Connected Minds,Connected Cultures:\ Connected Minds

A N I N V I T A T I O N T O R E A S O NA meeting of minds and hearts: On April 17, Pope Benedict XVI thanked Professor William Wagner (right) for realizing his requestmade nearly four years earlier. Providing the introduction was Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, C.M., president of The CatholicUniversity of America.Forty-five panelists, speakers andrespondents, associated with some of thefinest universities in the world, elevatedthe four-day dialogue into a discourse ofintellectual, legal and theological gravityand beauty.Princeton University’s RobertGeorge, for example, delivered a paperon “Natural Law, God, and HumanRights.” Other noted speakers includedStanley Hauerwas of Duke University,author of a work on Christian socialethics that was named one of the 100most important books on religion in the20th century; Paul Vitz of New YorkUniversity, who has written several bookson the relationship of Christianity andpsychology; and Jean Bethke Elshtain ofthe University of Chicago, a prolificauthor on the connections betweenpolitical and ethical convictions.By its conclusion, symposium participantswere in general consensus thaton the foremost question — do humansacross all cultures respond to a commonethical knowledge — the answer wasprofoundly affirmative, provided thatsuch knowledge was rooted in anacknowledgment of the Divine.As the Rev. John Polkinghorne, aleading particle physicist and the presidentemeritus of Cambridge University’sQueens’ College stated during the symposium’sopening conversation, “Wheredoes our moral knowledge come from?It comes from intimations of the goodand perfect world of our creator.Religious belief makes intelligible wherethese moral intuitions come from.”GENESISThe ground-breaking conferenceand the world-sized concepts it was taskedto wrestle with was nearly four years in themaking. In October 2004, before his elevationto the papacy, Cardinal JosephRatzinger, then prefect of the Vatican’sCongregation for the Doctrine of theFaith, wrote to CUA president Very Rev.David M. O’Connell asking the universityto consider hosting a major symposiumon universally held moral principles and toinvite scholars of different religions andoutlooks to participate. It laid out the casefor such a gathering:“The Catholic Church has becomeincreasingly concerned by the contemporarydifficulty in finding acommon denominator among themoral principles held by all people,which are based on the constitutionof the human person and whichfunction as the fundamental criteriafor laws affecting the rights andduties of all,” the letter stated.“The recognition of such moraltruths has also constituted a startingpoint for the Church’s dialogue withthe world. [We] would be grateful ifThe Catholic University of Americawould consider hosting a symposiumon some aspect of this question.”By extending the invitation, theChurch was trying to incubate new ideasand approaches to some of the most14CUALAWYER /Spring–Summer 2008