Rick Santorum Speech

Rick Santorum - Speech

(In August 2008, Rick Santorum gave a speech at Ave Maria University, a Catholic university, in Florida. Excerpts from Rick Santorum's speech are transcribed below. This is page 1 of 4.)

Rick Santorum:

Thank you. Thank you.

I have to start my address with a recent interchange between a reporter and [Speaker Nancy Pelosi]. The reporter, Tom Brokaw, said, "Senator Obama said the question of when life begins is above his pay grade. Whether you're looking at it scientifically or theologically, if he were to come to you and say, 'Help me out here, Madame Speaker, when does life begin,' what would you tell him?"

[Speaker Nancy Pelosi said], "I would say as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. But Senator, Saint Augustine said, 'At three months, we don't know."

Well that has set off quite a firestorm and we saw many - thankfully - many members of the clergy stand up, including first and foremost the Archbishop of Denver who initially responded to this reinterpretation of Catholic teaching.

But I want to quote from (sic) you the one you may not have seen that came out yesterday from Bishop Samuel Aquila in Fargo, North Dakota. He, among other things, said, "Catholics who support so-called abortion rights support a false right, promote a culture of death and are guarded by the Father of Lies." He went on to say that they should be denied Communion.

That is a rare bit of courage that needed to be repeated. And the reason I quote from him is that while we all see this in a great political conflict in a warfare between the Obama camps and the McCain camp and cultural wars, what Bishop Aquila put his finger on and what I suspect those of you who are here understand [is that] this is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war.

And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies - Satan - would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s pre-eminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes away even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by 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 have so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different, pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

And so you'd say, “What could be the impact of academia falling?” Well, I would have the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall. And so what we saw was this domino effect.

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