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Oh she was a virgin when Christ was born, but heaven forbid that she would ever have real sex with her husband and have another six or seven or eight or so. That reality would just absolutely muddy the tidy image that many have of Mary...one of eternal chastity and bountiful omnipotent grace!

Your jejeune attempt at sarcasm has failed, dear brother.

"You had good reason to be horrified at the thought that another birth might issue from the same virginal womb from which Christ was born according to the flesh. For the Lord Jesus would never have chosen to be born of a virgin if he had ever judged that she would be so incontinent as to contaminate with the seed of human intercourse the birthplace of the Lord’s body, that court of the eternal king."
-- Pope Siricius I, "Letter to Bishop Anysius", A.D. 392

Yes, it is natural and proper for husband and wife to have sexual relations, but there are appropriate and inapproprate places for that intercourse. just because a given bodily function is natural doesn't mean it's always and everywhere okay to perform it. Urination is natural and proper, for example, but there are appropriate and inappropriate places to urinate. Even though a crucifix is only a piece of wood or metal, it's still a symbol of and reminder of our Lord; no Christian would ever piss on a crucifix!

Mary's body and soul were immaculate, made so by the Christ she carried within her. What sort of holy man would St. Joseph have been if he'd wanted to impregnate a womb that had one held God Himself? It would be worse than pissing on a crucifix; it would be an act of carnal desire performed upon the Ark of the Covenant itself.

So you are saying that Mark chapter 6 is false doctrine? I was not trying to be sarcastic, I was trying to get Catholics to look at the original source material. Jesus had real brothers and sisters, how do you suppose they got here?

Sex is ordained by God. The Bible says that the "Marriage bed is undefiled!" Mary was a virgin when Christ was conceived in her womb by the Holy Spirit and continued to be so until after his birth. After-words she continued to perform her duties as both mother.....and WIFE. Judging from the reproductive results she must have been a very good wife to Joseph....;)

Seriously though your post underscores the problem that many believers have with the Catholic Church...the Bible gets ignored as to what it actually says in favor of the pontifications of so called "church fathers" who "write around" scripture and pluck biblically unsupported blaspemies out of the air(or have had it "whispered to them") and trumpet them as truth! One could argue that St. Jerome might have been the prophet Mohammed had the circumstances been just right...and with the same type of self justifications. I mean come on... I cannot find any biblical basis for what St. Jerome wrote concerning her eternal immaculate and virginal status. Jesus was born of a woman who herself acknowledged her own SINFULLNESS, who called the fruit of her womb.."the Lord of her salvation"
The council of Nicea in 325 pretty much put the Bible together in its present form. There was nothing that came out of that council that asserted that there was a scriptural basis for Mary being for-ever immaculate and virginal..and they even chose to leave Mark chapter 6 in the bible! The writings by various "fathers" were just hyper anal musings from those that just could not get it into there heads that God could find a way to wrap himself in mortal flesh so that he could"surely, he knew our grief and bore our sorrows!". That he could be born of both water(ie: the passing of amniotic fluids during birth) and of spirit(his baptism by John and the empowering given to him by the Spirit). That he might have had a mother who was just an ordinary human being made extra-ordinary by God's choice of her, who declared that she was "saved" by her son, who went on to be a dutiful Jewish wife and lover to her husband, and went on to have other kids besides!

But to certain church "fathers", they just couldn't leave the simple truth of salvation alone...the simple fact that God has a concern for mortals who eat, sleep, copulate, defecate..and die and go to hell because they never accepted the gift of grace he provided for him through the breaking of his body and the shedding of his blood on the cross! Yes God became incarnate and was born from a woman who would indeed later on have her birth canal "corrupted" by semen from Joseph her husband;a woman who even saw it as her holy duty to DO SO, as she would have understood Jewish practice of that era. YET..... the simplicity of the plan was to messy, to involved with the "gross" things of humanity...to actually have God involved in the midst of it all. Yes, Christ was called Emmanuel or "God with us" but we can't have him really "with" us because we can't have God involved with all that "dirty icky stuff". So Mary is to made incorruptible and Christianity must be "purified" from all "icky stuff"....the Bible must be placed in its "proper perspective" and all the "icky" truths in it just explained away by the DOCTRINS of men. We musn't have Christ born from a "icky" woman...don't ya know!

"The marriage bed is undefiled" and Mary is still remembered as blessed for all generations because of her birth and care of Jesus....when she was still a virgin!