Let’s not kid ourselves, they look just so very fantastic, long black cassocks on today’s vital young priest. The Roman cassock, 33 buttons all black and slimming, the semi-Jesuit cassock and the complicated way you fasten it. A Catholic clergyman in a cassock walking through the sanctuary or on the city streets: There is a priest. The Year Rounder, the Southport, mandarin collars with a one-inch opening, a man unafraid to be seen, to be visible, to be clergy! 

In a world so denuded of signs and symbols of the sacred, the cassock is back. Has been for several years now, but more and more these days the thing. The timeless priestly garment, draping to the ankles, young men wearing them all over the place. Seminarians strolling the convention hall at the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis or giving out ashes in a New York parish hall; priests attending a Communion and Liberation gathering or presenting at the SEEK youth summit or leaving a West Omaha church. 

And not just in ecclesial spaces. There they are, shopping at a Boston grocery store or waiting in an airport security line and bringing a robust sign of God to the quiet hell of modern American air travel. At the annual Serra Night baseball game in St. Louis last fall, a handful of the priests wore cassocks. At a baseball game! The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the dark pigment of the cotton-poly sacerdotal garb. 

Father Ian VanHeusen works in campus ministry at East Carolina University and wears a simple Roman cassock everywhere he goes. “Even when I’m in New York City,” he said. Walking down the street, “I make eye contact with people and I smile. A lot is how you present yourself to the world. If you’re smiling and polite, it’s going to open a lot of doors.” 

The church unafraid to be what it is! Old school but new school. So deeply old school it is completely new school. Cassock as Sign and Signal and Cultural Marker. John Wick and “The Matrix” and Luke Skywalker and Val Kilmer in “Tombstone” and the Classic Vision of Priest, and who doesn’t need the Classic Vision of Priest these days when Priest is going the way of the nine-inning start? Father Benedict Radich of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Landover Hills, Md., said that when he was invited to visit a nondenominational church in Dallas, the pastor asked him to wear his cassock and show to the congregation that he is “clearly a priest and not afraid of it.”

Father Joe Kelly, the 70-year-old pastor at St. Monica Parish in Philadelphia, said he wears his cassock in public, on buses and on trains. He said, “If I have to wear clerics, it seems the easiest thing to wear. It strikes up good conversations.” 

The black fabric of the numinous, the bolts of cloth to manifest Something Bigger, witness to final things, to holy death; a cassock ducking into a confessional or walking down the street as sort of a sartorial shock troop to break open what is pedestrian and dull and small. To the unreligious, Flannery O’Connor might have said, you have to wear long and startling cassocks. 

The theater of it, the sweep, the way you feel walking around in a cassock, the way you feel! I have an old Roman cassock I found years ago in the attic at a Jesuit community on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. I never wear it; I hold on to it mainly for history’s sake, nostalgia. I decided to put it on one day for a walk around my neighborhood. (Cassocks aren’t just for priests; brothers can wear them, too.) It was 3 p.m. on a warm, post-rain, early March day; not many second looks from people. A man in a long gown, as it were. Not unusual here. I passed the Nonbinarian Bookstore up the block. Not unusual at all. 

I live near a Lubavitch Jewish community, and I passed an elder in his own long black garb. We caught each other’s eyes and kept walking. A religious person in a long black garment presents no kind of problem here.

I felt different, in my cassock, walking down President Street. I immediately noticed a slouch. I stood up straighter! (I am still standing up straighter! What is happening here?) 

We could say this about any kind of religious habit, frankly—they have been worn more and more for the past several years by younger members of orders. Young Dominicans in the hooded white habit, Holy Cross seminarians in the hooded black habits roaming the Notre Dame campus, Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in chalky gray-blue habits. 

But there is something about the diocesan priest in the black cassock. A woman seeing Father VanHeusen walking down the street in his church’s neighborhood near the college once told him, “I like seeing you wear that thing. It reminds me Jesus is in our midst.”

•••

The cassock has been called a “classless” garment. It is a sort of grand leveler that fixes the priest outside of any social status. It removes the priest from being seen as a member of some kind of Catholic upper class, which a fine clerical suit might indicate. Father Joseph Okonski, the pastor of St. Athanasius Parish in Philadelphia, said he wears a cassock “as a uniform.” The priest, who in 2024 received a Liberty Bell Award, the highest honor the city bestows for service to the community, said that a cassock is “my idea of dress up and it’s my idea of dress down.”

