Former Democratic governor Mario Cuomo passed away yesterday to meet the Great Theologian. Cuomo’s vaunted rhetorical skills probably won’t do him much good as he sits for a heavenly discussion over his role in legitimizing the slaughter of the innocents.

Undoubtedly his most significant historical and spiritual contribution to American culture, Gov. Cuomo launched a full-throated defense of a new theology in his 1984 address to students and faculty at Notre Dame University. In his Democrat Encyclical on Abortion, Cuomo laid claim to being a faithful Catholic while simultaneously being at war with Christianity over the matter of killing preborn children. He asserted for himself a moral ground in which he could personally be uncomfortable with abortion, while using his public power to defend the “right” of women to kill their own children in the womb.

His was a spellbinding speech that provided lesser Democrat politicians with the rhetoric necessary to support abortion rights while purporting to be decent, moral persons. It was a watershed moment for the Democrat Party and the nation. No longer did the likes of Ted Kennedy have to squirm around the need to maintain ties with progressives while claiming to be Christian.

He provided the intellectual framework which allowed the Democrat Party to become the pro-abortion institution it is today.

At the time, his challenge to the orthodoxy of Christian faith produced loud rumblings of disagreement from Catholic leadership. Cardinal John O’Connor reportedly considered ex-communicating the politician for his bold leadership in legitimizing abortion. But the decision was made to accommodate Cuomo and others like him – a political decision by the Catholic Church which is broadly applied to renegade public figures to this day.

Thinking about the death of Mario Cuomo, one wonders where the course of his own life – both here and eternally – and America’s embrace of abortion may have gone if Cardinal O’Connor and the Catholic Church had responded to Cuomo differently.