Browsing articles tagged with " Rick Santorum"
In 2008, a controversy erupted
between Pastor John Hagee of the 19,000-member Cornerstone
Evangelical Church
in San Antonio, Texas, and William Donohue, the head of the
Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights. Hagee had made claims about
Catholicism spawning a theology of hate toward Jews. Donahue said that these
remarks were insulting to Catholicism. The
spat was patched up (at least temporarily). But there has been a history of harsh words
between Protestant and Catholic officials. It goes all the way back to Martin
Luther’s excommunication (1521.) Look back over 2,500 years of Western History. Before verbal spats, there were riots,
occasionally deadly. Before that, extreme violence: there were massacres, persecutions,
expulsions, inquisitions, and wars between religions. The young Mormon Church
was violently expelled from eastern states where it was founded. But once it
got control of Utah,
its members were prominently involved in at least one massacre of non-Mormons
(Mountain Meadows, 1857.) In May 1844, there was a riot in Philadelphia over whether only the Protestant
Bible, or also the Catholic Bible, could be read in public schools. Thirteen
people were killed. Even today, sporadic war between religious groups,
frequently evangelical Christians versus Muslims, goes on literally around the
world along the Tenth Parallel north of the equator (see the book The Tenth Parallel.) Here in the U.S.
controversy occasionally erupts about the practice of some Mormons baptizing
the dead. Some people of other faiths object that it’s “attempted soul
stealing.” Recently Maureen Dowd, (New
York Times, “Is Elvis a Mormon?” 3.18.12) noted that Romney admitted to
Newsweek in 2007 that he had engaged in that practice. He said he had done this
sometime in the past, but not recently. Romney is a bishop of the Mormon Church.
Rick Santorum claimed that President Barack Obama’s agenda is ” about ”
some phony theology” not a theology based on the Bible…” Now that he’s out of
the race, some evangelical pastors are urging support for Ron Paul.
Why are religious differences
such durable sources of division among humans?
A religion is a group of humans, larger than a cult, which has a church,
a creed, and a code of morals. The creed is the dogma, sentences such as “I
believe in one God”" etc. Or is it three Gods in one? Sentences of dogma do not
claim anything that could be checked by observation with our senses. And
history reveals that they are not subject to major revision or withdrawal from
within the religion. The same non-verifiability is true of non-behavior
implying claims about another person’s pure states of mind, e.g., beliefs.
There is no way, e.g., to verify or falsify claims that “X is not a Christian”
or “X is a Christian,” in his mind, in his secret heart of hearts. Unless of
course, the claimant is a mind reader!
Religions emerged before nations. But their sheer size, in number of
adherents and territory of prevalence, is so large that their church leaders must contend with others for domination
of people, their labor, and resources to support their church personnel (land,
water, crops, craft goods, trade, and temple offerings, i.e., pre-taxes.) That
conflict is the source of their nation — like characteristics. It further sustains
all forms of intolerance: bigotry, racism, sexism, nativism and hyper
patriotism.
Religions are inherently
political. They are proto-nations, nascent governments. Their personnel
(whatever called) direct, judge and police their member’s behavior.
Proselytizing, seeking converts, sometimes by Evangelism, spreading their “good
news,” is their form of expansion. It may appear to relatives and friends of
converts, if not as alienation of affection, at least like relational
aggression, a deliberate weakening of social ties. The Supreme Court’s decision
enabling “Good News” clubs to allow “child evangelists” to recruit other
children in school buildings may seem especially aggressive. Explicit nations
continue this expansionary trend by economic and military means, now called
“imperialism.” Like nations, religions
have had coercing forces, often explicit armies. Dominionism is Evangelism’s
“Great Commission, its’ “imperialism. Rule over all people is its’ Manifest
Destiny. Martyrdom is honored among Dominionists as is extreme valor in a
national military cause. After all, it is refusal to switch loyalties, even
under torture or death threat. “Onward Christian (Jewish, Muslim, etc.)
Soldiers!” Prohibitions on masturbation
and homophobia: well, they won’t produce cannon fodder, will they?
Creeds function like pledges of
allegiance. That’s a reason the most powerful atheist writers and science-based
debaters can’t faze religious witnesses by challenging them with any facts.
They may affect audience members, but it’s really at cross purposes to answer
“I believe in”" with “Your belief is false, and here’s why”" In western societies (European),
disagreements in creeds between religions often arose out of exegesis, interpretations
of basically “the same” scripture.
