The importance of virginity/maiden/chastity?

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I’ve seen that most saints are virgins and if not they’re married…

Is virginity that important?
 
JMO, but I think that the kind of work, time, and heart/love that a person has to put in to become a saint makes it difficult to include a spouse in your life.

Many of the saints spent hours everyday in prayer–can you imagine telling a husband, “Honey, sorry I haven’t shopped or cooked or cleaned, but I’ve been praying and adoring the Lord Jesus for the last 12 hours.”

Also, married sexual love is a huge commitment and spiritual experience, especially if a child/children is/are conceived.

I do think that a lot of married people and parents ARE saints, but they just haven’t been officially declared saints by the Church. 😃 How many of us take up the cause of presenting our parents and/or grandparents for sainthood? How many of us say, “They gave everything to loving each other and raising their children well.”

But God knows.
 
xdz said:
I’ve seen that most saints are virgins and if not they’re married…

Is virginity that important?
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There are plenty of saints who were neither virgin nor married. St. Mary of Egypt, St. Margaret of Cortona, St. Augustine, probably a large number of the male saints who did not embrace the holy life until they were in their 20s and 30s. Not to mention all the saints who became interested in religious pursuits after they were widowed - a huge number.

For male saints, we do not have a category of “male virgin saints” and consequently we don’t have a good test for knowing if most of them were lifelong virgins or not. The only way we know is that if they died very young or entered monastic life very young, we can presume (might not be correct) that they were virginal, or if they or their biographers wrote about their lives it might be explained whether or not they were virginal.

For female saints, for many centuries a woman pretty much had 2 decent choices : 1) Go into religious life or 2) Marry. Society objected strongly to unmarried women who had sex, and also looked down a bit on women who never married but weren’t dedicated to God. If such women did not have rich fathers or other relatives willing to take them in, they also might have had trouble surviving, as jobs for women were few and there was a social order of who could take what job (a member of nobility could not easily become a peasant or servant). Bottom line is most women ended up married or committing their virginity to Christ.

While I wouldn’t say virginity is unimportant, a non-virgin can certainly also achieve sainthood.
 
Indeed, it could be argued that a person who had led a bad life before becoming a believer had an advantage, in that they had known the mercy of God firsthand, and even more importantly, they were not tempted to believe themselves holy through their own merits…
 
Chastity is more important than virginity, but I virginity was seen as a sign of chastity to the point that it’s been equated and confused for it. One can be an unchaste virgin and one can be a chaste sexually active married person. Moreover, where sin increases, grace increases all the more. We need to be more wary of spiritual pride than lust.
 
It is always ironic to me that St Augustine wrote in such praise of virginity when he led one of the most dissolute lives of a saint on record, prior to becoming a saint. I am sure his writings were heavily influenced by his own negative feelings about his past behavior, which was certainly bad behavior but was past and forgiven. His mother St. Monica had wanted to be a Virgin consecrated to Christ but for whatever reason acquiesced to marry instead (unlike many of the female saints who absolutely refused marriage and were martyred for it). Because of St Monica’s choice, her pagan husband eventually converted AND her son became a very great saint. If she had remained a virgin, these things would not have happened.

The Church has a very odd tension to me in how it regards virginity. It is viewed as a gift for the Lord, but if everyone was called to give that gift, then we would have no more Catholic children and many saints, priests, religious and other holy people would never have been born. God instructed Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, not consecrate their virginities to Him. Louis and Zelie Martin planned on a Josephite marriage but were talked out of it by their priest and as a result created one great saint, a possible second saint, several more who entered religious life, and became saints themselves. The Church has also repeatedly condemned as heresy groups that negatively regarded sex between a man and woman in marriage and open to life. There is also the story of the Prodigal Son for those who reformed after committing sexual sins.

This is not to say that consecrated virgins aren’t doing a great thing by following their call from the Lord, nor that we should all go lose our virginity because chastity doesn’t matter, but it is a bit difficult to keep contending that virginity in and of itself is a higher level of holiness than people engaged in an appropriate sexual relationship in marriage and people who committed sexual sin but reformed, repented and were forgiven and absolved.
 
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Sainthood should be an aspiration for all of us, even the non-virgins. It is God after all who saves us not our virginity.
 
