I begin with some license here. I want to ask the question “what do you want to say about Christian Chastity as a Virtue?” in the context of a larger question, “what do we want to say about the Christian virtues and sexuality?” Months ago, I explained to the organizers several times that I wanted to speak on the latter and I was told that I could, but then saw the agenda and so I want to honor the former question as well.

      For young people, virtues are extraordinarily helpful for moral education in general and sexual education in particular, for virtues hold out the possibility of attaining long-standing goals and covering a more complex, yet ordinary moral terrain.

      In this essay, I proceed in three parts. First, what is virtue ethics (and its relevance for moral education)? Second, what are the Christian Virtues? What is Christian Chastity?

      Renewed interests in virtue ethics arises from a dissatisfaction with the way we do ethics today. Most discussions about contemporary ethics consider major controversial actions: abortion, nuclear war, gene therapy, etc. These discussions basically dominate contemporary ethics.

      Virtue ethicists have more extensive concerns. ¹ We are not primarily interested in particular actions, but rather persons. We believe that the real discussion of ethics is not the question what actions are morally permissible, but who should we become? In fact, virtue ethicists, following Alasdair MacIntyre’s proposal, expand that question into three key, related ones: Who are we? Who ought we to become? How are we to get there? ² I now turn to each of these questions.

      No question is more central for virtue ethics than the self-understanding or identity question “who are we?” ³ To virtue ethicists, the question is the same as “are we virtuous?” To answer this first question we must focus on two major considerations. First, what standards are we to measure ourselves against? Second, how will we know whether we are measuring fairly? Regarding the first point, two of the most important works in ethics attempt to assist us by naming the basic virtues. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives us eleven different virtues that are necessary for citizens to engage. Friendship, magnanimity, practical wisdom are some of these. In the “Second Part” of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas takes from Plato, Cicero, Ambrose, Gregory and Augustine the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. Together with these he adds the three theological virtues. He states that the first four we can acquire through deliberately willed and enjoyed habitual right action; the latter three are gifts from God. These virtues help us to answer the question of self-understanding.

      But how can we know whether we are answering the question objectively? Here Aristotle suggests that we can know ourselves by considering how we act in spontaneous situations: We “discover” ourselves when we act in the unplanned world of ordinary life. We may believe that we are particularly brave or cowardly, but that assessment is only correct if it conforms to how we actually behave in the unanticipated concrete situation. Self-knowledge is key, therefore, but this is a self-knowledge that is critical and honest, not one based on wishful thinking.

      MacIntyre’s second question embodies a vision of the type of person we ought to become. Though we use Thomas’ four cardinal virtues to find out how virtuous we actually are, we could use those same four virtues to determine who we ought to become. For certainly, if we are honest in the first question, then some virtues are not as fully acquired by us as are others. In fact, for the honest person the virtues are not what we acquire in life; they are what we pursue.

      We use the virtues, therefore, to set the personal goals that we encourage ourselves to seek. Thomas and others call this goal the “end”. That is, the middle question sets an end that we should seek. That end is a type of person with the cardinal virtues. Setting this end means that the fundamental task of the moral life is to develop a vision and to strive to attain it. Inasmuch as that vision is who we ought to become, then, the key insight is that we should always aim to grow. As a person-oriented ethics, virtue ethics insists that without growth, we cannot become more moral.

      Setting such an end describes then another way that virtue ethicists are different from other ethicists. Rather than examining actions and asking whether we should perform them or not, virtue ethicists say that we ought to set ends for the type of people we believe we should become and should pursue. Thus, to the extent that we are examining our lives and seeking ways of improving ourselves for the moral flourishment of our world, to that extent we are engaging virtue ethics.

      Turning to the third question, in order to get to the end, we need prudence. For many years prudence has had a terrible reputation, being thought of as caution or self-interest. “Be prudent” meant “Don’t get caught,” “Be extra careful,” “Watch out!”

      For Aristotle and Thomas prudence is not simply caution. Prudence is rather the virtue of a person whose feet are on the ground and who thinks both practically and realistically. Prudence belongs to the person who not only sets realistic ends, but sets out to attain them. The prudent person is precisely the person who knows how to grow. ⁴

      Being prudent is no easy task. From the medieval period until today, we believe that it is easier to get something wrong, then to get it right. For today we still assert if only one component of an action is wrong, the whole action is wrong.

