Sargent and Eunice, Pray for Us!

The Kennedy tribe was playing football. Young Bobby Shriver fell, hurt himself, and started to cry. Uncle Robert Kennedy scolded "Don't cry! Kennedys don't cry." Dad Sargent Shriver picked the little guy up and said "Don't worry! You can cry. You are a Shriver!" Sargent and Eunice Shriver are perhaps the quintisential Catholic Liberals of late 20th century America in that they renounced the Kennedy Legacy. In a brilliant article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opinion/31douthat.html?_r=1) Ross Douthat compared and contrasted the Shriver and Kennedy legacies. He identified the essence of the cursed Kennedy patrimony: the dominating patriarchy of father Joseph. Joe disrespected and violated, in ways blatant and subtle, the femininity of the pious, gentle Rose. The entire Kennedy ethos can be understood as dominance of an unrestrained machismo over a violated femininity: unbridled ambition and competitiveness, promiscuity, divorce, addictions, and the litany goes on. The pro-abortion fanaticism is a perverse compensation, a misguided effort to assuage repressed guilt for violation of the feminine. Contrast the Shrivers: Eunice had a career that compared with that of her famous husband and siblings; Sargent reflects, in the football incident above, a paternal strength lightened by "feminine" compassion and tenderness; to the end they championed both care for the poor and for the unborn; Sargent was a daily communicant for his entire life; and the two of them lived out an integral, consistent liberalism as an expression of their Catholic faith.They are numbered among the very few classic Catholic liberals who persevered on behalf of the poor even as they pivoted to resist the assault on human dignity from the sexual left. Tragically, we have no such Catholic liberals today. None! Sargent and Eunice, Pray for us!