How to Grow in Chastity

A virtue wrongly reduced to a mere prohibition

Chastity suffers from a heavier misunderstanding than any other virtue. It is confused with repression, fear of the body, frustration erected into a rule. It is turned into a negation — "not doing" — whereas it is an integration — "unifying in order to love". Reduced to a prohibition, it seems sad and unlivable; understood as a virtue, it is on the contrary what sets free.

For sexuality, left to itself, does not unify man: it divides him. It drags him where his deepest will does not want to go, makes him a slave to his impulses, splits him in two between what he desires and what he does. Chastity is precisely the virtue that mends this tear. The Catechism says it bluntly: "either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy"^[3]. Far from oppressing, chastity involves "an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training for human freedom": it makes a man capable of disposing of himself instead of being disposed of by his appetites.

God's will: your sanctification

Chastity is not an optional ideal reserved for a few fervent souls: it touches on the very will of God for every baptized person. Saint Paul states it as a positive command, and he roots it not in fear but in holiness:

"For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from immorality; that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God." — First Letter to the Thessalonians 4, 3-5^[4]

The decisive word is "master of his body". Chastity is not hatred of the flesh, it is its mastery; not the absence of desire, but desire governed and restored to its truth. And Paul immediately adds the highest reason: "For God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness" (1 Th 4, 7)^[5]. Chastity is therefore a path of sanctification, that is, a concrete way of answering the universal call to holiness.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"

Finally, and this is its highest promise, chastity opens onto the vision of God. Christ makes it the object of a beatitude:

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 5, 8^[6]

The link between purity and vision is not arbitrary. Sin against chastity clouds the interior gaze, as stirred-up water ceases to reflect the sky; chastity clarifies it. The Catechism specifies that the "pure in heart" of the beatitude are those who have attuned their intellect and will to the demands of God's holiness in three areas: charity, "chastity or sexual rectitude", love of truth and orthodoxy of faith^[7]. And this purity does not wait for the afterlife: "Even now it enables us to see according to God"; "it enables us to perceive the human body, our own and our neighbour's, as a temple of the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of divine beauty"^[8]. To grow in chastity is therefore to restore to the soul the transparency that disposes it toward God.

Before the means, a decisive clarification: many fail to grow in chastity because they aim at a caricature of it. They confuse it with insensitivity, fear, or contempt for desire. The virtue of chastity is something else entirely, and defining it exactly is already half the journey.

Chastity: Integrating Sexuality, Not Denying It

The great Catholic insight, summed up in § 2337, is that chastity is an integration. Sexuality is not an enemy to be slain nor a shameful realm to be hidden: it is a good force, given by God, which must be incorporated into the whole person instead of fragmenting it. The chaste person is not the one who no longer has desires, but the one whose desires are governed and directed toward gift. The Catechism says of the chaste person that he “maintains the integrity of the powers of life and love placed in him”^[9]. Saint Augustine, who had known this scattering, gave it the formula that the Catechism takes up:

“Chastity gathers us together again; it brings us back to the unity we had lost by scattering ourselves.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 29, 40, quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2340^[10]

That is why chastity is not the opposite of love, but its condition. The opposite of chastity is not love: it is lust, which reduces the other person to an object of pleasure. Chastity, by contrast, makes one able to look at the other as a person and not as prey — and therefore able to love truly.

A Part of Temperance, Not a Repression

Saint Thomas makes chastity a species of temperance — one of its “subjective parts,” the one that regulates sexual pleasure — temperance being the cardinal virtue that moderates the pleasures of touch according to reason^[11]; the Catechism likewise places it “under the sway of the cardinal virtue of temperance, which seeks to permeate the passions and appetites of the senses with reason”^[12]. This lineage is illuminating: chastity is not a blockage, but a measure. Temperance does not abolish pleasure, it orders it; likewise, chastity does not extinguish sexuality, it puts it in its rightful place in a human life. The very name of the virtue says so, following an etymology Thomas notes: castitas comes from concupiscence being “chastised” — corrected, restored to its measure — by reason^[13].

