Edward Kennedy, R.I.P.

I didn't know Senator Kennedy personally, and met him only once, very briefly and many years ago. And so I won't say too much about his death. I know his family is grieving, as any family grieves when it has lost one of its own; and so my prayers go out to them. And I will pray for the repose of Ted Kennedy's soul, and trust I will be joined in this by all Catholics of good will.

In the days to come we will hear the senator both praised and condemned. Some will lionize him as the last knight of Camelot, applaud him as the Senate's liberal icon, and canonize him as the saintly reformer who thought only of the "little guy." I will not join them. His political views and mine are far from coincident. Others, of course, will focus on what they believe to be the senator's personal sins. And I won't join them either. Whatever personal sins he committed are between him and the Lord, and have no doubt already been addressed in their recent meeting. Anyway, I have my own collection of sins and, like the senator, I will work on overcoming them without a lot of interference by others.

In truth, it's the senator's public sins -- if I may call them that -- that concern me. Anyone who knows me also knows that I disagreed with Senator Kennedy on most issues, and certainly on the key issue of abortion. I've always thought it remarkably sad that the senator, a practicing Catholic, should have changed positions virtually overnight, switching from being pro-life to being pro-abortion, apparently strictly for political reasons. His subsequent votes on this and similar moral issues gave a lot of cover to other Catholic lawmakers who needed only the slightest excuse to jump ship and go against Church teaching by making that tired old claim, "Yes, I'm personally against abortion, but..." Of course the more than 40 million innocent lives that have been brutally killed during his tenure in the Senate are reason enough to withhold my praise.

I expect, however, that we will hear the senator praised to the rooftops in the coming days; and the eulogists will doubtless wax eloquently about his many legislative accomplishments. But I'm also pretty sure we will never hear the word "abortion" mentioned by one of these same eulogists. And it's that word that will always color my memory of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy.

Requiescat in pace.