Rudy Giuliani: Catholic Prodigal Son
Rudy Giuliani faces an uphill battle in the 2008 Presidential election to win over traditional Christian values voters given his record on abortion and same-sex marriage.
Introduction
While the general election is still more than a year away, the 2008 presidential campaign is already in full swing. Both parties have had televised debates and the candidates are staking out their positions. Today Faith and Action continues its series on the religious background of each of the presidential candidates.
This third article looks at former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The first two articles in the series examined Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. As we will see, Giuliani shares some of the two Senators’ liberal policy stances. Clinton and Obama, however, are both members of liberal churches. There is no contradiction between what they hear in the pulpit on Sunday and how they vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Giuliani speaks openly about being a lifelong Catholic. Yet his equally open support for abortion and the homosexual lifestyle fly in the face of his church’s teachings.
This article examines the early influences that shaped Giuliani’s Catholic faith and his subsequent religious walk. We are not out to explore his economic, social or foreign policies, except where they explicitly intersect with his faith. We did look at his legislative record, but only in the light of what it tells us about his religious beliefs.
Early Life
Rudy Giuliani was born into a Catholic family and his thinking was shaped by his Catholic education. The devotion evidenced in his early years, however, evaporated into a liberal lifestyle and policy stances. Giuliani has never spoken about any one, sudden experience that caused him to abandon the traditional Catholicism of his youth. Rather, his is the story of a gradual erosion of faith and values.
Rudolph William Louis Giuliani was born May 28, 1944. He was the only child of Harold and Helen Giuliani. They named their son for his paternal grandfather Rodolfo Giuliani, who emigrated from Italy to America at the beginning of the twentieth century.[1]
The Catholic Giulianis had their son baptized at the St Francis of Assisi Church in Brooklyn on July 2, 1944.[2]
Giuliani recalls that, “while neither of my parents was particularly devout, they both felt deeply the Church’s message of experiencing grace by giving to others. That commitment filtered down to me.”[3]
Looking back on his childhood, Giuliani credits his mother Helen with instilling a strong work ethic in him. She taught him to always finish his homework before going out to play. Giuliani remembers his father Harold as being committed to helping the needy. “My father was always helping people, trying to find a job for a neighbor of taking a relative to the hospital.”[4]
While his parents were not devout, Giuliani received extensive instruction in the teachings of the Catholic Church through his schooling. After the Giuliani family moved to Long Island in 1951, Rudy attended St. Anne’s Catholic School. Students wore uniforms and followed strict rules of conduct. The teachers were all nuns and each day commenced with the reciting of prayers and the pledge of allegiance.[5]
Giuliani took his first communion during this time. To prepare for the momentous event, St. Anne’s students were required to study the Baltimore Catechism.[6] It features questions like “From whom do we learn to know, love and serve God?"
Answer: “We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches through the Catholic Church.”[7]
In 1957 Giuliani enrolled at the prestigious, all-boys Bishop Loughlin Memorial High school. He earned admission by passing a competitive entrance exam. Like St. Anne’s, Bishop Loughlin had strict rules of conduct. The school was run by a French order of the Christian Brothers. The instructor began each class by saying, “Let us remember that we are in the holy presence of God.”[8] The school emphasized patriotism as an important part of Catholic faith. Classrooms usually featured both a crucifix and an American flag. One of Giuliani’s Loughlin classmates recalls that:
The talk from the brothers was about God and country. Work hard and you can get the American dream. They’d yell these things at you, and you believed in it. You'd get one side of an issue, and they'd say, that's the way it is. There was never a debate on, say, abortion. It was just wrong. You were given the Catholic view. It was not an open debate.[9]
Giuliani appears to have taken his school’s teachings to heart. He went above and beyond mandatory religious activities. He hung a crucifix in his bedroom at home. He participated in several of the school’s religious extracurricular activities, even helping evangelize in poor neighborhoods.[10]
Giuliani’s time at Bishop Loughlin is also significant because he met his life long friend and confidant Alan Placa there. They shared a passion for debating, particularly about religious issues. Both wanted to serve the needy and intended to join the priesthood. Giuliani says:
