c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service<
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Sheila Rauch Kennedy says that during her 12-year marriage to Rep. Joseph Kennedy, he often told her he was the star in the family and that she was a ``nobody.'' And when they were divorced in 1991, she says, she ``kept quiet.''
Not anymore. The divorce was one thing (in fact, she was the one who filed for it), but the annulment granted to Kennedy by the Roman Catholic Church in October has her fighting mad. ``It hit me boom, in the gut,'' she said.
She is not only appealing the ruling, but with her new book, ``Shattered Faith: A Woman's Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage'' (Pantheon, $23), she is publicly waging a battle royal: Kennedy vs. Kennedy.
Ms. Kennedy, 48, is on a crusade against what she calls the ``hypocrisy'' and the ``nonsense'' of the practice of annulling marriages: since the Catholic Church does not recognize divorce, the only way for Catholics to be free to marry again in the church is to have the marriage declared invalid in the first place.
As she takes up arms against annulment, Ms. Kennedy is an unlikely warrior: She is Episcopalian.
Why, then, is she fighting so hard to prevent the Catholic Church from annulling her marriage? Ms. Kennedy said she sees annulment as a broad moral issue. She and Kennedy were married in a Catholic church by his family's priest, and an annulment would mean that in the eyes of the church, their 12-year marriage was invalid and, therefore, did not exist.
``How can anyone say this marriage didn't happen?'' Ms. Kennedy said during lunch recently just off Harvard Square, near her home. ``The annulment process is so hypocritical and so dishonest. It is important for children to know there are certain things you don't lie about simply because it's convenient. If you duck that, you send your children a very bad message.''
Kennedy, 44, and her former husband are the parents of 16-year-old twin boys, Matthew and Joseph.
``Going public is a little scary, but annulment is a sick process, and you have to stand up to it,'' she added. ``If I didn't have the guts to do this, I'd really be a wimp. I didn't want to be a wimp for my kids.''
Linda Pieczynski, the president of Call to Action, a national Catholic reform organization based in Chicago, called annulment a ``humiliating and demeaning'' process. ``It is very painful to be told that you never had a marriage,'' she said.
The Rev. Andrew Greeley, the writer and a visiting professor of social science at the University of Chicago, said that to the church, annulment is an ``act of compassion.''
``Most Catholics are grateful when the church gives them a second chance for marriage,'' he added.
Ms. Kennedy has a vivid recollection of the morning when she received a letter from the Archdiocese of Boston saying that her former husband was seeking an annulment. First, she ran into the bathroom to throw up. Then she vowed to fight, she said, ``with everything I had.''
Greeley said that in his view, contesting an annulment is often a means of punishing a spouse. ``It's a way of getting back,'' he said.
But Ms. Kennedy insisted that her intransigence ``has nothing to do with bitterness over the past. ``I'm not going to be dragged into something I feel is dishonest,'' she said in a firm, even tone. ``I have a right as a human being to be honest, and that should not be erased by either Joe or the church.''
Kennedy declined to speak about the annulment or the marriage. He issued a statement through his press secretary in which he called the annulment ``a very personal matter.'' He also said, ``I understand Sheila's feelings, and I respect her right to express them.''
Roughly 50,000 annulments are granted each year in the United States, according to the Washington-based Canon Law Society of America, the national association of canon lawyers.
Kennedy, the oldest child of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, applied for an annulment in 1993, the year he married Anne Elizabeth Kelly, a former member of his staff, in a civil ceremony. Without an annulment, neither Kennedy nor his present wife, who is also Catholic, can receive communion or other church sacraments. Annulment has no bearing on Kennedy's children or any that he may have in the future.
Kennedy was granted an annulment on the grounds of his ``lack of due discretion,'' meaning that he was found incapable of entering into marriage at the time of the wedding, in 1979.
The Rev. Patrick Cogan, the executive coordinator of the Canon Law Society, said the ``vast majority'' of annulments are granted on similar psychological grounds. He said the church looks into a person's ``inability to consent to or carry out the responsibilities of marriage.''
The Rev. James Provost, the chairman of the canon law department at Catholic University in Washington, said that lack of due discretion means there was ``something defective'' in a person's consent to marriage. ``A person may have been too immature, or lied at the altar, or suffered from some psychological factor,'' he said.
Ms. Kennedy said that she and her former husband attended Catholic premarital counseling, which included discussion of the permanence of marriage. ``Both of us understood the principles on which we started our life together,'' she said.
Ms. Kennedy writes in her book that her former husband urged her not to take the annulment seriously, but to go along with it as ``just Catholic gobbledygook.'' She also quotes him as saying: ``I don't believe this stuff. Nobody actually believes it.''
