The unshakable Catholic Faith of Ethel Kennedy – through all of it

“Introspection, I hate it,” was the watchword of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F.  Kennedy, who spent her life looking forward and died last week.

She was 96 and suffered a stroke in her sleep, dying on 10 October. Born in Chicago to a self-made coal and coke trader, Ethel Skakel’s family was as star-crossed and ill-fated as the Kennedys. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was in her twenties. Ten years later she lost her brother George in another plane crash.

After moving East, she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York and later at Manhattanville College, where she became friends with one of the Kennedy girls.  Introduced to the family, she first developed a crush on John F. Kennedy, also known as Jack and JFK, but when he evinced no interest in her she turned to his brother, the more seriously religious Bobby. 

They were married in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich in 1950 and went on to have eleven children, two more than Rose, the Kennedy matriarch, had had herself.

Ethel and Bobby bought their home, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC, and it became a rambunctious focal point for family and New Frontier friends. 

Whereas Jackie Kennedy was glamorous and ethereal, Ethel was athletic and competitive; the author George Plimpton claimed she once bit him on the ankle during a touch football game.

Robert Kennedy was a loyal campaign strategist to his older brother and later became his attorney general.  He spoke movingly on his brother’s death, quoting from Romeo and Juliet in his eulogy.  He and JFK’s successor Lyndon Johnson loathed each other, and Kennedy carved out his own career running and winning a senate seat for New York.

Robert Kennedy’s own political career, which was in the ascendant after he declared for president, forcing Johnson from the race, and won the California Democratic primary in June of 1968, was tragically ended by the gun of the assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Ethel was by his side that night and years later wrote to oppose early parole of Sirhan’s life sentence, because of the torment he had inflicted on her family.

Left to raise her large family on her own, Ethel encountered multiple hardships and heartbreaks, including divorces, drug arrests and sex scandals.

David Kennedy died of a drug overdose in The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach in 1984, and Michael was killed while skiing in Aspen, when he crashed into a tree in 1997. Ethel’s grand-daughter Saoirse also died of a drug overdose at the family compound in Hyannisport.

In a long-running case, her nephew Michael Skakel was twice convicted of murdering Martha Moxley in Greenwich, and twice the conviction was overturned. Her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ended his own quixotic presidential run last month, was expelled from two prep schools and became a drug addict and serial philanderer. His wife Mary Richardson eventually hanged herself. 

A sister, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, was arrested for driving under the influence of pills and is now divorced from her husband Andrew, the former governor of New York.

Upon her death, Robert Kennedy Jr. posted the following on X:

“My mom, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, passed peacefully into Heaven this morning. She was 96. She died in Boston surrounded by many of her nine surviving children and her friends. God gave her 34 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, and the energy to give them all the attention they required.

“He blessed her with a rich and eventful life. Even as she declined in recent months, she never lost her sense of fun, her humor, her spark, her spunk, and her joie de vivre. She wrung joy from every moment, but for 56 years she has spoken with yearning of the day she would reunite with her beloved husband.

“She is with him now, with my brothers David and Michael, with her parents, her six siblings, all of whom predeceased her, and her ‘adopted’ Kennedy siblings Jack, Kick, Joe, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Rosemary and Patricia. From the day she met my father, her new family observed that she was ‘more Kennedy than the Kennedys’.

“She was never more enthusiastic about the afterlife than when she considered that she would also be reunited with her many dogs, including 16 Irish setters – all conveniently named ‘Rusty’.

“The cognitive dissonance that allowed her to keep two inconsistent truths in her heart at the same time without budging made my mother a collection of irreconcilable convictions. Among these was her ironic combination of deep – nearly blind – reverence for the Catholic Church and irreverence toward its clerics…

“I credit her for all my virtues. I’m grateful for her generosity in overlooking my faults.”

Through it all, Ethel Kennedy, who leaves four daughters – Kathleen, Courtney, Kerry and Rory – and four sons – Joe II, Chris, Max and Douglass – remained committed to her humanitarian activities and to her unshakable faith. 

Although she had gentleman admirers, none was ever romantic; she remarked: “How could I with Bobby looking down from Heaven?  That would be adultery.”

Photo: Ethel Kennedy in the room where John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for US president on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 20 January 2011. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images.)

This article appears in the November 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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