Kaveny Gives the Commonweal Talk

The most important generation to hear this conversation is your own generation, according to eminent Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny after she gave a lecture on the importance of the teachings of St. Thomas of Aquinas.

Her talk “Law, Morality, and the Culture Wars,” which was a part of the third Annual Commonweal Magazine Lecture at the University this past Wednesday, examined the teachings of St. Thomas in the context of significant current issues.

The lecture discussed hot button issues such as abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, stem cell research and cloning. Kaveny stressed the importance of looking to how Aquinas looked at laws while also pointing out the flaws of Aquinas’ dependence on laws without separating the different types of laws.

She stressed this point saying, “You don’t read criminal law to find out what virtue is, but to find out what it is absolutely not.”

Kaveny’s other theme throughout the talk looked at being able to accept different viewpoints than your own and to be able to work with those who oppose your belief system. This was a message she felt was extremely important especially in today’s political realm.

In the Q&A portion of the lecture, Kaveny fielded a question which asked about politicians who do not believe in abortion because of their Catholic beliefs. Kaveny’s response criticized politicians for blaming their Catholic belief system for their views on abortion. She felt that this meant politicians make the pro-life movement seem to be a small group of Catholics.

Paul Lakeland, the head of the Catholic Studies department, organized the event and said he was pleased with the turnout.

He found there was a good mix of young and old and said the only missing age group was 40-year-olds, which he joked were at home taking care of their kids. Lakeland was also impressed with the intelligence of the questions during the Q&A period, pointing out that the especially students that asked questions.

Joe Mercadante ‘11 shared a different view. “I felt lost, it was over my head and hard to understand.”

But Mercadante did say, “She did make good points, it was interesting.”