(Helen M. Alvare served as the spokesperson on pro-life issues for the National Council of Catholic Bishops from 1990-2000. She is now an associate professor of law specializing in marriage and family issues at the George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, VA.)

Kristen: What is it like being at the center of a media storm?
Helen: Something in me is attracted to a storm. I can evaluate it. A controversial movement needs many kinds of personalities– you need the counselors, the organizers, the demonstrators outside the court. That’s not me. I am a thinker and a speaker, not a rallying person. Getting on 60 Minutes in front of millions of people doesn’t bother me in the least. It doesn’t give me a rushed up beat of the heart and that’s a grace. At the same time, it’s high profile work. Mistakes are embarrassing.

Translated from Norwegian by Nicholas Rudall

Dover Thrift Edition, 1992. 84 pp.

Although we read about distant storms like tornadoes, floods and hurricanes daily, it is often the wild seas of relationships that cause us to fear that we might perish. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is an insightful view into the psychological drama and vulnerability of marriage.

Ibsen is considered by many to be the father of modern theater. A Doll’s House was among the first of Ibsen plays to use the stage as a soap box. The final act was considered so controversial that Ibsen wrote an alternative ending to be used “in cases of emergency.” Notoriety led to popular success; A Doll’s House was reprinted three times within the first three months of its original publishing date.

(Nancy Grubbs is the mother of four children, one of whom has severe autism. Before motherhood, she worked for Concerned Women of America, and was a drill sergeant in the U.S. Coast Guard’s Presidential Honor Guard.)

Kristen: When did you become a mother?
Nancy: My newbie Catholic faith, deepened through the oven-blast desert of infertility, really was scorched up a notch when God brought us new life through adoption.

Following roughly nine months of paperwork and St. Gerard’s intervention, our five week old son arrived in 1994 with a very difficult birth history. Six months later, a dynamic duo of girls arrived, one just shy of a year old, the other barely two. Six months, three babies… Oy, the infertility was the easy part!

Kristen: Were you scared in those early months?
Nancy: Yes, but not for the reasons you would think. Shortly before the girls arrived, their maternal grandmother gave me pictures of their baptism. It was literally over fire, a black baptism, an occult ritual. This was unexpected. Fortunately, I understood the seriousness of this history. I had even consulted a Spiritual Warfare course online through the Intercessors of the Lamb in Omaha, Nebraska.

We couldn’t legally baptize them for sixteen months. Armed with Holy Water, Blessed Oils, Blessed Salt and Objects, Divine Mercy chaplets, and a fresh new confession on my part to clear the decks; we took the girls to a Deacon for a cleansing prayer. God won! They are devout Catholics today, literally plucked from the fire.

 No, really, what does it mean to be a virgin?

Our society is so focused on the deflowered that one might wag that no one today really knows. Over the years, the definition has changed somewhat to reflect, er, usage. More recent dictionaries like the Oxford Collegiate state the definition as “a person who has not had sexual intercourse,” whereas my 1973 Webster’s dictionary defines it colloquially: “free of impurity or stain”. In 1828, Webster was more direct: “a woman without carnal knowledge of a man.”

One thing seems obvious. The definition of virginity is completely anchored in the reality of sexual intercourse. And, therefore, our understanding of sex will have an impact upon our appraisal of virginity. If sex is only a physical act, then virginity is also just a physical reality, or more accurately, a physical non-reality.  Virginity only has meaning in a universe where there is a sexual act to NOT undertake.