Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 7:56 pm by Guest Contributor

Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective 2015-04-29T19:56:01-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Following is the text of an address by Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York on “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective,” delivered September 13, 1984, as a John A. O’Brien Lecture in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Theology.

I would like to begin by drawing your attention to the title of this lecture: “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective.” I was not invited to speak on “Church and State” generally. Certainly not “Mondale vs. Reagan.” The subject assigned is difficult enough. I will try not to do more than I’ve been asked.

It’s not easy to stay contained. Certainly, although everybody talks about a wall of separation between church and state, I’ve seen religious leaders scale that wall with all the dexterity of olympic athletes. In fact, I’ve seen so many candidates in churches and synagogues that I think we should change election day from Tuesdays to Saturdays and Sundays.

I am honored by this invitation, but the record shows that I am not the first Governor of New York to appear at an event involving Notre Dame. One of my great predecessors, Al Smith, went to the Army – Notre Dame football game each time it was played in New York.

His fellow Catholics expected Smith to sit with Notre Dame; protocol required him to sit with Army because it was the home team. Protocol prevailed. But not without Smith noting the dual demands on his affections. “I’ll take my seat with Army,” he said, “but I commend my soul to Notre Dame!”

Today I’m happy to have no such problem. Both my seat and my soul are with Notre Dame. And as long as Father McBrien doesn’t invite me back to sit with him at the Notre Dame – St. John’s basketball game, I’m confident my loyalties will remain undivtded.

In a sense, it’s a question of loyalty that Father McBrien has asked me here today to discuss. Specifically, must politics and religion in America divide our loyalties? Does the “separation between church and state” imply separation between religion and politics? Between morality and government? Are these different propositions? Even more specifically, what is the relationship of my Catholicism to my politics? Where does the one end and other begin? Or are the two divided at all? And if they’re not, should they be?

Hard questions.

No wonder most of us in public life — at least until recently — preferred to stay away from them, heeding the biblical advice that if “hounded and pursued in one city,” we should flee to another.

Now, however, I think that it is too late to flee. The questions are all around us, and answers are coming from every quarter. Some of them have been simplistic, most of them fragmentary, and a few, spoken with a purely political intent, demagogic.

There has been confusion and compounding of confusion, a blurring of the issue, entangling it in personalities and election strategies, instead of clarifying it for Catholics, as well as others.

Today I would like to try to help correct that.

I can offer you no final truths, complete and unchallengeable. But it’s possible this one effort will provoke other efforts — both in support and contradiction of my position — that will help all of us understand our differences and perhaps even discover some basic agreement.

In the end, I’m convinced we will all benefit if suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue; if the emphasis in our debate turns from a search for talismanic criteria and neat but simplistic answers to an honest — more intelligent — attempt at describing the role religion has in our public affairs, and the limits placed on that role.

And if we do it right — if we’re not afraid of the truth even when the truth is complex — this debate, by clarification, can bring relief to untold numbers of confused — even anguished — Catholics, as well as to many others who want only to make our already great democracy even stronger than it is.

I believe the recent discussion in my own State has already produced some clearer definition. In early summer, newspaper accounts had created the impression in some quarters that official church spokespeople would ask Catholics to vote for or against specific candidates on the basis of their political position on the abortion issue. I was one of those given that impression. Thanks to the dialogue that ensued over the summer — only partially reported by the media — we learned that the impression was not accurate.

Confusion had presented an opportunity for clarification, and we seized it. Now all of us are saying one thing — in chorus — reiterating the statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that they will not “take positions for or against political candidates” and that their stand on specific issues should not be perceived “as an expression of political partisanship.”

Of course the bishops will teach — they must — more and more vigorously and more and more extensively. But they have said they will not use the power of their position, and the great respect it receives from all Catholics, to give an imprimatur to individual politicians or parties.

Not that they couldn’t if they wished to — some religious leaders do; some are doing it at this very moment.

Not that it would be a sin if they did — God doesn’t insist on political neutrality. But because it is the judgment of the bishops, and most of us Catholic lay people, that it is not wise for prelates and politicians to be tied too closely together.

I think that getting this consensus was an extraordinarily useful achievement.

Now, with some trepidation and after much prayer, I take up your gracious invitation to continue the dialogue in the hope that it will lead to still further clarification.

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