It Is Still A Terrible Thing to Fall Into The Hands of the Living God, part one

It was in January of 1983, just weeks after the first gubernatorial inauguration of Mario Matthew Cuomo, that I began a course in State and Local Government that I was teaching at Nassau Community College, Garden City, New York, with a no-holds-barred excoriation of the second straight "personally opposed to abortion but can't 'impose' morality" Catholic to serve as the Governor of the Empire State. Hugh Leo Carey, who repented in 1989 of his support for baby-killing under cover of the civil law (although this did not keep the late Mr. Carey from continue to endorse pro-aborts such as William Jeffeson Blythe Clinton, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.,, John Kerry or Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro), had been succeeded by the man who had served as his appointee in the position of New York State Secretary of State from January 1, 1975, to December 31, 1978, and his lieutenant governor from January 1, 1979, to December 31, 1982, the aforementioned Mario Cuomo.

My comments back in 1983 were pointed. I took no prisoners, explaining that a Catholic had an obligation to defend the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law at all times no matter what it might cost him in terms of human respect or career success. This prompted one student to say another, “He’s crazy. I have to transfer out of this class.” The student, however, stayed, coming to realize that his professor was not so crazy after all. He was baptized by a conciliar priest in June of 1986, although he had been actively involved as a member of the Hofstra University Pro-Life Group since the Fall Semester of 1984. (It is likely the case that my former student has reverted to "he's crazy" in reaction my rejection of conciliarism and its false doctrines, barren liturgical rites and endless stream of blasphemies and sacrileges. Obviously, there are a good many people who make up the "Droleskey is crazy" brigade.)

It was at this student’s invitation that I gave a number of well-attended talks at Hofstra University, including one that I gave on Monday, November 5, 1984, the day before that year’s presidential election, that refuted then Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo’s infamous address at the University of Notre Dame on Thursday, September 13, 1984, to justify his public position in support of the “legal right” a woman to kill her preborn child. My own address provided me with the opportunity to give other addresses in and around the Long Island area, and it was about nineteen months later that I was nominated for lieutenant governor of the State of New York by the Right to Life Party to run with Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon against Governor Mario Cuomo and his own lieutenant governor running-mate, then United States Representative Stanley Lundine (D-Jamestown, New York).

Although United States Senators Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware), Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and the aforementioned Governor Hugh Leo Carey (D-New York) championed the "personally opposed to abortion" hypocrisy before him, Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo to provide "intellectual and theological muscle" to the "I'm personally opposed to abortion" position in the address that he gave at the behest of Hartford's Mark of Apostasy, Father Richard P. McBrien, then the Chairman of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, on Thursday, September 13, 1984:

The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose.

We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.

This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experience in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a persuasive and dominant concern. . . .

As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created. We thought church doctrine was clear on this. Life or fetal life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine justices of the Supreme Court and my neighbor disagree with me. A fetus is different from an appendix or a set of tonsils. At the very least, even if the argument is made by some scientists or some theologians that in the early stages of fetal development we can’t discern human life, the full potential of human life is indisputably there. That—to my less subtle mind—by itself should demand respect, caution, indeed . . . reverence.

But not everyone in our society agrees.

And those who don’t—those who endorse legalized abortions—aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards. In many cases, the proponents of legal abortion are the very people who have worked with Catholics to realize the goals of social justice set out in papal encyclicals: the American Lutheran Church, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, B’nai B’rith Women, the Women of the Episcopal Church. There are just a few of the religious organizations that don’t share the church’s position on abortion.

Certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics, however sincere or severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers, no pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the church from criticism.

But if the breadth, intensity, and sincerity of opposition to church teaching shouldn’t be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can’t help but determine our ability—our realistic, political ability—to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don’t need it but for the believers who reject it.

And it is here, in our attempt to find a political answer to abortion—an answer beyond our private observance of Catholic morality— that we encounter controversy within and without the church over how and in what degree to press the case that our morality should be everybody else’s, and to what effect.

I repeat, there is no church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism. There is neither an encyclical nor a catechism that spells out a political strategy for achieving legislative goals.

