And speaking of circuses (I did so just now, didn't I?): with the spectacle that has just taken place in the cornfields of America's heartland, Mr. Santorum is back on the radar screen of Americans as a viable candidate for the highest office in the land. And because he's a Catholic (and a self-avowed super-Catholic), his connection to his Catholic faith is getting a bit of media attention lately.
American Catholics being the sharply ideologically-divided folk we are these days, commentary about Santorum the Catholic is naturally all over the place. Yesterday, the right-wing, pro-Republican PAC Catholicvote.org endorsed Santorum for the presidency, with the claim that "Rick Santorum is a workingman’s Republican with a record and a plan which are especially appealing to Catholic voters."
Pay attention to that conflation of phrases: "workingman's Republican" and "Catholic voters." I'll say more about it in a moment. And about what those working the rustbelt Catholic swing vote in this election are seeking to accomplish with this rhetorical conflation.
If you want to know why I call Catholicvote.org a right-wing, pro-Republican PAC, read Frank Cocozzelli's incisive analysis of the financial backers and political affiliations of the group's parent organization, Fidelis, at Crossleft (see also Right Wing Watch here and here). As Frank notes, while the organization claims to be a broad-based Catholic lay political organization with wide Catholic support, it's actually a classic astroturf organization with predominant support from a few well-heeled individuals and cozy ties to right-wing Republican Catholic pizza magnate Tom Monaghan, right-wing Republican Catholic media spokesperson Bill Donohue, and right-wing Republican governor of Kansas Sam Brownback.
And so the claim of Fidelis's daughter organization Catholicvote.org on its "about" page to be "a lay movement, foremost, of committed Catholics" is suspect at best, and credible only if astroturfed political organizations whose funding comes overwhelmingly from a handful of wealthy conservative individuals are "lay movements." Frank concludes that Fidelis and Catholicvote.org are driven far more by political motivations than by the defense of Catholic orthodoxy that they claim to be all about. And I concur.
Among the real-life broad base of lay Catholics in the U.S., however, there's a much wider spectrum of opinion about Mr. Santorum's Catholicity and what that means--and would mean if he became president--than is to be found in the press releases of groups like Catholicvote.org. At Faith in Public Life this week, Rick Gehring makes a Catholic case against Santorum, maintaining,
But it’s a political delusion to think Rick Santorum is a standard-bearer of authentic Catholic values in politics. In fact, on several issues central to Catholic social teaching – torture, war, immigration, climate change, the widening gap between rich and poor and workers’ rights – Santorum is radically out of step with his faith’s teachings as articulated by Catholic bishops and several popes over the centuries.
Catholic political commentator E.J. Dionne has also weighed in on Santorum's Catholicity at Washington Post, finding Santorum a "Catholic of a certain kind"--to be specific, Dionne views Santorum as a "social renewal" Catholic who does not represent the Catholic mainstream or the long and rich tradition of Catholic social teaching in any adequate way. As Dionne notes, Santorum sees opposition to abortion as a non-negotiable, foundational matter on whose basis Catholics must singularly cast their votes, opposition to gay marriage as essential to “protecting” the family, and the government as "inflicting harm on the nation’s moral character," à la Steve Wagner, rather than protecting the weak against the strong and rapacious, à la St. Augustine and the long tradition of Catholic social teaching.
In recent commentary, not even some of Santorum's fellow Catholic conservatives are willing to give his overt opposition to core Catholic social teachings a pass. As Kevin Clarke notes in a recent blog posting at America, conservative Catholic blogger Mark Shea characterized Santorum as a "torture enthusiast" at Shea's Catholic and Loving It site this week. Shea writes,
Neocons are particularly enthused with Santorum, who promises to ignore the Pope and the catechism on that whole pre-emptive war thing, as well as re-establish torture as a fundamental American value (in keeping with the disproportionately large enthusiasm for torture so-called “conservative” Catholics have in defiance of the teaching of Holy Church). Indeed, the damp-handed Orwellian from Pennsylvania has actually had the temerity to tell Vietnam torture victim John McCain that he doesn’t understand torture as well as he does.