      Prudence is even more complicated when we try to figure out the appropriate ways of becoming more virtuous. It must be attentive to detail, anticipate difficulties, and measure rightly. Moreover, as any one who has watched children knows, we are not born with prudence. Actually we acquire it through a very long process.

      Finding prudence is finding the middle point: all of prudence is precisely getting to the middle point or the “mean” between extremes. As Aquinas says, “virtue is the mean.” The mean is located where there is adequate tension for growth, neither too little nor too much. That mean is not fixed. The mean of virtue is not something set in stone: rather, it is the mean by which only specific persons or communities can grow. This is another reason why prudence is so difficult: no two means are the same.

      Finding the mean of the right tension depends on who the persons or communities are. In a matter of speaking, a virtue ought to fit a person the way a glove fits one’s hand. There is a certain tailor-made feel to a virtue, which prompts Aquinas to call virtue “one’s second nature.”

      Virtue ethics is, therefore, a pro-active system of ethics. It invites all people to see themselves as they really are, to assess themselves and see who they can actually become. In order both to estimate oneself and to set desired goals, it proffers the virtues for both. Moreover, it invites all people to see that they set the agenda not only of the end, but also of the means to accomplish that end. Virtuous actions, like temperate drinking or courageously facing our fears, are the prudential means for achieving the end of becoming more virtuous persons. Virtue ethics encompasses our entire lives. It sees every moment as the possibility for acquiring or developing a virtue. To underline this point, Aquinas held that every human action is a moral action. That is, any action that we knowingly perform is a moral action because it affects us as moral persons. Whatever we do makes us become what we do.

      Thomas saw every human action as an “exercise.” Though some of us go through life never examining the habits we engage, Thomas suggests to us that we ought to examine our ways of acting and ask ourselves: are these ways making us more just, prudent, temperate, and brave? If they are, they are virtuous exercises.

      When we think of exercise we think of athletics. The person who exercises herself by running eventually becomes a runner just as the one who dances becomes a dancer. From that insight Thomas like Aristotle before him sees that intended, habitual activity in the sports arena is no different from any other arena of life. If we can develop ourselves physically we can develop ourselves morally by intended, habitual activity.

      Virtue ethics sees, therefore, the ordinary as the terrain on which the moral life moves. Thus, while most ethics make their considerations about rather controversial material, virtue ethics often engages the commonplace. It is concerned with what we teach our children and how; with the way we relate with friends, families, and neighbors; with the way we live our lives. Moreover, it is concerned not only with whether a physician maintains professional ethics, for instance, whether she keeps professional secrets or observes informed consent with her patients. It is equally concerned with her private life, with whether she knows how to respect her friends’ confidences or whether she respects her family members’ privacy. ⁵ In a word, before the physician is a physician she is a person. It is her life as a person with which virtue ethics is specifically concerned.

      Virtue ethics looks at the world from an entirely different vantage point, moving ahead with less glamour and drama, but always seeing the agent, not as re-actor, but as actor: knowing oneself, setting the agenda of personal ends and means in both the ordinary and the professional life.

      The virtues are therefore traditional teleological, (i.e., end-oriented) guides that collectively aim for the right realization of the human person. As teleological, they need to be continually realized and redefined; their final expression remains outstanding. The mature person is constantly growing in the virtues. This means that virtue is always at once looking for expression in action and when a virtue is realized in action it makes the person more virtuous. But the more we grow in virtue, the more we are able to recognize our need for further growth.

      This type of growth ought not to be seen as a cycle or a circle but as a spiral moving us forward through history. ⁶ The nature of virtue is, then, historically dynamic; being in themselves goal oriented, they require being continually considered, understood, acquired, developed, and reformulated.

      Underlying the teleological nature of the virtues is then an implicit belief in the progress of ethical thought, both in the individual and in the community.
This plays out in the lives of both individual persons and moral communities. For instance, as I age I consider how much I need to engage patience and reconciliation, when earlier I did not see these needed virtues in part because I lacked the prudence (and humility) to acknowledge them. Similarly, we see nation states as they develop, continually redefining the meaning of justice so as to extend the circle of equality. We see this also in the language of “solidarity” which through religious leaders and social movements has become more and more relevant to people’s lives though thirty-five years ago it was hardly known as a virtue.

