In 1993, an envelope from the Archdiocese of Boston arrived at Sheila Rauch Kennedy’s home. Her ex-husband, Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, had petitioned the Catholic Church for an annulment. In the language of canon law, he was asking the Church to rule that their marriage had never been valid.
Sheila, who prided herself on having what she called nerves of steel, read the letter, went to the bathroom, and was sick. In 1979, she had stood at an altar outside Philadelphia while a Catholic priest and an Episcopal minister married her to the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy. Now a letter was asking her to agree that none of it had meant anything.
The question of why a single letter could do that to a grown woman with a career, two children, and a completed divorce was bound up in the two families that had met at that altar. One was the most watched Catholic dynasty in America. The other was a Philadelphia family most of the country had never heard of and had no particular wish to hear of. What began between them in 1993 was not publicly resolved until 2007, and the answer came from Rome rather than Boston.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy II was born on September 24, 1952, the eldest son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. He was eleven when his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was fifteen when his father, then a senator from New York and a presidential candidate, was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after midnight on June 5, 1968.
Robert Kennedy died the next day. The name the eldest son carried from that summer was tied to two assassinations in under five years. In August 1973, on Nantucket Island, Joe was driving a Jeep with passengers when it rolled over. A young woman named Pam Kelley was paralyzed.
His brother David fractured a vertebra. Joe was fined one hundred dollars for reckless driving. Kelley later became a disability rights advocate, and in 1999 she summarized what had happened to her in two plain sentences: what happened to me was awful, she said, but I made something decent out of it. By that time, Sheila Rauch had known the family and the young man behind that Jeep for about three years.
Sheila Brewster Rauch came from a very different world. Born in 1949 into a prominent Episcopal family in Philadelphia, her father, R. Stewart Rauch Jr. , ran the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society for twenty-five years.
The family’s standing was built on banking and civic life, not politics. Sheila did not lean on that inheritance. She earned a master’s degree from Harvard and built a career as an urban planner, specializing in housing and community development, patient, unglamorous work about where people live and how a neighborhood holds together. In a family like the Kennedys, where private moments became public property, a planner who preferred to work away from the spotlight was an awkward fit.
Joe, according to Sheila, had a habit of reminding her where she stood in his world. More than once, he told her that in Boston she was nobody. Sheila and Joe met around 1970, when they were both young and neither was yet what the world would later call them. Their engagement was announced in December 1978, and by then they had known each other for more than a decade.
Accounts of the relationship consistently return to the same number: nine years. Nine years is long enough to know what a person is like on a bad morning. Whatever was later said about this couple, they were not strangers when they married. That number would later become a matter of dispute in a church court.
Then there was the matter of faith. Joe Kennedy was Catholic in the most public way an American could be. Sheila was raised Episcopalian and remained so. She did not convert, but she attended the lessons the Catholic Church required of couples marrying in its churches, receiving instruction in a tradition that was his, not hers, so they could marry in his church rather than hers.
On February 3, 1979, they married at Saint John Vianney Catholic Church in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. The ceremony was ecumenical. A Catholic priest and an Episcopal minister presided together, one from each tradition standing in that church. The details mattered more than they seemed to at the time.
Years later, a court of one of those churches would rule that no valid sacramental marriage had ever taken place in that building. The other church, whose minister had also blessed the vows, had no say in the matter. For a while the picture looked good. The groom was the eldest son of an assassinated senator.
The bride came from a respected Philadelphia family, a Harvard graduate with a career of her own. The wedding had been blessed twice, once by each church. On October 4, 1980, Sheila gave birth to twins in Boston: Joseph Patrick Kennedy III and Matthew Raoul Kennedy, Matthew being older by a few minutes. This was the sequence the Church had set: a sacramental marriage, then children born within it.
Joe’s public life moved quickly. In 1986 he ran for the Massachusetts seat being vacated by Tip O’Neill, a district his uncle had once represented, and won. He took office in January 1987 and held the seat until January 1999. At thirty-four he was a congressman.
By most external measures, this was a working political family: two sons, a husband in Congress, a wife with her own career, and the constant low hum of public attention that accompanied the name. The private picture, as Sheila later described it, was more complicated. Joe had a quick temper and, by her account, did not pretend otherwise. She says he sometimes called himself the family’s pit bull.
