‘Boots on the ground’ — Catholic life for a consecrated virgin
What does a consecrated virgin actually do?
Marriage prep is probably the last place you’d expect to someone to find a vocation to consecrated virginity. But for Celeste Thomas, a marriage prep session, decades ago, was the first place she began to have the sense of a call to an unexpected vocation.
For Thomas, discerning that call took time — and turmoil. But after more than two decades of consecrated virginity, Thomas says that her unexpected vocation has been a source of real and lasting joy.
Of course, at a glance, you would not know that Thomas, a very energetic and spry 70 year old, is a consecrated virgin.
And that’s kind of the point. Consecrated virgins are supposed to live in the world, and they are not instructed to stand out, at least in terms of how they look or dress. Unlike religious sisters or nuns, they do not wear habits. Though they aim for modesty, they are otherwise free to wear what they would like.
When I met Thomas at a coffee shop with a mountain view on an unseasonably warm September day, her hair was curled and she wore pretty gold hoop earrings and a black and white Breton stripe shirt. Her nails looked recently manicured, and were painted a cheerful pop of red.
(One thing I can tell about Thomas at a glance: this lady is organized. She arrived to our interview with a fair stack of articles, pictures and documents for my perusal. This is the first time I have profiled someone who has literally handed me a copy of her autobiography. She’s making my job easy.)
But appearance is not the only way consecrated virgins differ from religious sisters.
What is consecrated virginity?
“We don't make vows of chastity, poverty and obedience,” which are the standard vows of a religious order, Thomas explained. Rather, consecrated virgins only vow “perpetual virginity.”
If the vocation itself sounds unfamiliar, that may be because consecrated virginity was uncommon in the Church for about 1,000 years before its relatively recent revival by Pope Paul VI in 1970.
“We hear a lot about the early virgins of the Church, like St. Lucy or St. Agnes,” Thomas said. Then when religious orders started gaining ground in the Church, many of which began around the early 1000s, the official rite for becoming a consecrated virgin was set aside - it was assumed that most women with a religious vocation would join the religious orders.
Its revival as a stand-alone vocation came about, Thomas suggested, in large part as a response to the sexual revolution.
“Pope Paul VI realized that there was a need for [this rite] for women trying to lead a holy life in this immodest and sex-saturated world, with abortion, and contraception, and everything Humanae vitae predicted,” she offered.
According to canon law, consecrated virginity is a state that is “neither clerical nor lay. The evangelical counsel of chastity embraced for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven, is a sign of the world to come, and a source of greater fruitfulness in an undivided heart. It involves the obligation of perfect continence observed in celibacy.”
“The order of virgins is also to be added to these forms of consecrated life. Through their pledge to follow Christ more closely, virgins are consecrated to God, mystically espoused to Christ and dedicated to the service of the Church, when the diocesan Bishop consecrates them according to the approved liturgical rite,” Canon 604 states.
Officially, women like Thomas who become consecrated virgins join what is called the Order of Consecrated Virgins Living in the World.
Besides vowing virginity, such women also make promises to follow Christ “that your whole life may be a faithful witness to God’s love and a convincing sign of the kingdom of heaven,” and they accept consecration “as a bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” according to the rite of consecration for women in the world.
Consecrated virgins are under the direction of their local bishop, though there are no official vows or promises made in that regard. They are considered to have special charisms of prayer and service, particularly to priests and families.
But what that all looks like in the day-to-day lives of each consecrated virgin varies widely.
The road to marriage leads to consecrated virginity?
Perhaps most surprising about Thomas’ call to the vocation is that she traces its roots to a conversion experience she had during a Natural Family Planning class, when she was engaged to be married.
Thomas, then 28 years old and a lifelong Catholic, was engaged to Steve, who was not religious. The couple took the course as a part of their marriage preparation in the Archdiocese of Denver.
But they only attended one class before they broke up.
It was not because Steve, who had never heard of NFP before, was put off by the class. On the contrary, he was enthralled - so much so that he told Thomas he wanted to teach NFP classes after they finished the course. He was fascinated by the mechanics of how elegantly NFP worked with a woman’s cycle.
“But I realized he was bought in on kind of a natural level,” Thomas said, “and I was starting to feel this supernatural pull, like, that it’s really important to have God be part of a marriage.”
For Thomas, the class spurred a deeper conversion experience, as she realized “there's a reason for these things. There's a ‘why’, and it's the Lord of life who is behind it all.”
Thomas wrestled for weeks with a sudden unease in her relationship with Steve - both for religious and other reasons. One of those reasons was her dad, who Thomas described as having a deep knowledge of and intuition about people, relationships, and communication, after a long career in human resources and a long, healthy marriage.
