Eugene Kennedy: A Man, the Catholic Church, and the Life of Faith

By William Van Ornum and Michael Leach

For two decades, Eugene Kennedy was one of the church's fiercest critics in the sexual abuse crisis, with frequent articles in National Catholic Reporter. This book--written as an appreciation by one of Kennedy's former students at Loyola University of Chicago--recalls and assesses his huge literary output throughout fifty years of active research and writing. Kennedy's entire career can be seen as an extension of Vatican II. Topics in the tremendous arc of his career include a career-starting book on improving seminaries, inspiring books about faith in the twentieth century, leadership in the 1972 study by United States Catholic bishops, books on how to do counseling at the parish level, ongoing reviews of how the church put Vatican II in motion, and his last book, which is a gentle collection of blogs as he fondly reminisced about his life. In the middle of all this, he was a successful novelist and political commentator whose editor was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And much, much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Oct 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498240482

William Van Ornum

William Van Ornum is professor of psychology at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He has written A Thousand Frightening Fantasies: Understanding and Treating Scrupulosity and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (1997), which includes an introduction by John Cardinal O’Connor of New York. He is the author, coauthor, or general editor for over thirty books, many of them on the relationship between psychology and spirituality

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Eugene Kennedy

A Man, the Catholic Church, and the Life of Faith

William Van Ornum

Foreword by Michael Leach

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Eugene Kennedy

A Man, the Catholic Church, and the Life of Faith

Copyright © 2017 William Van Ornum. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1662-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4049-9

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4048-2

Manufactured in the U.S.A. October 23, 2017

All biblical quotations are cited from the New Jerusalem Bible: New York, Doubleday 1990, general editor Dom Henry Wansbrough

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Genius of Vatican II

Chapter 2: Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Researcher

Chapter 3: Working with Jacqueline Onassis and Chicago Politics

Chapter 4: Redevelopment and Reaffirmation of Faith

Chapter 5: The Bernardin Books

Chapter 6: Church Prophet, Sweet Recollections

Afterword

Bibliography

To Michael Leach

Mentor, Friend, Inspiration

You are a priest for ever of the order of Melchizedek

—Psalm 110:4 and Hebrews 7:17

Foreword

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

—Eugene Kennedy

In 1972, Eugene Kennedy wrote a book called The Pain of Being Human. The title alone, I think, made it a bestseller. Everyone feels the pain of being human. He followed it in 1974 with The Joy of Being Human. It attracted far fewer readers.

Gene Kennedy knew both sides of being human, and understood that suffering, although a most familiar experience, was one that humans could transcend. He was a priest, later a husband, psychologist, friend, critic, listener, teacher, mentor, novelist, columnist, and author of more than fifty books. In addition to The Pain of Being Human and The Joy of Being Human, he wrote The Choice to Be Human, The Trouble with Being Human, and A Time for Being Human. Human experience, he observed, resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

Gene’s mission in life, it seems to me, was to show us the sun.

He came into my experience a few years before the author of this splendid biography, Bill Van Ornum, did. After editing a book of Gene’s essays, St. Patrick’s Day with Mayor Daley, at The Seabury Press in 1976, I asked Kennedy if he thought it a helpful idea for us to collect his popular newsletters on counseling into a book that would serve the needs of non-professional counselors—clergy, teachers, guidance counselors, nurses, doctors, social workers, supervisors, family, and friends—who are the first ones that people in pain seek out for help. He did, and we did, and in 1977 Seabury published On Becoming a Counselor, which America magazine dubbed the definitive guide in its field. It has remained in print for more than forty years now. Gene followed it with specialized counseling guides for those on the frontline: Sexual Counseling and Crisis Counseling. They, too, became widely used and eventually incorporated into the third (2001) and fourth revised editions (2017) of On Becoming a Counselor that Gene put together with his wife, psychiatrist Sara Charles.

