sentences:  At Kennedy's state funeral mass, Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, served as the principal celebrant.Cushing was a close friend of the family who had witnessed and blessed the marriage of Senator Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, baptized two of their children, given the invocation at President Kennedy's inauguration, and officiated at the recent funeral of the President's infant son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy.Hannan, however, was asked by the Kennedy family to deliver the homily at the "low" or recited Requiem Mass (as opposed to a "high" or sung Requiem Mass which a high government official would ordinarily receive), which substituted for a formal eulogy, since a traditional eulogy was not permitted by the Catholic Church (the first presidential funeral to feature a formal eulogy was that of Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1973.