When the new widow, Jacqueline Kennedy told Jesuit priest Richard McSorley of Georgetown University: “I’m so bleeding inside … I won’t ever get over it … I don’t know how God could take him away” – and that she was contemplating suicide – did she ever contemplate that he would type up all these confidences?
And even though this was on a tennis court and not in a confessional booth, did she ever imagine that these obvious confidences would be typed and donated to the Georgetown University Library – which has just made them available to the public?
The Associated Press interviewed the Rev. Michael Baxter, an assistant professor of theology at Notre Dame University, who said the informal setting for the discussions complicates the matter.
“If it was a clearly defined sacramental setting, it’s hard and fast and clear” that the conversations should be kept private, Fr. Baxter said. “If it was a professional relationship, a formal counseling situation, that would be rather clear, too. But, if it were something else, the situation changes.”
Coleman McCarthy, a Georgetown University professor who was a longtime friend of Fr. McSorley’s, said the priest would never intentionally hurt the Kennedy family.
He said Fr. McSorley probably made the conversations public because “it was new, it was valuable, it was honest.”
You may recall Coleman McCarthy as one of the Washington Post’s most far left-wing columnists – who could be expected to say something like this.
If what she told Fr. McSorley was “new, valuable and honest” and designed for the public, why did this priest conceal it for so long?
The AP noted: “The release has raised questions about the propriety of a priest keeping notes on private discussions.”
And let me add, the propriety of the Georgetown University library releasing these private conversations.
The AP also reports:
To a grieving nation, Jacqueline Kennedy was stoic following her husband’s assassination. But over tennis with a priest who counseled her, she apparently revealed her feelings, including thoughts of suicide.
She wondered whether God would separate her from her husband if she killed herself. She agonized over eternal life, and suggested that her young children might be better off if they were raised by the slain president’s brother Robert and his wife, Ethel.
But the Washington Post noted:
One ethics scholar, the Rev. John Paris, said McSorley should not have told anyone about his counseling sessions with Jacqueline Kennedy.
“The disclosure of this was wrong, absolutely wrong,” said Paris, who is Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College, a Catholic institution. “You would have the same sort of confidence here as you would have with a physician. Everything that is said is said in confidence because the individual comes to you precisely because he trusts you to keep it secret, and these are committed secrets. You’ve made the commitment prior to hearing it.”
McSorley should not have written down his conversations with Kennedy, Paris added, because “you don’t have absolute control over what is written.”
Esther Newberg, who has been Caroline Kennedy’s book agent, reacted angrily when contacted about the diary. “You should be embarrassed to make these phone calls,” Newberg told a reporter, adding that Kennedy would have no comment on the disclosure of her mother’s talk with the priest.
It is regretful indeed that Georgetown University an allegedly Catholic institution has no comment all about their late Jesuit priest and faculty member – and their library – disclosing what he wrote down concerning what was quite obviously so confidential.