But no factual inquiry can progress to settlement. When such
disagreements became acute, schism, persecutions, inquisitions, even wars have
occurred. Church rulers arrogated to their own authority not only dogma, but
notions they develop about how congregants should behave, such as the 613
commandments of the Torah. These often go far beyond what creeds explicitly
imply. Many of these in all religions eventually appear to laity as
inconvenient, restrictive, irrational, exploitative of money, without survival
value, anti-scientific, and sometimes even harmful. How inconvenient and restrictive are some of
these religious dictates? Here’s an example: “Sickness is the Will of God, to
be treated only by prayer.” Another is:
“No one should ever have or perform an abortion under any circumstances.” For a
scientifically-minded person, to cite a fact, such as that 50% — 70% of
fertilized eggs never implant,” is simply not relevant to contradicting people
who hold such a religious allegiance. A recent paper by Joe Keohane, titled
“How Facts Backfire,” available online, summarizes political behavior research
which shows that once people believe a political falsehood, after presenting
them with contradicting facts, they continue to believe the falsehood and do so
more vigorously! Thus in a secular
democracy, all one can do is persuade less committed minds, beat the dogmatists
at the polls, have reality – based candidates elected and make law that hacks
out compromise like Roe v. Wade.
Dictionaries define “bigotry” as
a stubborn devotion to a church, or creed, and intolerance of any that differs.
The word itself may even have originated in emphatic religious swearing, “By
God!” Similar devotion to and intolerance of other races, nations, or sexual
orientations gets other names: racism, jingoism, nativism, homophobia,
etc. Partisans, even extreme, just take
the part of some cause. Bigotry is more virulent. Bigotry deforms one’s
intellectual character and damages one’s potential moral character. Bigots have
trouble with reality. They commit to un-provable dogma, and so can’t
acknowledge some facts. Bigotry stupefies people, substituting their strong
emotions for reason and reality. Thus it impairs capacity for citizenship in a
tolerant civil democracy. Bigots pridefully think: “I’m theologically
correct; others are perverse in belief and morals, e.g., they sanction outright
murder!” [meaning abortion.]
Statistics prove that middle
income and poorer Americans have done significantly better in income gains over
4-year periods of Democratic majorities than over periods of Republican
majorities. However, Republicans have learned to promise tax cuts that provide
the middle class and poorer people some increase in the first year of
Republican administrations. Also, since the Democratic Party passed the civil
rights bill, the southern states turned from mostly Democratic to mostly
Republican in voting patterns. These factors, in addition to the money power
behind Republican candidates, have enabled Republicans to maintain rough parity
with the Democrats in national Presidential elections (See Unequal Democracy,
Larry Bartels, and Winner Take All Politics, Joseph Hacker and Paul Pierson.)
This near equality in voting strength is why bigotry may play a large role in
defeat of any Republican candidate in 2012. People who claim others are “not real
Christians,” have “phony theologies” or demonstrate irrelevantly at funerals
like the homophobic Westboro Baptists, or burn Korans, as well as Mormon dead
soul baptizers, are ” playing the religion card.” In motivating violent behavior, the religion
card may trump even the race card. Our founders wisely wrote, “No religious
Test shall ever be required as a qualification to any Office or public Trust
under the United States”
(Constitution, Art. 6 Sec. 3.) For presidential candidates to make such
theological, or mind-reader claims, publicly sets a divisive example. It opens
the lid of Pandora’s Box to a past fetid with insults and, earlier, riots, mass
murder, inquisitorial torture, and genuine war.
It’s possible that some of the
remarks of candidates were meant for other purposes than to win nominations.
American politics is also bad theater “entertainment.” Masses of Americans freely
contribute small sums of money to candidates, failing to realize that many
small donations add up to a lot of influence, even money power. A lucrative
career may await anyone, like Santorum, who gains such support. The career is
that of being an avatar for the contributors’ religious — political views. Look
at the salaries of Fox newscasters, or better, the contracts of “hatertainers”
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But since it’s divisive, bigotry ought to divide
people and be politically vincible. Maybe many Mormons won’t come out and vote,
if Republicans eventually nominate two non-Mormons. Perhaps many Catholics
won’t vote for Republicans, if no Catholic like Santorum gets either
nomination. Possibly a lot of Evangelicals will be unmotivated to vote by a
ticket with a Mormon like “flip flopper” Romney at the top and a Catholic like
Santorum for Vice President. We’ll see.
Originally published in Vol. 2 No. 8 of the Erie
Reader on 5/1/12
Rick Santorum has ended his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. This is an historic moment. Santorum’s was possibly the most religiously-based presidential campaign, not only in this election cycle, but perhaps in American history.
