Rick Santorum and the Politicization of Religion

By Steve Klingaman
Open Salon
March 15, 2012

http://open.salon.com/blog/steve_klingaman/2012/03/14/rick_santorum_and_the_politicization_of_religion

Rick Santorum, children’s advocate.

March is Rick Santorum’s moment to strut the stage like a minor Shakespearean buffoon, who mortifies but entertains the crowd before he is yanked behind the curtain. Much of his message is old news, but he also represents a movement to insert the most conservative brand of Catholic theology into secular political discourse. But Catholic voters reject this guy. Why? Despite the church’s rightward drift under Pope Benedict, the church has had an at times uneasy relationship with Opus Dei and Regnum Christi, two branches of Catholic lay practice that Santorum endorses and that have been highly suspect to many within the church.

Of the two groups, Regnum Christi is the more virulent. It is the lay branch of the Legion of Christ order founded by child rapist and bigamist Father Marcial Maciel. According to the New York Times, Santorum has long been a supporter of the group and in 2003 was the keynote speaker at a Regnum Christi event in Chicago. Though this occurred a decade ago, Maciel, who had been under investigation since the 70s, was already well on his way to repudiation by the church.

According to a 1997 Hartford Courant article, Maciel was accused of serial sexual abuse including young children. Maciel's accusers included “a priest, a guidance counselor, a professor, an engineer, a lawyer, and a former priest who became a university professor,” according to a Wikipedia summary of the article. Maciel was investigated by no less that by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVIl, who presumably spurred Maciel’s removal from his leadership position of the Legion. By 2010, the church referred to Maciel thusly:

an "immoral" double life "devoid of scruples and authentic religious sentiment."

“the very serious and objectively immoral acts"

"true crimes and manifest a life without scruples or authentic religious sentiment"

Anyone vaguely familiar with the church’s agonizingly slow response to the preponderance of evidence concerning its decades-long priestly sex scandal has to find the straightforward nature of this condemnation rather striking. And yet Maciel’s legacy, Regnum Christi, is a pet project of Santorum.

“The Culture Did It”

Rick Santorum has followed the lead of many apologists for the Catholic sex scandal, which cost the U.S. church $2.6 billion in settlements from 1950 to 2009; he blamed the culture. He said:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

In fact, by 1957, Catholic cleric Gerald Fitzgerald, who established church treatment centers for offending priests in the U.S. wrote:

If I were a bishop, I would tremble when I failed to report them [sexual offenders] to Rome for involuntary laicization. Experience has taught us these men are too dangerous to the children of the parish and the neighborhood for us to be justified in receiving them here....They should ipso facto be reduced to lay men when they act thus.

That sounds to me like the observations of a man who has experienced interactions with sexual offenders on a systemic basis.

The truth is, the Catholic sex scandal is about cheating, not permissive culture or moral relativism. It is about cheating on vows, on common decency, and the law. To believers, it is about cheating on God. But most of all, it’s about cheating children. It’s about cheating them out of their lives, and the disease runs in the priestly culture of the church to a far greater extent than the culture as a whole.

If the separation of church and state makes Santorum want to “puke,” it’s up to us to grasp the true meaning of his reliance on Catholicism’s more cultish offshoots to understand what he has in mind for the nation. If he wants to bring religion front and center onto the national stage, we really ought to look at the historical and cultural antecedents he represents.

His recent biography, which includes a private audience with the Pope in 2000, aligns his personal actions and beliefs very closely with the strictures of Opus Dei. The group had been widely criticized for its misogyny, secrecy, and rightwing ideology. Santorum is strutting the stage proclaiming his soul-on-sleeve religiosity, but I think there exists a great deal more that we might want to know about his grand plans for a saintlier society. Despite his strutting, he remains a pig in a poke when it comes to contemplating him as Confessor-in-Chief.