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This happy birthday day for the city of Rome was marked by a concert which was attended by the Mayor, the Italian President, and the Supreme Pontiff. The CWNews report gives some indication as to the pontiff’s remarks on the occasion. Apparently, his remarks didn’t include some basic pointers about modesty in dress, which speak to such things as see-through garments and necklines diving towards the stomach. Was this soprano (Laura Aikin) also involved in singing the “Ave Verum”?
Pace my dear Ambrosius’ recent post, why does the pontiff say things like the following, that the city of Rome should be “a beacon of civilization and of spirituality for the whole world”? A beacon of civilization, yes, of course, as it has been in the past - but “of spirituality”? A beacon of salvation for the entire world, yes, but a beacon of “spirituality”?
I suppose that I shouldn’t go too far on the CWNews report before I can read the whole of what he said. I hope that it sounds better when taken in toto. I get frustrated, though, with the sugar-coated language; just tell it like it is. The history of Rome is inextricably bound up witht the fact that it is the see of Peter, the home of the Vicar of Christ. When will Rome tell us again who she is, that no man can be indifferent to her on his “spiritual” journey?
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
Anon9, said “There is no problem at all with people choosing to dress this way. The problem begins when they want to impose their personal tastes on the rest of the Catholic world and damn those who do not fall in line. As someone said earlier, this is tyranny.”
God will be the judge, none of us. But it seems that you are the one advocating for “personal taste,” against the point of view of the Church which God established to give us direction.
Anon9,
Perish the thought, Catholicism should never be tyranny.
Go ahead and burn your bra.
You’ve come along way, baby.
(along way from Mary, that is)
Scholastic has been very patient, so I don’t mind his treading slightly into the verbotten breastfeeding terrain. But please, no one engage him on that point?
I still think, though, Schol., that referencing works of art is a bit misleading — what you’d like to see your daughter go out of the house wearing of a morning is rather different than your expectation for an idealized, or stylized, or even realistic-for-artistic-reasons form in a museum or gallery.
How, btw, do you guarantee that your daughters ‘culture’ will be such that they won’t want to mimick the broader culture around them and gallavant about in sports bras? We know you aren’t advocating a flee to the praries, so will you just make sure they know they’re not in the same culture as the hundreds of girls I see (and avert my eyes from) zooming about, skimpily clad, in Ithaca, NY? I’m curious — if not guidelines, then culture. Yes, that’s great. How do you propose fixing the culture sans guidelines? And until the culture is fixed, do you really think it so inadvisable to provide guidelines to young people who want to know what is right to do? I guess I found the argument in the book, A Return to Modesty, pretty convincing, and one of Ms. Shalitt’s most constant tropes was that it does, in fact, help for adults and persons-in-authority to take the lead and say “this is ok; this crosses the line.” There’s hardly anyone doing that today! And thus it would be nice if some authority figures, like Bishops or priests, would do their share of being the “bad guys” so that parents aren’t left swinging in the wind.
I don’t normally reference Protestant materials, but this is an excellent 5 Joe Six Pack Apr 25th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Schol,
Your continued use of art as a justification for immodest dress is idiotic.
Great pieces of art show complete nudity too, does that mean we can walk around completely nude?
Art is not a standard for human conduct.
Do you use the Rape of the Sabine Women to justify rape and pillage?
Also you state:
“Further,
Within limits, culture teaches the senses what is stimulating to them. The sense of touch recognizes heat in relation to the heat it is currently stimulated by, so likewise with the other senses.
With that in mind, it’s imprudent to form our children so that they are stimulated by modes of dress which are the cultural norm because they will be exposed to those modes of dress and thus it puts them unnecessarily in temptation.”
This is pure liberal claptrap and further example that you have serious problems at the basic levels of Catholic faith and morals.
But you are in plenty of ignoble (if not good) company.
“The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau
You and Jean Jacques are enlightened brothers, it seems.
Continuing waging your battle against the Cross, if you will.
You certainly have been thoroughly warned.