Santorum’s vision of the presidency, as gleaned from his many statements on faith and policy, was more of a Christian “theologian-in-chief” than a political leader of the most religiously diverse nation in the world.
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum speaks to supporters at Savre Lanes in Menasha, Wisconsin in this April 2, 2012 file photograph. Santorum will announce that he is going to drop out of the presidential race, two sources familiar with the decision told Reuters on April 10, 2012. REUTERS/Darren Hauck (UNITED STATES – Tags: ELECTIONS POLITICS)
(DARREN HAUCK – REUTERS)
The Santorum run was an historic candidacy because his often off-the-cuff remarks would reveal what is at stake for American democracy when ‘faith in the public square’ shifts and becomes more like ‘one faith should dominate the public square.’
The best framing for this analysis is, of course, Santorum’s comment that he “almost threw up” after reading John F. Kennedy’s historic 1960 address on separation of church and state. The very visceral quality of Santorum’s reaction, its literal ‘from the gut’ reaction, is most revealing. The idea that his conservative Catholic faith could remain private, and not dictate what he would do as President in running the government of a religiously and non-religiously pluralistic society, was literally anathema to Santorum.
Kennedy’s famous statement showed exactly how he thought his Catholic faith should neither dictate, or he as a Catholic be dictated to by Catholic religious authorities, and how his presidency of the whole nation meant religious and non-religious neutrality. He so famously said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”
Santorum introduced not only revulsion for the separation of church and state into this presidential campaign, but within the church arena, theological differences. Santorum strikingly attacked the “theology” that he presumed undergirded the president’s views and described them as one “not based on the Bible.” Obama’s agenda, Santorum told tea party supporters, is “about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.” But later Santorum affirmed that he thought President Obama was a Christian. Thus, Santorum brought up a Christian theological difference as a campaign issue. Theological differences between one faith and another are indeed divisive, but perhaps even more divisive is criticizing the theology of a member of one’s own faith in the political square. Neither is appropriate.
Santorum’s popularity with the Protestant evangelical “base,” mostly accounted for his success during the primaries. Santorum’s attraction for this group illustrates that there is a segment of the conservative American religious public who believe that separation of church and state is wrong as codified in the first amendment. Many in this group seem to believe that a particular type of Christianity should “be established,” that is, not just have a voice in our public debates, but be decisive in our political administration. That’s establishment by any name.
There is enormous risk to our democracy if someone elected to the presidency of the United States thinks the job is to be “theologian-in-chief,” not “commander-in-chief” and political leader of a religiously pluralistic America. In the United States, our freedom of religion depends, without question, on freedom from tyranny of one religion over another.
Santorum’s candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination has ended, but I do not believe this is the last we have seen of someone running to be “theologian-in-chief.”
Malawi’s president reportedly dead
Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika has died after a heart attack, doctors who treated him said Friday, as the troubled and impoverished southern African nation awaited official word of Mutharika’s death and who would succeed him.
The doctors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the 78-year-old died Thursday, and his body was then flown to South Africa, apparently to buy time for politicians who may be squabbling over the succession.
Tearful Chavez pleads for his life
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wiped away tears as he pleaded for life in his fight against an undisclosed cancer at a Catholic Mass in his home state of Barinas.
Chavez, speaking Thursday at the Mass held for his health and broadcast on state television, said cancer is a “real threat” that takes many lives and that he has faith that he will win the fight against the disease.
Chavez returned Wednesday from Cuba, where he underwent radiation therapy.
Launch by N. Korea apparently on track
North Korea may have moved the first stage of a rocket to a launch stand, indicating it is on schedule for a controversial mid-April launch, according to analysis of satellite images.
The rocket isn’t visible at the Tongchang-ri site, but an analysis by the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies says evidence suggests the first stage may be in the launch stand’s closed gantry, a support frame, ahead of the launch planned for April 12-16.
Santorum’s daughter back in hospital
The ill daughter of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been taken to the hospital.
Santorum’s campaign said Friday that 3-year-old Bella had been returned to the hospital. She has the rare genetic condition Trisomy 18 and was hospitalized earlier this year.
Bella’s condition typically proves fatal.
Ex-teacher arrested over sexual contact
A former California teacher who made headlines when he left his job and family to move in with an 18-year-old student was arrested Friday for previously having sexual contact with another teen, police said.
