For eighteen years, a photograph from a small church in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, seemed to capture a fairy tale. Taken on February 3, 1979, it showed two priests, one Catholic and one Episcopal, sharing an altar because the bride was not Catholic and the groom was the oldest son of Robert Kennedy. The story of a wealthy Episcopalian bride and a Kennedy heir was filed away by America as a romance. Fourteen years later, the groom would ask a church court to rule that the wedding had produced nothing at all.
The woman at the center of that fight was Sheila Brewster Rauch. In 1997, she wrote about opening the letter from the Archdiocese of Boston and vomiting. It was, she noted, completely out of character for her, as she had always prided herself on a strong stomach. By then, she was forty-four years old, a professional city planner, and the daughter of one of Philadelphia’s most respected bankers.
For two years following her divorce, she had done exactly what the Kennedy family expected of a departing wife. She stayed in Massachusetts so her sons could see their father. She asked for nothing. She said nothing.
The letter informed her that Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II had petitioned for an ecclesiastical declaration of nullity. This was not a divorce; she already had one of those. This was a request for a finding that the marriage had never existed in the eyes of God.
That the Gladwyne ceremony, the twelve years together, and the twin sons rested on a sacrament that was never valid in the first place. When she called her ex-husband, according to her account, he was baffled that she was making it difficult. He insisted he did not believe any of it himself and called the process, in his words, “just Catholic gobbledygook, Sheila. ” He simply needed her to say what the church wanted said.
The grounds for his petition were lack of due discretion of judgment, a canon law finding that one spouse lacked the maturity or capacity to consent to marriage. The couple had known each other for nine years before the wedding. Sheila Brewster Rauch was born in 1949 into old money, an environment where feelings were not worn on sleeves and private matters were never taken public. She grew up watching her parents remain married for roughly sixty years, and she learned the same restraint.
Asked once about her own famous reserve, she answered with a small smile, “They call us the frozen people. ” That temperament would be mistaken for passivity for the next twenty years. She became a city planner specializing in housing and community development, a serious professional with clients and deadlines. She met Joe Kennedy in 1970.
She was twenty-one, finishing college. He was eighteen, just two years past the night his father was shot in Los Angeles. At fifteen, he had been handed the role of oldest son in a family that had just lost its second national martyr. The courtship ran nine years, and it was not serene.
In August 1973, on Nantucket, Joe was driving a Jeep that flipped, leaving a young woman passenger paralyzed. He was charged over the driving and fined. Sheila dated him for six more years after that. In 1979, he founded Citizens Energy Corporation to sell discounted heating oil to low-income families in Massachusetts.
It worked and ran for decades. She had not married a monster. She had married a difficult, charismatic, damaged young man she had known for nearly a decade, which made the later claim of incapacity to consent read like an insult delivered with a straight face. At the Gladwyne wedding, a Catholic ceremony under Catholic rules, the Episcopalian bride was accepting the authority of the Roman Catholic Church over the validity of her own marriage.
When the twins, Joseph Patrick III and Matthew Rauch, were born on October 4, 1980, they were baptized Catholic with godparents from both churches. She had honored every religious condition the Kennedys asked for. Nearly a decade later, she said the marriage unraveled not over an affair or a fight, but an election. In 1986, Joe Kennedy won Tip O’Neill’s congressional seat, and in January 1987, he went to Washington.
The household changed. He came home expecting the deference he received everywhere else, and she was not prepared to fawn. She could never make the adjustment from what it had been like before. He called himself the family pitbull.
By the end of the marriage, she wrote, she had simply become afraid of him. When an interviewer asked directly, “Did he hit you? ” she paused, then answered, “No. Not directly violent to her.
He has a temper. ” She filed for divorce, explaining, “Living a charade had become too hurtful for everyone. ” They separated around 1989, and the divorce came through in 1991 on grounds of irreconcilable differences. There was no prenuptial agreement.
She did not ask for a penny of alimony. She moved out of the family home, borrowed money from her parents, bought a ramshackle house in Cambridge, fixed it up herself, and stayed in Massachusetts so her sons could see their father. She built the public story of an amicable Kennedy split alone, and she did it for free. In 1993, Joe married Beth Kelly, a former member of his congressional staff, in a civil ceremony.
Sheila’s response was measured. She said she was a little surprised, then that he could have done a lot worse, that Beth took good care of him and the boys. But then he gave an interview. He said he was waiting for the annulment to come through so he could marry Beth in the church.
