In 1993, Sheila Rauch Kennedy received a letter that would define the next twelve years of her life. Two years earlier, she had divorced Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy.
The divorce had been amicable, a no-fault civil end to a twelve-year marriage that produced twin sons. Sheila, an urban planner and Episcopal by faith, had moved forward. The letter told her that her ex-husband was asking the Catholic Church to annul their marriage. He did not want the marriage dissolved; he wanted it declared as if it had never existed at all.
If granted, the annulment would retroactively erase the 1981 wedding, the vows, and the twelve years of marriage in the eyes of the Church. Joseph, who had remarried civilly to a woman who had worked in his congressional office, wanted to remarry inside the Church. Sheila was encouraged to ignore the details and allow the process to proceed quietly. She refused.
What followed became one of the most unusual spiritual and legal battles in modern American Catholic history—one that reached the Vatican, produced a bestselling book, and ended in 2005 when the Vatican’s highest court overturned the annulment completely. Joseph Patrick Kennedy II was born on September 24, 1952, the eldest son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. He grew up in one of the most scrutinized families in American history, a family shaped by extraordinary political power and extraordinary loss. President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, when Joseph was eleven. His father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, the night he won the California primary. Joseph was fifteen.
The family that Americans regarded as the closest thing to royalty was also a family that seemed haunted by tragedy. The phrase “Kennedy curse,” coined by journalists and adopted by the public, described a pattern of death that followed the family across generations. John F. Kennedy Jr.
died in a plane crash in 1999. Joseph’s brother Michael died in a skiing accident in Aspen on December 31, 1997—the same year Sheila’s book was published. Sheila Rauch was not born into this world. She was born in 1949, the daughter of parents with no political influence and no famous name.
She was an Episcopalian, not Catholic. She was an urban planner specializing in housing and community development—serious, practical, unglamorous work. She met Joseph Kennedy in the early 1970s. They knew each other for nine years before marrying.
In 1981, she agreed to a Catholic ceremony out of respect for his tradition, fully aware of what she was entering. Their twin sons, Matthew and Joseph, had been born in 1980, before the wedding. For twelve years, Sheila was part of the Kennedy world—the gatherings, the expectations, the particular blend of privilege and obligation that came with a name the whole country felt entitled to have opinions about. She also maintained her own identity.
She continued her career. When the marriage ended in 1991, it ended the way many marriages end: with accumulated distance and mutual recognition that what had been was over. The divorce was no-fault, designed to be practical. She had no reason to expect what came next.
The distinction between divorce and annulment is not merely technical; it is the core of the injustice Sheila fought. Divorce ends a marriage in the present. An annulment declares that the marriage never existed as a valid sacrament. It is not that a marriage ended; it is that it never truly began.
In the eyes of the Church, the vows were void from the moment they were spoken. Grounds for annulment under canon law include parties who lacked the capacity to consent, marriages made under duress, and cases where one party never intended a lifelong commitment. By the 1990s, the most common ground cited in American annulments was “lack of due discretion”—a claim that one or both parties lacked the psychological or emotional maturity at the time of the wedding to make a genuine sacred commitment. Joseph Kennedy was asking the Church to declare that when he stood before a priest in 1981, after nine years of knowing Sheila, he lacked the psychological maturity to make a true commitment.
He was asking the Church to say he had not really meant it. The practical reason was clear. He had married Beth Kelly, a woman who had worked as a nanny for his children and later as a staffer in his congressional office, in a civil ceremony in 1993. He wanted that marriage recognized as valid within the Catholic Church.
The only way, given that he had been married in a Catholic ceremony, was to have the first marriage declared invalid. Sheila was encouraged to see this as routine, to not complicate things. Instead, she was horrified. In her 1997 book “Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Canceling Her Marriage,” she wrote: “I was horrified.
My husband and I knew each other for nine years before we married in a Catholic ceremony. We were married for twelve years and have two wonderful children. I couldn’t understand how anyone could claim our marriage was never valid. ” She was not Catholic.
Her salvation did not depend on the Church’s recognition. But for her, this was a matter of truth. The marriage had happened. It had been real.
She would not participate in an institutionally sanctioned process that declared it had not been. She hired canon lawyers. She testified before the Boston archdiocesan court. When the initial ruling went against her, she appealed.
She pursued the case through every available channel at enormous personal cost of time, energy, and peace of mind. She also made the battle public. In 1997, she published “Shattered Faith,” which became one of the most talked-about books on religion and family law in America that year. It was praised as brave and criticized within the Church as an improper intervention in a private legal matter.
It was both. What Sheila discovered was that her case was not rare; it was typical. The American Catholic Church was granting more than 50,000 annulments a year by the 1990s, up from about 300 a year in 1968. The United States, home to six percent of the world’s Catholics, was issuing about eighty percent of the world’s annulments.
Women Sheila spoke with had been married twenty, twenty-five, thirty years. They had children, sometimes grandchildren. Many had not been adequately notified of the process. Many were not given a real chance to participate.
The stated grounds—usually some form of “lack of due discretion”—were broad enough to apply to almost any marriage that had ended. Sheila’s book documented a pattern in which divorced wives were expected to accept the retroactive erasure of their marriages. The institutional weight of the Church, combined with the social and financial weight of the petitioning husband, made resistance seem impossible. The book also placed the Kennedy annulment under continuous public scrutiny.
