This stunning thirty-year-old talk delivered in St. James Cathedral in Brooklyn was praised by Notre Dame’s Father Theodore Hesburgh, who found it better even than Mario’s historic speech at Notre Dame. Could any bishop, cardinal—or even a pope-have done better? This, I respectfully suggest, is one of the governor’s very best. I was there in Brooklyn that day, October 2, 1986, to witness its power and beauty.
It’s a great privilege for me to be asked to speak at St. James Cathedral.
The truth is, we all need guidance, and I come here tonight not so much to instruct as to learn.
Certainly, I do not come here as a theologian: I do not have that competence.
Nor am I competent to speak to you as a philosopher.
I am here as an old-fashioned Catholic who sins, regrets, struggles, worries, gets confused, and most of the time feels better after Confession.
And I am here as a politician and public official who has found that trying to be both, as a Catholic, has raised some questions.
I started to think seriously about being a Catholic right here in Brooklyn—at St. John’s Prep and later at St. John’s College, where I first began to regard my faith as something worth struggling to understand more fully.
And later, as I moved into other phases of my life, it was in Brooklyn, too, that I married Matilda, we had our first child, and I worked at the practice of law—at a time when the Church, through the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council, was moving into another phase of its life.
Amid all the changes in the Church’s life, and my own, Brooklyn changed too, in many ways.
Real estate development, demographic patterns, and changing attitudes took their toll. Some parishes merged or closed. Congregations dwindled.
There is no secret to St. James’s success. It has utilized the oldest and most obvious strength of Christianity—a broad, deep emphasis on a life of love. It has committed itself to what a cathedral church was in medieval times: the symbol of a city that belonged to all people, a place where the blessings of life were celebrated and the burdens shared.
St. James has worked as hard as any parish in this city—or, for that matter, in this state and nation—to love the world. To marry its mission to all the needs of its people—their need for physical as well as spiritual sustenance, for song, celebration, beauty, and art.
We are living through a time of turbulence in the Church’s history.
This is a time of disagreement, public dissent, and debate.
That debate has been in two areas principally.
Recently it has involved dissent from Church doctrine between and among theologians and members of the hierarchy.
A second—and distinctly separate—part of the public debate involved the Church and politicians.
The more difficult debate for me is the theological discussion on Church doctrine and on teaching authority in the Church—on questions like the role of theologians and pastors and their relationship to those who exercise juridical authority over the area of doctrine.
It is not uncommon for people who share a great deal—people even part of the same family—to find themselves sometimes at odds, their closeness sometimes marred by suspicion or distrust.
As my opportunities and experiences broadened, my father, especially, feared that I was moving away from his world. And despite all his ambitions for me, despite the pride he felt, I think that troubled him.
He never said so, but I could sense it. I could see it in his face, hear it in his voice.
It took him a while to adjust to what were for him new ways, new emphases, different truths.
But gradually I realized that whatever success I had, however many degrees I obtained, whatever money I earned, however comfortable in my new identity I seemed, the deepest part of me belonged to him and my mother, and what they were.
I carried in my heart their values, their sense of family, their faith.
And those things were more profound, more important, more enduring than the differences that developed over the years.
Only gradually did my father come to understand this, to know that his son in a suit and tie, with the big desk and the office, the son who seemed so at home in another language, another world, was bound to him and my mother in ways that could never be broken.
Bound to them by love for them, for whom they were and what they stood for.
The Church is a family, like mine, like yours. After all the headache and the heartache of the moment’s contentions, that will prove to be the greater truth.
The early Church was a church journeying through history with a still-forming sense of its identity and mission. Ambiguity, restlessness, incompleteness, an eagerness to probe, refine, to deepen understanding, did not cause the “gates of hell to prevail against the Church.” In fact, they led to a deeper, more vibrant faith.
So, while the Church struggles to discern where the spirit is leading it, on questions like the role of the laity, particularly of women, church–state relationships, even the precise meaning of subtle doctrines, we should be neither surprised nor unduly threatened because people disagree about what the answers to these questions are.
In my own experience, I was part of a discussion over how we, as Catholics, having agreed on what we believe as doctrinal truth, were called upon to relate our belief to our political world. More specifically, we were asked to consider how a Catholic politician should exercise political judgment in an area where the Church’s moral teaching is clear.
The question I, and many others, struggled over was to what extent my belief, my full acceptance of Catholic moral teaching—in such areas as birth control, abortion, divorce, capital punishment—bound me to work to make my belief the law in a pluralistic society such as ours where millions of decent and good people believed differently than I.
At Notre Dame, I stated my belief that as a Catholic I was a partner in the Church’s salvific mission and was bound by its moral teachings, but that the Church did not require me to pursue that mission according to a precisely defined political plan or strategy.
Nor did it require me, as a matter of doctrine, to engage the political system in a struggle to have it adopt every article of its belief as part of public morality.
The Church has often made the decision to abide by the civil law on questions of moral conduct where the law’s direction ran counter to the Church’s teaching.
On birth control, for example, and even capital punishment—one area where the Church’s instruction was pointed directly at government—the Church had decided not to insist that the moral values it teaches be the law of the land for our pluralistic society. Even on the question of slavery in the 1850s a barely established Church thought it prudent not to make a political fight over the elemental moral proposition.
At Notre Dame I did not suggest, however, that the freedom to disagree with the Church’s political strategy on the abortion question would excuse doing nothing to proclaim our belief. I urged that, in the present climate, where not everyone accepts what Catholics and others believe, we must begin with ourselves, proving the beauty and worth of our instruction.
The central truth—the Church’s principal teaching—is that Christ calls on us to be centers of his energy by working not with force or wealth to change the world but by using the weapons of the Word and of love.
He calls us to share our truth—not just by legislating its acceptance—but by being living examples of it. By accepting the terrible risk of loving each other the way he loved the world.
This is the simple, astounding truth that is the greatest mystery of our belief. This is the great mission of the Church, a mission that has endured through all the tumult of 2,000 years.
We are called to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, entering the world as He entered it, not to sit in judgment, not to condemn, but to heal and enlighten. To bring the light of His hope into all the arenas of our lives—social, political, economic, and cultural.
T
o affirm with our lives the revolutionary idea that we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. And that the responsibility to love is higher, wider, deeper than any of our differences.
We all agree on that: cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, brothers, the lay people. From the beginning until now.
And the Church’s work of love goes on, day in and day out, in thousands and thousands of places, unnoticed by the unconcerned, unnoted by the media.
When a priest, in the twenty-fifth year of his ministry to the people of the South Bronx, climbs up into the pulpit this Sunday to offer his congregation the message of a God of joy and hope, there will be no network coverage of this miracle of one man offering his life to all these others—in the name of Christ’s love.
When a thirty-year-old Sister of Charity makes her rounds this evening in the hospice where she tends victims of AIDS abandoned by the world, there will be no reporter inquiring as to how the call of Christ’s love brought her to this place and this service.
When the Franciscans fill the plates and cups of the scores of shivering, homeless, hungry souls who come to St. Francis of Assisi on 31st Street in Manhattan, where love is measured by the things that permit survival, no pictures will be taken for the next day’s centerfold.
There are a thousand times a thousand wonders being worked in this city by people bearing to the world the outrageous belief we share. And none of them will be in tomorrow’s news.
We have dissent and argument enough to occupy us. But there is no dissent on the obligation to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, to care for the ill, to educate the young, to work to provide everyone with the dignity of a job, to find ways to console those who are broken in body or soul, and to dedicate ourselves to the vision of a society that is as inclusive as the kingdom that Christ came among us to found.
That—more than the complex and nuanced differences among theologians—is the fundamental strength of this amazing institution we call the Church, which has survived the 2,000 years since the message was first heard, the message it will be uttering and living until prophecy becomes eternity.
Teilhard de Chardin, himself the survivor of a lifetime of contention and debate, in just a few magnificent sentences said it better than I and most of us ever could. Talking about what truly matters, about our obligations to involve ourselves in things of this world, he wrote these words:
Lift up your hearts! Look at the immense crowds of those who build and those who love.
Over the world they toil—in laboratories, in studios, in factories—in the vast social crucible.
Open your arms and your hearts, like Christ your Lord, and welcome the flood and the sweat of humanity.
Accept it all, be part of it all, Teilhard said. For without becoming part of it, what hope have we of the kingdom?
Teilhard’s words and the lively, world-loving faith of St. James’s parish are worth thinking about as this diverse family that is the Church struggles toward that kingdom.
DIVERSITY IN AMERICA: “THE NEW IMMIGRANTS”
This speech about diversity in America and the new immigrants, delivered June 7, 2000, resonates even now, sixteen years after Mario stood at the lectern in the great ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Even the captains, waiters, and busboys applauded.
One of our greatest gifts is the rich diversity we are allowed as Americans.
And despite the world’s skepticism two centuries ago, it certainly has proven to be a good prescription for building a new nation.
The world said it couldn’t be done. A great nation could not be assembled from fragments of other cultures, joined together permanently by the idea that human beings are inalienably entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But in 1776 the call went out from a small group of immigrants in a new and wild land, struggling against a powerful oppressor. And ever since, people from all over the world have responded.