Christopher Hooker, 41, was arrested on one count of oral copulation with a minor. Police said it stems from his 1998 relationship with a 17-year-old student from Davis High School, where he once taught.
Plotter sentenced, renounces terrorism
A Maryland man who once said he wanted to wage jihad against the United States renounced terrorism Friday as he was sentenced to 25 years for plotting to bomb a military recruiting center near Baltimore.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine Manuelian told U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz that Antonio Martinez maintains the mindset that led him to place what he believed was a bomb in front of the recruiting center in 2010. However, Martinez said in a lengthy apology that he knew little of Islam when he was arrested and “all I had was a religious zeal.”
From wire reports
Here at “On Faith,” the Post’s Lisa Miller recently wrote that Rick Santorum could be called a “cafeteria Catholic,” someone who “cherry-picks” which teachings of the faith he wants to follow and which he doesn’t. He might even be “not all that Catholic,” says Miller. But what are Miller’s examples of Santorum’s alleged “cherry picking,” and do they really represent deviations from “rules and doctrines” of the Catholic faith, as she puts it?
Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum speaks to supporters and caucus voters during a campaign stop March 17, 2012 at Westminster Christian Academy in Town and Country, Missouri.
(Whitney Curtis – GETTY IMAGES)
First, the death penalty. Miller cites a 2005 statement of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, arguing for an end to the death penalty in the United States. As a senator, Santorum did not work to end the death penalty; quite the contrary. But what does the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church say on the subject? “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”
While the Catechism goes on to urge public authorities to consider the need for the death penalty in many societies as “rare” if not “non-existent,” it does not impose an obligation on citizens or public officials of the Catholic faith to abolish capital punishment outright. The question of the death penalty’s use is a prudential one, which Catholic teaching leaves up to the judgment of those invested with public authority—the laymen who hold office and the voters who choose them. In short, there is no Catholic “rule or doctrine” calling for the complete abolition of the death penalty. And the position staked out by the U.S. bishops does not change that fact.
Second, Miller mentions “torture.” She rightly notes the church’s unequivocal position against torture, but she tendentiously asserts that Santorum is in favor of it. She acknowledges—only implicitly to dismiss as obviously wrong—Santorum’s view that our government’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against captured enemy terrorists was not torture. Miller’s link to a news article elsewhere does not establish that she is right and Santorum is wrong about what constitutes torture. She has only identified a disagreement about a practice, not a “deviation” on Santorum’s part from what his church teaches. Miller’s Post colleague Marc Thiessen (also a Catholic) has written an entire book (“Courting Disaster”) responsibly making the case that the Bush administration had no policy amounting to “torture.” I recommend it to her.
Her third item is our policy toward Iran. Here Santorum is presented as ready to “threaten Iran with bombs,” whereas a committee of the bishops led by Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines recently counseled restraint. This seems to be a wholly manufactured difference between Santorum and leading prelates in his church. Even “preventive war” (taking steps to attack first against an imminent aggressor) is not ruled out by anything the church has ever authoritatively taught, nor even by the letter of Bishop Pates that Miller cites. As in the case of the death penalty, Catholic recognition that we live in a fallen world, where public authorities have a duty to protect innocent life, leads to the conclusion that deadly force can be morally employed, even preemptively. Also like the question of the death penalty, questions of war and peace are preeminently political judgments for the laymen invested with responsibility for the nation’s defense. The church has principles to offer, not policies, much less decisions in individual cases.
Finally, Miller mentions immigration. Though she writes that “only on this issue has Santorum explicitly distanced himself from the church,” it is perhaps her weakest example, because the church authoritatively teaches practically nothing about this subject. The U.S. bishops, Miller says, “support immigration reform that includes a way for illegal aliens to earn citizenship.” True enough. But Santorum, she writes, “wants to build a fence between the United States and Mexico” and on his Web site, she says, he “conflates immigrants with ‘drug cartels, violent criminals and terrorists.’” Score that as, respectively, a half-truth and a falsehood. Santorum’s site says “secure the border first,” but that isn’t the whole of his policy.
And as for his alleged “conflation” of “immigrants” with criminals and terrorists, try to find it yourself on that Web page. You can’t. What Santorum does say is that the Obama administration has given us an “exposed border and a nation vulnerable to drug cartels, violent criminals, and terrorists.” This is arguably so. But nowhere does Santorum say that “immigrants” generally or even “illegal immigrants” are part of that problem. Who’s doing the conflating here?
But let’s come back to Santorum vs. the bishops on this one. At most the bishops may be said to be speaking pastorally on this subject, but not authoritatively. Their views are worthy of respectful engagement, but they do not demand obedience. It is no test of anyone’s faithful Catholicism to inquire whether they agree with the bishops about immigration.
Miller seemed moved to write this critique of Santorum by the fact that conservative Catholics can sometimes be heard to call their liberal brethren “cafeteria Catholics.” But in the case of many (not all) liberal Catholics, there really are serious deviations from “rules and doctrines” taught by the faith. The teachings against abortion and contraception are unequivocal and authoritative. Ditto for the teachings on the priesthood of celibate men, and on the preservation of marriage as between one man and one woman. The bishops defend these doctrines as pillars of the Church’s teaching, and when they speak it is the church we hear. On these questions, it is our brethren on the left who are not “all that Catholic” if they are at odds with the bishops.
But the case is different for the principles that govern the use of the death penalty, the use of military force, or policymaking on immigration. The bishops are rightly revered as the shepherds of the faith, but they know that they lack the authority to “loose and bind” the voters and public officials of the Catholic faith on these questions. Individually and collectively, the bishops’ views (even the pope’s view) on these matters are instances where they speak for themselves, in a great ongoing conversation among Catholics. They know they cannot, and so they do not, speak ex cathedra on questions as intricate as immigration policy.
Ironically, Miller’s standard for Santorum’s Catholicism is just the kind of test John F. Kennedy insisted was wrong for his fellow Americans to apply. The complaint about Kennedy in 1960, in some Protestant circles, was that he would, as president, do the bidding of Rome or of the American bishops, sacrificing his judgment (and his constitutional responsibilities as president) to religious authority. According to Miller, Rick Santorum can only be a completely good Catholic if he lets the bishops make immigration policy, remake our criminal justice system, and determine whether we can attack Iran. Luckily for Santorum, she is wrong.
Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University.
Politicians may want to abstain from talking about religion, a new poll showed.
The Pew Research Center found that 38% of Americans questioned in a recent survey felt that lawmakers and campaigning politicians bring up their faith too often.
That was the highest percentage for that answer in the annual Pew religion-in-politics poll, which was first launched in 2001, when just 12% failed to give their blessing to faith-based political chatter.
But the poll, released Wednesday, also revealed that 30% of Americans believe there is not enough talk about religion in the political arena.
The results could signal that some of the Republican presidential candidates this year are taking an unholy risk in the campaign battles over government-mandated birth control, gay marriage and funding for Planned Parenthood.
Rick Santorum, whose Catholic faith represents the backbone of his political ideology, has courted religious conservative voters — and won key victories in the Deep South as a result. He’s argued on the stump that religion ought to play a much larger role in the public square.
Newt Gingrich often trumpets his faith, too. The twice-divorced former House Speaker credits his conversion to Catholicism with turning around his messy personal life.
Front-runner Mitt Romney is a Mormon, who has often spoken generally about his faith without getting into specifics — an approach likely intended to not alienate the Christian voters he would need to win the party’s nomination.
Romney’s supporters are more likely than Santorum’s to say there’s too much expression of faith by political leaders, the poll found. Some 55% of the ex-Pennsylvania senator’s backers indicated they believe there is too little talk about faith and prayer by lawmakers, compared to just 24% among Romney supporters.
The survey found “some important signs of public uneasiness with the mixing of religion and politics,” Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Forum, told the Daily News.
The survey was conducted between March 7 and March 11, a month after the Obama administration directed some religious institutions to cover contraceptive services in their employees’ health care plans.
The move provoked furious opposition from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and sparked an unsuccessful effort by Senate Republicans to overturn it.
But the Obama Administration later softened its stance, determining that insurance companies would pay for the coverage and not religious employers.
Politicians may want to abstain from talking about religion, a new poll showed.
The Pew Research Center found that 38% of Americans questioned in a recent survey felt that lawmakers and campaigning politicians bring up their faith too often.
That was the highest percentage for that answer in the annual Pew religion-in-politics poll, which was first launched in 2001, when just 12% failed to give their blessing to faith-based political chatter.
But the poll, released Wednesday, also revealed that 30% of Americans believe there is not enough talk about religion in the political arena.
The results could signal that some of the Republican presidential candidates this year are taking an unholy risk in the campaign battles over government-mandated birth control, gay marriage and funding for Planned Parenthood.
Rick Santorum, whose Catholic faith represents the backbone of his political ideology, has courted religious conservative voters — and won key victories in the Deep South as a result. He’s argued on the stump that religion ought to play a much larger role in the public square.
