Monday, March 05, 2012 4:17:53 AM
Why evangelicals love Santorum, hated JFK
JFK campaigns for president with Jackie in 1960 when, Michael Wolraich says, evangelicals feared he was the pope's agent.
By Michael Wolraich, Special to CNN
updated 9:15 AM EST, Thu March 1, 2012
Editor's note: Michael Wolraich is a founder of the political blog dagblog.com [ http://dagblog.com/ ] and the author of "Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual [ http://dagblog.com/blowing-smoke ]."
(CNN) -- Sen. Rick Santorum, who is campaigning to become America's second Catholic president, disagrees from the bottom of his gut with the first Catholic to hold the office.
In October, he told a Catholic university audience that when he read the 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he "almost threw up." More recently, he elaborated on his dyspeptic condition in an ABC television interview, calling JFK's credo "an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960."
But the Baptist ministers who witnessed Kennedy's speech surely felt differently. In the 1960s, evangelical leaders were not concerned that Kennedy was too secular; they were concerned that he was too Catholic.
For most of American history, the Protestant majority has regarded Catholics with deep suspicion. Many of the 13 colonies banned Catholics from public office and prohibited Catholic rituals. Priests were banished and sometimes executed.
After independence, the Constitution protected Catholics from the worst persecutions of the Colonial period, but discrimination persisted, and anti-Catholic paranoia raged with an intensity that would have made Glenn Beck blush. One popular book, "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States," warned of a secret Jesuit plot to deliver America to the Austrian empire. Its author was Samuel Morse, co-inventor of the telegraph.
Such fears diminished as Catholic immigrants assimilated in the 20th century, but many Protestants remained hostile toward Catholic politicians. During JFK's presidential campaign, the Department of Justice documented 144 producers of anti-Catholic campaign literature. The pamphlets warned of Vatican influence over American policy and the prospect of state-funded Catholic schools. Most of the opposition came from evangelical groups like the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention.
In the face of unrelenting hostility, Kennedy decided to address concerns about his religion directly. Speaking to a group of Baptist ministers in Houston, he reassured them:
"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."
Perhaps Rick Santorum's father, an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in 1930, heard these words and understood the prejudice that JFK struggled against. But Rick Santorum was only 2 years old when they were spoken. If he has any memory of Catholics' difficult history in this country, he does not publicize it. Nor do other Catholic champions of the religious right in their determination to wash away the old hostilities that divided American Christianity.
Evangelicals and Catholics began collaborating politically in the late 1970s. The architect behind their reconciliation was a political strategist named Paul Weyrich. Frustrated by the Republican Party's preoccupation with business interests, Weyrich sought to reorient the party toward religious and cultural issues [ http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1016 ]. To this end, he founded the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the Moral Majority, the first organization to represent what we now call the religious right.
Weyrich, a Melkite Greek Catholic, knew that a Catholic leader would not appeal to evangelicals, so he tried to recruit televangelist Pat Robertson to lead his cause. When Robertson turned him down, Weyrich enlisted the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Falwell would later say that Catholics and evangelicals found common ground in their opposition to abortion, but Weyrich remembered it somewhat differently. He had tried to mobilize evangelicals over abortion and failed. Most Protestants regarded abortion as a "Catholic issue," and many prominent Baptist leaders had even endorsed the Roe v. Wade decision.
What actually brought Catholics and evangelicals together was a common enemy. This imaginary enemy has gone by many names. In the 1970s and '80s, it was known as "secular humanism," a fiendish anti-religious movement that had supposedly taken over the schools, the courts, the media and the government.
In the 1990s, it was called "political correctness," and rampaged through the universities. When Bill O'Reilly of Fox News announced that Christmas was under siege in 2004, he blamed "secular progressives" in the media. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum decries "cultural liberalism [ http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=30 ]" and warns that the government is trying to destroy religious freedom by forcing Catholic organizations to insure birth control.
Regardless of the name, the supposed enemy's goals remain the same: to eradicate Christianity from the public sphere and replace traditional Judeo-Christian values with a liberal agenda. Its agents are progressive politicians, journalists, professors and nonprofit organizations. Its creed is the separation of church and state that JFK once appealed to in his campaign to become the first Catholic president.
The construction of such a villain has been devastatingly effective in uniting the religious right. The same evangelical groups that once attacked JFK as an agent of the pope have become the foundation of Santorum's support in the Republic primary, and his only rival for their vote is fellow Catholic Newt Gingrich. Times have changed.
But should Santorum and his conservative Catholic allies succeed in breaking down the barriers between state and religion, they may reap a bitter fruit. For without the secular menace to distract Protestants from their doctrinal differences with Catholics, the old enmities may rise again. And just as religious right leaders seldom extend their demands for religious freedom to Muslims and other non-Christian religions, Catholics might one day find the freedoms that they have come to take for granted are no longer assured.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Michael Wolraich.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/opinion/wolraich-catholics-protestants/index.html [with comments]
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From ‘Nominal Catholic’ to Clarion of Faith
Rick Santorum at a forum for pastors last month in Texas.
Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
Mr. Santorum with his wife, Karen, and their family while announcing his bid for president last June in Pennsylvania.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
The family church in Virginia.
Luke sharrett for The New York Times
Mr. Santorum speaking at a church service in Florida in January.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 3, 2012
GREAT FALLS, Va. — Rick Santorum [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/rick-santorum ] was, in his own words, a “nominal Catholic” when he met Karen Garver, a neonatal nurse and law student, in 1988. As they made plans to marry and he decided to enter politics, she sent him to her father for advice.
Dr. Kenneth L. Garver was a Pittsburgh pediatrician who specialized in medical genetics. The patriarch of a large Roman Catholic family, he had treated patients considering abortion but was strongly opposed to it.
“We sat across the table and the whole evening we talked about this issue,” Mr. Santorum told an anti-abortion group last October. He left, he said, convinced “that there was only one place to be, from the standpoint of science as well as from the standpoint of faith.”
For Mr. Santorum, a Republican candidate for president, that conversation was an early step on a path into a deeply conservative Catholic culture that has profoundly influenced his life as a husband, father and politician. Over the past two decades, he has undergone a religious transformation that is now spurring a national conversation about faith in the public sphere.
On the campaign trail, he has attacked President Obama for “phony theology,” warned of the “dangers of contraceptives” and rejected John F. Kennedy’s call for strict separation of church and state. His bold expressions of faith could affect his support in this week’s Super Tuesday nominating contests, possibly helping with conservative Christians, especially in the South, but scaring off voters uncomfortable mixing so much religion in politics.
Central to Mr. Santorum’s spiritual life is his wife, whom he calls “the rock which I stand upon.” Before marrying, the couple decided to recommit themselves to their Catholic faith — a turnabout for Karen Santorum, who had been romantically involved with a well-known abortion provider in Pittsburgh and had openly supported abortion rights, according to several people who knew her then.
The Santorums went on to have eight children, including a son who died two hours after birth in 1996 and a daughter, now 3, who has a life-threatening genetic disorder. Unlike Catholics who believe that church doctrine should adapt to changing times and needs, the Santorums believe in a highly traditional Catholicism that adheres fully to what scholars call “the teaching authority” of the pope and his bishops.
“He has a strong sense of that,” said George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where Mr. Santorum had a fellowship after losing his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2006. “He’s the first national figure of some significance who’s on that side of the Catholic conversation.”
The Santorums’ beliefs are reflected in a succession of lifestyle decisions, including eschewing birth control, home schooling [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/home_schooling/index.html ] their younger children and sending the older boys to a private academy affiliated with Opus Dei, an influential Catholic movement that emphasizes spiritual holiness.
As members of St. Catherine of Siena, a parish here in the wealthy Northern Virginia suburb of Great Falls, the Santorums are immersed in a community where large families are not uncommon and many mothers leave behind careers to dedicate themselves to child-rearing, as Mrs. Santorum has. Mr. Santorum has been on the church roster as a lector, reading Scripture from the pulpit.
The parish is known for its Washington luminaries — Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court is a member — as well as its spiritual ardor. Mass is offered in Latin every Sunday at noon — most parishes have Mass only in English — and each Wednesday parishioners take turns praying nonstop for 24 hours before a consecrated communion wafer, a demanding practice known as Eucharistic adoration.
The Santorum campaign did not respond to interview requests about the couple’s beliefs, and their pastors declined to comment. But friends say Mr. Santorum believes he is in a “moment of testing” and feels “a calling to be faithful,” regardless of whether he wins the nomination. One friend, Frank Schoeneman, sees Mr. Santorum as carrying out a vow he made to live a life that would make Gabriel, the child he lost, proud.
“Rick found himself in his faith, and he found himself in Karen,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has known Mr. Santorum for more than 20 years. “He isn’t like one of these born-again people where you get hit in the head by some televangelist and you suddenly see the light. It’s been an evolution. He’s always been a Catholic and he’s always been faithful, but he’s never been at this level of faith.”
The Family Fold
Church on Sunday was a way of life in Butler, the western Pennsylvania town where Mr. Santorum grew up. But by the time he met his future wife, sports and politics were at the center of his world. He was working in Pittsburgh at the prestigious Kirkpatrick & Lockhart law firm and recruited Ms. Garver, then a University of Pittsburgh law student, for a summer internship.
Fair-skinned and auburn-haired, she was from a Pittsburgh family of 11 children, some of whom followed their father’s path into medicine. Dr. Garver was well known in Pittsburgh for a practice that included prenatal testing.
But Ms. Garver, those who knew her say, had broken with her family and her Catholic faith over her relationship with Dr. Tom Allen, who founded Pittsburgh’s first abortion clinic. The two became a couple in 1982, when Ms. Garver was a nursing student in her 20s and Dr. Allen was in his 60s. An obstetrician-gynecologist, he had delivered her and knew her father professionally.
In an interview, Dr. Allen, now 92, said that Ms. Garver rented the basement apartment in the building where he lived and worked, and that they soon became romantically involved. (The Philadelphia City Paper reported on the relationship in 2005.)
“He was a pillar of the liberal community in Pittsburgh, well known for his charitable work, for the arts, and also very well known for his wine collection,” said John M. Burkoff, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who knew the couple. While Dr. Allen was a strong personality, Mr. Burkoff said, Ms. Garver “was not in his shadow.”
She joined Dr. Allen in hosting fund-raisers for liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and for his clinic and expressed strong support for abortion rights, said Herbert Greenberg, a concert violinist and friend of Dr. Allen.
Mr. Greenberg’s wife, Mary, a mother of three, sought counseling from Dr. Allen on whether to terminate her fourth pregnancy for health reasons. Mrs. Greenberg said Ms. Garver offered to accompany her for an abortion.
“She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing,’ ” Mrs. Greenberg recalled, adding that she went alone for the procedure.
Ms. Garver and Dr. Allen spent six years together, but she left him when she met Mr. Santorum. Her relationship with the politically conservative, aspiring politician brought the young woman back into the family fold — and seemed to change her political orientation.
“It’s a total 180,” Mr. Greenberg said. “Her change could not be more extreme.”
God and the Senate
Mr. Santorum often says that before he and Mrs. Santorum married in 1990, they had long talks about the life they wanted to build: a large family and a relationship with God. One former aide likened them to “two halves of a circle coming together.”
Mr. Santorum’s religious beliefs would come to infuse every aspect of his political life — not just his views on social issues like abortion, but also his work to overhaul the welfare system, increase financing to fight AIDS in Africa and promote religious freedom. “He is passionate about all of these issues, which all come from a deep faith,” said Mike DeWine, the Ohio attorney general, who served with Mr. Santorum in the Senate.
But at the outset of his career, Mr. Santorum was not particularly guided by the tenets of the church. A former law school classmate, Charlene Bashore, recalls him saying when he ran for the House of Representatives in 1990 that while he opposed abortion, “he didn’t see himself as a leader in the cause.”
Mr. Santorum was elected to the United States Senate in 1994. He likes to say he found God there.
In the speech to the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation last October, he described himself as having arrived “almost exhausted, just having poured it all out to get where I thought I wanted to go.” Faith, he said, “was sort of a part of me; I went to church, I could check all the boxes, but it wasn’t at the center of my life.”
His more spiritual path, he said, was prompted in part by a hallway encounter with Don Nickles, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma, who urged Mr. Santorum to attend a Bible study with fellow senators. And the Santorums moved to Northern Virginia, where they ultimately found a spiritual home at St. Catherine of Siena.
“We ended up moving into a neighborhood and joining a parish where the priest was just amazing — an absolutely amazing pastor who just energized us and filled us with the Holy Spirit,” Mr. Santorum told the anti-abortion group. “Over the course of that time, I just saw changes in me and changes in Karen.”
The loss of the Santorums’ son Gabriel, in 1996 — just as the senator was leading the fight in Congress to ban the procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion — was devastating for the couple. Mrs. Santorum was nearly 20 weeks pregnant; doctors discovered a fetal anomaly. After a risky operation, she developed an infection and took antibiotics, which the couple knew would result in the birth of a baby who would not survive.
Critics likened it to an abortion, but in a 1997 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Santorum said that was not the case. Mr. Schoeneman, the couple’s friend, said the death convinced them that “God had a purpose in Gabriel’s life, and they were going to live out that purpose in their lives.” Both Santorums began speaking out more strongly against abortion; Mrs. Santorum became prominent in her own right after publishing a 1998 book, “Letters to Gabriel.”
In the Senate, Mr. Santorum started a prayer group and would go on to help convert a fellow senator, Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas, to Catholicism.
After Mr. Santorum’s re-election in 2000, the family traveled to Rome, where they had a private audience with Pope John Paul II.
“He said to the pope, ‘Father, you’re a great man,’ ” Mr. Schoeneman said, recounting the session as Mr. Santorum told it to him. “And the pope turned to him, because Rick at this point had all six children sitting there, and he said, ‘No, you’re a great man.’
“And it was like a message from God,” Mr. Schoeneman said, “that he was living his life in the right way, that his path was correct.”
‘For the Sake of Our Souls’
Mr. Santorum made another trip to Rome in 2002, this time to speak at a centenary celebration of the birth of Saint Josemaría Escrivá [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josemar%C3%ADa_Escriv%C3%A1 ], the founder of Opus Dei [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_Dei ]. In a little-noticed interview there with The National Catholic Reporter, he said John F. Kennedy had caused “much harm to America” with his 1960 speech calling for strict separation of church and state.
That remark foreshadowed the candidate’s recent comment — he said the Kennedy speech “makes me throw up” — that set off a controversy and made some Catholics wince. It grew out of Mr. Santorum’s view that libertine culture has put America and American Catholics on a path toward moral decline.
In a 2002 essay, Mr. Santorum wrote that too many Catholics had been exposed to “uninspired, watered-down versions of our faith” and that it was time for more committed Catholics to reclaim religious institutions, like colleges, schools and hospitals, “for the sake of our souls.”
He also blamed liberal culture for the sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests. “When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected,” he wrote.
Mr. Santorum has been a supporter of Regnum Christi, the lay wing of a conservative, cultish order of priests known as the Legion of Christ. In 2003, he was the keynote speaker at a Regnum Christi event in Chicago that drew protesters because the group’s charismatic founder, who had spent years denying that he had sexually abused seminarians, was scheduled to share the podium.
The founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, did not show up, but critics faulted Mr. Santorum for agreeing to appear at the group’s forum. “He was certainly lending them legitimacy,” said Jason Berry, a documentary filmmaker and the author of a book about Father Maciel.
Many Catholics take issue with Mr. Santorum’s approach to their faith. Mr. Santorum, polls show, has lost the Catholic vote in every primary contest so far, some by wide margins.
Garry Wills, a cultural historian and professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is among many Catholics whose touchstone is the Second Vatican Council from 1962-65, which opened up Catholicism to the modern era and proclaimed that the church is its people, not just the pope and his bishops.
“Santorum is not a Catholic, but a papist,” Mr. Wills said in an e-mail.
Mr. Santorum’s defenders say there is nothing troubling about his approach to faith and politics. “What he is saying is something very simple: I should not shed my moral beliefs when I walk in the Oval Office,” said Mr. DeWine, who is also Catholic.
To listen to Mr. Santorum speak to an audience of the faithful is to hear a man for whom God is at the center of everything. In his talk to the anti-abortion group last October, as his presidential campaign was just beginning to heat up, he likened himself to his special-needs daughter, Bella — a child capable, he said, of nothing but love.
