Brendan Hoban: Church should rid itself of old sartorial habits  

Western People 25.6.2024

One of my favourite columnists is Liz Dodd who writes for The Tablet, an English Catholic paper, and sometimes in The Sunday Times. Liz is a young 30-something, has an unnatural shade of purple hair, a trendy haircut, five ear piercings and six tattoos and she is given, as part of her work, to cycling around Nottingham in a t-shirt and jump suit. At first sight not the kind of person I would normally want to read.

Oh! and by the way, she’s also a nun, a Sister of St Joseph of Peace, an ‘active’ congregation (as distinct from a contemplative ‘monastic’ order) and has made her first vows – of poverty, celibacy and obedience – at the end of a two-year novitiate. She is one of the few now entering religious life – just 11 in England and Wales in 2021, and of those only two made first vows this year. Liz was one of the two.

She lives in a convent with other sisters, refugees and young homeless people and sometimes she wonders, as do some family members and friends, why she gave up what she describes as ‘a dream gig as a travel, food and drink writer and her boisterous London houseshare’. She is, in short, the kind of nun that prompts the question: ‘She’s not a nun, is she?’

But she is. Her congregation’s charism (or mission) is peace through justice. They listen for God’s promptings in particular in the voices of the marginalised and their focus is on those society often excludes – in her case, asylum seekers and young homeless – including those marginalised by the Church: gay and transgender people and women. The God she encounters (usually when out running) is in soup kitchens and foodbanks and raves. It is a love, she believes, that will outlast the questions, the trendy haircut, even the tattoos.

For those of us who remember the staid, permanent world of religious life in the past with uniforms, habits and various forms of nonsense and incarceration, the image of the new nun courtesy of Liz Dodd seems a once-off curiosity. But, apparently, she seems to be exactly the kind of person God is calling into religious life at the moment – as she describes them – ‘risk-takers, in-between people, who thrive on uncertainty’. It’s obvious now that religious life as a stable, fixed entity with huge numbers of young women dedicated to teaching or nursing or parish work is well past its sell-by date.

I sometimes wonder whether the Liz Dodds of a different Church and their refusal to bend the knee to the traditions of the past by their ease with ‘modern’ dress have a message for the rest of us.

I remember once in Croke Park, on one of those recent painful All-Ireland days when Mayo conspired not to ‘bring Sam home’, seeing four priests dressed from head to toe in jackdaw black. It was a startling image, incongruous and almost defiant against the background of a sea of colour and life and energy. It seemed as if the black suit was an extension of their personalities, as if their role had consumed the person, as if they dressed any differently it would have meant leaving something of themselves at home.

Or maybe it was just that their wardrobes didn’t extend to dressing casually. Yet the rest of the human race can sometimes leave their uniforms at home. In Croke Park on that day soldiers weren’t wearing their uniforms. Nurses weren’t wearing their whites. Chefs weren’t in their high hats. Vets weren’t in their wellies. Barristers weren’t in their silly wigs. Yet for the men in black, it can mean black every day of the year, even on All-Ireland day. It’s like having a second skin we’ve grown into over the years.

In the 1940s and 1950s, students for the priesthood seemed to be everywhere. Like blackbirds. Black suits, black ties, sometimes even a black hat. (I remember at 18 years of age being turned back by a Dean of Discipline at the gates of Maynooth College as I was going home for Christmas because I wasn’t wearing my hat!)

Strangely, younger priests seem to have a natural preference for black, favouring the old stock and wide collar, even (it is whispered) wearing black socks. They love wearing the long soutane (or cassock), walking confidently up the Church as it swishes around them, throwing back the lapels to reveal a touch of black silk.  Capturing the good, old days when priests were everywhere and where they really were ‘the men in black’.

I notice now that the long black soutane seems to have disappeared in Maynooth, apart from formal liturgical occasions. In my time we wore it all day, even going to football matches. It had a symbolic significance as if representing the limited, enclosed clerical world we inhabited. It was the opposite of what Liz Dodd’s modern dress represents, a freedom to say what you think and to be the person you are.

In a recent column in The Tablet, Liz takes issue with some of comments made by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on gender ideology and registers her disappointment with its head, Archbishop Fernandez, a celebrated liberation theologian. In another column, she criticises some decisions of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in relation to the publication of the New Lectionary – the book used for scripture readings at Mass. She is unhappy that the translation used; unhappy too that the new version retains masculine pronouns – or sexist language; and unhappy that the New Lectionary with ‘gold-blocking, gilded edges and multiple ribbon markers’ costs £695. 

Liz describes the bishops’ decisions in relation to the Lectionary as ‘wasteful and scandalously unjustifiable for a Church that ought to be prioritising the needs of the poorest in our communities’. Would that our Church, like the Sisters of St Joseph of Peace, give us all the freedom and the courage to say what we think. As Liz Dodd does.

‘I’ve become a nun’, she says, ‘but the tattoos are non-negotiable’.