I saw this story at Amy Welborn’s site earlier this week.<\/p>\n
In an effort to rid his church of the sight of young women’s bare midriffs, a Catholic priest in Cinisello Balsamo, Italy posted a sign at the entrance of his church that reads: "God knew what your navel looked like even before you were born, so there is no need to expose it in church.” Although guards at major churches in Italy routinely keep out people wearing skimpy attire, the priest says he resorted to the signs because his parish cannot “afford guards to keep out the low-cut jeans and high-cut tops.”<\/p>\n
And it reminds me of one of my favorite stories about St. John Vianney. In Ars at the time a form of dance was introduced that the saint considered quite immoral and though probably quite tame by today’s standards he was certainly right. He took action by both preaching against it and by hanging a sign on the neck of the statue of St. John the Baptist in the church. The sign read "He lost his head over a dance." He would also at times pay the fiddler engaged for dance as much or more than he normally earned to stay away from the dance.<\/p>\n
My own parish has a poster as you enter the door that says something to the extent of "Out of respect for Our Lord…" and then describes what forms of clothing are not appropriate. Not that it has had much effect. It never ceases to amaze me what people choose to wear to Mass. Clothes so immodest that only a floor length chapel veil would be of any help. Though of course immodest clothing is not restricted to just women. The clothes people wear in Florida are quite casual as it is and so you can’t say dress up as you would for going out for dinner since they in effect already do that. Though it always seems that it is the poorer members of our parish that dress up the most. I have heard Fr. Groeschel make the same observation that the more materially rich the parish is the more casual the clothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw this story at Amy Welborn’s site earlier this week. In an effort to rid his church of the sight of young women’s bare midriffs, a Catholic priest in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}