Santorum and Catholicism

Rick Santorum and Catholicism

P. Schultz

March 25, 2012

            Here is something that recently occurred to me. I have this friend who is very Catholic and whenever I write things about Santorum or how other issues, such as abortion, are being used today, he responds as if I were writing about the Catholic Church. But here is why this is an inappropriate response.

            Let me use an illustration, viz., education. Now Catholics have always had a healthy respect for education, even or especially a Catholic liberal arts education as in Villanova University, the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University [run by the currently dreaded Jesuits!], the Catholic University of America, the University of Dallas and, of course, the pinnacle of all of these institutions, Assumption College. On a different level, few realize that what we call “public schools” were begun by Protestants who were trying to offset the many Catholic schools created by immigrants coming to this country in the 1800s.

            What does this mean? Well, it means in large part that Catholics have never seen the world as a place where one could live as well as is possible merely by following a catechism. Or, to put this differently, it means that Catholics were not convinced that one could be properly educated by one's parents as in “home schooling.” There are certain questions, certain issues that are best treated outside the home, even in a place called a “university” or a “college” where there is a premium placed on inquisitiveness as opposed to, say, the acquisitiveness that informs a capitalist social order or to, say, familial loyalty.

            Rick Santorum likes to present himself as something of a maverick because he and his wife – I imagine it is largely done by his wife – home school their children. But this is not really all that “radical” once one gets beyond what we take to be “normal” today, viz., a bureaucratized education meant to socialize human beings so they fit neatly into a particular society. I mean such a concept of education, socialization, is quite old and, hence, quite common. Home schooling, it seems to me, may be faulted for failing to recognize just how powerful is the desire to call socialization “education” and how it alone is incapable of denting this leviathan.

            Catholics were not under a similar delusion and, hence, established schools, elementary, high school, and colleges and universities in order to build a “firewall” against an education that merely socialized without, let us say, spiritualizing. But this seems to me a dimension Santorum does not possess or even recognize. And insofar as this is the case, why aren’t Catholics protesting the identification of Santorum with Catholicism? Or perhaps I should ask, why aren’t more Catholics protesting the identification of Santorum with Catholicism? To me, this seems like it would be a fertile ground and one that might even bear some fruit of more than passing – i.e., political - interest.