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Hey Nick. Psst. Nick. Can you say where we are? We're at St. Ignatius on 84th and Park at an 11 a.m. Mass. And you can hear the choir sing right now.

So, my friend Nick brought me to Sunday Mass at a pretty lefty Catholic church. It should be noted that this church has posters of Dolores Huerta and Sharon Levine and other activists and labor leaders. But the Mass was as thunderous and full of tradition as ever. The choir picked up, the organ hit, the incense came out like a dry ice machine.

The incense is to cloud the vision because God is cloudy and you can't see him. This is a little nod to that. Obviously it's not enough incense to cloud anything, but it's a symbol. No one puts on a show like the Catholics, which sounds kind of flippant, but I mean it. The drama of it all, or as they jokingly call it, the smells and bells.

It draws people in, like this couple that was sitting behind me. Our story is good. We drive an hour from Greenwich, Connecticut to come here. Why? Why? Because we love it. This music just helps me to center and takes me back in history. And I grew up Catholic. I went astray. I came back. So it holds me. I mean, it holds me as a Jew who'd never been to Mass before.

There's no denying the power of the choir, the vaulted ceilings, and of course, the costumes. "How are you?" "So excited." "I wear something special for you." "You look great." Father James Martin, perhaps the most famously outspoken American Jesuit, notoriously inclusive of queer Catholics, took the stand. "Praise and peace to our Lord Jesus Christ,

He gave a beautiful homily about how we relate to each other, how we need other people for our salvation. We express our love of God through relationships with one another. He talked about needing to tend to community, especially within the church, as flawed as the church can be. Why do I even need the church when some of its members are so misogynistic or homophobic or mean or just sinful?

It was a pretty fitting homily because

Listen, I'm not here to enumerate all the controversies around the Catholic Church, nor the values that the church has taken stances on. So whatever your thoughts may be on divorce or contraceptives or abortion or the infallibility of the Pope or any number of issues, we are all called in relationship to concede that priests have incredible style. They also do.

I'm sorry to distract you from the prayer, but can you describe what Father Martin is wearing? What color is this? It's like gold. A beautiful sort of brocaded woven floral pattern on it. It's just very elegant.

Father Martin was decked out in yards of sumptuous, elegant cloth. And that's just seeing it from the pulpit. It was even better up close. Hi, that was beautiful. Backstage, Father Martin had taken off the gold brocade and was standing in his business casual attire, which was the black shirt with the high collar. The black and white priest collar is intended to be sort of a clothe.

a collar like a dog collar. It's a sign of devotion to God and to the church. But it's not required that Father Martin wear the collar all the time. This is like his business uniform. I wear it on official business, I would say. If I'm giving a talk, if I'm visiting someone in the hospital. It's like how a doctor wears scrubs or a lawyer wears a suit.

It's just that this uniform has a lot more baggage. When I put on the collar, right, it's called the clerical collar and the black suit, everybody treats you differently. Everyone treats you completely differently. Either they treat you like you're Jesus and you're the holiest person alive,

Or they hate you, you know, because you're a priest and therefore you're a pedophile. Father Martin said people have spit on him, told him he's going to hell. Or conversely, they unload on him. They want to make a confession. But it's interesting. It's a kind of litmus test about how people feel about the church or priest or God. Another priest told me that the little white square around your neck is a miniature projection screen. That people are going to put all kinds of ideas onto that little white square.

But again, the collar is for going around and doing regular duties, visiting a hospital, meeting parishioners, etc. That's the business wear, not the formal wear. If Father Martin is about to lead a wedding or a funeral or the mass I just witnessed, there's the fancy attire. Okay, get ready to do a little imagining with me, okay?

Over that black collared shirt, Father Martin will put on what looks like a long white nightgown. It's so long it almost brushes his shoes.

That's called an alb. So the alb goes first. The alb sort of covers everything and makes you a clean white slate. And then the stole goes over that. And then over that long white alb comes the stole, which is a long skinny scarf that hangs open around his neck. And then the chasuble goes over the whole thing. The chasuble is the big brocaded poncho. The chasuble is the main event.

Alb, stole, chasable. Nightgown, scarf, poncho. These are the vestments. The vestments are the formal wear for priests. And they are stunning. Aren't they beautiful? They're beautiful. They were. But I have to say, I felt kind of guilty, which I suppose is fittingly Catholic.

But I think I felt a little embarrassed that after all the singing about heaven, after the reading of an ancient text that was passed down for centuries, after the beautiful homily about how to be in community...

