While the math-challenged Rudy Giuliani eagerly tallies foiled terror attacks worldwide ("it's about 21, 22, something like that, the last time we counted, which means about one every four months. So this is a very persistent enemy," he told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Monday) I just want to return to the matter of Giuliani's moral character and religiosity for a moment.
As mentioned in a previous dispatch, the former mayor early last month pointedly declined to answer an Associated Press candidate survey on whether and how frequently he goes to church. Giuliani was the only presidential hopeful to so respond. "The mayor's personal relationship with God is private and between him and God," was how his campaign put it at the time.
Yeah, and the Pope's Jewish.
It is likely that Giuliani, who projects himself as The Catholic Candidate, and was described by the Washington Post recently as "devout," actually has been barred from playing a public role of any sort in the church -- such as receiving Holy Communion or Confession -- because his personal conduct has been and remains far out of step with traditional Catholic teachings.
Giuliani doesn't seem to attend church much or at all, and his only ties with the religion with which he strongly identifies -- during political campaigns that is -- are through a scandal-tainted childhood friend. Not Bernie Kerik this time, but rather a discredited monsignor, Alan Placa, stripped of his priestly duties, who shows up on the Giulani Partners payroll and presumably at the office.
Placa, as has been reported most recently by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice, has been charged with sexually groping boys as a Long Island priest and with covering up allegations of other priests' sexual misconduct over a decade. As with the embarrassing spectacle of Homeland Security nominee Bernie Kerik's plunge from the heights to which Giuliani elevated him, loyalty for this White House hopeful trumps all else.
It was Placa who steered through the annulment of Giuliani's first marriage to Regina Peruggi in 1982, allowing Giuliani to wed his second wife, Donna Hanover, with the blessings of the church. Though Placa was best man at the Giuliani-Peruggi wedding in 1968, he would conclude years later that the couple needed the church's dispensation to marry because they were second cousins. They never received this special permission, Placa reasoned, so the Giuliani-Peruggi marriage was never permissible in the eyes of the church in the first place -- a legalistic loophole that is typical in Rudy World. Giuliani divorced Hanover after two children, three mayoral campaigns, and 14 years of relationship work. He took the hand of his third and present wife, Judith Nathan, in a civil ceremony at Gracie Mansion, the traditional mayoral residence, in 2002. The church was not invited.
While Giuliani was once regularly seen at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral along with other high-powered New Yorkers at the Mass on Christmas Eve, he was absent for the last one while reportedly in the city. This May, the New York Daily News quoted Father Joseph Marabe, who oversees St. Patrick's, as saying that if Giuliani "comes to my church, he would be refused communion," a statement he later clarified by stating Giuliani would be advised not to take communion in order to protect himself from embarrassment. The New York Times reported last month that he walked out of a Mass in Washington, D.C., before communion.
A loyal supporter of Giuliani told me the leader of the New York Roman Catholic Archdiocese, Cardinal Edward Egan, has informed the ex-mayor that he may not receive communion. According to this source, Cardinal Egan's decision was delivered privately, as he doesn't engage publicly in what might be perceived as political moves rather than as religiously motivated actions. The source attributed the cardinal's cold shoulder to both Giuliani's remarriages and his firmly pro-choice position (if anyone still doubts Rudy's previously hard support for abortion rights, they should read Wayne Barrett's front-page piece in the June 27-to-July 3 issue of the Voice, "No Wafer for Rudy," in which he notes among other things that the mayor hosted celebrations of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade three times at city hall). The archdiocese has not commented on any of this.
For conservative voters in particular to understand Giuliani's suspect status within the church as he now trolls in search of the Catholic swing vote, they need to look beyond the Sept. 11, 2001 Rudy to confront the Giuliani of May 10, 2000. The latter is the man they'll really be electing if they help to make him the Republican Party's standard bearer in 2008.
It was on May 10, 2000 when Giuliani stunned reporters to silence, myself included, in announcing that he and his wife were headed to Splitsville. Though typically quick to verbally slap down any reporter who asked about the rumors of his messy private life, he declared his love for Judith Nathan, and spoke solemnly about his desire to protect their children, then ages 10 and 14. Here was the problem right off the bat: he hadn't bothered to tell Hanover any of this first. Two days later, he took Nathan on a stroll up Second Avenue in Manhattan, permitting photographers to take pictures of them. It was just in time for Mother's Day weekend, so the love stroll didn't square with his professed concern for his children, who to this day have taken their mother's side.
In the ugly divorce case that ensued, Rudy attacked his estranged wife through his matrimonial attorney Raoul Felder. Felder, ironically, would wind up appointed to the mayor's "decency commission" to screen art exhibits in city-supported museums. Giuliani created it after attempting, in the middle of his circus-like Senate race against Hillary Clinton, to shutter the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a painting of the Virgin Mary he branded offensive.
"Bill Clinton may have embarrassed his family," writes Michael Tomasky in a well-reasoned cover story in The American Prospect (May, 2007), "but Rudy Giuliani humiliated his."
As Tomasky recalls, May 10, 2000 was immediately preceded by Giuliani's self-defeating assault against the character of the unarmed, fatal victim of a police shooting fiasco, Patrick Dorismond that March; the stinging declaration by Hanover, who had once campaigned at her husband's side, that she would appear in The Vagina Monologues; the May 8 exposure of Giuliani's extramarital liaison with Nathan by The New York Post -- on the same day, as it happened, that Egan predecessor Cardinal John O'Connor died -- as well as the mayor's diagnosis of prostate cancer. Giuliani went to O'Connor's funeral and sat by himself in the presence of the Clintons, the Gores, the Bushes, and the Patakis and their respective spouses.
On that morning of May 10, the leading statewide Republican office holder, state Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno, pleaded angrily through the press that Giuliani get his personal affairs straightened out and concentrate on his Senate campaign, which was floundering in the sea of his personal difficulties and public statements.
So Giuliani used his famous press conference at Bryant Park that day to, in effect, respond to Bruno's call for some sanity on his part. It had the opposite effect, however. A shaken Donna Hanover emerged from Gracie Mansion late that afternoon with intimations of yet another Giuliani extramarital affair, "with one staff member," an apparent reference to his then-communications director, with whom he was once seen buying a dress (for her, that is, despite his penchant for performing in drag).
As for the Giuliani-Nathan affair, it had been going on under the radar since the summer, although how Rudy and Judi met remains to this day a mystery. The police-protected Giuliani spent summer weekends at Judith's condo in the Hamptons while his wife struggled to keep their family together and to reconcile.
This, then, is how Giuliani treats his foes, family, friends, and allies. He makes life-long enemies of those who get too close to him, and sticks by suspect characters like Kerik and Placa.
Are "Character Counts" conservatives so cynical, or desperate, that they'll support these type of pathologies, let alone his somersaults on social issues?
For those who say it's his positions on policy issues that really matter, well, sure, but what are they? While he beats his chest on terrorism on a daily basis, he refused this week to fill out the New York Daily News' perfunctory "Candidate Challenge" feature that asked White House hopefuls for their opinion on a number of questions. Giuliani's refusal smacked of the familiar -- his desire to shun or scorn anything he can't directly control. Or, perhaps, his pettiness: The political sympathies of Mort Zuckerman, publisher of The News, a paper that virtually canonized Giuliani for his performance on 9/11, and that is the traditional voice of New York's working- and middle-class Catholics, are now said to lie with Hillary Rodham Clinton.