This Article is Not About Modesty, And Yet it Is

I don’t want to talk about modesty.

In fact, I refuse to talk about modesty. It’s the least interesting subject in all of internet Catholic discourse and it just doesn’t matter to me anymore. I don’t want to talk about modesty any more than I want to talk about felt banners (which I don’t mind) or tambourines (which I loathe) or the song “Mary, Did You Know?” The modesty discourse is a meme from 2019 and we all need to move on. I won’t have an argument with you about what you wear to Mass.

But I do want to talk for just a moment about the latest kerfuffle on social media, and that, unfortunately, involves modesty. So, modesty will be mentioned in this article, but modesty isn’t my point.

On X/Twitter, I saw one of those AI slop accounts that pretends to be manned by a pious priest but is actually manned by an internet troll, sharing a photo which wasn’t AI slop. The photo was of several people, mostly dressed casually in shorts and tees, attending Mass in what looked to be a beautiful cathedral. The focal point of the photo was the back of a woman with her hair in a braid, wearing gym shorts and a tank top. The AI fake priest was lamenting that anybody would “allow” people to attend Mass while dressed so immodestly, calling it “an insult to Christ.” It turned out later that this was a photo taken at St. Joseph Old Cathedral in Oklahoma City, which was offering a special 5 AM Sunday Mass so that people running in that morning’s marathon could attend Mass before they ran. That was why there were so many people there in running clothes: they’d come to make their Sunday obligation before they ran twenty-six miles, since they surely wouldn’t be in any shape to run afterwards.

That didn’t really stop the discourse. People were using the photo as an excuse to mock the Novus Ordo Mass, for some reason. Other people were chiding the woman in the tank top for not throwing on a sweatshirt before Mass began. Somebody was passionately explaining to me that I didn’t know what “male hormones” were like so I couldn’t empathize with the fact he felt like a woman’s bare arms at Mass were a temptation to lust. And, yes, dozens upon dozens of people were also mocking the people making a fuss over the pearl-clutchers. If anything, I saw many more Catholic commentators glad that the runners had come to Mass than offended they’d come in their running clothes.

Again: I absolutely refuse to talk about whether that woman, or any woman, ought to wear a sweatshirt over her tank top when she goes to Mass. I want to talk about something else.

I just want to say that, over ten years ago now, I once walked into an Adoration chapel with a noisy toddler Adrienne. I whispered to her that Mommy wanted to pray for a minute, and she could play quietly on the cushion in the back. Toddler Adrienne did not keep quiet, so I gently hushed her again, and a lady who was kneeling there angrily threw up her hands and stormed out of the building. Her husband turned and hissed at me that “this is a place of quiet and reflection,” and that I was responsible for people walking out of the presence of God, and he hoped I’d think about that– and then he stormed out. I just sat there alone with Jesus and noisy Adrienne, feeling so humiliated that I wished I’d never come to the Adoration chapel. And I still don’t like to go to that particular chapel.

I also want to say that when I was suffering from severe fatigue from my misdiagnosed chronic illness and couldn’t get through a liturgy without sitting, heavily, during the standing or kneeling parts, people stared at me and gossiped about me and made me feel terrible. They also gossiped about Adrienne, who is high-functioning Autistic like me, and who had severe trouble behaving herself at the liturgy when she was little, and about my parenting for having a child that wild. They gossiped to the pastor about it, and he scolded me. And I didn’t want to go to that church anymore.

I also want to tell you that when my religious trauma was at its worst, as I’ve written about many times, I would go and pray in a nice ugly chapel near my house, because the pretty ornate churches around town triggered severe panic attacks. My trauma was so bad that I absolutely couldn’t attend Mass and confession was out of the question, but I’d go and sit in the chapel with Jesus for a few minutes during the week if I could bear to. It was just about the only prayer life I had for awhile. And I think that keeping that little window open inside my mind: having one place I could go and sit and be quiet with the Eucharist for awhile, was part of why I was able to go back to Mass and recently try confession again. But there were days when I was driving by that chapel and thought I’d go inside for a minute– and then I’d remember that I was wearing shorts, just modest knee-length khaki shorts, and that some people yelled at women who wore shorts in church, and I was terrified that someone would see me and yell at me and make my religious trauma worse. And I’d decide I couldn’t go make a visit to Jesus and keep driving.

What if we just didn’t judge people when they walked into a church?

What if a church was a sanctuary, where people were welcomed in to take refuge?

What if we treated it like the Lord’s house and not our private club?

What if we let Jesus who was stripped naked and tortured to death in public be the one to judge the people who walked into His house, and we all just tried to love them?

On second thought, maybe this article actually is about modesty. Maybe we all ought to cultivate the virtue of modesty, in the OTHER sense of the word. Maybe we could all be humble and honest about our own limitations, not boasting or showing off our virtues, not too confident in our own infallibility. If we were modest, in that sense, we would recognize we didn’t know what somebody else was going through, but that they had as much right to be in the presence of God as we did. That would be something to cultivate.

I would like to attend a church full of modest people, in that sense.

I wonder what that kind of church would look like.