UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Peter Feuerherd | Jun. 4, 2015
Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a writer, psychologist, and former Maryknoll priest transformed into a lay Catholic activist, died Wednesday. He was 86.
Kennedy died in Lakeland Hospital in St. Joseph, Mich., with his wife, Sara, beside him and surrounded by family.
Kennedy, retired psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago, was comfortable both inside powerful church circles — he was a confidante to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and authored books about his friend — and on the outside, lobbying for changes about how the hierarchy handled sex abuse and other issues. Much of his retirement was spent talking to groups such as Voice of the Faithful, galvanizing lay action on church issues.
“In many ways, he was right in the middle of the church and he looked around. He also stepped to the edge and looked deeper at some aspects of the church,” said Msgr. Ken Velo, a Chicago priest, former aide to Bernardin, and friend of Kennedy’s.
In an essay for NCR, posted online in June 2002, soon before the bishops met in Dallas to chart a response to the sex abuse crisis, Kennedy blamed the scandal on the “characteristic passivity of American bishops” and warned against the secretiveness of clerical culture. He castigated what he called a “Pontius Pilate Syndrome” in the hierarchy, a “getting along by going along.”
In 2006, Kennedy told a Voice of the Faithful meeting in Long Island, N.Y., “The world of hierarchy has come to an end. Don’t fight with it. Let it disintegrate.”
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