NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
As a child, Eunice Kennedy knew how beautiful children with special needs could be. She saw that beauty every day in her big sister, Rosemary, who was born with a developmental disability. In 1941, however, after a botched lobotomy took away Rosemary’s ability to walk, speak, and interact with the world, Eunice learned that not everyone recognized the beauty of her sister and those like her.
Eunice—the fifth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children—was just 20 years old at the time and could do nothing to help her sister, whom her parents institutionalized. But she could help others. And that’s what she resolved to do when she took charge of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation 16 years later.
Founded in 1946 after the eldest Kennedy brother’s death in World War II, the foundation first focused on general charitable giving. But with the recently married Eunice at its head (she’d wed Robert “Sargent” Shriver, Jr., in 1953), it switched its focus to advocating for those with intellectual disabilities.
In the years that followed, the foundation spurred groundbreaking advances in research and care for those with special needs—-helping launch the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, establishing intellectual disabilities research centers at major universities and hospitals, and creating centers for the study of medical ethics at Harvard and Georgetown.
Kennedy Shriver herself helped found Special Olympics International, which grew out of an annual summer camp for special needs children that she started in the early 1960s on her Maryland farm. A devout Catholic and committed friend of the pro-life movement, Kennedy Shriver brought five children into the world and supported pro-life organizations such as Feminists for Life and the Susan B. Anthony List.
She also vociferously opposed the inclusion of the pro-abortion plank in the 1992 Democratic Party platform. Made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope Benedict XVI, Kennedy Shriver died on August 11, 2009.