Sorry for the bad link. That should be:
http://www.biblebb.com/
files/ModestyMatters.htm
Any part of a woman’s body can potentially be provocative to men, most especially the face and hair. Serious Muslims will tell you that that’s why women must wear burkas, so that both their faces and their entire bodily shapes are concealed. How would the Six Packs respond to that, I wonder?
I respond by following in Holy Mother Church and following the explicit guidance from the likes of Pius XI, Pius XII, and Padre Pio.
This isn’t about “the six packs” opinions.
You are going up against the Sacred Traditions of the Catholic Church.
Women are beautiful and an expression of God’s goodness and beauty.
Catholic modesty frames the beauty of woman in dignity and respect.
Mohammedan false-modesty hides women from view.
“On the road to Cairo one may see twenty groups [of Mohammedans] exactly like that of the Holy Family in the pictures of the Flight into Egypt; with only one difference. The man is riding on the ass.” Chesterton
A Catholic woman can dress perfectly modestly, looking beautiful and stylish, and not come across looking like a Muslim in a burkha.
To even suggest the burkha analogy again shows how warped and out of touch with Catholic tradition many of you are.
Go ahead and fight against your own Church and Her reasonable time-honored traditions. And when our society reaches the boiling point of sexual saturation, and former Christians start turning to Mohammedanism and it’s clear guidelines and “respect” toward woman, you’ll have yourselves to thank.
I second those people who have noted that art is not a guide for dress. I have an analogy — depictions of the Crucifixion and of martyrdoms. Many people rightly complain about young children’s over-exposure to scenes of violence, mutilation, corpses, etc., in public entertainment and the media. Children should not be desensitized to violence. However, we proudly display crucifixes in our homes and pictures of saints with swords through their heads (St. Peter Martyr), arrows through their chests (St. Sebastian), and holding their own gouged-out eyes on a platter (St. Lucy). A friend of mine from childhood was a Jehovah’s Witness (*sic*; now he’s gone on to be some sort of leftist homosexual advocate: please pray for him, as he needs it). He was physically repulsed by the crucifix in our house, not only because he was indoctrinated in an evil cult, but just because of the torture it depicts. And none of us would have any pictures of stripped, mutilated, tortured, executed people in our houses except for Our Lord and the saints. We take liberties with the usual rules of decorum because of the importance of these deaths and what they represent. I dare say that the same rule applies to some of the paintings of Our Lord as an Infant and of Our Lady — we need to be reminded of their humanity, the “earthiness” of their lives in this world, in order to recall that they lived pure lives *in the flesh,* better even than Adam and Eve would have in the Garden had they not fallen. We can’t blame our bodies for our sinfulness — Our Lord and Lady had bodies fashioned from clay, too, and by divine grace they did not sin — what’s our excuse? As for us, well, we are already far too aware of our own base “earthiness,” and for us it actually does conflict with purity due to concupiscence. So, no, we can’t use these works of art as standards for our own dress or decorum — these works of art are not designed in order to be models for fallen men and women’s dress. (That’s rather like a soldier in Iraq thinking he should fight naked because Michelangelo’s David and the Dying Gaul are both nude.)
Having consulted the dictionary, I see that “earthiness” has both good and bad meanings. Please don’t take it in the bad meaning for Our Lord and Lady in my post, but take it as at least ambivalent for wretched, fallen worms like us.
“The most famous painting of a mother is probably that by Whistler. Once, when complimented on its beauty, he answered: “You know how it is; one tries to make one’s mother as nice as possible.”” Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/marys-book1.htm
Why should we expect less of artist’s depictions of Mary the Mother of Jesus? Why should we expect artists to portray Mary in any manner than as pure?
Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe was rejected by the salon because it was scandalous because of its context. The history of art is a history of context, if we desire to understand the art we must know the context, and in knowing the context, we can also know the culture it was painted in. A knowledge which also gives incite to what was understood to be decorous.
Further, the portrayal of women in art is a window to the soul of a culture in the manner that the eyes are the window to the soul of a man.