And so the Catholic trying to make moral and prudent judgments in the political realm must discern which, if any, of the actions one could take would be best.  (American Rhetoric: Mario Cuomo --"Religious Belief and Public Morality.)

Apart from the disregard of the facts of biology that young attorney Mario Matthew Cuomo used to provide to groups before which he spoke as a representative of the Diocese of Brooklyn in the 1960s, Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo--Mario Pilate/Pontius Cuomo, an admirer of the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., had the audacity to refer to "our" morality when referring to the immutable and eternally binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law that proscribe the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being. God's laws apply to everyone without regard to whether anyone accepts them. Civil law must be conformed to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in all that pertains to the good of souls, and Catholics have the positive moral obligation to work in behalf of such a conformity. Catholics are not permitted to privately hold one thing while publicly speaking and acting in a contradictory manner.

Pope Leo XIII made this abundantly clear in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Pope Pius XI, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

End of argument. 

Along with other Catholic pro-aborts in public life, Cuomo supported the legal "right" of mothers to support the execution of their babies under cover of law, attempting to cover himself in a mantra of not seeking to "impose" "his" morality upon others, while doing precisely that when it came to the issue of capital punishment. Cuomo said that it was his moral duty as a Catholic to oppose capital punishment even though a majority of the citizens of the State of New York desired its restoration. What hubris. What incredible arrogance to consign the innocent preborn to cruel, merciless deaths under cover of law while criminals convicted of heinous crimes after the exhausting of the levers of due process of law are considered to be above the ultimate punishment for their crimes.

Cuomo was unbent in his support for abortion by the time that the pro-abortion Baptist, then Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, was nominated by the Democrat Party for President of the United States of America in 1992. Cuomo said the following in the principal nominating speech at Madison Square Garden in the City of New York in behalf of Clinton's nomination on July 15, 1992:

America needs Bill Clinton for still another reason. We need a leader who will stop the Republican attempt, through laws and through the courts, to tell us what god to believe in, and how to apply that god's judgment to our schoolrooms, our bedrooms and our bodies. (Nominating Speech by Mario M. Cuomo)

Cuomo was demagogic in his support of the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn, which included his signing into law measures passed by the New York State Legislature each year to fund such executions for impoverished women by means of taxpayer subsidies for the Medicaid program. Mario Cuomo forced those of us who were residents of the State of New York during the time of his governorship to become material cooperators in evil by means of the state’s confiscatory taxing powers. Although those of us opposed to baby-killing did not will the evil to be done with our tax monies, Cuomo saw to it that each of us who were New York taxpayers had to become involuntary participants in the slaughter of the preborn.

Obviously, our Federal taxpayer dollars have long supported the chemical slaughter of the innocent preborn by means of Title X domestic “family planning” programs and by means of the international funding of such chemical killings. Federal funds have also subsidized surgical baby-killings subsidized by Medicare in the so-called “hard cases” domestically and to subsidize the dismemberment of innocent children internationally both directly and indirectly.

Mario Matthew Cuomo, however, indignantly claimed a moral “high ground” as a Catholic by appealing to a “diversity of beliefs” about abortion in the name of “religious liberty.” What if one claimed during the Third Reich that it would be impossible to oppose Adolf Hitler’s eugenics program because of a “diversity of beliefs” about its morality?

As Pope Leo XIII noted in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

But with what bitterness and in how many guises war has been waged against the Church it would be ill-timed now to urge. From the fact that it has been vouchsafed to human reason to snatch from nature, through the investigations of science, many of her treasured secrets and to apply them befittingly to the divers requirements of life, men have become possessed with so arrogant a sense of their own powers as already to consider themselves able to banish from social life the authority and empire of God. Led away by this delusion, they make over to human nature the dominion of which they think God has been despoiled; from nature, they maintain, we must seek the principle and rule of all truth; from nature, they aver, alone spring, and to it should be referred, all the duties that religious feeling prompts. Hence, they deny all revelation from on high, and all fealty due to the Christian teaching of morals as well as all obedience to the Church, and they go so far as to deny her power of making laws and exercising every other kind of right, even disallowing the Church any place among the civil institutions of the commonweal. These men aspire unjustly, and with their might strive, to gain control over public affairs and lay hands on the rudder of the State, in order that the legislation may the more easily be adapted to these principles, and the morals of the people influenced in accordance with them. Whence it comes to pass that in many countries Catholicism is either openly assailed or else secretly interfered with, full impunity being granted to the most pernicious doctrines, while the public profession of Christian truth is shackled oftentimes with manifold constraints.

Under such evil circumstances therefore, each one is bound in conscience to watch over himself, taking all means possible to preserve the faith inviolate in the depths of his soul, avoiding all risks, and arming himself on all occasions, especially against the various specious sophisms rife among non-believers. In order to safeguard this virtue of faith in its integrity, We declare it to be very profitable and consistent with the requirements of the time, that each one, according to the measure of his capacity and intelligence, should make a deep study of Christian doctrine, and imbue his mind with as perfect a knowledge as may be of those matters that are interwoven with religion and lie within the range of reason. And as it is necessary that faith should not only abide untarnished in the soul, but should grow with ever painstaking increase, the suppliant and humble entreaty of the apostles ought constantly to be addressed to God: "Increase our faith.''

But in this same matter, touching Christian faith, there are other duties whose exact and religious observance, necessary at all times in the interests of eternal salvation, become more especially so in these our days. Amid such reckless and widespread folly of opinion, it is, as We have said, the office of the Church to undertake the defense of truth and uproot errors from the mind, and this charge has to be at all times sacredly observed by her, seeing that the honor of God and the salvation of men are confided to her keeping. But, when necessity compels, not those only who are invested with power of rule are bound to safeguard the integrity of faith, but, as St. Thomas maintains: "Each one is under obligation to show forth his faith, either to instruct and encourage others of the faithful, or to repel the attacks of unbelievers.'' To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth, is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe. In both cases such mode of behaving is base and is insulting to God, and both are incompatible with the salvation of mankind. This kind of conduct is profitable only to the enemies of the faith, for nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good. Moreover, want of vigor on the part of Christians is so much the more blameworthy, as not seldom little would be needed on their part to bring to naught false charges and refute erroneous opinions, and by always exerting themselves more strenuously they might reckon upon being successful. After all, no one can be prevented from putting forth that strength of soul which is the characteristic of true Christians, and very frequently by such display of courage our enemies lose heart and their designs are thwarted. Christians are, moreover, born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God aiding, the triumph: "Have confidence; I have overcome the world." Nor is there any ground for alleging that Jesus Christ, the Guardian and Champion of the Church, needs not in any manner the help of men. Power certainly is not wanting to Him, but in His loving kindness He would assign to us a share in obtaining and applying the fruits of salvation procured through His grace.

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

Mario Cuomo not only failed in this duty. He made war against the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. As indicated by his rhetoric at the Democratic National Convention in 1992, however, Cuomo had become a full-throated supporter of baby-killing under cover of the civil law, although he had the utter audacity to tell 1994 New York State Right to Life Party gubernatorial nominee Robert Walsh the following prior to a televised debate that included the Republican Party’s gubernatorial nominee, pro-abortion Catholic George Elmer Pataki, and the Independence Party’s nominee, pro-abortion Thomas B. Golisano (an entire, head-spinning piece could be written about this poor man’s claim to have been “always pro-life” even though he said in 1994 that he was “pro-choice” and has given millions of dollars to pro-abortion politicians and institutions): 

“Bob, I’m pro-life! I have to say I’m pro-choice in order to get elected." (Mr. Walsh asserted this in a presentation he gave to a graduate course on political parties that I was teaching at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University in the Fall of 1996.)

For a man who was “pro-life,” Mario Matthew Cuomo certainly excoriated those who criticized his support for baby-killing as a matter of public policy and as a protected “constitutional right.”

