Cuomo, surrounded by child sex abuse survivors, said he’s not surprised that there have been calls among some Catholic leaders in the state and nationally for him to be excommunicated from the Church.

He recalled that his father, the late former three-term Gov. Mario Cuomo, faced similar calls over his position on abortion.

“This is not a new issue for a governor named Cuomo,” he said. “It’s sort of a second chapter.”

He called the tensions with the church “an ongoing situation.”

But Cuomo also dug in, defending his positions on abortion and calling out the church for leading the opposition when it came the Child Victims Act. Days after signing into and celebrating and expanding the state’s abortion laws, Cuomo reiterated he agrees with Pope Francis, who has called for a crackdown on pedophile priests.

“To the Catholic Church, I am sorry about the situation,” Cuomo said. "I’m not sorry about my position. I’m sorry they have taken the position they’ve taken.”

Cuomo, a Roman Catholic and former altar boy,accused the church bureaucracy in New York of decades of cover-ups when it came to sexual abuse issues.

“You cannot deny what happened,” he said. “You cannot deny there was significant abuse in the Catholic Church and you can’t deny it was not handled appropriately, and you can’t deny that people were hurt and damaged by it.

“And then the position they took is ‘we don’t want to acknowledge and we don’t want to participate in justice aggravated it, in my opinion,” he added. “It was the exact worst thing to do. Tell the truth. It’s about the truth. Jesus Christ, his teachings were about the truth and justice.”

“it’s not what the church did here and that’s what Pope Francis was trying to say we should do,” Cuomo said.

Noting the church dropped its longstanding opposition to the Child Victims Act, Dennis Poust, spokesman for the state Catholic Conference that Dolan heads, called it “truly unfortunate that Gov. Cuomo continues to portray the societal issue of child sexual abuse as a Catholic-only problem.”

Meanwhile, Dolan, appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” Monday morning, lit into Cuomo for last week signing an abortion law that moves abortion from the state criminal statute to the health code, allows health professionals who are not doctors to perform the procedure, and allows third trimester abortions in certain circumstances.

Dolan called the Reproductive Health Act that Cuomo signed into law ““ghoulish, grisly, gruesome” and admitted he has been getting “wheelbarrows of letters every day” calling for Cuomo to be excommunicated. But the cardinal said he believes it would be counterproductive.

Not only would such a drastic move “be giving ammo to our enemies,” but it would not likely move Cuomo, the New York archbishop said.

“We have a governor that brags about it,” Dolan said. “We have a governor that uses his dissent from church teachings as applause lines. We have a governor that takes quotes from Pope Francis out of context to draw lines between Bishops of New York and the Holy Father himself. He’s not going to be moved by this. So what would be the use?”

Dolan called it a “good point” when asked his thought on denying Cuomo communion, though he called it a “pastoral issue that I think one has to talk to him about.”

He also said that despite Cuomo having called it painful, he believes the governor enjoys the criticism from the church.

“He likes this,” Dolan said. “He likes being the Pecks bad boy when it comes to the Catholic Church.”

Cuomo said it’s not the job of elected officials to “legislate religious beliefs.”