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Structure of Religious Chastity (II)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

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Christian chastity and purity, therefore, look towards God, and by a development in this direction can become a new virtue, that of vowed virginity or perfect and perpetual continence. Virginity consists in the will to abstain totally from sex for God, the will to be immune from sexual pleasure. It is destroyed by deliberate consent to such pleasure, though restored by penitence, in the sense that there can return a will to remain virgin and to have remained virgin, though the fact of indulgence cannot be done away with. Bodily integrity is not essential. Perfect perpetual continence is the same will to abstain from all use of sex, but only in the future, in those who take the vow after voluntary experience of sex. While those who take the vow before any such experience can reiterate their former good will even after losing the virtue, and so regain its formal element in the will, though not the material element of never having experienced sex, those who vow after such experience cannot will virginity, except as a might-havebeen.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1953 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers