Ted Kennedy Only Senator To Sit In A Pope's Lap

That I am pretty sure of. Ok he was not Pope at the Time but close enough.


This is pretty interesting from the new Kennedy Book. I was aware that Teddy got his first communion from the Pope but I was not aware of this second very personal visit.

Teddy Kennedy and Pius XII [Mike Potemra]
Teddy poignantly recounts the day he received his First Communion from Pope Pius XII:

I wore a blue suit and had a white rosette on my left arm. As he blessed me, [the Pope] said, “I hope you always be good and pious as you are today.” It caused a great deal of a stir in some circles – a seven-year-old American boy given his First Communion by the Pope, who himself was giving that honor for the first time as Pope and to a non-Italian to boot. [Pius had been elected just 13 days earlier.] But it was among the greatest moments of my life.

Amazingly enough, this was not the first meeting between the two. Three years earlier, Joseph Kennedy had escorted then-Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli on a tour of the United States. “One of his last stops was at our house. I remember crawling up onto his lap. I was fascinated by his long robe and scarlet skullcap, and his long aristocratic nose. We still have the couch where he sat, and the plaque that Mother put on it.” A remarkably domestic encounter between two men who would be each be the subject of more than his share of controversy, during his life and even after his death.
09/14 10:34 PMShare

I find these trip that Sec of State Cardinal Pacelli (the soon to be Pope) made to the USA very interesting. There seems to have been some important stuff happening. In fact one of these trips he visited with President Roosevelt at his New York estate.. From my understanding the record of that meeting is still classified.

But these events recounted above really does show that the Kennedy dad was really a big cheese.