Word: vatican
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...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...
...letter, most likely already resealed and tucked away in the Vatican archives, was probably just a dying Catholic's request for a papal blessing. (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.) In the eyes of the traditionalist wing of the Church, however, Kennedy should have been asking the Pope for forgiveness. The Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reported Kennedy's death, praising his work on civil rights and fighting poverty, but noted that his record...
...veteran official at the Vatican, of U.S. nationality, expressed the view of many conservatives about the Kennedy clan's rapport with the Catholic Church: "Why would he even write a letter to the Pope? The Kennedys have always been defiantly in opposition to the Roman Catholic magisterium." (Magisterium is the formal term for the authority of Church teaching.) (See a Kennedy family photo album...
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...