Marco Rubio: Baptist, Mass-Going, Gay Wedding-Attending Catholic

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Sharing love and joy at important events

Catholic Vote has just republished the assertion that Florida Senator Marco Rubio has returned to his Cuban Catholic roots.  Just the other day he was reported to ‘crave the Blessed Sacrament.’

It’s not unusual for people to claim to be Catholics yet in reality be some form of Protestant, but Sen. Rubio seems really to be embracing a ‘big tent Christianity.’  His wife attends a Baptist megachurch, where he is a regular contributing member.

Can one be both Protestant and Catholic?

As an adult, from 2000 to 2004 Rubio took a detour from his Catholic roots to exclusively attend Miami’s Christ Fellowship, a Southern Baptist megachurch to which Rubio has given at least $50,000.

Now straddling both Christ Fellowship and the Catholic Church, Marco Rubio seems positioned to appeal both to conservative Catholics but also the anti-LGBT, demon-casting, creationist segment of the Protestant evangelical right.

Though he’s now primarily and “firmly” Catholic, Rubio has recently toldReligion News Service reporter Sarah Pulliam-Bailey that he has “maintained the relationship with Christ Fellowship” and often attends services at the church.

At CatholicVote they say Marco Rubio goes to Mass every Sunday and to the Baptist Megachurch too!

Why no reference to a Catholic parish?

Marco Rubio had perhaps the most fascinating journey of them all. He was born in Miami and his Catholic parents were both born in Communist Cuba. When he was about 8, his family moved to Las Vegas. And for awhile the Rubio family became Mormon. By the time Marco was in sixth grade, his family left the Mormon Church. He received Holy Communion on Christmas Day 1984. When the family returned to Miami a year later, he received the sacrament of Confirmation. His wife encouraged him to start attending an evangelical church in 2000 — and they exclusively for several years. “I felt called back to Catholicism around 2004,” he said. When Rubio ran for the Senate in 2010, there was confusion about whether he was evangelical or Catholic. I spoke with Rubio’s spokesman JR Sanchez in 2010. Sanchez told me that Rubio went to Mass every Sunday but that he also attended services at the evangelical church. As noted by religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Rubio himself later confirmed this in his memoir.

It’s not hard to see how many Catholics today can make no real distinction between the Mass and Protestant services.  If they have no other exposure to the Faith, they’re fair game for all kinds of silly trendy ideas.

Today from Politico:

Marco Rubio says he would attend the wedding of a same-sex couple, even though the Republican Florida senator and newly minted presidential candidate has said he believes marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

Fusion host Jorge Ramos pressed Rubio on Wednesday about whether he would go to the same-sex ceremony of someone in his family or someone on his staff who happens to be gay.

“Happens to be gay”  You sure hear that a lot, as if it were all some casual accidental occurrence.

“If there’s somebody that I love that’s in my life, I don’t necessarily have to agree with their decisions or the decisions they’ve made to continue to love them and participate in important events,” he told Ramos.

Terrific.  If it’s an ‘important event,’ then by all means participate.  It’s all about love the Bible says.

 

 

 

 

Is Marco Rubio Catholic or What?

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Seeking the Baptist-Mormon-Catholic Vote

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.

New York Times, Bishops Sing Jeb Bush’s Catholic Praises

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“Peace Be With You” from the New York Times

Why is the New York Times so interested in Jeb Bush’s Catholicism?  It’s creepy.

He arrived a few minutes early — no entourage, just his wife and daughter — and, sweating through a polo shirt in the hot morning sun, settled quietly into the 14th row at the Church of the Little Flower.

A bit of a murmur, and the occasional “Morning, Governor,” passed through the Spanish Renaissance-style church, with its manicured grounds and towering palms, as worshipers recognized their most famous neighbor, Jeb Bush. He held hands with the other worshipers during the Lord’s Prayer, sang along to “I Am the Bread of Life” and knelt after receiving communion.

“It gives me a serenity, and allows me to think clearer,” Mr. Bush said as he exited the tile-roof church here on a recent Sunday, exchanging greetings and, with the ease of a longtime politician, acquiescing to the occasional photo. “It’s made me a better person.”

Does this sound Catholic to you yet, or is this Zen?

Twenty years after Mr. Bush converted to Catholicism, the religion of his wife, following a difficult and unsuccessful political campaign that had put a strain on his marriage, his faith has become a central element of the way he shapes his life and frames his views on public policy. And now, as he explores a bid for the presidency, his religion has become a focal point of early appeals to evangelical activists, who are particularly important in a Republican primary that is often dominated by religious voters.

Many of his priorities during his two terms as governor of Florida aligned with those of the Catholic Church — including his extraordinary, and unsuccessful, effort to force a hospital to keep Terri Schiavo on life support, as well as less well-known, and also unsuccessful, efforts to appoint a guardian for the fetus of a developmentally disabled rape victim and to prevent a 13-year-old girl from having an abortion. He even, during his first year in office in 1999, signed a law creating a “Choose Life” license plate.

He differed from his church, significantly and openly, over capital punishment; the state executed 21 prisoners on his watch, the most under any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. But he has won praise from Catholic officials for his welcoming tone toward immigrants and his relatively centrist positions on education — two issues in which he is at odds with the right wing of his party.

Now I’m confused.  Is he Catholic or is he Republican or is he a Conservative or is he a Democrat?  At least he made the bishops’ happy most of the time?

 “As a public leader, one’s faith should guide you,” Mr. Bush said in Italy in 2009, explaining his attitude about the relationship between religion and politics at a conference associated with Communion and Liberation, a conservative Catholic lay movement.

For a ‘conservative’ Catholic movement, Pope Francis sure seems to honor Communion and Liberation’s leading lights, especially those that help them “rediscover a no-moralizing way of being Christians.”

“In the United States, many people think you need to keep your faith, put it in a security box, if you’re an elected official — put it in a safety deposit box until you finish your service as a public servant and then you can go get it back,” he added. “I never felt that was appropriate.”

For a man who likes to wear his faith on his sleeve, so to speak, he sure seems to agree with the Catholic Bishops a lot on politics.  What’s so Catholic about that?  What’s conservative about it?  What’s even Republican about it?

Don’t worry though.  At least he might seem a bit more Catholic than Pope Francis.  He knows when to go to Holy Communion.

D. Michael McCarron, who at the time was the executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, recalled seeing Mr. Bush with his wife during a Mass in Tallahassee in the late 1980s, when Mr. Bush was Florida’s secretary of commerce. “At the time he was not a Catholic, and I was struck by the fact that he would not take communion, which is appropriate, and I just observed him kneeling and praying,” Mr. McCarron said.

Look at that!  He still became Catholic anyway after being unmercifully rejected and denied by lawmakers who destroy.

“I love the sacraments of the Catholic Church, the timeless nature of the message of the Catholic Church, the fact that the Catholic Church believes in, and acts on, absolute truth as its foundational principle and doesn’t move with the tides of modern times, as my former religion did,” he said in the speech in Italy in 2009. (Asked by email recently what his concerns were, he said only: “I loved the absolute nature of the Catholic Church. It resonated with me.”)

That was then.  This is now.  It’s a whole new Catholic world apparently.  Will Jeb stick or move?

As Florida Governor Bush heard from the bishops occasionally, but they had much in common.  He even crossed notorious St. Petersburg Bishop Robert Lynch, if only just a bit.

“I appreciate the Catholic Conference’s sincere commitment to advancing public policy that complies with the teachings of our Lord,” the governor wrote in an email to Bishop Robert N. Lynch of St. Petersburg. “I hope you know that I try to do the same. When we seldom disagree, it makes me very, very uncomfortable. Having said that, I will continue to do what I think is right.”

For the most part however, Jeb Bush seems to be a presidential candidate the U.S. Bishops can stand behind.  For that matter, perhaps so can the Times.

I’d watch my back, Mr. Bush.

Those disputes notwithstanding, Mr. Bush has received praise from Catholic leaders. Last year, he visited New York to help raise money for Catholic schools, attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and won plaudits from Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who interviewed Mr. Bush on his radio program and then talked about him on “Face the Nation” on CBS

“I like Jeb Bush a lot,” Cardinal Dolan said in the television appearance. “I especially appreciate the priority he gives to education and immigration.”

There’s a ringing endorsement!