A Roman Catholic priest who gave tennis lessons to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis after her husband's assassination in 1963 kept a diary of their conversations, it has emerged. The papers, which include many of her personal comments, are to be published as part of a book.

The publication raises again the issues of confidentiality and whether the priest, who died last year, should have been transcribing what she presumably imagined were her private thoughts. Senator Edward Kennedy, the president's only surviving brother, had no comment yesterday.

The priest, the Reverend Richard McSorley, was asked by the late Robert Kennedy, the president's other brother, to give the widowed Mrs Kennedy tennis lessons to help her bereavement. During this period, she apparently confided in the priest who wrote down their conversations, typing them out as they occurred.

When he died last year, Mr McSorley left his papers, which filled 59 boxes, to Georgetown University in Washington where he had latterly been a theologian. Some of those papers form part of a book on the Kennedy family by the journalist Thomas Maier.

According to the papers, Mrs Onassis - she married the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis in 1968 - felt suicidal but wondered if God would keep her from her husband if she committed suicide. Mr Maier, who taped interviews with Mr McSorley and had access to his papers, defended the late priest. "I think he saw it as an eye toward history," he said

In conversations recorded by McSorley, Mrs Onassis told him: "If I only had a minute to say goodbye." While a priest would be forbidden by church law from divulging anything said to him in the course of a confession, the ethical position of a priest who was doubling as a tennis coach is less straightforward.