At Funeral for Mario Cuomo, Praise for a Leader’s Role as a Humanist
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In the end there were the words, and the words were the son’s, and the words were about his father, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.
“At his core, at his best, he was a philosopher, and he was a poet, and he was an advocate, and he was a crusader,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at his father’s funeral service on Tuesday. “Mario Cuomo was the keynote speaker for our better angels.”
In a eulogy that touched on Mario Cuomo’s thoughts about how to deliver a speech — don’t extemporize, use a prepared text — as well as his love of the French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his all-out style on the basketball court well into middle age, Andrew Cuomo said that his father was more of a “humanist” than a politician. To his father, he said, “politics were more of a personal belief system: It was who he was, not what he did.”
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“They say your father never leaves you — if you listen carefully, you will hear his voice,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I believe that’s true. But one doesn’t need to listen that carefully or be his son to know what Mario Cuomo would say today — that it’s time for this city to come together, it’s time to stop the negative energy and move forward.”
He added, “And that’s just what we will do. I promise you that, Pop.”
Mario Cuomo, 82, died on New Year’s Day. In the pews at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue were hundreds of elected officials and government leaders, past and present, among them former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray; former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; and Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in Brooklyn who is President Obama’s nominee to replace Eric H. Holder Jr. as attorney general.
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“What came across to me was Mario Cuomo was unafraid,” Anthony M. Masiello, a former State Senator and former mayor of Buffalo, said after the service. “He was unafraid to lead, unafraid to govern, unafraid to be contrary. When people were going right, he was going left. When people were talking about what they had, he was talking about people who didn’t have. He was unafraid to define it as he saw it.”
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