Why Holy Things Still Need Signs
When the Church forgets how to teach sacred symbols, vestments begin to look like costume, and holiness begins to look like pretence.
One of the quiet confusions of modern church life is that reverence is often mistaken for fear.
Not “holy fear” in the older Christian sense, not the fear of the Lord that Scripture speaks of as the beginning of wisdom, but something flatter and more psychological. A nervous, distant formality mistaken for coldness. For many people, anything that looks solemn, symbolic, or “set apart” is assumed to be designed to keep “ordinary” people at arm’s length.
That misunderstanding has touched almost everything, including the way many people now see clergy, vestments, robes, and the outward signs of sacred office.
A cassock becomes theatre, a stole becomes fussiness, a chasuble becomes extravagance, a collar becomes an oddity. What was once understood, however imperfectly, as part of the Church’s way of marking holy things now risks being dismissed as costume, ornament, or clerical vanity.
If people are not taught what these things mean, that reaction is hardly surprising.
When symbols are no longer taught
The modern layperson is often surrounded by church symbols and yet given very little help in reading them.
They see a priest vested for Mass, or in choir dress, or simply wearing a collar in the street, but no one has really explained what any of it is for. They may notice colours changing with the seasons, or garments becoming more or less elaborate, but without any real catechesis those things simply register as style choices. At best they become part of the atmosphere, at worst they look like needless complication.
The Church shouldn’t be shocked by this. If symbols are no longer taught, they will eventually become opaque. Once they become opaque, they are easily treated as optional, eccentric, or vaguely embarrassing.
This has pastoral consequences. People begin to assume that vestments are only for clergy taste, only for aesthetic preference, only for those who like “high church things”. The deeper truth, that the Church clothes ministers in certain ways because she is trying to say something about office, sacrifice, service, time, holiness, and the difference between ordinary life and liturgical action, begins to disappear.
That is a serious loss.
Vestments are not self-expression
The point of vestments was never that, “Father gets to wear something impressive”.
In fact, properly understood, vestments do almost the opposite. They cover the person in order to point beyond the person. They say that what matters most here is not the private personality of the minister, but the office being exercised and the mystery being served. They place the priest inside an inheritance, reminding both priest and people that the liturgy is not being improvised out of individual charisma.
That is why dressing everything down is not always as neutral as it seems.
Of course there are contexts in which simpler dress is fitting. Of course not every priest is vested in every setting. Of course the Church must avoid empty fussiness and aesthetic self-importance, but when the instinct is always to reduce, simplify, flatten, and de-symbolise, the message people receive is that these signs don’t matter very much.
And if they don’t matter, why keep them?
The answer, of course, is that they do matter. Not because God is impressed by fabric, but because human beings learn through signs. We are formed by what we see as well as by what we hear. The Church knows this (or at least she used to...).
The difference between richness and extravagance
There is, of course, an honest objection here.
How can the Church justify fine vestments, precious vessels, embroidered fabric, candles, silver, gold, and visual richness when there are poor people in the world, hungry people in the parish, struggling families just outside the church door?
It is not a foolish question. It is a serious Christian question, and the Church should answer it seriously.
The answer has never been that beauty is a betrayal of the poor. The answer is that the Church must hold together two duties which modernity constantly tries to pull apart, the duty of mercy and the duty of worship.
The poor should be fed. The lonely should be visited. The suffering should be served, and God should be worshipped with reverence, beauty, and costly love.
Christian tradition has generally understood that these are not enemies. The woman who anointed Christ with costly ointment was criticised in terms that sounded practical, even moral, but Our Lord did not accept the criticism. There is a kind of expenditure that is not waste but worship.
That does not excuse vanity. It does not justify clerical “peacocking”. It does not mean every church must imitate a baroque sacristy, but it does mean that not every sign of richness is worldliness. Some of it is simply the Church’s attempt to say that God is worthy of honour.
What clergy represent
Part of the difficulty today is that many clergy themselves may not have been formed very deeply in the meaning of these outward things.
Some wear them with dignity and understanding, some because they have inherited them, some avoid them because they do not want to look fussy, inaccessible, old-fashioned, or overdone.
Some have never really been taught to think of them as “theology in cloth”, but that is what they are.
