I was flummoxed by this question. I could not answer it. I had never thought about it. I had never been given a reason. I knew that they were celibate: the perpetual virginity (before, during and after Jesus' birth) of Mary is part of our Catholic faith. I knew the What, but I couldn't say the Why.
(Sidebar: the sexual history, like the age, of Joseph is unknown. An early tradition has Joseph with children by a prior marriage. A later tradition has him as a perpetual virgin. Each is a pious belief; not stated in Scripture and not taught by the Church. One may belief what one wants. My own view is that such speculation is futile.)
I was more perplexed: our dear friends of 50 years, a solid and devoted Catholic couple, were certain and passionate in insisting that the holy couple, as married, would certainly have enjoyed sexual intimacy. Worse than that was the logic: "The Catholic Church is obsessed with a negativity about sex. That is all they talk about. This idea of perpetual virginity expresses this negative view of sex, even within marriage." What most saddened me was the disparagement of the Church by a dear brother and sister in Christ.
I had never heard that or thought that.
Catholic View of Spousal Sexuality
My experience in the Church is crystal clear: sex within marriage is a wholesome, holy act. It is part of the sacrament of marriage in which we are joined to each other in Christ. The marriage bed, along with the family table and the Eucharistic altar, are the privileged places of encounter with God. Sex is unspeakably precious, sacred and awesome: to be protected, cherished and revered. It is reserved for the conjugal union: free, final, faithful, fruitful, unitive. Outside of that it is a grave sin: dangerous and destructive.
I see a reality opposite to that noted by our friends: the Church speaks too little on the treasure that is sex. It is never mentioned from the pulpit. Our youth are drowning in a cesspool of pornography, masturbation, hook-up sex, adultery, and divorce; our priests are mute on it. We are bombarded with rainbows, parades and pride months! Cohabitation/contraception has become for our Catholic youth, not a mortal sin, but a positive, normative step towards adulthood. How often do we hear about the value and challenge of chastity? Of fidelity? Of celibacy and virginity?
(Anecdote: standing on West Side Avenue, Jersey City, I mentioned to two friends that our confirmation program included a retreat about being chaste. My street smart black friend liked that and probed: "Cool! Cool! You mean...What do you mean 'being chased'...you mean being chased by the cops?"
The profound esteem of the Church for the male/female body is evident in the Renaissance art of Rome. The reverence for marriage and sexuality reached a high point in the catechesis of John Paul on the human body. The idea that our doctrine that Mary is "ever virgin" camouflages a Catholic contempt for marital sexuality is startling and saddening!
The Dark Side of Sexuality
However, their logic is not entirely unreasonable: the abstention from sex could, but does not necessarily, suggest a disparagement of it. And our Catholic history does include a suspicion, a fear, an aversion to sexuality. We find such in Augustine, in some spiritual writers, in the Jansenism that moved from France into Ireland and into our own American Irish Catholicism of earlier generations. John Paul himself said that his intention was to overcome just such a suspicion in our tradition.
A degree of fear, awe and vigilance about sex is salutary and intrinsic to any real religion. Calvinism, Shakerism, Manicheism are all extreme forms of that, even going so far as to forbid marital sex entirely. But since the Fall our sexuality is entwined with concupiscence: disordered, dark, incomprehensible drives and desires. These do not disappear after marriage.
Psychoanalysis has probed somewhat, finding in our sexual longings dark forces: the death wish, infantile regression, oedipal and incestuous drives, not to mention the long list of paraphilias.
Even within marriage, sex is not an angelic, pure, innocent thing. It brings with it dark, obscure, always potentially destructive dynamics. Yet, within marriage it becomes a meritorious, holy act.
Prudence, sober caution, and realistic vigilance are called for, especially in education of our children.
Catholicism: The Facts
"The facts, Ma'am, just the facts." Sergeant Joe Friday, on Dragnet, TV Show, 1951-9.
Catholicism is first and foremost about FACTS. The FACT of God the Trinity. The FACT of God engaging us in Jesus Christ in his incarnation, life, death, rising, ascending, sending of the Holy Spirit and his return in glory. These are all FACTS, realities, events, happenings, within a dramatic, on-going history.
Our faith is a code of conduct: compassion for the suffering, action for justice, all the virtues. But all this comes after the FACT.
Our faith is feelings of awe, gratitude, joy, hope. But all this comes after the FACT.
Our faith is a rich network of prayers, cults, sacraments and rituals. But all this expresses the FACT.
Our faith is a system of belief, theology, theory. But all this articulates the FACT.
