Catholics, politics & abortion: my argument with Mario Cuomo

Listening to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry talk about his position on abortion ("We believe that what matters most is ... not narrow appeals that divide us, but shared values that unite us ..."), I hear loudly in the background the sonorous voice of Mario Cuomo, our foremost "philosopher-politician," as the Boston Globe has lately crowned him. It is twenty years since Cuomo delivered his famous speech at Notre Dame, in which he defined what has become the established rationale for prochoice Catholic politicians. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece on Kerry and the Catholic bishops ("A Political Sacrament," May 28, 2004), I dismissed that speech as a piece of "ancient sophistry." That brought a message from the former governor of New York urging me to reexamine his words. And so I have. I have also tracked Cuomo's statements on the abortion issue in this political season and discussed the matter with him by phone.

A whole new generation--including Senator Kerry--has come of political age since 1984, when Cuomo's speech was seen as a defense not only of his own prochoice politics but also those of Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic congresswoman from New York who was that year's Democratic candidate for vice president of the United States. Since then, Cuomo's apologia has been enshrined in books by and about him, highlighted in recent histories of American Catholicism by John T. McGreevy and Peter Steinfels, and echoed by the forty-eight members of Congress who recently asserted that "As Catholics we do not believe it is our role to legislate the teachings of the Catholic Church." It is, then, a kind of benchmark statement that is worth revisiting to see what his arguments were and whether they hold up.

Mario Cuomo, it should be recalled, served three terms as governor of New York. In 1984 there was talk of his running for president eventually, which later he nearly did. In the month or so before his Notre Dame speech he was the subject of a flattering cover story in Newsweek, to which I contributed a piece on Cuomo the Catholic. He had already been invited to Notre Dame to speak on the relationship between religion and politics when he happened to catch a Sunday morning interview with then-Archbishop John J. O'Connor on a local New York City TV channel. Under questioning, O'Connor said he could not see how a Catholic in good conscience could support abortion rights. When asked if excommunication should be leveled against any Catholic politician who did, O'Connor said he'd have to think that over. A thicker-skinned politician might have let the comment pass, especially one so casually made. But Cuomo took it as a personal challenge. At Notre Dame he would respond.

In his speech, the governor declared that as a Catholic and as a matter of conscience, he regarded abortion as "sinful." But this, he insisted, was his "private" view as an "obedient" Catholic raised in the "pre-Vatican II" church. As a politician and public official, however, Cuomo said, he was not obliged to work for laws that reflected Catholic "dogmas," citing among other examples the fact that the bishops themselves no longer sought through laws to oblige non-Catholics to observe church teachings on birth control. While acknowledging that abortion is a graver moral issue than contraception, Cuomo further argued that it would be both wrong and impractical to seek laws restricting abortion. He gave two reasons. First, such laws would oblige non-Catholics and Catholics who disagree with the church's teachings on abortion, thereby violating their religious freedom: "We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us." Second, since there is no public consensus in support of antiabortion legislation, any efforts to pass such laws would be divisive and unenforceable: "The values derived from religious belief will not--and should not--be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus."

At this point it is worth noting what Cuomo did not say, as well as what he did. Never once did he say that abortion was evil, intrinsically or otherwise. Never once did he say--as the bishops had, as he himself could have--that opposition to abortion as a matter of public morality is a defense of the human rights of the unborn. Never once did he say the abortion dispute is a disagreement over the scope of social justice. He did not say these things, and never has, I believe, because doing so would make his position difficult if not impossible to defend. He did not say these things, and never has, because, as I think his record makes clear, he does not believe them to be true.

In his book, A People Adrift, Peter Steinfels has cautioned against twisting Cuomo's argument "into the crude formula, 'I am personally opposed to abortion but I don't want to impose my view on others.'" In fact, Cuomo's argument strikes me as even cruder than that. It says that his reasons for thinking abortion "sinful" are not only "private" but sectarian as well. Thus, while formally rejecting the notion that Catholic opposition to abortion on demand (another phrase he avoids) violates separation of church and state, Cuomo advances a rationale (the church has told him so) that bolsters the case for advancing just such a charge. It was, withal, a carefully crafted speech. Cuomo sought to defend both his docility toward church teachings and his right--indeed, his duty--to act against them.