"The liturgical celebration should be an “experience of beauty as well as of faith and prayer.”"

In an article written for Worship in 1980 entitled, “The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers,” Robert Hovda reminds us that the liturgical celebration should be an “experience of beauty as well as of faith and prayer.” ¹ Referencing Harvey Cox, Hovda goes on to say that liturgical celebrations demand that vesture “incarnate” the “conscious excess of festivity,” because “dressing up in an uncommonly beautiful and colorful way” is part of the service of the liturgical minister to the assembly.² The chasuble, says Hovda, helps the presiding celebrant recognize that he is “wearing something important, something that urges grace and dignity in movement, something that serves the festival excess” of the liturgical ministry.³ The chasuble’s “design and form and texture help to focus the action of the assembly” and its “massive color relates to feast and season and festive celebration.”⁴ Like lilies in full bloom, “liturgical vesture has a considerable impact on the feelings of the assembly“⁵ as well as the liturgical minister. Members of the assembly need the “massive color” of the chasuble or dalmatic to remind them that something very big is happening right before their eyes, that God’s love, lavish and breathtaking in its vastness, is accessible, ready-to-hand in Christ, in Word and Sacrament. This is what we join together to celebrate. And this is what vesture must help the People of God to do. Unabashedly beautiful vesture is what the Eucharistic gathering requires. (Of Lilies and Chasubles by Fr. James Palmigiano)

1 Robert Hovda, “The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers,” Worship 54 (March 1980) 99.
2 Ibid., 101
3 Ibid., 109-110.
4 Ibid., 109.
5 Ibid., 104.