View Photo Gallery: Scenes of religious faith meeting politics in the 2012 campaign.
What does it mean to be a Catholic politician in America?
Rick Santorum and I talked about this question last May, just as the GOP debates had begun and not long after his 2 percent showing in a conservative group’s straw poll.
Since our nation’s founding, questions of church and state have generated debate. Before the American experiment, European countries split on whether their sovereigns were Catholic or Protestant, and as the ruler went, so did the country, at least officially.
Our founders chose a different path. They gave us legal safeguards to minimize the wars of religion here. The Constitution bars Congress from establishing a religion or prohibiting its free exercise and expressly prohibits any “religious test” as a prerequisite for government service.
Despite these safeguards, controversy often surrounds a candidate’s religious faith and its influence on policy positions or electability, from Mitt Romney’s Mormonism to Mike Huckabee’s evangelicalism to Newt Gingrich’s newfound Catholicism.
Elected officials also find themselves under evaluation for whether their policy positions accord with the doctrines of their declared faith. Catholics such as Nancy Pelosi, Rudy Giuliani, and Ted Kennedy have worked against the official positions of their church on the issue of abortion.
The ensuing debate over whether bishops could deny Holy Communion to these Catholic politicians brought claims that one side was “politicizing the sacrament” while the other was “cooperating in evil.”
In assessing Santorum’s candidacy, Ann Coulter argued that he is “more of a Catholic than a conservative.” Translation: “He’s good on 60 percent of the issues, but bad on others, such as big government social programs.” More to the point: “He’d be Ted Kennedy if he didn’t believe in God.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez thinks Santorum’s success in Iowa marks a new type of Catholic candidate “who refuses to give up the fight on social justice” both in word and deed.
When Santorum and I discussed these issues, he explained his view of John F. Kennedy’s famous speech as a presidential candidate, in which JFK distanced himself from the church and the influence of its clergy, promising instead to rely on the guide of conscience.
JFK proclaimed “absolute” separation of church and state, borrowing from Jefferson. But, according to Santorum, Jefferson intended the “wall of separation” to protect religious believers from the state, not vice versa. Santorum maintains that JFK wrongly saw the wall of separation as protecting government from people of faith.
Locating Jefferson’s “wall of separation” can be difficult. Justice Jackson lamented that judges trying to decide “where the secular ends and the sectarian begins” in public education would probably make the wall of separation “as winding as the famous serpentine walls designed by Mr. Jefferson for the university he founded.”
Santorum argues that politicians “hide” when claiming simply to be “guided by conscience” because conscience must be “formed by something” and no one is “born with a formed conscience.”
One way of assessing a Catholic politician is to compare his national policy positions with the church’s teachings. Another is to ask whether the politician practices his faith in his everyday life.
Today I spoke with someone who knows Santorum and his family very well. He recalled then-Senator Santorum making pancakes at 5:30 a.m. for all the kids at a youth retreat.
When visitors are in his home, Santorum is on his feet, serving guests and making sure everyone is comfortable and well attended. “He is the real deal,” my friend said of Santorum. “He walks the talk.”
Peggy Noonan has written about Santorum’s contentious Senate race six years ago against Bob Casey. She relates an anecdote “too corny to be true, but it’s true.”
Driving on the way to a debate against Casey, Santorum and his wife, Karen, discussed how brutal the campaign had been. Realizing that the campaign must be hard on Casey and his family too, the couple prayed the Rosary for the Caseys. “We pray for the Caseys every night,” Santorum said. “We know it’s as hard for them as it is for us.”
The Santorums married in 1990 and have six living children. Marriage is one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic faith. The Santorums’ fruitful, faithful, and influential marriage reflects Catholic teaching on the sacramental nature of marriage and the gift of children. Many Catholic parents find that the work of being parents draws them back to their faith and strengthens their devotion.
A week after leading the Senate debate on a partial birth abortion law, Santorum learned that his unborn son, Gabriel, was going to die. “It was that maelstrom of what we went through with Gabriel,” Santorum recalled, that “profoundly affected me in a way that ultimately affirmed what I was doing, even though we lost our son.”
Republican voters have yet to decide whether Santorum’s Catholic faith is an advantage, a disadvantage, or simply irrelevant. But Santorum would say that he has a “constituency of one.”
He explained it to me in this way: “If you are serving God in your daily work, what you know is right and you are being transparent about what you are doing and why you are doing it, then it is up for the people then to decide.”
Having just finished Iowa within eight votes of first place, Santorum has come a long way from his 2 percent showing last May. Is he too Catholic for conservatives, or a new breed of Catholic politician? Primary voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina will soon have their say.
Gayle Trotter is a Washington, D.C, lawyer and a writer for First Things.
