Edward Kennedy: His Funeral and Busy Afterlife (media affront of conservative catholic principles)

Teddy Kennedy was memorialized at a solemn funeral Mass on Saturday in Boston in a service reminiscent of the way Kennedy spent his days on Earth: bringing together disparate elements of the America's political and social worlds, flummoxing his foes and inspiring his more numerous admirers – and, albeit through surrogates this time, tirelessly working the room on behalf of his latest legislative project.

This was a "Catholic" event in both the uppercase and lowercase sense of the word--a grand religious ritual that matched or exceeded anything even in the storied history of the Boston church, and a "catholic," or universal, display of the values Kennedy embodied and the breadth of his vision and influence.

Thousands stood in the pouring rain to watch Kennedy's funeral hearse pass by, the kind of sight reminiscent of the passing of FDR, or Martin Luther King Jr., or one of Kennedy's older brothers. And inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual help in the city's poor Mission district, tenor Placido Domingo sang the Panis Angelicus at Communion while the actor Jack Nicholson sat reverently amid the throng of mourners that filled the church to capacity. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma played and Kennedy's children delivered eulogies featuring stories as warm and humorous as they were emotionally wrenching.

"I don't mind not being president, I just mind that someone else is," Ted Kennedy, Jr., quoted his father as saying in one of many tales that provoked laughter from the throng of 1,500 in the huge church, which was hot and humid, closed off from the outside by heavy security but still damp from the heavy rains that continued to fall outside.

Kennedy also told the story of losing his leg to bone cancer as a 12-year-old, and his father bringing out a sled a few months later during a snowfall for a jolting ride down an ice-slickened driveway. The younger Kennedy's voice started to crack as he recalled being unable to walk back up the hill with his new artificial leg, and plainitively telling his father he couldn't do it.

His father would have none of it. "There is nothing that you can't do, we are going to climb that hill together if it takes us all day," he quoted his father as telling him.

But above all the confluence of opposites meant the funeral was, like Kennedy's life, an inextricable mix of faith and politics, from the presence of 58 current senators from both sides to the aisle (not quite enough to end a filibuster, but still not bad) as well as 11 former senators and three former presidents (the elder George Bush could not attend), led by the current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama, whose poignant eulogy seemed to claim Kennedy's mantle as his own.

'He Had Such a Big Heart'

President Barack Obama delivers the eulogy at the funeral of former Sen. Edward Kennedy Saturday. "Ted Kennedy's life's work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections," Obama said. "It was to give a voice to those who were not heard, to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity, to make real the dream of our founding."

Alex Brandon, AP

So many of the congregants were, in life, Kennedy's political rivals or foes. Yet any past reservations were rendered mute (if not moot) out of respect for his memory, or just as likely, out of appreciation for their longstanding work -- and friendship -- with the liberal lion of the past generation. As Kennedy's son, Teddy Jr., said of his father in one of the eulogies that drew as many laughs as tears, "He even taught me some of life's harder lessons: such as how to like Republicans."

Before the mass, John McCain was conferring in the pews with Chris Dodd, while California's Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was there with his wife, Maria Shriver, a Kennedy niece.

Still, the Mass represented the kind of compromise Kennedy might have sought on the Senate floor: The service was held, at his request, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, also known as the Mission Church, rather than the city's cathedral, which is O'Malley's own pulpit. The principal celebrant was Father J. Donald Monan, a Jesuit priest and former president of Boston College and a Kennedy confidante for decades. Church sources said Kennedy specifically requested these arrangements in part to take some of the pressure off O'Malley and the archdiocese. Having a Jesuit preside in the Mission Church, which is run by the Redemptorist order, removed O'Malley a few welcome degrees from the hot spotlight.

Hession's sermon, and indeed all of the remembrances, did not seek to canonize Kennedy as much as his public agenda. "My father was not perfect, but he believed in redemption," said Ted Jr. "Although it hasn't been easy at times to live with this name, I have never been more proud of it than I am today."

Hession spoke of the "inevitable gap of what we are called to and what we achieve" as part of our shared, human condition. And he recalled Ted Kennedy's own words at his brother Bobby's funeral in 1968, that he "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

"We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium, a veritable force of nature, in support of health care or workers' rights or civil rights," Obama told the gathering. "And yet, while his causes became deeply personal, his disagreements never did. While he was seen by his fiercest critics as a partisan lightning rod, that is not the prism through which Ted Kennedy saw the world, nor was it the prism through which his colleagues saw him. He was a product of an age when the joy and nobility of politics prevented differences of party and philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation and mutual respect – a time when adversaries still saw each other as patriots."

"We cannot know for certain how long we have here," Obama continued. "We cannot foresee the trials or misfortunes that will test us along the way. We cannot know God's plan for us. What we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose, and love, and joy. We can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care about them, and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves. We can learn from our mistakes and grow from our failures. And we can strive at all costs to make a better world, so that someday, if we are blessed with the chance to look back on our time here, we can know that we spent it well; that we made a difference; that our fleeting presence had a lasting impact on the lives of other human beings. This is how Ted Kennedy lived. This is his legacy."

The even-keeled Obama struggled at times to keep his emotions in check. And after more than two somber and celebratory hours, the funeral finally concluded.

Needs the biggest BARF/HURL/PUKE alert that can be given. So Cardinal O’Malley was there?? What good are principles if the Church is going to ignore them and give what amounts to a state funeral to one who so blatantly ignored the most important ones??

And in Kennedy’s name expect to be royally screwed every way possible, loss of physicians, services but gain of immense taxation and national debt. Just dizzying.

(p.s. took out my nastiest comments about priests as child molesters; the church is so hypercritical it hurts to think I was raised in it.)

Is Ted still dead?

Poor guy, he died. Here's a clue for everyone on the entire planet - WE ALL DIE!

The question amongst men of honor is how we lived our lives.

Personally, I believe the Ted Kennedy was a man of dis-honor, and a socialist who has done more harm to our Constitutional principles than any other politician.

And guess what? I get to say, I hated the man when he was alive and still hate him being dead!.

Oh no!! Hate speech...come arrest me Obama brown shirts. I dare you. You want a martyr? I'm your Hucklebee. You know where to find me.

What is with people who can despise a person during their living days, and then feel bad for them just because they died? Again, we all die.

Frig McCain and all their un-Constitutional Congressional brotherhood clique. I'm glad the Socialist, bordering on communist POS got the frig off our planet.

Not to mention, Teddy let a young lady die in a car accident. Guess that was the turning point for politicians to get away with crimes. Nah, there were many earlier...

Nobama is about to get a big surprise when he finds out just how personally “black friendly” the kennedy clan really is on welcoming him and manchelle into the kennedy family. This kennedy bro legacy thing is something made up by nobama’s minions trying “movin on up” and maybe even movin on in, at their expense and “the family” just hasn’t figured out how to tell the new found bro to remember to use the backdoor servants entrance.

Saw a few minutes the other day on FNC with one of the younger sons (Joe? with the long white hair?)giving nobama “that look”.

This kennedy bro thing will be fun to watch.

At some point a human, especially an American conservative just has to start taking the Catholic church at face value.

This constant shifting around of who is in charge on what day and which office did it come from and so on and so on is just too much political intrigue and entirely too slippery to deal with.

The Catholic vote is a very dependable Democrat vote and it always has been, it used to be even more dependable. At some point we have to quit pretending that the people in the pews are always going against the wishes of the people preaching to the pews and running the religion. After a few generations or so of a person constantly getting the same run around he finally has to say that things are going pretty much the way the leaders want it to.

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