“The name of chastity comes from the fact that concupiscence is chastised by reason, concupiscence which must be restrained as a child is.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, q. 151, a. 1 (our translation)^[14]

The image is exact: the surge of desire is not bad in itself, but it is like a child who, left to itself, rushes headlong anywhere; chastity is not the death of that surge, but its education.

Chastity, Continence, Purity, Modesty, Virginity

The spiritual language distinguishes several neighbouring realities that must be separated in order to cultivate each rightly. Confusing them leads to aiming at one while thinking one aims at another.

Reading the table: these realities do not oppose one another; they fit together. Modesty guards chastity, chastity serves purity of heart, and purity of heart opens onto the vision of God. Continence is the form chastity takes outside marriage; consecrated virginity, its oblative form.

Chastity According to States of Life

A frequent error: believing that chastity concerns only single people, or worse, that it is synonymous with abstinence for everyone. Every baptized person is called to chastity, but in a form proper to his state^[15]. The spouse is not called to less chastity than the monk: he is called to another chastity, that of fruitful fidelity. The Catechism takes up here a saying of Saint Ambrose:

“There are three forms of the virtue of chastity: one of spouses, another of widows, a third of virgins. We do not praise one of them to the exclusion of the others. This is what makes the discipline of the Church rich.” — Saint Ambrose of Milan, On Widows, 23, quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2349^[16]

Reading the table: chastity is not a privation imposed on some and spared to others; it is the truth of love proper to each vocation. The faithful spouse, the continent single person and the virgin monk all live, differently, the same virtue.

This universality is liberating: no one is exempt from growing in chastity, but no one either is condemned to a life without love. Chastity embraces each vocation instead of denying it.

A Virtue and a Gift of God

A last truth, and the most consoling: chastity is not only the fruit of effort. It is also, and first, a grace. The Catechism holds both together:

“Chastity is a moral virtue. It is also a gift from God, a grace, a fruit of the spiritual work.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2345^[18]

The practical consequence is immense. On the one hand, the most embattled temperament is not condemned: grace can give what the will alone cannot obtain. On the other hand, since chastity is a gift, the first means of growing in it is not tensing up, but asking. Scripture, in the Latin version the Fathers read, states it as a principle:

“I knew that I could not be continent unless God gave it to me.” — Book of Wisdom 8:21, after the Latin Vulgate (our translation)^[19]

Saint Augustine quotes this verse at the very moment he formulates his great prayer for continence (Confessions, X, 29, 40): ask for everything, because everything is received. It is the first of the concrete means, detailed below.

Like every virtue, chastity stands at the summit between two abysses. By falling short, one drops into impurity; but by deviation, one drops into a contempt for the body that has only the appearance of virtue. Knowing both protects growth, for one can miss chastity by falling on either side.

By Falling Short: Impurity and Lust

The first defect is impurity: the disordering of sexuality, which detaches it from love and gift in order to reduce it to the pursuit of pleasure. In its various forms — dwelt-upon thoughts, looks, acts — lust disintegrates the person, exactly the reverse of chastity, which unifies. It promises liberation and delivers slavery; it promises intimacy and isolates.

The direct struggle against this vice — resisting, fleeing, getting back up — is the subject of How to Grow in the Fight Against Lust. Here, we retain only that impurity is the default edge: the one onto which we fall when desire is no longer governed.

By Deviation: Contempt for the Body and Anxious Rigorism

The opposite error is subtler, because it wears the mask of virtue. It is false angelism: believing that holiness would consist in despising the body, in holding sexuality to be shameful in itself, in living in fear and disgust of the flesh. This attitude is not Christian: it joins the old Manichaean error, which held matter to be evil, and which faith in the Creator God and the Incarnation rules out. The body is not evil; it is “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19), destined for the resurrection.

