The black sheep story
Twice today, on different blogs, I’ve come across links to this Time article: “After Ted Kennedy’s Death, Silence from the Pope,” by Jeff Israely. It tells the story of how Teddy fell from favor with Catholics, built around a dramatic final rejection: as the (original) article tells it, the pope simply ignored the deathbed letter Ted Kennedy wrote and had hand-delivered by President Obama.
Israely rehearses the usual RC sqabbles, and then tosses in a few quotes from “one veteran official at the Vatican, of U.S. nationality”:
“Why would he even write a letter to the Pope? The Kennedys have always been defiantly in opposition to the Roman Catholic magisterium.”
Back at headquarters, however, there is little room for nuance. “Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody. He’s a legend with his own constituency,” says the Vatican official. “If he had influence in the past, it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston, and that eventually disappeared too.”
The problem with this article — aside from the scurrilous anonymous quotes from “headquarters” — is that the pope did, in fact, respond to Kennedy’s letter with his own letter promising prayers and imparting his apostolic blessing (as the AP reports here). We know this because Cardinal McCarrick read from both letters at the gravesite on Saturday. After that, the article was amended, but not exactly “corrected.” A parenthetical briefly interrupts the flow, and then it’s back to handicapping Kennedy’s Catholic credentials:
(UPDATE: At Kennedy’s burial at Arlington on Saturday, retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick read excerpts from Kennedy’s letter; he also provided portions of the Vatican’s response to it.)
I think that pretty seriously underplays the extent to which this article got it wrong. I know the pope’s letter wasn’t anything extraordinary, and there are genuine reasons for Catholics to feel ambivalent about the Kennedy legacy. But gossip and bad information is a pretty flimsy hook to hang an article on — especially one that ends with an attempt to discern “the final flicker of Kennedy influence in American Catholicism.”
UPDATE: If Israely was embarrassed by the article linked above, he’s hiding it well. His follow-up article has this headline: “The Pope’s Response to Ted Kennedy’s Letter: Pro Forma.” Rather than acknowledge that the “pro forma” response revealed on Saturday discredits his original report, he’s now reporting that the Vatican’s failure to comment after Kennedy’s death proves…something. (His anonymous sources say so!) And, oddly, he tries to set up a contrast with the letter received by Ted’s sister Eunice just before she died, even though that sounds like it was precisely the same kind of we’re-praying-for-you form letter. Is this another example of that incorrigible liberal media bias I keep hearing about?
Perhaps anonymous sources are not the gold standard in journalism, but this exquisitely tasteless comment from an unnamed Vatican official is completely in keeping with my experience with American clergy working in the curia. Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in Rome knows that the kind of extreme right-wing rubbish believed among American expat clergy is something one would expect at a Mississippi trailer park rather than the center of a world religion. I cannot count the number of truly idiotic statements I have heard, first hand, from curial officeholders probably similar in rank to whoever is quoted here, among them, that condoms do nothing to prevent AIDS (“the virus passes right through!”), that Jesus “invented” altruism, that nothing of note happened during the Inquisition. Very few possess any academic bona fides whatsoever except those obtained at church-sponsored institutions, and hence most have either forgotten or never learned how to interact civilly with anyone outside their increasingly fringe subculture. It does not surprise me at all that, when asked about Ted Kennedy, one of them thought it a marvelous opportunity to spit on his grave.
The Pope’s letter, as quoted at The Boston Globe’s Articles of Faith here, appears to be written in the third person, as if someone other than the Pope wrote it …
The Holy Father has read the letter in which you entrusted to President Obama, who kindly presented it to him during his recent meeting. He was saddened to know of your illness …
Not sure of the signifcance of that.
Crystal, it appears that someone responded to Sen. Kennedy’s letter at the direction of Pope Benedict. (As we only have part of the letter, we don’t know who.) In my own experience at the diocesan level, such a response, at least from a bishop, is not unusual.
Some years ago I wrote to Servant of God John Paul II when he was preparing to visit Austria. I urged him to take advantage of his visit to meet with Mrs. Franziska Jaegerstaetter, the widow of (now Blessed) Franz Jaegerstaetter, and announce the beatification of her martyred husband (by the Nazis for his refusal to fight in Hitler’s army in 1943. He was beatified in October 2007.).
I received a letter from then Archbishop Giovanni Batista Re, the “sostituto” in the Vatican Secretariat of State, writing for the Holy Father, thanking me for my letter, explaining that the process for Franz’s beatification was still incomplete and that it would be premature for the pope to do what I was requesting, but assuring me that the Holy Father welcomed my sentiments and sent his Apostolic Blessing — language strikingly similar to that read by Cardinal McCarrick at the graveside of Senator Kennedy.
