Not a minor issue
Some may think this is a minor issue, but I disagree. the way we dress and present ourselves directly reflects our pride in the office we hold. Whether we wish to admit it or not, our dress is an external sign of our interior attitude which influences our mannerisms and behaviours. In the case of clericals, the wearing of such garments is a public witness to Christ.
We must ask ourselves how we would react if a person presented themselves for a job interview, a date or at a dinner party dressed in dirty old clothing?
This public witness is one of the main reasons why religious Orders that pride themselves in the wearing of their respective clericals like the Society of Pius X or religious habits as worn by the Sisters for Life are flourishing. In contrast, consider Orders like the Sisters of Mercy or the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits).
The Church simply cannot function without her religious members. It continues to astonish me that many diocesan and religious seminaries forbid their seminarians from embracing this external witness to Christ.
And this stubbornness is having drastic effects on the age and number of priests throughout the Western world.
This same attitude towards religious clothing reflects the ideology of the priest as an individual, the seminary in which he studies and above all, the Diocese or Order he serves. Ask yourself what the ideology, the theology, the adherence to doctrine is likely to be in a seminary that specifically forbids its seminarians from wearing clericals. Please keep in mind that these seminarians are the Church’s future priests.
I won’t go into the philosophical, canonical, dogmatic and theological errors that were taught at the nearby theological college where we studied as seminarians; but they accurately reflect the same corrupted ideology.
My home Archdiocese of Melbourne, where the bishops and priests have largely abandoned their clericals, and with the average age of a typical parish priest rising by the year, refuses to ask the correct questions, for fear of the answers.
Women’s Orders
Women’s religious Orders are not immune. In truth, the remnants of these once great Orders are dying a slow death.
Orders such as the Sisters of Saint Joseph (the Josephites) and Sisters of Mercy have shunned their religious habits in favor of the pants-suits and jewellery popular in the 1970’s when these Orders’ sisters were young.
Many have closed their last houses of formation. Is it a coincidence that these Orders which abandoned the external witness of clerical dress correlate almost perfectly with the drop in the numbers within their own communities? As a researcher by profession, I would argue, not.
REGINA | 83