I had come to talk about fashion. I mean, they're hugely expensive. You know, it's like damask and all this silk and all this stuff. So most, you know, I certainly couldn't afford it. Father Martin shares all these vestments with the other priests. These clothes are as much a part of the church as a bench or a statue and almost as expensive. Yeah, they're the parishes. So someone gave this in memory of

Her husband, actually. So you can give vestments to the church, like as a gift, because, you know, they're pretty expensive. A well-made chasuble can cost anywhere from $400 to $12,000. Does that feel weird? Should that feel weird? Is this a good use of funds? I don't know. Okay, so obviously I have this podcast about fashion, but at best I feel very mixed about fashion. Maybe you do too, but this is my confessional.

I feel guilty buying clothes. I feel guilty about consuming unnecessarily, about working in an industry that relies on shopping, for over-considering my appearance. Of course I don't think that people should dedicate so much money and so much time worrying about how they look. I want to believe that we should dedicate ourselves to the larger world beyond us, or the introspective world within us, literally anything beyond the layer of fabric that rests just above skin.

And surely these holy men who have devoted their lives to service and study must feel the same. And yet, I gotta tell you,

There's a reason they're called men of the cloth. But they're just so beautiful, and you can just tell when you wear them. Priests love clothes. They do. They like the meaning of them. They like the feel of them. They like the beauty of them. And it's not just Father Martin and the Jesuits. I have talked to Trappists, Franciscans, Dominicans, Episcopalians, and a couple of experts for good measure. And they'll all tell you the same thing.

That when it comes to engaging with the world and engaging with your community and engaging with your soul, style does matter. It's just a matter of which style. After the break.

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I didn't think I knew much about Catholicism, but turns out we're not so different. Christianity...

is essentially just first century Judaism frozen in time. Like, Judaism moved on, like, got new clothes, grew up. Christianity stayed really, really frozen in the first century. That's my friend Nick, the one who took me to Mass. He's a journalist who covers the Vatican, and he's the one who turned me on to this idea of looking at what priests wear. So I'm knee-deep in this two-year project, making a documentary about the Vatican, and

This guy's name keeps popping up, John of Damascus. This guy, he lived 1,400 years ago in Damascus, appropriately enough. He is the key that forever links Christianity to articles of interest. But stay with me. Here's what I mean. 1,400 years ago, as I said, these little religious images started to pop up everywhere, right?

Little icons. Icons meaning like a little painting, a little statue, any depiction of God. Which, you know, according to the Ten Commandments, you are technically not supposed to do. It is in fact the second commandment. No idols, no worshipping statues. People were horrified by this. They would smash them, smash them. They were called iconoclasts, appropriately enough.

But this guy, John of Damascus, pipes up with a point. Wait a minute. So did God not become man through Jesus? Yes, right? Okay. So, says John of Damascus, if God, who made a beautiful, holy piece of artwork for us by making his son, you know, wouldn't he want us, maybe even love for us,

to make sketches and statues and ceilings and columns and rugs, whatever. Like, I think we have a special permission from God. You can thank John of Damascus for the Sistine Chapel and the Last Supper and Caravaggio and Raphael and El Greco and any number of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. So many great works of art and architecture over the last 600 years or so have come from this logic. It all comes down to the fact that many Christians believed

that through Jesus, God made a painting. And therefore, Christians are encouraged to use things of this world. Anything can be appropriately used to pay tribute. So this is entirely different from religions or sects who seek to disconnect with the mortal plane, who think that this world is nothing more than an amuse-bouche for the next one, who want to detach from worldly objects.

That's not Catholicism. Honor things, not dishonor things. No, no, no. Honor the thing. The things are everything. This beauty in the world of things makes sense when you think about a sense of awe in a place like the Sistine Chapel or that Sunday Mass we went to. But it makes less sense when you consider that there's another side of Catholicism, the monastics.

The men who, to me, seem to actively eschew the world of things, even as it develops all around them. So we are in the West Village on the intersection of Waverly and Sixth. It's like lower Manhattan. I was just saying I must have passed this building a thousand times and never noticed it. Didn't you say it's like a monastery? Oh, so this is where Dominican friars live. But this rectory is really not ornate at all.

This is not that kind of Catholicism. So you'll see, this will look like we're going to the DMV. Because these guys are very no-nonsense. And so who's our friar? Our friar is Father Boniface.

Hey, Father. Good to see you. Hello, Father Boniface. Father Boniface, so you're wearing a uniform from the Middle Ages in 2023. That's at the height of 13th century fashion. Father Boniface is clothed in a long, white, hooded robe. Someone asked me if I was a Jedi once. I mean... He does look like a Jedi. And that's kind of the point.

Friars are sort of like knights. So this is a tunic. You have the belt. We have a rosary on this side, prayer beads. And they're worn on this side. In the Middle Ages, for a knight, he would wear a sword on this side if he were right-handed. And so our sign is our weapon is spiritual, not a sword, but a rosary. So this 13th century robe is called a habit. This is Father Boniface's casual wear.

It's a bit more intense than the black and white clerical collar because habits, as their name rightly implies, are worn constantly. From time to time, I'll wear normal clothes. Like when I'm out with other friars and we're hiking deep in the woods, I'm not going to wear the habit. But I would say the vast majority of the time I wear the habit. A decidedly simple symbol of his faith, his poverty, and his vows. I do prefer it because it's a sign of

of what your life is about and you get a chance to evangelize as people will come up to you on the street and ask and talk or people will say, hey father, can you hear my confession? And so if you wear street clothes, you lose all those opportunities. Ultimately, the habit is a tool to be used. The habit is in fact such a powerful tool that that is how your position gets handed to you as a friar. When you enter the order, there's a ceremony called vestition and when

We take religious names. So I still have my baptismal name, but I got the religious name Boniface. And so you kneel, and then the superior of that community clothes you in the habit. You don't put it on yourself the first time. You're clothed in it by the community. And they put it on you, and then they say, in the world you were known as Robert. In the order, you will be known as Boniface. And you get a religious name. And so you essentially take on a new identity as a part of living out the vows. Wow.

Yeah. Religious life is good at drama. Even if the drama is subdued. Because it should be noted that even this simple white habit is not just some bed sheet or something. It's somehow elegant. Father Boniface looks regal in his habit. And it's not just because of his divine inner glow. We have to get seamstress to make them because obviously there's not an off-the-shelf religious habit store.

So this is custom made for you? Yes. It's tailoring. Even in these simple, anachronistic frocks, the fit matters. This is essentially like a custom suit, you know? If you only own two habits and they're all you wear,

They might as well be perfect. This one was made by a young woman named Emma. I think it has a tag. Yeah, the E. That's really classy. That's a really, it's just a script E with a period. I think we need to find Emma. I'm Emma. Mysterious Emma. Emma is actually a bit mysterious and would like to keep her anonymity. But suffice to say, I had to fly quite far.

quite far from New York to find her. But I am a Dominican habit seamstress, professionally. So when making a habit, Emma has to consider individual dimensions. So we're looking for something that looks appropriately proportionate on the young man. So the tunic hits at the right length at the ankle. Adjusts the neck bands on the tunic. Are the shoulders loose enough? You hunch your shoulders a little too much and you're not going to correct that at this age. It really is like a bespoke suit, which is to a degree about making you look symmetrical and proportionate.

where you just look good and no one can quite put their finger on why. Once the Friars have received their new habits, I do a studio setup in person and I fine-tune all the details. These habits are simple, but they are not careless.

They are, to borrow an annoying fashion phrase, quiet luxury. Beauty is a way in which we encounter the goodness of reality. And to seek beauty in clothing is not a bad thing. Father Boniface says there are just different ways to go about it. There's places for adornment and outrageous, over-the-top beauty. And then there's places for noble simplicity. And Father Boniface does engage with both kinds of beauty—

Even though normally day to day he wears the simple looking habit, he will also dress up formally for Mass, just like Father Martin did, just like any Catholic priest does in the vestments. They can be over the top so they can get extremely ornate. Over his habit, Father Boniface will put on the crisp white gown of the alb, the thin scarf of the stole, and the beautifully embroidered poncho of the chasuble.

All priests in Catholicism wear the vestments. I think it's kind of nice. It's basically about fitting in with the rest of the priesthood. The Jesuit Father Martin again. So if you see a Dominican day to day, they'll be wearing the white habit. Now, during mass, if you think about it, we put on the same thing. Over their habit, they would put on the stole and the chasuble. Over my collar, I would put the stole and the chasuble on. And so it would be indistinguishable.

That is what unites all these holy men. No matter what vows they've taken, whether they live in a monastery or give talks on TV, they are all united under this really beautiful and often very expensive garment. Which made me think, huh.

So we tend to think that religious garb is really simple. You know, it's simple, it's articulating something pure and simple about the Christian message. But that's not true, especially when you think about the origins of the clothing, especially against the backdrop of like richly embroidered clothing, things that were dyed with very expensive dyes that people could not afford. This is Dr. Candida Moss, journalist and professor of theology at the University of Birmingham. When you talk to people who are not Christian,

they'll almost always say, "Oh, but if I was going to convert, it would be to one of the denominations with the cool dress up." Like, "I want beautiful churches. I want beautiful music. I want those things." You nailed it so entirely. Not my first time talking to a non-Christian, right? You know, because beauty is compelling. It's compelling in the world today. And that feeling, the pull of beauty,

It's the foundation for the religious experience, but it's also the foundation for modern advertising. An image of a beautiful, well-dressed person somehow makes you believe that you could live like them, that you could be better and find more love and respect and success. People associate beauty and ideas of beauty like symmetry.

with not just with like physical appearance but with morality as if your soul and your body match in some way. It's not a new idea if you look at Christian art. When people draw saints they are always gorgeous looking. If they were decapitated they've been put back together. No scar. No scar in modern artwork. You might see a thin line in some sort of like almost like a necklace or

or a beautiful piece of jewelry. These are beautiful bodies and they're also rich bodies because there's an association between the divine and beauty and lingering beneath the surface is an assumption that wealth makes you beautiful. So what does that say? Is the idea like in heaven, once we transcend our disgusting mortal coil, we shall all be rich and beautiful?

Well, no one would say rich out loud. That's the quiet part. The church isn't supposed to be rich. It's supposed to be taking that money and giving it away. The argument about you keeping the money and spending it on clothes and spending it on the churches is that that beauty reflects the glory and beauty of God. So the book of Revelation says that at the end of time, the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city, will descend onto the earth. That heavenly city...

Has gates with precious jewels on it, like pearls. Gold everywhere, jasper, amethyst. So that's the basis. That's why churches look so gorgeous. This is why people are okay with this idea

extremely expensive kind of spaces. I used to think, well, this is just otherworldly. It is expressing the kind of otherworldliness of heaven and of the new Jerusalem. And then I started reading more widely about the Roman super elites. And I realized they have these things. Like the emperor Nero had jewels in the ceiling of his domus aurea, his golden house. That's what it means.

And so I think what bums me out was that it wasn't about transcendent wealth beyond people's dreams. It was about wealth that people actually had. So whenever we think about heaven, we just project into it wealth and what we would want now. Perfect bodies, dressed perfectly. So I think it's about people's hopes, about their worldly desires. And yes, that is profoundly depressing.

We mortals get confused. We conflate what is good, what is beautiful, and what is wealthy.

And I can't help but wonder if this is a profoundly human fallibility, something innate that we just are drawn to the shiny things. And if this is what the elaborate church vestments are playing into. Certainly they are projecting wealth as a marker of sanctity. Again, even if the priest himself only lives in two habits day in and day out, he still puts on the rich ensemble for the showtime that is mass. I'm stuck for it too.

If I'm going to go to a church, it better be some beautiful church. And even though in principle, theoretically, you could just have a room with a simple wooden table and like some chairs, that personally wouldn't do it for me because I'm shallow.

And that's what I worried about, that I, a shallow fashion person, might have been bending this whole exploration to fit my predilections. To shape this argument about beauty and holiness as it pertains to priest clothes to ultimately come away with a lesson that's like, "See? Clothes are important. They're good. You can invest in something that's really, really expensive if it's really, really beautiful."

I am, perhaps, seeking absolution for my confession so that I can continue to sin again and again. And so it makes sense to me that once upon a time, not so far away, there was once extensive discussion within the church about if priests should wear vestments at all. So maybe you saw this coming, but I have to talk about Vatican II after the break.

This is your Rome correspondent. Nick sent me this voice note on one of his trips to the Vatican. Okay, so...

I'm looking at this immense Renaissance catwalk that is St. Peter's. I'm seeing a couple of guys walk right now. They have the classic black pants and the shirt and the little white Roman collars. And then there's three bishops, and they've got a more ornate kind of shoulder material. I'm looking at all of them weave in and out of each other in this great, enormous square of St. Peter's. And every outfit means something else. And it's just like an articulation of fashion that I've never thought of fashion at all.

The Catholic Church contains many different fashions, so to speak. And so what I thought was niche turned out to be actually a relatively robust market. I think every city probably has nine to ten churches at least. Because you don't only have the Catholic Church, you have the Lutherans, the Baptists, you have the Scopalians. You have so many denominations of churches. And they all need a banner, they all need a tapestry, they all need altar linen. They all need something.

So how many markets do you know that actually cater to at least eight, nine, ten buildings per village? And a lot of those churches are catered to by SlaBank. My name is Victor SlaBank. I'm part of the fourth generation of the SlaBank family. We started our business in 1903 in the historical city of Bruges, Belgium. And the company itself is 125 years young. SlaBank makes almost everything a church would need. Altar linens, banners, tapestries, yes.

but also the vestments that every priest wears: the alb, the stole, and the chasuble. And in that case, Victor says,

there are really only two kinds of priests. Well, in the Catholic Church, you pretty much have the very conservative priest and you have the rather liberal, open-minded priest. And it does reflect. When a priest comes in our showroom and he takes out the vestment, we immediately know how his theological thinking is because he takes out the vestment that pretty much reflects his way of thinking.

And the difference really comes down to the chasuble. That's the part that I've been calling a poncho. But it's not always exactly like a poncho. There's another kind of chasuble that doesn't have sleeves. It looks almost like a vest or an ornate cloth sandwich board. It's called poncho.

a Roman chasuble. A lot of really conservative priests, when they come in, they take out the Roman vestment, which is the vestment without sleeves. And for them, that represents a vestment that goes back to before the Second Vatican Concilium. The Second Vatican Concilium, also known

as Vatican II. The Second Vatican Council. It's a big surprise. Okay, I didn't know what Vatican II was, so I'm going to define it. The Second Vatican Council was a big meeting to try to reimagine the role of the church in the 20th century. This is a recording of a talk by John W. O'Malley, a priest and historian who passed away in 2022. He wrote an excellent book called What Happened at Vatican II? So Pope John XXIII was elected in 1958.

Pope John XXIII was like, look, the church needs to reconsider some things. A lot has happened. The Holocaust was finally emerging from the shadows. Germany, a Christian country, strongly Lutheran, strongly Catholic. And this happened. Wow.

Another thing that was emerging after the Second World War was democracy. Not so surprising for us in the United States, but on the continent, the official church in Europe was in favor of return to the monarchy. This was true up until 1944 when Pius XII gave a famous address saying, "Well, maybe democracy is the way of the future, and it's more in keeping with human dignity."

And also in regards to human dignity, the period of open, rampant colonialism was done. Well, this is now over with. What does that mean? This was a big shock to the missionaries and also these native peoples, former colonies, saying, "What about our culture?" There were now lots of Catholics in Asia and Africa and South America. What about our culture?

you're trying to europeanize us we don't want to be europeans we're ourselves so pope john the 23rd decided that the catholic church needed to reconsider its role in the modern world so he called this massive meeting of almost the entire church in saint peter's at any given moment during the council there were generally about 2100 to 2200 bishops so it was

Huge simply in terms of the number of people. I love looking at the pictures of Vatican II. It's this massive hall full of bishops all wearing their red suits. 116 different countries were represented. But it's not like this was just one meeting. Vatican II actually happened over the course of years. It opened on October the 11th, 1962 and met

in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican for four periods lasting 10 to 12 weeks in the fall of 1962, '63, '64, and '65. And amid much, much debate, in short, there were a number of big decisions that came out of Vatican II.

Most notably, the church got rid of Latin Mass. Now, Mass was in the local language, whatever that was, so that participants could understand the whole liturgy. It's a full act of participation. And, I just want to be fair, there are pros and cons to this, right? Like, yes, when Mass is in the local language, everyone can understand what the priest is saying. But...

something that I always liked about Judaism is that even though I don't fully understand the service in Hebrew, there are a lot of prayers that I recognize and know by heart. And so I've gone to synagogues all over the world, and it's always in Hebrew. And so no matter where I am, I can participate. So you know what I mean? Like,

That's sort of something the church lost. So there was this debate back and forth there. And then there was this other sweeping change that before Vatican II, congregants spent the whole time looking at the priest's back. He was facing the same direction they were praying, to the cross. After Vatican II, he turned around and faced his flock. And another thing that Vatican II paved the way for was a wider acceptance of other religions. When I was growing up as a boy...

We could not go to a wedding or even a funeral of a Protestant friend or relative. To us today that sounds like unbelievable.

But that's the way it was. And all these little changes amounted to something massive. So what the council was asking really was for a kind of conversion and a shift in core values. John O'Malley put it in this beautiful way. This comes down to the question of style.

I love that. It was something about style, a change in a cohesive way of being. I mean, style is personality, expression of personality. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about the style of the church. The Second Vatican Council was about much more than a handful of superficial adjustments to the modern world. This style change was a move from the church prescribing certain behavior, often with

penalties for non-observance, into trying to inspire and motivate faith from within. So the movement was from commands to invitations, from threats to persuasion, from ruling to serving, from behavior modification to conversion of heart. As you can tell, John O'Malley is a big fan of Vatican II.

But as these meetings were happening, the Slabink family wasn't exactly sure what these changes would mean for the vestment business. After Vatican II, there actually was a movement within the Catholic Church to not wear vestments anymore, to just quit doing that because they just wanted to feel close to the faithful. They did not want that distance that was always created. And they felt that wearing vestments

might create some kind of distance between the faithful and the priest. I mean, and there were several movements. There were movements that became quite Protestant and said we will not be wearing vestments anymore, which would be the end of the company. And a lot of priests thought that this would be the end of the Catholic Church itself. Since Vatican II, we have seen the complete breakdown of the doctrinal discipline of the Catholic Church.

This is a clip from an interview show called What Catholics Believe, and this priest is part of a small but vocal movement claiming that Catholics since Vatican II had become too ecumenical, too Protestant. Because Vatican II created a church without dogmas. You have people who are teaching in Catholic universities who say that sexual perversions are okay or abortion is okay.

And so there are some priests who insist on continuing on as if Vatican II never happened. They say the Latin Mass, they turn their backs to the pews, they talk about divorce and birth control as sins, and they wear the vest form of the chasuble, the Roman chasuble.

The one without sleeves. So they consider themselves extremely traditional. When these kinds of priests come to Slabink and pull out one of these pre-Vatican II Roman chasubles, Victor knows exactly what their mindset is. And so he teases them a bit. Now, when they take that out, I always say, wow, you guys are so progressive. And you see them panicking because exactly what they do not wish to do. And then I say, well, it's funny how a much younger vestment is actually seen as a very traditional vestment. Something that's interesting

that's interesting about Vatican II is that it's often talked about for all the ways that it reformed the church and pushed it forward, not in the ways that it actually took the church back to the text and to first principles, which it actually did in some ways. And one of those ways was the fashion.

The chasuble with the sleeves, the poncho, actually came first before the Roman chasuble. The Roman chasuble was invented like 10 centuries later because the embroideries were just becoming too heavy because there was embroidery all over. So what they did, they just cut off the sleeves, which is a lot less cloth. They used a lot of velvet. So they just cut off the sleeves.

just to make it more practical for the priest. But it was modern. It was 10 centuries more modern than the first vestment that was ever worn in the church. So bringing back the original sumptuous long sleeves were sort of a dress reform movement because you can really only make them so heavy and so embroidered and so rich. They put a ceiling on the amount of wealth a priest's body can actually support while not getting rid of the vestments entirely.

I wear my owl, which is the white robe, and then I wear the stoles over it. And I typically don't put on the chasuble. They're not always the right size for someone, like I'm 5'5".

Celeste Geldrich is a priest based in Texas. Congregants can just call her by her first name or Mother Celeste if they're so inclined. Now I have other colleagues who are actually going by Father, even though they're women. She's obviously not Catholic. Women can't be priests in Catholicism. So the Episcopal Church is a derivative of the Church of England. It really was a compromise between the more Reformed and the more Catholic.

Here's the more reformed parts: Mother Celeste is married, she has children, she's supportive of divorce and gay rights, she buys her clergy shirts from this company called Clergy Image, and they make dresses and sleeveless shirts with clerical collars on them. Mother Celeste shakes up a lot of what I thought a priest could be. But the traditional part is that when she leads a mass, she wears vestments.

We still have this love of tradition and connecting back with something that has stood the test of time. And I think the vestments really signify that to a lot of people. In the church, the values have changed a lot. The architecture has changed a lot. Its reputation has changed a lot. But then the vestments have really stayed the same. Maybe that's just the nature of people and how much change people are willing to experience.

accept. And so maybe that's the one thing you're going to keep. I struggle to think about how this relates to the life of a lay person, because when I go through a shift in mindset or values, I tend to change my clothes accordingly. You know, you get new shoes after a breakup or a new wardrobe for a job. When you go through changes, you're

Your style changes. Right, Vatican II historian John O'Malley? "Style is not simply an ornament of speech. It's the ultimate expression of meaning. And style in life is crucial, right? What is John O'Malley? John O'Malley's a priest, John O'Malley's a Jesuit, he's an American. All that's important, right? How is John O'Malley? He's kind. He's sweet. He's a swell guy. That's what we're interested in, right?