      Moreover, sometimes we try to replace the emphasis of one virtue over another, in part, to establish balance. Blessed John XXIII made a point of talking about the need for the Church to practice greater mercy in place of its severity. More recently Anne Patrick described virtuous shifts within society. She examined the canonization of Maria Goretti and suggested that it implicitly proposed a woman’s chastity as a social virtue of greater importance than a woman’s own life. ⁷ But then she noted how people’s devotion turned to look for other heroine’s who upheld life, justice, and being a woman working through a full and robust life. Therein, among others, was Dorothy Day. Patrick presumes an ethical development in our insights in the shift from chastity as the signature virtue for women to a more egalitarian anthropology where justice is the hallmark virtue for both genders.

      For this reason, ethicists and moralists have several tasks: to critically reflect on the contemporary situation to see whether existing anthropologies and the corresponding constellations of virtues inhibit or liberate members of our global community; to perceive new horizons of human possibility; to express the possible ways that virtue can attain those horizons; and to make politically possible the actual new self-understanding and self-realization. This final task is often overlooked: too often ethicists and moralists think that our work ends with written proposals, but inasmuch as ethical insight to be ethical must end in action, similarly the task of the ethicist must end in political action, an insight that Aristotle routinely affirmed. I hope in this paper to carry out these four tasks.

      But first let us see here how virtue ethics intersects with natural law. Natural law is the universally accessible study through human reason of a normative anthropology. But we each perceive the natural law from our own context as Karl Mannheim taught us. Christian ethicists perceive the humanum with the eyes of faith. This does not mean, then, that we are claiming that moral prescriptions are deduced from truths of faith. Rather, we believe that our perception will be prompted by a particular urgency because of the narrative of salvation history. Instead of talking about new essential norms, as Klaus Demmer puts it simply: “genuine theology leads to a fundamental change in our way of thinking.” ⁸ Thus virtue ethics is the stuff, the articulation of the normative anthropology of the natural law.

      Our hermeneutical investigations into the nature of the human person, the horizon of our anthropological vision and the corresponding virtues, depend then where we are in history. That does not mean that we make up virtues. Rather we become more able to see what or rather who we should become. We are always being challenged to discover a more correct anthropology of human personhood and community.

      The claim of moral objectivity is not then negated by the recognition of our historical context. Our right perception of that mean or what we today would call the anthropological goal of a particular character trait depends upon our ability to perceive it in the first place. This is why Aristotle recommended to us that we find the mean by seeing how a prudent person would determine it. ⁹ Yet Aristotle departed from Socrates on the point that prudence is sufficient for self-realization and self-determination. Prudence, Aristotle warned us, depended upon the other virtues and those virtues were dialectally dependent upon prudence. ¹⁰ For this reason, the competency of prudence is deeply imbedded in the historic nature of human beings such that human beings can only perceive well the horizon of their possibilities to the extent that they have rightly realized themselves through the virtues.

      If we take the cardinal virtues as they are proposed in Thomas Aquinas, who built upon the insights of Cicero, Ambrose, Gregory and Augustine, we find that the four cardinal virtues--prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude--perfect four corresponding powers: the practical reason, the will, the concupiscible, and the irascible. These virtues inhere in a particular hierarchy. Temperance and fortitude are predominantly at the service of justice. Prudence determines the right choice of means for each of the virtues, but it especially looks to recommend the just action since justice governs all exterior principles. In a manner of speaking, the anthropological identity of the virtuous person is simply the just one.

      But Thomas developed the Patristic agenda on the virtues. For instance, for Augustine all real virtues were rooted in charity without which there was no real virtue, but Thomas modified Augustine’s claim: while acknowledging that justice without charity is not perfect justice, for Thomas it is nonetheless virtue. ¹¹ This here is what we mean by Thomas using Aristotle to develop Augustine.

