Sheila Rauch Kennedy: The Kennedy Marriage That Ended in Betrayal and Death

An envelope reached a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1993 carrying word that a church court in Boston was revisiting a wedding that had already been witnessed, blessed and lived in. Sheila Rauch Kennedy had married Joseph P. Kennedy II in a Catholic ceremony in 1979 while remaining an Episcopalian. Twelve years, twin sons and a civil divorce later, a tribunal was weighing whether the consent exchanged that day had ever been valid at all. She had not asked for the case. She was the respondent in it. The hearing ran on one canon, 1095, which asks whether a spouse lacked the psychological capacity to consent, or to carry out what that consent promises. She testified in March 1994, her own psychiatrist filed answers dated that same month, and when the tribunal offered its own examiner she declined after learning he held a doctorate in sociology rather than psychology. Three witnesses were heard, all from her former husband's side; the friends she submitted, people who had watched the marriage from inside it, do not appear to have been called. Then the tribunal's defender of the bond, the official whose assignment is to argue that a marriage is real, concluded the 1979 wedding had been valid and that an appeal to Rome would likely succeed. The tribunal asked Joe Kennedy whether he wanted to withdraw the petition. He did not. In April 1997 her account of the whole file, Shattered Faith, went on sale at $23 a copy. He answered reporters in Washington, apologizing for mistakes he made during the marriage and saying the annulment was the only way he could receive Communion beside his wife and his children. That August he quit the governor's race he had been expected to win. On the last afternoon of 1997 his brother Michael was killed on a ski slope in Aspen. Fourteen years after the petition was filed, a Vatican court held that the annulment should never have been granted; the Boston archdiocese sat her down and told her in May 2007, and the ruling that reached her then was the one she had been waiting on since 1993.