The Song of Santorum

Former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) who is considering running for president, recently visited Boston, a major hub of Catholic politics and the biggest media market in New England. While minor appearances by non-candidates don’t always make the news, Santorum’s remarks to a small group of Church partisans made The Boston Globe because he not only denounced our first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy in his home town, but he attacked Kennedy’s historic 1960 campaign speech in which he explained his unwavering clarity regarding the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state. Kennedy’s position had served as the standard for a half century of political leaders. (See Rob Boston’s excellent defense of Kennedy’s views on separation.)

Santorum has been trying to rebuild his political career since being unseated by Bob Casey (D-PA) in 2006. And while he may not catch fire on the campaign trail, Santorum’s bombast in Boston is certainly part of an escalating war of attrition against the principle of separation — and it may be a bellwether for what we might anticipate in the run-up to the 2012 presidential campaign.

The coming battle may very well turn on the details of American history, as we shall see. But in the meantime, let’s return to the beginning of our story.

The Boston Globe reported

“In remarks to about 50 members of the group Catholic Citizenship — which encourages parishioners to speak out on issues of public policy — Santorum decried what he called the growing secularization of American public life.

He traced the problem to Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which Kennedy – then a candidate for president – sought to allay concerns about his Catholicism by declaring, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Santorum, who is Catholic, said he was “frankly appalled” by Kennedy’s remark.

“That was a radical statement,” Santorum said, and it did “great damage.”

Unsurprisingly, Santorum has been a hero to the Catholic Right. According to a 2005 profile in National Catholic Reporter:

“To us, he’s the preeminent Catholic politician in America,” says Austin Ruse, president of the Culture of Life Foundation, a Washington-based pro-life group. The “us” Ruse refers to are conservative Catholics, loyal to the magisterium, to this pope and his predecessor. “He’s a living, breathing, daily communicant who’s in the Senate leadership so all of us know that the things that we care about are discussed at the highest levels of the U.S. government,” says Ruse.

If Santorum’s Massachusetts appearance is any indication, he is positioning himself as the anti-Kennedy and the epitome of the new Catholic pol. To better appreciate how this is so, note that his remarks are rooted in a little-noticed address he gave last fall in Houston (the text of which is featured on the web site of the neo-conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.) The event was evidently positioned as an answer John F. Kennedy’s historic speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in which he declared that as president he would not take orders from the Pope and that he respected the doctrine of separation.

Santorum is deeply steeped in revisionist history. But let’s focus on just one of his claims.

The phrase “wall of separation”… comes from a letter written by a founder who didn’t even attend the constitutional convention, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson’s famous phrase has long stood in the way of the ambitions of the theocratically inclined because the Supreme Court has found it to be useful in explaining the meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. That’s why the Religious Right expends so much energy attempting to invalidate it.

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