CVs don't have to be Virgins?

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This is the sort of thing that happens when we try to solve problems with bigger problems. 😎
 
well, if I have to persons with a broken leg, one of them because of a crime and completely innocent, the other because of a car accident under drug influence on the way home from a brothel - then both will occur in the same “broken legs 2018 statistic” and both will meet n the same waiting room.
The problem started when we overweightet physical virginity in vocations.
 
“A better term would be ‘consecrated chastity/celibacy’”

I agree. I understand the idea of wanting to honor and preserve virginity (which in our society is treated more like a burden to be gotten rid of as soon as possible), but when it comes to a state of life that involves public vows, do we REALLY want to call attention to the issue of whether or not someone is literally a virgin? There’s no way to verify that unless you want to get really, really invasive. If we simply call this state “consecrated chastity” it would cover virgins, widows, penitents, and those who don’t fit into any of these categories (e.g., a divorced woman who had been chaste prior to her marriage, been faithful during her marriage, but whose husband divorced her against her will. She might want to consecrate herself to a life of chastity after the divorce, but she isn’t a virgin, she isn’t a widow, and she can’t really be classed as a penitent since she has no fornication or adultery in her past.).

Also, the traditional vows taken by religious have always been referred to as poverty, CHASTITY and obedience – not poverty, virginity and obedience. If nuns don’t take vows of “virginity”, why insist that lay women do?

Finally, to insist that a lay woman who wants to live a life of consecrated chastity has to be a literal virgin would IMO be akin to insisting that only people who have never owned property or never had an income above the poverty line can take vows of poverty. That would exclude people like St. Francis, who had grown up very wealthy. One could, perhaps, also argue that if the vow of poverty means more when taken by a wealthy person who knows just what they are giving up, maybe the vow of chastity means more when taken by someone who knows just what they are giving up?
 
take any life site news article with a huge grain of salt, they are very biased and very antivatican these days.
 
Provide Mater is the church document that extends the consecration of virgins to others through secular institutes. My advice for penitents and widows, respectively, is to form their own secular institutes.

We need the example of all of those groups, but need the Order of Virgins to remain the way it is. I’m supporting the USACV on this. Today is the feast of St Kateri Tekakwitha, who is their patron.
 
Virginity is a special vocation. Of course the physical parts don’t matter, it’s voluntary causing these pleasures that makes one lose this state. I think people who have this vocation will understand it’s importance and high dignity.
 
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Why is there no “consecrated virginity” rite or vocation for men? Why is it only valued for women? I’m not trying to be controversial–I honestly don’t know, and am curious.
 
nunsuch said:
Why is there no “consecrated virginity” rite or vocation for men? Why is it only valued for women? I’m not trying to be controversial–I honestly don’t know, and am curious.
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Because the nature of the vocation is marital, the virgin represents the Church. It’s not like how a priest is like Christ, but it’s similar.
 
I always thought it was following in the same tradition of virgins in religious vocations in the pre-Christian era. As mentioned earlier on the thread, virginity was a large part of what made a woman valuable. She could give that virginity to God instead of giving it to a human husband, and in so doing make a sacrifice for the Lord since she was giving up not only sex but all the benefits considered to come with it, such as a family life and children.

A man giving up sex was making a sacrifice of a different sort, basically subduing his lust. Women weren’t really expected to have lust.
 
The root of the word means girl or maiden and as a student of languages on CAF once said, it would be odd to refer to men as virgins because of that context. Consider how male saints are called martyrs while female saints will be called virgins or virgin and martyr. Male saints are never called virgins.
 
But historically women were the lustful sex. It is only in relatively recent times that men were considered the more lustful. To suggest otherwise is simply ahistorical.
 
nunsuch said:
But historically women were the lustful sex. It is only in relatively recent times that men were considered the more lustful. To suggest otherwise is simply ahistorical.
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This is correct, but has nothing to do with the “side effects” of sexuality and how they are weightetd for women and men.
In mos pre-christian mediteranean societies, the honour of a women depended mostly on the number of her children and her domestic skills. Virginity takes one large part of this away, and the second also in most cases, as sitting in a large household and weaving textiles was not really what female saints used to to whe they left in the desert. Traditionally, many children were also the men´s pride, yes, but the emotional connections and the wish tu nurture a child was seen as a basic character of women, so their loss is greater when they chose virginity.
 
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Right, I think when I said “lust” I was thinking that a normal woman in that society would not have been going around having sex with many different men, visiting male prostitutes, having sexual relationships prior to marriage etc. If she had done these things she would have been regarded as a harlot, and it was not how women were expected to gain their joy in life - as alice24 said, a woman was supposed to be happy with one husband, a home and children.

Whereas a normal man might have had sex with multiple women, visited prostitutes or had sexual relationships outside of marriage, and this would have been regarded as normal behavior. A man who chose to not have sex was giving all of that up.
 
Lea101 said:
It hurts to think about all the women who were injured or killed in the past because they failed to produce a bloody sheet on the night of their wedding.
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And yet some cultures still do the wedding night sheet thing…😑
 
I think wha tis more important is to live chastity rather than just to focus on virginity. After all what good is virginity if the source of your virtue is lack of opportunity to do evil.
 
This is right to an extent, but it is also true that virginity was actually condemned by the first “church fathers,” because an unmarried adult woman was also an independent woman, no longer under the control of her father, and not under the control of a husband. For more on this, see:

Jo Ann K. McNamara, “A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries” and
Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity”
 
this is right, but if you have a look at the legal systems in the first centuries, than you see that in many cases married or even more widowed women had a far more independet legal status. Maidens were mostly still under the legal controll of their fathers and didn´t lived for their own, this is a modern freedom in many cultures.
But as virgin and unmarried were two connected terms, more than today, and a widow may have had to care for children of her marriage, of course it´s a point to see a virgin as more free to follow god. But if you ask me, it is still the ancient praise of virginity that made this vocation so popular in this time, rather than arguments of law, free time or anything else.
 
But the point is that virgins were condemned by the early church “fathers”–until (given that women refused to stop dedicating themselves to God, instead of to a man) the patriarchs decided that they would co-opt the state of virginity (it is laudable and even superior–so long as you do it our way and by our rules). Both Elm and (especially) McNamara discuss this thoroughly.
 
I don’t know how accurate this is, but I won’t be surprised since some of them had said really questionable things about women (or at least allegedly, I don’t know if the sources are legitimate)
 
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