Tag: Personal life

Political and personal life of politicians in Pakistan can never be told apart. As what’s personal is political and vice versa, more because it gives one’s opponents to spin off the circumstances or even incidents from a bygone era of one’s life to their own advantage with instances proving to be successful. However, moral obligations bind one to not to drag one’s personal life into the realm of work, yet to do so it’s important that the same is aware of the notions of ethics and morality towards their fellows. Much like other local politicians, Imran Khan too time and again has cashed in on the life events of his biggest opponent Nawaz Sharif. Only a day ago, Khan accused the former PM of using his wife’s unstable medical condition to blackmail people and for gaining their sympathies. Regardless of Sharif’s intentions, the PTI chief has outdone himself by stooping even lower than his previous accusations. How Khan was himself was exposed by the then MQM’s Babar Ghauri should have been enough to let him taste the humiliation one faces by having it all out there for millions to know. Yet accusing someone in the absence of substantial evidence is in fact more degenerating. Yaseen Hashim Peshawar

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.