"How presumptuous it is to try to treat of such a subject in a short article, when great books (like Dietrich von Hildebrand's In Defense of Purity) have been written on the subject....
"A loss of virginity is a loss of integrity, wholeness, a solitary completeness. In marriage, it is a surrender, a giving of one's self to another, 'a dying to self,' a 'putting off the old man' and putting on the new in that one is on the way to becoming cocreator with God of another human being. Sex, having to do with life itself, affects us, body, mind and soul....
"the marriage act purged of impurities is the nearest thing to the beatific vision we can know. The intense pleasure and delight of the act itself may be like a sword piercing the heart, but though momentary in itself, it colors the hours and days, people and events, before and after, so that one is apt to feel that one is seeing others as God sees them, loving them as God loves them....
"'The tracing of analogies holds an honored place in Catholic theology,' a priest writes to me. 'Outside of divine revelation itself, it is the only positive means we have for studying and contemplating God. By means of it theologians seek to fill the gaps left by revelation in our knowledge of God. And in this particular case, the analogy between sexual union and the union of love between God and the soul is at once affirmed by reason and pointed out by divine revelation itself'....
"To offer the suffering of celibacy, temporary or permanent, to the Lord is to make use, in the best possible way, of man's greatest joy....
"chastity is a positive virtue, a strength and a power in the great world around us."
https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/561-plain.htm
"A loss of virginity is a loss of integrity, wholeness, a solitary completeness. In marriage, it is a surrender, a giving of one's self to another, 'a dying to self,' a 'putting off the old man' and putting on the new in that one is on the way to becoming cocreator with God of another human being. Sex, having to do with life itself, affects us, body, mind and soul....
"the marriage act purged of impurities is the nearest thing to the beatific vision we can know. The intense pleasure and delight of the act itself may be like a sword piercing the heart, but though momentary in itself, it colors the hours and days, people and events, before and after, so that one is apt to feel that one is seeing others as God sees them, loving them as God loves them....
"'The tracing of analogies holds an honored place in Catholic theology,' a priest writes to me. 'Outside of divine revelation itself, it is the only positive means we have for studying and contemplating God. By means of it theologians seek to fill the gaps left by revelation in our knowledge of God. And in this particular case, the analogy between sexual union and the union of love between God and the soul is at once affirmed by reason and pointed out by divine revelation itself'....
"To offer the suffering of celibacy, temporary or permanent, to the Lord is to make use, in the best possible way, of man's greatest joy....
"chastity is a positive virtue, a strength and a power in the great world around us."
https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/561-plain.htm
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