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When Cardinal O’Connor was Archbishop of New York and Edward I. Koch was the city’s mayor, they disagreed on many hot-button issues, including abortion, gay rights and the death penalty—but they nevertheless enjoyed a close, friendly relationship that should be the model for public leaders today, said former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week.
“Through their friendship, they helped show New Yorkers and the world that people who hold strong beliefs can still get along with those on the other side, a lesson that, sadly, people have forgotten,” Bloomberg said in a talk at the new Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, an archdiocese-sponsored arts center in Manhattan.
Bloomberg said it would be a positive development if Americans would look for such qualities in their public officials as “one of the determinants in who we vote for.”
He said, “If people can’t get along, they can’t make progress, and all of us, the electorate, suffer.”
Cardinal Dolan welcomed the audience and participants to the Sept. 20 program, “Faith and the State of the City,” which was one of the events of the Sheen Center’s opening season.
The cardinal, speaking to a full house in the 274-seat theater, said the new center is a way for the Church to “engage with the culture” in the arts and other disciplines, noting that it’s named for Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the pioneering radio and television evangelist whose spiritual message was always intertwined with the popular and political culture of his day.
“He’s one of the people who has done it best,” Cardinal Dolan said.
To applause from the audience, he added that he hoped the day’s program was the first of an annual Koch Memorial Lecture series on religion in the public square.
The program, which included a panel discussion, was based on the book co-authored by Koch and Cardinal O’Connor called “His Eminence and Hizzoner.”
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president and a former president of the New York Board of Rabbis, was the moderator of the event; panelists, who discussed their own relationships with Koch, were James F. Gill, a former law partner of the mayor who served in many prominent state positions and is currently general counsel for the board of trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral; Pat Koch Thaler, Koch’s sister; and John LoCicero, who served as special adviser to Koch during his 12 years in office.
Bloomberg, in his talk, said the most important bond that Cardinal O’Connor and Mayor Koch shared was the “respect they had for the other’s devotion to the different institutions that each served: the mayor works for the city, the cardinal works for the Church and very often their responsibilities collide.”
He said the inherent tension between church and state is the genius of the American constitution, but “the genius of Koch and O’Connor was that they rose above the tension so cheerfully,” setting an example for New Yorkers and for all mayors and cardinals that followed.
“For all the public attention that gets focused on a few issues,” he said, “when you get right down to it the city and the Church share a fundamentally common mission of feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, educating the young, caring for those who are abandoned and helping people fulfill their God-given potential.”
Bloomberg concluded saying that it’s wonderful that the interfaith dialogue started by Koch and Cardinal O’Connor has continued, but “we should never forget that there are lots of places around the world where clerics don’t dare argue with government officials and there are other of places where government officials don’t dare argue with clerics.”
“We are very lucky,” he said. “Freedom is a very precious thing and religious freedom is at the core of it; and the best way to preserve it, the only way, is to preserve the separation of church and state so that religious beliefs can never curtail constitutional rights.
“This is a great country,” Bloomberg said, on an evening when the city’s two baseball teams were engaged in a subway series. “We have an awful lot to be thankful for, no matter what happens with the Mets and Yankees this year. We’re all new Yorkers, we’re all here together.”