All through high school (at Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn), I would discuss religion and notions of service with one of my teachers, Brother Kevin, and with my friend Alan Placa. At the end of my time there, I signed up to enter for Montfort Fathers (in Bay Shore, Long Island), a religious order devoted to serving in the poorest countries. Alan was going to join the Christian Brothers. I wasn’t going to do anything halfway: if I was going to become a priest, I was going to help out the most underprivileged I could find. I remember thinking I would probably end up in Haiti or Africa.[11]
Giuliani’s desire to become a priest was probably not supported by his parents. Alan Placa recalls that when he told Harold and Helen Giuliani he was enrolling in seminary, Harold told Placa, “Sweetheart, you're not so ugly you couldn't get married, and you're not so dumb you couldn't get a job. Why would you ever want to be a priest?”[12]
As the time to enroll in seminary approached, though, Giuliani realized celibacy might present him with some difficulties:
But then, as June turned to July, I realized I had a problem: my budding interest in the opposite sex was something that wouldn’t be suppressed. I thought, maybe I’m just not ready. I enrolled in Manhattan College hoping that perhaps I’d be better prepared for celibacy after a couple of years.[13]
Manhattan College was an all-male, Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers. Students said prayers at 9 a.m. and noon each day. Rules were still strict, but there was more freedom than at Bishop Loughlin.[14]
In the spring of his freshman year, still struggling with whether or not to enter the priesthood, Giuliani and Placa attended a religious retreat at an ultra-strict Trappist Monastery in Massachusetts. Placa said, “The idea of people so thoroughly dedicated to a life of order stunned us both.”[15] Placa went on to enter the priesthood. Giuliani, however, “was already dating, I knew that a religious vocation was not for me.”[16]
This decision did not immediately change Giuliani’s lifestyle. He was not known to participate in the partying or political protests that characterized the college experience of many of his contemporaries. According to Placa, Giuliani “didn’t think it [protesting] was an effective way to make a point.”[17]
Legal Career
At Manhattan College, Giuliani began to focus increasingly on his passion for debate. After graduating in 1965, he enrolled at the secular New York University School of Law. Once out of a Catholic setting, Giuliani also seemed to move away from a Catholic worldview. He saw law in more general religious terms, rather than specifically Catholic ones. For instance, he began to believe that:
[Democracy’s] invention was predicated on ideas developed by the great religions. Judaism contributed the notion that God and man enjoy a dialogue, and this leads on naturally to the idea that individuals are worth the Creator’s time, that they’re worthwhile. For Christians, God actually became a human being. It’s an extraordinary idea: we humans were so valuable that God wanted to walk among us. Christianity spread because other people saw what it did to the lives of Christians. When nonbelievers threw early Christians to the lions, they were stunned by the peace with which the victims accepted their fate. The early martyrs were a tremendous advertisement for the ideas of Christianity. In the same way, Martin Luther King’s stand against racism and his use of non-violence were extraordinarily powerful witnesses to the dignity of human beings. It held a mirror up to Americans. It showed them the distinction they were making between their promise of equality and the practice of racism. I began to see law as a way of giving embodiment to the best ideas man has had.[18]
Giuliani graduated with a Juris Doctorate in 1968. That same year he married his second cousin Regina Peruggi in a traditional Catholic ceremony.
Over the next two decades, Giuliani rose steadily in the legal profession. He began by clerking for Judge Lloyd MacMahon.[19] He also worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office of New York. He did two separate stints at the Department of Justice under Ford and Reagan. He spent several years in private practice. In 1983 he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He quickly gained fame for high profile prosecutions of mafia figures and white-collar criminals.[20] He parlayed his reputation as a tough, no-nonsense prosecutor into a bid for Mayor in 1989. He lost to David Dinkins by a narrow margin. He returned to private practice until 1993 when he ran for Mayor again. This time he was elected.[21]
Marriage and Family
At his inauguration in 1993, the woman by his side was his second wife Donna Hanover. Giuliani and Regina Peruggi had divorced in 1982. They obtained both a civil divorce and a Catholic annulment. Giuliani was able to have his first marriage annulled because he and Peruggi were second cousins. The Church requires special dispensations to be obtained before such marriages may be performed. Giuliani claimed he had not requested a special dispensation because he thought Peruggi was only his third cousin.
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