In an intriguing twist on ancient and ever new concerns over women’s appropriate attire in worship, recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in chapel veils, aka mantillas, in some Catholic circles. How to think about this renewed interest? As someone with a scholarly interest in performances of gender and practices of liturgy, I offer the following thoughts.
First, the renewed interest in chapel veils should not be read, simply and exclusively, as a manifestation of a traditionalist mind-set — even if the sale of chapel veils, particularly online, is usually linked to tradical groups within the Catholic Church. Yet chapel veils also have appeal as part of a broader resurgence of practices of popular piety, especially among younger Catholics. Some women within this age group have begun to wear mantillas in worship as a way to enter an older, richer liturgical materiality that they never knew, since their parents had gladly left it behind. These young women are surprised to be seen as traditionalists, or as women opposed to women’s freedom from (what some see as) traditional signs of inequality.
Second, in the interest of full disclosure: I myself cherish my grandmother’s mantilla and have been known to wear it, for example to a Tridentine Mass. The point here is this: wearing a chapel veil in the early twenty-first century is — to use a grandiose term — a multivalent sign. It can mean a million different things, and we do well not to read this multivalent sign as simply a critique of post-Vatican II liturgical reforms, backwardness, mis-interpretation, or a combination of all of these.
That said, and this is my third point, a sudden increase of women donning veils in a particular parish served by a particularly conservative priest would trouble me, I think. What would trouble me most is not the women wearing veils but the overall vision of the parish. If the problem were just the women wearing veils, I might gather my women friends and commit to coming to Mass in outlandish hats every Sunday; we could start a liturgical head-gear contest that way (which I am sure existed when women traditionally wore hats or veils to chapel in any case). What I am trying to say is that in the case of such a parish, women’s chapel veils are part of a much larger problematic, and this problematic cannot be solved by attending to chapel veils.
As will be obvious by now, my own sense about the renewed interest in chapel veils is less dogmatic than my professional commitments to liturgical scholarship might suggest. If a young woman came to me and told me that wearing a chapel veil helps her, through bodily posture and attire, to enter more deeply into prayer, I would willingly hear that. I might even bring out my grandmother’s mantilla and see whether it can help me in the same way; I need all the help I can get with deepening the life of prayer, after all. In fact, a broader conversation with the young women might develop, about the rich and complex history of veils in worship (not only women were veiled and unveiled, after all). I might even tell the young woman that at least one community in the early Liturgical Movement of the twentieth-century encouraged women to veil for worship and provided mantillas for that purpose at the entry to the sanctuary.
If, on the other hand, a priest in the parish I attended encouraged women to veil in worship as part of a larger tradical turn, I probably rethink my commitments to that particular parish. Or I might begin to wear counter-signs: the most flamboyant hat imaginable, or maybe a biretta purchased on eBay?
The long and short is this: head-coverings have a rich and complex history in Christian worship (and women’s hair and faces in particular have long been sites of liturgical anxieties). Yet in our times, as maybe never before, these gender-specific clothing signs have become malleable, and can now “mean” a multitude of things. I actually appreciate that as a new freedom.
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