She described outbursts over things that should not have mattered: a refrigerator with two cans of cream soda instead of three, a box of English breakfast tea bought when he had wanted Irish breakfast tea. Small domestic grievances, repeated often enough, changed the air inside the house. But she was careful on one point. Joe would be the first to admit he had a temper, she said, but no, he was never directly violent with me.
What she described instead was slower and harder to prove. I never faced the truth, she wrote, that by the end of our marriage, I was simply afraid of him. By the end of the 1980s the drift had gone too far. The couple separated around 1990.
In 1991 the marriage ended in a no-fault civil divorce. Accounts conflict over who filed first, and neither version changes the outcome. What stands out is what Sheila did not ask for. She says she requested no alimony at all from a congressman with two sons to raise.
Instead, she borrowed money from her parents to set up a new home for herself and the boys, a rundown house in Cambridge she renovated herself. After the divorce she went back to work as an independent city planner. By 1993 she was raising her two young boys and building a life that no longer required anyone’s permission. Then, in the summer of 1993, Joe announced his engagement.
The bride was Anne Elizabeth Kelly, known as Beth, who had worked on his 1986 congressional campaign and joined his staff in 1987 as his schedule coordinator. Sheila bore her no grudge. I loved Beth, she wrote in her book, adding that the sooner the two married, the better. Her quarrel was with the annulment, not with the new marriage, and with what Joe was asking the Church to say about the old one.
Joe wanted to marry Beth inside the Catholic Church. In the Church’s view, no civil court could dissolve a valid sacramental marriage. Even with a divorce, he was still considered married to Sheila. The only road back to a church wedding ran through a declaration that the first marriage had never been valid.
According to Sheila, what settled it was hearing Joe say publicly that he was only waiting for the annulment, as if the outcome were already decided and the whole thing were a formality on his path. So the letter arrived. The notification from the Archdiocese of Boston informed her that her ex-husband was seeking a church declaration of nullity. Her first reaction, as she recalled it, was blunt: oh, Joe must have lost his mind.
This was a man she had known for nine years before the wedding and remained married to for twelve years after it. He was the father of her two sons. Now he was asking the Church to testify that the bond between them had never been a valid sacred mystery, not even from its first day. According to her book, when Sheila raised objections, Joe tried to wave them away.
It’s just Catholic nonsense, Sheila, she quotes him saying, but you just have to say it that way because that’s the way the Church is. In her account he also put three direct questions to her: how can you oppose this, what right do you have to oppose it, how can you keep me from going on with my life? For Joe, as Sheila describes him, the annulment was a formality, a piece of paper allowing a Catholic man to remarry with his Church’s blessing. For Sheila, it was an official statement about her own life, issued by an institution that had witnessed her vows and was now being asked to rule that a marriage had never begun that day.
In September 1993 she gave her answer to the Boston Globe, carried by the Associated Press across the country: I will not lie before God about the birth and bearing of his children just so he can have a big church wedding. In a letter to Time that year she put it more quietly, writing that if the marriage were treated as if it had never been, then our children, like those of other annulled marriages, would not have been conceived or born in a sacred union. On October 23, 1993, Joe married Beth Kelly anyway, in a civil ceremony at his home in Boston. No priest presided because the Church had not given him what he needed.
The civil marriage went forward while Sheila’s objection to the annulment remained pending. To understand what followed requires some understanding of canon law. A civil divorce ends a marriage in the eyes of the state. The Catholic Church does not recognize divorce in that sense.
An annulment does something different: it does not end a marriage, it declares that a valid sacramental marriage never came into being because something essential was missing on the wedding day itself. By the late twentieth century, one of the most common grounds in American courts was what the 1983 Code of Canon Law called a grave defect in discretion of judgment. In plain language, it is a claim that one spouse lacked the maturity on the wedding day to understand what marriage required. The question is not whether the marriage later failed, but whether it ever really began.
An annulment would not have made the twins illegitimate; canon law treats children of a good-faith marriage as legitimate, and church officials said so publicly in 1993. Sheila’s objection was never about her sons’ legal status. It was about meaning. She objected to a ruling that said they had not been born of a sacred union.
