On wearing clerical attire.

Before I turn to the real subject of this post, here's a brief preview of coming attractions: For a while, I've been preparing a response to a tag from Macrina Walker on a 'fifteen authors' meme that has been making certain rounds. Actually compiling a list of fifteen authors took me very little time (in full compliance with the rules, I managed to do it in under fifteen minutes), but preparing a post that goes beyond a list of names and actually explains the role that each has had in my life has proven much more of a challenge when teaching and preparing to teach dominate most of my waking hours. I hope that the break from work provided by this week's Thanksgiving holiday will give me the time to complete the 'fifteen authors' post and to work on some others that have been in the hopper for a while.

Now, the matter at hand: over the weekend, America's In All Things blog included a post by Jesuit Father Francis X. Clooney, currently Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard, offering some personal reflections on the question of how priests should dress in public. As he notes at the start of the post, Father Clooney was prompted to write on this topic in response to some readers' reactions to an earlier blog post which included a video link to a lecture that he gave recently at Harvard; to Father Clooney's surprise, reader comments on the earlier post focused not on the substance of his lecture but rather on his attire, or, more specifically, the fact that he wasn't wearing a clerical collar when he gave the talk. For Father Clooney, these comments raise the following question: "Should priests always wear clerics?"

In his reply, Father Clooney notes that great Jesuit missionaries like St. Francis Xavier, Roberto de Nobili, and Matteo Ricci all adapted their attire to suit the cultures in which they worked, concluding that "how we dress is instrumental to our purpose, and should be assessed in terms of its usefulness and appropriateness to the occasion, the mission." For a Jesuit at Harvard, Father Clooney suggests, this may mean dressing as most academics dress, even if doing so requires one to eschew more explicitly "priestly" garb. At the same time, Father Clooney is quick to point out that he always wears a Roman collar when he goes to the parish where he says Mass on weekends and that he sometimes does so at Harvard as well. He also insists (most explicitly in the comment thread on his earlier post) that at Harvard "everyone knows I am a Jesuit and a Catholic priest" even though he doesn't wear the collar on a daily basis.

Overall, Father Clooney's remarks on this issue strike me as fairly reasonable. I'm a bit skeptical of his claim that "everyone" at Harvard knows exactly who he is; I'm sure that this is the case with his Div School colleagues and others with whom he has regular contact, but I have a hard time believing that this is more universally true - Harvard, after all, is a big place, and I doubt that everyone on campus recognizes Father Clooney on sight and knows his bio. Nonetheless, there is something classically Jesuit about Father Clooney's argument on inculturation in an academic milieu - as he points out with his references to Xavier and Ricci, it's the sort of thing that Ours have always done - though in practice Jesuits are bound to disagree about how principles like these should be applied in concrete circumstances. As perhaps bears mentioning, Father Clooney offers his views not as a reflection of official Jesuit policy or as a prescription for all priests, seminarians, and religious, but merely as an explanation of his personal practice.

Though I'm not a priest, as a Jesuit regent and university lecturer I wear clerical attire on a regular basis. The Jesuits with whom I live and work take varying approaches to the issue of attire: some never wear clerics, some wear them for part or most of the time, and some wear them all the time (indeed, one priest in my community goes a step further and regularly dons a traditional Jesuit cassock when going out to do pastoral work). Though we rarely discuss such matters in community, I'm sure that each Jesuit could offer his own well-articulated rationale to explain why he dresses as he does. Given the diversity of the global Society of Jesus, it would be unwise to try to generalize too much about Jesuits' attitudes and practices in this area. At the very least, I should emphasize that anyone who presumes that Jesuits never wear clerics is quite mistaken - even if the Jesuits that you know don't wear clerics, you shouldn't take their example as representative of the universal Society. To quote an old and wise saying, "If you've met one Jesuit, you've met one Jesuit."

In my case, I always took it for granted that as a regent I would wear clerics in the classroom. Given that I teach at a Jesuit university and that it is precisely as a member of the Society that I came here, I think that it's important that I dress in a manner that visibly manifests my identity as a Jesuit; the easiest way for me to do this at a place like Saint Joseph's University is to wear clerics. Though this sometimes forces me to explain my status in Jesuit formation, noting (as I always do to my students on the first day of class) that I'm not yet a priest even though I often dress like one, I've come to value initially awkward 'don't-call-me-father' moments as opportunities to help my colleagues and students broaden their understanding of the Jesuit charism that animates the place where they work and study. I could articulate other good reasons for wearing clerical attire in my ministry at Saint Joseph's, but the ones I've given so far should suffice for now.

Given that this precise question came up in some of the responses to Father Clooney's post, I should add that I don't believe that priests, religious and seminarians should be expected to wear identifiable religious clothing every time they appear in public. You're not likely to see me in clerics at the bank or the post office, or (to cite one of Father Clooney's examples) at the airport. Though my sense of decorum is such that I generally dress up a bit when I attend classical concerts (something I do as often as my time and budget will allow), in that particular context I take 'dressing up' to mean wearing a jacket and tie - but never a Roman collar. I've also been in apostolic situations where I found it best not to wear clerics. As a novice and as a scholastic I have worked in two refugee resettlement programs, both of which operated under Catholic auspices and had vowed religious on staff; though all of my coworkers and some of the clients I served were aware of my religious identity, for various reasons I decided that I could more effectively carry out the mission that I had been given if I wore secular clothes. Thus, I recognize that the question of what Jesuits ought to wear in ministry is a complex and multifaceted one.

I could certainly write a lot more on this topic, but the above will have to do for now. Later today, I'll be driving up to Massachusetts to join my family for Thanksgiving. My prayers and best wishes are with all readers who are traveling or preparing to welcome guests and visitors in the coming days. May those who celebrate Thanksgiving Day this week find peace and joy on this holiday, and may God grant all of us a greater sense of gratitude for His work in our lives. AMDG.