How Mario Cuomo Made the World Safe for Pro-Choice Catholics

[cbayer]

http://religiondispatches.org/how-mario-cuomo-made-the-world-safe-for-pro-choice-catholics/

BY PATRICIA MILLER JANUARY 2, 2015

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who passed away yesterday at 82, is being remembered as one of the last of the liberal lions before the Democratic Party was overtaken by “Third Way” Clintonism.

But Cuomo also deserves to be remembered as the Catholic politician who was willing to go toe-to-toe with the Catholic hierarchy at a critical moment for pro-choice Catholicism and in doing so help ensure that that designation wasn’t an oxymoron.

In the summer of 1984, during the run-up to the presidential election pitting President Ronald Reagan against former VP Walter Mondale, conservative elements of the Catholic hierarchy, most notably New York Archbishop John O’Connor, started to push back against attempts by Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to remove abortion as a point of leverage with Catholics for the Republican Party. Bernardin famously asserted that Catholics should consider all “life” issues—abortion, nuclear war, poverty—when considering which candidate to vote for.

But at a news conference in June, O’Connor seemed to throw the momentum back to the Republicans when he asserted that a Catholic “in good conscience cannot vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion,” in effect shredding Bernardin’s seamless garment just when Mondale had announced he had picked pro-choice Catholic Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

more at link

[edhopper]

1. A good man and a good governor

who lost his final election of on the bogus death penalty issue.

It also reminds me of anti-Gay bigot O'Connor. (Who was silent about the death penalty during that campaign, even though it is supposedly a Catholic issue)

[marym625]

2. I forgot about this

Thanks for the reminder. I love Bernardin too. No one in the US Roman Catholic Church anymore.

[hrmjustin]

3. A great man.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

[unrepentant progress]

4. The last real governor New York ever had

I absolutely despise his son though.