Savonarola, Satan, and Santorum

The Republican debates. I watched them all. Santorum both fascinated and repelled. 

Well not so much Santorum --- he's just a jumped-up demagogue with a lot of energy -- but those who wave signs and cheer him on.  

Savonarola famously burned books and preached his version of morality while he played Florentine politics, until he was executed at the turn of the 16th Century. He used hate, veiled with Catholic exceptionalism, to fuel his rise to power. 

My friend Gordy emailed me about Santorum today. Here's a little of what he wrote:

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Maureen Dowd, a Catholic, devoted her column in this morning’s New York Times to “Rick’s Religious Fanaticism.”  She said

“Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.

“That’s far too grand.  He’s more like a small-town mullah.”

She recalls Santorum’s 2008 warnings about Satan’s activities here in America, how Satan bores his insidious way into our souls via our vices, like pride, vanity, and sensuality…  Dowd:  “When, in heaven’s name, did sensuality become a vice?  Next he’ll be banning Barry White.” 

There is nothing about Rick Santorum I like or admire, other than, perhaps his consistency (and wrong-headed convictions) and the consistency of his steel trap-like mind – nothing gets in – nothing gets out. 

Yet, I’m troubled by how people react to him and I regard the resistible rise of Richard John Santorum with a mixture of dread and horror – and yes, fascination.  For one thing, even if he loses his bid to be the GOP nominee, he will count the loss as a valuable sacrifice to the cause – it’s just that the Lord needed to do some more prep work before he comes marching in brandishing his terrible swift sword

Fifty-two years ago, if John Kennedy had espoused any one of the ideas that Santorum has expressed in, let’s say, just in the last week or so, the hue and cry for the wholesale roundup and exile of American Catholics would have been well underway by the end of the year.

I wish Socrates were here for the debates instead of cowering John King because I think Socrates had a Buddhist heart. 

I wish there was someone who could apply the Socratic method of questioning to the debaters and watch their arguments collapse under the scrutiny of thoughtful questions.  The Socratic method has its own patient and extraordinarily insidious method of arguing – respecting, not demonizing, the opponent, all the while exposing his errant ideas to the unrelenting light of reason.