Then the case took its first strange turn. According to Sheila, Joe’s petition did not argue that he had been too immature to marry. It argued that the defect in judgment had been on her side. Other reports described the petition differently, and the file was never made public, so her version is the fullest available.
In her telling, the Church was being asked to rule that a Harvard-educated professional who had known her fiancé for nine years had lacked the wisdom to understand her vows. The petition, as she described it, was directed against her. Her case was not rare. American church courts issued 338 annulments in 1968.
By 1991 the annual number was 63,933. Robert Vasoli, a Notre Dame professor, estimated the United States accounted for about 80 percent of the world’s annulments that year. Even in 2007, the United States had about 6 percent of the world’s Catholics and produced about 60 percent of its annulments. Tens of thousands of American Catholics filed such petitions every year, and nothing in the public record suggests Joe broke any church rule by filing his.
What made his case different was who he was, and who refused to let it pass. Rome had noticed the American numbers. In 1987 Pope John Paul II told the judges of the Roman Rota, the Church’s highest appeals court, that the breakdown of a marriage was not in itself proof of the incapacity that makes a marriage invalid. The following year he warned against confusing the ideal of full maturity with the minimum capacity actually required for valid consent.
He was not talking about the Kennedy family. He was naming a concern Sheila would spend the next fourteen years raising. She put it less diplomatically, saying later that the cause could be almost anything: a bad haircut, your goldfish died, you’re not all there mentally. She described being on the receiving end with one of the sharpest images produced in the whole affair: religiously, she said, it was like sending the brood mare to the glue factory when she can no longer produce foals.
The case moved slowly and secretly through the Boston archdiocese. Sheila gave her own testimony and fought the petition from inside the process. In October 1996 the court issued its initial decision, and it went against her. The court found the marriage invalid, but not for the reason Joe had asked.
According to subsequent reports, the court did not rule that Sheila lacked proper discretion. It ruled that Joe was the one who had lacked it. After a nine-year engagement, the court concluded, the groom had not possessed the judgment required for marriage. The man who had courted her through most of the seventies, who had attended Catholic marriage classes with her, who had stood before two clergy members at twenty-six, was now described by his own Church’s court as lacking the discretion needed to marry.
The nine years Sheila had considered evidence of serious commitment became evidence of the opposite. The ruling did not accuse her. It said instead that the man she married had lacked, on their wedding day, the judgment the Church required for a valid covenant. Sheila could have stopped there.
Most people would have. The process was secret and exhausting. She later said no one explained her options to her. The Archdiocese of Boston does not even tell you that you can appeal to Rome, she told Time.
She said she got help from outside the archdiocese, without which she would not have known an appeal to Rome was possible. I feel sorry for people who don’t get help, she added. Under the legal code then in force, an initial annulment was not effective by itself. A second court had to confirm it.
Sheila decided to appeal directly to the Roman Rota in Vatican City. According to her, the archdiocese told her sending the case to Rome would cost $850, three times what Joe had paid to file his petition in the first place. The bill came at a bad time. The holidays were approaching, and I certainly did not have an extra $850, she later remembered.
On one side was a congressman from the most famous Catholic family in America. On the other was a divorced city planner with two sons, a house in Cambridge she had renovated herself, and an appeal fee due just before Christmas. Her appeal would not reach Rome until the following summer. Before it did, she did something the annulment system had never been designed to absorb.
She wrote everything down. In April 1997 Pantheon Books published Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage. It was a detailed account of how the process worked from the respondent’s side: what she was told, what she was not told, and how it felt to have a church she did not belong to rule on the meaning of her marriage vows. At its center was one question printed for everyone to read: how can he believe that the marriage which produced our children was never valid?
That spring she also explained to Time why the old argument for keeping quiet had stopped working. No one was ever able to convince me that the annulment was in the best interests of the children, she said. So the argument that was used to keep me in line before didn’t work this time. The book put private conversations on paper.
The line about Catholic nonsense was printed for anyone to read, along with Joe’s question about what right she had to oppose him, and her descriptions of his sharp temper, including the nickname he gave himself. A Boston Globe summary years later said the book portrayed him as a quick-tempered bully who intimidated her. The book also raised a harder question. The Kennedy family had been woven into Catholic life in Massachusetts for generations.
