When the monks of Canterbury Cathedral prepared Thomas Becket’s body for burial in the year 1170, they discovered a hairshirt hidden under his vestments. The British faithful considered it evidence of the martyred archbishop’s piety. G.K. Chesterton considered it symbolic of the relationship between beauty and asceticism. “Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt,” Chesterton wrote, “while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold.”
When Robert Francis Prevost emerged from an antechamber in St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope Leo XIV on May 8, he greeted the crowds in a red mozzetta and crimson-and-gold stole. The people gathered saw those vestments as a punctuation mark on the premodern and regal trappings of the conclave. As Cardinal Prevost and now as Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope has signaled an appreciation for the Church’s heritage, which he does not consider a pharisaical distraction from the Gospel but a conduit for Catholics to draw closer to God.
The mozzetta and stole have rich histories in the Church. The mozetta, an elbow-length cape, has been worn by clerical leaders throughout the hierarchy. Stoles—cloths worn about the neck—are symbols of priestly authority. The pope’s use of red at his election, often thought to represent a willingness to die for the faith, traces back at least to Pope Gregory VII in 1076.
Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, was the first modern pope to decline the red mozzetta and stole at his election. Francis reportedly told the papal master of ceremonies that he “prefer[red] not to” wear the red cape, and his progressive interpreters characterized the decision as an act of humility and “simplicity”—implicitly accusing his predecessors of pride, or at least of being out of touch with the Gospel.
Whatever Francis intended by the gesture, his choice became a symbol of what one advisor described as the pope’s willingness to break “traditions whenever he wants.” That was a reductive description of a complicated pontificate, but it captured how many progressive Catholics felt about Francis. The Church, in their view, clings to an “iron triangle of bureaucracy, dogma and male power.” It insists on retaining markers of its identity—traditions, rituals, moral and theological teachings—that “modern man” no longer understands or appreciates.
These Catholics are unlikely to find in Pope Leo XIV someone who repudiates the traditions of the Church. In recent remarks to Eastern Rite Catholics, for example, the new pope emphasized the Christian West’s need to “recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!” These are recognizably traditional sentiments about the purpose of the Church’s liturgical life—not a communal celebration of the faithful, but a sacrifice that unites the faithful to God and one another.
As Cardinal Prevost, he repudiated evangelical efforts that downplay the “mystery of God” in favor of “spectacle.” “Certainly, the church has recognized after the experience of the past fifty years that we should not be trying to create spectacle, if you will, theater, just to make people feel interested in something which in the end is very superficial and not profound, not meaningful in their lives,” he said in a 2012 interview with Catholic News Service.
As Cardinal Prevost and now as Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope has signaled an appreciation for the Church’s heritage, which he does not consider a pharisaical distraction from the Gospel but a conduit for Catholics to draw closer to God.
After 1965, many parishes embraced spectacle in a misguided attempt to appeal to the modern world. They decorated their churches with kitschy felt banners, deviated from the liturgical rubrics to create a more “interactive” experience at Mass, and, in edge cases that captured the mood of the period, embraced absurdities like “Clown Masses.” While it is true that a reverent Mass, with its incense and in-built drama, is a “spectacle” in its own right, the most radical modernizers were attempting to advance a form of Catholicism that was “very superficial and not profound.”
In his speech announcing his intention to convene the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Pope John XXIII declared the need for aggiornamento—updating, referring specifically to canon law. Since the council’s conclusion, the principle of aggiornamento has taken on normative force in some corners of the Church. In practice, this has meant ridding the Church of those elements that distinguished it from the world—that which made it holy; literally, “set apart”—and embracing lower horizons in a misguided attempt to appeal to the modern world.
This has involved a rejection of traditional Catholic vestments, architecture, and music. After the Council, many priests ditched ankle-length cassocks for street clothes. Nuns abandoned habits for jeans and sneakers. Dioceses levelled their altars and replaced once-ornate churches with crude imitations of high school auditoriums. Churches traded organs and choirs for guitars and percussive instruments.
These changes do not have much to show for themselves. They certainly have not produced a surge in conversions or vocations. Catholics in many Western countries live identically to their non-Catholic peers and no longer recognize basic doctrines of the faith. Many lack a sense of sin or of the stakes of their lives. Seeking to appeal to the modern world on its own terms has made elements of the Church more like the world, but has not made the world more like the Church.
Chesterton described Becket’s hairshirt-and-vestments as “at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.” For sixty years, the Church has presented a drab face in hopes of appealing to an increasingly irreverent world, hiding its gold out of mistaken shame, and deploying shallow gambits to appeal to modernity. The strategy has failed. By embracing the Church’s ancient rituals and emphasizing the continuity of its teachings, Pope Leo XIV can chart a new course—one that calls modern man out of himself and toward the One who created him.