Millions left their birthplace to join in building a unique republican democracy—freer than any nation on earth, and still remarkably well-ordered by an extraordinary legal system.
Now, after 200 years, we have made our nation the world’s most powerful economy, military force, and engine of opportunity.
We could not have done it without the immigrants.
Nothing was built. No war was won. No new level of progress ever reached, without them.
Immigrants from Europe claimed the new land, rejected the foreign oppressor, and participated in writing the documents that established a unique new nation.
Immigrants from all parts of the world have supplied workers, entrepreneurs, soldiers, judges, artists, philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders.
They shared with us their culture as we worked to create our own.
And as they have been vital to our past, they are indispensable to our future.
That’s especially evident here in New York, where so many of us are from other places that it’s hard to think of any of us as an alien.
Immigration has been the protein of New York’s life, giving it sustenance and strength and growth.
The continuous new waves of immigrants have nourished this multi-layered, polyglot, pulsating crowd of humanity. Together, we’ve built the great World City.
Many of the immigrants stayed a lifetime.
Others spread from here to the rest of our nation, reseeding it with their twin cultures, relishing America’s unique prerogative: here you can affirm the present without having to deny your past.
New York needs the immigrants now more than ever, and so does the rest of the nation.
Our Social Security and Medicare systems depend upon today’s workers paying for today’s elderly. At the current rate at which we are producing native-born Americans, we will soon not have enough workers to support our growing number of elderly.
At the same time, our education system has not produced enough high-skilled workers to meet the needs of our high-tech industries, so this year we will seek 200,000 more computer engineers from other nations.
We will continue to rely on immigrants.
And they will come.
They will not be exactly like my parents’ generation.
They won’t be part of the “huddled masses.”
The color and accent of most of them will be different.
And their skill and education level will almost surely be higher.
But they will come, yearning to breathe free the air of opportunity.
And they will come bearing gifts.
In addition to skills, the replenishment of our work force, and the willingness to work hard, they will provide a fresh appreciation of the glorious good fortune all Americans enjoy, and an eagerness to contribute at the highest level they can reach.
The honorees can describe their gratitude and pride, eloquently, in the English language.
My mother and father would have not been able to do that. They were immigrants too, but they came speaking only the rough dialect of their small community in the mountains of Salerno, and they were never given a chance to be educated here.
They arrived as the Great Depression began to drag down the nation and soon found themselves with two children, no money, and no work.
There was no welfare or unemployment insurance or Medicare or Medicaid or housing vouchers.
And in their poor neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens, on the other side of the tracks, there were no charities either.
They were rescued by a couple who owned a small grocery store, other immigrants from Poland, Harry and Ruby Kessler.
Harry had to run the store but suffered a heart attack and needed someone to do the physical work. In exchange, he provided a large room behind the store with a toilet, a black tub, a coal stove, enough to eat, and a few dollars a week.
Harry and Ruby Kessler saved Momma and Poppa and their kids.
But they weren’t able to teach them to speak, read, and write any kind of decent English.
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r to appreciate more fully the world around them.
Indeed, Harry’s and Ruby’s own command of the language was a limited one. And in those years before television and the computer, their understanding of the culture that surrounded them hardly reached beyond the simple daily patterns and lifestyle of their own tenement community.
The Kesslers and the Cuomos of the early twentieth century in South Jamaica, Queens, accomplished more than anyone had the right to expect of them.
But it pains me to think of how these bright, proud, ambitious, God-fearing, family-loving, hardworking new Americans were stifled by a lack of education.
How it tied their tongues and imprisoned their intelligence.
It hurts to think of what they might have been, what they might have given, what they could have enjoyed, if only someone, somehow, had taught them the language.
With the language they would have taught themselves all the rest.
A thousand volunteers—many themselves immigrants—teach thousands of immigrants every year the English language and American culture.
Empowering them, enriching their contributions to our society, enhancing their enjoyment of the gift of life in America they cherish, and deserve.
For all the celebrating and even exultation in this room tonight, there are other people in other places, deriding immigrants as fragmentors of the American culture, and pledging to use their political and economic strength—in the words of one of the more prominent of them—“to stem the flow of foreigners into our great country.”
People like that have been with us from the beginning.
Their own forebears were immigrants: they themselves may even have been.
But once they were safely ensconced here, they decided America should take up the gangplank and lock the gates against all but temporary visitors, lest they be required to share our abundance with people not lucky enough to have been born just a generation or so sooner.
There were people like that even before the Know-Nothings and Nativists of the nineteenth century.
Later, in the 1950s, they talked about “mongrelization” by Slavs and Mediterraneans.
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