Moreover, Mario Matthew Cuomo was very pleased when his son was able to secure the passage of legislation that made possible the atrocity known as “gay marriage” four years ago, that is, in 2011:

Friends and associates of Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo privately predict difficult times ahead for the governor as he adjusts to the end of his unusually dependent relationship with his strong-willed father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, who died Thursday.

“Andrew holds most people in contempt, but that wasn’t true of his father, one of the few people he genuinely looked to and needed for positive reinforcement,’’ a longtime friend of the younger Cuomo told The Post.

Cuomo family intimates predicted over the weekend that Andrew — who reveled in his father’s praise when he won adoption of a gay-marriage law — will even more aggressively pursue a liberal agenda in his second term. (Cuomo faces difficult term after death of his father.)

Yes, Mario Matthew Cuomo supported the moral aberration of “gay marriage, congratulating his son for pushing the members of the New State Legislature to recognize “marriage equality” as a supposed “civil right.”

Yet it is that Mario Matthew Cuomo died as a Catholic in “good standing” on January 1, 2015, the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord and was accorded with a so-called “Mass of Christian Burial” at the Church of Saint Ignatius on Park Avenue in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York, on Tuesday, January 6, 2015, the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

“Yes, Mario Matthew Cuomo supported the moral aberration of “gay marriage, congratulating his son for pushing the members of the New State Legislature to recognize “marriage equality” as a supposed “civil right.”

Yet it is that Mario Matthew Cuomo died as a Catholic in “good standing” on January 1, 2015, the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord and was accorded with a so-called “Mass of Christian Burial” at the Church of Saint Ignatius on Park Avenue in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York, New York, on Tuesday, January 6, 2015, the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

“Father” Thomas Witt, S.J., the pastor of the Church of Saint Ignatius, praised the late Governor Cuomo effusively:

“Mario Cuomo ever communicated a spirit of inclusivity and care, a spirit of decency and uprightness that inspired love and respect,” said the Rev. George M. Witt, the pastor of St. Ignatius, where some of Cuomo’s five children are parishioners and several of his grandchildren have gone to school. “In the end, it was not so much the eloquence of his words that spoke to us but the eloquence of his life.” (Mario Cuomo laid to rest.)

Mario Cuomo “ever communicated inclusivity and care, a spirit of decency and uprightness,” “Father” Witt?

Go tell that to the innocent preborn, “Father” Witt. Where was Mario Matthew Cuomo’s “inclusivity and care,” “decency and uprightness” for the innocent victims of the great American genocide, “Father” Witt?

Mario Matthew Cuomo upheld the “right” of women to kill their babies up to and including the day of birth.

What kind of “inclusive” and “caring,” “decent and upright” man supports the slaughter of an innocent human being by means of various chemical pills and potions, by means of a vacuum machine twenty-nine times more powerful than the household vacuum cleaner, by means of saline solution poisoning or by means of surgical dismemberment, whether inside the mother’s womb or in the birth canal (as happens in “dilation and extraction” baby-killing, aka crushed skull abortion), “Father” Witt?

You say that Mario Matthew Cuomo was “inclusive and caring,” “decent and upright,” “Father” Witt?

How “decent” and “upright” was it, “Father” Witt, for Mario Matthew Cuomo to display his thin-skinned arrogance when auxiliary “bishop” Austin Vaughan, a man whose kindness and true Catholic charity for souls prompted him to warn then Governor Cuomo in 1991 that he risked for the fires of Hell because of his support for abortion under cover of the civil law?

Well, this imaginary interrogation of “Father” Thomas Witt is, of course, merely rhetorical. “Father” Witt has no sense of the eternal jeopardy that faced the thin-skinned, arrogant and dismissive demagogue he praised so lavishly two days ago now. “Bishop” Austin Vaughan, a man whose kindness and humility made an impression upon anyone who had the privilege of meeting him (as I did on several occasions), understood that Mario Matthew Cuomo was wrong and that he faced the strong possibility of eternal damnation for his expedient separation of supposedly “personal beliefs” from his duties as an elected official.

Although the late Father Austin Vaughan was not a true bishop, he was a true priest, and it was this priestly concern for the immortal soul of Mario Matthew Cuomo that prompted him, a putative auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, to warn Cuomo that he was risking the fires of Hell for his support of child-killing under cover of the civil law.

Ever the demagogue, Cuomo accused Father Vaughan of “damning him to Hell.” Father Vaughan had done no such thing, of course.

Here is a report, contained in a June 29, 2000, obituary on "Bishop" Vaughan, about the controversy that erupted after he had made his remarks about Cuomo’s possible eternal damnation while he, Vaughan, was imprisoned after being arrested for peacefully blocking an abortuary as part of Operation Rescue in 1990:

Regarded as a conservative church leader, Bishop Vaughan was named auxiliary bishop by Pope Paul VI in 1977. He was a professor of theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers from 1956 to 1973 and then its rector until 1979, when he was appointed vicar of Orange County. He was fluent in Spanish, Italian and French as well as Latin.

Bishop Vaughan took his firm stance against abortion well beyond the pulpit and went to jail for it more than once. In 1990, he spent 10 days in an Albany lockup for trespassing after he tried to block the entrance of a local women's clinic the year before.

While in jail, he caused a furor when he told an interviewer that Governor Cuomo was in ''serious risk of going to hell'' for upholding abortion rights and public financing of poor women's abortions. Mr. Cuomo responded that he would defend ''the right of this bishop to curse any politician he wants, and every woman to make her own judgment under the Constitution as to whether or not to have an abortion.''

Cardinal John J. O'Connor, writing in Catholic New York, the weekly newspaper of the archdiocese, noted that the bishop's views were consistent with church teaching. In his first sermon out of jail, at a Mass at St. Patrick's, his parish church in Newburgh, Bishop Vaughan said: ''All I was saying is what he learned, and I learned, and all of you learned in the first grade. If you commit a serious sin and die without repenting, you go to hell.'' (Bishop Austin B. Vaughan, 72; Criticized Cuomo on Abortion.)

This applied to the late Mario Matthew Cuomo, and it applies to his son, Andrew Mark Cuomo, a public adulterer and full-throated supporter of baby-killing and perversity who was permitted by “Father” Witt to give a forty-minute eulogy of his father two days ago. It applies also to Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi and to every other pro-abortion public official, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Support baby-killing only at the peril of eternal damnation.

Alas, such is not the “gushy-gooey” sentimental sap of conciliarism, which is why Timothy Michael “Cardinal” Dolan, the conciliar “archbishop” of New York, scandalously paid his respects at Mario Matthew Cuomo’s wake on Monday evening, January 5, 2015, the Vigil of the Epiphany of Our Lord and the Commemoration of Pope Saint Telesphorus. The fact that Dolan even permitted a “Mass of Christian Burial” to be staged for Mario Matthew Cuomo was scandalous, no less appearing physically at the wake for a man who was celebrated as follows by one of leading defenders of unrestricted child-killing on demand anywhere in the world, The New York Times, as follows:

He stoutly defended abortion rights in the face of opposition from the leaders of his Catholic faith. He repeatedly vetoed attempts to restore the death penalty in the face of legislators’ grandstanding. As a gifted mediator, he helped settle a riot at Sing Sing prison in which 19 hostage guards were freed, in contrast to the 1971 Attica prison riot in which 10 hostages and 33 inmates died. (Mario Cuomo's Life in Public Service.)

Veteran journalist Frederic U. Dicker, who has covered state politics in Albany for decades now, wrote about Mario Matthew Cuomo's very public support of child-killing under cover of the civil law after noting Cuomo's penchant for arrorgance:

I covered Mario Cuomo when he was New York’s secretary of state, lieutenant governor and governor for nearly 20 years, for three news organizations, and what a strange, infuriating and ultimately tragic experience it turned out to be.

To nearly all who knew Mario Cuomo well, he was an underachieving enigma — brilliant yet indecisive, accomplished as a lawyer yet riddled with self-doubt as a politician, an initially popular governor who was eventually booted from office for failing to use that popularity to lead New York in a direction that would have made this a better state.

Early in Cuomo’s service as lieutenant governor, Robert Morgado, Gov. Hugh Carey’s longtime chief of staff, startled me with the observation that Carey was convinced there was “something odd with Mario” — that he was arrogant, angry and often resentful toward those he worked with in public life.

As the years passed, I heard dozens of others close to Cuomo, including some who worked with him every day, echo Morgado’s words.

Mario Cuomo was one of the nation’s greatest orators, but his sometimes-dazzling speeches — like his keynote to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984 — almost always lacked answers to the problems they addressed.

Cuomo insisted he was a believing Roman Catholic, but then he went to war with his church on the theologically crucial issue of abortion.

He was someone who claimed to have foresworn political labels but was actually a quintessential political liberal and, usually, proud of it.

People who knew him well often joked that Mario Cuomo was someone who was ready with a question for every answer.

He was called New York’s “Hamlet on the Hudson’’ because of a painful penchant for delaying — usually in the grips of agonizing indecision — virtually every important decision he had to make, most famously on whether he would run for president in 1988 and in 1992, years when the Democratic nomination could have been his for the seeking.

Cuomo, a brilliant and accomplished lawyer in his pre-political life, reinforced that “Hamlet’’ image when he repeatedly told friends he was comfortable serving as a defense lawyer even in cases involving accused murderers but could never be comfortable as a prosecutor because, he said, he never would feel sure enough that someone was guilty and therefore deserving of punishment.

While Cuomo could be charming in one-on-one conversations, could show a remarkable degree of caring when dealing with individual human tragedies, and could put aside ideological differences to help political adversaries — including the New York Post in the early 1990s, when it faced severe financial difficulties — he could also be arrogant and even cruel, browbeating opponents, abandoning longtime allies, and even turning on his own son and one-time key political adviser, New York’s current governor, Andrew.

Cuomo presided over the state’s highest office during the Reagan/Bush era, and because he was such a strong proponent of traditional liberal values — higher taxes to fund state spending on social programs, opposition to the death penalty, an unrelenting defense of abortion rights — he became a darling of the political left and of many in the national media.

But his legacy as governor was anything but positive.

Gov. Mario Cuomo raised literally hundreds of state taxes to fund ever-expanding social programs and developed fiscal gimmicks, including the notorious scheme to “sell’’ the Attica Correctional Facility back to the state to pad public revenues so he could spend even more.

Cuomo rejected a chance to end the hugely expensive tolls on the New York State Thruway and he literally destroyed, under pressure from environmental activists, the Long Island Lighting Co. and its $5 billion Shoreham nuclear power plant, saddling Long Island residents to this day with some of the highest utility costs in the nation.

Mario Cuomo presided over the widening loss of upstate jobs, industry and population, of which he was well aware. Either because he didn’t know how to address the problem or because, more likely, a deep streak of fatalism left him believing there was nothing he could do about it, the problem has continued to this day.

Although he didn’t initially realize he was doing so, David Garth — Cuomo’s longtime friend and political guru, who, coincidentally, died just a few weeks ago — encapsulated Mario Cuomo’s failures as governor a few months before he was turned out of office in 1994.

Garth was overseeing Cuomo’s bid for a fourth term and he was pressed at the Democratic nominating convention by several reporters to name some of the governor’s accomplishments during his term in office.

After several seconds of cold silence, a clearly uncomfortable Garth responded, “Haven’t you seen the new rest stops on the Thruway? They’re really something.’’

Such a singularly meager legacy from 12 years in office explained why a few months later, Cuomo — the great liberal champion who might very well have become president — was defeated by a little-known freshman state senator and former mayor of Peekskill, one George Elmer Pataki. (Frederic U. Dicker, Cuomo inspired but did little for New York.)

Few in number are the conciliar "bishops" such as the late Father Austin Vaughan who dare to speak truth to power, who dare to remind those who support chemical and surgical baby-killing and special rights, including "marriage," for those engaged in unrepentant perverse sins in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments of these terrible words of Our Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, as contained in the Gospel according to Saint Mark:

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? [37] Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? [38] For he that shall be ashamed of me, and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation: the Son of man also will be ashamed of him, when he shall come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. (Mark 8: 36-38.)

