Tag: Kerry Kennedy

The Story: On Tuesday, August 10, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he is resigning his office, amidst credible reports that he had turned his administration...

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. 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. 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 he stayed outside because he is Jewish. “Robert was the Kennedy who took his Catholicism most seriously. He attended Mass regularly, and prayed with his family before meals and bed,” said Jerald Podair, a history and American studies professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. As he put it in an email to CNS, Kennedy viewed his faith “as a summons to heal the world, making it a more equal and just place. An example was his strong support for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers movement, one that itself was steeped in Catholic liturgy and morals.” Podair said Kennedy was drawn to the farmworkers’ cause - when few other mainstream politicians were - “largely because of its links to Catholicism.” He noted that when Kennedy sat with Chavez as he took Communion at an outdoor Mass after the end of his March 1968 hunger strike, it was a public expression of Kennedy’s firmly believed Catholic view that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.