Newt Gingrich often trumpets his faith, too. The twice-divorced former House Speaker credits his conversion to Catholicism with turning around his messy personal life.
Front-runner Mitt Romney is a Mormon, who has often spoken generally about his faith without getting into specifics — an approach likely intended to not alienate the Christian voters he would need to win the party’s nomination.
Romney’s supporters are more likely than Santorum’s to say there’s too much expression of faith by political leaders, the poll found. Some 55% of the ex-Pennsylvania senator’s backers indicated they believe there is too little talk about faith and prayer by lawmakers, compared to just 24% among Romney supporters.
The survey found “some important signs of public uneasiness with the mixing of religion and politics,” Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Forum, told the Daily News.
The survey was conducted between March 7 and March 11, a month after the Obama administration directed some religious institutions to cover contraceptive services in their employees’ health care plans.
The move provoked furious opposition from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and sparked an unsuccessful effort by Senate Republicans to overturn it.
But the Obama Administration later softened its stance, determining that insurance companies would pay for the coverage and not religious employers.
WASHINGTON – The Catholic movement Opus Dei has become a “significant presence” in the life of presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, who has made his faith one of the central elements of his campaign, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The daily reviews the evolution of Santorum’s faith, discussing how the former Pennsylvania senator held more liberal views in his youth but then came to practice Catholicism in a more rigorous manner after meeting his future wife, Karen Garvey.
A few years after the death of the couple’s fourth child, Gabriel, two hours after he was born in 1996, Santorum got to know an Opus Dei priest, the Rev. John McCloskey, “and began to assert his faith more publicly,” the newspaper said.
Santorum, who was a senator at that time, began a Senate prayer group. In 2002, he traveled to Rome with McCloskey to participate in a conference to celebrate the founder of Opus Dei, Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer.
In his speech at the conference, according to the daily, Santorum supported the position of Escriva de Balaguer that it is absurd to leave one’s Catholic faith to the side when one involves oneself in politics and insisted: “Without a shared belief system that is held and enforced, a culture disintegrates into moral chaos.”
For advice on matters of this kind, the then-senator explained, he turned to “blessed Josemaria.”
During the course of the legislative debates on abortion, Santorum told the Rome audience, he listened to Escriva saying that “it is not true that there is opposition between being a good Catholic and serving civil society faithfully.”
That speech, the Post added, was the first time Santorum had publicly expressed support for Opus Dei, which has about 3,000 members in the United States.
The senator sends two of his seven children to a Washington-area private school run by Opus Dei members, the daily added.
And when he is at his residence in suburban Washington, he attends St. Catherine of Siena in Great Falls, Virginia, “one of the few churches in the diocese that host a monthly Opus Dei spiritual meeting.”
“Santorum, whose campaign declined several requests for comment, is not a member of Opus Dei, according to the group, and it is not clear to what degree he adheres to its tenets,” the Post said.
Santorum on Tuesday is facing a difficult challenge in the Illinois Republican primary, but he has won important victories in the southern states of Alabama and Mississippi, where the conservative Christian vote was crucial.
During one of his victory speeches last week, Santorum said that what he hears with increasing frequency from his voters is “I’m praying for you,” while wife Karen has said that her husband believes “God is calling” him to pursue the presidency. EFE
National Catholic Register
Mar 17, 2012 – 5:52 PM ET
Rick Santorum is showing surprising support from evangelicals, despite making no bones about diligently practicing his Catholic faith.
The former Pennsylvania senator is tenaciously maintaining second place in the campaign to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, especially following primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi this week.
Even more surprising, perhaps, is his relatively poor showing among Catholic Republicans, who are demonstrating a distinct preference for front-running Mitt Romney, a Mormon and former governor of Massachusetts.
Does it mean the wish expressed by the only Catholic ever elected president in his pre-election speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960 — that religion should be irrelevant to politics — has come true?
Or does it show that religion has become relevant in a way unimagined 50 years ago?
John F. Kennedy’s advocacy of an “absolute separation of church and state” has certainly not been embraced by the American electorate, noted Greg Smith. He is the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life senior researcher. “I have seen no data to suggest religion is irrelevant,” Smith said. “Religion has been a powerful predictor of voting trends in recent general elections.”
