The Council of Trent (1545–63) said: “If any one says . . . that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema” (Session 24, Canon 10).
The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) said that marriage was a “Christian vocation” (Gaudium et Spes 49, 52). If people are called by God to be married, then it is better for those people to follow God’s will and be married.
Trent says that it is better to remain in virginity, but Vatican II says that that isn’t always the case. This raises a question: Did Vatican II change the doctrine that virginity is better than marriage?
1. What Do We Mean by Virginity?
There are differing definitions of “virginity,” which can relate it to physical facts, mental intentions or even cultural circumstances.
Pope Pius XII (d. 1958) provides a characterization of “virginity,” in his 1954 encyclical Holy Virginity. One of the reasons for the encyclical is declining vocations (HV 68) which, Pius XII seems to think, may be due to a mistaken over-extolling of marriage to the detriment of virginity.
The encyclical’s categorization of virginity includes all those states in life which could be affected by an over-extolling of marriage. It is the men and women who make religious vows of celibacy, whether they have never married or are widows. And it encompasses secular clergy, religious orders and those in lay states with vows of celibacy (HV 4–6).
This means that virginity can be thought of, in a broad sense, as vowed religious celibacy.
2. Scriptural Views of Virginity
The New Testament shows a positive view of marriage. Jesus attends a wedding (John 2:1–11) and married couples like Priscilla and Aquila are shown supporting St. Paul with the growth of the Church at Corinth and at Ephesus (Acts 18:2–3; 18–19).
However, Jesus himself was unmarried, and he seems to recommend a renunciation of marriage (Matthew 19:10–12). He also encourages a poverty which would be difficult for married people to observe (Matthew 19:16–21).
St. Paul also seems to recommend virginity to his followers (1 Corinthians 7:32–34). His rationale is that virginity frees people from the duties of marriage, so it enables a greater giving of time to God. If St. Paul is right, and if giving more time to God is better than giving less, then that provides a reason for thinking that virginity is better for Christians than marriage.
Overall, the New Testament is ambiguous. Marriage is shown to be good, but so also is a renunciation of marriage, which could even seem to be better.
3. Early Medieval Views
In the early medieval period, there was a verbal insistence upon the moral goodness of marriage, but the lives of Christianity’s heroes pointed in a different direction. Heroic martyrs like St. Agnes (d. 304) were virgins, as were the heroic desert fathers like St. Anthony (d. 356). The example of widowed desert mothers like St. Paula (d. 404) reinforced the preferability of renouncing marriage.
The writings of St. Jerome show that the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4) was being used to show that virginity constituted a better response to God than marriage. Writing to dissuade Ageruchia from a marriage, Jerome stressed that the married are like those in the parable who make a thirtyfold response to God, while virgins are those who make a hundredfold response (Letter 123, 9). If Christians are serious about their faith, how could they not embrace virginity and do their best for God, rather than settling for marriage as a lesser response to God?
To compound the issues, there were also mistranslations of the Bible and misunderstandings of St. Augustine’s (d. 430) views. (For details see: “Is Marriage No Longer a Remedy for Concupiscence?”) These issues created a latent negativity about marriage, depicting it as an option, “if all else fails,” for Christians unable to commit to virginity.
4. St. Thomas Aquinas’ View
St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) made one of the clearest statements in favor of the goodness of marriage. However, he also viewed virginity as more perfect than marriage, due to the example of Jesus and St. Paul (Summa Theologiae 2-2, Q.152, A.3).
Even if virginity was better (or more perfect) than marriage, Aquinas was adamant that this did not mean that individual virgins were better than married individuals (Summa Theologiae 2-2, Q.152, A.4, ad.2). In his own day he had the example of St. Louis IX (d. 1270), who was the saintly, and married, king of France.
In making this point, Aquinas is introducing a nuanced distinction. In the abstract, virginity is better than marriage. But that cannot be assumed to be the case when it comes to particular instances of virginity and marriage. “This married spouse” might be better and more perfect than “that virgin,” while virginity itself remains better and more perfect than marriage, considered as a state in life.
To illustrate the point with a modern example, Mariam Soulakiotis (d. 1954) was a nun who was found guilty of 27 murders. It would be very odd to argue that she must nevertheless be better and more perfect than each and every married person, just because she embraced virginity.
