At first I thought this was a great idea considering some of the things I have seen people wear in Church. After thinking it over, I don’t think this is a path the Church should go. Where are you going to set limits? What about the poor who attend Church wearing tattered clothing? Certainly we are not going to deny them.
Rather than set an official “dress code”, perhaps we as Catholics should be more active in finding out why a person dresses the way they do in Church. I’m not saying suggesting being confrontational about it, but maybe these people are struggling financially, or maybe they are headed down a path they don’t want to go by wearing suggestive clothing.
just my two cents…
I’m sorry, but I simply must interject my thoughts on this which are certainly contrary to most who have posted on this thread.
We lived for two years in the South in a very poor Amish area in a small town of 2,500. The Catholic Church was 20 miles away. One Easter Sunday the family who took up the gifts were an absolute embarrasment for the entire congregation. The youngest daughter (probably around 13) wore short shorts and flip flops. The only son wore a black t-shirt that had an emblem of a skull on the back and the words, “No Fear” on the front. I know this was a poor family because many of us had helped them in one way or another. IN CONTRAST, we would see the extremely poor Protestant children ALWAYS dressed for church in the only ‘good’ clothes they had. The girls were not allowed to wear anything but dresses (usually home-made), and although thread bare, the boys wore long sleeve dress shirts (sometimes one size too small.) These were "hill-country folk - hill-billies if you get the picture, who had virtually no means but the land they lived upon to get by. My neighbor personally knew many of them. They were scandalized to know the way many Catholics went to church.
I say that the poverty issue is **not prevalent **as you think. There is not a person alive who cannot go to Goodwill and buy something suitable for the occasion, or go to a yard sale and buy clothing for 50 cents. Protestant Churches always have free clothing that they distribute several times a year.
We Catholics have lost the sense of the sacred - we have lost the gift of the Spirit of the fear of the Lord, and God have mercy on us because WE, of all people, have the greatest gift of all, the most holy and loving Eucharist. Did not God tell Moses to take his sandals off because he was on holy ground?
Where is the inner sense, when we enter our churches, to bow before Almighty God? Those Protestants had that sense - they would NEVER have entered God’s house without the proper attire.
I had a nun in high school who influenced me profoundly. One of her most frequent sayings was this, “the outer person reflects the inner disposition.” (Reflect on that for a moment!)
The ones who go to Mass wearing their yard clothes are saying “God doesn’t care what I wear to church - it only matters that I’m here!” To me, those people are patting themselves on the back and being self-righteous because they are in church, but they cannot be bothered to give the slightest respect to the Body and Blood of Jesus Himself!
Please forgive the rant - it really isn’t a judgment, but the biggest of my peeves to see so many dress before the altar without any dignity and receive our Precious Jesus in flip flops!
