The Culture and Politics of Chastity

Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas tell us that human beings are not only rational animals but social animals. When they say this, what they mean is that we are not naturally self-sufficient as individuals and need the help of other people both to survive and be happy. But our social nature is also evident from experience. We know that babies and children cannot survive without other people caring for them. Yet it is also the case that adults need the help of others to survive. Imagine having to build your own shelter, make your own clothes, gather and prepare your own food, or care for yourself when you are sick. Consider also having to teach yourself the skills you would need to do any of these things. Obviously, that would be impossible.

Besides bare survival, we have a natural desire to use all of our powers well, above all our powers to choose, to act, and to think. That we do this is God’s will and it is what satisfies us and makes us happy. A person who is able to choose rightly, act rightly, and think rightly will do well in life and be rightly related to God. To use our powers well, however, requires virtue. Virtue is a kind of skill. Whereas other skills help us to do well in some particular trade or profession, say, as a plumber or an accountant, virtue helps us to do well as human beings.

Like other skills, we learn virtue from other people. The first place where we learn virtue is, ideally, the family, from our mother and father. The people who know us the best are also the people in the best position to help us cultivate virtue. They know our strengths, weaknesses, and motivations like no one else.

But to perform their task well and successfully, families too need help from others. They need the example and encouragement of other families, they need the Church with its teaching and sacraments, they need a wider culture that reinforces the training they give their children, and they need a political community whose policies and laws do the same.

It is true that families can “get by” with just the support of the Church and a few other families, but that is not the ideal. If the wider culture is morally corrupt and the policies and laws of the political community do nothing against this corruption or serve to perpetuate it, this will be a grave threat to families. It is for this reason that Catholics have an obligation to be culturally and politically engaged, each of us in the way appropriate to our state in life.

But even if families do need the help of others in the moral training of their children, this help, however crucial, is ancillary and facilitative, and the primary responsibility still belongs to the parents. It is perhaps in the context of the family that we have the most important application of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. According to this principle, no higher-level social entity should take over the task that an individual or lower-level social entity can adequately perform.

Keeping in mind these general points about the cultivation of virtue and its social support system, I want now to turn to a specific virtue, chastity. Chastity is a form of the cardinal virtue of temperance (also called moderation). Temperance is the virtue by which we master our desire for pleasure. Temperate people do not shun pleasure; they enjoy it, but they do not let it control them and they do not seek pleasure in excess or in the wrong things. Food and drink give us pleasure, and so does sex. And chastity has to do with self-mastery when it comes to the pleasure of the latter.

In a Catholic context, chastity is practiced in one way by married people and in another way by unmarried people. In marriage, of course, the husband and wife do not forego the pleasure of sex. But if they are chaste, then their only sexual relationship will be with each other, and it will be based on a deep love and respect. They will avoid anything that will endanger their commitment to each other.

Chastity outside of marriage means complete abstinence from sex. For consecrated people who take a vow of chastity, and for Latin Rite priests, this abstinence is permanent. For everyone else, this form of chastity will change once they are married (if they get married).

It is not hard to see how a lack of chastity can threaten the stability of families or bring children into the world who cannot be properly cared for. If families are the best place for us to learn virtue and set out on the way to happiness, then promiscuity is a threat to these things.

It is well-known that in the encyclical Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI reaffirms the Church’s traditional teaching on the immorality of artificial birth control. But besides this, and in connection with it, the Pope also reaffirms the importance of chastity. What I would like to draw to your attention is the fact that the Pope does not only appeal to individuals or families in what he says about chastity. He does not see chastity as a merely private matter but as a public matter involving the wider culture and the political community. Without a doubt this is because the Pope sees them as necessarily involved in the promotion of virtue.

Here are the Pope’s own words:

“We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.” HV, 22

The Pope then goes on to say that

“everything in that the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit.” HV, 22

Speaking to public authorities, he says:

“We beg of you, never allow the morals of your peoples to be undermined. The family is the primary unit in the state; do not tolerate any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God.” HV, 23

The Pope is here acting as a prophet. He is calling on institutions to respect the law of God. In this case the natural law.

Taking our cue from Pope Paul, we should reflect on our culture and laws in the U.S. today. Do they promote chastity or are they a threat to it? If they are a threat, then what are we doing about it? If we are waiting for other people to do something, then we should expect things to get worse before they get better.