Joseph Kennedy was a sitting congressman, the son of Robert F. Kennedy, and a member of the most politically prominent Catholic family in American history. The questions “Shattered Faith” raised—whether the Kennedy name bought a smoother path through the church courts, whether annulment grounds in America had expanded beyond any coherent theological logic, and what it meant for thousands of women to have their marriages retroactively erased for the convenience of their ex-husbands—were questions the public now had to confront. Sheila could not control the outcome of the church court proceedings, but she could shape public understanding of what those proceedings meant.
She let the sunlight in. The battle moved through the hierarchical levels of the Catholic Church’s judicial system. Over more than a decade, the Boston archdiocesan court initially granted the annulment. Sheila appealed.
The case moved up through the system, from the diocesan court to the metropolitan court, and eventually to the Roman Rota, the highest court of appeal at the Vatican. The Roman Rota handles a very small number of cases. It is the final judicial authority of the worldwide Catholic Church. The fact that the Kennedy annulment reached it was itself a result of Sheila’s relentless refusal to accept previous rulings.
During this time, she maintained her career, raised her children, and lived with the public dimension of her private struggle. The publication of “Shattered Faith” meant she was no longer merely a party in a private church proceeding; she was the author of a nationally discussed book. The Church does not typically respond well to public challenges to its internal processes, and the pressure the book created came at a personal price for Sheila—public attention, controversy, and exhaustion. She also faced the social dynamics of standing in the way of a Kennedy.
Joseph Kennedy was a congressman with strong ties to the Catholic Church in Massachusetts. The institutional relationships between the Kennedy political strand and the American Catholic hierarchy had been cemented over generations. Sheila was an Episcopalian urban planner fighting a canon-law battle in a system that was structurally more aligned with the petitioner’s interests than the respondent’s. She fought anyway.
In 2005, the Roman Rota overturned the annulment. After twelve years of proceedings, the highest judicial authority of the Catholic Church concluded that the original annulment had been granted in error. The marriage of Joseph P. Kennedy II and Sheila Rauch Kennedy was valid in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
It had always been valid. The Boston archdiocesan court had erred. The Vatican court reviewed the case and agreed with the woman who had fought all the way to Rome. The ruling had no practical consequences on anyone’s daily life.
Joseph and Beth Kennedy remained married. The twin sons were unaffected legally. But the ruling changed something that operated at the level of meaning. It declared that Sheila Rauch Kennedy had been right—that the marriage was real, that the twelve years had happened, that the sacrament was valid, and that the Boston archdiocesan court was wrong to declare otherwise.
The woman who had fought through twelve years of proceedings, who had written a book about what was being done to her and why it was wrong, and who had been told by her ex-husband to simply ignore the details, had been right in every particular. The Kennedy name was not enough. The institutional weight of the American Catholic hierarchy was not enough. The social pressure to go along quietly was not enough.
She was right, and the Vatican confirmed it. The story of Sheila Rauch Kennedy is, on its surface, the story of one woman’s fight against a powerful institution and an influential family name. Beneath that surface lies something more fundamental. It is a story about what happens when an institution tries to rewrite a woman’s past.
The annulment process as practiced in America during the 1980s and 1990s did something genuinely unusual when you name it clearly. It took events that had happened, marriages that were real, years that were lived, and children who were born and raised within those marriages, and declared that those events in the dimension that mattered to the institution had never occurred. Not that they ended, but that they had never been real. The cost of this institutional revision fell almost entirely on women.
The ex-husband filed the petition. The Church processed it. The ex-wife was expected to accept it, or at least not obstruct it. The gains went to the petitioner—the possibility of remarrying within the Church, a fresh spiritual start.
The loss fell on the respondent: the retroactive erasure of years of her life, the institutional declaration that what she believed and chose and committed to had been a mistake she did not know she was making. Sheila refused this. She refused not because she was quarrelsome or vindictive or specifically anti-Catholic. She refused because she understood, with the precision of a rigorous mind, that it was false.
The marriage had happened. It was real. The Church’s retroactive declaration that her marriage had not been a valid sacrament was not a theological ruling she was obligated to accept as an accurate description of her own experience. She also refused because she realized, as she documented in “Shattered Faith,” that what was being demanded of her was being demanded of thousands of other women at the same time, most of them with far fewer resources and far weaker public platforms.
She did not ignore the details. She wrote a book about those details. She appealed to the Vatican. She waited twelve years for a ruling that confirmed what she had known from the beginning: the marriage was real, she was right, and the institution was wrong.
There is one final dimension to this story worth noting. The Kennedy family, which through Joseph’s annulment petition attempted to erase a chapter of its history, is a family that across generations has been unable to escape its own history. The deaths, tragedies, and public failures accumulated around the Kennedy name are not erasable. The assassination of John F.
Kennedy was not erased by time. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy was not erased by political rehabilitation. Michael Kennedy’s death on the last day of 1997, at the very moment his family’s treatment of Sheila was under public scrutiny, was a further reminder that the Kennedy family does not get to choose which of its stories becomes part of the historical record.
Sheila Rauch Kennedy understood this. Her story became part of the record not because she sought revenge or fame, but because she sought the truth—the simple, specific, verifiable truth that a twelve-year marriage existed, was real, and deserved to be acknowledged exactly as both parties had known it to be. She pursued it. She found it.
After twelve years and a Vatican ruling, it was formally confirmed. The Kennedy marriage that ended was also concluded with something the person who sought to erase it did not expect: a permanent, lasting record of what was done, preserved in a book still in print, in a Vatican ruling still on record, and in a woman’s account of her own experience that ultimately could not be erased.