Pope critiques ‘rigid’ dress sense and mentality of conservative prelates

The Pope has taken conservative bishops and cardinals to task for the way they dress, suggesting their adherence to ostentatious styles reveals a “rigidity” of mind that in some cases may even reach a level of “mental instability” and “emotional deviation”.

The Pope made his criticism of the sartorial preferences of traditional-leaning prelates, who have at times opposed his more liberal efforts at reform in the Church, in his autobiography titled Hope, which was published on 14 January, reports The Times.

Their “rigidity”, he writes, “is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets”, and which he described as amounting to “clerical ostentation”.

The Pope then adds: “These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.”

The Times cites Frédéric Martel, the French author of In the Closet of the Vatican, who states. “He is talking about cardinals like the American Raymond Burke and the late Raffaele Martino who have used the cappa magna, a robe which can be ten metres long and requires helpers to hold it so you can walk. It’s ridiculous.”

A longtime champion of conservatives within the Catholic Church, especially in the US, 76-year-old Burke challenged the Pope’s move in 2016 to end the ban on communion for remarried divorcees and more recently opposed the change over blessings for same-sex couples ratified in Fiducia Supplicans.

The Pope removed Burke from his job as the Vatican’s high court justice in 2014, then ejected him from his subsidised apartment in Rome in 2023, after he compared the Church to a rudderless ship, notes The Times.

Martel claims that the Pope told Burke “repeatedly and in vain that wearing the cappa magna in Rome is out of the question”.

In his autobiography, Francis stresses how he avoided the trimmings and finery of papal tradition once he he was elected in 2013.

“They offered me a beautiful golden cross and I said: ‘I have this nickel silver one from my episcopal ordination, I’ve been carrying it for 20 years,’” he writes.

He also notably turned down the papal red shoes favoured by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. “The red shoes? No, I have orthopaedic shoes. I’m rather flat footed,” he said at the time, he recalls in his book.

“Likewise, I didn’t want the velvet mozzetta, nor the linen rochet…They were not for me. Two days later they told me I would have to change my trousers, wear white ones. They made me laugh. ‘I don’t want to be an ice-cream seller,’ I said. And I kept my own,” he writes.

Hope, The Autobiography has been billed as the first ever biography to be published by a serving pope. It was originally intended to be published after the Pope’s death, but given the Holy Father’s ongoing longevity and overall robustness for his age of 88 years old, it has been published now and “serves as an update of his views”, reports Melanie McDonagh.

In her analysis of the Pope’s autobiography for the Catholic Herald, McDonagh says: “What this book does is yet again that Francis is a complex man, simultaneously compassionate and authoritarian.”

RELATED: Pope’s autobiography sheds light on his complex and contradictory mind

Photo: Pope Francis and Cardinal Pietro Parolin leave the Paul VI hall after taking part in the papal consistory before the nominations of new cardinals, Vatican, Vatican City State, 12 February 2015. (Photo credit FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images.)

The post Pope critiques ‘rigid’ dress sense and mentality of conservative prelates first appeared on Catholic Herald.

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