CathNews New Zealand

For believers, the Catholic Church is at once transcendent and mundane — the Holy Spirit working on Earth through 2,000 years of committee meetings.

For those of a more secular bent, it is simply a terrific show, and hence the Met’s current exhibit of Catholic religious garments — and the Met Gala’s Catholic-themed fancy-dress ball lampooning them.

Some Catholics complained that the gala costumes were blasphemous, with Rihanna in a miter, Zendaya as Joan of Arc as imagined by Versace (she was not the only one in faux armor), Taylor Hill wearing something that looked like it came in a Halloween-costume box labeled “Slutty Cardinal,” and Madonna as . . . something called “Madonna,” in a crown and veil. But “blasphemy” isn’t quite the right word: What was mocked and caricatured at the Met gala was not God so much as the clergy, and God knows the clergy has it coming.

No less an authority than Pope Francis has from time to time put the holy verbal smackdown on prelates he regards as too ostentatious in their style.

The pope himself is a notably modest dresser, as befits a man who took the name “Francis.”

Rather than take offense, Catholics ought to smile a little at the dog-and-pony show at the Met. It is a reminder that the Catholic Church matters in the wider world, far beyond Catholic circles, in a way that most other congregations do not.

There is never going to be a Methodist-themed Met gala, and there are not millions of people around the world watching, rapt with anticipation, every time the Southern Baptist Convention elects a new president.

With all due charity to my Protestant friends, their traditions and their foibles are rarely held up for mockery because no one can be bothered to take the time to do so, give or take the occasional joke at Joel Osteen’s expense.

The secular world may not care much for Catholic doctrine, but it remains fascinated by Catholic aesthetics, which permeate our popular culture: About half of the horror movies ever made, heavy-metal music from Black Sabbath forward, highbrow television from “The Borgias” to “The Young Pope,” cinema from “The Godfather” to “The Matrix” (If Neo’s neo-Jesuit cassock isn’t in the Met’s exhibit, it should be) and much else.

In the 1990s, Gregorian chant was briefly inescapable after the commercial success of Enigma’s “Sadeness Part I,” most recently resurrected to comical effect in “Tropic Thunder.”

Even Kevin Smith’s generally misunderstood “Dogma” is, despite its wild vulgarity, a strangely sincere Catholic movie, a “Garden State of Earthly Delights,” as it were.

Why is it that Catholic style retains its power even as Catholic teaching is attenuated in the Catholic homelands? Continue reading

• Image: This Insider

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