Its cousin is anxious rigorism: chastity lived as a perpetual tensing, a scrupulous self-examination, a terror of fault that shuts the soul up in self-absorption instead of opening it to gift. This false chastity is not peaceful but tormented; it does not free, it obsesses. Yet true chastity is joyful, because it lives under the influence of charity: it then appears as “a school of the gift of the person”^[20], not as a prison.

The Golden Mean: A Free and Joyful Purity

Between these two edges, the virtue stands in a luminous balance: a free and joyful purity. It is pure, because it refuses to let desire govern man; it is free, because it does not hate the body but receives it as a gift to be offered; it is joyful, because it is ordered to love and not to fear. The following table fixes this discernment.

Reading the table: chastity is not a fragile point between two dangers, but a fullness that holds together what each defect separates — respect for the body and mastery of desire. We grow in chastity by moving away from both edges at once: neither slave of the flesh, nor enemy of the flesh.

The Catechism speaks explicitly of the laws of growth in chastity. This changes everything for anyone who wants to make progress: chastity is not a state one either has or does not have; it is a path travelled step by step.

A Lifelong Work, Never Fully Secured

First law: chastity is not conquered once and for all. It is a lifelong struggle, to be taken up again at every age.

"Self-mastery is a long and exacting work. One can never consider it acquired once and for all. It presupposes renewed effort at all stages of life." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2342^[21]

These words free us from two opposite illusions: that of believing we have "settled the matter" (the presumption that comes before a fall), and that of believing we will "never" manage it (the discouragement that justifies giving up). Chastity is not acquired like capital; it is maintained like health: through a daily discipline, constantly renewed.

Growth by Degrees, Through Imperfection

Second law, the most liberating for wounded souls: growth happens by degrees. The Catechism says so with a precision that matters: chastity is subject to laws of growth, which proceed through "stages marked by imperfection and too often by sin"^[22]. The word too carries weight: sin is neither a planned stage nor a permission; it is an all-too-frequent accident to be regretted — but it does not abolish growth. The same paragraph takes up a saying of Saint John Paul II:

"Day by day, the virtuous and chaste man builds himself up through his many free decisions. Thus he knows, loves, and accomplishes moral good by stages of growth." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2343, after Saint John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, no. 34^[23]

The holiness of chastity is therefore not measured by the absence of all struggle, but by the steady direction of the will and the refusal to settle into evil. Hence a practical attitude: never turn a fall into surrender. He who falls and gets up at once moves forward; he who gives up getting up moves backward. Growth looks less like a straight line than like a climb made of overcome relapses.

Patience with Oneself and Recourse to Confession

From these two laws follows a consequence: we need patience with ourselves. Saint Francis de Sales observes that outbursts of anger and vexation against oneself "tend to pride and have their origin only in self-love, which is troubled and disquieted at seeing us imperfect" — and he takes precisely the example of the man who, loving chastity, "will fret with unequalled bitterness over the slightest fault he commits against it"^[24]. His remedy is a patience full of gentleness:

"Raise up your heart when it falls, quite gently, humbling yourself greatly before God through the knowledge of your misery, without being at all surprised at your fall, since it is no wonder that infirmity should be infirm, and weakness weak, and wretchedness wretched." — Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, Part III, ch. IX^[25]

The privileged place of this recovery is confession. The sacrament does not merely erase the fault: it restores grace, revives the will, and breaks the cycle of discouragement in which impurity seeks to trap the soul. Regular confession is, for chastity, what regular care is for a convalescence.

The Catechism itself lists the means, which the spiritual tradition has tested: "self-knowledge, the practice of an ascesis adapted to the situations encountered, obedience to God's commandments, exercise of the moral virtues, and fidelity to prayer"^[26]. Let us unfold them as concrete tasks.

