by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
If Ted and Vicki's marriage was "blessed", it means the marriage was convalidated. Convalidation is when the Church recognizes the marriage. For that to occur, annulments would have to have occurred.
Another digs deeper:
I did a little Lexis-Nexis searching and can report that it's a matter of public record that Victoria Reggie sought and received an annulment to her first marriage sometime prior to marrying Senator Kennedy. However, while the couple married in a civil ceremony before the Senator's first marriage was annulled, by Jan. 1995 it was subsequently annulled, and his marriage to Reggie was blessed by the Church.
see: James L. Franklin, “Senator Quiet on Application for Annulment, Boston Globe, (July 5, 1992), p. 10. and Peter Steinfels, “Kennedy Blessing Raises Questions for Catholics,” New York Times, (Jan 28, 1995), p. 9.
And another offers some excellent thoughts:
I think this reader is confusing the Vatican with the acts of a local church. This church and the priests involved in the ceremony were doing the decent humane thing which was to acknowledge Sen. Kennedy’s current spouse. My dad was briefly married and divorced before he married my mom, but my mom was acknowledged as his spouse at his funeral as well. Many individual churches have more understanding and compassion than the Vatican. Should this compassion be extended to same sex couples? In my mind, of course.
Also, as a recent Time piece illustrates, the Vatican didn’t seem to keen on Ted Kennedy.
The Catholic Church, especially the Vatican, is brimming with hypocrisy. The Pope rails on about abortion and the sanctity of life, while still ignoring the sins and crimes of pedophile priests. The Vatican came out in support of punishing the doctors and mother of a child who was repeated raped and impregnated, because they procured an abortion for her. The Vatican did not care that the pregnancy would likely have killed this girl who had already suffered so much. The sanctity of the fetus’s life mattered the life of the girl who was already walking the earth did not. Of course the Vatican had little to say about the man who raped her and her sister. All people are not equal in the eyes of the Vatican.
So a local priest being sensitive to the realities of a family is not the big gotcha moment for nailing the Church’s hypocrisy.