c. 1997 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ Sheila Rauch Kennedy is sturdy and deliberate about the importance of telling the truth.

It was why she filed for divorce in 1991. Living a charade, she says, became too hurtful for everyone. And it was why she fought the Roman Catholic Church annulment sought by her ex-husband, U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., oldest son of Ethel and Robert Kennedy. Her tenacity on this point surprised even her closest friends.

Annulment is a ruling by a church tribunal that a couple’s marriage was never actually valid under church law, clearing the way for the spouses to remarry and receive the sacraments.

In their case, Joe Kennedy wanted the church’s blessing on his 1993 civil wedding to Beth Kelly, a Catholic woman on his congressional staff.

He told his first wife, according to her new book,”Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage”(Pantheon, $23) that she was ridiculous to wrangle over an annulment of their 12-year union.

“I don’t believe this stuff. Nobody actually believes it,” she quotes him as fuming over the telephone. “It’s just Catholic gobbledygook, Sheila. But you just have to say it this way because, well, because that’s the way the church is.”

Five years after that conversation, wearing a red suit and a slight smile, Sheila Kennedy flew into Cleveland to promote the book.

She lost the first round in October when the tribunal of the Archdiocese of Boston ruled Joe Kennedy lacked “due discretion” to marry her after a nine-year courtship. But Sheila Kennedy has appealed the decision to the Roman Rota, the Vatican’s court, and is hoping for a different outcome.

“We are a religion and a nation about second chances,” Kennedy said. “So I think it’s even more important to stand up for what is honest and true and sacred. So much of life is for sale or bartered _ or now, I find, denied. Well, one of the things I find not for sale are the terms under which my children were born.”

Kennedy’s position is simple: Her marriage was both sacred and valid when she and Joe Kennedy entered into it, and no retroactive pronouncement from the Archdiocese of Boston can erase it.

The couple’s children, twins Matthew and Joseph III, are 16. When the marriage broke up, they moved with their mother into a ramshackle house in Cambridge, which Kennedy bought with help from her parents. She fixed up the house, took work as a free-lance city planner (she has a master’s degree from Harvard), and sought not a penny of alimony.

Sheila Kennedy, 48, seems satisfied her boys have been kept outside the fray. She said they haven’t read her book and described their lives as full of lacrosse, school, and requests to borrow the car. She said she promised not to tell reporters which son said what in “Shattered Faith.”

“They see it as a disagreement between their parents, and they know their mother has a disagreement with the church,” Kennedy said evenly.

Her own Episcopalian parents, a prominent Philadelphia couple, were less than thrilled with their daughter’s decision to go public.

“They are in their 80s now, and very private, with a WASP orientation that you don’t wear your feelings on your sleeve and don’t take public what is private,” Kennedy said. “That was a concern for me too. They wanted to know what was wrong with my city planning work that I had to write a book. But once they realized I could manage, and I wanted to do this, they were very supportive.”

She said she embraced the authority of the Catholic church over her marriage on her wedding day. The ceremony was celebrated by both a Catholic and an Episcopal priest.

The book represents a turning point for its author, who described herself as adept at staying quiet, possessing a natural shyness in contrast to Joe Kennedy’s extroverted style. But the day she received a letter from the archdiocese officially notifying her that her ex-husband sought “an ecclesiastical declaration of nullity,” she threw up. And she decided she was through “being stomped on.”

Sheila Kennedy wishes her children’s father well in his new marriage and the next phase of his political career. In the same way, she asks him to remember their children were born as the “result of a great love, commitment, true happiness and a Christian marriage rather than a nonexistent union.”

“For me, a marriage, even one that was over, remained a sacred bond,” Kennedy wrote. “Though divorced, I remained loyal to it. Now, by denying the sanctity of our marriage, Joe had broken that bond.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Now the two communicate only through intermediaries. When shown a copy of Newsweek with a red “down” arrow next to the Kennedy name and the words, “Phony annulments, sex with baby sitters _ the legacy continues,” Sheila Kennedy shook her head.

“I’m sure it’s difficult for Joe,” she said. “I certainly didn’t anticipate the book would generate the talk about him it has, and I don’t think it would have if the allegations about his brother had not come on the heels of the book.”

Michael Kennedy, the younger brother of Joe, is in hiding after reports he began a romantic relationship with the family baby sitter when the girl was 14. His wife, Victoria Gifford Kennedy, mother of their three children, has filed for divorce.

The same week the Boston Globe published its front-page story about his brother, Joe Kennedy called a news conference in Washington, D.C., to counter the negative publicity around Sheila’s book.

He apologized for “any of the mistakes I made” during their marriage and said he pushed for the annulment as “the only way that I can go to communion with my children and wife _ and that is important to me.”

Polls show Joe Kennedy’s popularity in Massachusetts declining in the wake of “Shattered Faith” and his brother’s difficulties. His expected run for governor looks imperiled. Sheila Kennedy doesn’t think that’s fair.

“I think we should draw a distinction between personal behavior and politics,” she said. “I was always told in the first grade, `Don’t vote for your best friend, vote for the one who will do the best job.’ Politicians are politicians. Athletes are athletes. We project on celebrities all our own needs and issues, and I think that’s very dangerous. We create Godlike heroes and then we tear them apart with equal vigor.”

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