“I think, ‘That’s me with the Father,’ ” Mr. Santorum said then. “I am profoundly disabled in his eyes. I can do nothing for Him, except love Him.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Great Falls, Va., and Laurie Goodstein from New York.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/politics/from-nominal-catholic-to-clarion-of-faith.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/politics/from-nominal-catholic-to-clarion-of-faith.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Leaps of Faith
By MOLLY WORTHEN
March 1, 2012, 10:23 pm
For the past three and a half years, Republicans have struggled to explain a great conundrum. If they are the party of authentic America with a mystical connection to the will of the people, then how, exactly, did Barack Obama get elected president?
Some Republicans have come up with an answer that allows them to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of their own party’s failures: Obama must be a great deceiver. He won the White House by subterfuge.
Claims that Obama concealed nonnative birth or faith in Islam failed to gain mainstream traction, but conservatives like Sean Hannity [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229428/turning-obama-tide/sean-hannity ] were more successful in labeling Obama as covertly “anti-American” based on his association with the incendiary pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By this logic, Obama was a paragon of Christian piety. He “savored [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225971/wright-101/stanley-kurtz ]” every word on Sunday mornings and would surely govern by these traitorous principles: his beliefs were dangerous because, well, he really believed them.
Now his critics have reversed course: they say Obama is a sham Christian. He thinks religion is not heartfelt belief that demands full expression, but only a matter of showing up at church. He is not the first president to stand so accused: in the election of 1800, one clergyman charged Thomas Jefferson with “disbelief of the Holy Scriptures,” and Abraham Lincoln battled the suggestion that he was a “scoffer of Christianity.”
But Obama’s opponents have a new twist on this old allegation. They find evidence for his unbelief not by exposing his biblical illiteracy or shoddy church attendance, but in his failure to support “religious freedom.”
Religious freedom is as American as apple pie, isn’t it? How could anyone oppose it? Because — this line of reasoning goes — Obama is not who he says he is. He claims to be a true Christian and a true American, but his actions prove otherwise.
The charge that the president is a faker on religious freedom is the most recent iteration of the ongoing attack on his legitimacy: it is the new “birther” movement. It’s also a decades-old rhetorical tool of the culture wars intended to depict the entire left as frauds who supposedly stand for a tolerant open society, but who are in fact disciples of a secular pseudo-religion intent on quashing Christian influence in America.
The Rev. Franklin Graham, who has always been more provocative than his prudent father Billy, told MSNBC last week [ http://mojoe.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/21/10466963-graham-santorum-gingrich-christians-you-have-to-ask-obama-if-he-is ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08P_ECzaNgA (the video just below)]that the president lacks sufficient outrage over the plight of persecuted Christians. “Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama,” Graham said, adding that the Muslim world sees Obama as “a son of Islam” who will not challenge religious oppression. “The Muslims of the world — he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries – that’s what bothers me.” (Graham offered a half-apology [ http://www.religionnews.com/politics/election/black-churches-defend-obamas-faith ] on Tuesday, saying he regretted any comments that “cast any doubt on the personal faith of our president.”)
Last week, at a rally at a Christian college in Michigan, Rick Santorum called the president [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-santorum-religious-rhetoric-michigan-primary-20120220,0,1104628.story ] “particularly weak” on religious freedom. He insisted that “freedom of religion” is much more than “freedom of worship” confined within a church’s four walls, which even “tyrants” support. “When you have the president of the United States referring to freedom of religion and you have the secretary of state referring to the freedom of religion, not as the freedom of religion but the freedom of worship, you should get very, very nervous,” he warned [id.].
When conservatives cry “freedom of religion” and insist they mean something more than “freedom of worship,” this is what they mean: religious freedom is not just the freedom to gather in a room and pray one morning a week. It is the freedom to impose one’s own religious values on others. Free expression of religion entails the right to reason from religious principles in the public square and — with sufficient electoral support — to enshrine those principles in law and social institutions. If Obama does not support this view, they argue, then he is hardly a true American.
Over the course of American history, “religious freedom” has been a shape-shifter invoked just as often in the name of prejudice (in 19th-century Protestant campaigns [ http://www.blaineamendments.org/ ] against Catholic schools; in fundamentalist colleges’ racial discrimination [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0461_0574_ZS.html ] a hundred years later) as on behalf of liberty. It is a code phrase alternately benign and sinister, much like that other clever cloak for bigotry, “states’ rights.” In the context of the 2012 race, the charge that Obama subverts religious freedom is a code meant to label the president as an impostor, a blasphemer of the American gospel who adheres to another religion entirely.
Santorum has hit this theme the hardest, warning that conservative Christians must not be fooled by the president’s efforts to play the neutral statesman who treats all believers equally. On the contrary, he obeys a false religion with nonnegotiable assumptions of its own. Santorum described Obama’s environmentalism [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505267_162-57381228/santorum-remark-on-obama-theology-draws-ire/ ] as a “phony theology” and a “worldview.”
This is an attempt to paint as irrationally ideological a president who has proven himself to be not very ideological at all (much to the frustration of his supporters on the left). It is a culture warrior’s maneuver to cast American politics as a Manichean battleground between two worldviews — red-blooded Christian America pitted against the secularist stranger — worldviews so captive to their own logic that they cannot possibly compromise on anything.
This obsession with “worldviews” has been a favorite tactic of the Christian right. In the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer and other activists taught evangelicals to organize against the “secular humanist worldview” that was denaturing America’s Christian values in an acid bath of “humanist religion,” “an exclusivist, closed system which shuts out all contending viewpoints” (that’s the “phony theology” that Santorum was talking about).
Schaeffer’s admirers often note that he defends religious freedom in his 1981 book, “A Christian Manifesto [ http://books.google.ca/books?id=FNIboW-rZTwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false ].” But after Schaeffer called for “general religious freedom” for all faiths, he went on to lament the left’s manipulation of the First Amendment to encourage a “new concept of pluralism” in which “there is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference.”
To recover America’s biblical foundation, Christians had to “do battle on the entire front:” not just in church, but in the courts, classrooms, outside abortion clinics and everywhere else, Schaeffer wrote. The emerging Christian right asserted that this was the true meaning of “religious freedom” in America: freedom to institutionalize Christian dogma in American society and law. Freedom of religion — a phrase that sounds at first blush like a bipartisan nod to our common political heritage — is a weapon of culture war.
Slogans like this have political power. Voters on both the right and the left have little sympathy for politicians who reason through problems and recognize ambiguity (conservatives won’t forgive Romney for his honest struggles [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_conversion/2012/02/mitt_romney_s_abortion_record_flip_flop_or_conversion_.single.html ] with the abortion issue, and Obama faces liberal wrath for his nuanced approach to economic recovery). Wonkish debates are boring and complicated, and not very good for separating the sheep from the goats [ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A31-46&version=NIV ]. What matters are your “presuppositions,” your “worldview.”
Conservatives’ accusations that Obama disrespects religious freedom have little to do with the White House’s actual policy: his administration has a strong track record in supporting faith-based organizations and ensuring that prisoners have access to religious literature, for example. They have everything to do with resurrecting old challenges to the president’s legitimacy and framing the 2012 campaign as a battle between honest Christian Americans and atheist subversives. “Enemy of religious freedom” is shorthand for a deceiver who is not one of us: in Gingrich’s words [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa/ ], one who “played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
Molly Worthen teaches religious history at the University of Toronto.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/leaps-of-faith/ [with comments]
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Santorum's Strange Interpretation of the Founders' 'Pursuit of Happiness'
The former Pennsylvania senator thinks the Declaration of Independence gives us the right only to seek pleasure insofar as we do God's will.
Conor Friedersdorf
Feb 29 2012, 5:12 PM ET
Rick Santorum is continuing to invoke the Declaration of Independence as if its words imply that his brand of social conservatism is enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. In doing so, he has gradually revealed his unusual interpretation of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness."
Here's how he sees it [ http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2012/02/19/rick-santorum-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/ ]:
"Happiness" actually had a different definition, way back at the time of our founders. Like many words in our lexicon, they evolve and change over time. "Happiness" was one of them. Go back and look it up. You'll see one of the principle definitions of happiness is "to do the morally right thing." God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. That's what the moral foundation of our country is.
[...]
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/santorums-strange-interpretation-of-the-founders-pursuit-of-happiness/253753/ [with comments]
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Santorum, Gingrich target Obama at GOP dinner in Ohio
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum speaks at the Ohio 5th Congressional District Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, March 3, ahead of voting on Super Tuesday.
(Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images / March 3, 2012)
By Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 3, 2012, 7:15 p.m.
Bowling Green, Ohio— Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich courted GOP activists at a party dinner Saturday night, each painting a dire picture of America's straits, arguing that the nation's very soul is at stake in this upcoming election and saying that they were the candidate best suited to take on President Obama.
Santorum, who delivered a fiery speech about the nation's heritage, clearly received the warmer reaction, with the hundreds of GOP voters gathered in a university student union leaping to their feet four times during his speech to give him a standing ovation.
He said that the United States is better than all other nations because it was founded on the premise that each person is granted rights not by the government but by God.
"We declared the truth, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Unalienable -- you can't take them away. They were given to you because you were created by God and each one has dignity and value," Santorum said. "?Where does that concept come from? Does it come from Islam? Does it come from other cultures around the world? Are men and women treated equally? Are adults and children treated equally? No. It comes from our culture and tradition -- the Judeo-Christian ethic, that is where this comes from, this sense of equality."
But Americans' rights and liberty are doomed if Obama's healthcare law goes into effect, he said.
"The siren song of government taking care of us will finally have our ship crash on the rocks, and we will become dependent if Obamacare is implemented," he said. "Every single American will have to look to the federal government for their health. Once that happens, game, set, match for freedom."
While he did not mention his main rival Mitt Romney by name, he alluded to him for supporting the Wall Street bailout, believing in global warming and taking other stances that are controversial among GOP primary voters, and for pummeling him with attack ads and for changing his positions over time.
"I am not someone when the climate changes, I change," he said.
Gingrich argued that Obama's worldview is destroying the nation and that if he were reelected, he would be emboldened to go even further. "Every evidence we have in the real world is that Barack Obama's left-wing view doesn't work, is based on fantasy, is expensive to the American people and is easy to take apart," he said.
Gingrich focused his remarks on energy, arguing that the left wants energy to be expensive so Americans use less of it, and that if Obama and Democrats allowed greater domestic production, many of the nation's problems would end.
"As a matter of national security, we should have as our goal to be energy independent so that no future president bows to a Saudi king," he said. "And in the process of becoming energy independent, we would actually end up putting millions of people to work, we would lower the cost of living, lower the cost of doing business, which would put more people to work." He said Obama could take three simple actions to tap millions of barrels of per day: approving the Keystone pipeline from Canada, approving offshore productions off Louisiana and Texas, and tapping Alaskan oil fields. "The president says, 'The Republicans will tell you drill, drill, drill,' " Gingrich said. "First of all, I want to reassure the president, we should drill, drill, drill." He mocked the president for suggesting that some of the United States' energy problems would be solved with biofuels made from algae. "Americans get to decide: Would you like $10 a gallon and algae or would you like $2.50 a gallon and drilling?" he said.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-santorum-gingrich-saturday-speeches-20120303,0,3404424.story [with comments]
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'Et tu Brute?' The Blunt Amendment: Why did these 'Catholic' Senators betray us?
'Et tu Brute?' Why have our Catholic senators betrayed us?
13 Catholic senators voted against an amendment that would have protected religious freedom and women's health.
By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
3/2/2012
Catholic Online
( http://www.catholic.org )
"Et tu Brute?"
The Senate, including 13 professed Roman Catholic senators, has voted down the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, leaving fellow Catholics in an unethical and unconstitutional position where they are compelled to violate their conscience under threat of law.
WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - The final tally was 51-48, a narrow defeat for religious liberty - and one that could have been swayed to the affirmative by the votes of the Catholic senators who had the responsibility of casting the decisive votes.
The amendment, also called the "Blunt Amendment," was tacked onto existing legislation and would have allowed any US employer, not just those affiliated with religious organizations, to not violate their conscience or deeply held moral or religious convictions when providing health coverage to employees under Federal Law. Specifically, the plan would have allowed employers to opt out of paying for the provision of sterilization,contraception and abortion inducing drugs.
The amendment is a response to the Obama administration's healthcare edict that requires all organizations to pay for 100 percent free contraception, sterilization and abortion inducing drugs for women, regardless of their religious or moral convictions. Failure to do so would bring punitive measures.
House Speaker John Boehner promised the fight would continue. "I think it's important to win this issue," Boehner affirmed. "The government, our government, for 220 years has respected the religious views of the American people, and for all of this time there's been an exception for those churches and other groups to protect the religious beliefs that they believe in, and that's being violated here."
Generally, Republicans and Democrats divided along party lines on the issue with Republican leadership understanding this issue as a question of fundamental human rights, specifically religious freedom and freedom of conscience - as codified in the first amendment. Some Democrats did rise to the occasion to defend religious liberty. However, most Democrats are labeling the issue as a matter of "women's health" despite the fact that contraception and abortion are clearly proven to be dangerous to women and deadly to unborn children - the antithesis of health.
If there is any silver lining to this issue, it is that people of all faiths as well as all genuine proponents of real women's health and concern for rights have unified under the banner of respecting religious freedom. This broad and growing coalition opposes the blatantly unconstitutional edict that threatens to force Americans, for the first time in history, to actively violate their moral conscience as a matter of law.
Unfortunately, Catholics and those who support religious freedom have been betrayed by those in the Senate who adore their political party more than the freedom and well-being of all Americans.
Here is the full list of Catholic Senators and how they voted on the amendment.
- Senator Mark Begich (Alaska, D) - Opposed
- Senator Lisa Murkowski (Alaska, R) - Supported
- Senator Marco Rubio (Florida, R) - Supported
- Senator Tom Harkin (Iowa, D) - Opposed
- Senator James Risch (Idaho, R) - Supported
- Senator Richard Durbin (Illinois, D) - Opposed
- Senator Mary Landrieu (Louisiana, D) - Opposed
- Senator David Vitter (Louisiana, R) - Supported
- Senator John Kerry (Massachusetts, D) - Opposed
- Senator Barbara Mikulski (Maryland, D) - Opposed
- Senator Susan Collins (Maine, R) - Supported
- Senator Claire McCaskill (Missouri, D) - Opposed
- Senator John Hoeven (North Dakota, R) - Supported
- Senator Mike Johanns (Nebraska, R) - Supported
- Senator Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire, R) - Supported
- Senator Robert Menendez (New Jersey, D) - Opposed
- Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (New York, D) - Opposed
- Senator Bob Casey Jr. (Pennsylvania, D) - Supported
- Senator Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania, R) - Supported
- Senator Jack Reed (Rhode Island, D) - Opposed
- Senator Pat Leahy (Vermont, D) - Opposed
- Senator Maria Cantwell (Washington, D) - Opposed
- Senator Patty Murray (Washington, D) - Opposed
- Senator Joe Manchin III (West Virginia, D) - Supported
© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.
http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=45018 [with comments]
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Cardinal Dolan Urges 'Freedom Of Religion Battle'
ETAssociated Press
03/ 3/12 07:53 PM
HICKSVILLE, N.Y. -- Cardinal Timothy Dolan called on Roman Catholic worshippers Saturday to become more involved in politics as the church stands against the government in what he called a "freedom of religion battle," as he spoke about the recent controversy involving contraceptive coverage.
Speaking at Holy Trinity Diocesan High School in Hicksville, the spiritual leader of the Archdiocese of New York said the U.S. government is engaged in "an unwarranted, unprecedented radical intrusion." He told the crowd they "live in an era that seems to discover new rights every day."
"We're not trying to impose our teachings on anybody," said Dolan in his 45-minute speech to a packed auditorium of about 1,000 people. "We're simply saying, don't impose your teaching upon us and make us do as a church what we find unconscionable to do."
Some religious organizations protested when President Barack Obama moved to mandate that religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities include free birth control coverage in their employee health plans.
Obama later said religious employers could opt out, but insurers must pay for the coverage.
Proponents say the plan is a breakthrough for women's rights, but Dolan and other leaders say it violates religious freedom.
Dolan, who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters after the speech that they are in discussion with legal experts and constitutional scholars to determine whether legal action is necessary.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/03/nys-cardinal-urges-freedo_n_1318984.html [with comments]
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JFK campaigns for president with Jackie in 1960 when, Michael Wolraich says, evangelicals feared he was the pope's agent.
