Monday, April 25, 2011

Mantillas: Cardinal Burke speaks

The canonist Edward Peters has a quotation from a letter from Cardinal Burke, the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, which has something both good and sensible on the subject of ladies wearing mantillas in church.

“Thank you for your letter …The wearing of a chapel veil for women is not required when women assist at the Holy Mass according to Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. It is, however, the expectation that women who assist at the Mass according to the Extraordinary Form cover their heads, as was the practice at the time that the 1962 Missale Romanum was in force. It is not, however a sin to participate in the Holy Mass according to the Extraordinary Form without a veil.”

I've argued before that bringing back the obligation to wear a head covering would be a good idea - though I'm not expecting it to happen any time soon.
2011 04 21_9296
Communicants on Maundy Thursday at St William of York, Reading.

The American habit of calling mantillas 'chapel veils' reminds me of a poem by GK Chesterton, 'A Ballad of Abreviations':

The American’s a hustler, for he says so,
And surely the American must know.
He will prove to you with figures why it pays so
Beginning with his boyhood long ago.
When the slow-maturing anecdote is ripest
He’ll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report,
And because he has no time to call a typist,
He calls her a Stenographer for short.

3 comments:

  1. Nicole8:47 am

    I wonder what people would say if Cardinal Burke declared it permissible, and that it imputes no sin, for a priest to say an heretical consecration formula at Mass. 

    I also find your apparent amusement with the label "chapel veil" interesting.  Most people that I have come across, even the old women who used to wear mantillas as girls, do not remember the name mantilla, nor do they call a mantilla a chapel veil (at least in my experience).  I do not know why there is a group in the USA who call the mantilla a chapel veil, personally.  I am guessing it is some sort of commercial term dreamed up by some marketing team to sell an old concept in a new package, so to speak.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3:03 am

    WOMEN DO NOT ASSIST AT THE EXTRA ODINARY LATIN MASS WHAT LAME BRAIN COULD CONNECT THE TWO?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joseph Shaw8:54 am

    Hey watch that Caps Lock key!
    Do you mean that there are never ladies at the TLM? Sounds like a claim that would be easily refuted.

    ReplyDelete