Vatican II talked about the Church in dialogue with the modern world. Some of us have wondered whether that dialogue has been largely one-sided, i.e., modernity talking and the Church listening. One hopes the dialogue also would proceed in the other direction, to a world largely convinced of its rightness even amidst its wrongness.

Last Sunday, August 11, would have been the Memorial of St. Clare, Virgin, had it not been preempted by the 19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. St. Francis of Assisi’s contemporary, noblewoman Clare Offreduccio founded the female branch of the Franciscan family and is celebrated as a virgin.

How does the Church speak to people today about virginity?

I’ve raised this question in the past, especially in conjunction with Ss. Maria Goretti, Bl. Karolina Kózka, and Bl. Anna Kolesárová (see here and here). I ask about them because they were all 20^th-century women — women closest chronologically to people today. When Pope Pius XII proclaimed Goretti a saint in 1950, her canonization was an occasion for the Vatican to showcase the value of virginity by involving people who were Goretti’s contemporaries. It was attended by many young women who used the occasion to affirm their own commitment to virginity.

Each of the abovementioned women were virgins and martyrs honored for giving their lives in defensum castitatis. The Church may honor them for giving their lives in defense of a value; the modern world, much of which denies any sexual aspect to rape, questions why the Church might think it in any way laudable that these women gave up their lives rather than be victimized by a criminal. I will not get into that discussion here. It’s why, instead, I am turning to St. Clare. St. Clare was not a martyr, but she is honored as a virgin. And that poses the deeper question: Do modern people understand, much less value, virginity?

Consider teen-pitched magazines that, apart from telling their readers virginity is nothing more than a “choice,” suffer from a variant of ABCS (Acute Bill Clinton Syndrome), unable to define what constitutes loss of virginity. “It depends what ‘is’ is.” Is it only vaginal penetration or does some other kind of quasi-sexual act qualify — or not? The contemporary ethos stipulates but one ethical criterion for sex: consent. It pretends that sexual attraction, provocation, or seduction almost do not exist; the one thing that matters is abstract consent.

As with most errors, this appeals because it gets something right. As Karol Wojtyła notes in Love and Responsibility, sex involves many dimensions. It involves the physical: attraction to the body and physical appeal of the opposite sex, a drive especially powerful in men. It involves the emotional and psychological: the appeal of “masculinity” and “femininity,” even if moderns pretend these are but socio-cultural constructs and not grounded in person-as-sexed-being. Sexual attraction and emotional appeal are not deliberate choices. What ultimately matters in interpersonal relationships is will: the decision for, the choice of this other, “for better or worse, till death,” even if things get worse, poorer, sicker, or whatever. So, to the extent that consent is an act of will, it gets to the core of the interpersonal relationship.

The problem with modernity is that it tries to pretend those choices are some kinds of mental abstractions extrapolated and isolated from the particularly attractive or especially sympathetic person of the opposite sex in front of you. Tell that to a young person with raging hormones.

Consent, therefore, is an essential, but not the exclusive, factor when it comes to relations between persons of different sexes. Consent in a Catholic sense means a choice between good and evil, both of which exist independently of the chooser. Consent in the modern sense means a choice that establishes its object as good. This fiction, of course, primarily prevails in the sexual arena; rarely does one get excused for taking the elites’ property by the defense “I wanted to.” Try putting even a “compatible” non-manufacturer’s ink cartridge into your printer!

Such a view of the alchemic power of consent leads, of course, to virginity having no inherent value. It is valuable only insofar as and as long as one thinks it is valuable. Case-in-point: the New York Times’ June 14 “Modern Love” column by Clare Almand (here), who, having remained a virgin until 30, thought she might not be long for this mortal coil due to heart disease. Her rationale: “I’ve had open heart surgery more than I’ve had sex.” (Almand’s namesake passed through 59 years and a lifetime without sex.) Consider, though, that Almand admits she didn’t even “particularly like” her partner. Her surrender of virginity did not come from love. It came from fear (I might die soon), chance (a “middle school teacher” happened to be around), and curiosity (this is still on my bucket list). In other words, in the immortal words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”

In the Catholic understanding of virginity: everything. Because sex is an act that both expresses and effects a relationship between persons of opposite sex that accepts the whole person in their whole reality — permanently, unreservedly, and even as a potential parent — the newly married’s surrender of virginity is an act of love. And the religious person’s consecration to virginity is likewise an act of love for the Unseen Bridegroom and the eternal espousal. None of that makes any sense in the light of modern sexual ethics.

Which raises questions like: Could Pope Francis have assembled young people for the beatification of Isabel Campos (see here), a young woman called the “Brazilian Maria Goretti,” like Pius did in 1950? What does a young Catholic today think about celebrating a woman like Clare Offreduccio, honored as a “virgin?” Or Edith Stein? Would she think there is anything inherently “saintly” about their virginity? If virginity is so inherently meaningless, why would a young woman consider a life of “consecrated chastity?” Would she even know what that means? And, finally, as this week is bookended with the Solemnity of the Assumption, what does a young person see in the Blessed Virgin Mary? What sense is there to the Annunciation or the idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity?