If I had to pick a point to start my story from, I would start from when I was just beginning to confront the facts of life. My journey as a Chaste Virgin began when I was in elementary school. I had received a Catholic school education pretty much from kindergarten all the way through high school. I never attended a public school. My parents were not Catholic. My mother belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and my father was Baptist (or so he said). I went to private schools where religion was taught because my parents felt that private schools offered a better education than public schools. Yet, religion was never something that my parents imposed upon me as a child. This was deliberate on my mother’s part because she wanted me to “have my own mind” and believed that I should be free to “make my own decision” about what church I should join, so I didn’t get much religion at home. But because I attended a Catholic school where I was very deeply immersed in the teachings, rituals, and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, I felt Catholic even though I come from a Protestant home.

After my parents, the adult role models and authority figures in my life were the nuns, priests, and monks that regulated my daily life. Society may view lifelong Chastity and those who live in it as strange or abnormal, but you tend to see it differently when you grow up around it. Growing up in the Catholic school system, Chaste people were an everyday part of my life. The principal, administrators, and a many of the teachers at my schools were nuns (I had one administrator that was a monk); and every other day the whole school would attend church services where the priests performed mass. I never questioned why the nuns and priests were not married and had no children, and neither did anyone else. In Catholic society lifelong Chastity was taken for granted, especially where the clergy was concerned, and no one thought anything of it. And I certainly wasn’t paying attention to such things in those days, because like any “typical” tween girl the only thing that I was concerned with was the latest clothing styles and whatever pop singer was at the top of the music charts.

And for the record, I was not sexually abused. I have absolutely nothing dishonorable to say about any priests or nuns that I knew, and nothing unfortunate to speak of involving any children that I went to school with. My childhood experience with Catholic priests and nuns was positive. And it was here that I was first introduced to the concept of sexual purity starting me out on what would eventually become my “calling” or the path which I would be oriented to follow in life.

How I came to be a Perpetual Virgin menu