Asking for Chastity as a Grace

First means, and the most fundamental, because chastity is a gift (CCC § 2345): asking for it. Saint Augustine, who knew better than anyone the weight of the flesh, left two prayers that sum everything up. The first is the admission of his resistance — the prayer he prayed before his conversion, which he reports with cutting lucidity:

"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 7, 17^[27]

That is the prayer of the man who wants to be healed without giving up his sickness. The true prayer of the chaste person is the reverse: not "later", but "now, and by you alone". Augustine found it further on, in one of the most famous lines of his book:

"Give what you command, and command what you will." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 29, 40^[28]

Everything is there. God commands chastity; but what he commands, he gives to whoever asks him for it. Augustine blamed himself for having long believed that continence depended on his own strength: "I was foolish enough not to know that no one can be continent unless you give it" (Confessions, VI, 11, 20)^[29]. Asking for chastity, especially at the very moment it fails us, is already to practise it, for this request is an act of humility that disarms presumption before it falls.

Knowing One's Weaknesses and Guarding One's Senses

The second means is self-knowledge joined to the custody of the senses. You cannot fight an enemy you do not know. Each person has his hours, his places, his times of weariness, his solitudes where temptation returns: knowing them is already being able to outwit them. And since impurity enters through the senses, chastity is guarded first by the custody of the eyes. Job had made a covenant of it:

"I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a virgin?" — Book of Job 31:1^[30]

Custody of the eyes is not puritanism: it is strategy, which the Catechism calls "purity of vision, outward and inward", with "discipline of feelings and imagination"^[31]. The gaze is the first door; turning one's eyes away from an image, a screen, a scene, is extinguishing the fire at the match rather than fighting it once it has taken hold of the whole house. To this custody of the senses, the Catechism adds modesty, which "protects the intimate centre of the person" and "is ordered to chastity, to whose sensitivity it bears witness": "Modesty is decency. It inspires one's choice of clothing"^[32]. It protects what is intimate — in dress, gaze, and speech — not out of contempt for the body, but out of respect for its mystery.

Fleeing Occasions

The third means is the most concrete and the most neglected: fleeing occasions. Impure temptation is not overcome by facing it head-on, but by fleeing it before it grows strong. Saint Francis de Sales makes this the first of his counsels for preserving chastity, because this evil grows imperceptibly:

"Be extremely prompt in turning away from all the paths and all the allurements of lust, for this evil acts imperceptibly, and by small beginnings makes progress toward great calamities: it is always easier to flee than to be cured." — Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, Part III, ch. XIII^[33]

The biblical model of this flight is Joseph before Potiphar's wife. He had refused — "How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" (Gen 39:9) — and, on the day she seized him, he did not linger: "he left his garment in her hand, and fled out of the house" (Gen 39:12)^[34]. There is a flight that is the highest wisdom: the flight that refuses the battle one would lose by staying. Cutting off a dangerous companionship, removing an access, leaving a place: these humble gestures do more for chastity than the finest resolutions.

Sobriety and Mortification of the Body

The fourth means is ascesis: a certain sobriety of the body that makes it obedient to the spirit. Tradition links chastity to sobriety in food, drink, and rest, because a pampered and softened body resists concupiscence poorly; Saint Thomas, moreover, lists abstinence, sobriety, and chastity among the species of a single virtue, temperance^[35]. Fasting, sobriety, the fight against gluttony, and giving up superfluous satisfactions are not ends in themselves: they make the flesh supple and strengthen the will. This ascesis must be "adapted to the situations encountered" (CCC § 2340) — that is, measured, without rigorism: not to despise the body, but to set it free.

Prayer and Vigilance

The fifth means is watchful prayer. Christ gave the formula in the Garden of Olives, at the very hour when his disciples were about to succumb:

"Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 26:41^[36]

Watch and pray: both together. Vigilance without prayer becomes tension; prayer without vigilance becomes presumption. Chastity calls for watching the first movements — the image, the thought, the complacent daydream — and handing them over to God at once, before they settle in: this is the whole art of spiritual vigilance.

