Is Marco Rubio Catholic or What?

Seeking the Baptist-Mormon-Catholic Vote

Mark Stricherz at Aleteia reports on the Marco Rubio announcement.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has told political donors that he is running for president, according to The Washington Post:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the son of Cuban immigrants whose rapid political ascent was nearly blocked five years ago by national Republican leaders, told supporters on a Monday call that he is running for president, according to two people familiar with his plans.

Five years ago Marco Rubio was reliably conservative.

Rubio is four years into his first term as a senator. Rubio won his race in 2010 by appealing to fiscal conservatives or tea-party supporters, cultural conservatives, and Hispanics. The mixture has made him one of the Republican Party’s top political prospects, according to Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight.com:

In part because he did so well with Hispanics, Rubio vastly over-performed most other Republican senatorial candidates in 2010, as well as those who ran in 2014.  Rubio won his race by 11 percentage points more than you would have expected controlling for the past presidential vote of the state and incumbency.

That was before Rubio became the conservative poster-boy for illegal amnesty, a wasted expense of political capital by of one of the most trusted and popular GOP leaders.

Then there’s his religion.  Is he Catholic or Protestant?  It depends on who you ask.  At one point it was rumored he began to return to his Catholic roots, but that was a while ago.  Today, on the point of his entering the GOP field for president, Stricherz picked up something from Rubio’s autobiography:

Rubio was baptized as a Catholic, turned to Mormonism as a youth, married a Southern Baptist, and has gone to Baptist and Catholic services. As reporter Lauren Markoe of Religion News Service notes, in his autobiography Rubio explained his devotion to Catholicism this way:

“I craved, literally, the Most Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion, the sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven,” he wrote. “I wondered why there couldn’t be a church that offered both a powerful, contemporary gospel message and the actual body and blood of Jesus.”

Starting in late 2004, he began to delve deeper into his Roman Catholic roots, reading the whole catechism, and concluding that “every sacrament, every symbol and tradition of the Catholic faith is intended to convey, above everything else, the revelation that God yearns, too, for a relationship with you.”

The “sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven?”  What does that mean?  Does it work for the non-Catholic?  Why must you ‘crave’ it so, and if you do, why not go to Mass somewhere?  Catholics are doing ‘powerful and contemporary’ all over the place these days.

“every sacrament, every symbol and tradition of the Catholic faith is intended to convey, above everything else, the revelation that God yearns, too, for a relationship with you.”

So the entire Catholic faith is all about God’s yearning to have a relationship with me?  This is a man who, despite having read every page of the tedious Catechism, holds only a tangential and Protestant faith.

It’s telling how these top-tier Christian politicians can only cobble together some nonsense to express their beliefs.  Jeb Bush can’t seem to find anything the least bit meaningful to say about his Catholicism either, but at least he can be found in a Church occasionally.

Faithful Catholics need Christians to represent them in government.  If they are Protestant, at least we can support them for the elements of Faith that they share and apply.  What we don’t need are men who will play with us and feign Catholicism when they show little respect or understanding of its beliefs or evidence of its practice.