WASHINGTON , D.C. – Recollections and tributes to Robert F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination have mainly highlighted his charisma and determined advocacy for social and racial justice.
But underlying these tributes to the former attorney general, U.S. senator, Democratic presidential candidate and father of 11, also is an unmistakable connection to his Catholic faith.
Inevitable references to Kennedy’s faith come up when mentioning his Irish Catholic family or his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, but there also are plenty of anecdotes in biographies mentioning that he was an altar server or wore a St. Christopher medal. And then there are his speeches, which often echo Catholic social teaching without coming right out and saying it.
A Newsweek tribute to Kennedy describes one of his speeches as “typically peppered with erudition and an almost ecclesiastic, Catholic compassion.”
That particular speech asked what reason people have for existing “unless we’ve made some other contribution to somebody else to improve their own lives?”
Historians and biographers alike have not shied away from Kennedy’s Catholicism, often saying he was the most Catholic of the Kennedy brothers and that he wasn’t afraid to express his faith.
Larry Tye, author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon in 2016, said Kennedy’s faith helped him as he grieved the 1963 assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, noting that he kept a missal beside him in the car and thumbed through it to prayers he found consoling.
And instead of just attending Sunday Mass, Tye said, Kennedy was “in the pew nearly every day. His faith helped him internalize the assassination in a way that, over time, freed his spirit.”
Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who was a legislative aide to Kennedy from 1964 until his death, can attest to this.
He described Kennedy as “assiduous in his practice of his Catholicism” and said his “values and work were certainly based significantly in his faith.”
When asked to explain this more, he told Catholic News Service that when he and Kennedy were in New York City, Kennedy often stopped for a few minutes to go into a church to pray while Edelman said…
