Papal dress code
When Pope Benedict XVI visits the U.S., what he wears could send a message to Catholics.
Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States later this month has inspired speculation about what the pontiff will say to his sometimes restive American flock. Will he use a lecture at Catholic University in Washington to chastise Catholic colleges and universities for succumbing to secularism? Will he make more than an oblique reference to the pedophilia scandal that led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law as the archbishop of Boston (a city not on the pope's itinerary)?
And there's another interesting question for American Catholics on both the left and the right: What will the pope wear?
When Benedict celebrates Mass in Yankee Stadium on April 20, he will be clothed in the raiment of his office -- a poncho-like vestment called a chasuble and the double-peaked bishop's cap known as a miter. Asking if the pope will be dressed up is like asking whether the pope's Catholic.
But the Catholic Church is a house with many rooms, and those rooms have different clothes hanging in the closets. To the delight of conservative Catholic bloggers, Benedict -- the pope who has ordered wider use of the Latin Mass of the Council of Trent -- has lately been donning elaborately embroidered vestments and miters in what is called the "Roman" style, in contrast with the neo-medieval "Gothic" style that made a comeback after the Second Vatican Council.
The Gothic style features short, squat miters and full, flowing chasubles. The Roman style, a product of the Baroque era, produced the super-tall miters beloved of anti-Catholic polemicists (the cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed bishops as crocodiles, with the two points of their miters forming jaws) and chasubles reduced to the point that they resemble an embroidered sandwich board. This style of chasuble is known as the "fiddleback" because the front portion is shaped like a violin.
Fiddleback chasubles and skyscraper miters were the norm in the Roman Catholic Church through the early part of the 20th century. The Gothic style, which hearkened back to the 12th century, was viewed with suspicion in Rome partly because it was favored by priests of the Church of England who wanted to reestablish their church's Catholic heritage. (Ironically, some of those "Anglo-Catholic" clergymen were imprisoned in the 19th century for wearing what Protestant-minded Anglicans regarded as the "rags of popery.")