By Michael Wolraich, Special to CNN
updated 9:15 AM EST, Thu March 1, 2012
Editor's note: Michael Wolraich is a founder of the political blog dagblog.com [ http://dagblog.com/ ] and the author of "Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual [ http://dagblog.com/blowing-smoke ]."
(CNN) -- Sen. Rick Santorum, who is campaigning to become America's second Catholic president, disagrees from the bottom of his gut with the first Catholic to hold the office.
In October, he told a Catholic university audience that when he read the 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he "almost threw up." More recently, he elaborated on his dyspeptic condition in an ABC television interview, calling JFK's credo "an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960."
But the Baptist ministers who witnessed Kennedy's speech surely felt differently. In the 1960s, evangelical leaders were not concerned that Kennedy was too secular; they were concerned that he was too Catholic.
For most of American history, the Protestant majority has regarded Catholics with deep suspicion. Many of the 13 colonies banned Catholics from public office and prohibited Catholic rituals. Priests were banished and sometimes executed.
After independence, the Constitution protected Catholics from the worst persecutions of the Colonial period, but discrimination persisted, and anti-Catholic paranoia raged with an intensity that would have made Glenn Beck blush. One popular book, "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States," warned of a secret Jesuit plot to deliver America to the Austrian empire. Its author was Samuel Morse, co-inventor of the telegraph.
Such fears diminished as Catholic immigrants assimilated in the 20th century, but many Protestants remained hostile toward Catholic politicians. During JFK's presidential campaign, the Department of Justice documented 144 producers of anti-Catholic campaign literature. The pamphlets warned of Vatican influence over American policy and the prospect of state-funded Catholic schools. Most of the opposition came from evangelical groups like the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention.
In the face of unrelenting hostility, Kennedy decided to address concerns about his religion directly. Speaking to a group of Baptist ministers in Houston, he reassured them:
"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."
Perhaps Rick Santorum's father, an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in 1930, heard these words and understood the prejudice that JFK struggled against. But Rick Santorum was only 2 years old when they were spoken. If he has any memory of Catholics' difficult history in this country, he does not publicize it. Nor do other Catholic champions of the religious right in their determination to wash away the old hostilities that divided American Christianity.
Evangelicals and Catholics began collaborating politically in the late 1970s. The architect behind their reconciliation was a political strategist named Paul Weyrich. Frustrated by the Republican Party's preoccupation with business interests, Weyrich sought to reorient the party toward religious and cultural issues [ http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1016 ]. To this end, he founded the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the Moral Majority, the first organization to represent what we now call the religious right.
Weyrich, a Melkite Greek Catholic, knew that a Catholic leader would not appeal to evangelicals, so he tried to recruit televangelist Pat Robertson to lead his cause. When Robertson turned him down, Weyrich enlisted the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Falwell would later say that Catholics and evangelicals found common ground in their opposition to abortion, but Weyrich remembered it somewhat differently. He had tried to mobilize evangelicals over abortion and failed. Most Protestants regarded abortion as a "Catholic issue," and many prominent Baptist leaders had even endorsed the Roe v. Wade decision.
What actually brought Catholics and evangelicals together was a common enemy. This imaginary enemy has gone by many names. In the 1970s and '80s, it was known as "secular humanism," a fiendish anti-religious movement that had supposedly taken over the schools, the courts, the media and the government.
In the 1990s, it was called "political correctness," and rampaged through the universities. When Bill O'Reilly of Fox News announced that Christmas was under siege in 2004, he blamed "secular progressives" in the media. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum decries "cultural liberalism [ http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=30 ]" and warns that the government is trying to destroy religious freedom by forcing Catholic organizations to insure birth control.
Regardless of the name, the supposed enemy's goals remain the same: to eradicate Christianity from the public sphere and replace traditional Judeo-Christian values with a liberal agenda. Its agents are progressive politicians, journalists, professors and nonprofit organizations. Its creed is the separation of church and state that JFK once appealed to in his campaign to become the first Catholic president.
The construction of such a villain has been devastatingly effective in uniting the religious right. The same evangelical groups that once attacked JFK as an agent of the pope have become the foundation of Santorum's support in the Republic primary, and his only rival for their vote is fellow Catholic Newt Gingrich. Times have changed.
But should Santorum and his conservative Catholic allies succeed in breaking down the barriers between state and religion, they may reap a bitter fruit. For without the secular menace to distract Protestants from their doctrinal differences with Catholics, the old enmities may rise again. And just as religious right leaders seldom extend their demands for religious freedom to Muslims and other non-Christian religions, Catholics might one day find the freedoms that they have come to take for granted are no longer assured.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Michael Wolraich.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/opinion/wolraich-catholics-protestants/index.html [with comments]
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From ‘Nominal Catholic’ to Clarion of Faith
Rick Santorum at a forum for pastors last month in Texas.
Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
Mr. Santorum with his wife, Karen, and their family while announcing his bid for president last June in Pennsylvania.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
The family church in Virginia.
Luke sharrett for The New York Times
Mr. Santorum speaking at a church service in Florida in January.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 3, 2012
GREAT FALLS, Va. — Rick Santorum [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/rick-santorum ] was, in his own words, a “nominal Catholic” when he met Karen Garver, a neonatal nurse and law student, in 1988. As they made plans to marry and he decided to enter politics, she sent him to her father for advice.
Dr. Kenneth L. Garver was a Pittsburgh pediatrician who specialized in medical genetics. The patriarch of a large Roman Catholic family, he had treated patients considering abortion but was strongly opposed to it.
“We sat across the table and the whole evening we talked about this issue,” Mr. Santorum told an anti-abortion group last October. He left, he said, convinced “that there was only one place to be, from the standpoint of science as well as from the standpoint of faith.”
For Mr. Santorum, a Republican candidate for president, that conversation was an early step on a path into a deeply conservative Catholic culture that has profoundly influenced his life as a husband, father and politician. Over the past two decades, he has undergone a religious transformation that is now spurring a national conversation about faith in the public sphere.
On the campaign trail, he has attacked President Obama for “phony theology,” warned of the “dangers of contraceptives” and rejected John F. Kennedy’s call for strict separation of church and state. His bold expressions of faith could affect his support in this week’s Super Tuesday nominating contests, possibly helping with conservative Christians, especially in the South, but scaring off voters uncomfortable mixing so much religion in politics.
Central to Mr. Santorum’s spiritual life is his wife, whom he calls “the rock which I stand upon.” Before marrying, the couple decided to recommit themselves to their Catholic faith — a turnabout for Karen Santorum, who had been romantically involved with a well-known abortion provider in Pittsburgh and had openly supported abortion rights, according to several people who knew her then.
The Santorums went on to have eight children, including a son who died two hours after birth in 1996 and a daughter, now 3, who has a life-threatening genetic disorder. Unlike Catholics who believe that church doctrine should adapt to changing times and needs, the Santorums believe in a highly traditional Catholicism that adheres fully to what scholars call “the teaching authority” of the pope and his bishops.
“He has a strong sense of that,” said George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where Mr. Santorum had a fellowship after losing his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2006. “He’s the first national figure of some significance who’s on that side of the Catholic conversation.”
The Santorums’ beliefs are reflected in a succession of lifestyle decisions, including eschewing birth control, home schooling [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/home_schooling/index.html ] their younger children and sending the older boys to a private academy affiliated with Opus Dei, an influential Catholic movement that emphasizes spiritual holiness.
As members of St. Catherine of Siena, a parish here in the wealthy Northern Virginia suburb of Great Falls, the Santorums are immersed in a community where large families are not uncommon and many mothers leave behind careers to dedicate themselves to child-rearing, as Mrs. Santorum has. Mr. Santorum has been on the church roster as a lector, reading Scripture from the pulpit.
The parish is known for its Washington luminaries — Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court is a member — as well as its spiritual ardor. Mass is offered in Latin every Sunday at noon — most parishes have Mass only in English — and each Wednesday parishioners take turns praying nonstop for 24 hours before a consecrated communion wafer, a demanding practice known as Eucharistic adoration.
The Santorum campaign did not respond to interview requests about the couple’s beliefs, and their pastors declined to comment. But friends say Mr. Santorum believes he is in a “moment of testing” and feels “a calling to be faithful,” regardless of whether he wins the nomination. One friend, Frank Schoeneman, sees Mr. Santorum as carrying out a vow he made to live a life that would make Gabriel, the child he lost, proud.
