Mary Magdalen in the legend about her as a hermit preached in Provence, Cecilia, in her legend choosing chastity on her marriage night and giving her house in Rome to the Church, likewise preached the three days she was dying. Nuns preceded monks in early Christianity. We can witness the Christian debate concerning women and men, sexuality and chastity, in the Letters of Jerome and in those of Abelard , written to such women as Paula, Eustochium and Heloise. More serious problems have recently come about. Marriage itself, in our own century, instead of being a blessed sacrament for life, has come to be seen as fragile and, rather than being a bond, as bondage.
Nature is prodigal and of infinite variety.
We each contain both genders. Our sexuality is that of God within each of us, and it is of the love we owe to God and our neighbour. Yet Culture is now especially exaggerating gender formation away from the pairing of men and women as equals but opposites in love and respect. We seem to be returning to pagan Athens and Lesbos rather than basing ourselves upon Christian Jerusalem in our sexual mores. No one seems quite to understand why these problems may have arisen.