Has Modesty Become A Dirty Word? Yoga Pants, Cage Fighting & Catholic Teaching

Outerwear or Underwear?

    Here’s a curious thing.  A couple years ago I started noticing that women had done away with their skirts, and were walking around in public wearing nothing but tights (which I had always thought of as undergarments) below the waist. This seemed to me to create certain problems in regard to feminine modesty, but few others seemed to find it remarkable.

A Young Lady wearing "Yoga Pants" and a magazine ( uscatholic.org)

   I was soon made to understand that when tights were promoted from underwear to outerwear they earned the right to be called “yoga pants”, and that no one but a few stuffy old geezers had any objections. I had almost despaired of anybody in the Catholic world even posing the question of whether women in public places really ought to be displaying the contours of their bodies in quite such exacting detail when I came across an article called “Yoga Pants And Catholic Social Teaching”, authored by Stephen Schneck, Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America.  “Ah”, I thought, “no doubt Dr. Schneck will address the dehumanizing effects of fashions that present women as sex objects, or the importance Catholic tradition places on modesty and mutual respect between the sexes, or perhaps even the importance of purity.”  

The Bait and Switch

   Well, no. Dr. Schneck mentions the trendy, form-hugging women’s wear only as a hook to draw readers to a brief discussion on the role of the economic marketplace in Catholic Social teaching.  The result is a missed opportunity, and a disservice to both topics. He says:

How many millions of us have purchased yoga pants or baseball hats with flat brims? No doubt some of us do yoga and play baseball and need the appropriate uniform, but something else is going on here. Where did our desire to make those purchases come from? . . .  the marketplace that is fashion . . .

Catholic social teaching says nothing about yoga pants or baseball caps. But the church does say something about market forces . . . Traditional church teachings have some issues with markets.

And off he goes.  First of all, while it’s true the words “yoga pants” never appear in any magisterial documents, I think one can make the case that the Church never the less has rather a lot to say on the topic, as we shall see below.  But first, a word or two about Dr. Schneck’s primary target, the role of markets in the Church’s Social Teaching, which is more relevant to the topic of modesty than it may at first sound.  Catholic teaching on economics is a very complex topic, and it’s hard to do it justice in a short article (and I speak as one who has tried, for instance in my post “Pope Francis Is Not A Communist . . . He’s A Catholic”).  Dr. Schneck does do a good job of summarizing the negative side of the Church’s teaching. He points out that markets function outside of our control.  He refers to Pope Francis’s comment that they “have no human face”, and can have destructive consequences, especially for “those people who live on the margins of society.”

One could get the impression from Scheck’s brief discussion that the Catholic perspective on markets is uniformly negative, but that is not the case.  In magisterial documents dating from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 Popes have reaffirmed the right to private property, and of individuals to do business; they also acknowledge that only markets can harness the productivity necessary to provide for the material needs of the world’s people (see especially St. John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus).  Schneck alludes to the leftish tone of some of Pope Francis’ language in Laudato Si’ and other places, which is undeniable, but it’s worth pointing out that Francis himself has insisted he’s not a communist or socialist.

The Dignity of the Human Person

Papal teaching emphasizes the dignity of the human person (Reuters)

   In any case, the foundation for the Church’s teaching in this area is the dignity of the human person, not some theory of economics.  It is not that markets are bad, but that they are amoral, impersonal forces.  Our dignity demands that we who were made in the image and likeness of God do not let mere things like markets make moral decisions for us. The same is true of government programs, political movements and ideologies, and any number of other similar forces.  In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis warns us against the temptation to surrender our moral decision making to the “technical fix”:

        Any technical solution which science claims to offer will be powerless to solve the serious problems of our world if humanity loses its compass, if we lose sight of the great motivations which make it possible for us to live in harmony, to make sacrifices and to treat others well. Believers themselves must constantly feel challenged to live in a way consonant with their faith and not to contradict it by their actions. (Laudato Si’ 200, my bold type)

   Ironically, in yoga pants Schneck introduces a perfect vehicle to illustrate the dynamic among market forces, morality, and personal choices, but he drops it as soon as he starts drawing close to his proper target.  By speaking of yoga pants so dismissively, he suggests that this is one instance in which we can comfortably let the market choose for us. He reinforces this impression with his breezy closing: “My best thinking happens, coincidentally, as I walk, with my baseball cap worn the old-fashioned way. If yoga pants do the trick for you, go for it.”  I think he is mistaken.  I think that yoga pants are a perfect example of how the market can override our better judgment.  In this case, our desire to be fashionable, or our fear of seeming prudish, can lead us to ignore the virtue of modesty.  

