***GOLDENBIRD***

I have been accused of praised for my devotion to detail. If you only knew how much hard work and googling lies behind every page of Goldenbird… One particularly tricky subject, which has kept me awake many a late night, is the question of clerical fashion in the 1920’s.

Father Pietro doesn’t wear a pompom because it isn’t required of priests of religious orders. It may have something to do with a sense of style, as well. Here’s Don Camillo wearing one. I don’t think Falco would bother carrying a complete clerical wardrobe around on his travels, so he probably borrows a pompomless biretta from the Jesuits when he joins their services. I think he prefers the pompom secretly, though…

We are talking the Catholic Church, pre-Vatican2. Can you imagine the amount of fire-and-brimstone anti-modernist blogger oaths I’ve had to wade through in order to dig up useful information? Luckily, there is always some interesting Jesuit around to save my faith in Christians!

Yes, I confess that I have a soft spot for Christian individuals, although I don’t belong to the faith myself. That’s why I find it very important to get the details right and not make them seem any more silly than any other characters in my comics. Mayann, of course, is a very homespun type of Christian, tolerant and loving (based on many people in my family and among my friends). It is not obvious yet but her faith does play an important role in the story. Then we have the atheists and agnostics, who each deal with Christianity according to their personal history; for Lou, it is repression and tyranny; for Goldie, it is superstition and bigotry; and Andy is uninterested unless it serves the Revolution. This, of course, could lead to trouble with Falco…

… or not. I’m more curious about how I will make them work together for a common cause. I have no interest in depicting priests of any denomination as evil. They want to save the world, after all… I respect that. (Someone might say that this is naive, and it is true that I have never personally experienced true spiritual oppression from any source, religious or ideological. I don’t have an axe to grind against anyone but bigots - and bigots come in all shapes, colours and creeds.) However, I will reserve myself the right to make fun of the religious, like I do with everybody in Goldenbird, including myself. As Msgr. Georg Gänswein, the Papal secretary, said last year in response to some satirical sketches on Italian TV: “We’re convinced that smiles bring religion closer to the people, because a smile is never a sin.” Indeed! How much didn’t I learn from this enormous collection of anticlerical satire, guaranteed to bring a smile to your face, or at least to curl your lips and bare your teeth…

One of my main sources for seminarian life before Vatican v2.0 is the account of an American ex-priest from his seminar days in Belgium in the 50’s. Apparently, the young men were required to wear the cassock and the Roman hat even in their free time, which was something of an ordeal for the American students and made them easy targets for angry Communist youth in shady back streets. Wearing long pants under the cassock was ‘American-style’ - unheard of in Belgium (they must have had mild winters back then?!). On the pope Benedict XVI fan club forum I found the following tidbit: “[...] he seems to be wearing what look like “long johns” under the cassock. However, these are usually only worn in cold weather - at least in the UK. If he were wearing trousers under the cassock he’d be terribly hot in the Italian summer.”

Which reminds me of father Odilon Verjus, whose cassock hides only a pair of boxer shorts, an undershirt and some blasphemous tattoos from his shady past in the Parisian slums. How is this a part of the story? He considers it unseemly to beat up hoodlums unless temporarily defrocked. The horror!

Cassocks are rarely seen today, but apparently there are at least two varieties. The Roman cassock has 33 buttons in the front, the French soutane has a fuller skirt. There is also variation in how the fabric is plaited in the back, and seminarians apparently wear a cassock with three visible buttons. Don’t get me started on the colours of the piping and the fabric of the sash… I just hope that my illustrations don’t feature any glaring mistakes.

Thankfully (?) Benedict XVI has begun to bring back some of the old vestments again. The biretta, long gone from the normal liturgy except when worn by bishops and cardinals, is making a comeback since last year. It’s more difficult to imagine the saturno regaining any of its old-time ‘popularity’, although His Holiness has been sporting a fancy red version, matching his Prada slippers. The pope is quite a stickler to detail when it comes to his vestments. The cassock war of 2005 reminds me of the previous Benedict on the Petrine seat, who was elected right on the eve of the first world war. Benedict XV was so short of stature that none of the three different stock cassocks (more correctly, simars) would fit him properly. It seems that the former Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa accepted this with Christian humility, though. I have a soft spot for him, since he was one of the few European leaders during the whole war who made a conscious effort to stop the madness, drafted several peace plans and tried to reconcile the monarchs and governments.

“Neutral” Woodrow Wilson and Benedict XV: “How can my angel of peace fly, Mr President, when you keep filling his pockets with grenades?!” — Caricature by Olaf Gulbransson in Simplicissimus (1915-05-04)

August 31st, 2007 | Category: goldenbird, religion, à la mode | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL