pardon me if i sound a little presumptuous… but all these wrangling over the nitty-gritty of cloths - isn’t it a little too legalistic and fixated on forms?
…cassock and/or alb - a matter of deep, Christocentric tradition or just distracting judgemental legalism?
if the wording is a little harsh, i apologise. i do not mean any offense… but i can’t hold back a sense of incredulity about concerns which do not seem to reach beneath the surface!
In ritual, form does count. That’s what rituals are…forms, and forms saturated with meaning by careful repetition, not by endless or careless variation!! This isn’t an example of unhealthy legalism. It is simple anthropology. Anthropology is nothing but a scholarly description of the way God made our collective psyches. Ritual is a need, and ritual requires a form. How strict the form has to be and how much the form serves the reality is something else again, but form is necessary to ritual. That is not bad. It is human. It is how God made us.
The Mass is conducted using sacred objects, set aside for sacred use. This includes the vestments. Dedicated sacred objects are common attribute of human rituals. We naturally feel a need to set some special things aside for worship of God, and for no other use. We also need to treat sacred objects in a more reverent manner than secular objects. Objects thus set aside become invested with the power to return us to a worshipful mindset. This is how our minds and hearts work, how God made us.
Cassocks are street clothes for clergy. Street clothes, even if they look like vestments, are not to be used as vestments. Cassock-albs are albs: vestments, not street clothes. (And Grapenuts…well, let’s not even go there…)
Vestments, likewise, are not to be used as street clothes. It is not allowed to wear the chasuble, stole, or alb to the coffee social after church, for instance. You wouldn’t use real vestments in a secular theatrical production, either. The reason is similar to the reason why lavabo towels and purificators aren’t used as kitchen towels later in the week, why a real chalice wouldn’t be loaned out for a theatre production of
Macbeth, or why the altar isn’t used as anything whatsoever other than the altar.
The Dominican habit is very close in fabric, etc., to what is sold as a “contemporary alb”, the difference being that a “contemporary alb” has a cowl-style neck, while the Dominican habit is literally hooded. (There are other differences, but let’s skip over those…) If the Dominicans ever retired their habits, never wearing them for anything
but liturgical use, then those would no longer really be “habits”, but could concievably come into use as albs, if the form fits the other requirements of form needed for an alb. For reasons of confusion, though–and I would be interested to hear from FrDavid if I finally have this right–they couldn’t choose albs that look just exactly like their current habits, just as we would not use purificators that look exactly like kitchen towels. There has to be some recognizable difference in appearance.
My understanding is that in the early Church, the chasuble itself was simply a white street cloak, with the same cut as cloaks in everyday use, but that chasubles were also set aside for the Mass. Just the cleanliness of the garment would make it distinctive. In extremity, though, if an object set aside for sacred use cannot be had then the most noble available example of an otherwise fitting secular object has to suffice. It could be dangerous to have more objects that are obviously for conducting Mass than absolutely necessary in a country where the Mass if forbidden by law, for instance. Even in the US, a Mass offered in a place outside a sanctuary would probably have to use a normal table, instead of a dedicated altar. When an especially tall or big Dominican priest shows up to offer Mass, and none of the albs available will fit him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt forced to improvise his habit into an alb, rather than using an available alb that was so small as to look ridiculous on him. The secular would be the more worshipful choice than choosing the ridiculous. That kind of thing. When there is a choice, though, the dedicated object is used, because dedicated sacred objects are important to our sense of encountering the sacred.
I hope that helps, and that anyone who finds a mistake in it will offer correction or clarification.