The divorce itself was not a moral dilemma for Ms. Kennedy. ``I didn't object to getting divorced because we both realized it was over, and divorce recognizes that a marriage has broken down,'' she said. ``But annulment says you were never married in the first place, at least in the eyes of God.''
The daughter of a Philadelphia bank president, Ms. Kennedy is a tall, athletic-looking woman. She is poised and reserved and clearly uncomfortable about being interviewed and opening her life to public scrutiny. She said she wanted to protect her children and her privacy and not contribute to ``the garbage heap'' of Kennedy gossip. But she is also bursting to tell the world what she thinks of annulment.
Her book has a similar ambivalence. She writes mostly about the annulment process and how it has affected her, and five other women, whom she profiles, and little about her marriage itself. But she makes just enough swift surgical strikes against her former husband to create an unflattering portrait. She writes that Kennedy ``is not endowed with patience'' and ``has never been exactly an advocate for equality between the sexes.'' She also writes that ``by the end of our marriage I had simply become afraid of him.''
Asked why she had feared her former husband, she replied carefully: ``Joe doesn't mince words. That's about as far as I can put it. Those who live in the Boston area know of Joe's temper.''
She drew a deep breath. ``The annulment was the straw that broke the camel's back,'' she said. ``I have all the responsibility in terms of the children. The boys see Joe when he's here on weekends, but he's not here during the week. I wasn't going to do all this and agree to the fact that we were never married.''
Ms. Kennedy said her marriage began to unravel when Kennedy ran for Congress in 1986. ``Joe wanted a home front like his parents', and I couldn't deliver it,'' she said. ``His mother always traveled with his father and was never home. I was unwilling to turn my children over to nannies. ``The prospect of being on my own with two children was scary,'' she said. ``But it was very clear that this was the way to go.''
She picked at her omelet, hardly eating. She said that she and her former husband had agreed to raise their children in both of their faiths. But once the annulment battle began, she said, she ``went on strike'' and stopped taking the boys to Mass.
She said she has often felt isolated living in Boston as the target of the combined power of the church and the Kennedy family. ``I stayed here for the kids, but I often wished that I had moved,'' she said. ``Here I was in Kennedyland. When we got divorced, our friends went with the better deal, and that was Joe. It wasn't easy. But I never wanted to give up. I was too angry to give up.''
Ms. Kennedy did not ask for alimony and bought a house in Cambridge with a loan from her parents. She added that her divorce agreement did not allow her to go into details about its terms. Ms. Kennedy has a master's degree in urban planning from Harvard University and has worked free-lance in the field for clients like the state of Massachusetts, the city of Boston and Harvard.
Provost of Catholic University said that if Ms. Kennedy's appeal is accepted for review in Rome, a church-appointed advocate will draw up the grounds for her case.
Ms. Kennedy said she does not know if her book will have any influence on the appeal. ``They might be so angry at me for going public that the substance of the case will become irrelevant,'' she said. ``But I can't live a lie. Going to Rome is the best chance I've got.''
What if her appeal fails?
``I'll know I did the best I could,'' she replied. ``I can live with that.''
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE WEDNESDAY AT 5 P.M. EASTERN
For alleviating the pain of circumcision in newborn boys, an easy-to-use anesthetic cream offers a good alternative to injections of painkillers, a new study finds.
Many newborn boys are not given any pain relievers at all during the procedure, in which the foreskin of the penis is removed, because some doctors believe that circumcision is not painful, because they are concerned about giving medication to such young patients or they don't know how to administer the shots, the researchers said.
In the study, 38 newborns received lidocaine-prilocaine cream and 30 received a placebo cream. One gram of the cream was applied to the penis 60 to 80 minutes before the circumcision.
During the procedure, the newborns given lidocaine-prilocaine cream showed fewer signs of pain, including crying and facial expressions, such as chin quivering and squeezing the eyes shut. These babies also had a lower heart rate and lower blood pressure than the placebo group, the study showed.
The researchers, led by Anna Taddio of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, reported their findings Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
``A baby's pain should be treated,'' Taddio said.
And now that an available pain-relieving cream has been found to be safe and effective for infants undergoing circumcision, ``there is no excuse not to give them a pain reliever,'' she said.
While other methods for numbing a baby's pain during circumcision are more effective than applying the cream, they are infrequently used because most doctors do not have the necessary training, Taddio said. The other methods are injections of lidocaine into the penile nerve at the base of the penis and injections of lidocaine beneath the foreskin.
In an editorial accompanying the study, Dr. Thomas E. Wiswell, a professor of pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, said that ``lidocaine-prilocaine cream is a safe alternative.'' Some type of anesthetic should be used to quell the pain of circumcision, he said, because to not use pain relief is ``barbaric.''
