Clergy

May 22, 2024·51 min·4 clips

Avery Trufelman attends a lefty Catholic Mass to explore why priests' ornate vestments hold such power, even for non-believers.

The choir is already doing its work. A friend brings the host to Sunday Mass at a lefty Catholic church, where organ, incense, vaulted ceilings, and ceremony do what Catholic ceremony does: make awe feel physical. They joke about smells and bells, but the joke does not quite cover it. People drove an hour for this, and you can hear why. Then the clothes take over. Clergy dress sits between theater and theology, saying plenty before doctrine has to speak. The beauty is gorgeous, and a little suspicious. Someone links rich bodies and beautiful bodies to the divine, while the host keeps picking at the assumption that wealth can look holy. No one says rich. That is what makes it itchy, because a church is supposed to give money away, not sink it into garments and buildings. Revelation gives believers pearls, gold, jasper, amethyst, and other shining materials for imagining heaven. Rome complicates that shine. Reading about Roman super elites and Nero's golden house makes heaven look less like pure transcendence and more like the fantasy rich people already had. The glow gets darker. Perfect bodies, perfect dress, perfect rooms: maybe they are worldly wants dressed up as truth. The host leaves the tension intact. Maybe mortals confuse the good, the beautiful, and the wealthy because shiny things are very persuasive. The vestments still matter, though. By the end, the clothes matter less as objects than as a way into a thought she could not have reached without them. Then the spell breaks. The credits name Avery Truffleman, Nick Minoni, the Vatican project, the music, the images of chasubles and Vatican II, and a retreat into book-writing before whatever comes next.

As heard by us

A thoughtful Arts listen on Catholic spectacle, sacred dress, and the uneasy glow of wealth inside beauty.

Clergy listens to Catholic Mass as both ceremony and costume drama: choir, organ, incense, vaulted space, vestments, the whole "smells and bells" charge. Avery Trufelman is clearly susceptible to its pull, and that makes the episode sharper.

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Why you'd press play

When you want Catholic ritual to open into a larger argument about beauty.

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