“Rick found himself in his faith, and he found himself in Karen,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has known Mr. Santorum for more than 20 years. “He isn’t like one of these born-again people where you get hit in the head by some televangelist and you suddenly see the light. It’s been an evolution. He’s always been a Catholic and he’s always been faithful, but he’s never been at this level of faith.”
The Family Fold
Church on Sunday was a way of life in Butler, the western Pennsylvania town where Mr. Santorum grew up. But by the time he met his future wife, sports and politics were at the center of his world. He was working in Pittsburgh at the prestigious Kirkpatrick & Lockhart law firm and recruited Ms. Garver, then a University of Pittsburgh law student, for a summer internship.
Fair-skinned and auburn-haired, she was from a Pittsburgh family of 11 children, some of whom followed their father’s path into medicine. Dr. Garver was well known in Pittsburgh for a practice that included prenatal testing.
But Ms. Garver, those who knew her say, had broken with her family and her Catholic faith over her relationship with Dr. Tom Allen, who founded Pittsburgh’s first abortion clinic. The two became a couple in 1982, when Ms. Garver was a nursing student in her 20s and Dr. Allen was in his 60s. An obstetrician-gynecologist, he had delivered her and knew her father professionally.
In an interview, Dr. Allen, now 92, said that Ms. Garver rented the basement apartment in the building where he lived and worked, and that they soon became romantically involved. (The Philadelphia City Paper reported on the relationship in 2005.)
“He was a pillar of the liberal community in Pittsburgh, well known for his charitable work, for the arts, and also very well known for his wine collection,” said John M. Burkoff, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who knew the couple. While Dr. Allen was a strong personality, Mr. Burkoff said, Ms. Garver “was not in his shadow.”
She joined Dr. Allen in hosting fund-raisers for liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and for his clinic and expressed strong support for abortion rights, said Herbert Greenberg, a concert violinist and friend of Dr. Allen.
Mr. Greenberg’s wife, Mary, a mother of three, sought counseling from Dr. Allen on whether to terminate her fourth pregnancy for health reasons. Mrs. Greenberg said Ms. Garver offered to accompany her for an abortion.
“She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing,’ ” Mrs. Greenberg recalled, adding that she went alone for the procedure.
Ms. Garver and Dr. Allen spent six years together, but she left him when she met Mr. Santorum. Her relationship with the politically conservative, aspiring politician brought the young woman back into the family fold — and seemed to change her political orientation.
“It’s a total 180,” Mr. Greenberg said. “Her change could not be more extreme.”
God and the Senate
Mr. Santorum often says that before he and Mrs. Santorum married in 1990, they had long talks about the life they wanted to build: a large family and a relationship with God. One former aide likened them to “two halves of a circle coming together.”
Mr. Santorum’s religious beliefs would come to infuse every aspect of his political life — not just his views on social issues like abortion, but also his work to overhaul the welfare system, increase financing to fight AIDS in Africa and promote religious freedom. “He is passionate about all of these issues, which all come from a deep faith,” said Mike DeWine, the Ohio attorney general, who served with Mr. Santorum in the Senate.
But at the outset of his career, Mr. Santorum was not particularly guided by the tenets of the church. A former law school classmate, Charlene Bashore, recalls him saying when he ran for the House of Representatives in 1990 that while he opposed abortion, “he didn’t see himself as a leader in the cause.”
Mr. Santorum was elected to the United States Senate in 1994. He likes to say he found God there.
In the speech to the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation last October, he described himself as having arrived “almost exhausted, just having poured it all out to get where I thought I wanted to go.” Faith, he said, “was sort of a part of me; I went to church, I could check all the boxes, but it wasn’t at the center of my life.”
His more spiritual path, he said, was prompted in part by a hallway encounter with Don Nickles, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma, who urged Mr. Santorum to attend a Bible study with fellow senators. And the Santorums moved to Northern Virginia, where they ultimately found a spiritual home at St. Catherine of Siena.
“We ended up moving into a neighborhood and joining a parish where the priest was just amazing — an absolutely amazing pastor who just energized us and filled us with the Holy Spirit,” Mr. Santorum told the anti-abortion group. “Over the course of that time, I just saw changes in me and changes in Karen.”
The loss of the Santorums’ son Gabriel, in 1996 — just as the senator was leading the fight in Congress to ban the procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion — was devastating for the couple. Mrs. Santorum was nearly 20 weeks pregnant; doctors discovered a fetal anomaly. After a risky operation, she developed an infection and took antibiotics, which the couple knew would result in the birth of a baby who would not survive.
Critics likened it to an abortion, but in a 1997 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Santorum said that was not the case. Mr. Schoeneman, the couple’s friend, said the death convinced them that “God had a purpose in Gabriel’s life, and they were going to live out that purpose in their lives.” Both Santorums began speaking out more strongly against abortion; Mrs. Santorum became prominent in her own right after publishing a 1998 book, “Letters to Gabriel.”
In the Senate, Mr. Santorum started a prayer group and would go on to help convert a fellow senator, Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas, to Catholicism.
After Mr. Santorum’s re-election in 2000, the family traveled to Rome, where they had a private audience with Pope John Paul II.
“He said to the pope, ‘Father, you’re a great man,’ ” Mr. Schoeneman said, recounting the session as Mr. Santorum told it to him. “And the pope turned to him, because Rick at this point had all six children sitting there, and he said, ‘No, you’re a great man.’
“And it was like a message from God,” Mr. Schoeneman said, “that he was living his life in the right way, that his path was correct.”
‘For the Sake of Our Souls’
Mr. Santorum made another trip to Rome in 2002, this time to speak at a centenary celebration of the birth of Saint Josemaría Escrivá [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josemar%C3%ADa_Escriv%C3%A1 ], the founder of Opus Dei [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_Dei ]. In a little-noticed interview there with The National Catholic Reporter, he said John F. Kennedy had caused “much harm to America” with his 1960 speech calling for strict separation of church and state.
That remark foreshadowed the candidate’s recent comment — he said the Kennedy speech “makes me throw up” — that set off a controversy and made some Catholics wince. It grew out of Mr. Santorum’s view that libertine culture has put America and American Catholics on a path toward moral decline.
In a 2002 essay, Mr. Santorum wrote that too many Catholics had been exposed to “uninspired, watered-down versions of our faith” and that it was time for more committed Catholics to reclaim religious institutions, like colleges, schools and hospitals, “for the sake of our souls.”
He also blamed liberal culture for the sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests. “When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected,” he wrote.
Mr. Santorum has been a supporter of Regnum Christi, the lay wing of a conservative, cultish order of priests known as the Legion of Christ. In 2003, he was the keynote speaker at a Regnum Christi event in Chicago that drew protesters because the group’s charismatic founder, who had spent years denying that he had sexually abused seminarians, was scheduled to share the podium.
The founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, did not show up, but critics faulted Mr. Santorum for agreeing to appear at the group’s forum. “He was certainly lending them legitimacy,” said Jason Berry, a documentary filmmaker and the author of a book about Father Maciel.
Many Catholics take issue with Mr. Santorum’s approach to their faith. Mr. Santorum, polls show, has lost the Catholic vote in every primary contest so far, some by wide margins.
Garry Wills, a cultural historian and professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is among many Catholics whose touchstone is the Second Vatican Council from 1962-65, which opened up Catholicism to the modern era and proclaimed that the church is its people, not just the pope and his bishops.
“Santorum is not a Catholic, but a papist,” Mr. Wills said in an e-mail.
Mr. Santorum’s defenders say there is nothing troubling about his approach to faith and politics. “What he is saying is something very simple: I should not shed my moral beliefs when I walk in the Oval Office,” said Mr. DeWine, who is also Catholic.
To listen to Mr. Santorum speak to an audience of the faithful is to hear a man for whom God is at the center of everything. In his talk to the anti-abortion group last October, as his presidential campaign was just beginning to heat up, he likened himself to his special-needs daughter, Bella — a child capable, he said, of nothing but love.
