Catholicism ran deep at the home of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.
Prayers before and after every meal, when a family trip was beginning, when something got lost. Bible readings after dinner. St. Christopher medals around the neck. St. Francis pictures on the wall. Virgin Mary statues in the corner. Mass schedules by the bedsides. And Mass every Sunday, until Bobby was killed in 1968; then it was daily.
"It was central to my upbringing - I mean, we woke up in the morning, and we were down on our knees, consecrating the day to Lord Jesus," recalls Kerry Kennedy, 49, the seventh of the 11 children of the Kennedy couple. "And then before bed, we'd spend about 20 minutes with the entire family saying prayers together."
But today, like many Catholics, Kennedy has a hard time reconciling her own views with some of the teachings and actions of her church; in fact, she often can't. So Kennedy decided to talk with well-known Americans about their often complicated relationships with the Catholic faith; the result is a revealing book being released tomorrow.
The book, "Being Catholic Now," offers an unusually intimate view of how much being raised Catholic shapes the identity of many prominent Americans, but also how much tension many feel with the institutional church.
(...) Bill O'Reilly, the FOX News personality, told Kennedy, "Cardinal Law is a villain. I got him removed from office in Boston. I pounded him relentlessly, because he was not doing what he should have for the protection of children in this country."
(...) Kennedy, who was born in Brighton, raised in Virginia, and now lives in New York, said she does not view her book, which includes interviews with conservatives and liberals, as an attack on the church. A human rights lawyer, Kennedy is raising her three daughters in the Catholic faith, attending Mass regularly, and teaching religious education at her parish, and she says the more she realized that other Catholics struggle with their church, the less isolated she felt.
"I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me - it was my sense of connection to the Almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing," she said during an interview in Hyannis Port, where she and other members of the Kennedy family have summered for decades. "And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values."
(...) Many of those Kennedy interviewed praised the Catholic church for imbuing them with a sense of spirituality and community and concern for justice. But Kennedy found multiple recurrent themes among many of the people she interviewed - concern about the role of women in the church, concern about the handling of the abuse scandal, opposition to the church's teaching on birth control, and even frequent unhappy references to the way the specter of hell was used to discipline them when they were children.
(...) Kennedy said she is at odds with the church hierarchy over many issues - abortion rights and women's ordination among them. Her views do not make her extraordinary; polls suggest that an overwhelming majority of American Catholics support women's ordination and that American Catholics reflect the general public's split over abortion.
Kennedy is divorced from Andrew Cuomo, but said her divorce has not been an issue for her in Catholicism because she has not remarried; however, she said, she considers the debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights, such as her uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy, should be allowed to receive Communion "a terrible mistake" by "a few wayward bishops."
But Kennedy also said that in her travels around the world as a human rights advocate, she concluded that in "virtually every country I've gone to, the Catholic church is on the cutting edge of social change."
"I was witnessing the mighty spirit, and the tremendous capacity of this institution which was so much a part of my history, and my family, and my sense of spirituality, and my vision of social justice . . . and then coming back and hearing bishops who were protecting their turf instead of protecting children and playing Three-card Monte with the pedophile priests and blaming it on people who are gay," she said. "So it was important to me to resolve that."
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