      These classical cardinal virtues and their over-arching structure are, however, no longer adequate and in fact endorse an anthropology that inhibits greatly the present theological agenda. As far as I see it, three reasons merit replacing them. First, contemporary writers repeatedly express dissatisfaction with the insufficiency of justice. For the most part, they offer hyphenated constructs, the most famous being, “love-justice” which attempts to acknowledge that while working for the equality for all persons, we still maintain partial relationships that need to be nurtured and sustained. ¹²

      But the hyphen is distracting. Rather than reducing one to the other or eliding the two together, Paul Ricoeur places them in a “tension between two distinct and sometimes opposed claims.” ¹³ Ricoeur’s insight that the virtues are distinct and at times opposing stands in contrast with Aquinas’ strategy of the cardinal virtues where justice is supported by fortitude and temperance and neither shaped nor opposed by the two auxiliary virtues. Only when another virtue stands as a fully equal heuristic guide can there be a dialectical tension wherein the virtues challenge and define one another, and, as Ricoeur suggests, “may even be the occasion for the invention of responsible forms of behavior.” ¹⁴

      Second, the modern era insists that moral dilemmas are not based on the simple opposition of good and evil but, more frequently, on the clash of goods. Thus, a constellation of virtues acting as heuristic guides that already resolve the priority of one virtue over another by a preconceived hierarchal structure preempts realism. We cannot propose heuristic guides that prefabricate solutions when the concrete data is still forthcoming. Thus we need virtues that go beyond protecting the single good of justice and that allow us to interpret in each instance which of the primary virtues ought to be in play.

      Third, the primary identity of being human is not an individual with powers needing perfection, but rather a relational rational being whose modes of relationality need to be rightly realized. On this last point we can begin proposing a set of cardinal virtues that allow us at once to try talking cross-culturally and that covers our main objections.

      Our identity is relational in three ways: generally, specifically and uniquely. Each of these relational ways of being demands a cardinal virtue: as a relational being in general, we are called to justice; as a relational being specifically, we are called to fidelity; as a relational being uniquely, we are called to self-care. These three virtues are cardinal. Unlike Thomas’ structure, none is ethically prior to the other; they have equally urgent claims and they should be pursued as ends in themselves: we are not called to be faithful and self-caring in order to be just, nor are we called to be self-caring and just in order to be faithful. None is auxiliary to the others. They are distinctive virtues with none being a subset or subcategory of the other. They are cardinal. The fourth cardinal virtue is prudence which determines what constitutes the just, faithful and self-caring way of life for an individual. The older two virtues, fortitude and temperance, remain auxiliary and exist to support the realization of the other four.

      Let me explain how these four virtues work: Our relationality generally is always directed by an ordered appreciation for the common good in which we treat all people as equal. As members of the human race, we are expected to respond to all members in general equally and impartially. ¹⁵

      If justice urges us to treat all people equally, then fidelity makes distinctively different claims. Fidelity is the virtue that nurtures and sustains the bonds of those special relationships that humans enjoy whether by blood, marriage, love, citizenship, or sacrament. If justice rests on impartiality and universality, then fidelity rests on partiality and particularity.

      Fidelity here is like love in the “just-love” dialectic. It is also like the claim that Carol Gilligan made in her important work, In a Different Voice. ¹⁶ Gilligan criticized Lawrence Kohlberg for arguing that full moral development was found in the person who could reason well about justice as impartial and universal. She countered that the human must aim both for the impartiality of justice as well as the development of particular bonds.

      Neither of these virtues, however, addresses the unique relationship that each person has with oneself. Care for self enjoys a considered role in our tradition, as for instance, the command to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself. In his writings on the order of charity, Thomas Aquinas, among others, developed this love of self at length. ¹⁷

      Finally, prudence has the task of integrating the three virtues into our relationships, just as it did when it was among the classical list of the cardinal virtues. Thus, prudence is always vigilant looking to the future, trying not only to realize the claims of justice, fidelity and self care in the here and now, but also calling us to anticipate occasions when each of these virtues can be more fully acquired. In this way prudence is clearly a virtue that pursues ends and effectively establishes the moral agenda for the person growing in these virtues. But these ends are not in opposition to nor in insolation of one another. Rather prudence helps each virtue to shape its end as more inclusive of the other two.

