Plans are underway at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, to launch an initiative that will address what it means to be human amid “ever-increasing confusion in our world” about gender.

Franciscan University Franciscan President Father Dave Pivonka announcement the launch of the Institute for the Study of Men and Women during the conference “Man and Woman in the Order of Creation” from October 24 to 26.

The Washington, DC, conference brought together scholars from Center for Ethics and Public Policy (EPPC), including Francis Maier and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, as well as Angela Franks, principal investigator at Abigail Adams Instituteand other academics.

“Franciscan is excited to be a voice of reason and faith in a discussion that is often lacking in both cases,” Father Pivonka told CNA.

“What does it mean to be human? “This question has been asked for millennia, but with the ever-increasing confusion in our world, it takes on greater importance today,” said Father Pivonka.

The priest said the initiative “is not an institute to study gender, nor only women, nor only men.”

“To understand the human person more deeply, we believe we must take seriously the reality that God created both man and woman – and we cannot fully understand man without woman, nor the woman without the man,” he said.

The inspiration for the institute came when Franciscan theology professor Deborah Savage saw another Catholic university adding a women’s studies program.

Savage, a St. John Paul II scholar, told CNA that “the truth is that you cannot understand woman in isolation from man, or vice versa. They come in pairs.

The program is still in its early stages and is seeking funding. Savage, who proposed the idea, has been working on the project since last summer.

Through this institute, Savage hopes to develop a Catholic anthropology of men and women, thereby creating an alternative to the perspectives that are at the root of many of today’s cultural issues.

“I follow JPII’s advice that we focus not on fighting evil but on building something good,” Savage explained. “My project was in this direction: to have a solid and fully based story on the man and the woman to offer. »

“Just as men’s identities need to be better understood and valued, so must women’s identities,” Savage said, emphasizing that both men and women are negatively impacted by the “disaster that is occurring in our culture due to the ‘widespread use of artificial weapons’. contraception.”

Savage credits birth control with excluding men from “the most fundamental aspects of the relationship between men and women” and rejecting women’s “fundamental gift to humanity, which is their ability to conceive and nurture the life “.

“We cannot find happiness by agreeing to reduce ourselves to an object of sexual desire,” she stressed. “When you reduce the desire for connection to sex, as we have done (in modern culture), what you see before us is human beings reducing themselves to the level of animals.”

Lack of meaning is self-defeating, according to Savage.

“We are hotbeds of meaning, and we work so hard to remove any meaning or meaning from the sexual act, to free ourselves from any constraint, that we really destroy everything that makes us human,” Savage said.

Once established, the institute will have a research and teaching component, including a diploma program for students. It will also have an outreach component, designed to share ideas through conferences and workshops and in Catholic schools.

The institute is designed to be interdisciplinary, with faculty in neuroscience, biology, psychology, sociology, marriage and family studies, as well as philosophy and theology.

Both through the institute and at the recent conference, Franciscans are responding to gender ideology from a Catholic perspective.

Kheriaty, director of the EPPC Program in Bioethics and American Democracy, pointed out at the recent conference that contemporary gender ideology can promote rigid stereotypes.

“One mistake that contemporary gender theory or gender ideology makes is the idea that a man with typically feminine traits or interests is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body and vice versa. That’s not true,” he said.

“He might be a boy who likes ballet, or she might be a girl who likes football. That’s all,” he argued.

“Failure to recognize the full extent of these variations and overlaps in gender traits results in overly rigid cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman,” Kheriaty continued.

The Catholic understanding of men and women highlights both their unity and their distinct masculinity and femininity, Savage and other scholars have noted.

A Catholic understanding of men and women is found in Genesis, in the creation of Adam and Eve. In examining the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2, Savage observed that Eve is made of Adam’s rib, which “connects them in a one-flesh union for all eternity.”

“It doesn’t just mean sexual union,” she continued. “This means they are expected to collaborate as creative managers.”

While men and women need to collaborate, they are also distinct. The creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis shows two different experiences, which Savage calls male and female geniuses.

For Adam, “his first encounter with a reality is that of a horizon that contains only lower-order creatures,” Savage explained. “He knows the goods of creation; he knows them well.

“A woman’s contact with reality is very different,” she added. “Its first contact is with Adam’s face. She has never lived in a horizon that did not already contain other people.

Meanwhile, male genius “is very much tied to his ability to put the goods of creation to the service of his wife, his family and the community,” Savage said, noting that “men seem to be more orderly toward objects than towards objects. people. »

Franks, professor of theology at St. John’s Seminary and senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, added that identity is received from God: “If we conceive of identity not as a project but as a task received, then what becomes most important is not to discern what I want, what I desire or what I feel… (but rather) what the source of my identity has. top of mind for me. »