[Balt]

ATTENTION EVERYONE: Father Venditti acknowledges what has been pointed out by a few people here, namely, that he got his Kennedy annullments mixed up. He has, therefore, corrected the relavent paragraph in his homily as follows, and thanks those who saved him from embrarrassing himself on Sunday morning:

"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."

[JAKraig]

Nice job Father.

[Campion]

Sheila Rauch, who remains a faithful Catholic

Sheila Rauch Kennedy is an Episcopalian.

The Archdiocese of Boston has consistantly refused to say whether Ted Kennedy's first marriage to Joan was properly annulled and declared invalid

I was under the impression it was John Kerry's first marriage whose status was mysterious, not Ted Kennedy's.

Other than that, a fine sermon.