During the procedure, the infant is typically strapped to a restraining board, which may also add to the pain and increase heart rate, he said. ``Practitioners would never allow older children or adults to be subjected to such practices, nor would they submit to it themselves,'' Wiswell wrote.
Along with being given pain relief, infants also should be given a pacifier and be swaddled loosely to make the procedure more comfortable for them, he said.
The New England Journal of Medicine (1997;336:1197-1201)
c.1997 Hearst Newspapers
WASHINGTON—Ralph Reed announced Wednesday he is quitting his post as head of the Christian Coalition, the organization he built from scratch into the nation's premier conservative religious voice on issues ranging from abortion to homosexuality to obscenity.
Reed, 35, told reporters he would depart in September and form his own consulting firm to advise candidates who are ``pro- family pro-life and pro-free enterprise.'' He will divide his time between Washington and Atlanta.
Reed downplayed speculation he was leaving to run for elected office, saying he expected to work as a consultant for elections in 1998, 2000 and beyond. Nevertheless, a political bid ``is something I wouldn't rule out or in,'' he said.
Reed said he would continue to serve on the coalition's board. Christian Coalition supporters gave reporters copies of a written tribute to Reed from television evangelist Pat Robertson, the group's founder.
``The work of the Christian Coalition will never be done, and my work in the political arena is not over,'' Reed said. ``But my work for the Christian Coalition is done.''
He listed the coalition's legislative victories and near-misses, including welfare reform, legislation to bar access by minors to sexually explicit materials on the Internet, and a law barring interstate recognition of gay and lesbian marriages.
Last year, the Federal Election Commission filed a lawsuit against the coalition, charging that it violated federal law by funneling $1.4 million to Republican candidates, including nearly $1 million to Bush's 1992 campaign.
Federal election law prohibits non-profit, non-partisan organizations from direct involvement in electoral politics.
The suit also accuses the coalition of accepting $64,000 in 1990 from the National Republican Senatorial Committee to prepare voter-guide pamphlets critical of Democratic candidates. The FEC said the Christian Coalition's support of GOP candidates should have been reported as donations or in-kind contributions to the campaigns.
The FEC lawsuit is still pending.
The coalition was a key player in Senate and House passage of
legislation barring late-term ``partial-birth'' abortions that was
later vetoed by President Clinton 
.
Reed's choir-boy good looks masked what even his opponents acknowledged were finely tuned political instincts. In its eight-year existence, the Christian Coalition has mushroomed into a high-tech network of 1.9 million members with an annual budget of $27 million.
Beneath his aw-shucks demeanor and frequent references to Jesus Christ, Reed was a master at summoning conservative Christians to the political ramparts through a network of local chapters, churches and homes, wired together by telephones, fax machines, the Internet and cable TV broadcasts.
``Ralph Reed is one of the most talented people of his generation in public life,'' said prominent conservative thinker William Bennett.
Even critics praised Reed's skill as a political field marshal.
``Pat Robertson just lost the most talented front man any politician could ever want,'' said Carole Shields, president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. ``Reed's real mastery was in being the angelic face on the Christian Coalition's extreme agenda.''
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In 1989 Robertson picked Reed, then just 27, to head the newly formed group. The coalition tied its fortunes to the Republican Party, but moderated some positions after Bush lost to Clinton in 1992, a defeat that was partly blamed on the ultra-conservative tone of that year's GOP convention. Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who lost the Republican nomination that year and in 1996, called opposition to Clinton and liberalism a ``cultural war'' for the ``soul of America.''
Also in 1992, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Christian right, voting 5-4 to uphold its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion.
After Bush's defeat, Reed embarked on a campaign of softening the coalition's image as a lily-white, largely suburban and rural group committed to a narrow range of conservative social issues.
He reached out to black and Hispanic ministers through the Samaritan project, which called on Congress to approve tax credits, scholarships, anti-drug programs and sexual abstinence education for inner city youths and families.
Also, the coalition raised $750,000 to help rebuild black churches, primarily in the south, that were destroyed by arson over the past three years.
Reed attempted to mend fences with Jewish religious leaders who were offended by a passage in a Robertson book dredging up old anti-Semitic imagery of a Jewish banking conspiracy to take over the world. Robertson apologized to Jewish organizations for what he had written.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia government professor who co-authored a book on the coalition's voter guides, concluded they were rife with ``manipulations, distortions and outright falsehoods.''
On Wednesday, Sabato nevertheless praised Reed's political ability.
``He's become a household word, if not a trademark in politics,'' Sabato said.
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