Santorum injecting faith into presidential discussion
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Former Sen. Rick Santorum
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WASHINGTON -- In trying to become the second Roman Catholic president of the United States, Rick Santorum will seek to refute a key campaign plank of the first.
Fifty years after John F. Kennedy gave a landmark speech addressing his faith and the need to separate church and state, Mr. Santorum will speak today in Houston about the need for an increased role for religion in public life.
The former Penn Hills resident and two-term U.S. senator is publicly weighing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. For the last year he has traveled extensively across the country -- including key early primary states Iowa (five trips), New Hampshire (four trips) and South Carolina (four trips) -- raising his national profile before conservative audiences.
Central to Mr. Santorum's national reputation are his outspoken conservative Christian views and strong stances while in the Senate against abortion and same-sex marriage.
In the same city where Mr. Kennedy delivered his famous speech to the Houston Ministerial Association, Mr. Santorum will speak tonight to an audience at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic liberal arts school.
The speech is titled "A Charge to Revive the Role of Faith in the Public Square" and billed as a "challenge" to Mr. Kennedy's remarks a half-century ago. Mr. Santorum was not made available for an interview about the speech.
The event was organized through the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a group that applies Judeo-Christian values to public policy. Mr. Santorum is a senior fellow at the center, and in 2007 established its Program to Protect America's Freedom, which examines anti-American and anti-Western threats throughout the world.
Mr. Santorum, who lost his seat to Sen. Bob Casey by a wide margin in 2006, writes a weekly email newsletter for the group called "The Gathering Storm."
First Published September 9, 2010 12:00 am
