As we prepare to celebrate the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, during the Year of St. Joseph, I've been reflecting upon the virtues of this great saint, especially his chastity. There are many things that remain unknown about the life of St. Joseph, but there is one thing that we know with the certainty of divine revelation about his marriage to Mary, the mother of Jesus: Joseph and Mary abstained from sexual intercourse throughout their relationship with one another.

As the Gospel of Luke implies and tradition seems to make clear, Mary had made a vow to remain a virgin throughout her life (see Catholic Answers for more information). Some sources indicate that St. Joseph had made a similar vow (see Consecration to St. Joseph by Fr. Calloway, pp. 127-136). Nonetheless, Mary and Joseph entered into marriage with one another, presumably with some mutual understanding that their relationship would be a virginal one. In his extraordinary chastity, St. Joseph demonstrated heroic virtue that all of us, especially men, can learn from today.

It's worth noting first how unusual voluntary virginity was in the Jewish culture of Joseph and Mary. We today are very familiar with Catholic priests, nuns, and friars who take vows of celibacy, but such a practice was virtually unheard of among the Jewish people. In the Old Testament, the prophets, scribes, and Levitical priests were almost always married, and a man would generally remain celibate only if he was physically incapable of the marital act, i.e., if he was a “eunuch.” In the New Covenant, however, Jesus would speak to his astounded disciples about how some would voluntarily choose lives of virginity:

But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” (Matthew 19:11-12 RSV2CE)

St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose marriage ushered in the New Covenant era, anticipated these words of Jesus with their own surprising commitment to remain continent. They were given an altogether unique grace: By the power of the Holy Spirit, they became the parents of Jesus, without ever engaging in the marital act. They fully embodied the human vocations of both marriage and of virginity that Pope St. John Paul II so beautifully described in Familiaris Consortio 11:

God created man in His own image and likeness: calling him to existence through love, He called him at the same time for love. God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. As an incarnate spirit, that is a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit, man is called to love in his unified totality. Love includes the human body, and the body is made a sharer in spiritual love. Christian revelation recognizes two specific ways of realizing the vocation of the human person in its entirety, to love: marriage and virginity or celibacy. Either one is, in its own proper form, an actuation of the most profound truth of man, of his being “created in the image of God.”

Perhaps most of us today still understand, at least at some level, that the sexual act in marriage is meant to be a bodily expression of the love for which we are created, but how is virginity a bodily expression of love? Pope St. John Paul II addressed this question in his Theology of the Body:

It is natural for the human heart to accept demands, even difficult ones, in the name of love for an ideal, and above all in the name of love for a person (love, in fact, is by its very nature directed toward a person). Therefore, in the call to continence for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, first the disciples themselves, and then the whole living Tradition of the Church, will soon discover the love that is referred to Christ himself as the Spouse of the Church, the Spouse of souls, to whom He has given himself to the very limit, in the Paschal and Eucharistic Mystery. (General Audience, April 21, 1982)

In the life of the Church today, many men and women are called to give up sexual union with another person in order to more wholeheartedly pursue union with God. Sex is good, created by God for “the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2363), but those who hear and answer the call to celibacy renounce the good of sexual intimacy for the greater good of divine intimacy. They give up an earthly good for a heavenly one, pursuing God's love rather than human love. Through their renunciation of this bodily pleasure, they become signs that our souls and even our bodies are created for the glory of heaven.

Joseph and Mary both foreshadowed this vocation to virginity with their own singular vocations. They renounced the sexual privilege of marriage in order to give themselves more fully to God, who happened to be sharing a house with them. As I imagine Joseph and Mary, I can't help but relate more to St. Joseph than to the Blessed Mother. Joseph - conceived with original sin like the rest of us - must have experienced some temptation to lust or to compromise his vow to the Lord, but he was given extraordinary grace to resist such temptation. Sharing a home with an immaculately conceived wife and a divine son, I suppose that St. Joseph at times felt quite inferior in his pursuit of God's will, but he cooperated with God's grace to become the holiest of husbands and of fathers. A central part of St. Joseph's holiness was, without a doubt, his commitment to treat the Virgin Mary with the utmost chastity.

Most of us are not called to virginity, especially if we are married, but all of us are called to the virtue of chastity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

2339 Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. “Man's dignity therefore requires him to act out of conscious and free choice, as moved and drawn in a personal way from within, and not by blind impulses in himself or by mere external constraint. Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward to his goal by freely choosing what is good and, by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end.”

2348 All the baptized are called to chastity...

We tend to think that “chastity” means “not having sex,” but it instead means being in control of our sexual passions, not controlled by them. In the battle for chastity, simply not having sex is easy. Much more challenging is the call to look at others, including/especially our spouses, as persons created in the image of God and called to holiness rather than mean means of our sexual gratification. Much more challenging is the call to live by the desires of the Spirit, not the desires of the flesh (see Galatians 5:16-24). Chastity means learning to look at others with pure love and never with lust:

2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.

I'll reemphasize, though, that sexual pleasure, properly experienced, is a good thing, created by God for our benefit. Pope Pius XII said:

The Creator himself . . . established that in the [generative] function, spouses should experience pleasure and enjoyment of body and spirit. Therefore, the spouses do nothing evil in seeking this pleasure and enjoyment. They accept what the Creator has intended for them. At the same time, spouses should know how to keep themselves within the limits of just moderation. (CCC 2362)

It is the goodness of sexual intimacy that makes Joseph and Mary's abstinence so admirable.

If St. Joseph experienced the same interior passions and temptations that most men do - and why wouldn't he? - but resisted the temptation to lust that is so common, then we ought to call upon his intercession frequently in our efforts to be chaste. We ought to be in awe of the heroic chastity that he demonstrated as the virginal spouse of Mary, his beautiful wife. We ought to enlist his help in our battle to be holy in a culture that normalizes sexual sin. Joseph Most Chaste, Pray for Us!

I'll close by sharing this traditional prayer to St. Joseph for chastity:

Saint Joseph, father and guardian of virgins, to whose faithful keeping Christ Jesus, innocence itself, and Mary, the virgin of virgins was entrusted, I pray and beseech you by that twofold and most precious charge, by Jesus and Mary, to save me from all uncleanness, to keep my mind untainted, my heart pure, and my body chaste; and to help me always to serve Jesus and Mary in perfect chastity. Amen.

UPDATE: In response to this post, someone has asked whether Catholic couples should try to abstain like Joseph and Mary. Generally, the answer is no. St. Paul encourages husbands and wives to make themselves sexually available to one another:

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control (1 Corinthians 7:3-5, RSV2CE)

This obligation of husbands and wives to one another is traditionally referred to as the “marital debt.” Those rare couples who have historically discerned that they are called to a continent marriage are said to have entered “Josephite” marriages, but this is not an encouraged practice. Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, for example, originally thought they should enter a Josephite marriage with one another, but their spiritual director discouraged them from this commitment to abstinence. Thanks to his dissuasion, Louis and Zélie had five saintly daughters, including St. Thérèse of Lisieux, one of the greatest saints of recent centuries.

If you'd like to receive articles from the Heart to Heart blog in your inbox each week, subscribe here.