Chasuble

The chasuble is the clearest working example of how liturgical dress functions as a code that a congregation can read.

Absolute restriction

The chasuble is the outermost Eucharistic vestment, worn over the alb and stole, and its restriction is total: only a priest or bishop wears one, and only when actually celebrating the Eucharist. A priest merely attending a Mass someone else celebrates does not put one on, and a deacon never wears one, the dalmatic being his. Simply seeing who is wearing a chasuble tells the congregation who is at the altar and that the Eucharist, and not some other service, is being celebrated.

Colour as calendar

Its colour follows the liturgical season, white for Christmas and Easter, red for Pentecost and martyrs, green through ordinary time, violet in Advent and Lent, so the garment also tells the congregation where they stand in the year. The shape has swung between extremes, from the full conical form of late antiquity to the stiff cut-back fiddleback of the baroque and back again under the twentieth-century liturgical movement, and the argument between the two shapes is still running in some parishes.

The chasuble began as the paenula, a conical travelling cloak of the Roman world with a hole for the head, worn by everybody. In its original form it fell to the wrists and had to be gathered up over the arms to free the hands, which is why medieval illustrations show servers lifting the celebrant's vestment at the elevation.

Over several centuries the sides were cut away to solve that inconvenience, and the cutting went a long way. By the Baroque period the Roman form had become two stiff boards of ornamented fabric hanging front and back over the shoulders, with no material over the arms at all, a shape known in English as the fiddleback for the outline of its front panel. It carried heavy embroidery well and it was practical, and it became the norm across the Catholic world.

The nineteenth century liturgical movement objected. Reformers, including Augustus Pugin in England, argued that the full conical or ample Gothic form was the authentic garment and that the fiddleback was a mutilation, and they revived the older cut. Rome was initially unenthusiastic and restricted the revival, then relaxed, and by the middle of the twentieth century the fuller shapes were general. The argument has not gone away: the fiddleback returned to use in traditionalist celebrations and is now a visible marker of liturgical allegiance rather than a neutral choice of tailoring.

The chasuble carries the liturgical colour, and this is where the colour system is most visible: white or gold for feasts and the seasons of Christmas and Easter, red for martyrs and Pentecost, green for ordinary time, violet for Advent and Lent, and rose on two Sundays. Black survives for requiems in some places.