Before the Second Vatican Council, American priests wore black cassocks in church settings as a matter of course. Spencer Tracy and all that. Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley. Priests wore them hearing confessions or teaching catechism to sixth graders or beneath their liturgical vestments at Mass. The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 decreed that priests shall “observe the law of the Church, and that at home or in the church they shall always wear the cassock, which is proper to the clergy.” It went on to say that “when they go out for duty or relaxation or on a journey, they may use a shorter dress, which is to be black in color, and which reaches to the knees, so as to distinguish it from the dress of the laity.”

The “shorter dress to the knees” basically turned into black slacks, clerical shirt and white tab collar. Priests at that time rarely wore cassocks outside of ministerial spaces. (Until Vatican II, priests and brothers in religious orders pretty much wore their habits everywhere, in church and out. Jesuits wore cassocks all the time.)

After Vatican II, in the mid-1960s, as Joseph Weiss, S.J., a professor of liturgy at Boston College, put it, the cassocks “fell out of favor to help priests identify more with people, as integrated into their real lives.” Priests started to wear clerical shirts instead of the cassock in church settings, or they began donning flannels and oxfords and Izods in church and out. We’re all in this together. The Jesuits dropped the requirement for the cassock universally.

•••

The word cassock comes from the French word casoque, which means a long coat or overcoat. Priestly cassocks became the norm in the church in Europe as early as the sixth century, an ecclesial adaptation of the tunica, which was standard Roman wear at the time. Over the years, cassocks became more and more the accepted priestly garb in the church. In fact, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 decreed that priests must wear garments closed in the front. 

The Code of Canon Law now requires that clergy “wear suitable ecclesiastical garb in accord with the norms issued by the conference of bishops and in accord with legitimate local custom.” In the United States in 1998, the bishops’ conference approved this use of black suits and Roman collars for priests when outside the church. It added, “The use of the cassock is at the discretion of the cleric.” 

Thirty years later, this discretion might lead a cleric to Renzetti-Magnarelli, a religious apparel shop nestled in a sort of “funeral home district” of South Philadelphia. It first opened its doors in 1945, now employs four full-time tailors and makes the finest cassocks on earth. Priests fly in from around the country to the shop to get fitted for their cassocks, where everything is done by hand. When Robert Magnarelli, the owner, hires a new tailor, the first thing he teaches them is to learn to handle a needle and thread. “We don’t work with machines,” he said (italics mine, on behalf of everyone).

Mr. Magnarelli, who is 58, took over the shop from his father, Luccio, now 88, who himself had a reputation as such a superb tailor that in 1965 he was recruited from Italy to come to the United States and make garments for the shop. Mr. Magnarelli has been at this since 1990, and it took him until 1995 before he began, as he put it, making cassocks proficiently. He said there has been an “uptick” in cassock sales the past couple of years. When I interviewed him in early February, he already had cassocks scheduled to be made through September. 

The most popular styles, Mr. Magnarelli said, are the Roman style and the semi-Jesuit. The Roman is a simple black cassock with, traditionally, 33 buttons straight up front—33 signifying, of course, the jersey number of Larry Bird. A semi-Jesuit cassock is known by the way the inner flap goes across the body and underneath the cassock, with the upper flap starting from the neck and coming in from an angle…you’ll have to ask Mr. Magnarelli, he can explain it better. (The Jesuit cassock has a simple clasp at the top and no buttons, fully enclosed. They are difficult to find these days.)

When he sees seminarians or priests in cassocks, he said, it is not unlike a cop in uniform or a nurse in scrubs “who is there to save people.” In the same way, “A young priest or [any] priest wearing that cassock is a sign they are there to protect and save your soul for the coming of Christ.” 

•••

A Jesuit priest is visited at his ministry by a Totally Famous Leftist congresswoman, and on this day the priest wears a cassock. And she, does she have a problem with his wearing of the cassock? Does she post on social media the next day that I as the Premier Leftist Socialist Congresswoman, was with this priest in his cassock and while sure, he does some nice work with the poor, it was really just pretty annoying and disturbing and hyper-reactionary of him that he was wearing this cassock?

No, she did not post that. She just visited his work and loved what he did.

