Marriage and Virginity (continued)
husband. So the virgin, who is rightly held to be more perfect than married women, is not the one who presents herself to a number of men as worthy of love, looking to be loved by one of them, nor the one who gives herself over to one man after finding him, thinking about worldly things, how to please her husband (1 Cor 7:34). Rather she is the one who has so loved the most handsome of men (Ps 45:2), that, since she could not conceive him in the flesh as Mary did, she has conceived him in her heart and keeps her body intact for him.
The Church Gives Birth to Consecrated Virgins
12. No natural fertility has brought forth this kind of virgin; she is not the child of flesh and blood. If you are looking for her mother, it is the Church. No one gives birth to consecrated virgins except a consecrated virgin, that sacred virgin who is betrothed to one man, Christ, to keep herself chaste for him.†11 Not wholly a virgin physically, but wholly a virgin spiritually, it is from her that holy virgins are born, those who are virgins both in body and in spirit.
12. Certainly marriages have their value. It is not because they produce children, but because they produce children honorably, because they do so lawfully, because they do so chastely, because they do so in a social role, and because they educate those children without favoritism, soundly and perseveringly, and because they maintain marital fidelity, and because they do not abuse the sacrament of matrimony.†12
Virginity Is an Anticipation of Heavenly Immortality
13. All these, however, are duties and privileges that come from being a human being.
Virginal integrity, on the other hand, and the freedom from all sexual intimacy that comes with the devout practice of celibacy, belongs with the angels, and in corruptible flesh it is a foretaste of eternal incorruptibility. All physical parenthood, all married chastity, must give way to this. The former is not in one's own power, the latter does not last for eternity; free will does not possess physical fertility, conjugal chastity does not exist in heaven. Assuredly in that state of immortality, shared by all, those whose bodies are already in a certain way unbodily will have something special over and above what the others have.