As Clarke also notes, another popular conservative columnist, Will Bunch (I'm not sure if Bunch is Catholic), takes a careful look at Santorum's politico-fiscal ethics in the Philadelphia Inquirer this week, and finds them a tad bit short of the Catholic moral ideal--and, I'd add, more than a little at variance with the "honor, integrity, and authenticity" that the Catholicvote.org endorsement of Santorum touted yesterday in its press announcement. For more in this vein, see Paul Blumenthal at Huffington Post on Santorum's integrity-challenged wheeling and dealing with the K-Street crowd and some of the unprincipled Republican lobbyists that that set seeks to foist on the national political machinery.
It might also be noted that if, in a state which is 35% Catholic--I'm speaking of New Hampshire--Santorum is already being booed when he trots out his toxic anti-gay rhetoric (Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel report this at Huffington Post recently), he may have a strong uphill climb convincing most American Catholic voters that he represents "the" Catholic position on gay issues and other sexuality issues--where his own fringe views are wildly at variance with those of most of his fellow Catholics, no matter what the hierarchy says to the contrary.
Given what appear to be exceptionally strong reasons for a large number of Catholics to reject Santorum's claim to represent the Catholic tradition faithfully, and for even conservative political commentators (and conservative Catholics) to doubt Santorum's Catholic values and Catholic integrity, why do some political commentators (aided and abetted by some centrist Catholics who claim to know better) continue to give Santorum a pass as a strong "family-values" Catholic and exemplary defender of Catholic social principles?
A case in point: New York Times columnist David Brooks has published two op-ed pieces this week (here and here) in which he does everything but stand on his head to paint Mr. Santorum as the Catholic candidate for white working-class Catholics who stand for good, old-fashioned family values and the work ethic that has, as Brooks never ceases to remind us, made America exceptional. And here's what's going on with that argument, it seems to me: white, working-class Catholics throughout the political swing states of the rustbelt represent a significant bloc vote that has the potential to swing elections.
For those who want a Republican victory in the coming elections, that bloc of votes is important to secure. And nothing has secured the votes of swing-state rustbelt Catholic voters up to the present like family-values issues, including abortion and gay marriage. (Or, for that matter, like the red-meat issues of overt racism, Islamophobia, appeals to apple-pie American exceptionalism, and anti-intellectualism.)
Mr. Santorum is the man for the job, for those whose primary concern is to keep the economic control of the nation firmly in the hands of the economic elite whose interests are really at the heart of these spurious battles for the "soul" of the nation. Mr. Brooks has long done the bidding of that elite with his incessant stream of columns reminding the working classes to be sober, hard-working, and frugal--and to vote against their own economic self-interest in order to assure the victory of candidates who claim to uphold strong heartland moral values while their primary concern is to serve the rich. (The rich who, for some strange reason, are never asked in any of Mr. Brooks's editorials to be sober, hard-working, and ethical.)
There's a game going on here, in other words, and it's one that the Republican party has long played with under-informed conservative Catholic voters. It's a game of promising the family-values moon and delivering rather stinky green cheese instead, once the party gains control of the political apparatus in D.C. Whether the hard-working Catholics of swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan will, in the coming election, begin to wake up to how they've long been used, very cynically, by Republican political operatives and the media commentariat shilling for those operatives remains to be seen.
There's still far too much red meat, after all, sitting on their plates in the form of ugly racist and homophobic bugbears, deflecting attention from their woeful economic plight, to assure that they'll wake up. And the Republican presidential selection process may well be playing all of us for fools by trotting in front of us an unusually odd and extraordinarily cracked set of clowns and buffoons this election cycle, to predispose us to breathe a sigh of relief when the "moderate" Saint Mitt finally emerges from the shadows of the stage wings to save the day.
Since, after all, nothing so assures that a spurious second-act saint looks holier than thou than a first act of knaves, crooks, and imbecilic comedians claiming to represent the moral center of the play they're acting out. (On which theater of the absurd as played out on the Iowa stage recently, see Alan McCornick's acerbic and brilliant commentary at Hepzibah this week.)
(P.S. More valuable commentary on precisely where Santorum stands as a [fringe] Catholic from Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches.)
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