Books, Arts & Manners: Mario Cuomo v. the City of God

Caesar’s Coin: Religion and Politics in America, by Richard P McBrien (Macmillan, 294 pp., $19.95)

An ecclesiologist by trade, Professor Richard P. McBrien is a liberal apologist by avocation. Through his newspaper column and television appearances, he acts as the media’s barometer of “moderate” American Catholic dissent from Vatican pronouncements. He appeals to the many middle-class Catholics who, in order to float with the secular mainstream, rely on hauts vulgarisateurs for opinions acceptable to the information elites. So even though he wrote this ramshackle book for a broad audience of “intelligent nonspecialists,” they won’t find anything original and provocative in it. Such significance as it does have derives from the views and career of its hero, Mario Cuomo.

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Michael Liccione

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Caesar’s Coin: Religion and Politics in America, by Richard P McBrien (Macmillan, 294 pp., $19.95)

An ecclesiologist by trade, Professor Richard P. McBrien is a liberal apologist by avocation. Through his newspaper column and television appearances, he acts as the media’s barometer of “moderate” American Catholic dissent from Vatican pronouncements. He appeals to the many middle-class Catholics who, in order to float with the secular mainstream, rely on hauts vulgarisateurs for opinions acceptable to the information elites. So even though he wrote this ramshackle book for a broad audience of “intelligent nonspecialists,” they won’t find anything original and provocative in it. Such significance as it does have derives from the views and career of its hero, Mario Cuomo.