He told Celeste that while he didn’t think Steve was a bad person, he saw many ways in which they were not a good match. He had concerns about Steve’s approach to finances, as well as other important topics the couple had been avoiding. During one discussion about the pending marriage, he broke down in tears, urging his daughter to rethink the relationship.
“That’s the only time I’ve ever seen my dad cry,” Thomas recalled. “I love my dad, I knew he loved me…so that really got to me.”
While she initially tried to dismiss her dad’s concerns, Thomas said they added to her internal turmoil. Looking back, she said she can see it was the Holy Spirit at work. For three weeks, she went through a “can’t live with him, can’t live without him” debate in her heart before she broke up with Steve. It was not an overly dramatic or tumultuous break-up, she added. “It was fine.”
Still, even though her marriage was no longer to be, that didn’t stop Thomas from finishing her NFP classes — she found them fascinating.
“I went to the last two classes by myself because I thought ‘This is so cool,’” she said.
Her enthusiasm did not wane after the course, and she felt the urge “to learn everything the Church teaches about sexuality. I got audio tapes (this was the 1980’s, people), I got newsletters, I got pamphlets, I got books,” she said. She wasn’t even actively seeking them out, she said, the information just kind of kept “ending up in my lap.”
The accidental chastity speaker
Thomas started attending conferences on NFP and Church teaching on sexuality. That was all happening in the mid-1980s, while Pope St. John Paul II’s addresses on the Theology of the Body were just beginning to be distilled down to the masses through speakers and writers like Christopher West.
At one conference, Thomas— who had come of age as the sexual revolution was rapidly and chaotically unfolding — realized that she had been taught as a teenager what the Church teaches about sexuality and morality, but she had never been taught why.
Thomas said she found herself wishing she had already been taught that love was self-sacrificial; that it cares more about others than self. She said she wished she had been taught that sexuality outside of the context of marriage was using another person and not loving them, and that even within a marriage, most of the time is not spent in sexual pleasure, but in loving, self-sacrificial service to one another.
“And I'm thinking — why wasn't I ever told? I should have been told. Our kids have to know this,” she said.
So Thomas told the speaker that she wanted to start something similar for teenagers in Denver.
The idea was still in its early stages when, during a visit to Chicago to see her parents and to attend a set of chastity workshops, Thomas found out - completely to her surprise - that she had been invited to speak at three different schools in the area on chastity.
“I was really mad,” Thomas recalled. She told her friends on the speaker circuit, “I told you not to tell anybody. I don't know what I'm doing.”
They told her, “Celeste…we didn't say anything to anybody.”
To this day, Thomas said, she does not know how she came to be invited to speak, but it launched what became a 20-year run as a chastity and sexual morality speaker.
It was not her full-time job. Thomas was also a professional speech pathologist for schools in Aurora, Colorado, a job she loved and for which she felt particularly well-suited.
“I didn’t even do it as a way to make money,” Thomas said. “I wanted people to know this message.”
She did assemble a group of local teens called the “PROMISE” team, which stood for Promoting Relationships, Opting for Maturity, Instead of Sexual Exploitation. The group put on skits about chastity and sexual morality and gave personal testimonies in the Denver and Fort Collins areas. Thomas and some of her speaker friends also put on programs specific to teenage girls or boys. They talked about the harm of pornography; they spoke about saints like St. Maria Goretti.
Of course, the life of a speaker and presenter is hard work. Thomas recalled times where she would not get to bed until midnight after an evening of presenting. Sometimes, she told God she didn’t want to give these talks; she was tired. But then, she said, she would feel God calling her to pray for everyone who would hear her speak, so that their hearts would be open to him.
There was a “richness,” she said, in that “self-donating, sacrificing of self. Really, that's what it's all about.”
In the meantime, Thomas said she didn’t really date. She told God: “It's fine that I don't get married. If I'm supposed to get married…the guy has to wear a billboard and come up my doorbell and say, ‘Here I am.’”
Thomas’ friends in the speaking world became like family. She was, and still is, very involved in their lives, including having attended the births of five of their children. She is godmother to a whopping 15 of their children.
“I never felt like the odd man out,” she said. “I never felt like (my friends) were like, ‘Oh, poor Celeste, we have to invite her for dinner because she’s just sitting at home eating her cold soup…’ and I had great parties. I just got back from a wedding this weekend, with a family I met doing chastity presentations.”
A tabled vocation
In her time as a speaker, around the year 1990, Thomas read an article in Our Sunday Visitor about consecrated virginity that piqued her interest. She cut out the article and filed it away.
