President Donald Trump’s impeachment is underway in the U.S. Senate, something that has dominated news coverage in recent days and will continue to do so.
While Trump is at the center of the Senate trial, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is a key figure in all of this as well. Once called “America’s mayor” for the leadership he exhibited after the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani served as Trump’s personal lawyer and, according to evidence compiled by Democrats, is responsible for the alleged shenanigans involving Ukraine and the request for an investigation into Joe Biden and his family.
Giuliani is a complicated figure. A lot has been written about him over the past three decades — some good, but also plenty of bad — regarding the impact he had as mayor all the way to the present day. While his politics and tactics are rightly scrutinized, a lot of information linked to his private life is often glossed over. Among the largest things that has been ignored is Rudy’s faith.
The pros at The New York Times Magazine, in a cover story this past Sunday, featured a cartoon of Giuliani under the headline: “The Fog of Rudy: Did he change — or did America?” The piece tried to dig into Giuliani’s mind — with the help of responses to 65 statements the former mayor provided in writing — and why populism has taken over the current body politic.
In a way, the piece is reminiscent of another Times feature — this one on media mogul Rupert Murdoch last year — where religion (again Catholicism) seemed to be missing (tmatt took on the subject in a blog post).
This Giuliani piece by Jonathan Mahler also lacked religion — although two of Giuliani’s answers did include his Catholic faith. Mahler did include them as footnotes (as he did with all of the former mayor’s quotes), but largely ignored them in his news feature that read more like an opinion essay.
This was a lost opportunity to examine the complicated crossroads between politics and faith that has dominated Giuliani’s public life. Here’s where the statements make an appearance in the piece:
Giuliani was shameless, but he also understood the power of shame: He was educated at Catholic schools through Manhattan College and has said that it was the prospect of celibacy that kept him from the priesthood. As a crusading prosecutor, he made a habit of publicly humiliating his targets, in one instance having Wall Street executives perp-walked across trading floors, in another calling the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge, Hortense Gabel, to the stand to testify against her mother. As mayor, he leaked the juvenile record of a black security guard, Patrick Dorismond, who had been fatally shot by an undercover detective. (‘‘He’s no altar boy,’’ Giuliani said of Dorismond, who had, in fact, been an altar boy.)
This paragraph was appended with two footnotes. Footnote number seven read as follows:
“I just came to realize that it would be a struggle. I even thought of converting to Anglicanism because their priests can be married, but decided my loyalty was to Roman Catholicism.”
The second footnote, number eight in the piece, read as follows:
“The usual racial gangsters were spinning that he was an altar boy and small civil disturbances were emerging. So by putting out his true record, the false sympathy abated and the City was saved from a riot. My predecessor had two major riots, I had none. Also your privacy interest ends with death and you can release records in the interests of justice. Preventing a riot is in the interests of justice.”
That Giuliani was educated in Catholic schools (he attended Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. and Manhattan College, both schools run by Christian Brothers) isn’t news. That he considered Anglicanism so he could become a priest and marry is. Did his political conservatism later in life have anything to do with his faith? We don’t know because the piece fails to delve into it further. Remember that saying here at GetReligion: Politics is real. Religion? Not so much.
Stories about Giuliani also love to make mention of the Dorismond shooting and how both had attended the same school, albeit at different times. Again, this was a chance to delve deeper into a nugget of Rudy’s life that is often alluded to.
A 2015 piece in Commonweal magazine by Paul Moses, a former Newsday editor and a religion writer, did a great job giving some Catholic context to Giuliani’s life and actions, a piece that could have been helpful in framing the recent Times feature.
Here are the key paragraphs from that essay that started off with Giuliani going after then-President Barack Obama:
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
What makes me cringe is that I suspect Giuliani is referring in some measure to his Catholic upbringing. From the time I met him in 1983 as a young AP reporter covering him on the Manhattan federal court beat, I’ve observed how that upbringing was a part of him.
It is something he often has spoken of, and it shaped his approach as New York City mayor in dealing with police, schools, museums that exhibit paintings of the Virgin Mary speckled with elephant dung, and many other areas (except for abortion, on which he reversed field). “The first time I attended a class in which a prayer wasn’t said at the beginning of class was my first day at NYU Law School,” Giuliani said while campaigning for president in 2007.
When Giuliani was a prosecutor, the columnist Murray Kempton likened him to Savonarola, and indeed Giuliani was the scourge of evil in organized crime, on Wall Street and in government. I admired this pursuit of evildoers for a short while, until I began to see the consequences his hardball tactics held for the public at large.
Giuliani’s Catholic upbringing came to the fore in his finest moment, as he responded to the 9/11 attack, and he saw Catholic education as playing an important role in the city’s response. In a speech at Manhattan College marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11 he praised the police officers and firefighters who responded, not only for bravery but “also incredible love, a tremendous demonstration of love that you would stand your ground knowing that you could die because you could save other people. And many of them, not all of them, were taught that love in Catholic education.”
Giuliani had his Catholicism become a focus in the past, especially during his unsuccessful run for president in 2008. It was during that primary run, eventually won by John McCain, that Giuliani said he considered himself a “traditional, practicing Roman Catholic.”
At the time, Giuliani, during an Iowa townhall meeting in August 2007, said the following: “My religious affiliation, my religious practices and the degree to which I am a good or not so good Catholic, I prefer to leave to the priests," Giuliani said. "That would be a much better way to discuss it. That's a personal discussion and they have a much better sense of how good a Catholic I am or how bad a Catholic I am.”
Giuliani has now been married three times — like Trump — and recently divorced from Judi Nathan after allegedly having an affair. That Giuliani was pro-abortion-rights, supported same-sex civil unions and embryonic stem cell research did not come up in the Times feature. In his post-mayoral years, Giuliani became more politically conservative, something that likely has more to do with electability in New York than his Catholic faith.
Last month, Giuliani said in a New York Magazine article that he was more of a Jew than philanthropist, atheist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, a controversial statement that garnered lots of media attention.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him. Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is,” said Giuliani. “I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist D.A.’s in the United States.”
Giuliani has never shied away from religion.
Unfortunately, many reporters who have covered him recently have. That’s given us only a partial portrait of a man who remains full of contradictions — and one who’s actions could ultimately result in the removal of a president.