Cassocks, Roman Collars, Permanent Deacons, and Worker Priests

There’s a long string of comments on a Facebook post noting the decision of a French archbishop prohibiting his seminarians from wearing cassocks. Many of the comments bore me and some of the comments scare me. But so far none of the comments seems to take seriously that this is the decision of a bishop in France.

To understand his action, we might look at France and Europe now and in the middle of the last century.

Fra Gerard Francisco Timoner, OP, Master of the Dominicans, in a November 2021 Crux interview, noted that Europe is mission territory. 

This reminded me that in the 1940s, Abbé Henri Godin wrote France: pays de mission (France: mission country) which noted the loss of the working class to the Church. His book struck a chord. 

One response was the movement of worker-priests who worked in factories, without revealing their priestly identity. This was established first in Paris in 1944. The movement endured for several years until it was suppressed by the Vatican. One reason given was the involvement of worker-priests in unions, largely connected with the Communist Party. Some priests found themselves in leadership positions. 

It is very interesting to note that about the same time, priests in the priest block in the concentration camp at Dachau, began to discuss the possibility of married men as deacons. One of their concerns was the failure of the church authorities to be sufficiently aware of the evils of Nazism and to respond strongly.

After the war, one of the priests, Fr. Wilhelm Shamoni wrote in favor of married, working deacons:

The Church has not succeeded in holding its ground among either the leading intellectual classes nor among those classes most easily led astray, the proletariat. In their own milieu, deacons from these classes for these classes could gain influence incomparably deeper than could any priest, since priests would never develop within this milieu the kind of rapport that deacons would have already established.

There was a serious concern that the church had lost contact with the intellectual and working classes. The presence of deacons from these environments could enrich the church and open it to respond to the reality of contemporary life.

I also think of the foundation of the Little Brothers of Jesús by René Voliaume in 1933. The Little Brothers live and work among the poorest and in this way witness to the presence of Christ.

I wonder if Archbishop Guy de Kerimel of Toulouse who issued his admonition to seminarians  might have been affected by these experiences of the European and French church and so sought to avoid widening the breech between the church, its ministers, and the vast majority of “nones” in the French society who consider the church irrelevant or worse. 

I think we must consider all this before condemning the archbishop’s position. Perhaps he has a point and a concern that goes much beyond the question of clerical attire.

I have one quarrel with the bishop. He seems to tolerate seminarians wearing Roman collars. I got into a lot of trouble a few years ago suggesting that deacons not wear Roman collars except in ministerial roles. You can read my remarks here and here.