It does not matter how much Mario Matthew Cuomo was loved by his family and friends or in what great esteem he was held by friend and foe in the naturalistic farce and sideshow that is American electoral politics. What matters is that Mario Matthew Cuomo died without publicly abjuring his support for twoof the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, and that makes his death very tragic, a cause of genuine sadness when we consider the great price that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ paid to redeem just one soul by suffering all that He did during His Passion and Death, including shedding every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. 

Mario Matthew Cuomo consistently made public statements in behalf of the nonexistent "right" of women to sin mortally by killing their preborn babies. Sin is what caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer fearfully in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and caused His Most Blessed Mother to suffer in perfect union with Him as those Seven Swords of Sorrow pierced her Immaculate Heart through and through. One must put aside all empty sentimentality and maudlin emotionalism in order to remember that Mario Matthew Cuomo lived and died reaffirming women in their "civil right" to sin in violation of the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment. That is no way to prepare for eternity.

Sadly, the false church that has given us such an “opening to the world” under the leadership of Modernists and blaspheming stage artists of sacrilege and apostasy celebrates the lives of those who support each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance because of their supposed “care and concern” for the poor by means of unjust statist programs of income redistribution that make the poor indentured to the “largesse” of social engineers. As will be noted in part two of this commentary on Saturday, January 10, 2015, travesties such as the one that took place in the Church of Saint Ignatius on Park Avenue in New York City are simply par for the conciliar course.

Lest we become haughty in the manner of the Cuomos, however, we must always recognize that it is indeed a terrible thing for any of us to fall into the hands of the living God:

[26] For if we sin wilfully after having the knowledge of the truth, there is now left no sacrifice for sins, [27] But a certain dreadful expectation of judgment, and the rage of a fire which shall consume the adversaries. [28] A man making void the law of Moses, dieth without any mercy under two or three witnesses: [29] How much more, do you think he deserveth worse punishments, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath esteemed the blood of the testament unclean, by which he was sanctified, and hath offered an affront to the Spirit of grace? [30] For we know him that hath said: Vengeance belongeth to me, and I will repay. And again: The Lord shall judge his people.

[31] It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10: 26-31.)

It is indeed a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Each of us must remember this truth, contained in Saint Paul the Apostle's Epistle to the Hebrews. We are, after all, in the penitential season of Lent, a time during which we must call to mind the horror of our sins as we seek to live more penitentially so as to make reparation for them to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lord us that we do not know the day or the hour of the time He will visit us at the moment of our deaths:

Be you then also ready: for at what hour you think not, the Son of man will come. (Luke 12: 40.)

Many of us have much for which to answer. I know that I do!

The hour of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's visitation is something for which we must ask His Most Blessed Mother to prepare us each and every day as we examine our consciences nightly and make a perfect Act of Contrition in the morning and before we go to sleep, availing ourselves of the Mercy of the Divine Redeemer on a weekly basis, if at all possible, in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. We must never seek to minimize our sins or the debt that we owe to God for them.

It is, however, one thing to sin and to be sorry for one's sins as one seeks to live penitentially in reparation for them. It is quite another to persist in sin and/or the support for grave sins unrepentantly until the moment of of one's death, which is what so many pro-abortion Catholics who have served in public office have been able to do while maintaining their "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

May Our Lady help us to manifest the Sacred Rights of Christ the King at all times, keeping ever close to the mysteries of salvation contained in the fifteen decades of her Most Holy Rosary.

The Caligulas and the Neros and the Trajans and the Valerians and the Diocletians and the Cromwells and the Bismarcks and the French Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks and the Maoists all come and go. They have met the moment of their Particular Judgment. In the end, you see, these figures, much like the petty caesars and caesarettes of today, are forgettable figures, especially when you consider these words that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ the King, Himself spoke to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque:

"I will reign in spite of all who oppose Me." (quoted in: The Right Reverend Emile Bougaud. The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 1990, p. 361.)

Yes, Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.