5. Tridentine Spirituality
When the Council of Trent considered the issue of marriage and virginity, it was focused on the contemporary problem of the Reformation. Martin Luther (d. 1546) and his wife, Katharina Von Bora (d. 1552), had both made vows of celibacy. They renounced their vows and insisted that marriage was better than virginity.
The Council of Trent condemned their view, by reiterating that virginity was better than marriage. But it did so without Aquinas’ nuanced distinction between the state of life and the situation of individuals.
We can see the impact of Trent’s extolling of virginity in the life of people like St. Teresa of Avila (d. 1582). In her autobiography she writes: “Though I could not at first bend my will to be a nun, I saw that the religious state was the best and safest. And thus . . . I resolved to force myself into it” (Life, Ch. 3,6).
The life of Ss Louis and Zélie Martin (d. 1894, 1877) illustrate the problem caused by Trent’s lack of nuance. Both tried to enter religious orders, but they were rejected. So they married and gave birth to St. Thérèse of Lisieux (d. 1897). It seems in their case, that it was better for them to marry than to remain in virginity.
Examples like this show that Trent’s statement is “incomplete” because it lacks Aquinas’ nuance. Trent made a statement about the superiority of virginity, but it was an abstract statement about ideal circumstances, when “all things are equal.” Yet all things are not equal when Providence intervenes with its own plans for specific individuals, like Louis and Zélie Martin.
Spiritual directors have known this for centuries. When St. Francis de Sales (d. 1622) gave advice to the unmarried, he did not stress the superiority of virginity and tell his listeners to immediately sign up for religious orders. On the contrary, he expressed himself very carefully saying, “IF you are called to religious life, rather than marriage…” (Introduction to the Devout Life, 3,41).
Trent dealt with the specific issues raised by the Reformation. But, in doing so, it made an “incomplete” statement about the relationship of virginity and marriage. It explains the actions of saints like St. Teresa of Avila, but it doesn’t explain Ss Louis and Zélie Martin. Trent has spoken, but there was something theologically missing.
6. Vatican II
On the surface it can look as if Vatican II disagreed with the Council of Trent’s teachings on virginity, because the council rejected a Preparatory Schema on Marriage and Family, which repeated Trent’s claim about virginity being better than marriage.
However, the council rejected ALL preparatory schemas, as it did not want to be railroaded by the Curia. So, it is not possible to draw sound inferences about the implications of rejecting individual schemas.
The context of Vatican II is very different to the context of Trent. At Trent the problem was Reformers attacking virginity to extoll marriage. At Vatican II the problem was people attacking marriage to extoll “free love” (Gaudium et Spes 47). So the council focuses upon stressing the positivity of marital vocations.
Introducing the concept of a specific vocation to marriage, the council explains how individuals like St. Louis IX and Ss Louis and Zélie Martin could have been called to marriage, without that undermining the idea of a more perfect state of virginity.
Rather than disagreeing with Trent, there is a sense in which Vatican II completes Trent. Trent made a statement about the states of life of virginity and marriage, but it did not acknowledge the nuance which Aquinas added, about how matters could be different at the level of individual virgins and spouses. Vatican II rectifies that omission, using the language of vocations to relate the issues to individuals.
Although Vatican II does not quote Trent on virginity, it does echo its ideas. The decree on Priestly Training (1965) explicitly refers to the “surpassing excellence of virginity,” as compared to marriage (Optatam Totius 10).
Vatican II is not disagreeing with Trent. It is “completing” its teachings on virginity and marriage.
7. Contradictory Popes?
There is a sense in which virginity is better than marriage, when it applies to states in life. And there is a sense in which virginity is not better than marriage, when it applies to specific individuals.
This complexity means that it is possible for popes to seem to contradict themselves, without necessarily doing so.
For example, Pope Saint John Paul II (d. 2005) repeatedly reaffirmed Trent’s insistence that virginity is better than marriage. In a 1981 Apostolic Exhortation, he stated that “the Church, throughout her history, has always defended the superiority of this charism [i.e., celibacy] to that of marriage” (Familiaris Consortio 16). In a 1988 Apostolic Letter he repeats that “Saint Paul proclaims the superiority of virginity over marriage” (Mulieris Dignitatem 22). In a 1996 Apostolic Exhortation, he insists that consecrated life has an “objective superiority” (Vita Consecrata 32).
