We have recently held the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade, and this year is also the 40th anniversary of a key moment in the country’s long debate over abortion: a speech by Mario Cuomo, then the Democratic governor of New York, at Notre Dame University, which he called “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective.” There Cuomo laid out what would become a common argument among Catholic Democrats: While personally agreeing with the church that abortion “is to be avoided,” they would not seek “to translate our Catholic morality into civil law.”
Looking back at that speech on Sept. 13, 1984, helps to explain how the abortion debate has evolved in this country.
When he initially entered politics, Cuomo was pro-life. However, like numerous other Catholic Democrats (Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, to take an early example, or President Joe Biden), he became allied with “pro-choice” forces. The abortion issue became more partisan in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, and his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, staked out firmly pro-life and pro-choice positions, respectively (while still welcoming dissenting voices in their parties).
In New York that year, abortion had been an especially contentious topic since the appointment of John J. O’Connor as archbishop of New York City in March. (He was made a cardinal the following year.) A former rear admiral, the brilliant and outspoken Archbishop O’Connor reinvigorated an American church hierarchy that many regarded as ineffective on abortion. The issue was further highlighted by Mondale’s pick of a Catholic and pro-choice congresswoman, Geraldine Ferraro, as his running mate in July. After her nomination for vice president, Archbishop O’Connor publicly rebuked Ms. Ferraro for misrepresenting the church two years earlier by sending a letter to other members of Congress that said “the Catholic position on abortion is not monolithic.” The issue remained in the headlines throughout the summer, culminating in Cuomo’s speech at Notre Dame.
Cuomo’s argument was both simple and convoluted. “We create our public morality through consensus,” he said, “and in this country that consensus reflects to some extent religious values of a great majority of Americans. But…religiously based values don’t have an a priori place in our public morality. The community must decide if what is being proposed would be better left to private discretion than public policy.”
The governor seemed to be saying that there is a sphere of issues in which people of faith can advocate for specific causes (he cited the civil rights movement and opposition to the nuclear arms race as examples) because there is a sufficient nonsectarian “consensus” behind those causes, though how exactly to measure that consensus was left unsaid.
The corollary was that other causes, such as the restriction of abortion, do not meet this threshold of nonsectarian consensus, and to advocate for these causes is to “impose” one’s beliefs on another. Despite acknowledging that one could advocate against abortion legalization for reasons besides religion, Cuomo asked rhetorically:
….surely, I can, if so inclined, demand some kind of law against abortion not because my bishops say it is wrong but because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life… But should I? Is it helpful? Is it essential to human dignity? Does it promote harmony and understanding?
Later in his speech, Cuomo seemed to answer these questions in the negative. He said, “As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created…. But not everyone in our society agrees with me and Matilda.”
Essentially, Cuomo said that a Catholic can mention their faith when it aligns with the prevailing secular culture, but not if it is in contradiction. Or, as the historian Richard Brookhiser put it, Cuomo found “a way of having religion when he wanted it” but “not having it when he didn’t.”
The most obvious flaw in Cuomo’s argument is that if one believes that abortion is the taking of an innocent life, how can one stand idly by and allow millions of abortions to happen every year? What about other great injustices in the world? Should Catholics in the 19th century have tolerated slavery because pursuing abolition was not in the interest of “harmony”?
And Cuomo did not always follow the logic in his Notre Dame speech. The historian Robert N. Karrer noted that his own views on abortion were outside the “consensus” since he supported government funding for abortion despite a majority of Americans opposing it (then and now). Cuomo also vetoed an attempt to restore the death penalty in New York, saying that it “demeans those who strive to preserve human life and dignity,” despite national polls at the time showing overwhelming support for the practice.
In his Notre Dame speech, Cuomo argued that Catholics should listen to the U.S. bishops and understand the gravity of abortion. “A fetus is different from an appendix or a set of tonsils…. itself should demand respect, caution, indeed...reverence.” However, these words come off as perfunctory when the speaker goes on to oppose any legal protection for an unborn child.
The view that abortion is, at the very least, tragic, has all but vanished from the rhetoric and official statements of the Democratic Party. The changing attitudes of the party are best represented by Cuomo’s son Andrew, who as governor of New York signed the Reproductive Health Act,which reaffirmed legalized abortion on demand in that state for up to 24 weeks. Instead of somberly reflecting upon abortion as a tragedy and redoubling efforts to decrease it, the younger Mr. Cuomo celebrated its passage by lighting the World Trade Center in pink.
Ten days after Mario Cuomo’s speech at Notre Dame, another Catholic politician, Representative Henry Hyde, gave a very different address there. In “Keeping God in the Closet: Some Thoughts on the Exorcism of Religious Values from Public Life,” Hyde dismantled Cuomo’s arguments and reinforced journalist Cokie Roberts’s opinion that he was the “smartest man in Congress.” As Hyde put it:
Their dilemma is that they want to retain their Catholic credentials but realize that in today’s Democratic Party to be upwardly mobile is to be very liberal and to be very liberal is to be a feminist and to be a feminist is to be for abortion. I won’t quarrel with their political game plan, but their rationale is absurd.
Fundamentally upbeat, Mr. Hyde concluded by extolling his listeners to go out and change the world.
While the elder Cuomo may have thought his formula was a way out of the political impasse on abortion, its legacy must be judged in the negative. Not only was it unconvincing, but as the journalist Michael Sean Winters has pointed out, more politicians with “fewer scruples” have used his reasoning to simply opt out of church teaching rather than engaging in “the hard, moral work of resolving difficult issues.” He might not have wanted it, but Cuomo paved the way for the Pilate-like indifference of so many Catholic politicians to abortion.
During his time in office, Cuomo earned the nickname “Hamlet on Hudson” due to his flip-flopping on running for president and later being appointed to the Supreme Court. One could say the same of his views on the right to life.