Sheila’s account left readers wondering whether the family name had smoothed Joe’s path through the church court. News reports described the book as alleging that family influence helped obtain the annulment. There is no public evidence of direct intervention, and the archdiocese never discussed the case. The book had a quieter argument too.
I could not go along with this, she wrote. The marriage, even though it had ended, was a sacred bond. Despite my divorce, I remained faithful to it. Now, by denying the sanctity of our marriage, Joe broke that bond.
I could not go back and face myself or my children. There was an irony in all this that could only have happened because of the Kennedy name. An ordinary divorced wife fighting an ordinary annulment would have struggled in obscurity. With a congressman named Kennedy on the other side of the file, her book came out from a major New York publisher.
The name that made fighting her opponent difficult was the same name that gave her a hearing. The cover carried the name she had kept, Sheila Rauch Kennedy. When the Irish Times interviewed her that month, it ran the piece under the headline Mrs. Kennedy, I Presume?
The joke worked because the question beneath it was serious. If no valid marriage had begun in Gladwyne, then the name she had used since 1979 had resulted from a union the church court had just declared invalid. A paperback edition followed in 1998, with versions in Britain and Ireland. The book also changed her mail.
According to a report at its release, more than a hundred letters arrived, all from mothers whose marriages had lasted more than twenty years, women whose trust in the institution and in themselves had been shattered. In the book she described what they all had lived through as a conspiracy of silence that kept us all silent and powerless. Supporters read the book as an act of courage. Not everyone was persuaded.
Edward Peters, a canon lawyer who reviewed it for the National Catholic Register that fall, argued that it contained very little new fact about the case itself and relied on what he called flimsy arguments about church law. Even Peters, however, conceded the most important point: Sheila Kennedy deserved better treatment from the process than she received. The timing could not have been worse for Joe. That same spring, weeks after the book appeared, news reports began circulating about his younger brother Michael, who was facing serious accusations involving a young woman who had worked for the family.
The district attorney eventually closed the investigation without charges because the young woman refused to cooperate. But through the spring of 1997, the two Kennedy stories ran side by side. Joe’s first public reaction was restrained. In a written statement he said, I understand Sheila’s feelings, and I respect her right to express them.
He described the annulment as a very personal matter. In June of that year he apologized to delegates at the state Democratic convention for his own conduct and his family’s. His defense of the annulment itself never changed. Getting the annulment is the only way, the only way, that I can take communion with my children and my wife, he said.
Some accused Sheila of timing the book to damage his campaign. She denied it. This is not an election year, she said. I just don’t operate that way.
At the end of June 1997, standing at a Boston press conference beside a coalition of twenty-four Catholic groups, she announced that she had faxed her appeal to the Vatican. Her reasoning was direct. I have been told that Rome adheres more strictly to the code of canon law, she said. I think the chance of preserving the marriage is much better in Rome than here.
In a speech in Washington that spring, Joe told his audience, it’s a big family. There are always going to be some small problems along the way. He was the frontrunner for the 1998 Massachusetts governor’s race, and the damage was already showing in the polls. According to Time, a Boston Herald poll found one in four voters had a less favorable view of Joe because of the book.
NPR described his support as at its lowest point ever. On August 28, 1997, he announced he would not run for governor. Joe himself never said the book was the reason. That December brought a loss unrelated to any court.
On December 31, 1997, Michael Kennedy died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado. In March 1998 Joe announced he would not seek reelection to Congress either. This past year has brought me a new awareness of our individual weaknesses and the vagaries of life, he said, speaking of the need to focus on his family. He left Congress in January 1999, a private citizen at forty-six.
His first marriage was still before the court in Rome that Sheila had chosen. Then came the longest part of the story, the part with no headlines at all. The Roman Rota does not operate on the schedule of American politics. It is the Church’s supreme appellate court.
It handles cases from around the world and does not hurry for anyone. Joe returned to private life and to Citizens Energy, the company he had founded. Sheila continued her work, and by 2007 she was teaching at Wheaton College. Something decisive happened in Rome during those quiet years, and she would not know about it for a long time.
