Outward signs

On a private blog, there's a discussion going on about "Protestant nonsense" some Catholics have bought into -- that modesty means wearing a long skirt, that there's an 11th commandment saying "Thou shalt homeschool" and so forth.

What it reminds me of, more than anything else, is the time when I was about nine and discovered the Amish. And I wished that Catholics had to dress like them. (The women, anyway; I was too young to care what the guys looked like.) Not only did I think it was a more graceful style of dress -- and I needed all the physical grace I could get -- I wanted a concrete sign that I belonged to something. I wanted to be able to say, "Look, me too!" without saying anything.

Maybe that's all they want, these people who think you should be able to tell a Catholic at sight -- and since no dress regulations are ever going to come down from the Church, they try to encode their own. Except, without the official authority, it's not so much "Look, me too!" as "C'mon, you too! Please?"