Joe Kennedy, the senator's nephew and a former Congressman, married Sheila Rauch in 1979. They divorced in 1991. Kennedy married an aide in his office in 1993, but, being a good Catholic, he applied for an annulment of his marriage to Rauch. In 1996 the Archdiocese of Boston granted the annulment. However, since all annulments have to be approved by the Vatican, Rauch appealed.
Nine years later the Vatican ruled that the annulment was not valid. However, the ruling was in Latin and there just aren't that many Latin scholars around, even in the Catholic church. It took two years for Rauch to find out that she and Joe were still husband and wife. She found this out in May and the news was made public now.
You have to wonder whether the annulment would have been finalized had it happened in the 1970s rather than the 1990s. Ted Kennedy had no problem getting an annulment back then.
3 comments:
Not sure about your annulment comment regarding Ted Kennedy. He and Joan were not divorced until 1984
My memory failed me. Thanks for the correction.
Still, DeVito made a valid point.
The Kennedy influence is indeed waning. In the early 1960s, President JFK and Jackie both interceded with the Vatican to help Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwill, obtain an annulment of her first marriage to Michael Canfield. It worked.
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