A somewhat uncommon petition from October 1716 is tucked away within the pope’s diocesan archives within the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome:
Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, has discovered himself ill because the month of September on account of a steady flux that descends from his head and impacts his entire physique. He has fixed ache inside and outdoors and, because of this, has remained with out hair and virtually with out enamel, with dizziness and short-term blindness. Docs concern {that a} better, even unrecoverable, sickness might happen. Piervenanzi, on the recommendation of those that deal with him, subsequently asks permission to put on a light-weight wig in pure colors, with a tonsure and with out curls.
Why would an 18th-century priest must ask the pope’s permission to put on a wig?
The underlying context of Piervenanzi’s petition was the contemporaneous style craze for rigorously coiffured false hair. Consider portraits of Louis XIV, J.S. Bach, Marie Antoinette, the Founding Fathers, or the ‘hanging decide’ George Jeffreys. A wig, the bigger and the extra elaborate the higher, was a must have for any individual of significance. Certainly, the nice English church historian Owen Chadwick as soon as remarked how ‘the wig turned as essential to the uniform of Anglican bishops as to that of English judges’. But Chadwick additionally famous that the identical was not true of Catholic clerics. For a number of generations, quite a few bishops in France and Italy waged a concerted marketing campaign in opposition to monks who wore them.
Pietro Maria Orsini, an archbishop of Benevento who in 1724 turned Pope Benedict XIII, was on the forefront of this crackdown. A lifelong Benedictine monk, and likewise the 18th century’s solely totally bald pope, he might have approached the topic of wigs from a very private perspective. But, like different ‘wig critics’ within the Catholic hierarchy, he noticed synthetic hair as useless, inappropriate and eccentric.
In Benedict’s critique, a priest who wore a wig to slot in with trendy developments in wider society was exhibiting a misguided, even unholy, attachment to the secular. The Sixteenth-century saint and archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo had beforehand mentioned as a lot. In a well-known pastoral letter, he admonished his diocesan clergy for neglecting godliness, which was clean-shaven, in favour of that century’s male grooming fad, the fuzzy beard.
Sporting a wig was even worse than sporting a beard, wig critics argued, as a result of it broke a key injunction within the Church’s sacred legislation. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians states that ‘each man who prays or prophesies together with his head lined dishonors his head’ and likewise that ‘a person ought to not cowl his head, since he’s the picture and glory of God; however girl is the glory of man’.
Many all through historical past have interpreted these verses to imply that males, although not girls, should take away their hats in church. And what was a wig if not a sort of hat? How might a priest who was in breach of this rule stand earlier than the altar and utter the Blessed Sacrament’s holy phrases? The scandal undermined its efficacy.
As pope, Benedict XIII issued three edicts in simply three years which point out wigs. Different popes had prohibited carrying wigs in church, however his proscriptions have been the harshest but: a priest who introduced his wig wherever close to a sacred area, even a vestry, could possibly be sentenced to fifteen days in jail, an indeterminate financial positive and suspension of his rights to have a good time.
There may be scant proof that Benedict was capable of catch any offending clerics – or, if any have been caught, to punish them for his or her misdemeanours. He merely lacked the assets to watch or prosecute his ban successfully. The issue for him, as for different Church leaders, was that many Catholic monks dissented from the anti-wig coverage. They could have been males of the fabric, however they didn’t share all of their superiors’ beliefs. Additionally they needed to take part in a wider social order past the Church itself, the place wigs signalled that those that wore them have been respectable individuals of standing.
The subsequent pope however one, the celebrated ‘Enlightenment Pope’ Benedict XIV (r.1740-58), recognised the issue and so took a unique strategy. Intent mattered, he prompt. A priest who wore a modest, unostentatious wig out of medical necessity did nothing flawed. It was solely extreme concern for outward look that was a sin.
This, after all, was the place superior by the priest Piervenanzi in his petition of 1716. However Piervenanzi was unfortunate: his argument was forward of its time (and his request denied). Just a few different monks who pleaded comparable instances did higher as a result of they argued extra forcefully that they wanted the wig to cut back ranges of disgust (and subsequently scandal) amongst their congregations. The Church seen monks whose our bodies have been imperfect with nice suspicion. The argument about disgust needed to be taken critically as a result of it threatened the priest’s parishioners’ souls if his ugliness precipitated them to keep away from church.
The Vatican’s Congregation of the Council, a physique established to manage conduct amongst spiritual, was usually referred to as in to adjudicate such instances. It dominated that hermaphrodites could possibly be monks however not nuns, for instance. It additionally determined the case of Antonio Maniardo, a monastic doorkeeper sacked when his unhealthy stammer prevented him from discharging his duties. Maniardo argued that his duties have been carried out by bodily actions somewhat than by speech, which meant that his incapacity was no object to it. He appears to have been much less profitable than different monks, who obtained to maintain their wigs.
The Church’s drawback with wigs ultimately solved itself. They went out of favor after the French Revolution and shortly each Catholic cleric was embarrassed that any predecessors had ever worn one. Pius VI (r.1775-99), the one wigged pope, was later mentioned solely to have worn powder in his hair. Clergymen who put on wigs at this time are too discreet to inform us.
Miles Pattenden teaches Historical past on the College of Oxford.
