Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
	If the alb is the premier baptismal garment, then why are there so many other styles of vesture in evidence in our parishes? In some places, altar servers and other ministers might wear a garment, usually black, called a cassock. Over that is normally worn a white garment (a “surplice”), reminiscent of the alb but much shorter, often of starched linen and trimmed with lace. The cassock is not a liturgical garment, but a clerical robe. Its origins lie in the religious habit of monks. By the late Middle Ages, diocesan priests and clerics increasingly were encouraged to emulate religious priests. Very small boys were often apprenticed to monasteries, especially for music education, and would be invested with a cassock and sometimes even inducted into the ranks of clerics.
	For centuries before the Reformation, it was required that all men entering higher education be clerics, and so the cassock and its variations became familiar academic garb. At the Reformation, many ministers retained a form of the cassock as ordinary dress, rejecting liturgical garments. In the seventeenth century, the English Civil War was in part provoked by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s insistence that ministers wear surplices. Although the Episcopal Church now retains “cassock and surplice” as the normal dress for lay men and women assisting at liturgy, Catholics are increasingly attentive to the deeply traditional treasure of the alb, our baptismal robe, when special liturgical vesture is needed.
—Rev. James Field