Historic audio: Mario Cuomo and the question “Who is God?”

The day before Mario Cuomo’s funeral in New York City, the city’s fabled 92nd St. Y has released, for the first time, the audio of a memorable talk he gave there over 20 years ago on the subject of God.

The New York Times notes: 

Like few other elected officials, Mr. Cuomo sought publicly to reconcile his belief in the God of his own Roman Catholic Church with his progressive political agenda, while challenging religious leaders and other public figures who claimed a monopoly on morals.

Who else but Mario Cuomo, then serving a third term as the governor of New York, would take the bait when the essayist Roger Rosenblatt invited him to join a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y in 1991 to ponder the question of “Who Is God?” — and, more specifically, to reveal whether God confided in politicians.

Delivering an eloquent 15-minute soliloquy with a preacher’s cadence, Mr. Cuomo revealed as much about himself — an ordinary New Yorker from the “asphalt streets and stickball” of Queens who “struggles to keep a belief in God that he has inherited, a Catholic raised in a religion closer to the peasant roots of the simple Sunday Mass practitioners than to the high intellectual traditions of the Talmudic scholars, the elegant Episcopalian homilists or abstruse Jesuits teachers” — as he did about God.

Mr. Cuomo recounted growing up in Jamaica, Queens, among the poor and the wounded, in a neighborhood where a famous ex-jockey-turned-alcoholic froze to death one winter while sleeping in a crate across from St. Monica’s Church.

“It was hard to see God’s goodness in the pathetic faces of the customers in our small grocery store pleading with my father for bread and maybe some cold cuts just until the next relief check comes, ‘Andrew please,’ ” Mr. Cuomo recalled.

But through all the tribulations, the Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the ’60s, when Americans were asking not “Who is God?” but whether God even existed, Mr. Cuomo said, they still needed “something larger than ourselves to believe in” and that “in the end, to make sense, it must be a God of love.”

Read more. 

Better yet, click on the video below to hear the audio. It’s worth 15 minutes of your time.