Sheila Rauch opened the letter from the Metropolitan Tribunal of the Archdiocese of Boston and vomited. It was the most uncharacteristic thing she had ever done in public, and she wrote about it herself, plainly, in her 1997 book Shattered Faith. She was 44 years old, a professional city planner, and the daughter of one of Philadelphia’s most respected bankers. For two years since her divorce, she had done exactly what the Kennedy family expected of a departing wife.
She stayed in Massachusetts so the boys 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. Not a divorce; she already had one of those. This was a finding that the marriage had never existed in the eyes of God. That the ceremony in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, in February 1979, the twelve years together, the twin sons, all of it, rested on a sacrament that was never valid in the first place.
She called him. According to her account of that conversation, he was baffled that she was making it difficult. He told her he did not believe any of it himself. Nobody did.
It was, in his words, just Catholic gobbledygook. She simply had to say it the way the church wanted it said. The grounds his petition invoked were lack of due discretion of judgment, a canonical finding that one spouse lacked the maturity or capacity to consent to marriage. The couple in question had known each other for nine years before the wedding.
Sheila Brewster Rauch was born in 1949 into old Philadelphia society. Her father, R. Stewart Rauch Jr. , ran the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society and collected civic honors.
Her parents stayed married for roughly sixty years. She described her upbringing as WASP orientation, where you do not wear your feelings on your sleeve and do not take public what is private. Asked about her own famous reserve, she answered with a small smile. They call us the frozen people.
Old money, low volume, high walls. She met Joe Kennedy in 1970. She was 21, in her senior year of college. He was 18, two years past the night his father was shot in Los Angeles.
She did not meet a congressman. She met a teenager who had been handed at 15 the job of being the oldest son in a family that had just lost its second national martyr. The courtship ran nine years. In August 1973 on Nantucket, Joe was driving a Jeep that flipped.
A young woman riding with him, Pamela Kelly, was left paralyzed. He was charged over the driving and fined. He was 20. She 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. That worked and ran for decades. She married a difficult, charismatic, damaged young man she had known for nearly a decade, which is precisely why the phrase lack of due discretion of judgment would later read like an insult delivered with a straight face. The wedding was at Saint John Vianney in Gladwyne on the Main Line, a Catholic church under Catholic rules, on Catholic terms.
Two priests, one Catholic and one Episcopal, celebrated it together. The Episcopalian bride was accepting the authority of the Roman Catholic church over the validity of her own marriage. She embraced it that day. The twins, Joseph Patrick III and Matthew Rauch, born October 4th, 1980, were baptized Catholic with godparents drawn from both churches.
She had honored every religious condition the Kennedys asked for. All of it. For the first years, by her own account, it worked. In 2007, she told the Associated Press the marriage had been very strong in the beginning, that she had been happy, that things unraveled later.
The unraveling had a date on it. In 1986, Joe Kennedy ran for the 8th Congressional District of Massachusetts, Tip O’Neill’s seat, and won. In January 1987, he went to Washington. That is when the household changed.
He would come home and find two cream sodas in the refrigerator instead of three. He was used to being deferred to by people who wanted things from him. Her phrase for what he was getting everywhere else was fawning. I was not prepared to fawn, she said.
I could never make the adjustment. She wrote that by the end of the marriage, she had simply become afraid of him. When an interviewer asked directly, Did he hit you? She paused and answered, No.
Not directly violent to her. He has a temper, she said, and he is the first to admit it. She filed for divorce. 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, and bought a ramshackle house in Cambridge, which she fixed up herself while taking freelance city planning work.
She stayed in Massachusetts so their father could see the boys. She kept quiet. She listed that as a service rendered to a man with political ambitions. In 1993, Joe married Beth Kelly, who had worked on his congressional staff.
He gave an interview announcing he was waiting for the annulment to come through so he could marry Beth in the church. The civil ceremony had already happened. He had not waited for the ruling to remarry. He was waiting for the ruling to be married correctly.
In his calculation, she was a nobody in Boston. The nobody wrote to Time magazine. She argued the status of two 12-year-old boys who had been baptized Catholic at their father’s family’s request. Opening that letter from the tribunal was the day she decided she was through being stomped on.
The tribunal did not treat her testimony about her own marriage as central evidence. Nobody told her she had the right to appeal to Rome. She found that out from people outside the Archdiocese. Then the letters started arriving, hundreds of them, from women all over the country.
By the mid-90s, 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 against her. The reasoning contained a strange detail. The tribunal delivered the annulment by finding that the person lacking due discretion was Joe.
The Archdiocese of Boston, asked to erase a marriage on behalf of a sitting congressman, arrived at the conclusion that the congressman had not been competent to consent to it. After a nine-year courtship, a man who had run a nonprofit energy company for 17 years and won six elections to the United States House of Representatives. He got what he wanted. He just had to be declared the one who had not known what he was doing.
In early 1997, Pantheon published Shattered Faith. It was discreet, methodical, and verifiable. It hit at the worst possible moment for him. That same season, the Boston Globe put his brother Michael on the front page over allegations involving the family’s teenage babysitter.
In the same week, Joe called a press conference in Washington. He apologized for any of the mistakes I made during the marriage. His approval numbers collapsed. On August 28th, 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 go back and run Citizens Energy. 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 on cash. The holidays were coming and she did not have an extra $850. In 2005, the Roman Rota reversed the Boston Tribunal. The marriage of Joseph P.
Kennedy II and Sheila Brewster Rauch was valid. It had happened. It counted. She was not officially informed by the Archdiocese of Boston until May of 2007, roughly two years after the ruling.
When it surfaced publicly, she said she was very grateful the marriage had been validated. Then she said the thing that had been her position since 1993. 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 this marriage is hers because she wrote it first, wrote it carefully, kept it verifiable, and declined to exaggerate a single element of it. He never published his version. The boys she was arguing about the whole time grew up.
Joseph P. Kennedy III went to Stanford, the Peace Corps, Harvard Law. In November 2012, he won a seat in Congress. She is the person who made sure there was never an official document anywhere claiming he was born outside a real marriage.
Look at the Gladwyne photograph again. Two priests at one altar, February 1979. For 18 years, it read as a nice ecumenical gesture. It is not that.
It is 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 same 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.
She spent 40 years being underestimated by a family that mistook her restraint for compliance. When they finally pushed, she did not raise her voice once. She just went and got it in writing.