Word: cuomo
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...street crime and the plight of the homeless were not enough, New Yorkers now have something really big to worry about: Is Mario Cuomo going to hell? From his Albany County jail cell, where he had been serving ten days for taking part in a militant antiabortion protest, Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughan of New York recently warned that the state's Democratic Governor "is in danger of going to hell if he dies tonight" unless he changed his stance on abortion. Cuomo, a Roman Catholic, accepts his church's teaching that abortion is wrong. But he argues that it would...
...matter, of course, could not end there. After Cuomo sardonically noted that he had been "cursed . . . even to hell," John Cardinal O'Connor, Vaughan's superior, declared that the bishop had the duty to warn any Catholic against pursuing a gravely evil course of action. Thus Vaughan's statement was in the tradition of saints like John the Baptist and Thomas More -- one of Cuomo's acknowledged role models -- who also reproached public figures from prison for misconduct...
...more nuanced exploration of the issue Kennedy spoke to can be found in Cuomo's 1984 landmark address at Notre Dame. The Governor argued that his refusal to campaign actively for a ban on abortion was analogous to the cautious stance of U.S. Catholic bishops on slavery prior to the Civil War. They declined to endorse a constitutional amendment banning the practice. Then as now, Cuomo argued, the issue was not the moral validity of Catholic teaching but whether, when and how to translate that teaching into public policy -- a problem for which there can never be one simple solution...
...citizens, O'Connor and Vaughan have as much right as any pro-choicer to seek legislative endorsement of their views on public issues. (They are also entitled to ask Cuomo why he is so quiescent on abortion but so aggressive on another complex moral matter -- seven times vetoing bills that would bring back the state death penalty.) Still, some caveats are in order. One is that charity as well as justice should guide the hierarchs into correctly stating positions they condemn. Both O'Connor and Vaughan accused Cuomo of advocating "the right of a woman to kill a child...
...seems possible to wonder whether so intense a concentration on the sinfulness of abortion does not in some way diminish the church's self- proclaimed role as teacher and guide. Is there any other offense, even the defrauding of widows and orphans, for which a Mario Cuomo would today be warned about the risk of eternal punishment? To ask this is not to deny that abortion is a serious matter, or that its casual use as an ex post facto contraceptive is a national scandal. But to decide whether an individual is guilty of committing an act deserving of hell...