In the secular world, fashion talks a lot about style, a way of being, how the wearer wants to be perceived as an individual. And it makes you lose track of the fact that fashion is an ecosystem, that it is a web connecting many people beyond me. But with vestments, that's impossible to forget. The monastery...

was supervised by professionals, but the monks gathered the field stones and the design was designed by the monks. You're making this sound. It just sounds like monks are the greatest amateurs ever. Like, yeah, we'll get the stones from the field. Like, how hard could it be? We'll design a building and some clothes. Let's make clothes. I mean, did you know that you could do all these things before you got here? No. Oh, that's for sure. I certainly didn't. I never imagined I'd be involved in business in any way.

Part of being a Trappist monk is not only taking vows of poverty and chastity, but also a vow of obedience. You have to be game to do whatever the monastery needs. Taking on the whole monastic life, and a vow of obedience, and a vow of stability, that we make a vow to this particular place.

The Trappists are a contemplative order. This monastery that Nick and I went to visit is in the lush, green countryside of Massachusetts. Very remote. These monks are not out and about in the cities, preaching in the parishes. No. In their cloistered lives of simplicity and poverty and obedience, they write and think and care for each other.

and clothe each other. We make our own habits. The monks make them. Father Timothy's Trappist habit looks different than the friar habit that Father Boniface had. Father Timothy's is white with a long black scapular over it. I can think of no better way to describe a scapular than like a long table runner over his body. But he wears this black and white habit all the time.

But yes, when they lead Mass, the Trappists also wear the beautiful, luxurious vestments. You know, we do have, we do use them. But the difference is, this is the monastery where they make them. You know, the thing is, we don't have an active, we're not like the Jesuits, we don't have education, we don't have hospitals, we don't do these different things. So this was a way of our kind of reaching out and sharing our life with the larger church.

There in the monastery is a business which Father Timothy runs. I'm the director of the Holy Rude Guild. The Holy Rude Guild, fine purveyor of vestments. Father Timothy accidentally found himself in the luxury fashion business. Yeah, so there's Alps department, Stoll department, Chasuble department. You know, it's our way of serving.

So as our monastic work, we as monks, part of our rule is to be self-sufficient and to make things to support ourselves. Some monasteries brew beer. Some monasteries make honey. This one makes incredibly elegant clothes. It's something out of what we consider beautiful and fitting for the liturgy. And it comes out of our monastic prayer.

It's pleasing to wear something that is well made and is well done and done with care and everything. And also this is made by your community or designed by your community. We do have the women who actually sew them, but we should go see them. Holyrood has 18 employees and five or six monks who help out. This is Brother Robert. He does the folding of everything at the last stage. Brother Robert has been at Holyrood for 59 years. When did folding become...

your job? Oh this, I don't know. You're in the sacristy for example. The sacristy, the master ceremony. Yes. I mean some prior at that time.

May I ask a rude question? Yeah. Is folding an upgrade or a downgrade from ceremony? Oh, I don't know. We don't think of it in that way. That question never occurred to me, actually. He served in that particular way, and now he's doing these with the vestments. Making these clothes, ironing these clothes, folding these clothes is as devotional and holy a task as anything.

Even for those who aren't monks, who are just employees of the company. It is meditative because, you know, you're going back and forth, back and forth. It just is something about it. Like Margaret, who is ironing a Kelly Green Chazzable spread out on a table. I've been doing it for so long, I'm 80 years old and I'm still running around doing it. You're 80? Yeah, that's what I mean. You look amazing. I know, that's what I'm saying. That's because I do this job.

In a little farmhouse at the bottom of a rolling hill, more seamstresses of Holyrood were hard at work, sewing chasables, albs, and stoles with incredible love and attention. We definitely inspect really carefully for any stains, any dots. Andrea told me the level of quality control is exacting. Literally, there was a piece of fabric that...

You made an entire chasuble, start to finish, the whole thing. And then we saw one teeny tiny little warp in the fabric. It was just a little tiny blue dot. And I was like, well, we can't send that out. No.

They line up patterns perfectly so there's no break in them. They attach the cloth with French seams that have to be sewn twice. This attention and care and beauty means Holyrood chasuble's last a long time. We had somebody send something back that was like 30 years old just to get new tassels. It is a devotional and purposeful craft, but

Just in the name of creation. It's totally separate from religion. I mean, Andrea's Jewish. We actually have some really great conversations because of it. And this is Sandy, who is working on a stole. I am Protestant. So does that feel, I don't know, how do you feel about being a Protestant making investments? It doesn't make any difference to me. They're beautiful. It's a gorgeous place. It's a peaceful place. And I get to create. So that's like a dream.

