Franciscan University to launch Institute for the Study of Man and Woman

CNA Staff, Nov 14, 2024 / 11:00 am

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

Franciscan University President Father Dave Pivonka, TOR, announced the launch of the Institute for the Study of Man and Woman during the Oct. 24–26 “Man and Woman in the Order of Creation Conference.”

The conference featured scholars from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) including Francis Maier and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty as well as Angela Franks, senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, and other academics.

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

Men and women together

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

The priest said the initiative “isn’t an institute to study gender, or only women, or only men.” 

“To come to understand the human person more deeply, we believe we must take seriously the reality that God created both male and female — and we cannot fully understand man apart from woman nor woman apart from man,” he said.

Inspiration for the institute struck 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 you can’t understand woman apart from man or vice versa. They come as a pair.”

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

Through the 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 several cultural issues of the day.

“I follow JPII’s advice that we not concentrate on fighting evil but concentrate on building something good,” Savage explained. “My project has been toward that end: to have an actual robust, fully grounded account of man and woman to offer.”

“Just as men’s identities need to be more fully understood and lifted up, so do women’s,” Savage said, noting that men and women are negatively impacted by “the disaster that’s taking place in our culture as a result of the widespread use of artificial contraception.”

Savage credits birth control as both cutting men out “of the most fundamental aspects of the relationship between men and women” and rejecting women’s “basic gift to humanity, which is her capacity to conceive and nurture life.” 

“You can’t find happiness by being willing to reduce yourself to an object of sexual desire,” she noted. “When you reduce the desire for relationship to sex, as we have done, what you’re seeing in front of us unfold is human beings reducing themselves to the level of animals.” 

The lack of meaning is self-destructive, according to Savage.

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

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

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

Cultural issues

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

Kheriaty, a physician and director of the EPPC program in bioethics and American democracy, noted at the recent conference that differences between men and women run through all levels of human biology. “Aside from our reproductive organs, the most sexually differentiated organ in the human body is the brain," he pointed out.

In addition, he emphasized that "one mistake that contemporary gender theory or gender ideology makes is the notion that a man with some characteristically feminine traits or interests is really a woman trapped in a man’s body, and vice versa. That is not true.”

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

“A failure to acknowledge the full extent of this variation and overlap in gender traits results in overly rigid cultural stereotypes in what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman,” Kheriaty continued.

The masculine and feminine genius 

The Catholic understanding of men and women points to both their unity and their distinct masculinity and femininity, Savage and other academics noted. 

A Catholic understanding of men and women can be found in Genesis, in the creation of Adam and Eve. When looking at the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2, Savage observed that Eve is made from Adam’s rib, which “links them in a one-flesh union for all of eternity.”

“That doesn't mean just a sexual union,” she continued. “That means that they're meant to collaborate as stewards of creation.”

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 the masculine and feminine geniuses. 

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

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

Meanwhile, the masculine genius “is very much tied up in his capacity to put the goods of creation at the service of his wife and his family and the community,” Savage said, noting that “men seem to be more ordered toward objects than toward persons.” 

Franks, a theology professor 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 received task, then what becomes most important is not discerning what I want or desire or feel…[but rather] what the source of my identity has in mind for me,” she said.