      Inasmuch as all persons in every culture are constituted by these three ways of being related, by naming these virtues as cardinal, we have a device for talking cross-culturally. This device is based, however, on modest claims. The cardinal virtues do not purport to offer a picture of the ideal person, nor to exhaust the entire domain of virtue. Rather than being the last word on virtue, they are among the first, providing the bare essentials for right human living and specific action. As hinges (that’s what “cardo” means), the cardinal virtues provide a skeleton of both what human persons should basically be and at what human action should basically aim. All other issues of virtue hang on the skeletal structures of both rightly-integrated dispositions and right moral action.

      I believe that these thin and sketetal virtues become thickened and enfleshed in different cultures in different ways. For instance, some understanding of justice (the willingness to be impartial and to give to each their due) is presumably present in every culture. Justice in the United States, however, is affected considerably by the American esteem of personal autonomy and its respect of personal rights. Autonomy thickens justice inasmuch as we would not give “the due” to any persons without their consent. Our health care system, for instance, so powerfully protects the rights of the individual that we could not imagine justice in a healthcare system that did not privilege informed consent. This American understanding of justice differentiates itself from justice in the Philippines where an emphasis on “smooth interpersonal relationships” governs most social relationships. Similarly, through autonomy, American understandings of fidelity depend on the importance of mutual consent. In the Philippines, its strong emphasis on cohesion, unity, and peace, clearly provide the yeast for translating fidelity into ordinary life.

      Cultures give flesh to the skeletal cardinal virtues. This thickening differentiates, then, one virtue in one culture from a similar one in another. Justice, fidelity and self-care in a Buddhist culture have somewhat similar and somewhat different meanings than they do in a liberal or Confucian context. ¹⁸

      Over the years I have argued that mercy is the trademark of Catholicism. I cannot make the case here, but I have elsewhere. ¹⁹ In Catholic cultures, mercy thickens our understanding of the virtues. Inasmuch as mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another so as to respond to the other, mercy thickens justice by taking into account the chaos of the most marginalized. Mercy does not temper justice as so many believe; rather, mercy prompts us to see that justice applies to all, especially those most frequently without justice, those abandoned to the chaos of the margins. In Catholic cultures, mercy prompts justice to find the neglected, the persecuted, the oppressed and to bring them into the solidarity of humanity by assisting them in the pursuit of their rights.

      Similarly fidelity in the many relationships we enjoy is enfleshed by mercy. Mercy helps Catholics to see from the start that no relationship is without its chaos and that every relationship requires the merciful practice of reconciliation. In Catholic marriages, for instance, the barm of mercy prompts spouses to enter one another’s chaos and to forgive each other not once or twice but seventy times seven times.

      Finally the Catholic practice of self-care urges each person, through mercy, to enter into the deep chaos of one’s own distinctively complicated life. By the examination of conscience we believe that the loving, merciful light of Christ illuminates every dimension of the soul and helps us to see what we need to do in the care of ourselves.

      When these virtues are applied to us as relational sexual beings we see how each has a very particular agenda relevant for sexual ethics. Together they offer a comprehensive sexual ethics. I saw this developed at length by one of my doctoral students, Ronaldo Zaccharias, SDB, from Brazil who employed these virtues precisely for a Brazilian educational program of Christian sexual ethics. He took the four virtues that I have proposed and after seeing them as Catholic, that is, as thickened by mercy, he applied them to particular cases so as to elaborate a Catholic sexual ethics.

      In light of the conversations I had with him, I want to expand on some of the insights we shared. For instance, justice as it applies to sexual ethics is really about each of us learning to appreciate the other person with a dignity that belongs to being human and in the image of God. In sexual relations, justice always prompts us to see the other as subject and not as object and leads us to recognize the importance of never taking advantage of another for the sake of fulfilling our own desires or needs. Justice requires therefore that we see the person whom we are attracted to, “in love with,” “romantically involved with,” or dating as a person with an uncompromisable dignity.

      But Justice in sexual ethics does not simply apply to the person we are dating or marrying. Justice informed by mercy makes us more sensitive to any sense of inequality or indignity that afflicts our neighbor. A justice informed by mercy is vigorously alert to those who are particularly vulnerable. The abuse of children by clergy is a violent violation of Catholic justice. It reminds us again and again why justice is so important in a sexual ethics. Thus, the sexual abuse of the vulnerable adult, long overlooked in the recent crisis, calls us to a sexual ethics that privileges justice. Rape of any one is seen as a flagrant act of injustice and any society that tolerates “artistic performances” that could suggest the acceptance of rape or sexual subjugation violates an understanding of justice informed by mercy.

      In sexual ethics, this Catholic sense of justice calls us to recognize when others are denigrated, therefore, by the commercialization of sex, from prostitution to the kidnapping and transport of minors. Justice in a sexual ethics moves us to enter into the chaos of those whose dignity is compromised by sexual inequities as well. Here we especially think of the on-going work of establishing the God given equality of women. Justice in sexual ethics requires us to recognize, support and promote the equality of the genders, with the understanding that such work still has much to accomplish.

      Still, justice is particularly relevant in promoting more egalitarian understandings in heterosexual relationships where, as elsewhere, women still do not enjoy the status of equality in so many forms of life. But justice is not simply attentive to abuse and compromise in marriage. Clear-eyed justice ought to see the chaos of the lives of poor women and their lack of adequate power, this especially in a world where millions of people have HIV/AIDS and the rates of infection among women and particularly teenage girls continues to escalate unabatedly.

      Moreover, because justice is a forward looking virtue it prudently anticipates a way of seeing society more respectful of persons, their bodies, their expressions of sexuality. A justice informed by mercy looks to those who because of sexuality (histories of abuse, sexual dysfunction, orientation questions, etc.) cry out for protection, sanctuary, support and hospitality. Thus, as church leaders begin to examine their role in issues of sexual abuse, they will also need to review their role in the issue of justice and civil rights for gays and lesbians. Here church leaders have much work to do in learning about the experiences and self-understanding of these people, especially those who are devoted members of the Church including those in ministry.

      A Catholic justice informed by mercy in the context of sexual ethics can be taught in our classrooms in our religious education programs, or from the pulpit. It helps us to see that our sexuality, where we are most capable of expressing, receiving and mutually sharing love, is the embodiment of our most vulnerable dimensions. It is where through intimacy we leave ourselves open to the other. For this reason the church’s long history of privileging justice easily extends its interest into the realm of sexual ethics.

      Justice is not alone among the virtues. All societies call us to be faithful to the long standing particular relationships we have. Fidelity differs from justice in that the latter calls us to treat with impartiality all people, while fidelity recognizes that we each are constituted by a variety of specific interpersonal relationships. A fidelity informed by mercy then leads us toward approaching prudently and fearlessly those whom we love. It demands that we privilege the particular relationships that we enjoy.

      Fidelity requires us not only not to end or walk out of loving relationships but more importantly to defend and sustain them. Fidelity requires that the entirety of each of our relationships must be embraced and that, informed by mercy, we are always called to stand with those whom we love especially in their chaos.

      Fidelity also teaches us that in our sexual relationships we must consider the other in all his/her specificity. Therefore, fidelity demands an exclusivity to the sexual expression of the relationship. Fidelity calls us never to abandon our lover, to recognize rather that our sexual love must deepen, embrace, extend through intimacy.

      But by being informed by mercy Catholic fidelity anticipates the chaos of our sexuality and sexual relationships. Fidelity teaches us to be no fool in entering sexual relationships. It reminds us that entering into a sexual relationship with another means entering into an intimate complexity where we need to recognize the inevitable yet unpredictable moments of upheaval and confusion attendant to such intimacy.

      Catholic fidelity therefore privileges dialogue. It seeks to make a couple capable of communicating as best they can their needs, hopes, fears, and desires. This fidelity helps the Christian to grow further in love and in humanity. It sees sex itself as a language that expresses in a variety of ways the human person in openness and in pursuit of the other.

      This fidelity becomes particularly relevant when children are born into the sexual relationship. Catholic fidelity does not simply mean no divorce or separation. It is not primarily defined by negatives. Rather it seeks to convey the bond into which a child is born. For this reason Catholics are intensely interested in the nature of marriage as a place where faithful love and procreativity concretely flourishes.