Holyrood is supporting the lives of craftspeople and supporting the small, humble community of monks. As much as we mortals can conflate what is beautiful and what is rich and what is good, there's no denying that ethics under capitalism cost money. That ethics have, tragically, become a luxury.

And this is what makes vestments so expensive. Even the ones that aren't made in a monastery. We work in Belgium, we have unions here. We cannot start making a vestment under $400. That is completely impossible. Victor Slabink incorporates Catholic values into his family's business. We offer fresh soup to our people every day just to make sure they have their vitamins. When there was COVID, we created free masks for the community and we serve community.

But when I see a lot of products coming in right now from people who do not even have a connection nor with religion, they have no intention whatsoever of serving anybody except their own pockets. There are cheap chasables on the market. You could find one for $90 or $100, but they're probably going to be made with shoddy materials and dubious labor practices. And that to me is tough because if it's just fashion, it's already tough.

But if it is serving liturgy, then I think it's extra bad because basically if you're worshiping God and you're consecrating, but it's made by a 12-year-old, that doesn't make sense. Competition like that is just destroying the world economy, it's destroying the textile business all over the world. I'm not the first one to say that we don't properly consider our clothes.

That we treat them in an unholy way. That we don't know where they come from and don't bother to learn. And even if we wanted to learn, it's information that's hard to get. We, writ large, don't treat clothes as though they were made by humans, which they were. But I think of what Father Martin said in his homily at that first mass that I went to. God is relational. God is relational.

Father Martin said that sentence is a distillation of everything he had learned in seminary, from scripture classes, moral theology, church history, pastoral theology, systemic theology, and Christology, all boiled down to one sentence. God is relational. People say, and it's natural, why do I need other people for my salvation when they annoy me so much? It is because we are, even in the face of

God is relational. Whatever you think about God, it is a statement about clothes. Yes, about how we present to each other and how we consider each other and how we dress for each other. But also clothes support other livelihoods.

There is a world of designers and makers, of meanings and traditions, woven into every single garment we wear.

So it's no coincidence that Father Martin is a big fan of Holy Rude, the vestments made by the Trappists. The most beautiful ones are the Holy Rude. And it just, when you put it on, it makes you feel different about where you are and how you're to comport yourself, right? Which that's really beautiful. It's just beautiful. And it's a way to God. And perhaps not in the superficial way that I worried it might be.

It might not simply be that humans are just attracted to shiny things. So there's this Swiss theologian, philosopher, Hans Urs von Balthasar. That's my friend Nick again, taking us home with a little philosophy from Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was riffing on this ancient concept. And basically the concept is this, that everything that is has these three properties. It has truth, truth.

"goodness and beauty. "If you are a thing in this world, you have those." And so, Balthazar, who was a religious philosopher, so it's all about God, he said, "Okay, so God also has truth, goodness, and beauty. "And those three things are the only ways "we can really explain God to people." Like, just pointing at something visually and saying, "Look, dude, look at the beauty of that. "And perhaps that could be a way in." You see what I'm saying?

I do see what Nick is saying. Hear me out. It's like how John Lennon started to play guitar because he thought it looked cool, or how a kid joins a sports team because she likes the uniforms, or how you find the love of your life because, at first, you find them pretty. Everything has beauty, goodness, and truth, although you may see one before the others. The challenge is not to conflate beauty and goodness and truth entirely.

but to see them as parts of a whole. Not to disregard beauty or call it superficial, nor to worship it and put it on a pedestal, but to see it as a piece of something larger.

Just as the beauty of the sports uniforms might lead the kid to the goodness of teamwork and the truth of the mind-body connection of athleticism, just like the beauty in the church is supposed to lead one to the goodness of community and the Bible and ultimately the truth of spiritual fulfillment, the beauty of clothing, the fantasy of fashion, led me to the goodness of quality and style and craftsmanship and tradition

And every single exploration from there on out has been in the pursuit of something like a larger truth. And now, perhaps, the clothes themselves matter less to me. But I couldn't have gotten to this place without them. A pocket, a piece of paper, words from yesterday. There's a portrait, did on the thing we love.

Articles of Interest is made with love by me, Avery Truffleman, with reporting, tape gathering, and inspiration from Nick Minoni. If you want to hear his project about the Vatican, it will be out soon from Crooked Media, so keep an eye out for it.

Also, music this episode and every episode by Ray Dawn Royal with theme music by Sasami. If you want to see images of Chasables and Vatican II, go to articlesofinterest.substack.com. That's it for the year. I'm going to go disappear. I'm going to write this book. See you on the other side. There'll be more later. Radiotopia from PRX.