The Forum

From the American Spectator:

In 1939, Pope Pius XII issued the Eucharist to seven-year-old Ted Kennedy, who, biographer Joe McGinniss claims, was "the first American citizen ever to receive his first holy communion from a pope." In the seventy years since, Ted Kennedy's relationship with the Catholic Church has been problematic, to say the least. From receiving communion at Mary Jo Kopechne's funeral, to procuring an annulment for a marriage of 25 years that had produced three grown children, to revelations during the William Kennedy Smith rape trial that the senator had woke his son and nephew on Good Friday to instigate the ill-fated carousing in Palm Beach's bars, Ted Kennedy hasn't exactly acted as a model Catholic.

Highlighting this is the other major story -- the transformation of the Kennedy Compound into a museum -- to emerge from the Kennedy funeral. "Rose [Kennedy] wanted to turn the place over to the Benedictine monks before she died," Benedict Fitzgerald, the late Kennedy matriarch's personal attorney, told author Ed Klein for his book Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died. "I drew up the legal papers for her on my front porch. But when Ted found out about it, he ripped the thing in half. There was no way he was going to have the place turned into a monastery." Instead, as Fox News reported, "The Kennedy compound in Hyannis, Mass. will be converted into an educational center and museum as a tribute to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy."

With Boston archbishop Sean O'Malley offering a blessing at the senator's funeral, and the former archbishop of Washington, D.C. presiding over the burial, many of Kennedy's political antagonists are outraged, not that the Church was silent, but that it so loudly honored a man who fought to undermine church teaching.

"No rational person can reasonably be expected to take seriously Catholic opposition to abortion when a champion of the Culture of Death, who repeatedly betrayed the Faith of his baptism, is lauded and extolled by priests and prelates in a Marian basilica," C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, explained on Saturday. "This morning's spectacle is evidence of the corruption which pervades the Catholic Church in the United States."