the spector of scandal loaming for every faithful Catholic who wonders about it. Unfortunately, for most American Catholics, however, there is no such thing as scandal anymore."
I believe the priest is mistaken in writing that Joan Bennett Kennedy challenged the annulment of her marriage to EMK and wrote a book about it. I believe that was the wife of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Sheila Rauch Kennedy, who successfully had a Boston Archdiocese annulment overturned by the Vatican.
If the Boston Archdiocese was faithful to the Roman Catholic Church, they should have denied not only the full bore ceremony we saw today which was a total disgrace, but anything beyond a service simply to pray for his soul. The family could have just had something private at ‘the compound’ and jetted his body to DC without making the Catholic Church look like the largest, most hypocritical church on earth. It was an embarassment to the Church and to the practicing faithful. Cardinal McCarrick at the gravesite was even worse.
Similarly the Department of Defense has some ‘splainin to do. There are untold actual military heroes who served real time in real war, and/or who spent their careers in our nation’s defense, whose families, IF they can get buried at Arlington, have to wait for months to have their burial ceremony conducted at Arlington. And, when an Arlington burial IS scheduled, it’s at the pleasure of DoD, not at the pleasure of the grieving family. I have never heard of an evening burial there, tho there may be some, but never for a soldier who served two years, mostly in Paris, while a war was being conducted half a world away.
Neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the US Department of Defense bathed themselves in glory today.
Because he got his annulments mixed up, and there's so much confusion about the issue, Father Venditti says he's going to omit the paragraph about annulments altogether when he preaches in the morning. Whatever the truth, the point is still made in the later paragraph regarding the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. It may be prudent to leave any "marriage" allusions to that. In any case, he thanks everyone for their help. That's what it's all about! :)