A week after meeting the Pope at Yankee Stadium, Governor Paterson, opened up to a radio interview about his religious convictions.

Mr. Paterson, who is Catholic, was asked whether his support for gay marriage and abortion rights put him at odds with his church.

In his reply, the governor pointed out that “Church leaders squabble all the time” and then contrasted the top-down hierarchy and teachings of the Catholic Church with New Age religious philosophy.

“You never find that the seers, the shamans, or the spiritualists really disagree because they understand, as we all should, that in the end, each individual has the right to interpret all of this in a way that they think is right for them and obviously not hurting others or other spirits,” he said. “I’m not saying that I’m right and everybody else is wrong, but I’m just saying that I have an opinion and I have the right to have it.”

Catholics who seek guidance from the Pope rather than a shaman may disagree with the governor’s belief that doctrinal matters are best left up to the individual. What I found interesting about his religious permissiveness was how it mirrors his approach toward governing, which also favors tolerance to disagreement.

Mr. Paterson can be an engaging speaker. He’s never shrill or overbearing but disarms people with warmth, humor, and breadth of knowledge. But when you listen to him, you also wonder whether behind the charm lies a core of principle and consistency.

Mr. Paterson has a tendency to contradict himself, to straddle both sides of an issue, to respond to a tough question with a quip rather than with a straight answer, and to favor bigger words than action that could cause discord.

This protean quality emerged later in the interview when Mr. Paterson, who as a senator for 20 years clearly benefited from Albany’s incumbency machine, lamented that Albany is controlled by “the Incumbency Party.” The governor, who as Senate minority leader exerted much effort picking off Republican seats, now says he “can’t tell the difference between the Democrats and Republicans.”

Asked about what he was doing about pork-barrel spending, Mr. Paterson highlighted as an accomplishment the $700 million in the budget for an “upstate revitalization fund” that he said would “reignite the engine of the upstate economy.” “We don’t want to do it the way the federal government addressed poverty programs in the ’60s, and perhaps the way other government spending episodes have proven to be faulty,” he said. His administration “convened a number of councils,” “got input from all of our upstate regions,” and spoke to civic and business leaders, “so that when we do ask taxpayers to put that large amount of resource into an area to try to revitalize it that we would then yield results. … So yes the days of wine and roses and the days of pork and barrel are also over.”

That sounds fine until you realize that most of the $700 million is under the control of the Legislature, which is going to dole it out as pork just like it does every year. And Mr. Paterson isn’t touching the porkiest pot of money: the $200 million a year in “member item” discretionary grants that have been the source of so much controversy.

That hasn’t stopped Mr. Paterson from making fiscal discipline the theme of his young administration. But, again, if you take a look at what he’s doing, rather than what he’s saying, you’ll find that the governor is going out of his way to avoid confrontation with the Legislature and organized labor.

The governor warns about painful spending cuts in next year’s budget. But he’s only talking about tightening the belts of his own agencies. New York spends more per capita on education and Medicaid — which consume most of the budget — than other states, but Mr. Paterson is leaving those areas alone.

Even his across-the-board 3.35% cut to state agencies isn’t a cut but a reduction in planned spending growth. Many agencies are still spending more than they did last year.

On the single most important tax issue in the state, Mr. Paterson is absent. Albany wastes billions of dollars each year giving property tax exemptions to homeowners, who wind up paying more taxes because the subsidies only encourage school districts to spend more.

The cycle could be broken by capping property tax increases, a solution adopted by more than a dozen other states. Mr. Paterson isn’t taking a position on the cap because “We’re not actually sure if it can actually be achieved.”

It’s no coincidence that the cap is opposed by lawmakers and the teachers unions. For Mr. Paterson to fight for a tax cap would mean staking a position and risking an actual disagreement that could lead to an actual change. Too bad that won’t happen. It’s not the way of the shaman.

jacob@nysun.com