Michael Kelly
Catholic News Service
From left,
Robert F. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and John F.
Kennedy Jr. leave the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 24, 1963. The following day, a
funeral Mass was celebrated for President John F. Kennedy at the Cathedral of
St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington. (CNS/Abbie Rowe, National Parks Service,
courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)
Newly released
letters between former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and a Dublin-based
priest reveal Kennedy's struggles to keep her faith after her husband's
assassination.
The letters
exchanged by Kennedy and Vincentian Fr. Joseph Leonard, who died in 1964, are
set to be auctioned in Dublin in June. Excerpts were published in The Irish
Times newspaper.
One letter --
dated January 1964, just weeks after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated
-- revealed how the tragedy left the first lady struggling with her Catholic
faith. "I am so bitter against God," she wrote, but added, "only
he and you and I know that."
She explained
that she did not want to be bitter "or bring up my children in a bitter
way" and was "trying to make my peace with God."
She wrote:
"I think God must have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be
without him -- but that is a strange way of thinking to me."
Kennedy wrote in
the same letter, "God will have a bit of explaining to do to me if I ever
see him."
She asked
Leonard to pray for her and said she would pray too in an effort to overcome
her bitterness against God. "I have to think there is a God -- or I have
no hope of finding Jack again," she wrote.
Leonard taught
at All Hallows College, the Vincentian seminary in Dublin, and first met a
young Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in 1950 when she visited Dublin. The two struck up
an immediate friendship and corresponded regularly.
The letters
reveal that Kennedy often turned to Leonard at times of darkness. In 1956, she
wrote to the priest after the birth of a stillborn daughter, Arabella, and
said: "Don't think I would ever be bitter at God." She observed that
she could "see so many good things that come out of this -- how sadness
shared brings married people closer together."
The letters
reveal that Leonard rekindled Kennedy's interest in her Catholic faith. In
early 1952, she wrote: "I terribly want to be a good Catholic now and I
know it's all because of you. I suppose I realized in the back of my mind you
wanted that -- you gave me the rosary as I left Ireland."
She was 22 and
told the priest: "I suddenly realized this Christmas when my sister and I
decided -- after not going to church for a year -- that we desperately wanted
to change and get close to God again -- that it must have been your little
prayers that worked -- all the way across the ocean."