22 May 2014, The Tablet

Private grief or public property?


 
A Catholic college has withdrawn from sale letters by Jacqueline Kennedy to a priest after it was criticised for violating her privacy. All Hallows in Dublin says it decided not to auction the correspondence after contact with the Kennedy family The image of Jacqueline Kennedy cradling her husband in her arms as he lay dying is frozen in time. But the widow of the 35th President of the United States never spoke publicly about his assassination in 1963 or the difficult years that followed.Now, 20 years after her own death, private letters Jackie wrote to Fr Joseph Leonard, a Vincentian priest in Ireland, have revealed the bitterness and anger she felt towards God at the time. The 31 letters remained in a safe at All Hallows College, the Vincentian seminary in Dublin where he died in 1964.
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