“I remember discussions about how it’s not always clear what the right choice is,” said Amy Pierce, a classmate of Santorum’s.
Mullaugh said Santorum absorbed those ideas.
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“He just seemed to be so serious,” he said. “Such a serious kid.”
Finding clarity
Santorum’s first turn away from the gray-area Catholicism of his youth came when he met his future wife, Garver, around 1988.
She had only recently ended a six-year relationship with an obstetrician and abortion provider 40 years her senior. Her relationship with Tom Allen — who delivered her in 1960 — had led her to drift from her devoutly Catholic family.
Santorum, a lawyer moving toward his first campaign for Congress, described himself as “a nominal Catholic” at the time.
“I didn’t like the idea of abortion — I knew it was wrong, but I wasn’t sure if it was the government’s business to do anything about it,” he wrote in his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family.”
Then came a dinner at the home of Garver’s parents, and a discussion about abortion, and then, recalled her mother, Betty Lee Garver, “we had them watch a tape that we had, called ‘Meet the Abortion Providers.’ ”
In the video, people introduced as doctors and nurses who formerly performed abortions graphically described the procedures, their words accompanied by photographs of what appeared to be dismembered fetuses in trash cans.
“They just sat there crying,” Betty Lee Garver said in a brief interview at her Pittsburgh home. “And they became instantly pro-life. . . . With this and when they started to have children, they started to think more about their faith. I think through the years maybe they watched us,” she said, referring to herself and her husband. “And we are devout Catholics, not cafeteria Catholics.”
Santorum has said that switch to being firmly opposed to abortion had to do with his reading of scientific literature, but also with his religion.
In the Senate, he crusaded against what some opponents call “partial-birth” abortion, saying in a 1996 floor speech that there must be “some sort of moral code in this country.”
At the time, Karen Santorum was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child and began to develop serious complications. Their son Gabriel was born prematurely and died two hours later. They took him home and buried him the next day.
Betty Lee Garver said the loss caused her son-in-law to “go deeper” in his faith. And in the years after, both he and Karen spoke of “God’s purpose” in Gabriel’s short life.
In Karen Santorum’s 1998 book, “Letters to Gabriel,” she includes a kind of exhortation to her husband, writing: “Your daddy needs to proclaim God’s message for life with even more strength and devotion to the cause.”
A ‘turn away from God’
That same year, Rick Santorum met McCloskey, the Opus Dei priest, and began to assert his faith more publicly.
He started a prayer group in the Senate. McCloskey enlisted Santorum’s help in converting then-Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to Catholicism. And in 2002, Santorum traveled with McCloskey to Rome for the conference on Escriva.
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