Her appeal had been filed, the book had come out, and there was no date she could circle on a calendar. She had asked a court in Rome to decide whether her marriage was real. The answer could come in a year or in a decade. Meanwhile, the ordinary business of her life went on: the planning work, the teaching, her two sons growing into adults.
Whatever the Rota finally said would arrive in a life she had rebuilt without waiting for its permission. In 2005 the Rota issued its ruling in the case of Kennedy and Rauch. The court declined to confirm the Boston annulment, meaning that in the eyes of the Church, the presumption that the marriage was valid stood as it had before. The decision did not spread quickly.
It was written in Latin. It made its way through church channels, and no one announced it to the press. The outcome surprised the public more than it surprised canon lawyers. Robert Vasoli, the same Notre Dame professor, wrote that between 1982 and 1984 the Vatican refused about 80 percent of American annulments that reached it for review.
The pope’s 1987 warning to the Rota pointed in the same direction. Sheila had taken her case to the court she believed would read the law more strictly. On that point, the records suggest she was right. Sheila did not learn of the ruling until May 2007, when the Archdiocese of Boston notified her that a decision had been issued.
It had to be translated before she could read it. Only then did she learn that the ruling had been made in 2005. The question she had paid $850 to send to Rome had been answered two years before she was told. In June 2007 Time published a report on the ruling, and the Boston Globe and wire services followed within days.
When reporters reached her, Sheila’s comments were measured, many of them turning on the cost of the fight. When you try and defend your marriage, the onslaught is so vicious, she said. She listed what she had been called along the way: a bitter ex-wife, a drunk, a fanatic, an idiot. She did not say who had called her those things.
To Time she put it another way: the process was dishonest, and it was important to stand up and say so. Speaking to the Associated Press she added, things fell apart, but that does not mean you weren’t in a marriage. Joe could not be reached for comment. The Archdiocese of Boston declined to discuss the case, describing such matters as appropriately private and confidential.
In the eyes of the Church, as a University of New Hampshire sociologist put it at the time, they were both still married. The Globe reported that the ruling made Joe technically barred from taking communion, the very thing he had said the annulment was for. Whether the Church recognized his second marriage afterward is not a matter of public record. Edward Peters, the same canon lawyer who had criticized Sheila’s book, added a precise point in 2007.
Since the first ruling had needed confirmation before it took effect, he argued, it was not quite accurate to say the Vatican had overturned Joe’s annulment. Joe never got a completed annulment. Peters also noted Joe could still appeal within the Rota or bring a new case. There is no public report that Joe did either.
Daily life did not change either way. Joe and Beth remained married under civil law, and the legal status of the twins had never been in question. A later change makes her appeal look stranger in retrospect. In 2015 Pope Francis reformed the annulment process, and a first annulment no longer needed a second confirming ruling to take effect.
Under current rules, a case like hers might end in Boston. In the 1990s, the required second review was the opportunity Sheila had, and she used it by taking her case to Rome. What had changed was the Church’s own record of her marriage. Asked in 2007 what the ruling meant to her, Sheila was clear.
I’m very pleased, she told Time. It was a real marriage. It was a marriage that failed, but as adults we have to take responsibility for that. To another reporter she said, we had a very strong marriage in the beginning.
We had two wonderful children and the marriage lasted. To the Boston Globe she offered the sentence that may explain the entire conflict. It wasn’t that God didn’t bless the union. I didn’t feel it was right to put the blame on God.
In 1997 she was quoted saying her son saw the conflict as a disagreement between his parents. As adults, they kept that position. Joseph Kennedy III, Joseph P. Kennedy III, served in Congress from 2013 to 2021.
When a reporter raised the subject in 2012, he and his brother Matt declined to discuss their parents’ divorce. In 1979, clergy stood at an altar in Gladwyne and blessed a marriage between a Kennedy and a Rauch. In 1993, a letter from Boston asked the Church to rule that no valid marriage had begun there. The woman who opened it was sick.
In 2005, a court in Rome declined to confirm that ruling. In 2007, she read it in translation. The marriage had ended in 1991.
According to the Church’s highest appellate court, it was still a marriage.