Madeleine Kearns (The Free Press), The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils:
Nicole Moore, 30, wears a veil to church every Sunday. Sometimes called a mantilla, these sheer head coverings are usually made of lace or silk. … Worn by women throughout the Catholic church’s history, chapel veils fell out of favor during the late twentieth century, but in recent years there’s been “an explosion of veiling,” says Moore, who attends St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Manhattan.
Her pastor, Father Peter Martyr Yungwirth, 39, tells The Free Press he has also noticed an increase in veiling over the last two decades. Indeed, Veils by Lily, a website that sells mantillas, has gone from filling 30 to 60 orders per month to an average of 900 in the last ten years. And it seems to be young Catholics driving the trend. “I have definitely noticed an increase of women, especially young adult women, wearing veils,” says Father Roger Landry, 54, Catholic chaplain of Columbia University. He interprets the veiling trend “as an attempt to be maximally reverent to God at Mass and in receiving Holy Communion.”
That may be the ultimate reason for veiling, but it’s not the only one. To better understand what’s behind the boom, I reached out to over a dozen Catholic women, ranging in age from 19 to 42, who choose to wear a veil to church. … [A]ll the women I spoke to say veiling has become a profoundly meaningful religious practice in their lives.
Veiling ceased to be the norm after the Catholic Church’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, commonly known as “Vatican II”—which, among other things, placed restrictions on whether parishes could offer the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
In the following decades, these regulations were gradually relaxed. But the roots of the mantilla’s resurgence lie in 2007, according to Father Landry. That’s when Pope Benedict XVI increased younger generations’ exposure to the TLM by officially lifting the restrictions on it. Pope Francis reversed this decision in 2021. By that point, however, it had caught on. The year before, a survey found a “high volume of participation” in the TLM among 18- to 39-year-old practicing Catholics in the U.S.
Veiling at the TLM is the norm, but many women “just kept veiling,” Father Landry says, even when they attended the modern Mass. …
In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul instructs women to cover their heads, to both comply with contemporary standards of modesty and emphasize a distinction between the sexes. …
Catholicism is experiencing a wave of nostalgia for an ancient, more solemn and reverent form of the religion—the kind that inspired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Even many Catholics who attend the modern Mass remain attached to the pre-Vatican II practices and help to preserve some of the church’s reverent traditions. Among the laity, this might mean wearing formal attire instead of jeans, or kneeling at communion and having the priest place the host directly on one’s tongue rather than standing and receiving by hand. Among priests, it might mean facing the altar as opposed to the congregation, or insisting on male-only altar servers.
And among women—it might mean wearing a veil. …
In Corinthians, men are instructed not to cover their heads. Scholars debate the passage’s precise meaning, but one theological explanation for the asymmetry lies in Christian symbolism: Women represent the church, the submissive bride to Christ, while men represent Christ, the self-sacrificing groom.
Among progressives, the veil, representing distinct gender roles, is sometimes interpreted as a sign of female subservience. One op-ed writer for the National Catholic Reporter argues that it is “backward, if not downright repressive.”
But the women I spoke to rejected comparisons to the hijab, arguing that the mantilla is not mandatory. The decision to wear one is and ought to be freely made. They also note that the veil is not worn in all public places, but simply in church, to signify a difference between sacred and non-sacred spaces.
“People dress beautifully to go see the King or Queen,” says Nicole LeBlanc, 25, from Michigan—so it should be with the Lord. …
All the women I spoke to felt that the veil dignified them, and many say it helps them express their love for the Lord. Nicole Moore, from New York, put it best. For her, the veil has become a comforting accessory to prayer, and helps her connect to God.
“It’s like feeling I’m under a blanket,” she told me. “I can kind of shut other things out.”
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