At National Catholic Reporter, Thomas F O’Meara asks the burning question for our clerics:
What’s the message on the runway for Baroque fashions?
When I was a boy, more than 50 years ago, ecclesiastical clothes were impressive. They were unusual and colorful, antique and sacral; they were distinctively Roman Catholic. The colored watered silk, the jeweled gloves, the red slippers (buskins) pointed to an individual caught up in a church office. This transcendent figure, a representative of the divine, appeared among the ordinary suits and dresses of working-class Catholics at rare moments. Nonetheless, even as a teenager singing in a college choir at the archbishop’s liturgies, I had already noticed that sometimes rituals focused more on the clothes than on religious words and sacrament. Removing gloves and putting on glasses, keeping a skullcap in place or adjusting a pallium could appear more important than the elevation of the chalice.
Time passes, and today ecclesiastical clothes are less intelligible and point less clearly to something beyond their colors and gilt. They raise questions of gender and class, of culture and sacramentality.
There are three kinds of clothes male Catholics wear for public ecclesiastical and liturgical events. There are vestments for the liturgy of the Eucharist and other sacraments and for devotions. Among them are chasuble and stole, alb and cincture, miter and cope. Second, there are the habits of religious orders and congregations. Third, there are special garments for those in the episcopal order and for those in levels below (monsignors) or above (cardinals). Vestments at the Eucharist and other liturgies appear at their best when they are simple, aesthetically pleasing and inspiring to the people viewing them. Members of religious orders, particularly monks and friars, tend to wear their habits at liturgy and at other times inside their religious houses.
Here is a ninth-century description of the liturgical clothes used by the bishop of Rome, clothes related in their style to garments worn by Romans two centuries earlier. Walahfrid Strabo, who died in 849, wrote: “Priestly vestments have become progressively what they are today: ornaments. In earlier times priests celebrated Mass dressed like everyone else.”
Read the full opinion piece at NCR.
Then watch Fellini’s extraordinary, scary Ecclesiastical Fashion Show on Youtube. (Follow the link: this one can’t be embedded)
Related articles
- A Survey Of German Catholics Points To Some Serious Disconnect With German Bishops (enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com)
O’Meara makes an important point. Someone commented that there are more serious abuses they should be criticised for, which is true, but the way they present themselves is not unimportant. When a cardinal spends $30,000 on a single outfit it says something about their values (which are completely backwards), which in turn speaks to their credibility (or what’s left of it). It’s obscene the amount of money some church leaders spend on their clothes. I’d love to hear one of them respond to O’Meara’s article. Or maybe just Matthew 23.5-9.