Being a busy working professional and speaker, Thomas said she figured she would get back to the idea of consecrated virginity later. She was already living a kind of dedicated singlehood, where she had privately promised God to live her life as a single woman for him.
Nine years later, Carrie, a friend of Thomas, invited her to attend her own consecration as a virgin in the Archdiocese of Denver. Archbishop Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Denver at the time, presided over the consecration.
“I told Carrie, that’s nice, and that's something that I've been thinking about for a long time…I just haven't had the time to look into it,” she said.
At the reception after Carrie’s consecration, Thomas said she was chatting with Sr. Mary Dolores, a friend with the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, when the sister leaned over to Archbishop Chaput and told him: “‘That’s Celeste, and she’s going to be your next (consecrated virgin).’”
“(Archbishop Chaput) shakes my hand and said: ‘You must come talk to me,’” Thomas recalled.
Thomas was surprised. “I’m not going to go talk to the archbishop, that’s ridiculous,” she thought. She figured the archbishop was very busy, and that she could just look into becoming a consecrated virgin with her parish pastor.
But her pastor told her in no uncertain terms: “No, you must speak with the archbishop first,” she recalled.
How to become a consecrated virgin
Thomas did not know it at the time, but speaking with the local diocesan bishop is the first official step for anyone considering becoming a consecrated virgin.
“You don’t make up your own rules,” she noted.
After the local bishop speaks with a woman about becoming a consecrated virgin, she begins a process of discernment that usually lasts for several years, with a spiritual director that has been vetted by her bishop, and with other formators. Theological study is also required.
With her spiritual director, her formators, and the bishop, a woman discerns whether God has called her to commit to a life of virginity, prayer, and service to the Church — and the Church discerns her, as well.
While norms vary across dioceses, Thomas said was told that in her diocese, a woman needed to be at least 30 years old before she could become a consecrated virgin — something she considered to be “a good thing.”
“I was actually in contact with somebody who was maybe 27 or 28, and she was going to pursue it, and she started to, I even wrote a letter on her behalf. And then it all just kind of blew up,” Thomas said. “She’s married now. Your life could change a lot before you turned 30.”
When Thomas officially began her discernment of consecrated virginity, she was in her mid-40s, and had already been living a stable life of dedicated singlehood and prayer.
The canonical and spiritual tradition is that a woman seeking consecrated virginity is required to be a virgin, with the understanding that virginity is lost through a chosen act of intercourse, and not through sexual assault.
But a recent Vatican document said that “perfect continence” is “not [an] essential prerequisite in the absence of which admittance to consecration is not possible.” That document has been the source of considerable debate, both among canon lawyers and consecrated virgins themselves, and seems now to be a matter open to interpretation by diocesan bishops.
For Thomas, the discernment process ended up taking about two years, as she initially floundered to find a spiritual director with whom she felt comfortable and who had the time to meet with her. Today, with changes to the process issued by the Vatican, formation usually takes three to five years.
A woman discerning consecrated virginity usually meets with the director of vocations for her diocese, Thomas noted. This director serves as a point person between the woman and the bishop, and gives her the “nitty gritty” details of everything involved in becoming a consecrated virgin.
Discerning women often must write an autobiography, Thomas said, a standard requirement for most people discerning all religious vocations. Hers was roughly 20 pages, double-spaced. She said it was helpful in the discernment process to put words to her life, and to give it a “solid form.” It helped her discernment story feel more concrete, instead of like an amorphous idea floating around in her head.
A woman discerning consecrated virginity may also be asked by her bishop or spiritual director to take some additional formation courses, like a scripture study course, if they deem them necessary. Thomas, who had received ongoing formation in her time as a chastity speaker, was not asked to do so.
“And then I submitted myself to the Church. At the end of that, you say, ‘I submit.’ I think this is what I've been called to, but I let the Church decide.”
For her part, Thomas was consecrated by Archbishop Charles Chaput in the Archdiocese of Denver on July 15, 2003, when she was 48 years old.
She was consecrated alongside another woman, Anne. They both wore wedding dresses, as is customary, and Thomas held a reception afterwards to celebrate with her family and friends, complete with a bouncy house for all the kids in attendance. (According to the pictures, it looked like a blast.)
A day in the life
I asked Thomas if she was given a book or a PDF on “How-To Consecrated Virgin,” either before or after her actual consecration.
As someone who went through my own discernment journey, I remember visiting multiple convents for retreats called “Come and See” visits (or something of the like). You spend a few days with the sisters, you live their lives, you (mostly) participate in their community schedule of prayer and ministry - you essentially “job shadow” the sisters, to use a corporate term.
