Talk about your Sunday best, and the debate will rage

The surest way to spark a debate in Catholic circles is to mention clothing. There are four popular controversies around clothing and Catholicism: modesty, suitability for church, traditional habits and mantillas. I shall take my life in my hands and write merrily about them all.

One of my professors at Regis College, John Dadosky, wrote a brilliant essay about modernity and the rise of religious conservatism. His thesis was that religious faiths are now in retreat towards the certainties of their pasts in reaction to the destabilizing pace of change in the modern world. He thinks this bad; I think it sometimes good.

Prof. Dadosky notes also that, paradoxically, traditional religious movements are not adverse to using contemporary technologies. This is certainly true of the Internet, where you can read lengthy posts by young Catholics telling each other what modest clothing for women is.

Modest clothes for women is a topic on which everyone seems to have an opinion, from “If Mary is a model for women, why don’t women dress like her?” to “Women should be free to wear whatever we want, whenever and wherever, even if that is almost nothing.” The first extreme seems ridiculous: whatever Mary wore, it was appropriate for a Jewish woman in first-century Galilee. That does not mean it is appropriate for Christian women in 21st-century Toronto. The second extreme ignores the fact that all societies have conventions about clothing, socially — if not legally — enforced, because clothing is, inevitably if insincerely, a form of communication.

When I was in high school, the halls rang with the voices of teacher screaming, “Girls, unroll your kilts and tuck your shirts IN.” Loretto Abbey was in the business of forming the women of tomorrow, and it clearly envisioned a tomorrow where the women weren’t sloppy. It didn’t mind if we had our kilts professionally tailored to the size of table napkins as long as we looked tidy. But most workplaces, I think, would blink at the hemlines considered normal in Toronto Catholic schools. Modesty is in the eye of social convention, and the conventions of the Grade 10 locker room are not those elsewhere.

When choosing clothes for church, it may be salutary to reflect that, as poor as most of them were, our Christian ancestors had at least two outfits: work clothes and Sunday best. There are Christian communities to which “church clothes” are still very important; in Toronto it is a heartening sight to see beautifully dressed Pentecostal families on their way to prayer.

The usual riposte to suggestions that we follow their example is “God doesn’t care what I wear to Mass.”

However, the parable of the wedding garment should at least give us pause for thought.

We dress up to show respect. We dress up for job interviews to show respect for the job. We dress up for weddings to show respect to the bridal couple. We dress up for classical concerts to show respect for the musicians — who dress up to show respect for the music and us. It surely is therefore not an outrage against democracy to suggest we dress up for Mass to show respect for God. And “up” does not mean expensively, as our impoverished ancestors illustrated.

As I am not myself a religious, I do not have much to say about traditional religious habit, except that to report that at Regis College we students joked that our lay male professors were often mistaken for Jesuits because they wore jackets and ties. It was believed that students would feel alienated by our professors if they wore clerical dress; this may have been true. However, if one loves the notion of religious life at all, it is cheering to be able to recognize priests and religious at a glance. For me this is one of the great delights of travel in Europe.

And at last I come to that controversial frill, the mantilla. The mantilla — a piece of lacy fabric that covers the hair — has been making its appearance in Catholic churches to the surprise of those who enjoy the freedom granted in the wake of Vatican II from the traditional interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11. The mantilla is, of course, completely optional, so it surprises me that some feel threatened by it.

I don a black mantilla as I enter a church, even removing a winter hat to do so, as a way of centring myself. As I don’t wear a mantilla anywhere else, it helps me to transition from noisy, secular space to a quiet, sacred one. It is an expression of my sense of myself, not just as a Catholic, but as a Catholic woman at prayer — a sense of a special, separate, timeless women’s spirituality which is, perhaps, what the mantilla’s critics find frightening.