I am a liberal because I was raised Catholic. In a typically thoughtful and searching speech he gave at Notre Dame, former New York governor Mario Cuomo, the most intellectual of nonclerical Catholics, referred to practicing the work of Christ in our life, “practicing it especially where that love is most needed, among the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.” That’s the lesson I took away from the New Testament, the requirement that if you had two cloaks you should give one to the person who had none, that you should love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a lesson that has never left me.
