Teddy...and My Tribe 3 comments

By Ann Conway

I was traveling, once again, as I watched Teddy Kennedy’s funeral on a cross-country flight. I was hooked, just as I had been hooked on watching C-SPAN coverage of the Senator’s prolonged wake at the JFK Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

I couldn’t stop watching my tribe—not the tanned, otherworldly Kennedys—but the thousands of ordinary people who came to the public viewing: elderly black and white women making the sign of the cross, fat middle-aged guys saluting, families from every color and class.

My people, I thought, from the land of fading triple deckers and Darwinian driving, in southern New England’s dirty, Christ-haunted municipalities.

When I was in grammar school in Rhode Island, we fibbed outlandishly about the Kennedys, lied that we were related to them, as we also said we were related to The Beatles. Families emulated The Kennedy Clan in our parish, especially the Cavanaghs. They were a brood of eight kids who sat in the front row at Mass, next to their perfect parents. The Cavanaghs had money; they owned an altar-bread company.

They made God, we joked.

But the Kennedys were God.

The Cavanaghs and Kennedys were all mixed up in my ten-year-old mind. Despite their glamour, I knew I had something in common with them. Like the rest of us, they weren’t far from the tenements and the mills. They came from nothing, had fiercely struggled forward.

That old immigrant narrative played a central role in my personal and community life. With its ethos of willful persistence in the face of tragedy the Kennedy story was a powerful example on which to base my own, at a time when there were so very few to choose from.

On the plane not many others watched CNN. The Kennedys’ shining story has long been tarnished, after all. To many people in our culture, Ted Kennedy personified the world’s sinfulness and decadence, just as Catholicism itself sometimes embodies corruption to the dogmatic Left and the dogmatic Right.

“I don’t feel a bit sorry for Kennedy,” my ex-friend Sarah said of him, her face twisting in distaste (this from a pious woman who went to church twice each Sunday and led Bible study on another day). She seemed to hate Teddy—a visceral hatred, like the animus of the smug lieutenant toward the “whiskey priest” of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory: that sniveling, alcoholic priest who followed his calling till the end, burdened as he was.

Even after Kennedy’s funeral at Boston’s Mission Church, people complained that he shouldn’t have been given a Catholic funeral—so much so that the Cardinal later wrote of the need for a “civilization of love” that changes hearts, not the hardness of condemnation and hatred.

Others jeered about the funeral’s setting in a blue-collar neighborhood (where I once almost got mugged) and the liturgy’s many references to the poor. “The poor! The poor! Always bringing up the poor!” said one right-wing commentator.

But to me, Kennedy’s last months, where he spoke of life as a “continual process of atonement” (an astonishing phrase in our time, where public figures now usually only apologize “because you’re upset”), where he admitted his failings and seemed to truly believe that “every day is a gift,” were a powerful lesson, just as the Kennedys’ drive to succeed was a lesson in my early life.

In the Mass, these lessons were implicit in art, lovely readings, and stunning music: the Ave Maria’s “Thou canst hear through from the wild / Thou canst save amid despair / Safe may we sleep beneath Thy care / Though banished, outcast and reviled.” The Panis Angelicus contains the hope “that Thou wilt visit us / as we worship Thee, / Lead us through Thy ways, / We who wish to reach the light / in which Thou dwellest.”

Some people hate Ted Kennedy. He made horrible errors. But in darkness, he made gentler the light of the world. I loved him, I now realize, as one sometimes belatedly realizes of the dead.