The Sacraments: The Eucharist and Confession

The sixth means is recourse to the sacraments, sources of the grace that heals. Saint Francis de Sales closes his counsels for preserving chastity with this advice:

"Keep yourself ever close to Jesus Christ crucified, both spiritually by meditation and really by Holy Communion: for just as those who sleep upon the herb called agnus castus become chaste and modest, so too, resting your heart upon Our Lord, who is the true chaste and spotless lamb, you will see that soon your soul and your heart will be purified of all stains and lusts." — Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, Part III, ch. XIII^[37]

The Eucharist is not only a moral help: it is the Body of Christ coming to purify and strengthen our own. Frequent Communion, received in a state of grace, counts among the most powerful supports of chastity, for it feeds the soul with Him who is purity itself. And when a fall has come, confession raises us up without delay: rising quickly, through the sacrament, breaks the discouragement in which impurity would imprison the soul.

Devotion to Mary Immaculate

The seventh means is Marian devotion. Catholic tradition places chastity under the protection of the Immaculate Virgin, "all pure", whose lily is the symbol. Turning to Mary in temptation — through a brief invocation, a Hail Mary, a glance toward her image — is not sentimental devotion: it is taking refuge with the Mother whose purity disarms the enemy. Saint Alphonsus Liguori testifies to this with assurance:

"It is universally acknowledged, and the servants of Mary experience it every day, that her powerful name gives strength to overcome temptations against chastity." — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary, Part I, ch. X^[38]

Chastity is too high for human strength alone: it is kept under a mother's gaze.

Friendship and True Love

The eighth and final means is the most positive and the least known: chastity is kept not only by refusal, but by true love. The Catechism offers here a surprising word:

"The virtue of chastity blossoms in friendship." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2347^[39]

For ill-governed desire seeks to possess; chastity learns to give. A life poor in true love — in deep friendships, in active charity, in concrete gifts of self — is a life in which unused desire becomes deformed. Conversely, the heart that learns to love for real, to give itself without return, gradually disarms covetousness. Chastity is not the opposite of love: it is its pure form. We do not grow in chastity by loving less, but by loving better.

How can we tell that we are truly growing in chastity? Not by a feeling of invulnerability — which would be presumption — but by stable fruits which Tradition describes with constancy.

Interior freedom and peace

The first fruit is freedom. Impurity enslaves; chastity sets free. Whoever grows in this virtue gradually ceases to be the plaything of his impulses, his images, his moods; he possesses himself, and so he is able to give himself. From this freedom is born peace: not the absence of temptation, but the absence of that interior slavery which keeps us from resting in God. "Man governs his passions and obtains peace" (CCC § 2339): chastity keeps this promise.

Purity of heart and the vision of God

The second fruit is the limpidity of heart, which echoes the beatitude of the pure in heart (Mt 5:8). As chastity grows, the interior gaze becomes clearer: we see more truly, we pray more peacefully, we perceive in our neighbour a person and not a prey. Purity restores to the soul the transparency that disposes it to God, as water grown calm reflects the sky at last. That is the deep meaning of the promise: chastity, already here below, begins the vision of God.

The capacity to truly love

The third fruit, which crowns the others, is the capacity to love. Chastity appears as "a school of the gift of the person" (CCC § 2346): by freeing desire from covetousness, it makes possible the total gift — in marriage as in consecration. Thus chastity, which seemed a virtue of refusal, opens onto the highest of the virtues, charity: it does not diminish love, it makes love possible.

The writings of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), in which Jesus teaches how to live not only by doing the will of God, but in his very Divine Will, give chastity its final touch. Purity there is not only the absence of stain: it becomes the condition for the soul to be the mirror in which God contemplates himself, and it rises from a "natural purity" to a "divine purity" worked by love.