One other thought I just had is that we all have temptation, but of different types and in different degrees. Some people simply don’t have the same level of sex drive or sexual temptation. Mother Angelica for example has said she was not interested in dating or sex when she was a young woman. Their cross from being chaste or even being virginal is not very great, though they may have to fight huge temptations in a completely different, non-sexual area.

On the other hand, there are people like St Augustine for whom sexual temptation was huge and required a huge amount of effort to fight and conquer. These people might slip up a few times in the struggle. But in the end, who has made the greater sacrifice with respect to chastity? The one with the bigger temptation and more difficult battle, assuming he fought the good fight to the end.

Like I said, the person for whom chastity or virginity is easy probably had some other big temptation to fight. I suspect for many holy women who were forced into or stuck in bad marriages in the eras when women didn’t have much say in such things, the marriage itself and all that went with it was a bigger cross for them than staying a Virgin in a convent would have been.
 
Yes

I have no problems with staying true to chastity but food is an occasion of sin for me.

I used to be a shopaholic but thankfully I no longer am one.

I still have trouble with food though.
 
ioannes_pius said:
Virginity is a higher state of life than the married life. Virginity is a more direct route to heaven than the married life, so that might have something to do with why there are so many saints who are virgins.

However, this is not to say that the married life is bad, unimportant, or unnecessary, or that married persons cannot advance in holiness.
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Where are you getting this from?
 
I don’t understand virginity. I doubt many do in our day & time.

I think it was Paul who said virginity is closely associated with the angels.

I know when speaking of our Blessed Mother virginity also refers to her soul, not a stain of sin, not defiled by the world.
 
My apologies, I’m incorrect. I was thinking of something else. I will amend my post accordingly.

Edit: I can’t seem to edit my initial post, so I’ll simply delete it and make another one.
 
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The state of virginity is a higher state than that of the married life. Perhaps those who are virgins face greater temptations against chastity. It might also have to do with the whole ‘undivided hearts’ issue, so maybe that’s why there are more canonized virgins. I honestly don’t know for sure.

This isn’t to say that the married state is bad or unnecessary, or that married persons don’t experience temptations against chastity, or that they can’t achieve holiness to high degrees.
 
In terms of virginity being a higher state in life, I get that directly from the Council of Trent, Session XXIV, on the sacrament of Matrimony, Canon X:
If any one saith, that the marriage state is to be placed above the state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema.
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The rest of the information was my personal conjecture. I should have been more clear on that point.
 
st. paul directly mentions it, that those who marry do well but those wy do not do better.

but everyone has their call from God, not everyone is mean to be celibate
 
I would note that this topic has come up before on CAF because it actually is a church teaching from a lot of sources, a number of which are listed in this Patrick Madrid post. I think St. Augustine says the same.


I find it interesting that despite this teaching, there is such a push for married clergy. By this teaching, they’d be inferior to the virginal, celibate clergy. I also wonder why Jesus picked St. Peter to be the first Pope given that he’d been married (whether or not his wife was alive at the time of his apostleship and papacy) rather than someone who wasn’t.

This is one of the teachings of the church where I just sort of roll my eyes. Yes, some people have a calling to consecrated virginity or to the single, religious life. Other people have a call to married life. Why the two callings have to be “ranked” when the non-Josephite married life is the one producing the people to become consecrated virgins and single priests and religious, is beyond me and will continue to be beyond me, but since there are plenty of great saints who were married (and clearly had sex in the marriage since they had children), I don’t worry about it. Moreover, if we believe that choosing marriage, a consecrated single life, or just living a single life in the world (for example if we would like to be married and don’t feel a call to religious life, but there is no spouse available) is us carrying out God’s plan for us, it does not make sense that he would assign some people to a “higher ranked” plan for holiness while placing others in some lower-ranked state of marriage or the even more confusingly ranked state of just being single in the world without consecrating virginity. It’s like the “lower ranked” people don’t even get a chance to be as holy as the “higher ranked” people, which again doesn’t make sense as there have been married people and even unmarried non-virginal single people who became great saints.

The teaching to me perhaps makes sense in the early Church where people thought Jesus was returning really soon, like within a generation or two. Propagation would not have been as important if Jesus had come back quickly. Fast forward to today, it’s been 2000 years, obviously we needed propagation to keep the Church going.
 
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