“I think, ‘That’s me with the Father,’ ” Mr. Santorum said then. “I am profoundly disabled in his eyes. I can do nothing for Him, except love Him.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Great Falls, Va., and Laurie Goodstein from New York.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/politics/from-nominal-catholic-to-clarion-of-faith.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/politics/from-nominal-catholic-to-clarion-of-faith.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Leaps of Faith
By MOLLY WORTHEN
March 1, 2012, 10:23 pm
For the past three and a half years, Republicans have struggled to explain a great conundrum. If they are the party of authentic America with a mystical connection to the will of the people, then how, exactly, did Barack Obama get elected president?
Some Republicans have come up with an answer that allows them to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of their own party’s failures: Obama must be a great deceiver. He won the White House by subterfuge.
Claims that Obama concealed nonnative birth or faith in Islam failed to gain mainstream traction, but conservatives like Sean Hannity [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229428/turning-obama-tide/sean-hannity ] were more successful in labeling Obama as covertly “anti-American” based on his association with the incendiary pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By this logic, Obama was a paragon of Christian piety. He “savored [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225971/wright-101/stanley-kurtz ]” every word on Sunday mornings and would surely govern by these traitorous principles: his beliefs were dangerous because, well, he really believed them.
Now his critics have reversed course: they say Obama is a sham Christian. He thinks religion is not heartfelt belief that demands full expression, but only a matter of showing up at church. He is not the first president to stand so accused: in the election of 1800, one clergyman charged Thomas Jefferson with “disbelief of the Holy Scriptures,” and Abraham Lincoln battled the suggestion that he was a “scoffer of Christianity.”
But Obama’s opponents have a new twist on this old allegation. They find evidence for his unbelief not by exposing his biblical illiteracy or shoddy church attendance, but in his failure to support “religious freedom.”
Religious freedom is as American as apple pie, isn’t it? How could anyone oppose it? Because — this line of reasoning goes — Obama is not who he says he is. He claims to be a true Christian and a true American, but his actions prove otherwise.
The charge that the president is a faker on religious freedom is the most recent iteration of the ongoing attack on his legitimacy: it is the new “birther” movement. It’s also a decades-old rhetorical tool of the culture wars intended to depict the entire left as frauds who supposedly stand for a tolerant open society, but who are in fact disciples of a secular pseudo-religion intent on quashing Christian influence in America.
The Rev. Franklin Graham, who has always been more provocative than his prudent father Billy, told MSNBC last week [ http://mojoe.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/21/10466963-graham-santorum-gingrich-christians-you-have-to-ask-obama-if-he-is ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08P_ECzaNgA (the video just below)]that the president lacks sufficient outrage over the plight of persecuted Christians. “Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama,” Graham said, adding that the Muslim world sees Obama as “a son of Islam” who will not challenge religious oppression. “The Muslims of the world — he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries – that’s what bothers me.” (Graham offered a half-apology [ http://www.religionnews.com/politics/election/black-churches-defend-obamas-faith ] on Tuesday, saying he regretted any comments that “cast any doubt on the personal faith of our president.”)
During the recent outcry over the Obama administration’s new rule requiring religious employers to cover birth control in their insurance plans, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney blasted [ http://www.christianpost.com/news/candidates-pound-obama-on-religious-freedom-in-gop-debate-70093/ ] the president too: here was proof of Obama’s aim to oppress religious expression and trample constitutional rights.
Last week, at a rally at a Christian college in Michigan, Rick Santorum called the president [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-santorum-religious-rhetoric-michigan-primary-20120220,0,1104628.story ] “particularly weak” on religious freedom. He insisted that “freedom of religion” is much more than “freedom of worship” confined within a church’s four walls, which even “tyrants” support. “When you have the president of the United States referring to freedom of religion and you have the secretary of state referring to the freedom of religion, not as the freedom of religion but the freedom of worship, you should get very, very nervous,” he warned [id.].
When conservatives cry “freedom of religion” and insist they mean something more than “freedom of worship,” this is what they mean: religious freedom is not just the freedom to gather in a room and pray one morning a week. It is the freedom to impose one’s own religious values on others. Free expression of religion entails the right to reason from religious principles in the public square and — with sufficient electoral support — to enshrine those principles in law and social institutions. If Obama does not support this view, they argue, then he is hardly a true American.
Over the course of American history, “religious freedom” has been a shape-shifter invoked just as often in the name of prejudice (in 19th-century Protestant campaigns [ http://www.blaineamendments.org/ ] against Catholic schools; in fundamentalist colleges’ racial discrimination [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0461_0574_ZS.html ] a hundred years later) as on behalf of liberty. It is a code phrase alternately benign and sinister, much like that other clever cloak for bigotry, “states’ rights.” In the context of the 2012 race, the charge that Obama subverts religious freedom is a code meant to label the president as an impostor, a blasphemer of the American gospel who adheres to another religion entirely.
Santorum has hit this theme the hardest, warning that conservative Christians must not be fooled by the president’s efforts to play the neutral statesman who treats all believers equally. On the contrary, he obeys a false religion with nonnegotiable assumptions of its own. Santorum described Obama’s environmentalism [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505267_162-57381228/santorum-remark-on-obama-theology-draws-ire/ ] as a “phony theology” and a “worldview.”
This is an attempt to paint as irrationally ideological a president who has proven himself to be not very ideological at all (much to the frustration of his supporters on the left). It is a culture warrior’s maneuver to cast American politics as a Manichean battleground between two worldviews — red-blooded Christian America pitted against the secularist stranger — worldviews so captive to their own logic that they cannot possibly compromise on anything.
This obsession with “worldviews” has been a favorite tactic of the Christian right. In the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer and other activists taught evangelicals to organize against the “secular humanist worldview” that was denaturing America’s Christian values in an acid bath of “humanist religion,” “an exclusivist, closed system which shuts out all contending viewpoints” (that’s the “phony theology” that Santorum was talking about).
Schaeffer’s admirers often note that he defends religious freedom in his 1981 book, “A Christian Manifesto [ http://books.google.ca/books?id=FNIboW-rZTwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false ].” But after Schaeffer called for “general religious freedom” for all faiths, he went on to lament the left’s manipulation of the First Amendment to encourage a “new concept of pluralism” in which “there is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference.”
To recover America’s biblical foundation, Christians had to “do battle on the entire front:” not just in church, but in the courts, classrooms, outside abortion clinics and everywhere else, Schaeffer wrote. The emerging Christian right asserted that this was the true meaning of “religious freedom” in America: freedom to institutionalize Christian dogma in American society and law. Freedom of religion — a phrase that sounds at first blush like a bipartisan nod to our common political heritage — is a weapon of culture war.
Slogans like this have political power. Voters on both the right and the left have little sympathy for politicians who reason through problems and recognize ambiguity (conservatives won’t forgive Romney for his honest struggles [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_conversion/2012/02/mitt_romney_s_abortion_record_flip_flop_or_conversion_.single.html ] with the abortion issue, and Obama faces liberal wrath for his nuanced approach to economic recovery). Wonkish debates are boring and complicated, and not very good for separating the sheep from the goats [ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A31-46&version=NIV ]. What matters are your “presuppositions,” your “worldview.”
Conservatives’ accusations that Obama disrespects religious freedom have little to do with the White House’s actual policy: his administration has a strong track record in supporting faith-based organizations and ensuring that prisoners have access to religious literature, for example. They have everything to do with resurrecting old challenges to the president’s legitimacy and framing the 2012 campaign as a battle between honest Christian Americans and atheist subversives. “Enemy of religious freedom” is shorthand for a deceiver who is not one of us: in Gingrich’s words [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa/ ], one who “played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
Molly Worthen teaches religious history at the University of Toronto.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/leaps-of-faith/ [with comments]
===
Santorum's Strange Interpretation of the Founders' 'Pursuit of Happiness'
The former Pennsylvania senator thinks the Declaration of Independence gives us the right only to seek pleasure insofar as we do God's will.
Conor Friedersdorf
Feb 29 2012, 5:12 PM ET
Rick Santorum is continuing to invoke the Declaration of Independence as if its words imply that his brand of social conservatism is enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. In doing so, he has gradually revealed his unusual interpretation of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness."
Here's how he sees it [ http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2012/02/19/rick-santorum-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/ ]:
"Happiness" actually had a different definition, way back at the time of our founders. Like many words in our lexicon, they evolve and change over time. "Happiness" was one of them. Go back and look it up. You'll see one of the principle definitions of happiness is "to do the morally right thing." God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. That's what the moral foundation of our country is.
[...]
