Paul KeenanDocuments to be auctioned in Ireland on June 10
Former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy struggled with her Catholic faith in the wake of her husband’s assassination, a series of letters, newly discovered in Ireland, reveal.
The letters, part of a 14-year correspondence with an Irish Vincentian, Fr Joseph Leonard, show how Mrs Kennedy was “so bitter against God” in 1963, when the loss of her infant son, Patrick, was followed by the shooting of John F. Kennedy.
However, she subsequently writes that her faith had brought her a measure of comfort: “I have to think there is a God or I have no hope of finding Jack again.” She goes on to quip: “God will have a bit of explaining to do if I ever see him.”
Jacqueline Kennedy’s correspondence with Fr Leonard began in 1950 after she first met the All Hallows-based priest. In one early letter, dating to 1952, when she was 23, Jacqueline refers to that first meeting when she writes: “I terribly want to be a good Catholic now and I know it’s all because of you. I suppose I realised in the back of my mind you wanted that – you gave me the rosary as I left Ireland… I suddenly realised this Christmas when my sister and I decided – after not going to church for a year – that we desperately wanted to change and get close to God again – that it must have been your little prayers that worked – all the way across the ocean.”
Having married John F. Kennedy in 1953, Jacqueline subsequently writes frankly of her trauma at the loss of her baby, Arabella, in 1956, telling Fr Leonard: “Don’t think I would ever be bitter with God.”
Jacqueline Kennedy died in 1994, leaving no diaries or an autobiography of a life lived through an enduring phase of US history.
The letters, dating from 1950 to 1964, are set to become a boon for historians and will be auctioned on June 10.