In 1996 Simon & Schuster published an updated version of Mario’s Reason to Believe. It contains a lovely chapter called “Something Real to Believe In.” Here’s a stunning excerpt:
In an easier world we would all have the time we need to study history, with its syndromes, fads, cycles, and implicit suggestions as to how to do things better the next time.
But even then, if we did not probe a little deeper in our exploration, we would still be overlooking something—perhaps the most compelling truth of all. Accumulating deep below, drifting up between the cracks, insinuating itself into our consciousness, is a sense that there’s something missing. The political answers seem too shallow, too shortsighted, too harsh. There must be something deeper, grander, stronger—even sweeter perhaps—that can help us deal with our problems by making us better than we are . . . instead of meaner. All around us is the feeling that we will not progress if all we manage is the superficial manipulation of our day-to-day inconveniences. Surely we will not be able to achieve the better society we hope for by deliberately increasing our fragmentation, disintegration, alienation, and hostility.
We feel this hunger for larger answers as a vague ache of uncertainty and dissatisfaction. We play around with words that hint at it—“values,” “character,” occasionally even “morality.” We see it in the yearning for something to fill the vacuum that has disconcerted us increasingly over the last fifty years: no great hero or heroine, no uplifting cause, no reassuring orthodoxy or stimulating new rationale.
Give me something real to live by, to live for, something bigger than myself alone. Because for all my personal fears, for all the energy I put into the struggle for my own survival and that of my family—I know in the end that I am not enough for me.
Momma knew that truth. She knew it without polls, which, after all, mostly just measure confusion. She knew it with a wisdom more subtle than computers or macroeconomic modeling and more perceptive than even the most exquisite of our political punditry. And she taught it indelibly—by the quiet magnificent example of her own life and the occasional stunning power of her simple words. One day in the late 1930s, she was giving scraps of food from our little grocery store to a Gypsy woman and her children, when one of our Italian customers—a laborer, callused and bent by the pick, the shovel, and the wheelbarrow—asked her in angry tones, “Why do you give that to them free when we have to pay?” Momma’s answer came in her rough, uneven Italian, but it was this: “Because she’s hungry and she’s doing all she can do for herself. Because she’s like me. That’s why I give her bread to eat. Why do you question that?”
At the moment, however, rather than facing the implications of our intertwining fates, we are turning our gaze to conjurers eager to persuade us that our obligations in the world end at our own front door.
It is a simple truth our hearts already know: we cannot reach the levels of strength and civility we should with one-third of our people striding up the mountain with perfect confidence, one-third desperate in the ditches by the side of the trail, and the third in between wondering whether they’ll slip down into the ditch themselves.
We can create a nation stronger, wiser, and sweeter than it has ever been. But it can only be done together. Momma understood that. So should we.
Mario Cuomo also understood the power of working with people for a common good instead of against them in order to make a point or win a concession—it was his “something real to believe in.”
Of course, his other big “something real to believe in” was his spectacular wife, a woman named Matilda Nancy Raffa, who, truth be known, has almost as big a following internationally as he did. Through sixty of his eighty-two years, she was by his side—or rather, he by hers. She is to this day widely heralded on the continent and especially in Italy for her work as head of the Mentoring USA organization, which assists teenagers.
Mario once famously accused Matilda of being “the single most effective instrument” of his success. This remarkable woman travels abroad like a visiting head of state. During one such visit, the governor called a friend and said, “I understand some guy she met in Lake Como is greatly taken with Matilda. He’s a singer . . . named Luciano Pavarotti . . . a very good one, I’m told . . . I don’t know if I have to worry . . . .”
“Well, can you sing, can you even carry a tune?” the friend asked.
“No, but I can take him out on the basketball court.”
“Well, then I think you should worry only a little . . . .”
Mario M. Cuomo came into our lives at exactly the right time. Jack Kennedy’s brains were blown out in Dallas in 1963, and Bobby Kennedy died on a greasy kitchen floor in Los Angeles in 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot through the face on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in the same year.
During this bleak time, in 1965, Sir Winston Spencer Churchill also went to what Malcolm Wilson, the great Fordham orator, would describe as “another and, we are sure, a better world.” (Mario used to say, “In a debate Malcolm would beat you up in English . . . and finish you off in Latin!”)
In a desolate period devoid of anyone of standing, stature, or staying power in the body politic, and lacking the presence of any individual at all resembling a hero in the public arena, one winter afternoon I encountered one Mr. James Breslin Sr., famous reporter and writer (and lifelong pal of Mario’s), at Costello’s Bar on the East Side near Grand Central and cheek-by-jowl with St. Agnes Church (where suburban Catholics loaded with guilt go during the week when they are too lazy to make their way down to the Franciscans at St. Francis of Assisi on 31st Street). Jimmy Breslin looked across the table through the smoke and haze and, with the smell of stale beer in his nostrils, said, “Who’s to write about these days?” He had once called Churchill “the last great statue of the English language.” It was 1977, and we were still reeling from the fallout of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, and Watergate.