Four Facts about Mary
Dogmatically, infallibly, we Catholics hold dear four facts about Mary. She is:
1. Immaculately Conceived. Like no one else.
2. Mother of God. Not just of the humanity of Jesus.
3. Perpetually virgin: before, during and after the birth. Forever.
4. Assumed bodily into heaven. Like no one else except her son.
My Christian Brother friend-mentor told me that some 60 years ago his theology professor told him that this dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary is one of the hardcore, countercultural Catholic beliefs, offensive to softer, watered-down, progressive forms of Catholicism. That is about right.
We are Given the What. Not Always the Why
We know with certitude that Jesus was born a Jewish man, 2000 years ago, in Palestine, and died on Calvary, and rose on the third day.
We don't really know WHY: a man, not a woman? A Jew, not a Roman? 2000 years ago, not 4,000 or 10,000? in Palestine not Athens? on the 3rd day, not the 2nd or the 10th?
Why does she have no children, and she has 14? Why did he die at the age of one day and she is still alive at 105 years? Why such violence, suffering, nihilism? We cannot answer these WHYS.
These are Mysteries. We don't really know the Why?
Why did Joseph and Mary abstain? We don't really know. That was something between them and God.
But we can ponder it. Prayerfully. Hoping that our own intellects, hearts and wills be inflamed and enlightened by the Holy Spirit.
History of the Dogma
The virgin birth, but not the perpetual virginity of Mary is clear in Scripture. Her ever-virginity has its earliest written expression in the Protoevangelium of James, written a century after the apostolic era. It was clearly articulated in the very early councils of Constantinoble and Lateran and later repeated at Trent. While it was disputed in the early centuries, virtually all the heavy-hitters affirmed it: Origin, Ambrose, Augustine, Thomas, etc. Even the reformers Luther and Calvin accepted it although their followers soon rejected it. To say it is not true is formally defined as a heresy. Vatican II reaffirmed it in stating that "Christ did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity, but enriched and sanctified it."
We customarily refer to her as "the virgin Mary." It may be, along with "Mother Mary" the defining evocative for her. She is not, like most women, "the used-to-be virgin" but the "ever virgin." It is not natural for a virgin to be a mother or for a mother to be a virgin. But that is the exact point: we are not dealing here with a natural or historical fact. This is a supernatural FACT! Part of the fact of Christ is the FACT of the ever-virginity of Mary.
St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Moor
Riding on a country road in Spain on his donkey, the newly converted Ignatius engaged in an argument with the Muslim who accepted the miraculous conception of Jesus but insisted Mary's virginity could not be retained through the birth. They argued back and forth without resolution until the Moor sped ahead to his destination. As Ignatius continued, he became furious with the Moor and himself. He had failed to defend the honor of the Virgin and felt he must find and slay the man for his sacrilege. He was troubled in spirit and undecided so determined on a primitive mode of discernment: at the fork in the road, he would not lead the donkey but let him chose the path. If the animal chose the path taken by the Moor, he would find and slay him. If he chose the other path, he would let it go. Happily for all involved, the mule chose the other path. Happily also, the Spaniard warrior went on to develop more nuanced ways of discernment.
For better or for worse, I myself am no equal to the noble Basque in his reverence for the Virgin or his fighting spirit. Not many of us are today! For sure he did not question her perpetual virginity.
Mystery of Virginity
Virginity was unknown to the world before Christ, in Judaism and paganism. It came into the world with Christ. It is heavenly. It is not natural, but supernatural.
It is incomprehensible, even repugnant to Jew, Muslim, almost all Protestants, and especially seculars.
The virginity of Christ is a Mystery to us. It is the intimacy he shares with the Father. It is also part of his spousal, bridegroom embrace of us, his bride. He loves us, the Church, his body, our mother, as a husband loves his wife. Sacrificially, unto death. Generously, giving his all, his body and blood. It is fitting that he not love, engage conjugally, a single woman.
Catholic virginity is a sharing in that of Jesus. Mary, Joseph (at least during his marriage to Mary), John the Baptist, John the beloved disciple, Paul the Apostle were all virgins. Immediately in the early Church, young women in their love for Christ, vowed themselves spontaneously to virginity, sometimes incurring martyrdom, even by their Roman fathers.
Virginity is a heavenly charism, it is a love gift from the Heavenly Groom. It is an intimacy. It is a secret between the two lovers. It is no ones business.
At the same time, out of this intimacy with the Great Lover, the Beloved conceives a distinctive, heavenly love for the brothers and sisters. The energies and intimacies of spousal/paternal/maternal love are not destroyed; not repressed; not disparaged. Rather, they are released in a new, heavenly way.
And so the consecrated woman/man and the celibate priest bring a distinctive love to us, the Church. It is different, if difficult to describe. It is tender, reverent, detached and yet close. It is a sharing in the way Jesus himself loves us, each of us, all of us.
