What do you think about Pope Francis decision of never wearing the papal choir dress (red mozzetta and rochet). It kind of strike me as a radical decision, since all catholic prelates seems to have to wear the choir dress when needed.
The Pope’s is a symbol of his sovereignty, and Pope Francis seems to think that the white one used daily works fine. I think he sees us as in a time where a show of importance has taken on too much importance. It isn’t as if we live in a time (as we once did) when people saw the Pope so infrequently that they might not know who he was if he weren’t in the most splendid dress of any of the other prelates. The monarchs of Europe have also toned down the trappings of their authority in most of their public appearances, too. (Queen Elizabeth II, for example, sometimes wears her imperial robes to open Parliament and sometimes doesn’t. That is her decision and no one else’s.)
This quote from Henry IV, Part I, hints that life was a bit different when few people ever had the experience of seeing what a monarch even looked like, when sumptuous robes let people see the importance of a person from a distance in a time when an up-close view wasn’t likely or practical:
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne’er seen but wonder’d at: and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, showed like a feast
And won by rareness such solemnity.
The skipping king, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits…
…
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes
As, sick and blunted with community,
Afford no extraordinary gaze,
Such as is bent on sun-like majesty
When it shines seldom in admiring eyes…
So in an important moment when you have all the cardinals with their red choir dress, the Pope is wearing just the cassock. I think it creates a kind of unbalance between the formality and solemnity of such occasions. Besides all that, it seems like a breaking of centuries of tradition. For what reason?
The same reason that Pope St. John Paul II wore brown shoes instead of red, I guess. The Pope decides what symbolism fits his papacy. He has that authority. Like Pope Benedict’s decision to abdicate before he died, the tradition that is carried on is the tradition that the Pope considers those things that are within his authority to decide unilaterally, he discerns what fits the circumstances of his papacy, and he makes the call.
We don’t live in a time where splendid dress is reserved for royalty. It shows up in Las Vegas. It doesn’t elicit awe as it once did. It is more likely to be taken as a show of glamour.
Times change and the way certain things are taken and the way clothing feels to the person wearing it changes, too.
