No one on the CCPC group has ever claimed that the Church “mandated” skirts or coverings - either inside a church or at other times. Wearing them is completely voluntary. If you were arguing that we were wrong to wear skirts or coverings, then you didn’t belong in the group. The group is for women who WANT to wear skirts & cover & live simply.
The only discussion of shoes that I can recall was over 2 years ago. I remember it because I started it (talking about my orthopedic shoes) & I called them “old lady shoes.” I was gently reprimanded because I wasn’t being respectful to the elderly.
Bonnie, when I was a member of the CCPC group, I never said that anyone was wrong to wear skirts and coverings - I don’t veil, but I wear mostly skirts myself, and if I were of the opinion that veils, skirts, and such were wrong, I would never have joined the list. When I joined, I was told that the group believed that plainness was a charism, and not a necessity, and had the group really believed that, there would never have been a problem; as it was, though, when I was a member of the group, an ideology was being subtly promoted which held that folks who were not plain, who did not homeschool, or who preferred to attend Novus Ordo Masses were sinners, or at best, were a spiritually inferior sort of Catholic.
You say that in your experience, the group is not like that, and I hope that you are right. It may well be that things have changed on CCPC , but for much of the time that I was a member, the CCPC links page included a whole bunch of links to SSPX sites, sites which taught that skirts and coverings were mandatory. There were people on the list who claimed that ["]Padre Pio had ruled it is a sin for women to wear shorts or pants]("[A) or to fail to wear a headcovering at Mass; these same people also claimed that the Vatican had issued a “dress code” in 1930 that is still binding upon Catholics today:
“”[A] dress cannot be called decent which is cut deeper than two fingers breadth under the pit of the throat, which does not cover the arms at least to the elbows, and scarcely reaches a bit beyond the knees. Furthermore, dresses of transparent material are improper" [Sacred Congregation of the Council (under Pope Pius XI), January 12, 1930]"
Many of the women on the list also claimed that they were 'persecuted" for choosing to veil at Mass or wear skirts, and, people being what they are, I don’t doubt that this did happen in some parishes, but many of those same women spoke very disparagingly of those who did not share their particular “charism”, and any dissent with their points of view or with the SSPX-ish teachings that I have described above was quickly suppressed. Dissent, however tactfully phrased, was viewed as a disrespectful attack upon women who choose to cover and/wear dresses only. I invite you to search the archives of the CCPC website, but you may or may not find the threads to which I am referring - often, when someone pointed out that women who did not share the call to plainness were not sinning by choosing to wear pants, makeup, heels, etc, the whole thread ended up being shut down and deleted from the list.