The Virtue That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Modesty is a very unfashionable concept today.  Even Dr. Schneck’s sly suggestion that there just might be an objection to yoga pants, which he introduces only to swat it away as a non-issue, elicits numerous indignant comments such as “Oh, come on, it’s only yoga pants!”  And it’s true that this particular style of dress (or near-undress), in and of itself, does not spell the doom of Western Civilization. At the same time, there are serious reasons well-grounded in Catholic teaching and tradition to criticize this form-fitting fashion.  More than that, the widespread acceptance of yoga pants makes them an excellent example of the sort of groupthink whose deleterious effects Dr. Schneck decries in economic markets.

    So is there or isn’t there a Catholic teaching on yoga pants? Well, we must concede that the term “yoga pants” does not appear in any magisterial document, but a great deal has been said over the centuries about purity and modesty. Below are excerpts from the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s lengthy summation of this voluminous body of teaching (bold italics mine):

2518 The sixth beatitude proclaims, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." "Pure in heart" refers to those who have attuned their intellects and wills to the demands of God's holiness, chiefly in three areas: charity; chastity or sexual rectitude; love of truth and orthodoxy of faith. There is a connection between purity of heart, of body, and of faith . . .

2519 The "pure in heart" are promised that they will see God face to face and be like him. Purity of heart is the precondition of the vision of God. Even now it enables us to see according to God, to accept others as "neighbors"; it lets us perceive the human body - ours and our neighbor's - as a temple of the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of divine beauty.

II. THE BATTLE FOR PURITY

2520 Baptism confers on its recipient the grace of purification from all sins. But the baptized must continue to struggle against concupiscence of the flesh and disordered desires . . .

2521 Purity requires modesty, an integral part of temperance. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden. It is ordered to chastity to whose sensitivity it bears witness. It guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of persons and their solidarity.

Feminine, attractive, and modest: Tia Alese Wong in her "Modest Church Look"

2522 Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love . . .  Modesty is decency. It inspires one's choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet.

2523 There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies.

2524 . . . Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person.

2525 Christian purity requires a purification of the social climate. It requires of the communications media that their presentations show concern for respect and restraint. Purity of heart brings freedom from widespread eroticism . . .

    So, when we are judging a fashion or manner of dress (again, yoga pants are just an example) from a genuinely Catholic Christian perspective, we need to ask ourselves: does it discourage or encourage “voyeuristic explorations of the human body”? Does it bring “freedom from widespread eroticism” or instead ensnare the wearer (and potentially observers) in that eroticism by encouraging "unhealthy curiosity"? Does it promote “the dignity of persons” and “respect for the human person”?

Colleen Hammond

The Eyes Have It

    Former beauty queen and television newscaster Colleen Hammond has written extensively on the subject of modesty in women’s dress.  In her book Dressing with Dignity, Hammond shares the results of studies done by advertisers in the 1960’s and 70’s, when “pants became common attire for women and girls for school, work and even church.” The data held some interesting conclusions:

Advertising agencies quickly prepared marketing research to find out the reaction of men to a woman wearing pants.  Do you know what they found?  Using newly developed technology, they tracked the path that a man’s eyes take when looking at  woman in pants.  They found that when a man looked at a woman in pants from the back, he looked directly at her bottom.  When he looked at a woman wearing pants from the front, advertisers found that his eyes dropped directly to a woman’s most private and intimate area.  Not to her face!  Not to her chest! (Dressing With Dignity, 49)

That sounds an awful lot like “voyeuristic explorations of the human body” to me.  And these studies were done on women wearing ordinary pants. Consider how much more profound the effect when women are appearing in public (and, yes, even in church) wearing pants that are little better than a coat of paint over their bottom and “most private and intimate area.”

Enter The Gladiatrix

    Speaking of paint . . . well, let’s just say that it’s getting harder to separate the literal from the metaphorical these days.  In other words, we now come to the curious case of one Ronda Rousey.  Miss Rousey has achieved fame as a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter.  That is to say, she makes her living beating the daylights out of other women for the amusement of the (mostly male) crowd. And she’s good at it, or was.  She was the first female MMA champion, and went undefeated until last November, when she lost a match to a young woman named Holly Holm. She didn’t just lose: she was knocked out by a kick to her face that put her out of commission for a long time.  As an article on People.com explained several weeks after the fight:

The stitches in her lip still dissolving, and a few of her teeth still unstable from Holm's fight-ending kick to the face, Rousey admits to ESPN The Magazine in its "Ideas of the Year" issue, on newsstands Friday: "It might be three to six months before I can eat an apple, let alone take an impact."

Even now, almost a year later, it doesn’t look like Miss Rousey will be able to return to her chosen profession anytime soon, certainly not until 2017 at the earliest.

Ronda Rousey, clothed and out of the arena

    A compelling aspect of this story is that, despite her unladylike way of making a living, Miss Rousey is an attractive woman (at least she was before Miss Holm's foot put her in need of restorative dental surgery).  Her feminine beauty has gained her not one, but two, appearances in Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition, which has traditionally featured female models posing in decidedly immodest swimwear.  This is where the paint comes in.  Miss Rousey’s “suit” this year consisted entirely of body paint; she was, in fact, not wearing a stitch of actual clothing in the photos (sorry, I’m not posting any links).

