The Faith of the RFKs

'At one point, the entire Kennedy clan was pro-life. That all began to change after Roe and into the late 1970s and 1980s.' RFK, Sr would be horrified at what his family has become.

From Crisis

By Paul Kengor

Like his father, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. relies on his Catholic Faith during his political campaign. But there's a significant—and tragic—difference between father and son.

On April 25, EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo did an exclusive, hour-long interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kudos to both Arroyo and Kennedy for sitting down to dialogue in a civil, thoughtful manner that’s too rare nowadays for people on separate sides of the political aisle. For Kennedy, that side of the aisle has been the Democratic side, given his family’s roots as an iconic Democrat family, though Kennedy currently, in 2024, is running for president as an independent.

And independent Kennedy certainly is. His refusal to support vax mandates during Covid led critics to smear him as an anti-vaccine “conspiracy theorist” who peddled “misinformation.” To this day, the lead line in his Wikipedia entry describes him this way: “Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American politician, environmental lawyer, anti-vaccine activist, and conspiracy theorist.”

Kennedy has been trashed by erstwhile liberal allies within his family’s party. Most egregious, the Democratic Party’s standard bearer, President Joe Biden, outrageously refused to provide Kennedy with Secret Service protection, a customary practice done for decades, ever since—and because of—the June 1968 assassination of Kennedy’s father, Bobby Kennedy. 

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

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I have written about this at length, and I’m well aware of the excuses made by some Democrats justifying the lack of security protection. They are wrong. There’s no excuse for it, especially as Kennedy has faced multiple threats to his life. (Biden feels threatened by Kennedy politically, and rightly so.)

Speaking of the senior RFK, I’ve long known and written about his faith, as well as the faith of his late brother, President John F. Kennedy, and many other political figures, such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and even Hillary Clinton. The junior RFK has been somewhat of a faith-based mystery to me. And though there’s still much about his faith life that I don’t know, Raymond Arroyo’s interview sheds new light.

Kennedy told Arroyo that, growing up, “the centerpiece of our lives was Catholicism.” He noted that his family recited the Rosary at least once a day, and often three times a day. They prayed before and after every meal, read the Bible every night, and read the lives of the saints. Kennedy told Arroyo: 

We went to church, sometimes twice a day. We would go to the 7 o’clock Mass and 8 o’clock Mass in the summers. It was our whole family, and it was really our whole community. It was part of me growing up.

That was no small achievement for a family that size. Bobby and Ethel Kennedy had 11 children in all, with the last of them in the womb when Bobby was assassinated in Los Angeles at the age of 42.

Among the children, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the third. He was 14 years old when his father was killed, which threw his life into turmoil. He thereafter struggled with his faith and with drug addiction, including hard drugs, like heroin, into his late 20s.

“During that period of time,” said Kennedy, 

I wouldn’t say I lost my faith, but when you’re living against conscience, which you have to do if you’re addicted to drugs, you push God out over the periphery of your horizon. So the concept of God was, although it never was erased from me, it was just a distant concept that was not part of my day-to-day life.

He credits a “profound spiritual realignment,” a “spiritual awakening,” that turned him around and has been “the centerpiece” of his life ever since. “But,” he told Arroyo, “you can’t live off the laurels of a spiritual awakening. You have to renew it every day, and you renew it through service to other people.”

Fittingly, he says his favorite saints are Francis (his middle name) and Augustine.

This is intriguing information about RFK Jr.’s faith, though it provides more specifics about his family’s faith than his. Still, I see some interesting parallels with the faith of his father.

Robert Francis Kennedy Sr. (1925-68) was the most devout of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s boys, much more pious than his famous older brother. As a boy, Bobby’s parents sent him to school at St. Paul’s, a private Episcopal school in New Hampshire. He wasn’t happy there. He wrote to his mother complaining about the frequent use of the Protestant Bible at the school. She arranged his transfer to Portsmouth Abbey, an orthodox Benedictine school. There, he thrived under the monks.

Kennedy biographer Ronald Steel speculates that if RFK Sr. had been born into a poor family without a patriarch driving the boys into politics and power, he might well have been a priest. He was very philosophical, spiritual, intellectual, prayerful, and pensive, often speaking more like a poet than a politician. He had the makings of a monk had he not chosen the life of a politician.

Jackie Kennedy, who closely observed Bobby’s piety, once remarked that it seemed odd that her husband John F. Kennedy’s faith was an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign, particularly in light of the stark contrast to Bobby’s devoutness: “Now if it were Bobby: he never misses Mass and prays all the time.”

Bobby’s faith was called upon most acutely with the assassination of his beloved brother on November 22, 1963. He agonized over the death. The two were extremely close. No two brothers ever dominated the Oval Office together. The younger Kennedy questioned God the day his big brother was taken. That night, alone in his White House bedroom, a friend heard Bobby cry out, “Why, God? Why?” He was in visible pain, said the friend, “like a man on the rack.”

Notably, it seems that Bobby’s own son, RFK Jr., experienced similar “Why, God?” moments in reacting to his father’s death on June 6, 1968.

A significant difference between father and son, however, is their views on protecting unborn human life. In those pre-Roe v. Wade days, RFK Sr. was staunchly pro-life; he and Ethel obviously lived the pro-life life, giving the gift of life to 11 children. Bobby was socially and morally conservative, a further extension of his ardent Catholicism. 

Ronald Steel, in describing Bobby’s “fierce brand of Irish Catholicism,” said he “was at heart, and had always been, a Catholic conservative deeply suspicious of the moral license of the radical left,” particularly its embrace of drugs and sexual permissiveness. “He was no champion of women’s rights,” said Steel, “and would likely have been appalled by the very notion of gay liberation, had he ever been confronted with it.”

At one point, the entire Kennedy clan was pro-life. That all began to change after Roe and into the late 1970s and 1980s. In fact, even the terribly damaging “pro-choice” Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was once pro-life. The entire Kennedy family flipped on the abortion issue, swimming with the tide of their Democratic Party, which by the late 1990s was and firmly remains the party of abortion, as its standard bearer, Democrat President Joe Biden—a lifelong Catholic—has made painfully clear. 

And unfortunately, RFK Jr. swam with that tide. 

On the plus side, RFK Jr. does at least speak reluctantly for “abortion rights” and is even willing to say that “every abortion is a tragedy.” He told Raymond Arroyo that he is not “doctrinaire on either side,” though he makes clear that he believes such decisions “should be up to the mother” rather than “government officials and bureaucrats.” (Kennedy personally is the father of six children, though to different women. He is twice divorced and has a terribly disturbing past of infidelity and promiscuity, which has gone largely unreported.)

His overall position on abortion, as well as his crucial statement that every abortion is tragic, is at least better than Joe Biden’s seemingly no-limits extremism; and perhaps it is another good reason why RFK Jr. is making a better choice to run for president as an independent rather than as a Democrat. One hopes that his faith will provide a positive rudder in keeping him away from the ugliest extremes of his former Party on the abortion issue, just as it once guided his late father to cherish an abundance of unborn children.

But perhaps most poignant, this much is certain about the faith of the two RFKs: both RFK Jr. and his late father had their most trying moments, including questioning God, when the men closest to them were tragically gunned down. Their faith ultimately got them through, but not without agonizing questions and trials.

The big question for RFK Jr. is where he goes from here. His father’s presidential bid was brutally cut short. It seems highly unlikely that RFK Jr. could win the presidency in 2024, but he could really shake up the race as the most significant third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992.

As he does, he relies on his faith maybe more than we realized.