One of the quirks of human nature is that humans will do weird or unseemly things that feel natural or wonderful so long as everyone around you is doing the same thing. Take eucharistic adoration. For many devout Catholics, that's a central feature of their piety.
But take a step back and consider the spectacle of a grown man who thinks sitting in front of an ornate storage box containing wafers, for hours at a time, is a way to experience Jesus, commune with Jesus, feel the presence of Jesus beaming from the box. That may seem like the most natural thing in the world if you're in a social setting where there's group reinforcement, but if you think about it, isn't that a very artificial act of devotion?
To take a comparison, a few years ago a PCA church had three male ballet dancers perform on stage in the worship service:
To the ballet dancers, that seemed like a perfectly normal, reverent thing to do. In the social context of urban elites and the ballet subculture, there was nothing jarring about that.
But to a disinterested outside observer, the performance was a giggle fest. A normal man can't watch it with a straight face.
What's striking is the contrast between the self-image of the dancers and the image they're actually projecting. It never occurred to them that this performance would go viral. They couldn't foresee how this would make their church a laughingstock.
Consider kings and noblemen who used to dress up in slippers, silk stockings, and powered wigs. When we see those paintings we think how foppish and decadent they are, but that wasn't the impression they had. If everyone's a fop then nobody's a fop.
Catholicism provides many other examples. The Sistine choir used to have castrati. Popes sincerely thought that was better than having–heaven forbid!–women in the choir. Within the bubble of old-fashioned Catholicism, that seemed to be reverent. Here's one of the Sistine choir castrati:
To a disinterested outside observer, that's an utterly cringey performance. Unintended comic relief.
By the same token, the traditional wardrobe of popes would be a drag queen's dream come true. Yet until recently, Catholics reveled in that. It doesn't go over as well in the television age, which is why a media savvy pontiff like Pope Francis has mothballed that tradition.
The upshot is that almost nothing is too ludicrous which may not seem natural or praiseworthy so long as everyone in your peer group is doing it.
Fulton sheen dressed and paraded like a peacock.
ReplyDeleteCardinal Burke, too. Heck, David Zubic, the current bishop of Pittsburgh, used to dress like Liberace before he was the bishop here.
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