Jesus explains to Luisa that the purity content with avoiding acts, glances, thoughts and words contrary to chastity attains only a "natural purity"; it is love that transforms it into "divine Purity":

"Purity is content with performing no act, casting no glance, entertaining no thought and uttering no word that are not chaste. It tolerates the rest. With this, the soul acquires nothing more than natural purity. […] Love is jealous of everything, even of thought and breath, even if they were chaste. Love wants everything for itself. With this, it gives the soul not natural purity, but divine Purity. It is the same for all the other virtues." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 10, November 23, 1910^[40]

This page illuminates the whole journey: chastity is not the end, but the threshold. As long as it contents itself with avoiding evil, it remains "natural"; grafted onto the love of God, it becomes "divine". That is why the eighth means — loving more — is not an extra, but the summit: purity is fulfilled in love.

Elsewhere Jesus gives the image that sums up this purity: the virgin and upright soul is like a limpid fountain in which God can mirror himself.

"Virgin souls resemble the purity of the fountain. The crystal-clear and pure waters are their upright acts. The sun casting its rays perpendicularly is me. The variety of colours is love. Now if I do not find in a soul purity, uprightness and love, it cannot be my mirror." — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, volume 10, February 3, 1912^[41]

On the same page, Jesus specifies that other souls, "even if they are virgins", do not allow him to contemplate himself in them, for lack of uprightness and love; and he gives the sign of this true purity: peace. Growing in chastity, in this perspective, is not only avoiding stain: it is restoring to one's soul the transparency of pure water, so that God may be reflected in it and shine his light there.

We do not grow in a virtue by staring at it as an abstract ideal, but by contemplating those who lived it. Now chastity has sovereign masters.

The first model is Christ himself, incarnate purity, who sanctified the flesh by assuming it and made the human body the place of redemption. Next comes Mary, the "all-pure", whose Immaculate Conception is the summit of created purity, and whom Tradition invokes as the refuge of the tempted. At their side, Saint Joseph, virginal guardian of the Virgin, model of the chastity that protects rather than possesses.

The Church also proposes saints who embodied chastity even to heroism: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Saint Dominic Savio and above all Saint Maria Goretti, killed for refusing sin, who forgave her murderer before dying. Canonizing her on June 24, 1950, Pius XII hailed her as "the little and sweet martyr of purity": he saw in her purity "the most elementary and most significant affirmation of the perfect dominion of the soul over matter", crowned by "the heroic pardon granted to the murderer"^[42]. Their example says one thing: chastity is not a sad constraint, but a greatness, fulfilled in charity. The words of these saints are gathered in What the saints say about chastity.

Chastity does not grow through grand resolutions, but through a small and repeated faithfulness. The means studied can be summed up in a simple programme, graded from the most fundamental to the most everyday:

How to read the table: none of these exercises is spectacular; it is their faithful repetition that transforms. Start with one or two, hold to them, then add more.

The essential thing is not to aim at chastity in general, but to posit, today, the concrete act at hand: this glance to turn away, this occasion to flee, this grace to ask for, this gift of self to offer. For chastity is "a long and exacting work" (CCC § 2342); and the long haul is made only of instants. To the one who holds on, day after day, is promised the beatitude of the pure in heart: "they shall see God".

• Frequent errors concerning chastity — the common misunderstandings about chastity, and what the Church really teaches.
• What the saints say about chastity — the great voices of purity, from the Fathers of the Church to the saints of our time.
• How to grow in the fight against lust — the negative way, complementary to this article: the direct fight against the vice opposed to chastity.
• How to grow in purity of heart — the limpidity of the interior gaze, broader than chastity alone, to which chastity disposes.
• How to grow in temperance — the cardinal virtue of which chastity is a part: the measure of pleasures according to reason.
• How to grow in spiritual vigilance — watching over the first movements, the nerve of daily chastity.
• How to grow in fasting and How to grow in the fight against gluttony — the ascesis of the body that supports chastity.
• How to grow in frequent Communion and How to grow in regular Confession — the sacramental sources of purity.
• How to grow in patience and How to grow in charity — patience with oneself in relapses, and the charity that chastity makes possible.