    This raises some interesting questions.  Was Miss Rousey clothed, or was she naked? It’s true that her painted “suit” covered quite a bit more of her body than the scanty bikinis that the swimsuit models usually wear, and from the right angle it looks like she’s wearing a fairly unremarkable one-piece bathing suit.  On the other hand, how many of us wouldn’t object if our wife or daughter (or mother!) proposed going out in public wearing nothing but a coat of paint? I suspect that most of us would insist that she cover her body with some actual fabric.  

What Goes Around Comes Around

    Which brings us back to the topic of yoga pants.  How much more cover is provided, really, by the thin spandex-like fabric of yoga pants than by Miss Rousey’s body paint? It’s a question that we ought to take seriously. “Oh, come on, it’s only yoga pants!” I know, I know, yoga pants are not going to End The World As We Know It, but they are an example of just how well (or poorly) we are respecting the human person these days, particularly when that person is a woman.  Consider that not only are we sending our women out in public wearing “pants” that are barely distinguishable from a coat of paint: we are watching them knock each other’s teeth out for our entertainment; we had a Republican presidential debate before the New Hampshire primary in which not one of the candidates who was asked about it raised an objection to drafting our daughters and sisters into the armed forces;  those same armed forces themselves have just changed long-standing policy that kept women out of combat specialties such as the infantry, which means many more women sent directly into the maw of war. And we wonder why violence against women continues to be a problem.

    Our Lord tells us: "He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much” (Luke 16:10).  Likewise, those who are disrespectful in small things will be disrespectful in large ones as well.  The little things matter.  I’m not telling anybody what to wear, but I am suggesting that we who call ourselves Catholic should take the teaching of our Church seriously (teaching which, not surprisingly, tends to respond to common sense, not fashion).  Our choices need to be guided by a conscience formed by Christ’s precepts, and He has appointed the Church as the preserver and teacher of those precepts.  We have also been promised that obeying God will make us happy: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil” (Jeremiah 29.11). So, look around you: would you rather see the women in your life treated like the Blessed Mother, or like Ronda Rousey?

St. Bridget Of Sweden, Patroness of Successful Failures

     Today is the feast day of St. Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden, who lived in the fourteenth century.  She was married in her early teens and had eight children, one of them St. Catherine of Sweden, she enjoyed a deeply committed and loving relationship with her husband, and at the same time acquired a reputation for personal piety and charity that attracted favorable notice from many people, including learned clerics and even the King of Sweden.  When Birgitta was in her early forties her beloved husband died, after which she devoted herself completely to the practice of religion and Christian virtues.  Also, as the Catholic Encyclopedia [link] puts it:

The visions which she believed herself to have had from her early childhood now became more frequent and definite.  She believed that Christ Himself appeared to her, and she wrote down the revelations she then received, which were in great repute during the Middle Ages.  They were translated into Latin by Matthias Magister and Peter Prior.

Influenced by these visions, she laid the foundations for a new religious order (the Brigittines), and set out for Rome, both to seek Papal approval for her order (which was finally granted twenty years after she set out, in 1370), and also to urge to Pope to return to Rome from Avignon (a task later taken up by St. Catherine of Siena).  She is truly a versatile saint: she can be seen as a patroness of mothers and families, and also for those in religious communities, and also an exemplar of charity, piety, and determination. 
     One of things that I found most interesting about St. Bridget is summed up in this passage from the article about her [link] at Catholic Online:

Although she had longed to become a nun, she never even saw the monastery in Vadstena.  In fact, nothing she set out to do was ever realized.  She had never had the pope return to Rome permanently, she never managed to make peace between France and England, she never saw any nun in the habit that Christ had shown her, and she never returned to Sweden but died, [a] worn out old lady far from home in July 1373.  She can be called the Patroness of Failures.

The article goes on to call her a “successful failure”, citing her canonization in 1391.

     St. Bridget of Sweden is in fact an excellent example of the quote attributed to St. Theresa of Calcutta: “God hasn’t called me to be successful, he has called me to be faithful”.  Whether or not Mother Theresa actually said it, it’s a marvelous statement of what it is to be a Saint.  As St. Paul tells us, the “wisdom of this world” is foolishness in the sight of God (1 Corinthians 3:19).  St. Bridget is a living reminder to all of us that our “success” as Christians consists in fidelity to Christ, and in nothing else.

Why Would You Want Satan As A Mascot?

