A friend just emailed an article to me from Times Online about women who are paying big bucks to have their virginity surgically “restored.” The procedure is called a hymenoplasty. I’m hoping that says enough about what’s involved. Suffice it to say that for those non-virgins who want to provide physical proof of virginity, this procedure does the trick.

Once sought only by women from cultures in which lack of such “proof” could mean certain death, hymen repair is now being sought for a variety of reasons. Times Online reports that “an increasing number of women ...are now electing to be ‘revirginized’ ...to ‘put the sparkle’ back into their marriage or give their husband a surprise on the second honeymoon.”

One doctor who performs the procedure reflects, “Thousands of dollars, and it lasts a few seconds. People think it’s crazy but to my patients it does not matter. It means so much to them.”

Why does it mean so much? Perhaps it speaks to a yearning for innocence in a world awash in anything but. Sex has been so degraded in our world, so trampled upon, we’re willing to go to great lengths for the mere facade of innocence. Many of us are feeling the toll taken by our sexual mistakes. We begin looking for a way to turn back time; do things over. We begin daydreaming, if I could only reclaim my virginity.... Well now you can “for three easy payments of $1999.95.”

I can’t know for sure what’s going on in these women’s hearts. But hymenoplasty seems yet another example of seeking answers to moral problems in technology rather than in virtue. There is, in fact, according to John Paul II, a way to reclaim our “original virginal value,” as he put it – not through surgical procedures, but through the gift of redemption.

And we’re not merely talking about “renewed virginity” through forgiveness of sin. No, in his revolutionary “theology of the body,” John Paul II spoke of the possibility of spouses engaging in a sexual union so pure that it was not a “loss” of virginity, but in some way it became a “regaining” of it. What? How so? To understand this we have to think more deeply about the meaning of virginity.

In the Pope’s teaching here, it seems virginity is not first to be understood as the absence of sexual union, but as the integrity or deep unity of a person’s body and soul. Adam and Eve lost their virginity, in this sense, not at the moment of their first sexual embrace, but at the moment of original sin. It’s sin that causes a rupture within us between body and soul. And it is authentic love that heals this rift. In other words, it is sin that causes us to “lose our virginity” and it is authentic love that enables us to regain it.

Lustful sexual union – that is, sexual union in which people (including spouses) use one another for their own selfish satisfaction – is most certainly a loss of virginity. However, to the degree that spouses are loving one another in the image of Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32), they are entering the mystery of redemption and reclaiming bit by bit the original integrity of their humanity. They are, in this sense, reclaiming their “virginal” humanity.

This idea of virginity puts a different spin on the “ever-virgin” Mary. We immediately think, “Well, that means she didn’t have intercourse with Joseph.” That’s true. She didn’t. But at a deeper level it means she is the woman of perfect integrity. She is the woman “untouched” by the original sin. In other words, to speak of Mary the “ever-virgin” is to speak of Mary the “Immaculate Conception.”

Christ gave himself up for this woman to make her “holy and immaculate” (Eph 5:27). And his gift was effective. So too is the gift of spouses to each other. Authentic marital love is healing, redemptive. In this way spouses reclaim their virginity not through technology, but through the grace of their sacrament.