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Posted in: Holy Post
Tags: Catholics, Evangelicals, Mitt Romney, Mormons, Republicans, Rick Santorum
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As he rolls into Illinois for the Republican Presidential primary, former Senator Rick Santorum’s campaign is hyping the fact that he attended Carmel Catholic High School in suburban Mundelein. His supporters even created a “Carmel High School for Santorum” Facebook page, gushing that “Santorum embodies everything that true practicing Catholics believe, and the students at Carmel Catholic strive to become a positive public figure like Rick Santorum who stands up for the American people’s values.”
Yet, later this week Santorum is scheduled to campaign with former State Rep. Al Salvi (a fellow Carmel graduate) at a prep school in Niles (which is nowhere near Mundelein) and not at Carmel’s gym, which bears the Salvi family name. Perhaps Santorum knows what many in the Carmel community think of him and his campaign.
Carmel describes itself as a college preparatory school and “a community which fosters respect for diversity, mutual growth and development,” and many Carmel graduates, including myself, don’t consider Santorum a feather in our cap. While my Carmel experience was nearly 20 years after Santorum’s, I’m confident his political persona does not reflect what he learned there.
Carmel is part of the Catholic Church’s centuries-long commitment to intellectual development and the pursuit of knowledge. Listening to Rick Santorum, one would think he’s the product of some shady institution created by a televangelist during the age of disco to provide an academic pretense for challenging scientific consensus and reversing decades of social progress.
It is embarrassing for Santorum to cast himself as a vociferous defender of “intelligent design,” having pushed legislation instructing teachers to downplay evolution and teach that specific brand of creationism, even bragging how he angered the Biology Teachers Association and sparked years of conflict over the issue in schools across the country. Carmel has a nationally recognized academic program, and 25 percent of students pursue science and engineering careers. They know about evolution — and that the Catholic Church rejects intelligent design, has supported evolution for more than 50 years and decries the use of the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge.
Equally inexplicable are Santorum’s claim that “Satan” has infiltrated the university system and his attack on President Obama as a “snob” for reasonably suggesting that all high school graduates further their education by at least one year. “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,” Santorum said, “because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely.” Yet 99 percent of Carmel graduates attend college, apparently all doomed to become a bunch of elitists brainwashed by the devil.
Santorum defended a TV preacher who described Islam as “evil,” calling his statement “reasonable,” indulged birtherism at a campaign event and exploited racial stereotypes by saying he didn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” These typical Santorum remarks hardly reflect Carmel’s values of respect for self and others — values based in Catholic social teaching, which “calls us to overcome barriers of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, economic status, and nationality.”
Santorum can’t seem to reconcile that broader ethic that is inherent in Carmel’s philosophy with his political ambitions, since he campaigns as a religious conservative, yet openly disdains several Catholic social values.
Santorum’s defense of concentrated wealth and opportunity hardly reflects the Church directive that “economic development must remain under the people’s control, [not] left to the judgment of a few individuals or groups possessing too much economic power.”
He chastised a worried mother whose son’s annual prescription drug costs exceed one million dollars by saying, “We either believe in markets or we don’t” — hardly echoing Pope John Paul II’s denunciation of an “idolatry of the market” or his call for “the state and [all of] society to defend needs… that cannot be satisfied by the market system.”
Santorum may despise “Obamacare” and complain that Americans have “been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it,” but the law doesn’t go nearly as far as the Church’s edict that access to adequate medical care is an “inalienable right” that “should be a priority of governments” and “[as] far as possible it should be cheap or even free of charge.”
Santorum reviles church-state separation, but it is inconceivable that he would publicly espouse his faith’s more socially conscious principles. Instead, he artfully promotes right-wing fundamentalist notions he definitely never studied at Carmel. The media call Santorum an “evangelical Catholic,” which is simply a misleading euphemism that makes his political pandering appear virtuous.
Carmel students learn values that serve as a foundation for how they live, not as a guidebook for demeaning others and certainly not as a blueprint for remaking government. They are encouraged to think independently and respect cultural and religious diversity. How students apply their values as adults in a pluralistic society is a responsibility each confronts individually. Carmel graduates develop the same political ideologies and opinions on controversial issues as most Americans. And, they form their own views on the proper roles for government and religion in social and economic matters.
Similarly, Catholic politicians must reconcile their respect for Church teaching with their oath to the Constitution and responsibility to constituents of all faiths. Opposition to abortion, contraception and gay marriage seem to offer the clearest path to the heart of the Republican base. This works out well for Santorum, who clearly shares the Church positions here but whose language is laden with more apocalyptic condemnation than most will ever hear at mass.
Conservative Catholics like Santorum argue that those issues are the gravest evils facing our country and that liberals misguidedly associate them with such values as economic opportunity, compassion for the poor and respect for the global community. Regardless, all are essential elements of the Catholic faith. Harping on a few politically potent values doesn’t earn you a pass to actively work against the others.