I’m sure that the letter was not a “ruse” but was from an authorized office of the Vatican. If the pope personally wrote back to everyone who wrote to him, he would never have time to do anything else!
Michael, maybe if the pope wrote personally to evryone who wrote him, he’d keep himself from many public faux pas.
Oh, this sort of gossip is nonsense and not worth anyone’s time.
Of course Kennedy was not the “perfect Catholic”; none of us are.
He did try to bring his faith to bear in his efforts to help the poor and the working man. The fact that he, for whatever reason, did not support the Pro-life groups’ efforts in trying to outlaw abortions is too bad, but in the end, one need consider what he did do.
For all his faults, old Kennedy did try to use the gifts the good Lord gave him to make things better and help those around him and to help the country he loved. I am not even a Democrat, and I often did not always agree with him, but the fact that Kennedy tried his best to help his family, friends and nation, is good enough for me.
Indeed as a nation, we were fortunate to have such a man.
Yes, like I said, I don’t think the papal letter was anything special — as I understand it, it was a typical papal-blessing response. But the point is, pace Time‘s expert, the official response from the Vatican was not scorn and derision. Yet this piece is being cited, even now, as further evidence of (a) Kennedy’s low standing in the eyes of God and the Church, (b) the pope’s callousness, or (c) both.
Score anbother one for Romanita -I think MEP has it right.
That this trash made it to Time shows the power of the curial inner circle and it continues to drive terible wedges into our Church.
Or maybe it shows the power of SOME conservative/neo-conservative U.S. Catholics who are more interested in dividing than uniting.
Israely has a new piece of “analysis” today — see my update to the post, above.
Also, for the record — I emailed the two bloggers I saw citing the Time article as evidence of Vatican disregard for Senator Teddy. Jason Linkins, who writes the “Eat the Press” media blog at the Huffington Post, corrected his post immediately. No correction or response from Chris Bodenner at the Daily Dish (who dedicated a couple of hypocrisy-hunting posts to the important question of whether Kennedy was validly married in the eyes of the Church).
Israely’s redo reads like a relicking of a very old and sodden ice cream cone!
I always beware the anonymous quotes from American curial officials, as I can be pretty sure it comes from Burke and his loudmouth followers. I’m far more interested in what non-American curial officials (the overwhelming majority, of course!) have to say.
Unfortunately it does not appear that Terry Mattingly has walked back his invocation of the Israely piece as another example of what almost all the rest of us get wrong because we don’t “get religion”–as Mattingly says he does.
Isn’t it weird when advocates for accuracy-in-media let their vigilance slide? I hadn’t seen what Mattingly wrote about this. My initial googling led me to this, though, which looks to me like he’s hunting for things to complain about.
Yes, the Boston Globe misused the word “preside” in re: O’Malley.[Update: they were right! He was the technical presider, according to the official details.] But correcting that technical mistake does not justify quoting, for context, a Web commenter’s observation that O’Malley “did not look very happy to me.” Uh — gotcha?Anyway, here‘s the Mattingly piece David alluded to. Oy. On reading Israely’s piece, Mattingly wrote:
Oh, those picky “facts”! Good thing we have reporters like Israely to hunt them down for us. Lord knows what the folks in Vatican City privately think of Ted Kennedy qualifies as “hard news.”
As for the unnamed curial “official” above, Mattingly describes his gossippy disclosure as “what must be one of the most gripping negative quotations that has slipped into the mainstream media during this time of mourning inside the Washington, D.C., beltway.” Well, yes, it’s “gripping,” but “slipped into”?
This is how we’re supposed to be policing mainstream media reporting on religion?
I would say that Jeff Israely is very good on the Vatican beat, which is a terribly challenging one in terms of sourcing and reporting. Everyone in the Curia is available, except for the Pope, and no one knows what the Pope is thinking.
And no one in the Curia is willing to give his name…
Servant of God yesterday. Pope John Paul The Great today. Santo Subito tomorrow.
Righty-o!
Do we know McCarrick’s source for the letters? I read somewhere that he got permission from the family to read them, but that only deepens the mystery. Did he ask permission of the Pope? Did the Pope ask him to read them?
The last seems like the most likely scenario to me, which pretty much deflates any assertion of papal silence. A named cardinal, publicly reading a letter from the Pope, just seems like a more likely sign of papal intention than an unnamed curial official.