The John Paul II Institute cordially invites you to join us for a conference on “The Difference Sex Makes: Man, Woman, Child” on February 25-27, 2027.

Theme

Luce Irigaray, the French psychoanalyst, once said: Sexual difference is one of the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue.  According to Heidegger, each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one alone.  Sexual difference is probably that issue in our own age which could be our salvation.

This statement made decades ago by someone who wanted more difference, is truer today than it was then, now that we have (almost) lost sight of the difference altogether. That it has become a “fact” that we are identities stacked arbitrarily on top of a merely biological substrate, shows how ideological the sex-gender binary is: a highly constructed form of “self-knowledge” at the service of a revolution which aimed to abolish the natural order at its very root, the sex distinction itself.  If that revolution aimed first at giving birth, by detaching sex from its finality, it would not be complete until it detached our “selves” from the evidence our own birth, that is, our sex and the complex of relations it implies (between the sexes and the generations). We have just seen how successful that revolution could be.

Gender ideology is a “heresy,” in the strict sense of the term, in that it chooses (from hairesis) one dimension of the truth at the expense of the other, subsequently redefining each of the terms. “Person” is chosen over and against “nature,” the former having become a disembodied self, with no natural relation to what is now “mere” biology. The individual is chosen over and against the political, the former having become an interchangeable “unit of life” with no natural relation to others.

Currently, as many are witnessing the ruinous effects of this “heresy,” they are beginning to question its terms. If we want “salvation,” we will have to get out from under it. But, as with every heresy, “anathemas” are not enough. The recent attempt to eliminate the sex difference requires that we probe its depths and define it more clearly.

What is sexual difference? What is it, metaphysically? What is it to God, and in the whole economy of salvation? What is it, then, to be a man or a woman, a father or a mother? What is needed, culturally, for a girl to become a woman or a boy a man? What is the relation of sexual difference to culture and to the political order?  What is at stake when in getting these questions right or wrong? In short, what do we “believe” about sexual difference?

Schedule

Registration

Alumni Reunion

Following the close of the conference, graduates of the John Paul II Institute are cordially invited to an alumni reunion on the evening of Saturday, February 27. Registration for the reunion may be completed using the form on the alumni reunion event page. Please click here for details on the schedule of events.