If we look at sculpture we see that the classical period portrayed women’s platonic perfection, and medieval art portrayed women’s transcendent beauty. And if we look at modern cultural portrayals of women what do we see? We see either a whore, or an impossible to obtain sex object, or grotesque deformities such as Matisse’s “Carmelina 1903″ or Hopper’s “A Woman in the Sun”
Yes, Scholastic, I agree with your last post. Is it just additional commentary, or a particular response to someone?
insight, not incite.
Tobias petras,
It was directed at those who said that art cannot be used to known previous cultures and their understanding of what was considered modest.
Ah, everything is so clear now.
Why didn’t you provide that quotation from Art Appreciation 101 right from the start of this debate? It would have cleared everything up and saved us so much time.
Scholastic, you’re not answering anyone. Of course art is a window to period culture - no one could deny such a thing!
What I want to know is why you think you can denounce so many Christians as scrupulous and disordered without giving any time to answering the teaching of such a recent Pontiff as Pius XII? When the Pope gives explicit standards, or Cardinal Siri for that matter, barely 60 years ago, we expect someone to soberly address his concerns before they start railing about traditionalists, who seek nothing more than to follow his and all the various Apostolic successors’ advice on these matters in our darker age, when such things are lent nary a whisper by the heirarchy. Stop throwing up this smoke about elbows, and quarter cut sleeves, and Muhammadens! Stop this nonsense (which it is) about artwork, which the same Pontiffs who set these standards which you seem to resent certainly appreciated! That gallery of Maria Lactans is certainly not some explosive find, burst out into the open to reveal the fatheadedness of dark-minded Saints and overwrought traditionalists alike!
And in deference to Ambrosius’ will, I shant talk of your clear obsession with BLEEP!-feeding. There are things natural that you seem to neglect - for one, natural shame!
Well said, Antediluvian.
I’m a burkha man myself, so I won’t step into this debate other than with the occasional heckle or cheer. ; )
Antediluvian,
The problem is that what is being asked for are hard and fast rules which deal with each particular when there aren’t any such rules because we are dealing with contingent matters, not necessary matters. What there are is guidelines, guidelines which are formed using prudential judgement.
Tobias petras in an earlier post pointed out a photo and asked if the girls in it were immodestly dressed because they didn’t have covered elbows, if their dress is modest, than what are we to make of the stipulation that elbows must be covered? Obviously the stipulation is within a limited context and is not to be taken universally. I used art through the ages to show that clothing as a means to an end varies. While ancient Minoan dress may be deemed universally inappropriate because it is outside the limits, the same appears to not be true of the chiton or the peplos which would have been worn by the virgin martyrs in the canon of the mass.
As a friend of mine, who has two daughters in the Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, once commented on raising children, “I look for results”. That is, he looks to the end, the means to the end are instrumental to the end. How we raise one child may not work for another child because personalities are not the same in all children. The same is true with clothing. They are a means to an end. Clothing which may be necessary for tempering the senses in one culture, may be ineffective or impractical in another.
As I wrote before, the means are not without limit, and so the question is, how do we come to know those limits? Our own culture should teach us, but since we are without a Catholic culture, we must look elsewhere.
not edited, read at your own risk
Scholastic:
It’s Tobias Petrus, not “petras.” (That’s to give glory to my patron saint, not to me.)
I appreciate the patient response, Scholastic. The problem is that you are approaching the issue exactly like an apologist for evil modern fashions, whether you would like to appear so or not.
The thing which really gets tiresome is your attack on, shall we say, the “upper end” of modesty, which some might call Mary-like standards(your referenced artwork notwithstanding). In that article Iacobus links to, Pius XII mentions not abandoning the high moral level that Christianity has developed. This is what it appears you are doing: attacking that edifice which Catholic culture has worked at many an age - like making fun of the austere habits of some nuns.
