Chastity is an inner state of beauty and harmony developed by self-retraint, intentional prayer, and grace. - www.woveninhislove.org

Chastity has almost become a taboo for those in the Church who are calling for a change in the Catholic doctrine on sexuality. Change to be blunt is a euphemism for those who reject the Church’s teachings on sexuality and think they have the power to overrule the Scriptures and what has been handed down by the Apostles on questions of sexual morality. Every bishop takes an oath to uphold Catholic teaching.

Neither the Pope, nor the bishops have the power to change Catholic teaching in this regard. Hence it is refreshing to read that a bishop speaks positively of the virtue of chastity which brings order into human sexuality out of the disorder caused by lust and sexual sins. The bishop in question is Bishop Erik Trondheim, the bishop of Trondheim Norway. He describes chastity in his book Chastity Reconciliation of the Senses.

The book has been described this way: At a time when religion is in decline in the Western world and when it often seems that the senses have run riot, Erik Varden shows that chastity, the single-minded direction of the senses, is a loveable quality and one that affects and beautifies humankind. The terms sexuality and wholeness indicate that to be sexual is to exist in a state of incompleteness longing to be restored. Wholeness points to a healing embrace that we desire so greatly. In Biblical language, chastity is a function of simplicity of sight. We are no longer torn apart by our passions and our desires; indeed, they may reach their fulfilment. Body and spirit, male and female, order and disorder, passion and death can move from creative tension to a new kind of wholeness. Varden's text is enriched by a wide range of references to scripture, literature, music, painting and sculpture.

Bishop Varden is not the only bishop explaining the meaning of Catholic teaching and the meaning of the virtue of chastity. Back in 2022 a Catholic news agency reported remarks of Cardinal Wilm Eijk the Cardinal-Archbishop of Utrecht in Holland with the headline: Dutch Cardinal: Chastity is not ridiculous. The lead paragraph begins this way: "Chastity does not limit freedom but gives inner freedom to make difficult choices in life, for example, concerning sexual abstinence." In a time where ethical views on marriage and sexuality are shifting, he defends the traditional doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church concerning these issues. The traditional teaching about sexuality is that it only belongs to one man and one woman within the bond of matrimony.

The real issue in this regard is the amount of clergy and laity who reject Catholic teaching in order to accommodate homosexual activity and the secular world thus rejecting the natural order of creation and Catholic teaching contained in Scripture and Apostolic tradition about the meaning of sexuality: that it is ordered to the procreation and rearing of children and the unity of a man and a woman in lifelong union. Modern secular society rejects that order and claims to have the ability to change that order and creation itself to accommodate any sexual expression and even to re-define who and what a human being is in the claim to create the superman in an ideology called transhumanism. Hence there’s the notion that human beings are themselves gods and can do what they want. The notion of blessing homosexual activities being promoted by certain churchmen carries with it the blasphemous claim that God blesses sin and that God rejects His own order of creation.

It is not just homosexual activity that is disordered but all sexuality is in some degree disordered because of original sin and lust. The sins of disorder include fornication, adultery, and the various other sexual sins.

Chastity is the healing of that disorder through the power of grace, coming through the sacraments, especially the healing sacraments of Confession and the Holy Eucharist. All human beings struggle with this, including great saints, like St. Augustine who is very candid about it in his Confessions. Here is a sample of Bishop Varden’s remarks on Chastity:

Holiness, life everlasting, configuration to Christ, the resurrection of the body: these notions do not feature much, now, in people’s thinking about relationships and sexuality. We have become alienated from the mindset that brought about the soaring verticality of the twelfth-century cathedrals, houses holding the whole of life while elevating it. Was not a proposal recently made to fit a swimming pool on the rebuilt roof of Notre Dame de Paris? It seemed to me apt. It would symbolically have re-established the dome of water that sealed earth off from heaven on the first day of creation, before God’s Image was manifest in it (cf. Genesis 1.7). It would have cancelled, again symbolically, the piercing of the firmament at Jesus’ Baptism, which portended a new way of being human. Whatever fragment of mystery might remain within the church itself would have been performed beneath the splashing of bodies striving to perfect their form. The parable would have been significant.

Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the goal of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed. Understandably, a movement will then be afoot to consign these to the archives. For what will be the point of them? Become this-worldly, the Church accommodates the world and makes herself reasonably comfortable within it. Her prescriptions and proscriptions alike will reflect and be shaped by current “mores.”….Of course we should reach out to and engage those estranged by Christian teaching, those who feel ostracized or consider they are being held to an impossible standard. At the same time we cannot forget that this situation is far from new.

In the early centuries of our era, there was colossal strain between worldly and Christian moral values, not least concerning chastity. This was so not because Christians were better – most of us, now as then, live mediocre lives – but because they had a different sense of what life is about. Those were the centuries of the subtle controversies about Christ. Relentlessly, the Church fought to articulate who Jesus Christ is: “God from God” yet “born of the Virgin Mary”; true God, true Man. On this basis she went on to make sense of what it means to be a human being and to show how a humane social order might come about. (emphasis added) (END)

From the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church

487. What responsibility do human persons have in regard to their own sexual identity? God has created human beings as male and female, equal in personal dignity, and has called them to a vocation of love and of communion. Everyone should accept his or her identity as male or female, recognizing its importance for the whole of the person, its specificity and complementarity. (NOTE: Male and female are equal but not identical. Male and female are meant to complete each other)

489. What is involved in the virtue of chastity? The virtue of chastity involves an apprenticeship in self-mastery as an expression of human freedom directed towards self-giving. An integral and continuing formation, which is brought about in stages, is necessary to achieve this goal.

490. What are the means that aid the living of chastity? There are many means at one's disposal: the grace of God, the help of the sacraments, prayer, self-knowledge, the practice of an asceticism adapted to various situations, the exercise of the moral virtues, especially the virtue of temperance which seeks to have the passions guided by reason.

492. What are the principal sins against chastity? Grave-sins against chastity differ according to their object: adultery, masturbation, fornication, pornography, prostitution, rape, and homosexual acts. These sins are expressions of the vice of lust. These kinds of acts committed against the physical and moral integrity of minors become even more grave.

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