Between those claims, he also said that virginity is not better than marriage (Audience 14 April 1982). The context of this claim is a wider insistence that no individuals (i.e., virgins) are automatically better than others in the Church (i.e., spouses). This was the same point that Aquinas made. Just because virginity is better than marriage, it does not mean that virgins are better than spouses.
Pope Francis echoes this point in his 2016 encyclical Amoris Laetitia (AL 159). Critics may read this as a rejection of Trent’s claims about the superiority of virginity. But it is equally possible to read his comments in the context of his oft-repeated rejection of clericalism. Clericalism occurs when individual clerics are inappropriately over-extolled because of more general state-of-life factors, like “virginity.” Pope Francis has repeatedly rejected that approach, insisting that individual clerics are no better, and no more perfect, than individual married spouses. And so it is wrong to laud virginity over marriage in that sense.
8. Conclusion
Trent said that virginity is better than marriage. The Second Vatican Council does not disagree. However, it contextualizes Trent, and it does fuller justice to the lives of married saints and to Aquinas’ nuanced views. So there is a sense in which Vatican II “completes” Trent’s comments.
Ultimately, Trent states that virginity as a “state of life” is superior to marriage. This means that in the abstract, and “all things being equal,” it is better for a Catholic to embrace virginity than to marry. But Vatican II reminds us of what we can see in the lives of saints. At the individual level, where God’s grace works through vocations, “all things are not equal.” So, there may well be situations in which individuals do better to marry than to embrace virginity.
These nuances mean that the comparison of virginity to marriage is theologically more complex than it may initially seem. People need to be careful in jumping to conclusions about what the Church’s teaching is, and about what it means. And so, when individuals are pondering how to live their lives, understanding doctrine is important, but so also is a prayerful process of thoughtful discernment.
17 thoughts on “Is Virginity Better Than Marriage?”
This is just engineering: a couple who fails to live a josefine marriage will be happier than those who just live like cattle. Celibacy is superior to everyone, but we are free to emvrace what is better ir not, including Salvation. Now, because of malice, we are inclined to the lesser good and evil, so the duty of the Church is to preach Perfection, in order to maximize attempt and reaching of happiness in this life and the next one.
And of course there is the added complexity of discerning individual vocations from generalised principles about marriage and virginity. St Therese of Lisieux had a vocation to virginity. But her parents (Sts Louis Martin and Marie Azélie Guerin) clearly had a vocation to marriage.
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Both virginity and marriage share the same nemesis – temptation and fall – that the struggle
to remain faithful, as R. L. Stevenson opined is ” . . . long, straight and dusty to the grave.
A thoughful observation: perhaps virginity and marriage have more in common than is commonly recognised?
Thanks for this brief historical review.
I think the confusion is due to a basic shortcoming in the Church’s teaching which is striking as one reads your analysis and for which you are not responsible: All the authoritative teaching is from celibate males. To be blunt, when men celibate men instruct on marriage, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They are stumbling around in the dark, hence the confusion in what they say.
One might say, “Einstein was not a beam of light, but he understood it!” True, but if a beam of light came in through the window during one of his lectures and said, “Albert, you don’t know anything about me! Let me explain!”, I would listen to the beam of light and not Prof. Einstein. Wouldn’t you?
So it is to be expected that Catholic teaching on marriage is uninformed. What makes this odd is that there has been no lack of married authority in the Church, at least early on. Peter was married. All the other of the original 12 were married; and Paul defends their right to be so. (1 Cor. 9:5) Bishops were married. (1 Tim. 3:2) Out of the first 100 Popes, about 40 were married (the last one was Adrian II, who died in 872).
What did these married men say about marriage? We don’t know!
And when men, especially those who have never been pregnant, speak or teach about abortion, they too do not know what they are talking about [especially the 7 men who were in the majority in the Roe decision]. To be blunt, when Jesus instructed us on marriage, He didn’t know what He was talking about. He was stumbling around in the dark. BTW, I never knew, or heard, that Judas and John, the Beloved Apostle, were married. Guy, Texas
Guy
The only teaching Jesus gave on marriage is to forbid divorce (though in Matthew he adds an exception for the wife’s adultery; this sounds like a later interpolation). In another place he says that in heaven there are no married couples. You can’t read this to say that married people don’t go to heaven.
He could not have believed that celibacy is better than marriage because he picked married men as apostles and did not require anyone to be celibate. As to whether the young John was married, by the time Paul spoke in Corinthians he might have been. Paul just says that Peter, “the other apostles”, and Jesus’s brothers had wives.
Captcrisis, do you realize that you are criticizing Jesus Christ? He is the celibate male who provided the teaching on whether it is better to remain celibate or get married that the Church is trying to interpret and explain.
The Church’s teaching on marriage is not uniformed. It is very clear and based on Scripture. But this article is not about Church teaching on marriage. Rory Fox is trying to explain a very difficult theological nuance here: is celibacy better than marriage?
When Peter (who was married as you point out) and the other disciples asked Jesus if it is better not to marry, Jesus replied “Not all can accept [this] word, but only those to whom that is granted.”
So we have God telling us in Genesis to “Be fertile and multiply” and Jesus saying to His disciples not all can accept a life of celibacy.
So what is answer to the disciples’ question based on what God tells us in Genesis and Jesus’ answer to His disciples? Is it better to marry or not to marry? How does Captcrisis interpret this teaching?
Gene
Jesus’s remark, “Not all can accept this teaching” (verse 11) referred to his rule on divorce (verses 3 – 9), which seemed harsh to his listeners. It’s their remark as to the harshness of the rule (verse 10) which he is responding to (verse 11).
As to his subsequent remark about “eunuchs” (verse 12), who know what that means? He can’t mean literal “eunuchs” so we are in figurative language territory. And it doesn’t appear in the parallel passage in Mark, so it might be a later addition.
At any rate, the actual history of the early Church as Jesus established it, beginning with his original 12 apostles, shows no sign of celibacy being favored. At the time, to be observant a Jew had to marry, and if Jesus wanted to set his followers apart from Jews, he certainly did not choose celibacy as a way to do it.
Captcrisis, Scripture must be read for its literal meaning, its allegorical meaning, its moral meaning, and its anagogical meaning. You are completely missing the anagogical meaning of these verses.
I had to look up “anagogical”.
So Jesus was saying married people can’t get into heaven? Educate me.
Captcrisis, as far as educating you goes, I can only suggest that you humbly start to question all of your own contradictory opinions on the Catholic Church and Catholic Doctrine (“humility brings forth wisdom and understanding”). Here is a list of 10 books for you to read as a starting point: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-top-ten-tools-to-know-and-defend-your-faith
You might also want to find a good Catholic forum since you seem to want to argue your positions on various matters (just google “Catholic Forums” and you’ll find many). Comboxes are for comments, not discussions.
And since you seem to think that only celibate males are responsible for the development of Church teaching, you might also want to read what the four women Doctors of the Church had to say – St. Catherine of Siena, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Therese of Lisieux.
And, finally, if you have not read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, read it, paying attention to the footnotes for further reading.
Thank you Captcrisis for opening a set of considerations which have prompted a lot of interesting ideas.
It is undoubtedly true that a lived exerience of something like marriage helps with understanding it. But it is also the case that people can acquire a degree of expertise in things, without experiencing them. For example medical experts can be skilled in treating conditions which they have not themselves had. So perhaps the credentials for celibate males writing about marriage is a little more complex than it might initially seem?
Rory
Thanks for the compliment.
Theoretically, someone looking in from the outside can sometimes see things that the people inside can’t. That is (for example) the advantage of psychotherapy. So theoretically, celibate priests can see things about marriage that others can’t.
I say theoretically, because in fact there has been nothing that celibate males have said about marriage that couldn’t have been said better by married people. Some of it is just ridiculous. This is most obvious as to sex. Priests shy away from the subject. No priest, as far as I know, is comfortable talking about it.
It’s true as to other matters too. At my sister’s wedding the priest’s homily ended with, “Remember: never go to bed with an argument unsettled.” The instruction in Ephesians 4:26 means in general to not let things fester indefinitely, but the priest was taking it literally. Any happily married person knows this is bad advice. If you feel required to settle something before you go to sleep, as the hour gets later and you both get more tired you either dig in and make it worse, or give a false compromise that neither side means. Just go to sleep! In the morning, when you’re rested, and the sun is up and things look brighter, talking about the issue and getting it settled is so much easier.
Dear Rory, Interesting topic. I think, after reading your fine article, the answer is “Yes,” and “No.” Guy, Texas
Thank you Guy, “yes and no” is an excellent summary. And far more concise than I managed to achieve!