Suits You, Father

The other Pope caused some discussion among people I know recently by preaching about clerical attire. This puts one in mind of the vicar who angrily denied Bishop Mervyn Stockwood’s accusation that he’d preached a series of sermons in Lent about Georgian architecture with the words ‘It was Advent’, but Papa Francesco was focusing more on the moral implications of what priests choose to wear. As we know, he has a rather different sartorial style from his predecessor who favoured things like fanons and fiddlebacks and anything that might hark back to the days before Vatican 2, and he probably checks the tag on his chasuble to make sure it is genuine polyester.

Speaking at mass in his private chapel in December, Pope Francis described how an elderly priest colleague had been in Euroclero, the big clerical outfitters, and spotted a young chap trying on a saturno hat and an unnecessarily fancy cape and checking himself out in a mirror. The old monsignor had, said the Pope, ‘conquered his pain with humour’ and said to his preening colleague ‘and they say that the Church does not allow women priests!’

If that rather disagreeably misogynist remark, and the fact that the Pope sees nothing amiss with it, doesn’t make you feel too sick to continue reading, you might take on board the rest of his argument, that once a priest ceases to see themselves as a mediator of God to his people (that is, someone who in loving and sacrificial words and deeds does for them what God does), and instead becomes merely a functional intermediary (someone who occupies a position of bargaining between God and human beings), they will give in to rigidity and worldliness. They will, bizarrely, look ‘sad and serious’ and have ‘dark, dark eyes’ – and, presumably, shop about for elaborate churchy gear to emphasise their status.

One of my friend’s online interlocutors groused ‘Has the Holy Father nothing better to do than gossip about young priests in tat shops?’ ‘In my experience, it's the traditionalist priests with conservative sartorial taste who are often ministering in the places others shun. A bit like the Incarnation really - beauty among the dirt and grit’, commented another. ‘Some of the best priests I have known wore yards of lace and brocade in church and jeans and tee shirt in the pub in the evening’. Another friend of mine said ‘Perhaps the Msgr in the article would have much preferred it if he'd gone into Euroclero and spotted a nun playing a guitar badly. Because that (very 1960s) kind of Catholicism really got people flocking back to church didn't it. Perhaps we should be grateful to the Msgr for inspiring the Holy Father to teach us that dressing up is not consistent with humility and genuine mission. If only I'd known that when I was a parish priest in inner city Bristol working amidst the homeless and drug addicts - and when I increased my congregation from 30 elderly people to double that with lots of young families.’

You can see ideas eliding into one another here. Church is about the sacraments of Christ’s Kingdom and so churchy things should definitely declare the beauty of God, even if what we might consider to be beautiful will vary from setting to setting and arguably, though if we’re honest not wildly, from person to person. Francis isn’t explicitly taking a pop at that: saturnos and velvet capes do seem rather more about adorning a human individual rather than the God they serve. You know where he’s coming from, about that as well as the strained mediator-intermediary dichotomy, even if this isn’t a particularly edifying way of talking about it. However, you might be forgiven for suspecting that lurking behind his irritation at fancy clerical street-dress is also a scorn of fanons and fiddlebacks, his rolling-back his predecessor’s rolling-back the 1960s; so perhaps the clergy comments above aren’t that far of the mark. If that is what he thinks, it’s drawing an analogy too far.  I for one hadn’t considered that having dark eyes might be a sign of spiritual disorder: if so, I got it from my Mum along with that particular dominant gene. Well: not all my weekday-mass homilies have been impeccably thought-out theological masterpieces, either.

My church gear is a sort of battledress, it seems to me. The fallen world militates against beauty and hope, denies the reality of heaven and the true nature of human beings: the Church insists on the presence of the Kingdom, and even my biretta, which is both smart and ludicrous at the same time, is a little pom-pommed declaration that I’m not going to compromise about this stuff. Of course if that’s where your religion stops, it’s a bit catastrophic, but it very rarely is.

Outside church, priests should not be scruffy unless they are seriously unworldly (and very few of us are), and never dirty. Off duty entirely, I quite like the fun of conservative male dress, the selection of ties and shirts and hats and shoes according to occasion and circumstance: but I never think that it’s anything other than a game, an amusement which I trust causes no harm and may even bring a little delight to the world. I hope I’m right, anyway.