The Long Run
From ‘Nominal Catholic’ to Clarion of Faith
Rick Santorum at a forum for pastors last month in Texas.
Published: March 3, 2012
GREAT FALLS, Va. — Rick Santorum was, in his own words, a “nominal Catholic” when he met Karen Garver, a neonatal nurse and law student, in 1988. As they made plans to marry and he decided to enter politics, she sent him to her father for advice.
The Long Run
A Transformation
Articles in this series are exploring the lives and careers of the candidates for president in 2012.
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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Mr. Santorum with his wife, Karen, and their family while announcing his bid for president last June in Pennsylvania.
Dr. Kenneth L. Garver was a Pittsburgh pediatrician who specialized in medical genetics. The patriarch of a large Roman Catholic family, he had treated patients considering abortion but was strongly opposed to it.
“We sat across the table and the whole evening we talked about this issue,” Mr. Santorum told an anti-abortion group last October. He left, he said, convinced “that there was only one place to be, from the standpoint of science as well as from the standpoint of faith.”
For Mr. Santorum, a Republican candidate for president, that conversation was an early step on a path into a deeply conservative Catholic culture that has profoundly influenced his life as a husband, father and politician. Over the past two decades, he has undergone a religious transformation that is now spurring a national conversation about faith in the public sphere.
On the campaign trail, he has attacked President Obama for “phony theology,” warned of the “dangers of contraceptives” and rejected John F. Kennedy’s call for strict separation of church and state. His bold expressions of faith could affect his support in this week’s Super Tuesday nominating contests, possibly helping with conservative Christians, especially in the South, but scaring off voters uncomfortable mixing so much religion in politics.
Central to Mr. Santorum’s spiritual life is his wife, whom he calls “the rock which I stand upon.” Before marrying, the couple decided to recommit themselves to their Catholic faith — a turnabout for Karen Santorum, who had been romantically involved with a well-known abortion provider in Pittsburgh and had openly supported abortion rights, according to several people who knew her then.
The Santorums went on to have eight children, including a son who died two hours after birth in 1996 and a daughter, now 3, who has a life-threatening genetic disorder. Unlike Catholics who believe that church doctrine should adapt to changing times and needs, the Santorums believe in a highly traditional Catholicism that adheres fully to what scholars call “the teaching authority” of the pope and his bishops.
“He has a strong sense of that,” said George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where Mr. Santorum had a fellowship after losing his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2006. “He’s the first national figure of some significance who’s on that side of the Catholic conversation.”
The Santorums’ beliefs are reflected in a succession of lifestyle decisions, including eschewing birth control, home schooling their younger children and sending the older boys to a private academy affiliated with Opus Dei, an influential Catholic movement that emphasizes spiritual holiness.
As members of St. Catherine of Siena, a parish here in the wealthy Northern Virginia suburb of Great Falls, the Santorums are immersed in a community where large families are not uncommon and many mothers leave behind careers to dedicate themselves to child-rearing, as Mrs. Santorum has. Mr. Santorum has been on the church roster as a lector, reading Scripture from the pulpit.
The parish is known for its Washington luminaries — Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court is a member — as well as its spiritual ardor. Mass is offered in Latin every Sunday at noon — most parishes have Mass only in English — and each Wednesday parishioners take turns praying nonstop for 24 hours before a consecrated communion wafer, a demanding practice known as Eucharistic adoration.
The Santorum campaign did not respond to interview requests about the couple’s beliefs, and their pastors declined to comment. But friends say Mr. Santorum believes he is in a “moment of testing” and feels “a calling to be faithful,” regardless of whether he wins the nomination. One friend, Frank Schoeneman, sees Mr. Santorum as carrying out a vow he made to live a life that would make Gabriel, the child he lost, proud. “Rick found himself in his faith, and he found himself in Karen,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has known Mr. Santorum for more than 20 years. “He isn’t like one of these born-again people where you get hit in the head by some televangelist and you suddenly see the light. It’s been an evolution. He’s always been a Catholic and he’s always been faithful, but he’s never been at this level of faith.”
