It turns out the man taking over Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat is himself part of a Massachusetts Catholic dynasty, according to Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe:

A dispatch from the Boston-is-a-really-small-town department: Paul G. Kirk Jr., who was named today as the interim US Senator from Massachusetts, is the grand-nephew of Cardinal William H. O’Connell, one of the most powerful figures in local church history, who served as archbishop of Boston from 1907 until his death in 1944. Kirk, 71, is one of five children of Josephine O’Connell, whose father, Edward J. O’Connell, was an older brother of Cardinal O’Connell.

The connection ties Kirk to one of the odder stories now unfolding in town, as the Archdiocese of Boston seeks to disinter the cardinal’s remains and remove them from land that the church sold to Boston College to raise money to pay off victims of clergy sexual abuse. The saga of the cardinal’s tomb, which has been playing out for five years now, last week moved to Suffolk Probate and Family Court, where Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, joined by the trustees of Boston College, are suing 30 of O’Connell’s living relatives, including Kirk, for the right to relocate the remains.

I last spoke with Kirk about his famous great-uncle about a year and a half ago. Kirk was born in 1938, and the cardinal died in 1944, so they didn’t spend a lot of time together, and the memories have faded, but Kirk told me he remembered, as a little boy, visiting Cardinal O’Connell at his grand residence in Brighton (also now the property of BC), and that his most distinct memory was of reciting the pledge of allegiance for his great-uncle. At the time of our interview last year, Kirk was opposed to relocating the cardinal’s remains, saying, “I think I speak for the majority of the cardinal’s next of kin in saying that we would like him to remain at his chosen resting place.”