Adopting appearance of poverty
Claim
- 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).