Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most discussed gestures of a tightly choreographed day came at the Arlington National Cemetery evening burial service. Retired Washington Archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCarrick read excerpts from a private letter Kennedy wrote to Pope Benedict XVI - hand-delivered in July by President Obama - and portions of the Vatican response to Kennedy two weeks later. After making no public comment nor authorizing an official communique after Kennedy's death, was the Pope publicly reaching out to this controversial Catholic politician? According to both Vatican and U.S.-based Church officials, the answer...
...Vatican diplomat said the original copies of all correspondence to the Pope - and a photocopy of the responses - are duly sent to the Holy See archives. Such missives are divided among those of a personal nature from ordinary faithful that are kept in the Pope's personal archives and those of a public or political nature that go into the Vatican's "general" archive. After a certain period of time following a Pope's death, scholars may eventually be given access to the correspondence. The Pope would never reveal the contents of the private correspondence he receives, the Ambassador told...
...Pope earlier this summer. The Senator asked for the Pope's prayers because he knew his brain cancer had the upper hand. "I know that I have been an imperfect human being," Kennedy wrote, "but with the help of my faith I have tried to right my path." The Vatican's letter in response, made public by the Cardinal for the first time, encouraged Kennedy to remember that suffering can have its own spiritual force...
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." Some say the final sunset on the Kennedy name within Catholic halls of power was the Vatican's decision in 2007 to overturn the annulment of the first marriage of former U.S. Representative Joe Kennedy, the eldest son of Robert Kennedy. The successful appeal by Joe Kennedy's ex-wife Sheila...
...what may mark the final flicker of Kennedy influence in American Catholicism, reports circulated last spring that Obama was considering JFK's daughter Caroline Kennedy as the possible next U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. That was not to be. Indeed, in the wake of Uncle Ted's death came word Thursday that Obama's final choice had arrived in Rome to take up the diplomatic post at the Holy See. He is Miguel Diaz, a little-known Cuban-born professor of theology firmly on the record as prolife...