Adopting appearance of poverty

If, as is evident, you must take account of the human surroundings in which you live, in order to adapt your life style to them, your poverty cannot be purely and simply a conformity to the manners of those surroundings. Its value as a witness will derive from a generous response to the exigencies of the Gospel, in total fidelity to your vocation -- not just from an excessively superficial preoccupation for appearing to be poor -- and in avoiding those ways of life which would denote a certain affectedness and vanity. While We recognize that certain situations can justify the abandonment of a religious type of dress, we cannot pass over in silence the fittingness that the dress of religious men and women should be, as the Council wishes, a sign of their consecration, and that it should be in some way different from the forms that are clearly secular. (Papal Writings, 29 June 1971).