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/santorums-strange-interpretation-of-the-founders-pursuit-of-happiness/253753/ [with comments]
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Santorum, Gingrich target Obama at GOP dinner in Ohio
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum speaks at the Ohio 5th Congressional District Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, March 3, ahead of voting on Super Tuesday.
(Jim Watson / AFP/Getty Images / March 3, 2012)
By Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 3, 2012, 7:15 p.m.
Bowling Green, Ohio— Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich courted GOP activists at a party dinner Saturday night, each painting a dire picture of America's straits, arguing that the nation's very soul is at stake in this upcoming election and saying that they were the candidate best suited to take on President Obama.
Santorum, who delivered a fiery speech about the nation's heritage, clearly received the warmer reaction, with the hundreds of GOP voters gathered in a university student union leaping to their feet four times during his speech to give him a standing ovation.
He said that the United States is better than all other nations because it was founded on the premise that each person is granted rights not by the government but by God.
"We declared the truth, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Unalienable -- you can't take them away. They were given to you because you were created by God and each one has dignity and value," Santorum said. "?Where does that concept come from? Does it come from Islam? Does it come from other cultures around the world? Are men and women treated equally? Are adults and children treated equally? No. It comes from our culture and tradition -- the Judeo-Christian ethic, that is where this comes from, this sense of equality."
But Americans' rights and liberty are doomed if Obama's healthcare law goes into effect, he said.
"The siren song of government taking care of us will finally have our ship crash on the rocks, and we will become dependent if Obamacare is implemented," he said. "Every single American will have to look to the federal government for their health. Once that happens, game, set, match for freedom."
While he did not mention his main rival Mitt Romney by name, he alluded to him for supporting the Wall Street bailout, believing in global warming and taking other stances that are controversial among GOP primary voters, and for pummeling him with attack ads and for changing his positions over time.
"I am not someone when the climate changes, I change," he said.
Gingrich argued that Obama's worldview is destroying the nation and that if he were reelected, he would be emboldened to go even further. "Every evidence we have in the real world is that Barack Obama's left-wing view doesn't work, is based on fantasy, is expensive to the American people and is easy to take apart," he said.
Gingrich focused his remarks on energy, arguing that the left wants energy to be expensive so Americans use less of it, and that if Obama and Democrats allowed greater domestic production, many of the nation's problems would end.
"As a matter of national security, we should have as our goal to be energy independent so that no future president bows to a Saudi king," he said. "And in the process of becoming energy independent, we would actually end up putting millions of people to work, we would lower the cost of living, lower the cost of doing business, which would put more people to work." He said Obama could take three simple actions to tap millions of barrels of per day: approving the Keystone pipeline from Canada, approving offshore productions off Louisiana and Texas, and tapping Alaskan oil fields. "The president says, 'The Republicans will tell you drill, drill, drill,' " Gingrich said. "First of all, I want to reassure the president, we should drill, drill, drill." He mocked the president for suggesting that some of the United States' energy problems would be solved with biofuels made from algae. "Americans get to decide: Would you like $10 a gallon and algae or would you like $2.50 a gallon and drilling?" he said.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-santorum-gingrich-saturday-speeches-20120303,0,3404424.story [with comments]
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'Et tu Brute?' The Blunt Amendment: Why did these 'Catholic' Senators betray us?
'Et tu Brute?' Why have our Catholic senators betrayed us?
13 Catholic senators voted against an amendment that would have protected religious freedom and women's health.
By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
3/2/2012
Catholic Online
( http://www.catholic.org )
"Et tu Brute?"
The Senate, including 13 professed Roman Catholic senators, has voted down the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, leaving fellow Catholics in an unethical and unconstitutional position where they are compelled to violate their conscience under threat of law.
WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - The final tally was 51-48, a narrow defeat for religious liberty - and one that could have been swayed to the affirmative by the votes of the Catholic senators who had the responsibility of casting the decisive votes.
The amendment, also called the "Blunt Amendment," was tacked onto existing legislation and would have allowed any US employer, not just those affiliated with religious organizations, to not violate their conscience or deeply held moral or religious convictions when providing health coverage to employees under Federal Law. Specifically, the plan would have allowed employers to opt out of paying for the provision of sterilization,contraception and abortion inducing drugs.
The amendment is a response to the Obama administration's healthcare edict that requires all organizations to pay for 100 percent free contraception, sterilization and abortion inducing drugs for women, regardless of their religious or moral convictions. Failure to do so would bring punitive measures.
House Speaker John Boehner promised the fight would continue. "I think it's important to win this issue," Boehner affirmed. "The government, our government, for 220 years has respected the religious views of the American people, and for all of this time there's been an exception for those churches and other groups to protect the religious beliefs that they believe in, and that's being violated here."
Generally, Republicans and Democrats divided along party lines on the issue with Republican leadership understanding this issue as a question of fundamental human rights, specifically religious freedom and freedom of conscience - as codified in the first amendment. Some Democrats did rise to the occasion to defend religious liberty. However, most Democrats are labeling the issue as a matter of "women's health" despite the fact that contraception and abortion are clearly proven to be dangerous to women and deadly to unborn children - the antithesis of health.
If there is any silver lining to this issue, it is that people of all faiths as well as all genuine proponents of real women's health and concern for rights have unified under the banner of respecting religious freedom. This broad and growing coalition opposes the blatantly unconstitutional edict that threatens to force Americans, for the first time in history, to actively violate their moral conscience as a matter of law.
Unfortunately, Catholics and those who support religious freedom have been betrayed by those in the Senate who adore their political party more than the freedom and well-being of all Americans.
Here is the full list of Catholic Senators and how they voted on the amendment.
- Senator Mark Begich (Alaska, D) - Opposed
- Senator Lisa Murkowski (Alaska, R) - Supported
- Senator Marco Rubio (Florida, R) - Supported
- Senator Tom Harkin (Iowa, D) - Opposed
- Senator James Risch (Idaho, R) - Supported
- Senator Richard Durbin (Illinois, D) - Opposed
- Senator Mary Landrieu (Louisiana, D) - Opposed
- Senator David Vitter (Louisiana, R) - Supported
- Senator John Kerry (Massachusetts, D) - Opposed
- Senator Barbara Mikulski (Maryland, D) - Opposed
- Senator Susan Collins (Maine, R) - Supported
- Senator Claire McCaskill (Missouri, D) - Opposed
- Senator John Hoeven (North Dakota, R) - Supported
- Senator Mike Johanns (Nebraska, R) - Supported
- Senator Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire, R) - Supported
- Senator Robert Menendez (New Jersey, D) - Opposed
- Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (New York, D) - Opposed
- Senator Bob Casey Jr. (Pennsylvania, D) - Supported
- Senator Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania, R) - Supported
- Senator Jack Reed (Rhode Island, D) - Opposed
- Senator Pat Leahy (Vermont, D) - Opposed
- Senator Maria Cantwell (Washington, D) - Opposed
- Senator Patty Murray (Washington, D) - Opposed
- Senator Joe Manchin III (West Virginia, D) - Supported
© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.
http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=45018 [with comments]
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Cardinal Dolan Urges 'Freedom Of Religion Battle'
ETAssociated Press
03/ 3/12 07:53 PM
HICKSVILLE, N.Y. -- Cardinal Timothy Dolan called on Roman Catholic worshippers Saturday to become more involved in politics as the church stands against the government in what he called a "freedom of religion battle," as he spoke about the recent controversy involving contraceptive coverage.
Speaking at Holy Trinity Diocesan High School in Hicksville, the spiritual leader of the Archdiocese of New York said the U.S. government is engaged in "an unwarranted, unprecedented radical intrusion." He told the crowd they "live in an era that seems to discover new rights every day."
"We're not trying to impose our teachings on anybody," said Dolan in his 45-minute speech to a packed auditorium of about 1,000 people. "We're simply saying, don't impose your teaching upon us and make us do as a church what we find unconscionable to do."
Some religious organizations protested when President Barack Obama moved to mandate that religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities include free birth control coverage in their employee health plans.
Obama later said religious employers could opt out, but insurers must pay for the coverage.
Proponents say the plan is a breakthrough for women's rights, but Dolan and other leaders say it violates religious freedom.
Dolan, who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters after the speech that they are in discussion with legal experts and constitutional scholars to determine whether legal action is necessary.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/03/nys-cardinal-urges-freedo_n_1318984.html [with comments]
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