Clerical and religious dress

Actress Meryl Streep recently said that when she put on her nun’s habit to film the movie “Doubt” she felt clothed in God and was convinced that real nuns who wear the habit must also share the same incredible feeling as her that every moment of their day is being dedicated to God.

It is said that actor Alec Guinness’s conversion to Catholicism began when he first put on a collar to play a priest (Father Brown) in the movie “The Detective.” One evening Guinness, still in costume, was on his way back to his lodgings. A little boy, mistaking him for the real thing, grabbed his hand and trustingly accompanied the “priest.” That incident affected Guinness. “Continuing my walk,” he said, “I reflected that a Church that could inspire such confidence in a child, making priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable, could not be as scheming or as creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices.”

I hope our priests and nuns will reflect more deeply on the importance of and need for clerical dress—especially in these troubling times when secularism and atheism are gaining ground in obscuring Catholicism and its mandate to evangelize.

Jake Bajeani
Toronto, Ontario
Canada