He announced to the press that a proceeding was underway to declare his first marriage had never existed, and it was a formality standing between him and a proper wedding, before the woman on the other side had agreed to anything. The calculation he reportedly made explicit to her was that in Boston she was a nobody. The nobody wrote a letter to Time magazine. She argued that if the marriage were deemed never to have existed in the eyes of the church, her children would have been neither conceived in nor born to a sanctified union.
She was arguing for the status of two twelve-year-old boys who had been baptized Catholic at their father’s family’s request. Her friends were startled; it was completely out of character. She agreed. Opening that letter from the tribunal was the day she decided she was through being stomped on.
The process itself became the story. The tribunal did not treat her testimony about her own marriage as central evidence. Nobody at the Archdiocese of Boston told her she had the right to appeal to Rome; she found that out from people outside the archdiocese. Then hundreds of letters started arriving from women all over the country.
One was from an Irish woman, married for twenty-six years, with three children, annulled on the same grounds, who learned about it secondhand from her daughter because the tribunal had told the ex-husband first due to a typing backlog. By the mid-1990s, the American Catholic Church was granting annulments by the tens of thousands a year. In October 1996, the tribunal of the Archdiocese of Boston ruled. She lost.
The reasoning contained a strange detail. The petition had been filed on grounds that she lacked due discretion. The tribunal delivered the annulment by finding that the person lacking due discretion was Joe. To erase the marriage on behalf of a sitting congressman, the archdiocese had arrived at the conclusion that the congressman had not been competent to consent to it, after a nine-year courtship and seventeen years running a nonprofit energy company.
It was an elegant solution, except that it was an official church record stating that Joe Kennedy lacked the judgment to make a binding promise. In early 1997, Pantheon published Shattered Faith. It was not a tell-all; one interviewer called the book gallingly discreet. There was no catalog of infidelities, no gothic account of the family compound.
Instead, there was a woman methodically explaining a bureaucratic process, quoting her ex-husband accurately enough that he never seriously challenged the quotes, and printing the letters of other women it had happened to. That same season, the Boston Globe put Joe’s brother Michael on the front page over allegations of a relationship with a family’s teenage babysitter. Joe called a press conference and apologized for any mistakes he made during the marriage, explaining the annulment as the only way he could take communion with his children and his wife. His approval numbers collapsed.
On August 28, 1997, he announced he would not run for governor. That December, Michael died in a skiing accident. In 1998, Joe announced he was leaving politics to return to Citizens Energy. Sheila Rauch appeared at Michael’s wake.
She refused to take the win, saying personal behavior and politics should be kept distinct, that we build god-like heroes out of celebrities and then tear them apart, and that she found that dangerous. She appealed to the Roman Rota, the Vatican’s high court. The archdiocese wanted $850 from her to send the appeal to Rome, roughly three times what it had cost her ex-husband to obtain the annulment. She objected on principle and because the holidays were coming and she did not have an extra $850.
A Kennedy wife who took no alimony had to scrape together the filing fee to defend the existence of her own wedding. In 2005, the Roman Rota reversed the Boston Tribunal. The marriage of Joseph P. Kennedy II and Sheila Brewster Rauch was valid.
She was not officially informed by the Archdiocese of Boston until May of 2007, learning about the reversal roughly two years after the ruling had been reached. Her marriage had been restored, and she found out last, and by way of somebody else. She said she was very grateful the marriage had been validated. Then she said the thing that had been her position since 1993, unchanged.
There was a real marriage. It was a marriage that failed. And as grown-ups we need to take responsibility for that. The surviving account of the marriage is hers because she wrote it first, kept it verifiable, and declined to exaggerate a single element.
The tribunal’s file is sealed. His version was never published. The woman raised never to take public what is private took one private thing public exactly once. The boys she had argued about the entire time grew up.
Joseph P. Kennedy III went to Stanford, the Peace Corps, and Harvard Law, and in November 2012, he won a seat in Congress. In January 2018, he delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union. She is the reason there was never an official document anywhere claiming he was born outside a real marriage.
The photograph from 1979 was never a fairy tale. It was a jurisdiction being handed over. She gave the Roman Catholic Church authority over her marriage that day and honored every condition attached. Her husband spent roughly $280 asking that church to say none of it had happened, and she spent $850 asking it to check.
The church he assumed would belong to him ruled for her. They call them the frozen people. She spent forty years being underestimated by a family that mistook her restraint for compliance, and when they finally pushed, she did not raise her voice once.
She just went and got it in writing.