Why I Dress Down for Mass

I'll own that these preferences of mine flow from a big-R Romantic attachment to naturalness and spontaneity. Though not anti-Catholic in the strictest sense, it does fall well outside the Church's own tradition of fides et ratio. For that matter, anyone could argue that the Church's proudest days coincided with the tenure of the hierarchical society destroyed by the French Revolution—the one where men did doll themselves up in breeches and tail coats. Still, casualness can take on a distinctly Christian cast. Kallistos Ware, a metropolitan in the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate, once told the story of seeing a man walk into a church, light some candles, recite some prayers, and leave—all without removing his hat. The lesson, Ware decided, was not that the man was an incorrigible slob, but that he'd felt at home in his Father's house.

The more at home I feel in my Father's house, the more likely I am to stick around after dismissal and buy some of His cruelty-free coffee, grown in Chiapas.

Eating and cell phones are real problems—the first because it breaks the required fast, the second because they can snap nearby people out of what whatever prayerful trance they've managed to lull themselves into. In my old, decidedly laid back, parish, nearly everyone obeyed the music director when she gently ordered us to turn the phones off. The programs handed out at another nearby parish list categories of people ineligible to receive Communion. Adding recent eaters along with visitors from other denominations and Catholics with unclean consciences ought to stimulate some enlightening after-Mass discussions, at the very least.

If none of that works, if the faithful regress to picking their noses and belching—well, I recommend a visit to Manhattan's Eldridge Street Synagogue, which dates back to 1887, long before the dictatorship of relativism took hold. Visitors will note metal pots at either end of each pew. These weren't collections buckets or outsized thurifers; they were spittoons. Members of the original congregation would have seen nothing incongruous: they were godly people—just godly people who needed their dip.