Justifying Themselves Before Men

by Thomas A. Droleskey

A recent "Statement of Principle by Fifty-five Catholic Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives"is generating a lot of reaction. The statement, which repeats the canard that Catholics cannot “impose” their “religious views” about abortion on people of other religions, is nothing new. The statement is merely a warmed over version of the infamous address, "Religious Belief and Public Morality," that the then Governor of the State of New York, Mario Matthew Cuomo, gave at the University of Notre Dame, on September 13, 1984. Cuomo’s “encyclical letter,” as it was dismissed derisively by the then Vicar General of the Archdiocese of New York, the Most Reverend Joseph T. O’Keefe, outlined all of the points made recently by the fifty-five Democrats.

Even though the Cuomo speech is very fresh in my own mind (I gave a rebuttal to it at Hofstra University in November of 1984. sponsored by the Hofstra Pro-Life Group), here is a brief excerpt by way of demonstrating that the recent statement by the Catholic Democrats in Congress is absolutely nothing new:

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.

Cuomo's effort to portray himself as a serious, thoughtful Catholic who had to agonize over the application of his Faith in matters of public policy was disingenuous. The former Governor of New York from 1983 to1995 was whatever he had to be before whatever group he addressed in the years that followed. Indeed, Cuomo's transformation from being vocally pro-life, dating back to the 1960s when the Diocese of Brooklyn would ask Cuomo, then an attorney in his thirties in private practice on Court Street in Brooklyn, to speak to parish groups against efforts to "legalize" abortion, into being a full-fledged supporter of a woman's "right to choose" is quite interesting and a case-study of the influence of Americanism and careerism on a Catholic public official in the United States of America.

For example Cuomo once said during a debate with two other candidates, Anthony Olivieri and Mary Ann Krupsak, for the Democratic Party nomination for lieutenant governor of New York in August of 1974 that he would have voted against the law permitting abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy had he been a member of the New York State Legislature in 1970. Having lost that primary, Cuomo learned from his political mentor, Hugh L. Carey (Governor of New York from 1975 to 1983), who appointed Cuomo to be Secretary of State for the State of New York, to mouth the "I'm personally opposed to abortion but can't impose my morality upon others" slogan. Cuomo used this slogan when he ran for Mayor of the City of New York in a Democratic Party primary in 1977--and then in the general election as the nominee of Liberal Party against Representative Edward Irving Koch, the Democrat who defeated him in the primary, and talk show host Barry Farber, the nominee of the Conservative Party. It had become a standard refrain of by the time he defeated Mayor Koch in a Democratic Party gubernatorial primary in 1982 and then defeated Republican nominee Lewis Lehrman in the general election.

Cuomo received a free pass for his sloganeering on the issue of abortion from the Bishop of Brooklyn, the Most Reverend Francis Mugavero, in whose diocesan boundaries he lived in Hollis, Queens. Indeed, an auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, the Most Reverend Joseph Sullivan, served as a ready acolyte for Cuomo and for his fellow Queens Democrat, Representative Geraldine Ferraro. Bishop Sullivan's folically challenged head (I'm getting there myself, thank you) turned beet red on May 7, 1983, when I addressed a Brooklyn Catholic Charities conference, excoriating its organizers for not placing the most pressing moral issue of the day, the taking of innocent human life in the womb, anywhere on its agenda. Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro, among others, including Hugh Carey himself until he publicly apologized in 1990 for his past support of abortion, were given support and encouragement by the Diocese of Brooklyn to take the positions that they did. Anyone who suggested otherwise was a radical preconciliar type, and I wasn't even going to the Mass of Tradition at that time.

Cuomo's ready acceptance by the bishops of his home diocese--and the late Terence Cardinal Cooke's refusal to interject himself in matters of public policy--accustomed him to being beyond criticism by church officials. This ended with the Bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Most Reverend John J. O'Connor, was appointed to be Archbishop of New York in 1984. Then Archbishop-designate O'Connor told WNBC-TV News host Gabe Pressman that "he was sick and tired" of politicians who claim to be opposed to abortion but who would not work to outlaw it once again. This battle heated up on March 19, 1984, the Feast of Saint Joseph, at Archbishop O'Connor's installation Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral as O'Connor made it a point to greet the Mayor of Scranton and the Mayor of New York, Koch, with whom he developed a very close friendship over the years, and the American ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, and even the pro-abortion Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Archbishop O'Connor, in the presence of the then Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, made not one word of reference to the Governor of the State of New York, Mario Matthew Cuomo, and Cuomo was livid. How do I know? I saw it with my own eyes. Sitting with a few fellow seminarians from Holy Apostles Seminary, who more or less crashed the proceedings without an invitation, in the east transept of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, I saw the then governor walk right past us. He face was drawn and tense. He knew he had been snubbed and he was not happy about that at all.

The battle heated up during the late spring and throughout the summer of 1984, especially after former Vice President Walter F. Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro to be his Vice Presidential running-mate against President Ronald Wilson Reagan and Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. The criticism of pro-abortion politicians, including Cuomo, at least by implication, and Ferraro rather directly, by Archbishop O'Connor served as a contrast to the "Consistent Ethic of Life" address that had been given by the Archbishop of Chicago, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, at Fordham University on December 6,1983. Bernardin's so-called "seamless garment" approach tied together different moral issues (abortion, war and peace, capital punishment, government programs for the poor), providing political cover for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion Democrats because of their position on other "life issues."

Bernardin noted the following at the end of his address:

The substance of a Catholic position on a consistent ethic of life is rooted in a religious vision. But the citizenry of the United States is radically pluralistic in moral and religious conviction. So we face the challenge of stating our case, which is shaped in terms of our faith and our religious convictions, in non-religious terms which others of different faith convictions might find morally persuasive. . . . As we seek to shape and share the vision of a consistent ethic of life, I suggest a style governed by the following rule: We should maintain and clearly communicate our religious convictions but also maintain our civil courtesy. We should be vigorous in stating a case and attentive in hearing another's case; we should test everyone's logic but not question his or her motives.

Bernardin, who requested the Windy City Gay Men's Chorus sing at his wake, was confusing moral issues in his Consistent Ethic of Life address and clearly abdicating his responsibility to instruct Catholics to speak clearly as Catholics as Pope Leo XIII noted in Sapientiae Christianae in 1890:

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.

Bernardin had wittingly given cover to the likes of Cuomo and Ferrara, saying that Catholics could not be "single-issue" voters, thus continuing the long tradition of Catholics doing the bidding of Democratic Party politicians. Indeed, Bernardin was continuing the legacy of the Americanist heresy itself, seeking to accommodate the Faith to the exigencies of the lie of pluralism so that Catholics might be more generally accepted and become politically and materially successful. The obsequiousness of the American hierarchy to the patriarchs of the Democratic Party has been such that the bishops played the part of toadies to Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico in the second decade of the Twentieth Century was a necessary, if unfortunate, way to bring about the triumph of "liberal" ideas, and to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal policies were clearly violative of the principles of subsidiarity that had been outlined by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931. And it was just eighteen years before Bernardin's address at Fordham and nineteen years before Cuomo's address at the University of Notre Dame that Richard Cardinal Cushing said that it would be wrong for the Church to intervene against then pending legislation, introduced by State Senator Michael S. Dukakis, to permit the sale of contraceptive devices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A report in Catholic World News a few years ago noted the following:

Early in the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts legislature took up a proposal to repeal the state's Birth Control law, which barred the use of contraceptives. . . . In a state where Catholics constituted a voting majority, and dominated the legislature, the prospects for repeal appeared remote. Then on June 22, Cardinal Cushing appeared on a local radio program, 'An Afternoon with Haywood Vincent,' and effectively scuttled the opposition. Cardinal Cushing announced: 'My position in this matter is that birth control in accordance with artificial means is immoral, and not permissible. But this is Catholic teaching. I am also convinced that I should not impose my position upon those of other faiths'. Warming to the subject, the cardinal told his radio audience that 'I could not in conscience approve the legislation' that had been proposed. However, he quickly added, 'I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others.' So there it was: the 'personally opposed' argument, in fully developed form, enunciated by a Prince of the Church nearly 40 years ago! Notice how the unvarying teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemned artificial contraception as an offense against natural law, is reduced here to a matter of the cardinal's personal belief. And notice how he makes no effort to persuade legislators with the force of his arguments; any such effort is condemned in advance as a bid to 'impose' his opinion. Cardinal Cushing conceded that in the past, Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter the Birth Control law. 'But my thinking has changed on that matter,' he reported, 'for the simple reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do'. . . . Before the end of his fateful radio broadcast, Cardinal Cushing gave his advice to the Catholic members of the Massachusetts legislature: 'If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. You represent them. You don't represent the Catholic Church.' Dozens of Catholic legislators did vote for the bill, and the Birth Control law was abolished. Perhaps more important in the long run, the 'personally opposed' politician had his rationale."

Thus, you see, the position of Cuomo, given theological respectability and political cover by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who said in an address at Hebrew University in 1995 that the Gospel of Saint John the Evangelist was the source of anti-Semitism and needed to be "corrected," and other pro-abortion Catholic had been articulated by that shameless apologist for the Kennedys, Richard Cardinal Cushing. There is nothing new, therefore, in the "Statement of Principle of Fifty-five Catholic  Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nothing new at all. Just the same old lies of Americanism that have now become harder to oppose given conciliarism's embrace of the "secular state," an embrace that was advanced to a large degree by the efforts of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J.

Bernardin's "consistent ethic of life" made it possible for Cuomo to claim how it was his Catholic Faith sensitive he was to the needs of the poor and how much he wanted to uphold "Church teaching" on the death penalty by opposing it. When his nominee for lieutenant governor in 1986, then Representative Stan Lundine, said in a debate at The New York Times building on October 14, 1986, that Cuomo had consulted frequently with the aforementioned Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Brooklyn on economic issues, I posed the following question to him, participating in the debate as the nominee for lieutenant governor of New York of the Right to Life Party:

I find it very curious, Mr. Representative, that Bishop Sullivan's views on the economy are welcomed by Governor Cuomo but Cardinal O'Connor's statements on the inviolability of human life are not. Are you trying to violate the separation between Church and State? (My tongue was planted firmly in my cheek, with a little bit of relish, I must admit, as I asked the rhetorical question, to which Mr. Lundine, who was probably told not to engage me at all during the debate, did not respond.)

Cuomo's transformation from a Catholic "agonizing" over his official duties was disingenuous. Demonstrating himself to be the "man of the moment" rather than the "man for all seasons," Saint Thomas More, whose portrait he admitted in his own autobiography he took down from his lieutenant governor's office when he was running for Governor of New York in 1982, Cuomo unabashedly bashed those who sought to restore legal protection to the innocent preborn. This is what he said on July 15, 1992, at Madison Square Garden in the City of New York when he placed the name of Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Clinton into nomination at the Democratic National Convention:

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.

Just as an aside, the then New York Governor said this about then Governor Clinton:

He was born and raised with all the personal attributes needed for leadership: God-given intelligence; vitality. And an extraordinary quality of character that allowed him to survive the buffeting and the trauma of a difficult youth. 

The likes of Cuomo and other Catholics who refuse to support full legal protection for all innocent human life have been able to spread their poisonous lies and their venomous rhetoric as a result of the failure of  popes and cardinals and bishops to discipline them. These men and women, who have forgotten that there were baptized and confirmed to bear a visible witness to the truths of Our Lord at all times and in all places without any exception, have become emboldened now to make open war upon the Church as they seek to enshrine under civil law one evil after another. We have gone from the theoretical embrace by John Kennedy of the Judeo-Masonic ethos of the separation of Church and State to the arrogant promotion of evil by the likes of one Catholic politician after another, both Democrat and Republican, without hardly a word against them being raised by our bishops. Mario Matthew Cuomo was not only content to support evil with his eloquent and passionately-delivered rhetoric. This man had the temerity to telephone Catholic priests who had the courage to denounce his support of baby-killing under cover of law. One priest, who I believe was the pastor of Holy Family Church in Hicksville, New York, at the time, hung up on Cuomo in the mid-1980s after the governor had gotten wind of a sermon the priest had preached.

Mr. Cuomo and all other Catholics in public life, whether Republican or Democrat, had better reckon with the plain words of Pope Leo XIII in Sapientiae Christianae:

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.

Those who support--or who profess an inability to do anything about--the evils of our day are doing much more than being silent in the face of evil. They are serving as apologists for the very thing that caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross and wounds His Mystical Body, the Church, today: sin. And while Mario Cuomo himself took note quite correctly in his 1984 address at the University of Notre Dame of the fact that Catholics have cultural attitudes very similar to that of non-Catholics in this nation as a result of the failure of the bishops to teach the Faith properly, the failure of the bishops to teach the Faith does not exculpate those of us in the laity from speaking about the truths of the Faith as binding upon all men in all circumstances at all times. Pope Leo XIII noted this in Sapientiae Christianae:

No one, however, must entertain the notion that private individuals are prevented from taking some active part in this duty of teaching, especially those on whom God has bestowed gifts of mind with the strong wish of rendering themselves useful. These, so often as circumstances demand, may take upon themselves, not, indeed, the office of the pastor, but the task of communicating to others what they have themselves received, becoming, as it were, living echoes of their masters in the faith. Such co-operation on the part of the laity has seemed to the Fathers of the Vatican Council so opportune and fruitful of good that they thought well to invite it. "All faithful Christians, but those chiefly who are in a prominent position, or engaged in teaching, we entreat, by the compassion of Jesus Christ, and enjoin by the authority of the same God and Savior, that they bring aid to ward off and eliminate these errors from holy Church, and contribute their zealous help in spreading abroad the light of undefiled faith.'' Let each one, therefore, bear in mind that he both can and should, so far as may be, preach the Catholic faith by the authority of his example, and by open and constant profession of the obligations it imposes. In respect, consequently, to the duties that bind us to God and the Church, it should be borne earnestly in mind that in propagating Christian truth and warding off errors the zeal of the laity should, as far as possible, be brought actively into play.

Those who justify themselves before men, however, had better reckon on their encounter with God at the moment of their Particular Judgments. He is going to say to them: "I was in the womb and you did not give voice to Me. I was in the womb and you did not defend Me. I was in the womb and you supported My dismemberment. Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels."

Each of us has the obligation to stand up in defense of the fullness of the truths of the Holy Faith at all times, praying and working for the restoration for the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen. Although I am hated--and the word is hated--by many people because of my criticism of phony pro-life politicians, including the current President of the United States, I do have a rather proven track record of going after fully pro-abortion politicians of all political parties (see Volume 2 of Restoring Christ as the King of All Nations, which includes articles from the years 1996-2000), which is one of the reasons I never obtained tenure at any university and why applications I made in recent years for faculty positions have been dismissed summarily. Indeed, a group of feminists at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, approached that institution's then president in late-June of 1992 after I had signed a contract to teach there for the following academic year, 1992-1993. The feminists demanded that my contract be revoked because they had discovered that I had run for lieutenant governor of New York six year before. And I can tell you, folks, that I was pretty much a non-person in the eyes of many of my colleagues during the year that I taught at Morningside College. Anyone who claims that I "hate" our current president or that I am "unfair" to his fellow partly pro-abortion, partly pro-life Republican colleagues is refusing to look at my long record--in academe, in electoral campaigns for myself and others, in articles and in books--of criticizing anyone and everyone in public life who refuses to conform civil law to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. I do not "hate" anyone. I, a terrible sinner, simply love God and want to see His Social Reign restored once again as the ultimate fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. That's all.

In the meantime, there is nothing new under the sun insofar as the excuses made by Catholic politicians to justify themelves before men and to remain diffident in the face of the daily carnage against the preborn by chemical and surgical means. We pray for these politicians to abandon their apostasies and to embrace the fullness of the Faith so as to become apologists for the Faith in everything they say and do. We must not be surprised, however, that men and women raised in the ethos of Americanism and nurtured by the novelties of conciliarism can believe that it is possible to separate their allegedly "religious convictions" from their public duties. For most of them, I am sure, have never considered these words of Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, 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.

Once again, as I have stated so frequently, we cannot fight secularism with secularism. We can only fight secularism with Catholicism. Admittedly, this is, humanly speaking, more difficult to do when the Vicar of Christ, who has divested himself on March 1, 2006, of the title "Patriarch of the West," speaks of a "healthy secularity." However, we must adhere to what the immutable truths that the Church has taught perennial, understanding that the Modernist novelties of the recent past that have aided and abetted the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity in the world will be a thing of the past once a pope actually fulfills Our Lady's Fatima Message.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint Augustine of Canterbury, pray for us.

Saint Stanislaus, pray for us.

Saint Thomas a Becket, pray for us.

Saint Thomas More, pray for us.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us.

Pope Saint Gregory VII, pray for us.

Saint John Jones (aka John Griffith) and all of the English Martyrs, pray for us.

Saint Edmund Campion, pray for us.

Saint Edward the Confessor, pray for us.

Saint Oliver Plunkett, pray for us.

Saint Henry, pray for us.

Saint Stephen of Hungary, pray for us.

Saint Louis IX, pray for us.

Saint Genevieve, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, pray for us.

Saint Joan of Arc, pray for us.

Blessed Emperor Charles, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Blessed Bishop Clemens von Galen, the Lion of Munster, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.

Sister Lucia, pray for us.