“When you think about it, why would you want Satan as a mascot?”  This question was casually put to me twenty years ago or more by a high school student.  At the time I was the faculty moderator of a high school newspaper, and the student was leafing through a book of clip-art (do such things exist anymore?) when, in the mascot section, he came across several pages of “devils”.  I had never thought about it in those terms before, but he had a point; I’ve never since been able to consider devil logos as innocent and harmless.

     Now, there are many folks out there who will say that I’m making a big deal out of nothing.  As Catholics, however, we should know better: we of all people should understand the power of images. As I explain in an earlier post [here]:

This is something the Church has always understood: why else the great art, stained glass windows, cathedrals and Gregorian chant, the whole “smells and bells” routine?  Why else the traditional condemnation of “impure” images, and the stern warnings to steer clear of their dangers?

I go on to point out that current brain research that shows that images have a profound, often unconscious, impact on the psyche.

     In the case of mascots the connection is explicit. They are the modern-day descendants of the ancient tribal totems, which were believed to confer their most prominent qualities (e.g., the bear’s strength, the wolf’s ferocity, etc.) on the people that had adopted them.  While we no longer attribute numinous powers to them, groups still choose mascots (today mascots are often people as well as animals) because they represent certain desirable qualities that that the group would like to associate with themselves, and that they would like their members to emulate.  For example, American Indians have long been a popular mascot for athletic teams in the United States because of their reputation as brave and tenacious warriors.

     Images and logos on clothing serve a similar function for individuals: they depict things and ideas with which we want to associate ourselves, such as admired athletic teams and players, schools which we have attended, maybe a political message of some kind or some other symbol of personal importance (marijuana leaves are popular among a certain set).  The point is that we wear images on our person to tell the world something about us (and, usually, to tell ourselves something about ourselves).

     It was for this reason that my lovely bride was somewhat dismayed the other day when she went online to look for t-shirts for our children.  She visited the site of a well-known retailer that she had often used before, but found that this time a wide array of children’s clothing was adorned with skulls and similarly macabre images.  Now, I know that such images have been around for a long time, although usually only among a very narrow segment of the population; today they are becoming ever more pervasive, and less and less remarkable.  What does it say about our culture that we seem to think nothing of decorating our children, even little girls, with images of death and corruption?  What qualities are we holding up for emulation to these young people who are still forming their sense of self?

    This is the bottom line: if we surround ourselves with ugliness and grotesquerie, we shouldn't be surprised to find our world growing more ugly and grotesque; if we dress our children that way, why should we expect them to aspire to beauty and nobility?  That's no way to evangelize the world.  We need to say "no!" to the Culture of Death, even in a matter as "trivial" as a Jolly Roger t-shirt (don't they always say "the Devil is in the details"?). St. Paul tells us:

     Finally, brethren, what is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Philippians 4:8)

Not only is that Holy Scripture, it's plain common sense.

P.S, A final thought: The baseball team known as the Tampa Bay Rays played for the first time in 1998.  For their first ten years the name was actually the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (named after a fish, to be sure, not the Prince of Darkness himself); in those first ten seasons they finished in last place nine times, second to last once.  In 2008, the first season after the team had exorcised the word “Devil” from its name, they went to the World Series as American League champions.  Now, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence but, hey, just sayin’ . . .

These Guys were losers . . . 

    

. . . and these guys were American League Champs

Mozart, Herbert, John the Baptist, And Why We Can't Be Angels (from Principium et Finis)

All in the Head

     The great composer W.A. Mozart (who, I must admit, has made more than one appearance on this blog) is reported to have said that “Protestantism was all in the head”, and that “Protestants did not know the meaning of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world]”.  I would not put it so harshly, but with all due respect to my friends among the separated brethren, there is at least an element of truth to this observation.   Protestantism on the whole is very uncomfortable with the corporeality of more traditional expressions of Christianity, starting with the Protestant rejection of the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the efficacy of sacraments in general, and carrying that same mind-set through to a suspicion of any physical expression of faith apart from the Scriptures themselves (and, in some congregations, speaking in tongues).  As a consequence, the Sign of the Cross, genuflection, rosaries, icons and statues all seem foreign to them. It almost appears that many of our Protestant friends, relying on Sola Scriptura and focusing on just The Word, are trying to uncarnate (so to speak) the Word made Flesh.

Sure, they may not look naked . . . 

     Many of them, but by no means all: there have always been some members of the reformation churches who understand and embrace the sacramental outlook that has been preserved in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  One such is the 17^th century English religious poet George Herbert.  Herbert was an Anglican cleric in addition to being a poet, and so he devoted a portion of his poetry to defending his church.  Being an Anglican, he directed some of his fire at the Catholic Church, as one would expect, mostly criticism of the papacy and what he considered a certain superficiality (needless to say, I don’t concur in these objections).  He reserves his harshest and most substantive criticism, however, for the protestant Puritans, whom he accuses in his poem “The British Church” of being “undrest” . . . 

(Please read the entire post HERE at Principium et Finis)