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“Guard Your Heart!”

This chapter examines missionaries’ romantic relationships and argues that the way these young adults date, marry, and procreate shapes their position in the US Catholic landscape. These emerging adults develop wide-ranging and gendered interpretations of chastity. They discipline themselves and their co-missionaries to follow Catholic dictums articulated in Humanae Vitae and Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body More than personal ethics, however, this chapter posits that missionaries’ practices of Catholic romance are part of their pro-life politics. How and why these Catholic millennials embody the transitions from singlehood to family life proclaims their proud, dynamically orthodox Catholic alternative to contemporary sexual ethics in the United States.