Rick Santorum Wealth

Rick Santorum - Wealth

(Page 3 of 4 of Rick Santorum's speech at Ave Maria University. Rick Santorum gave the speech in August of 2008. Rick Santorum begins this section speaking about wealth.)

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Rick Santorum:

Then the wealthy, obviously a great target: those in the business community; those who have accumulated enormous wealth who see themselves as little demi-gods, and the enormity of wealth that we see in this country, not just among the select few but realistically, the wealth in America is incredible compared to historical standards or compared to the rest of the world.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of the rich man who goes to Jesus and says, 'What must I do to gain the kingdom of heaven?" And Jesus' answer was, "Obey the Commandments."

Now, you could tell this young man - this rich man - was not a lawyer because what he did was a classical legal error. He asked one too many questions, and he asked a question he didn't know the answer to. He persisted and say, "Well, I can do that, I keep my Commandments, I'm a good and pious man. What else must I do?"

And that's when Jesus said, "Sell all your things and follow me." America is an incredibly wealthy country. We are wealthy in ways not of the Lord. We are wealthy in materialism and we are focused too much on materialism which are not things of the Lord, but the things of the Father of Lies. This is the state of America.

And throw on top of that: we are being challenged by radical Islam from the exterior. So as America and the cultural wars and the spiritual wars is (sic) engaged here in this country we are having to fight an external war from another spiritual enemy: the forces of radical Islam.

Sounds pretty hopeless, doesn't it? Isn't that great? Isn't that great that things are so bad, and you're here. You could live in a time when things are good. You could live in a time when things were wholesome and people were God-fearing and there weren't threats to the security of our country or to our faith. But God has chosen you to be here at a time when He needs soldiers the most. Congratulations!

The greatest thing is that signing up for his army is easy, very easy. It doesn't cost you a thing. You can sign up, you can join, enlist. The money is lousy. You'll be unpopular. You'll be ridiculed. You will lose most if not every one of your battles, but you know who is going to win in the end. And so you warrior on happily.

I say this because I am the most unlikely of privates in the world. The title of this speech when I was asked what I want to talk about is 'A Personal Journey: Catholic Faith'.

I think I can say without fear of anybody who knew me at the time that at the age of a normal freshman going into college I would not be sitting in this audience. This is not a school that I would have even thought of going to. Oh, it's not that I wasn't Catholic. I was raised a Catholic.

But I had bought into the culture. I was raised in the 60s and in the early 70s. And I bought it. I drank the Kool-Aid. And back then there was really Kool-Aid that people drank. And I went to a school and I certainly didn't follow the norms of what I've heard here today.

But the interesting thing as to why I'm here, how did I get here, how did I start there and get here?

Well, let me tell you a little story. First off, it begins with a seed. There was a hybrid seed planted in me, grafting of the Catholic faith of growing up in, for lack of a better term, a Catholic ghetto, where all of my friends, everybody I knew, were Catholic. I went to Catholic grade school. ...

And secondly, grafted with coming from a family of immigrants, my father was an Italian American immigrant. And it was the immigrant love of America, and the immigrant understanding at that time of what the values of America were: hard work, self-reliance, optimism, service, patriotism, ...

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