The Pope has taken conser-vative bishops and cardinals to task for the way they dress, suggesting their adherence to ostentatious styles reveals a “rigidity” of mind that in some cases may even reach a level of “mental instability” and “emotional deviation.”
The Pope made his criticism of the sartorial preferences of traditional-leaning prelates in his autobiography titled Hope, which was published on 14 January. Their “rigidity”, he writes, “is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets”, which he described as amounting to “clerical ostentation.” The Pope then adds: “These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.”
In his autobiography, Francis stresses how he avoided the tri-mmings and finery of papal tra-dition once he was elected in 2013. “They offered me a beautiful golden cross and I said: ‘I have this nickel silver one from my episcopal ordination, I’ve been carrying it for 20 years,’” he writes. He also notably turned down the papal red shoes favoured by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. “The red shoes? No, I have orthopaedic shoes. I’m rather flat footed,” he said at the time, he recalls in his book. “Likewise, I didn’t want the velvet mozzetta, nor the linen rochet…They were not for me. Two days later they told me I would have to change my trousers, wear white ones. They made me laugh. ‘I don’t want to be an ice-cream seller,’ I said. And I kept my own,” he writes.