And now my mind drifts back to the arrival of a largely unknown New York secretary of state who came by the WVOX radio station in Westchester for an interview. I had read of the man in offbeat, bohemian journals like the Village Voice where Jack Newfield, Wayne Barrett, Pete Hamill, and Ken Auletta often wrote of a certain especially gifted politician from the outer borough called Queens, a man who spoke in graceful sentences and elegant paragraphs.
Mistaking him for John Santucci, the district attorney from Queens, I’m afraid I kept him waiting for at least twenty minutes (something he always kidded me about and never let me forget). During that interview I asked him about his resolute and principled stand on capital punishment. “Did your God tell you to be against this?” He looked across the microphone, our eyes met and locked, and Mario Cuomo said softly, “Look, even a Republican who doesn’t wear socks can understand this: Vengeance doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work . . . .”
As soon as the New York secretary of state left our radio studio, I raced to the phone and called some local Westchester Democrat warlords of the day—Samuel George Fredman, William F. Luddy, Max Berking, William “Kirby” Scollon, and M. Paul Redd—and asked, “Who is this guy . . . I mean, who the hell is he?”
One could say that Mario Cuomo was truly a son of the Roman Church, with the mind of a Jesuit and the heart of a Franciscan. He often quoted Jesuits and was conveyed to his final rest from a Jesuit church. But he loved the Franciscans. “How the hell can you beat the Franciscans? Three Hail Marys for a homicide! They forgive us gently and generously. You could be a Franciscan,” I once heard him say to a woman I once knew. And he spoke often of his admiration for “a tired Franciscan who, even after fifty years, pulls himself up into the pulpit each morning to preach the Good News to a few people in near-empty pews in a cold, drafty church.”
As a youngster, Mario Matthew Cuomo was an altar boy during the week in his parish church, and on Saturday he was a shabbos goy at the local synagogue, doing the menial work that is forbidden to Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath. He listened and learned in both places a
nd grew up to apply the ancient teachings of both religions.
I saw this one night as he sat on the banquette of table number 2 at Sirio Maccioni’s Le Cirque restaurant in the Bloomberg building on 58th Street, trying to console a mother who had lost her only son in a terrible accident at the age of twenty-two. “I choose to believe [in an afterlife] because the alternative is so bleak . . . and hopeless.”
For all his attractive and appealing public persona, Mario was really a very introspective and spiritual individual. Once when he was trying to explain the inconsistencies on display among those Catholic laymen and bishops who oppose abortion but are nowhere to be found on state-sanctioned vengeful killings known as capital punishment, a friend retorted, “Damn, Mario, you should have been a cardinal.” It was the only time I ever saw him at a loss for words, as he actually considered it, but for a moment.
It really wasn’t too many years ago that the governor of New York was actually persona non grata at certain Manhattan Catholic schools and institutions. Let’s just say his presence was not “encouraged,” according to the dictates of an obscure and now long-forgotten archdiocesan auxiliary bishop. I’m sorry to say, an Irishman. Yet Mario always acknowledged the legitimacy of the anti-abortion and pro-life advocates. At Notre Dame he said, “I accept the Church’s teaching on abortion . . . . I believe in all cases we should try to teach a respect for life. And I believe that despite Roe v. Wade we can, in practical ways.”
As his son and heir Andrew Cuomo said some years later, “My father had a lot of ‘tension’ with the Church. And the earlier generation of Catholic politicians had still more tension because the Church was trying to tell people, ‘You should govern as a Catholic.’ And my father and many other Catholic elected officials were saying at the time, ‘No, I live my life as a Catholic. I govern according to the Constitution, the laws, and the oath.’ ”
These days, Andrew is starting to sound more and more like his father. He told a reporter, “I believe my father is not gone and that his spirit is with us.” And in his 2016 State of the State address, Mario Cuomo’s son said, “Every time we walk by a homeless person, most of us can’t even bear to look, we can’t bear to make eye contact. We pretend we don’t see them. Why? Because we don’t want them to see us—because it diminishes us . . . to walk past a brother or sister, sitting on a sidewalk and doing nothing. Every time we walk by a homeless person we leave a piece of our soul on that curb.”
I once inquired of a bishop, now a cardinal of the Roman Church, why the hierarchy, or certain members thereof, were, shall we say, “uneasy” with, or in some cases downright hostile to, Mario. Was it his powers of articulation, his rhetoric, his way with words? This great churchman thought for a moment and said, “No, it’s not his rhetoric they fear, or his glibness. It’s his goodness.”
But times change. And in 2010 Timothy Cardinal Dolan wrote a beautiful column warmly embracing Mario’s statement to the Wall Street Journal that the scandal-ridden Church was not its flawed predator-priests or the bishops, cardinals, vicars, deans, and metropolitans far removed from the poor and cloaked in their scarlet finery and trappings of gilt and satin and gold. “Christ is the Church,” reminded the failed baseball player from Queens. “Christ!”
To the Wall Street Journal editor:
Like all Peggy Noonan’s pieces, “The Catholic Church’s Catastrophe” is beautifully written and intelligent.
I hope she will give some thought to writing another on how Catholics are able to “cling to their faith” notwithstanding the many serious sins of the church’s priests and popes over the church’s 2,000-year history.
