Caterpillar Cowboy

Ted Kennedy must have known that even on the occasion of his death, vast armies of armchair St. Peters would carry on arguing that the gates of Heaven should be slammed shut on his fingers — fearless as ever in their willingness to test whether Jesus really meant that “with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.” Far more surprising, however, was the senator’s evocative and extraordinary deathbed letter to Pope Benedict XVI, written earlier this summer and hand-delivered by President Obama last month. In it, Kennedy mounted his own soul’s defense, pleading the case for his salvation directly to Peter’s successor – and unabashedly angling for an amicus brief. The letter was a deep, and deeply conservative, old-school bow to church hierarchy from a Catholic who, as the cardinal who buried him suggested, often riled the Magisterium, principally over his support for abortion rights: “Sometimes,” Cardinal Theodore McCarrick said at Kennedy’s graveside, “we who were his friends and had affection for him would get mad at him when he roared at what we believed was the wrong side of an issue which was important to us, but we always were touched by his passion for the underdog, for the rights of working people, for better education and for adequate health care for every American.