2.2 Virginity, universal formation objective

There is already a significant pedagogic indication that comes from this clarification.  It is necessary to recover the truth of the term “virginity”; it is necessary to strip it of all those mistaken interpretations that have given  a partial and artificial idea of it, making it an exclusive thing for some vocational categories in God’s Church and strange for all the others.

Here is the sin:  we have sequestered the concept of virginity, making it a strange and improbable thing; we have appropriated it, making it indecipherable; we have boasted about it, maybe, making it unpleasant and arrogant; we have lived it for our private perfection, making it scarcely credible; we have often put up with it with little joy and little love, making it unattractive; almost as though it were a misfortune; we have thought we had to defend it from the tempting world, hiding it underground (cf Mt 23:25) or in a handkerchief (cf Lk 19:20), rather than sharing it. Especially, we have spiritualized it, taking away its  concreteness of a pedagogical path to propose to  others also, to whom it belongs by nature.  And dispensing ourselves from the hard work of looking for that path, we risked understanding very little of it ourselves, of its fascination and its mystery.