This was announced by the Vincentian order in Dublin on September 5.

The order said the decision had been taken with "regard to the respect due to what is correspondence of a private nature".

Plans to sell the 33 letters at auction earlier this year sparked outrage and the sale, which was expected to raise more than 1 million euros, was quickly called off.

The letters were written between 1950 and 1964 by the former first lady to Fr Joseph Leonard, a priest in the All Hallows seminary in Drumcondra, Dublin.

It is understood that Jackie Kennedy's daughter Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, the US ambassador to Japan, had retained a Dublin law firm to assert her ownership of the copyright of the content of the letters.

Ambassador Kennedy has declined to comment publicly on the matter.

It is not known if the Kennedy family paid the Vincentians for the letters and the order said it would be "making no further comment".

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The former United States first lady's letters were written to Vincentian Fr Joseph Leonard, who died in 1964.

The proposed sale was stopped after the intervention of the Kennedy family.

On May 23, All Hallows College announced its intention to close, "with huge regret and deep sadness".

The college, which has 450 current students, had run an increasing deficit for many years.

The Irish Department of Education said All Hallows undergraduate numbers had not reached a cap for student fee funding for the last five years.

The college gets a grant in lieu of tuition fee funding from the department.

"The wind down of the college will begin immediately," a college spokeswoman said.

All Hallows will try to help current students complete their courses, and there will be consultation with more than 70 staff members.

Thousands of priests who followed the Irish diaspora around the world did their seminary training at All Hallows, which was founded in 1842.

But in the 1980s, as seminarian numbers dropped, the college opened its doors to lay people and courses evolved in areas like social justice and church and culture.

In 2008, All Hallows, with two other institutes, became a college of Dublin City University.

It appears the sale of the Kennedy letters was a last ditch attempt to keep All Hallows financially afloat.

After "a stringent programme of sustainability" did not turn finances around, the college did an inventory of its valuable books, paintings and other items, with a view to sale.

It was in this context that staff decided to sell the Kennedy letters, which had been held at the college since 1964.

The letters were expected to fetch NZ$2million at auction in June.

Excerpts were published in media ahead of the proposed sale.

This prompted criticism that such correspondence on personal, spiritual matters involving a priest should be kept confidential.

Sources

• All Hallows statement
• The Tablet
• The Irish Times
• National Catholic Reporter
• The Journal
• Image: All Hallows

All Hallows College in Ireland announced that the letters would not be put up for auction as first planned.

The Tablet reports this decision came after members of Mrs Kennedy's family intervened.

Mrs Kennedy corresponded with Vincentian Fr Joseph Leonard for 14 years.

Extracts from her letters reveal her grief after her husband President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Her family, All Hallows and the Vincentians are exploring how best to preserve and curate the letters.

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The priest was Vincentian Fr Joseph Leonard, a lecturer at Dublin's All Hallows College, who died in 1964.

Excerpts from the letters were published in the Irish Times.

One letter, dated January, 1964, only months after President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, shows the depth of Mrs Kennedy's struggle.

"I am so bitter against God," she wrote, but added "only he and you and I know that."

She explained that she did not want to be bitter "or bring up my children in a bitter way" and was "trying to make my peace with God".

She wrote: "I think God must have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be without him -but that is a strange way of thinking to me."

Mrs Kennedy wrote in the same letter that "God will have a bit of explaining to do to me if I ever see him".

She asked Fr Leonard to pray for her and said she would pray too in an effort to overcome her bitterness against God.

"I have to think there is a God - or I have no hope of finding Jack again," she wrote.

Fr Leonard first met a young Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in 1950 when she visited Dublin.

The two struck up an immediate friendship and corresponded regularly.

In 1956, she wrote to the priest after the birth of a stillborn daughter and said: "Don't think I would ever be bitter at God."

The letters reveal that in the 1950s, Fr Leonard helped rekindle Jackie Kennedy's faith.

But Jesuit Fr Thomas Reese said All Hallows College should never have sold the letters.

The letters should have been burnt or placed in archives for a century, because there is a presumption of confidentiality when a person writes to a priest about his or her spiritual life, Fr Reese said.

The 33 letters are set to be auctioned in Dublin on June 10.

They are expected to sell for well over US$1million.

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• National Catholic Reporter
• Fox News
• Image: The Guardian