Posted on 02/22/2012 9:50:47 PM PST by darrellmaurina
Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.
That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.
“Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”
When, in heaven’s name, did sensuality become a vice? Next he’ll be banning Barry White.
Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”
Satan strikes, a Catholic exorcist told me, when there are “soul wounds.” Santorum, who is considered “too Catholic” even by my über-Catholic brothers, clearly believes that America’s soul wounds include men and women having sex for reasons other than procreation, people involved in same-sex relationships, women using contraception or having prenatal testing, environmentalists who elevate “the Earth above man,” women working outside the home, “anachronistic” public schools, Mormonism (which he said is considered “a dangerous cult” by some Christians), and President Obama (whom he obliquely and oddly compared to Hitler and accused of having “some phony theology”).
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Let them do an article about what the LDS really believe now during the primaries. That would blow most Americans away. They likely would do that article if their hopeful, worst candidate Romney were to win; pull it out to ridicule him running against their love interest, Obama. May they never get that chance.
My scoring of the debate:
Newt
Ron
Mitt
Rick
Santorum came across as an ass. Newt came across as an adult with knowledge and vision.
Someone please tell this tired old bitch to just shut up and go away......finally?
I think freepers need to start plying the NYT with our comments. Almost every comment is hatefully leftist that I read through. I wonder if that is about all they let in. The comment ability is closed on this article or they would have heard from me.
Exactly...and adding insult to injury he even lambasted Protestants let alone the unchurched. It was a bad move and alienated many as though he was Judge and Jury of the masses.....what he dished out was not delivered as "pearls"....more like take your medicine and if it makes you throw up so be it.
I guess Newt doesn’t have to be worried about being treated negatively by the press.
I don't agree on this. Rick Santorum was speaking at Ave Maria University, a conservative Roman Catholic school, about why he believes Roman Catholicism has the answers to the modern American cultural collapse. That's not casting pearls before swine; he's doing what most of us would do before an audience that largely agreed with us already, basically “firing up the base.” Even if he was saying, “this is bitter medicine, you need to swallow it,” that would be entirely appropriate in a speech to a conservative likeminded institution.
What makes the liberals think they've found a “smoking gun” in this speech at Ave Maria University is they think they've found what Santorum really thinks about Protestants when he's speaking to a Roman Catholic audience.
The interesting thing is that Santorum is saying the same thing about liberal Protestants that we evangelical Protestants say about liberal Protestants! Apparently the leftists in our intellectual elites aren't aware that much worse things get said about liberalism on a regular basis from evangelical pulpits than anything Santorum said.
Now it wouldn't surprise me at all if somewhere, somehow, Rick Santorum has given a speech in his many decades of public life saying he agreed with the Council of Trent and believes Protestant doctrine is dangerously wrong and Protestant church members are not in a right relationship with God because they have not joined the Holy Mother Church.
My reaction would be, “So what?”
Santorum is not a member of a nondenominational megachurch somewhere which doesn't have a clear doctrinal stance beyond the basics of the faith. He is a baptized, catechized, confirmed, Mass-going practicing Roman Catholic, and that means he's a member of a hierarchical church which values ecclesiastical authority and church tradition dating back two thousand years. I assume be believes what his church teaches, and has the decency to stay quiet in public if he does disagree with something. His church is wrong on a lot of things — there are reasons I am a Protestant — but that doesn't mean evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics can't work together on areas where we **DO** agree in the culture war.
As evangelicals, most of us decided two generations ago that we could work with Roman Catholics despite our disagreements. I think most of us who have much experience in the pro-life movement watching Roman Catholics pray the Rosary and invoke Mary and the saints during vigils at abortion clinics will give Santorum a fair amount of latitude even if some real criticisms show up by him about evangelical doctrine.
In other words, according to Maureen Dowd believing Catholics need not apply.
Excellent post! May your tribe increase.
Translation:
We be PRACTICING on Rick; awaiting Mitt, who will REALLY getting some serious VETTING.
The kind we did NOT do with our boy Barak!
1 John 2:16
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.
A mere SNIPPET of what MITT would have coming at him!
Your last two paragraphs summed it up quite well.
Thank you.
The audience at Ave Maria is not swine.
They are not CINOs.
“Jane, you ignorant slut”.
(Classic SNL)
We can’t fix the country unless the people make a spiritual turn. Morality and the government/economy are related. The people reap what they sow.
BTW, did you notice how Rick really gathered himself when the talk went to morals/pro-life/amniocentesis. I remember that line, “**I'll** go out....”
“Courage” is an apt descriptive.
CZ-J rules!
Oh, and Maureen ...... "Michael Douglas".
How soon people forget what Romney did to the then frontrunner in a prior debate. And how the frontrunner reacted.
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