Sen. Edward M. Kennedy wrote a letter to the pope. The urgency of the message was evident in the preeminence of the messenger: President Barack Obama himself had handed the letter to Pope Benedict XVI at the end of the historic first meeting between the two leaders in the Vatican last month. The papal spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, was peppered with questions by reporters from around the world. What did the letter say? Had the pope read the letter yet? Had President Obama asked the pope to pray for Senator Kennedy?
With his warm eyes and lyrical laugh, Father Lombardi parried all their inquiries. The two had spoken about many issues: bioethics, Middle East peace, and the economic catastrophe posed to the world's poor by the international recession. There was optimism at the Vatican, he said, that a new era had begun for finding solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems. But in halting Italian, one reporter asked again: What was in that letter from Senator Kennedy?
The Kennedy name has become intertwined with Catholicism in American political life. Rose Kennedy famously went to Mass twice a day, and it could reasonably be said that she had more to worry about than most Catholic mothers.
It is easy to forget the hatred that, for more than 150 years, met Catholics who sought a greater role in public life. The history of American Catholicism is rooted in the Irish and Italian immigrant experience and the clash of cultures that it brought. In 1928, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses along the path of a train that carried the Irish Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, to a campaign rally in Oklahoma City, where he said, "I have the right to say that any citizen of this country ... [who] votes against me because of my religion, he is not a real, pure, genuine American."
It took a non-Catholic governor of New York to bring real Catholic sensibilities to the White House. Franklin Roosevelt had a Catholic priest as one of his closest political confidantes. The legacy of the New Deal in a time of national crisis was one of caring for working people, lifting the elderly out of poverty, and helping lay the foundation for the civil rights movement.
But it was President John F. Kennedy who truly tore down the ultimate barrier for Catholics in public life. His brother Ted, battered by the untimely deaths of four older siblings and his own survival of both a plane crash and a tragic car accident, found deep personal inspiration in his Catholic faith.
