02-10-2021, 08:53 PM
Chapter 1 (Part 4)
One holy priest who was brave enough to stand up for what the Church taught us about modesty was Padre Pio. This holy stigmatist priest bore the bleeding wounds of Christ in his own body from 1918 until his death in 1968.
Born May 25, 1887 in Petrelcina, Italy, he was ordained to the Priesthood on August 10, 1910. Shortly after on September 7th, that same year, he received the invisible stigmata which would appear and disappear until September 20, 1918 when he received the visible wounds of Christ. So many people testify to his immense holiness and humility. One of his spiritual daughters, whom I know, relates how when she first saw him, she was awed by the tremendous holiness that emanated from him as he hobbled on his stigmatized feet toward the altar to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He was loved by so many and was popular even in his own lifetime for his wisdom, kindness and his spiritual ‘gifts’. He was also very strict in the confessional and he refused to grant absolution to any woman who did not wear her skirt well below the knee. He also insisted that women do not wear slacks (pants).He would not “tolerate low-necked dresses or short, tight skirts, and he forbade his spiritual daughters to wear transparent stockings (nylons). Each year his severity increased. He stubbornly dismissed them from his confessional, even before they set foot inside, if he judged them to be improperly dressed.” He sent so many away, that sometimes he heard very few confessions! His explicit wish was for women to wear their skirts at least eight inches below the knees upon entering the confessional. His brothers observing these dismissals with great unease decided to fasten a sign on the Church door which read, “By Padre Pio’s explicit wish, women must enter the confessional wearing skirts at least eight inches below the knees. It is forbidden to borrow longer dresses in church and to wear them for the confessional.” With his many gifts, one that was most popular was his ability to ‘read’ souls. No one could fool this holy priest with a borrowed skirt! Often the skirts were many inches below the knees but not sufficiently long for his moral severity. He would send them away saying, “Go and get dressed.”
What better message do we need than these very specific words of this most holy Priest! How very timely that God saw fit to give us this holy priest during an age of outright immodest fashions. His guidance speaks to us even today! May God give us other holy priests this courageous!
Men were not excluded from the requirements of modest dress, they were not allowed to enter Church without long sleeves and long trousers. This, at one time, was the standard rule of dress for men attending Mass. There is no reason why these simple guidelines cannot be adopted by the Faithful, especially coming from this Priest who was known as a living Crucifix and a true example for priests and lay people everywhere.
This is a dark world we now live in and our priests are only human, so we must pray for them! Those who do speak out against immodesty are to be commended, therefore, do not neglect to than your Pastor for doing this issue such justice. Our former Parish Priest made mention of it last summer and put a small notice in the bulletin as well. Another parish, who priest made mention of it, actually had parishioners walk out! This Faith of ours, is not for our picking and choosing, we must stop saying, “I will not serve!”
In 1946 the Canadian Bishops directed their comments to men by saying, “Man himself does not escape from the inclination of exhibiting his flesh: some go in public, stripped to the waist, or in very tight pants or in very scanty bathing suits. They thus commit offences against the virtue of modesty. They may also be an occasion of sin (in thought or desire) for our neighbour.” Often, we think that modesty is simply for girls or women, but clearly it is for men also as we can see from this statement. It is true though, that the larger part of the responsibility of adhering to modesty is in a woman’s hands simply because of the difference between women and men. Men are much more likely to fall into temptations by simply seeing a woman scantily clad, whereas, women sometimes take no notice of a scantily clad man. But in this highly visual age in which we live, there is a higher chance of women responding the same way and so it is imperative, that men also obey the rules of modesty and preserve, as best they can, the standards of modesty in society.
In 1940, Pope Pius XII, addressing a ground of Catholic Action girls, stated, “Many women…give in to the tyranny of fashion, be it even immodest, in such a way as to appear not even to suspect that it is unbecoming. They have lost the very concept of danger; they have lost the instinct of modesty.” Later, during the 1950’s, this same Pope, when speaking to Catholic Young Women’s Groups of Italy stated, “The good of our soul is more important than that of our body; and we have to prefer the spiritual welfare of our neighbour to our bodily comforts..If a certain kind of dress constitutes a grave and proximate occasion of sin, and endangers the salvation of your soul and others, it is your duty to give it up…O, Christian mothers, if you knew what a future of anxieties and perils, of ill-guarded shame you prepare for your sons and daughters, imprudently getting them accustomed to live scantily dressed and making them lose the sense of modesty, you would be ashamed of yourselves, the harm which you are causing these children, whom Heaven has entrusted to you to be brought up as Christians.”
He also often stated that, “The greatest sin of our modern generation is that it has lost all sense of sin.” This statement was made back in the 1940’s and 50’s, and it is more relevant today than it was then. We should be so grateful that God has blessed us with Popes who have had such insight! Children are born with a natural disposition toward modesty, which is especially noticeable as they grow and change. But take these same children and put them from birth in scantily clad “bikinis”, “speedos” and all other related clothing and you will see these same children will grow up with no shame about being partly nude, regardless of the company. Even in our own country here in Canada, I am ashamed to say, we have had ‘topless’ women up at our Parliament Hill demanding the right to go topless in public! What insanity! And even more insanity is that our Government gave them the right. A sure sign that our country is on a downward spiral of its own.
It is imperative that children be dressed properly from a young age, so as to instill in them the simple habit of being covered. This will guarantee them a chance of growing up with the natural modesty that God instilled in them as a sure protection for their purity later in life. Imagine living in a world where you must protect your children from people on the street who do not have the common decency to cover themselves? It is bad enough to have to shield them from immodest and even impure advertising billboards but I’d hate to live in a world where walking down a street could cause me, my husband and children to see nudity, which in some areas is possible already. What a sad place this world is becoming and it is getting worse every day.
In 1948, Pope Pius XII made this very clear statement, “Mainly through sins of impurity do the forces of darkness subjugate souls.” And this was in 1948! Imagine the immodesty today compared to 1948; it makes you want to shiver! Sins of impurity are so common that their sinfulness, in the Catholic sense, has been diluted. But these sins, like others, darken the soul and make us slaves to our appetites.
When Our Lady appeared at Fatima in 1917 she showed the three children a vision of hell saying “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go.” Imagine the many souls falling to hell every day from these sings of immodesty! “Sacrifice yourself for sinners” Our Lady of Fatima told the children. Even if all of the Church are not able to convince you surely Our Lady’s words can! This is one of the main reasons why F. Kunkel, found it necessary to emphasize modesty in his Crusade. He states, in his Marylike Handbook, “It is like a spiritual cancer slowly eating away the spiritual life in souls. It has brought the world to the brink of another Sodom and Gomorrah, this time on a worldwide scale.” Pope Pius XII sums it up when he says, ‘We are facing the threat of the greatest catastrophe since the deluge.’”
Is there a country that we can visit today, which has not been overtaken by immodest fashions? Sin as widespread as this surely has outraged God so much that we are facing a great chastisement of His holy justice.