The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul—lust.

Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (ed. Oxford University Press, 2016) - ISBN: 9780198718789