Newsweek profiles Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal
Newsweek profiles Bobby Jindal -- Lousiana governor, rising GOP star (and Catholic convert):
Together, Jindal's adaptive instincts and intellectual drive fueled his conversion to Catholicism. At 12, an evangelical friend named Kent gave him a paperback Bible for Christmas. Raised in a "strong Hindu culture," Jindal considered himself "anti-Christian" and stashed it in a closet. But a crush, Kathy, soon convinced him to read the book "from cover to cover." Jindal gradually warmed to the Scriptures, and while watching a Passion film at Kent's church, he was suddenly "convicted" of his "sinfulness and [his] need for a savior." Most conversion narratives end there. But Jindal's doesn't. Ever the A student, he studied Kent's Bible "by flashlight" and even "learned bits of Latin, Greek and Hebrew." After a long stretch of soul searching, Jindal concluded that Protestantism lacked "scriptural cogency" and decided to become a strict Catholic instead. ("Bobby said he trusted God to put his own house in order," recalls Ahsanuddin.) Although critics have questioned the governor's motives—Hindu activist Ramesh Rao recently wrote that "Jindal knew well that [conversion] was the only way, as an Indian-American Hindu, he could achieve his political ambitions"—his deeply Catholic views, including a "100 percent" opposition to abortion "with no exceptions" for rape, incest or health of the mother, undoubtedly anger more voters than they attract. "If I wanted the aesthetics without the inconvenient morality," he wrote in 1998, "I could become Episcopalian."Nowhere is Jindal's commitment to Christianity more evident than in the 15 essays, Obama-esque in their self-scrutiny, that he published in the New Oxford Review and other Catholic journals between 1991 and 1998. In the most controversial, he details an amateur exorcism he witnessed at Brown. One day, a friend—called Susan in his 1994 account—confessed that she'd started seeing "visions" and smelling sulfur when doctors discovered a cancerous lump on her scalp; soon after, she fell to the floor at a prayer meeting and started "thrashing about." As Susan screamed "Bobby," the group pinned her down and chanted, "Satan, I command you to leave this woman." But Jindal was too terrified to "confront the demon." Eventually, the struggle subsided; Susan claimed she felt "healed." A short time later, surgeons removed the bump—and, according to Jindal, "found no traces of cancerous cells." The account has already raised eyebrows among skeptics who find it difficult to reconcile the governor's Brown biology degree with a belief in demonic possession—liberal bloggers, for example, now call Jindal "the Exorcist"—but he seems unfazed. "It's important to share your spiritual experiences with people who might benefit," he says. "There are a lot of things in this life that we won't understand, and that's OK. How do you explain the Sacraments? How do you explain the Resurrection? Those are hard concepts. So I didn't try to interpret it or declare what happened, because I don't know."
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Following the 2004 Presidential election, we've expanded our discussion to cover the public policy decisions of Catholics in public service on both sides of the political divide.