It seems to me that there is certainly room for your daughter’s sundresses, or, as much as they might incite wretching, those majestic and ponderous tents under the wider umbrella of sensible modesty. I don’t think the people at this blog are the sort of be draped or be damned types, and even if those people actually exist, they are very rare. Then again, some things, like shorts and mini-skirts on women, or tanktops, or bikinis, or casual dress in Church, are things I hope we can all agree need to go. But even then, such issues should be approached with prudence. I just wish we could stop wasting time and focus on the real problem: women in pants! :] Just kidding…
But, within the previously defined limits of discussion, if you are taking a swipe at more than this, and saying that anyone who ever thought that a longer sleeve is probably better than a short, or that below the knee is better than above, or that its better not to see much below the neck in public(or should we not go there?), is some sort of scrupulous cretin who deserves to be mocked and corrected, than I still do have a bone to pick with you. Unless you want to break 100 comments, friend?
As to women in pants (yes, I know it was a joke!): our very sensible pastor once said, “It depends on the woman, and it depends on the pants”.
Which is, as I read it, the jist of Scholastic’s argument: it depends!
Ambrosius asks: “I’m curious — if not guidelines, then culture. Yes, that’s great. How do you propose fixing the culture sans guidelines? And until the culture is fixed, do you really think it so inadvisable to provide guidelines to young people who want to know what is right to do”
I’m a bit surprised that you think that I was proposing that there not be guidelines after I had just made a correlation with subsidiarity which is a guideline grounded in man’s nature. Similarly, the guidelines for dress are grounded in man’s nature which is fallen.
Further, I haven’t argued that there shouldn’t be particular guidelines, what I have argued is that those guidelines should be grounded in what is proper to modesty, which is concerned with contingent matter and not necessary matter. When I stated previously that I wouldn’t be let my daughter out of her room wearing a sports bra, I was comparing the sports bra to a preconceived universal principle. and found the sports bra did not measure up to that preconceived standard.
Just as the natural law is intellectually distinct but inseparable from man’s nature and is intrinsic to each individual man, so likewise are guidelines intellectually distinct but inseparable from culture and are intrinsic to a given society. Culture is the form which causes a society to be a unity. And since a Catholic culture doesn’t exist, there isn’t a formative principle, which is why people cast about searching for formation in the form of guidelines which are not sufficiently local to a given society. Which is why we have people proposing without proper cause that elbows should be covered.
Because of a lack of formation via a Catholic culture, traditionalist are little better than cafeteria Catholics in their latching onto anything without understanding. The same is true of the FSSP where the lack of formation concerning modesty is quite telling.
The pope provided guidelines, which you stand in judgment over as the moral arbiter of what is culturally or prudentially required, and so you reject those guidelines.
No one came on here supporting the covering of women’s elbows.
This discussion started over the showing of cleavage in public, and in front of the Holy Father no less.
You took umbrage with me and others for thinking that this style of dress is immodest.
And you attacked a hardworking FSSP priest for requiring women to not have breasts exposed at Church.
Then you go into a smoke screen maneuver of using breast feeding, art appreciation babble, and finally a some cultural relativist crap.
So, because we don’t live in a Catholic culture, that gives you the right to run around and cause confusion among well-meaning Catholics as to what is indeed proper dress for men and women?
You’ve added nothing to this discussion besides smoke and confusion.
Suggesting there’s no guidelines because we don’t have a true Catholic culture or even properly formed priests, is another attempt at a smoke screen.
The “universal principles” (as you call them) of modesty are clear enough to give us a detailed guide of what is acceptable and not.
In no time or place has the following been acceptable in a Catholic culture, and as such are universally rejected:
1) cleavage
2) short-shorts
3) transparent blouses
4) tight fitting clothes
The priest you were chastising (for simply caring about his duty of pastoring souls) was trying to enforce these universal standards, not covering of elbows.
You are a trouble-maker.
And you should think long and hard about making reparation against your calumny against that holy FSSP priest.
Good bye.
Joe six pack writes: “No one came on here supporting the covering of women’s elbows.”
You’re correct, after rereading Mrs. Joe six pack I stand corrected. It’s to the elbows. A slight distinction, but a distinction nevertheless. So let my previous comments be amended to read : sleeves to the elbows.
Mrs Joe six pack wites on April 22 2:29pm: “In case the “Mary-like Standards for Modesty in Dress” got lost in the rest of JSP’s post, here they are again:
“A dress cannot be called decent which does not cover the arms at least to the elbows“
This thread has been killed.
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