The priest does not only preach theology, they also wear it, carry it, enact it, and stand within it. The collar says something, the stole says something, the alb says something, the chasuble says something, even the refusal of these things says something.
Clergy represent more than themselves, one reason why the office matters, they are not simply private Christians with public jobs. They stand (however imperfectly) as visible signs of the Church’s ministry and of the holy things entrusted to her. That is why what they wear can never be only personal preference.
The point is not to turn priests into mannequins, it’s to remember that visible ministry is always teaching, even when no words are spoken.
The fear behind irreverence
Sometimes what gets called modernisation is not really confidence, sometimes it’s embarrassment.
An embarrassment about looking too priestly, too ceremonial, too formal, too set apart. An anxiety that sacred symbols will be misunderstood, and so it is safer to reduce them, look more familiar, more ordinary, more obviously of the world as it already is.
When the Church becomes embarrassed by her own signs, she usually teaches embarrassment rather than understanding.
People do not become more reverent because the symbols disappear, more often, they simply lose the chance to learn what those symbols meant in the first place. The mystery is not translated, it’s thinned, and a Church that is always thinning herself for fear of being misunderstood will eventually have very little left to explain…
Reverence does not keep people out
This is the point at which many people assume a choice must be made. Either the Church is reverent, symbolic, solemn, and perhaps slightly strange, or she is warm, inviting, and open to ordinary people.
That’s a false choice.
Reverence does not keep people out, often it is one of the things that draws them in. In a culture that explains everything, markets everything, personalises everything, and strips every office of its gravity, there is something deeply relieving about encountering a place where holy things are treated as holy.
People do not need every symbol to be immediately familiar in order to sense that it matters, often what arrests them is precisely the fact that it is not ordinary. The problem comes later, when the Church fails to teach what has been seen.
That is why explanation matters. Not defensive explanation, embarrassed explanation, but confident, patient catechesis. This is why the priest wears this, this is why the colours change, this is why the altar is dressed, this is why we bow, this is why we kneel, this is why some things are beautiful, this is why some things are veiled.
People are often more ready to learn than the Church assumes.
The Church must not be embarrassed by holy things
The deeper issue, then, is not really fabric, it is whether the Church still believes that holy things should look holy.
Whether sacred office should appear as sacred office, worship should feel different from ordinary life, outward signs should still carry inward truths, beauty and symbolism still belong to Christian formation, reverence is still understood as a form of love.
If the answer becomes uncertain, then vestments will always seem excessive, robes will always seem theatrical, and solemnity will always be suspected of hiding fear or pride.
If the Church remembers what these things are for, they can once again become what they were meant to be. Not displays of clerical self-importance, but humble signs that what is happening here is not casual, self-invented, merely functional, but given, received, and holy.
Reverence is not fear, it’s love taught to kneel.
Suggested Reading
Percy Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
Romano Guardini, Sacred Signs
This is an excellent and much-needed reflection.
One of the great losses of modern Christianity is not merely the abandonment of symbols, but the abandonment of the ability to read symbols at all. Vestments, liturgy, posture, sacred space, and reverence once formed part of the Church’s “grammar” of holiness. When that grammar is no longer taught, sacred things inevitably begin to look theatrical or unnecessary.
I especially appreciated the point that vestments are not fundamentally about elevating the personality of the priest, but about subordinating the individual to an office and inheritance larger than himself. Historically, the priest vested at the altar was meant to become less a private personality and more a servant standing within the worship of the Church through time.
I would only add that the deeper foundation beneath all of this is the Incarnation itself. Christianity is not a disembodied faith. God uses material things to communicate grace, truth, memory, and reverence. Water, oil, bread, wine, gestures, fabric, kneeling, beauty — these are not distractions from worship, but part of how embodied creatures learn to worship at all.
“Reverence is not fear, it’s love taught to kneel” is a beautiful line.
Great article. One argument that I typically run into in the Catholic world is that what we consider makes something look holy or look reverential is all a cultural construct. The only reverence that matters is in the heart of the worshipper. Not being a professional theologian, I don't have a great response other than the Church has never taught that. How do you respond to the argument that the only reverence that matters is that in the heart of the individual worshipper?