But no such book exists for consecrated virgins, Thomas said, because “this is a unique vocation in the sense that each person lives it differently.”
“It suits everybody,” Thomas said, whether they have an introverted or extroverted personality. “That’s one of the ways I knew I was called to this vocation… I’m better operating on my own.”
Consecrated virgins can decide for themselves what they do for ministry, and what they do for work, Thomas said.
“You are totally financially responsible for yourself,” Thomas said. The Church does not give consecrated virgins a salary or a retirement fund; terms that are made very clear before a woman’s consecration.
“We're allowed to own property, and we're allowed to have extra money, and we're allowed to go out to eat. You're allowed, if that's your jam. If it's not your jam, you don’t have to,” she adds.
“We are expected to live within modest, appropriate guardrails for our lifestyle,” Thomas said. While specifics are not given, Thomas said that generally means no excessive expenditures, like buying the latest sports car every year.
Consecrated virgins do not live in community with one another, Thomas said, though they could potentially have roommates. Some consecrated virgins spend more time in community with one another, while others, including Thomas, are more involved in their own respective communities of their parish, family and friends.
Although consecrated virgins are under their local bishop’s direction, he cannot tell them what job they can hold. He can and does ask them for prayers for special intentions, or asks for their help with special missions, like giving talks on certain topics of faith.
As for prayer, consecrated virgins are required to pray morning and evening prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours. They are also encouraged to attend daily Mass and pray a daily Rosary and Divine Mercy chaplet, or other personal devotions.
For Thomas, her day starts early with a three-mile walk, which finishes at her parish, Risen Christ in Denver, just in time for 6:30 Mass. She also prays a holy hour in front of the Eucharist three or four days a week.
She receives a lot of prayer requests, and she has developed what she calls her “Triple Whammy Novena,” which she prays for especially urgent intentions. This involves praying a rosary on her knees immediately after finishing morning prayer, then daily Mass and communion, followed by a Divine Mercy chaplet, for nine days straight. In especially urgent cases, she condenses her novena down to three days.
“Nobody told me to do that, I just thought of it, that’s my thing,” she said.
Otherwise, Thomas’ daily life can be quite varied. She retired from speech pathology 18 years ago, from which she collects a comfortable retirement, she said. Her free time has allowed her to do many things as she has felt called by God, including caring for her aging mother, which she did for more than 12 years, splitting her time between Denver and her native Chicago, until her mother’s death.
She also spends a lot of her time caring for her friends’ children. She recently watched a friends’ son with Down syndrome while his parents were away at a conference. She also babysat for another family’s six children - aged two through freshman in high school - for two weeks while the parents were on a pilgrimage in Europe.
“That's where the motherhood comes in,” she said. “That spiritual fertility of being a spiritual mother - that constantly is unfolding in my life. When I saw that email (asking for a babysitter for six children), that was pointing directly at me. I can’t not do that.”
She has also helped a friend who had a difficult time in postpartum recovery, and she tutored a Catholic Pakistani refugee boy for three and a half years of grade school. She is currently helping a friend who is receiving leukemia treatments, and she hosts a long-running Catholic women’s book club. God always finds something for her to do, she said.
“These things just appear, and they appear because you’re the boots on the ground for that mission that God needs you to do.”
Thomas said she hoped more young women would become aware of the vocation to consecrated virginity.
“I think people need to know about the vocation, because I think we live in a tumultuous time. And young women who want to put Jesus first in their lives need to know that this is available.”
“This is a primary call,” she added, “and not something to just consider after other vocation doors seem to close.”
“If God is calling you to this vocation…it is a vocation to marriage, but you're marrying the bridegroom,” she said. “So it's not an alternative or some second tier.”
Thomas said someone once asked her, “Well, but what if you meet someone?”
“And I said, ‘Well, who could be a better bridegroom than Jesus Christ? And who could be a better mother-in-law than the Virgin Mary?’”
I asked Thomas what she thought changed about her life the most after her consecration, since she had essentially been living the lifestyle of a consecrated virgin for years before her vows.
“I thought: There’s no going back. I am making a commitment for the rest of my life,” she replied. “There’s no going back and saying ‘I don’t feel like it.’ I have to do what I don’t want to do in spite of my feelings, which is what every married person does, what every religious person does - there’s no going back. In a good way.”
Ms. Farrow this is a great interview. Thank you, and I hope to see more of your writing in the future!
I love this. My diocese has a woman in formation for this vocation.