What is being Casto? With the San José model, Bishop rescues this devalued virtue

Regarding the day of San José, Patron of the Universal Church, the Bishop of Chascomús (Argentina), Mons. Juan Ignacio Liébana, took this day to venerate the Castal ESPOSO of the Virgin and rescue the “so devalued” virtue of chastity.

In a published reflection In the social networks of the diocesethe prelate admitted that “talking about the chastity of a male seems out of time.”

“However, contemplating Joseph on this day, moves me to try to say some of this devalued virtue,” he acknowledged.

“San José appears in tradition as the custodian of the Redeemer, the one who puts his life at risk to save his son and his wife. He who plays it in the darkness of faith to guard the sacred, the chaste, the virgin: the treasure of Mary and Jesus, the only ones in history to whom sin did not touch with his malice and iniquity,” he said.

“José, a pilgrim of hope,” he described, in allusion to the motto of the 2025 jubilee, “he sets on his way behind a dream, of a promise to which he clings with nails and teeth, in the humility of not seeing and not knowing.”

“It does not intend to possess, but guard, take care of, protect. It does not take over the promise, or his wife, or his child. He simply takes care of them and conducts them, being mysteriously conduct and careful,” he said.

Keeping chastity, considered the Liébana Bishop, “is to let her keep us from our eagerness for domain and possession.”

What is being Casto?

“Being chaste,” he explained, “is possessing yourself, the owner of our impulses and emotions. Being chaste is to guard a sacred and valuable gift, to deliver it and offer it in due time. Being is chaste is to be patient, supporting many times the claims of our flesh and our wound human condition, narcissistic, egocentric, anxious and devastating. Being is chaste Everything is grace that we must beg as beggars and receive grateful, ”he listed.

“Being Casto is humbly to host a discipline that orders our chaos and our excessive desire for well -being. We adopt a discipline because we are disciples, fragile and self -referential, which need to decent and put their center in another. Casto is to intuit the promise of life and fertility that is hidden in each resignation, trusting that, like Abraham and José, we will be parents of a crowd, ”he said.

“Being Casto is to contemplate the beauty of the other admired and, as Joseph with Maria, respect her intimacy, without possession or eagerness of dominance,” he summarized.

“Being Casto is to look with confidence and goodness everything that is, without pretending to intervene, change and transform. Being is to learn to receive, to be, to get rid of the dictatorship of thinking and do, to let us think with love and do for the artisanal hands of the good God. As Joseph who knew how to rest well and fall asleep in the arms of God to let himself be driven,” he said.

For Mons. Liébana, “being Casto is not to monopolize, it is to occupy second place and not the main as Joseph, well aware of the virgin space of every person, exclusive property of God.”

Therefore, he considered that Joseph’s chastity moves us “to ask for this grace as a gift and assume it as a challenging task.”