All of this is not to characterize Santorum as a “bad Catholic” and certainly not to challenge the way he has personally lived his faith, which in some respects is admirable. Rather, the bottom line is that Rick Santorum, the politician, has constructed his own independent theology, piecing together the most electorally beneficial elements of Catholicism, ignoring or deriding its other tenets and shrouding it all in rhetoric that frequently runs counter to the academic rigor and values central to the Carmel High School experience.
Few of us would claim to be the model Carmel graduate. I honestly don’t know who would be. But I do know the ideal model is not Rick Santorum.
Update: Santorum has since cancelled his appearance at Northridge Prep in Niles, Ill. He is now expected to appear at John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights on Friday, March 16, 2012.
Rick Santorum, children’s advocate.
media.knoxnews.com.com
March is Rick Santorum’s moment to strut the stage like a minor Shakespearean buffoon, who mortifies but entertains the crowd before he is yanked behind the curtain. Much of his message is old news, but he also represents a movement to insert the most conservative brand of Catholic theology into secular political discourse. But Catholic voters reject this guy. Why? Despite the church’s rightward drift under Pope Benedict, the church has had an at times uneasy relationship with Opus Dei and Regnum Christi, two branches of Catholic lay practice that Santorum endorses and that have been highly suspect to many within the church.
Of the two groups, Regnum Christi is the more virulent. It is the lay branch of the Legion of Christ order founded by child rapist and bigamist Father Marcial Maciel. According to the New York Times, Santorum has long been a supporter of the group and in 2003 was the keynote speaker at a Regnum Christi event in Chicago. Though this occurred a decade ago, Maciel, who had been under investigation since the 70s, was already well on his way to repudiation by the church.
According to a 1997 Hartford Courant article, Maciel was accused of serial sexual abuse including young children. Maciel’s accusers included “a priest, a guidance counselor, a professor, an engineer, a lawyer, and a former priest who became a university professor,” according to a Wikipedia summary of the article. Maciel was investigated by no less that by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVIl, who presumably spurred Maciel’s removal from his leadership position of the Legion. By 2010, the church referred to Maciel thusly:
- an “immoral” double life “devoid of scruples and authentic religious sentiment.”
- “the very serious and objectively immoral acts”
- “true crimes and manifest a life without scruples or authentic religious sentiment”
Anyone vaguely familiar with the church’s agonizingly slow response to the preponderance of evidence concerning its decades-long priestly sex scandal has to find the straightforward nature of this condemnation rather striking. And yet Maciel’s legacy, Regnum Christi, is a pet project of Santorum.
“The Culture Did It”
Rick Santorum has followed the lead of many apologists for the Catholic sex scandal, which cost the U.S. church $2.6 billion in settlements from 1950 to 2009; he blamed the culture. He said:
It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning “private” moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.
In fact, by 1957, Catholic cleric Gerald Fitzgerald, who established church treatment centers for offending priests in the U.S. wrote:
If I were a bishop, I would tremble when I failed to report them [sexual offenders] to Rome for involuntary laicization. Experience has taught us these men are too dangerous to the children of the parish and the neighborhood for us to be justified in receiving them here….They should ipso facto be reduced to lay men when they act thus.
That sounds to me like the observations of a man who has experienced interactions with sexual offenders on a systemic basis.
The truth is, the Catholic sex scandal is about cheating, not permissive culture or moral relativism. It is about cheating on vows, on common decency, and the law. To believers, it is about cheating on God. But most of all, it’s about cheating children. It’s about cheating them out of their lives, and the disease runs in the priestly culture of the church to a far greater extent than the culture as a whole.
If the separation of church and state makes Santorum want to “puke,” it’s up to us to grasp the true meaning of his reliance on Catholicism’s more cultish offshoots to understand what he has in mind for the nation. If he wants to bring religion front and center onto the national stage, we really ought to look at the historical and cultural antecedents he represents.
His recent biography, which includes a private audience with the Pope in 2000, aligns his personal actions and beliefs very closely with the strictures of Opus Dei. The group had been widely criticized for its misogyny, secrecy, and rightwing ideology. Santorum is strutting the stage proclaiming his soul-on-sleeve religiosity, but I think there exists a great deal more that we might want to know about his grand plans for a saintlier society. Despite his strutting, he remains a pig in a poke when it comes to contemplating him as Confessor-in-Chief.
