Consecrated Virgin

The order of virgins is among the oldest recognised states of life in the Western church, and it is older than organised monasticism. Christian writers of the early centuries describe women living consecrated to God within their own households and cities, recognised by their communities, before there were monasteries for them to enter. The liturgical consecration of such women by a bishop is attested in the early Roman rites.

What happened afterwards is the reason the state is unfamiliar today. As monastic life developed and then dominated, the consecration was absorbed into it: the rite survived, but as something conferred on nuns within monasteries rather than on women living in the world. For centuries that was effectively its only setting, and the older form disappeared from view.

It was restored as a distinct state in 1970, when a revised rite made the consecration available again to women living in the world under their own bishop. The 1983 Code of Canon Law lists the order among the recognised forms of consecrated life, and the number of women in it has grown steadily since the restoration. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sets out the early history and the interruption; the canon itself defines the present arrangement.

The distinctive thing about this state is what it does not involve. A consecrated virgin takes no vows of poverty or obedience. She belongs to no religious institute, follows no rule, wears no habit, and has no superior other than her own diocesan bishop. She keeps her employment, supports herself, arranges her own housing and remains where she is.

That combination is unusual enough to be regularly misunderstood. She is not a nun living outside a convent, because a nun's state is constituted by profession in an institute and hers is not. Nor is she a member of a secular institute, which is a different recognised form with its own structures. What consecrates her is the liturgical act of the bishop, and the state it confers is permanent and public.

The independence has practical consequences that the church has had to work out in the decades since the restoration: how a woman in this state is supported in old age, what happens if she moves diocese, what her relation is to a bishop who did not consecrate her. These are live questions rather than settled ones. A parallel revival exists in parts of the Anglican Communion, drawing on the same early tradition, and the atlas records it as a revival with its own history rather than as a continuation of the Roman order.