In surrendering, in freedom, spousal love in all its richness, romantic-sexual-generative, the celibate or virgin enjoys a a privileged intimacy with God-in-Christ, as well as an enhanced availability and closeness to the Church, to the rest of us. The Catholic intuits a claim, an ownership of the priest and sister, as virginal, in contrast to a certain distance honored towards a married person.
From a worldly perspective, such virginity is weird, unnatural, distasteful. In the eyes of faith, it is a taste of heaven.
Josephite Marriage
A marriage emulating that of Joseph and Mary in virginity is called a Josephite marriage. It is extremely rare; hardly discussed; but recognized in Catholic life. It is a real marriage, enacted by the mutual self-giving of the spouses. But due to an extraordinary charism/mission, they together embrace virginity. Of its nature as a spousal intimacy shared with God it is confidential and normally secretive. It is surely rare.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the Dorothy-Day-like founder of Madonna House, mystic, writer, spiritual leader was a Russian Orthodox baroness who married and conceived a son with her first cousin. She converted to Roman Catholic, divorced and had her marriage annulled. She lived an extraordinary life of prayer and service to the poor. Eventually, she married Eddy Doherty, noted journalist, with the understanding that they would live virginity together and that the marriage would be secondary to her vocation to prayer and service. This was approved by the Church. This is rare, but good. Her cause for canonization is alive in the Church.
Maria and Luigi Quattrocchi, the first lay couple to be beatified (2001,) made the Josephite vow after giving birth to four children.
Their contemporaries, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, also have a canonization process in the works. They are the famous philosophers who early in their relationship, atheists at the time, vowed to a shared suicide if they could not find meaning. They came under the influence of great intellect-spirits of the time (Bergson, Peguy) and converted to be genuine mystics and brilliant thinkers. They apparently took the Josephite vow. Jacques became the foremost protege of St. Thomas in the 20th century and himself became mentor to St. Pope Paul VI.
There seems to be no literature, discussion or theology of this reality. It is quiet, confidential, intimate, supernatural.
It also unveils the nuanced nature of Catholic matrimony. For centuries thinkers debated what created the marital bond: consent or sexual intercourse? The eventual resolution: it is consent that creates the bond; intercourse consummates or completes it. So, a "ratified but unconsummated" marriage is a real marriage. It cannot be annulled because it is valid, not void. However, strangely, such a marriage can be dissolved by the Pope, for good reasons. This is rare. I understand that in a country under the Soviet empire housing was so short that many couples married but had no home for themselves. Some lived separately for years and discovered they had no interest in being married to each other. Apparently, the Vatican was flooded with requests for (not annulment but) dissolution of the marriage. A ratified and consummated marriage is indissoluble, even by the pope. Not so for the unconsummated marriage.
We see here that intercourse is inherent to Catholic marriage, but not absolutely required. The Josephite marriage is a real marriage, although it is lacking something important. Something else is given in its place.
Super-Positivity of the Evangelical Counsels of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience
These three vows are not detachments from things negative or inferior. On the contrary, the goods of marriage/sex/family, ownership, and autonomy are created, natural goods. They are gifts from God. In surrender the consecrated one makes a sacrifice of something precious and good, not negative and inferior. It is like the sacrificial lamb of temple worship: it is to be spotless, perfect, healthy; not sick and deformed.
These vows are unnatural, as heavenly. The chosen one is embraced by a supernatural charism and mission, a rare and special intimacy with The Groom. The chosen one relishes and tastes the natural goodness of marriage and suffers a loss, a grief in surrendering it to the Lord for another type of intimacy.
In this vowed surrender, the wholesome, natural energies for romance, intimacy, sexuality, paternity and maternity are not destroyed, denied, repressed or ignored. Rather, "grace building on nature," they are transformed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit into new, creative, fecund, delightful expressions. First and foremost, of course, as with Jesus and the Father, the beloved enjoys a mysterious, spousal intimacy with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Out of that flows an availability to and tenderness for the brother and sister. The restriction, of no marriage and no children, allows a freedom to embrace the brother and sister, expecially the one in suffering, in sin, in need.
The vowed, the professed, the "beloved of Christ" suffers the deprivation of natural goods: family, ownership, autonomy. But in turn receives the "hundredfold" promised by Jesus: an intensification of charity as agape, affection, friendship and chaste eros; a Paul-like exultation in paucity and abundance; and a mysteriously enhanced agency and initiative in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Catholic States of Life
Classically, Catholicism cherishes a thick, deep sense of the "states of life": married/lay vs. vowed/ordained. We pray for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, aware that marriage/family is the normal/default vocation. I was surprised to learn while studying at Union Theological that Protestants do not talk or thing about "vocations." Theirs is a homogeneity: everyone is the same, ministers are married, there is no consecrated life, no ordination or marriage as a sacrament.
Ours is not a simple, absolute binary however. Rather, there are a number of interwoven binaries: priestly/lay, married/vowed, contemplative/active, cloistered/worldly, solitary/communal and so forth. Catholic life has a complex, organic, vigorous integrity to it; along with a fluidity and flexibility.
We cherish exceptions, such as the Josephite marriage, which do not eliminate but accentuate the binary forms. We have married priests, but they are exceptional. The most romantic, "eros-possessed" man I ever met was the holy theologian-mystic Joe Whelan S.J. who taught me about prayer and the Catholic mystics. Adrienne von Speyr, collaborator with Balthasar in creating the secular institute of St. John, was married three times, apparently not a virgin, but herself an exceptional mystic. The Memores Domini of the Communion and Liberation movement are evangelical but consider themselves lay rather than consecrated. Dorothy Day was a mother who lived a vigorous life of voluntary but not vowed poverty and secondary virginity. Monsignor Ivan Illich surrendered his clerical status for a life of intellectual activism and controversy, but fulfilled his priestly vows to celibacy and prayer of the daily office. Rose Hawthorn "left" her sick husband to serve the poor who were dying of cancer. A normal pattern to sainthood is abandonment of the world for the hermetical life, followed by the forming of a community of monks: solitude flowing into community.
Families in the Neocatechumenal Way take their children into mission in poverty and danger, embracing an apostolate normally reserved for the single and celibate, in a startling renunciation of bourgeois comfort and safety. Kiko and Carmen, founders of this "way" that is the most energetic, militant expression of Catholicism moving into the new millenium, were neither married, ordained nor publicly vowed. They may have taken private vows. In any case, along with other leaders of renewal movements, married (Ralph Martin and charismatic renewal) and single (Chiara Lubich of Focolare), they present a vibrant, fecund lay spirituality that challenges the more narrow binary that prevailed in the four centuries between Trent and Vatican II.
The rich, nourishing smorgasbord of Catholic life today preserves the distinction and integrity of diverse charisms: marriage, ordination, consecration, social service, solitude, community life. But they find novel, surprising, fruitful, even eccentric expressions and combinations.
Catholic life is the mutual indwelling of contraries! The most paternal (John Paul) and maternal (Mother Teresa) are also the most childlike and pure. The most active (Martha) are the most contemplative (Mary.) The most humble, the most magnanimous. The most trusting, the most ferocious. The most solitary, the most communal. And so, the underlying strength of a good marriage is the personal, solitary prayer life of each spouse. The quintessential fruit of a genuine religious or priestly vocation is the tenderness toward the others.
The Enduring Conjugal Virginity of Mary and Joseph
We stab, finally, at understanding the continued abstinence within the Holy Family.
:First: a thought experiment. If they had been sexually active, we must wonder; why no children? It conceivably could be providential that they be active but sterile. That is not an inspiring thought, not in our contraceptive society. Imagine if they had seven children and twenty-seven grandchildren (a normal number in that time.) Would this have effected Mary's participation in the redemptive drama? Would she have been at the foot of the cross...or babysitting? Would Jesus have entrusted her to John, and thereby to all of us, or just sent her home to the family? This line of thought is not promising!
The perpetual virginity of Mary and the continence/chastity/maybe virginity of Joseph can only be pondered in light of that of Jesus. His abstinence was not a condemnation of sex as evil. It was rather an exceptional intimacy with his heavenly Father. As such it was confidential, unspoken, precious and sacred. We do not probe; we only ponder and adore.
It was secondly, a mode of closeness to all of us, each of us. He had no wife, no natural children. We the church are his bride; each of us his very own son and daughter.
Mary and Joseph were so close to him, naturally and spiritually, that they shared in this intimacy, in a mysterious manner. They shared with each other, and personally with God the Father in the Holy Spirit, an unnatural, heavenly, incomprehensible communion in love. This turned the Holy Family towards us in an openness, availability and closeness that is naturally impossible and inconceivable.
And so we do not question, we do not disparage the reality of this virginal marriage. We receive it, contemplate it, allow ourselves to be grasped and penetrated by it. It is the GREAT FACT. It is the Great Drama of God's becoming flesh among us.
Virgin Mary, Pray for Us!
Chaste St. Joseph, Pray for Us!
All you holy virgins and celibates, Pray for Us!
Give us chastity in heart, body, spirit. Make us faithful to each other!
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