Mario Cuomo, who died New Year's Day and about whom Paul Moses writes here, was also a Commonweal author. In "Persuade or Coerce?" he responded to Kenneth Woodward on the subject of Cuomo's 1984 speech at Notre Dame; in "Faith & Government," he wrote about the experience of elected officials who try to reconcile personal religious convictions while serving a pluralistic American constituency. "Catholicism is a religion of the head as well as the heart, and to be a Catholic is to commit to dogmas that distinguish our faith from others," Cuomo wrote in our pages:

Like most religions, it also requires a lifelong struggle to practice that faith day to day. The practice can be difficult. Today’s America is a consumer-driven society filled with endless distractions and temptations for people struggling to live by spiritual as well as material impulses. Catholics who also happen to hold political office in this pluralistic democracy-and therefore commit to serve Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, Protestants, as well as Catholics-undertake an additional responsibility. They must try to create conditions under which all citizens can live with a reasonable degree of freedom to practice their own competing religious beliefs, like the right to divorce, to use birth control, to choose abortion, to withdraw stem cells from embryos...or even to fight the belief in a God.

Also, in 1985, the editors of Commonweal interviewed Cuomo, then in his first term as New York governor; you can read the complete interview here.