Religion and Rudy

This week, the campaign of Rudy Giuliani curiously refused to say whether or how frequently he goes to church.

"The mayor's personal relationship with God is private and between him and God," the campaign wrote in reply to an Associated Press survey of presidential candidates in both parties, reported June 6 by Newsday.

Is he worried that if he replies, lighting will crackle as it did during the Manchester, N.H., debate on June 5 when Wolf Blitzer asked Giuliani about a Roman Catholic bishop's broadside against his abortion rights position? Along with Giuliani's left-of-center record on abortion, gay marriage and immigration, two failed marriages, extra-marital dalliances, and criticism of his family values by his own children, the candidate's unique silence in the face of the Associated Press survey is the kind of thing that could complicate his front-runner status as Republican voters get to know him.

Does he possess a reliable spiritual compass? Is he a genuine church-goer? Many white evangelical Protestants in swing states such as Florida, and others on the Religious Right who are currently cottoning to his confrontational stance on fighting terrorism and spreading democracy (in the apparent belief that George W. Bush's missionary foreign policy should be continued since it has worked such magic in Iraq), may well want to know more about his religiosity down the line.

The public record shows that Giuliani, a Catholic with a parochial school background (as he highlighted in Manchester), has a greater appetite for Scotch and cigars than for prayer and reconciliation, and, in fact, does not shy from interjecting religion into the campaign arena when it suits his political needs of the moment.

Best known in this regard is his past attempt to close down the venerable Brooklyn Museum of Art for an exhibition of contemporary art he termed "sick" and anti-Catholic. That acid furor occurred just in time for the 2000 Senate race against Hillary Clinton, when thousands of Roman Catholic voters were up for grabs in upstate New York.

The rush to penalize the Brooklyn Museum went nowhere in court, as expected, while his subsequent handpicked committee to screen art in city-funded institutions -- to which Giuliani even appointed his divorce lawyer -- proved about as effective as Giuliani's much-ballyhooed and well-funded tirades and antics aimed at his comparatively cool and dignified Senate rival, Clinton.

Back in 1997, while running for re-election to city hall against Democratic nominee Ruth Messinger, Giuliani sharply faulted his opponent after she missed a prominent Columbus Day Mass in Manhattan. He suggested that politicians should be judged by whether they attend a religious service.

Messinger is Jewish; she missed the mass because she delivered a speech on Judaism to a Jewish organization headed by a Guiliani supporter that morning.

Catholic and Jewish leaders responded that the mayor had gone too far with his statement. One commentator, former Gov. Mario Cuomo -- he had lost his bid for re-election three years earlier in spite of Giuliani's endorsement -- said, "We should not be requiring people of other religions, or people of our religion, to attend Mass as proof of their religions."

But Giuliani, who was in the throes of running a characteristically petty and vindictive campaign, unburdened by substance or specifics, offered what amounted to, at best, a half-hearted apology for his grubby religious attack.