As Peggy reminds us, Christ told Peter he would be the rock on which Christ would build his church. But he also pointed out to Peter that despite his bestowal of that unique responsibility, Peter would—on his first night of service—commit three serious sins by denying Christ three times.
It has always seemed to me Christ was letting Peter and all the rest of Christendom know that for all the years to come, the church would be charged with the mission of spreading Christ’s word, but its members would be vulnerable human beings who may sin seven times a day.
In fact, Christ is our religion, not the church, and that’s why Catholics are behaving rationally, as well as loyally, when they continue to believe.
Mario Cuomo
New York
Indeed, Mario was over the moon to hear Pope Francis describe the kind of priests he envisioned and hoped for: “I want shepherds with the smell of sheep . . . and a father’s smile. In the sea of words in today’s world . . . you must act as the whistle of the shepherd whose sheep recognize him perfectly and let themselves be moved by him.”
A few months before Mario departed, the current archbishop of New York, who wrote in that 2010 column, “Thank God for Mario Cuomo,” was told that the governor was fading. As he stood in the sunlight outside St. Pius X Church in Scarsdale, New York, the affable Timothy Cardinal Dolan, always full of bonhomie, stopped in his tracks, the color draining from his face as he leaned heavily on his crosier, the ornate bishop’s crooked staff, and removed his miter: “Oh, my God. I’ll have to call Matilda. I’ll go and see him.”
“THE LECTURE OF MY LIFE”: MARIO CUOMO AT THE 92ND STREET Y
On January 25, 2010, a cold, rainy night, Mario took the stage at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan to deliver “The Lecture of My Life,” which succinctly encapsulated who he was and how he came to be. This is what he told an overflow crowd of prominent New Yorkers that night.
Throughout my youth I was only mildly interested in politics.
The things I came to believe in most deeply I learned from the sweaty example of my immigrant parents’ struggle to build a life for themselves and their children; the nuns at St. Monica’s Church in Jamaica, Queens; the priests at St. John’s University; the great rabbis I met during the Second Vatican Council—and from the enlightened vision and profound wisdom of an extraordinary man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist who participated in the discovery of “Peking Man” and who understood evolution. A soldier who knew the inexplicable evil of the battlefield. A scholar who studied the ages. A philosopher, a Catholic theologian, and a teacher.
He reoriented our theology, rewrote its language, and linked it, inseparably, with science. His wonderful books The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, dedicated to “those who love the world,” made negativism a sin.
Teilhard glorified the world and everything in it. He taught us to love and respect ourselves as the pinnacle of God’s creation to this point in evolution.
He taught us how the whole universe—even the pain and imperfection we see—is sacred. He taught us in powerful, cogent, and persuasive prose, and in soaring poetry.
He envisioned a viable and vibrant human future: “We are all foot soldiers in the struggle to unify the human spirit despite all the disruptions of conflict, war, and natural calamities.”
“Faith,” he said, “is not a call to escape the world, but to embrace it.”
Creation is not an elaborate testing ground with nothing but moral obstacles to surmount, but an invitation to join in the work of restoration; a voice urging us to be involved in actively working to improve the world we were born to—by our individual and collective efforts making it kinder, safer, and more loving.
. . .
Without books or history, without saints or sermons, without instruction or revelation, two things about our place in the world should occur to us as human beings.
The first is that the greatest gift we have been given is our existence, our life.
The second is that since we all share the same principal needs and desires, our intelligence naturally inclines us to treat one another with respect and dignity.
The Hebrews, who gave us probably the first of our monotheistic religions, made these ideas the foundation of their beliefs. Tzedakah is the principle that we should treat one another as brother and sister, children of the same great s
ource of Life. And Tikkun Olam is the principle that instructs us to join together in repairing the world.
Rabbi Hillel pointed out that these two radiantly logical principles together make up the whole law. “All the rest,” he said, “is commentary.”
Jesus agreed it was also the whole law for Christians. “The whole law is that you should love one another as you love yourself for the love of truth and the truth is, God made the world but did not complete it; you are to be collaborators in creation.”
Teilhard confirmed for me the intelligence and efficacy of the words of both Hillel and Jesus.
. . .
From all these sources: my struggling immigrant parents and neighbors, the nuns and priests and rabbis, Hillel and Jesus and Teilhard, Our Lady of the Law—with whom I fell profoundly and irretrievably in love—and my own other life experiences—by the mid-seventies I felt I had all the simple, basic values I needed to build a life for myself and my family.
I have learned the vanity of trying to know and to define fully the infinite and the eternal.
But I have also learned that in the end even if my intelligence is too limited for me to know absolutely the truth of things, I can nevertheless choose to believe—and call it “faith” if I must—if that promises me meaningfulness.
I can respond to the ancient summons of Tzedakah and Tikkun Olam, knowing my own religion’s faith rests solidly on those same two pillars.
I’d rather be committed to those propositions than not.
I’d rather believe, because it’s better than the anguish of fearing futility.
And better than the bitterness of despair.
Mario Cuomo Page 3