Fr. Robert A. Sirico: Kennedy the Catholic And Certian Boston Jesuits

(Here) is an excerpt of Fr. Sirico's latest article from the NRO.

James Joyce once remarked that the Catholic Church was

“Here comes everybody,”

and while I relish the experience of being part of a Church rather than a sect, a Church in which there are a host of matters on which faithful Catholics can disagree,

I also recognize that there are some defining issues from which are derived the very sense of a shared identity.

From my own life and in my pastoral work, I understand that not everyone lives up to the demands of the faith all the time. Graham Greene’s famed “whiskey priest” in The Power and the Glory was the prototype of an essentially good, yet flawed man.

Yet there are some matters so grave that they go beyond mere flaws and work to diminish or even fracture an identity. I fear that this will be part of Ted Kennedy’s legacy, notwithstanding his other personal weaknesses.

What might the face of the Democratic party,

indeed American politics, today look like if Ted Kennedy had, instead of reversing himself, maintained the unflinching stance of his late sister Eunice

in her consistent defense of vulnerable human life — whether that of a mentally handicapped child or sister or an infant in the womb?

Instead, the senator took the dubious advice of certain Boston Jesuits

to abandon that tradition and hence those most vulnerable.