The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [97]
That’s a poignant image—Peter Favre surrounded by wildflowers, the sun overhead, ardently making a youthful vow to God. But few people would encourage that kind of promise today. For one thing, purity doesn’t mean refraining from sex. Purity flows from a pure heart, and there are plenty of married men and women who have pure hearts. For another, what twelve-year-old (then or now) has an adequate understanding of sexuality to make a lifelong vow of chastity? But Favre lived in a different time.
Members in religious orders were also willing to go to extremes to encourage chastity, or as they would say, to “safeguard” it. Late in life Favre made another promise: never “putting my face” close to anyone—male or female, young or old, as a way of further preserving his chastity. St. Aloysius Gonzaga, a young nobleman-turned-Jesuit, maintained “custody of the eyes,” which meant never looking a woman in the face—including his mother!
On the other hand, St. Ignatius Loyola, whom Peter Favre knew and Aloysius Gonzaga revered, enjoyed the warm friendship of a great many women, for whom he served, through letters or in person, as a valued spiritual director and counselor. As the authors of The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed note, many of his women friends returned the favor by supporting Ignatius and his new religious order, particularly in terms of finances. Two women—Isabel Roser and Juana, the regent of Spain—even took vows as Jesuits. “A more accurate picture reveals Ignatius not as a solitary figure,” the authors write, “but as a relational one; these relationships included specific women.”
This complicated history leads to some provocative questions: Can religious chastity teach us anything? Can St. Ignatius’s ideas about chastity teach us anything? Can men who lived in a world where sexuality was considered dangerous—even evil—teach us anything about healthy, loving relationships?
You won’t be surprised when I say that the answer to all these questions is: yes.
But you might be surprised when you find out that the answer has less to do with abstinence and purity and more to do with love and friendship. Because chastity is about love.
CHASTITY? CELIBACY?
Chastity is the most difficult thing to explain about life in a religious order. It inevitably conjures up the stereotype of the hateful, cold priest or the repressed, bitter nun—out of touch with their own sexuality, closed off to the world of love and human relationships, as well as rigid, cold, spiteful, and maybe a little cruel. And crazy, too.
In the wake of the sexual-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, in which chastity was seen by the general public as a contributing cause, the vow of chastity engenders more suspicion than ever. Now it is seen as not only crazy, but unhealthy, sick, and—something that would have astonished sixteenth-century Christians—dangerous.
Popular thinking runs along three lines:
Chastity is unnatural; it tries to shut down a natural part of life and thus leads to unhealthy behaviors.
Chastity is unhealthy; therefore religious orders attract unhealthy people.
Chastity is impossible. No one can keep that vow with any integrity or honesty, so anyone who says he or she is celibate must be lying.
Before I continue, I should explain that despite their common usage there is a difference between chastity and celibacy. It’s a bit complex, so bear with me.
Strictly speaking, chastity refers to the proper and loving use of our sexuality, something that everyone is called to. In his book on human sexuality, In Pursuit of Love, Vincent J. Genovesi, a Jesuit professor of moral theology, quotes another author who says that living as a chaste person means that our “external expressions” of sexuality will be “under the control of love, with tenderness and full awareness of the other.” Summing up the work of another theologian, Genovesi calls chastity “honesty in sex,” where our physical relationships “truthfully express” the level of personal commitment we have with the other. In other words, the goal of chastity is receiving and