The Family Fold
Church on Sunday was a way of life in Butler, the western Pennsylvania town where Mr. Santorum grew up. But by the time he met his future wife, sports and politics were at the center of his world. He was working in Pittsburgh at the prestigious Kirkpatrick & Lockhart law firm and recruited Ms. Garver, then a University of Pittsburgh law student, for a summer internship.
Fair-skinned and auburn-haired, she was from a Pittsburgh family of 11 children, some of whom followed their father’s path into medicine. Dr. Garver was well known in Pittsburgh for a practice that included prenatal testing.
But Ms. Garver, those who knew her say, had broken with her family and her Catholic faith over her relationship with Dr. Tom Allen, who founded Pittsburgh’s first abortion clinic. The two became a couple in 1982, when Ms. Garver was a nursing student in her 20s and Dr. Allen was in his 60s. An obstetrician-gynecologist, he had delivered her and knew her father professionally.
In an interview, Dr. Allen, now 92, said that Ms. Garver rented the basement apartment in the building where he lived and worked, and that they soon became romantically involved. (The Philadelphia City Paper reported on the relationship in 2005.)
“He was a pillar of the liberal community in Pittsburgh, well known for his charitable work, for the arts, and also very well known for his wine collection,” said John M. Burkoff, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who knew the couple. While Dr. Allen was a strong personality, Mr. Burkoff said, Ms. Garver “was not in his shadow.”
She joined Dr. Allen in hosting fund-raisers for liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and for his clinic and expressed strong support for abortion rights, said Herbert Greenberg, a concert violinist and friend of Dr. Allen.
Mr. Greenberg’s wife, Mary, a mother of three, sought counseling from Dr. Allen on whether to terminate her fourth pregnancy for health reasons. Mrs. Greenberg said Ms. Garver offered to accompany her for an abortion.
“She said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing,’ ” Mrs. Greenberg recalled, adding that she went alone for the procedure.
Ms. Garver and Dr. Allen spent six years together, but she left him when she met Mr. Santorum. Her relationship with the politically conservative, aspiring politician brought the young woman back into the family fold — and seemed to change her political orientation.
“It’s a total 180,” Mr. Greenberg said. “Her change could not be more extreme.”
God and the Senate
Mr. Santorum often says that before he and Mrs. Santorum married in 1990, they had long talks about the life they wanted to build: a large family and a relationship with God. One former aide likened them to “two halves of a circle coming together.”
Mr. Santorum’s religious beliefs would come to infuse every aspect of his political life — not just his views on social issues like abortion, but also his work to overhaul the welfare system, increase financing to fight AIDS in Africa and promote religious freedom. “He is passionate about all of these issues, which all come from a deep faith,” said Mike DeWine, the Ohio attorney general, who served with Mr. Santorum in the Senate.
But at the outset of his career, Mr. Santorum was not particularly guided by the tenets of the church. A former law school classmate, Charlene Bashore, recalls him saying when he ran for the House of Representatives in 1990 that while he opposed abortion, “he didn’t see himself as a leader in the cause.”
Mr. Santorum was elected to the United States Senate in 1994. He likes to say he found God there.
In the speech to the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation last October, he described himself as having arrived “almost exhausted, just having poured it all out to get where I thought I wanted to go.” Faith, he said, “was sort of a part of me; I went to church, I could check all the boxes, but it wasn’t at the center of my life.”
The Long Run
A Transformation
Articles in this series are exploring the lives and careers of the candidates for president in 2012.
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His more spiritual path, he said, was prompted in part by a hallway encounter with Don Nickles, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma, who urged Mr. Santorum to attend a Bible study with fellow senators. And the Santorums moved to Northern Virginia, where they ultimately found a spiritual home at St. Catherine of Siena.
“We ended up moving into a neighborhood and joining a parish where the priest was just amazing — an absolutely amazing pastor who just energized us and filled us with the Holy Spirit,” Mr. Santorum told the anti-abortion group. “Over the course of that time, I just saw changes in me and changes in Karen.”
The loss of the Santorums’ son Gabriel, in 1996 — just as the senator was leading the fight in Congress to ban the procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion — was devastating for the couple. Mrs. Santorum was nearly 20 weeks pregnant; doctors discovered a fetal anomaly. After a risky operation, she developed an infection and took antibiotics, which the couple knew would result in the birth of a baby who would not survive.
Critics likened it to an abortion, but in a 1997 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Santorum said that was not the case. Mr. Schoeneman, the couple’s friend, said the death convinced them that “God had a purpose in Gabriel’s life, and they were going to live out that purpose in their lives.” Both Santorums began speaking out more strongly against abortion; Mrs. Santorum became prominent in her own right after publishing a 1998 book, “Letters to Gabriel.”
In the Senate, Mr. Santorum started a prayer group and would go on to help convert a fellow senator, Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas, to Catholicism.
After Mr. Santorum’s re-election in 2000, the family traveled to Rome, where they had a private audience with Pope John Paul II.
“He said to the pope, ‘Father, you’re a great man,’ ” Mr. Schoeneman said, recounting the session as Mr. Santorum told it to him. “And the pope turned to him, because Rick at this point had all six children sitting there, and he said, ‘No, you’re a great man.’
“And it was like a message from God,” Mr. Schoeneman said, “that he was living his life in the right way, that his path was correct.”
‘For the Sake of Our Souls’
Mr. Santorum made another trip to Rome in 2002, this time to speak at a centenary celebration of the birth of Saint Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. In a little-noticed interview there with The National Catholic Reporter, he said John F. Kennedy had caused “much harm to America” with his 1960 speech calling for strict separation of church and state.
That remark foreshadowed the candidate’s recent comment — he said the Kennedy speech “makes me throw up” — that set off a controversy and made some Catholics wince. It grew out of Mr. Santorum’s view that libertine culture has put America and American Catholics on a path toward moral decline.
In a 2002 essay, Mr. Santorum wrote that too many Catholics had been exposed to “uninspired, watered-down versions of our faith” and that it was time for more committed Catholics to reclaim religious institutions, like colleges, schools and hospitals, “for the sake of our souls.”
He also blamed liberal culture for the sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests. “When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected,” he wrote.
Mr. Santorum has been a supporter of Regnum Christi, the lay wing of a conservative, cultish order of priests known as the Legion of Christ. In 2003, he was the keynote speaker at a Regnum Christi event in Chicago that drew protesters because the group’s charismatic founder, who had spent years denying that he had sexually abused seminarians, was scheduled to share the podium.
The founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, did not show up, but critics faulted Mr. Santorum for agreeing to appear at the group’s forum. “He was certainly lending them legitimacy,” said Jason Berry, a documentary filmmaker and the author of a book about Father Maciel.
Many Catholics take issue with Mr. Santorum’s approach to their faith. Mr. Santorum, polls show, has lost the Catholic vote in every primary contest so far, some by wide margins.
Garry Wills, a cultural historian and professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is among many Catholics whose touchstone is the Second Vatican Council from 1962-65, which opened up Catholicism to the modern era and proclaimed that the church is its people, not just the pope and his bishops.
“Santorum is not a Catholic, but a papist,” Mr. Wills said in an e-mail.
Mr. Santorum’s defenders say there is nothing troubling about his approach to faith and politics. “What he is saying is something very simple: I should not shed my moral beliefs when I walk in the Oval Office,” said Mr. DeWine, who is also Catholic.
To listen to Mr. Santorum speak to an audience of the faithful is to hear a man for whom God is at the center of everything. In his talk to the anti-abortion group last October, as his presidential campaign was just beginning to heat up, he likened himself to his special-needs daughter, Bella — a child capable, he said, of nothing but love.
“I think, ‘That’s me with the Father,’ ” Mr. Santorum said then. “I am profoundly disabled in his eyes. I can do nothing for Him, except love Him.”