      Self-care is another virtue in which the person recognizes the call to be accountable for oneself. This brings with it a particular competency to not let oneself be taken advantage in any relationships, sexual or otherwise. Instead it calls for a recognition of knowing one’s own capabilities, whether and when one can sustain a sexual relationship. It recognizes that while fidelity seeks to look to the other and to the relationship, self-care reminds us that we need to be responsible to ourselves in sexual relationships as well.

      Often people enter sexual relationships before they are actually capable of being able to sustain one. They do harm to the other and to themselves. For this reason persons around the country and elsewhere constantly encourage younger people to delay sexual experiences and relationships, not because sex is bad but because sexual relationships are demanding and require a maturity that engages not just justice and fidelity, but self-care as well. Self-care also prompts people not to succumb to cultural disvalues that encourage casual sexual experiences.

      A self-care informed by mercy prompts us to attend to our own personal histories where areas of need or particular vulnerability need to be recognized rather than repressed. Interestingly, many of us are more willing to entertain and stand with the chaos of another than ourselves. Our pride basically keeps us from seeing the more messy side of ourselves where our hopes, needs and vulnerabilities exist. Self-care invites us to be as patient with ourselves as we are with others and invites to not look to sexual experiences as a way, for instance, of resolving problems of self-esteem. Self-care invites us to see instead sexuality and sexual relationships as goods to be pursued but precisely within a virtuous context.

      Not only are sexuality and sexual relationships goods, but by self-care we are called to understand ourselves as embodied and alive with passion which are goods as well. Virtue prompts us not to be indulgent but rather to take these goods seriously and to see whether we really appreciate these goods as such and whether we can develop the askesis or discipline to grow passionately, bodily, sexually to maturity.

      While chastity takes its place, I think, within the context of these more fundamental virtues, The Catechism of the Catholic Church places its discourse on chastity within the context of the sixth commandment, which specifically acknowledges chastity’s reference to sexuality. ²⁰ In The Catechism chastity is a functionary virtue, in the sense that chastity helps us to integrate the gift of sexuality. On the practical level, chastity functions on two levels: this act of self-understanding of the gift that leads us to seek its integration within ourselves as relational persons and a more regulatory promotion of abstinence.

      The first function is a positive appreciation of sexuality, embodiment, relationality and maturing sexual intimacy. Appreciating sexuality as gift, chastity invites the Catholic to see the need for understanding the special ways that sexuality brings us together within the love of God. Chastity calls the Catholic to develop this positive appreciation incrementally throughout her/his life.

      The latter function promotes an abstinence whether very narrowly in terms of a marital chastity that teaches that Catholic spouses should abstain from sexual relations outside of marriage, or for that matter any sexual activity that would in itself be anti-procreative, and more broadly in denying any sexual expressions that are genitally intimate outside of marriage, whether heterosexual or homosexual dating. It is important to realize that in promoting abstinence, Church teaching sees heterosexual attraction as a good and recognizes the expression of sexuality in relationships as a gift to be enjoyed solely in the context of the institution of marriage. On the other hand, chastity applies to persons who are not predominantly heterosexual differently, in part because their sexual tendencies ought to unite them not to another person but to the cross wherein they will hopefully find inner freedom. This teaching on chastity tries then to recognize that by a special union with Christ, even here, the chaste homosexual is not meant to be alone.

      Outside of the question of orientation of mature adults, (where despite papal, curial, episcopal teachings there continues to be a position from theologians and pastors who contend that homosexual tendencies must have some in se moral legitimacy), ²¹ still chastity promotes a considerable Christian realism about the challenges of sexuality in the modern world. Christian chastity is particularly important in engaging those who are growing to realize that the gift of sexuality requires a great deal of appreciation and prudential reflection and that the innate inclination to realize sexual desires needs to be checked by a realistic appraisal of one’s own maturity and the willingness to commit to another. In short Christian chastity has always brought a sense of reality to much discussion on sexuality, though contrarily, Christians have sometimes not spent enough time considering how much of a gift sexuality actually is. ²²

      In the context of the contemporary cardinal virtues, chastity helps draw a variety of basic lines about the moral liceity and non-moral liceity of sexual expressions, a line drawing that the other virtues might not so easily attain. For this reason, it is always relevant for sexual ethics precisely because it provides basic moral guidelines especially in its ordinary propadeutic function.

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