In 1982, I was publisher of the new Continuum Publishing Corporation and received a call from a young psychologist at the Astor Home for Children in Rhinebeck, New York, who had tracked me down as the editor of Gene’s counseling books. He was Bill Van Ornum, a former student of Gene’s at Loyola University in Chicago. Astor was, and is, the first residential treatment center for children with special emotional needs in the United States. Bill, together with his colleague John Mordock, inspired by Kennedy, had written a manuscript, Crisis Counseling with Children and Adolescents, to serve the same individuals without extensive psychological training as the three groundbreaking books. We published the first edition of their book in 1983. The magazine Marriage and Family Living summarized: Every parent should keep this book on the shelf right next to the nutrition, medical and Dr. Spock books.

These two books, On Becoming a Counselor and Crisis Counseling with Children and Adolescents, have many things in common, but chiefly their understanding of the pain of being human and a desire to show the sun.

Over the years, I would publish many books with Eugene Kennedy and with William Van Ornum. When Gene resigned from the priesthood in 1977 and married Sara Charles who, like him, was a former Maryknoll missioner, I thought to myself, If they could have a son, he would be like Bill Van Ornum.

As Kennedy, a professor of psychology at Loyola University, went on to do major studies and popular books on the priesthood and the Catholic Church, so would Van Ornum, a professor of psychology at Marist College, on religious issues such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and scrupulosity. In 1987, I asked Bill to be the general editor of a new series I wanted to start: The Continuum Counseling Series, a series of state-of-the-art books that would inform and inspire non-professional counselors on issues that strike all families. That ask begat more than twenty-five books on topics including marriage and divorce, bereavement, grief of all kinds, addiction, eating disorders, autism, and Alzheimer’s. They culminated in The Counseling Sourcebook (edited with Judah Ronch and Nick Stillwell), a comprehensive reference book for practitioners, consumers, and general readers.

Bill Van Ornum, an accomplished psychologist and lifelong Catholic, is the ideal person to write a popular presentation of Eugene Kennedy’s life and career. He makes us feel both the pain and the joy of being human in his warm and detailed telling of Kennedy’s life choices and life-affirming contributions. As Gene himself once observed: The mystery of being human and, certainly, of being a Catholic lies in our embracing together the imperfect state known as the human condition. First and foremost, if we could ever be perfect or do things perfectly, we would eliminate mystery, an essential ingredient in the good life and the spiritual life.

Readers of Eugene Kennedy as well as anyone interested in the healing of the human condition, in mind or heart, will find much to love in Eugene Kennedy: A Man, the Catholic Church, and the Life of Faith.

Michael Leach

Publisher Emeritus, Orbis Books

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their help: Michael Leach, Martin Rowe, Evander Lomke, Monsignor Kenneth Velo, Dr. Sara Charles, Robin Straus, Margie Ecklund, Thomas Wermuth, Ph.D., Margaret Calista, Brian Palmer, and RaeAnne Harris. Their contributions have enriched this modest volume immeasurably.

As always, I am grateful to Marist College for support of my scholarship; a sabbatical grant in Fall 2016 was especially helpful as I worked on this book.

Introduction

Eugene Kennedy (1928–2015) was a significant intellectual force and a major presence in the academy. When you look up his work using contemporary means of gauging scholarly importance—such as scholar.google.com—he is widely cited. However, his presence in the broader American culture was considerably greater, with a reach and influence over millions of people. Indeed, from 1965 to 1975 Kennedy was arguably one of the most visible commentators on Roman Catholicism. He wrote best-selling books that were published by major publishing houses in New York City. He gave talks at conferences and on radio and television, and was a prominent and successful journalist.

Kennedy’s connections within Catholicism and the wider culture made him the perfect mediator to bring the post-Vatican II church to the world, and vice versa. As they might have said in Chicago, he had clout, lots of clout. He numbered Joseph Cardinal Bernardin and John Cardinal O’Connor as close friends. Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, John Gregory Dunne, and Garry Wills were literary associates. Through his working relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (no relation; 1929–1994), he was one degree away from the most important people anywhere.

Kennedy joined a vibrant and hopeful milieu of Catholics during the decade following Vatican II as arguably the most visible Catholic clinical psychologist of his day. His theological thinking mirrored other Catholic intellectuals of the time: Hans Küng, Charles A. Curran, Andrew Greeley, Adrian van Kaam, Dorothy Day, and others. Most importantly, he actively promoted the message of Vatican