In Praise of Virginity? Anybody?

While the secular world continues its onslaught against the family with its relentless promotion of same-sex so-called marriage, the Church has been enduring a parallel attack against the discipline of celibacy. Both attacks are diabolical, both equally ferocious, and both based on the premise that human beings are absolutely and utterly incapable of moderating their sexual appetites.

On the homosexual question, conservative pundits, mostly Protestant and severed from Catholic Tradition, can offer no defense of traditional marriage grounded in natural law and largely stand by dumbly, protest on the grounds of biblical prohibitions, or else meekly acquiesce so they can be "on the right side of history." Similarly, as the discipline of celibacy is assaulted within the Catholic world, no one steps forward to boldly praise the ancient discipline. While liberal ecclesiastics clamor for its abolition, conservative clerics fumble about the practical difficulties of a married clergy or, even worse, meekly shrug and say "It's only a discipline. It could be changed," as if one of the Church's most ancient disciplines could be tossed aside with no consequences.

It is not surprising that the Faith is under attack; a reflective view of Church history reveals that the Faith is always under attack. But what is surprising with regards to celibacy is the lack of any truly zealous defenders of the discipline. Sure, we get apologetics and defenses of the reasonableness of celibacy, but when was the last time we really heard a bishop speak out boldly in praise of virginity, as the Fathers of the Church used to do? Arianism threatened the Church, and St. Athanasius opposed it with such rigor that the heresy was subdued; St. Augustine almost single handedly undid the Pelagians with his masterful exposition of the doctrines of grace; when Iconoclasm reared its destructive head, St. John Damascene slew the beast with his treatises in praise of holy images; St. Gregory VII, Anselm and Thomas Becket humbled kings and emperors who sought to define the Church as a functionary of the state, St. Thomas Aquinas put the nail int he coffin of Latin Averroism, and St. Francis of Assisi's life and message served as a stinging rebuke to the worldliness of his day, just as the holy life and teachings of St. Ignatius served as an antitode to the poison of the Protestant revolt and the bold defense of papal primacy made by Bl. Pius IX and St. Pius X served to combat the errors of modernism.

Where, then, are the zealous promoters of celibacy who will rise up in this hour and glorify the Church's teaching on holy virginity? Where are those ecclesiastics who, with their teaching, will not only meekly defend the legitimacy of the practice, but will actually show forth its splendor and praise it? Where are those who will speak of the radiant beauty of the consecrated soul, the many spiritual and temporal benefits that virginity bestows upon him who practices it, and the immense merit consecrated virgins accrue before the throne of God?

The silence is appalling. Oh, don't get me wrong, we have plenty of folks out there defending celibacy. We have plenty of priests who are willing to explain its reasons and its legitimacy and point out the possible difficulties we would run into if we had a married clergy. But to defend the validity of a discipline is not the same thing as to praise it, and to coolly remind the hostile world of the reasons behind the discipline is not the same thing as to heap glory upon a custom that is universally praised in the eastern and western traditions.

When Tertullian and Cyprian and Augustine write in praise of virginity, their goal is not to explain virginity to a hostile world, but to laud virginity among other Catholics, helping them to see the mystical reality behind the discipline. When the Church Fathers praise virginity, the praise it as men who have seen a vision of something truly beautiful, something gloriously resplendent, a pearl of great price that they do not offer a defensive apologetic for, but rather a glowing hymn in praise of.

The modern apologists attempt to convince the intellect to accept the reasonableness of celibacy; the Church Fathers attempted to move the will in order that their hearers would personally embrace celibacy themselves as a positive good to be sought.

It is difficult enough these days to find someone who will rigorously defend celibacy, let alone attempt to convince their readers to take up the discipline. Yet this is how the practice was first introduced to the faithful, not as a practice that the Church should accept, but as an ideal way of life that is actually superior to matrimony.

There are many facets to the vocations crisis - there is the man-made aspect of it, in which the crisis is artificially blown out of proportion for the purpose of creating lay-run parishes; like the canard of "religious liberty", there is the fact that most American Catholics cannot offer satisfactory answers to critics of the discipline. But can the major problem perhaps be that we have lost sight of celibacy/virginity as a treasure to be cherished? That in fighting so hard to defend it against a hostile world without and a skeptical Church within, we have contented ourselves with defending the existence of celibacy alongside of marriage when we should have been praising it as a superior vocation to marriage? As is the case with so many other issues in the Church today, can our problem be not that we are expecting too much, but that we have been habitually aiming too low?

"As a Church living in expectation of glory to be revealed she will find ever greater strength to proclaim the value of celibacy that is lived for the Kingdom of God." (John Paul II, ad Limina Address, "The Church of the Millennium Bears Witness to Christ with No Fear of Displeasing the World," L'Osservatore Romano English ed., April 25, 1988, 5,8).