Informal Chaplain To The Joseph P. Kennedy Family
During his many years of association with Joseph P. Kennedy, Father John was called on for advice and assistance in times of difficulty. He officiated many of the Kennedy family weddings, said a special Mass in the East Room of the White House prior to John Fitzgerald Kennedy's funeral at St. Matthew's Cathedral, and was one of the three priests serving at the funeral itself.
As spiritual and secular advisor to the Kennedys, Father Cavanaugh also performed other rites for the family. On April 24, 1954, for instance, Cavanaugh performed the marriage of Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy at The Church of Saint Thomas More in New York, New York. Some of the 250 guests at the wedding reception at the Plaza Hotel included Greer Garson, Marion Davies, Bernard Baruch, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Mr. and Mrs. Igor Cassini, and Mr. and Mrs. Morton Downey Sr. He was the personal priest of the Kennedy family and a good friend of John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy. John Cavanaugh was Virginia Joan Bennett's preferred celebrant for her wedding to Edward Moore Kennedy in 1958, but Rose and Joseph Kennedy chose Cardinal Francis Spellman instead.
Joseph P. Kennedy sparked up a friendship with Father Cavanaugh when became a member of University of Notre Dame's Board of Trustees. Beginning in 1958, Father Cavanaugh advised Joseph P. Kennedy on a strategy for addressing American Protestant concerns about the potential election of a Roman Catholic president. In 1959, Father Cavanaugh also advised Joseph P. Kennedy on the hiring of Harris Wofford for the 1960 Presidential Campaign. The future Senator from the State of Pennsylvania was a civil rights attorney then teaching at Notre Dame Law School. Father Cavanaugh, as former president of the University, approached Father Theodore Hesburgh to arrange a leave of absence. Cavanaugh was present with the Kennedy family at Hyannisport in 1960, as they anxiously awaited returns from the swing states of Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota and California in the unexpectedly close Presidential election.
Father John’s advice to the Kennedy family included thoughts on the handling of materials censored by the Vatican, as when Rose Kennedy asked for judgments on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, all of Emile Zola’s works, and some tomes by Jean Jacques Rousseau. But the relationship was reciprocated. When the United States Military Academy uncovered excessing cheating on its Varsity Football team, Father Cavanaugh obtained a special gift from Joseph P. Kennedy to provide Notre Dame scholarships for all the former cadets, under the condition that they play no varsity sports.
Read more about this topic: John J. Cavanaugh
Famous quotes containing the words informal, chaplain, kennedy and/or family:
“We as a nation need to be reeducated about the necessary and sufficient conditions for making human beings human. We need to be reeducated not as parents—but as workers, neighbors, and friends; and as members of the organizations, committees, boards—and, especially, the informal networks that control our social institutions and thereby determine the conditions of life for our families and their children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“Though I had not come a-hunting, and felt some compunctions about accompanying the hunters, I wished to see a moose near at hand, and was not sorry to learn how the Indian managed to kill one. I went as reporter or chaplain to the hunters,—and the chaplain has been known to carry a gun himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946.... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)