Father Okonski said his parishioners have never had an issue with his wearing of a cassock. “I’m not dealing with people who are post-Vatican II or pre-Vatican II or that whole religious political mindset of how you dress.” He said there have been instances when people come up to him at the parish food bank when he helps distribute food, or on the street, and ask for a blessing, ask for a prayer. “I’ve had a number of experiences like that.” 

Brother Claire M. Simon was a Jesuit at Red Cloud Indian School (now called Mahpíya Lúta), who for years until his death in 2006 strolled the campus in a long black cassock long after it fell away from Jesuit expected wear. He smoked, he grumbled, he was (delightfully?) cranky. He worked with young Native artists and started the Red Cloud Indian Art Show, now in its 58th year. And the cassock. Why did he wear a smoky black cassock when priests around him were wearing simple clerics or flannels and Levis? Because, as Brother Simon put it, when Chief Red Cloud asked for Jesuits to come to the reservation to educate Lakota people, “he asked for the Black Robes, not the Blue Jeans.” (It may also have been because he was contrarian by nature.)

•••

Nevertheless, you see a Catholic priest in 2026 walking around in a cassock and it would appear to some he is publicly telegraphing to the world: “I am boldly Catholic, I am ‘taking the church back’ from its diminishers and water-downerers; taking it back and out into the streets, marching under the banner of the Cross into the secular world thirsty for us.” And so no matter how witness value and gently smiling and “class free” the priest in the black cassock actually is, the impression can’t be helped! It’s just the way it is! “Behold, here is Priest! Ecce Me! Father has entered the vestibule of the church or the Trader Joe’s and will gladly receive your somewhat reserved awe. Gladly.”

The priest in the Bing Crosby cassock is broadcasting to the Catholic world: “Come, come, and enter the winged doors of the battered silver DeLorean that I have prepared for you since the foundation of my ordination: The flux capacitor is fueled up, the gigawatts are primed, let us get this thing cranked up to 88 m.p.h., so we can make a proper pilgrimage back to the Catholic Church of 1955…and stay there.”

But here is the next question: Who is noticing this? Who is feeling telegraphed to? Who is clocking the evidently triumphant young priest, the “Ecce Me!” of the modern-day cleric? Who is highly sensitive to any priest coming off as “smug” or self-elevating or backward time-traveling? 

Father Radich told me the only people who have ever made “a thing” of his wearing the cassock were other priests. One pastor told me that some of his brother priests “go bonkers” over younger priests wearing cassocks. Father Okonski speculated that older priests may get agitated over the return of the cassock because, by the time Vatican II came around, “they were just tired of it. They had to live in it for the most part.” A priest friend of mine was told by another priest he looked “ridiculous” wearing a cassock. When I brought the topic up in an email, one priest responded to me with an enthusiastic and delighted smackdown of the very idea of young priests walking around in the old school cassock. 

(Such a young priest’s pre-eminent apostolic ambition is to unilaterally install altar rails, disband social justice committees, with Teutonic emotional sterility preach against birth control and, with all the warmth of a hockey rink, preface the distribution of communion with, “Those who are in good standing with the Church…” Or so goes the impression.)

(And don’t get me wrong, I have heard stories that approach this reality. Nevertheless….)

And who else has their suspect eyes on the cassock wearers? You? Or people you know? Or this author? Or…? Who is letting other people’s clothing choice get so deeply under their skin?

Anyway, so there’s that.

Pause.

At this point I had intended to wrap this all up with a robust summary analysis of the socio-ecclesial matrix of modern evangelization as refracted through the inter-sacerdotal, textile-centered tensions arising out of the reclaiming of ars celebrandi as framed by Pope Benedict XVI in the midst of a reckoning with hyper-casual social norms as sifted through the experiential factotums of how long it takes a young priest to purify a chalice versus how long it takes a chalice to purify a young priest….

But to be honest? I don’t think it’s worth it. 

I don’t think it’s worth it in the best way that kind of thing isn’t worth it. Namely, the native problem of analysis: of trying to figure out, to dissect, to draw conclusions about people, to answer the why. Rather than just…let it be. Just notice a cassock and wonder about a cassock and then let it go. Because analyzing and figuring out and summing up and drawing conclusions about people and what they do and what garments they put on their body can be just another way to try and control them. And control life. Which is pretty much counter to the very idea of evangelization in the first place: to share the Word, and then let the Word do what it will. 

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”