Liturgical lace
Though it is often believed that "no documentary evidence exists that lace was made before the 15th century", it has also been shown from ancient Egyptian nets that embroidered patterns from Antiquity could be found.
In fact, given that these dresses were too heavy to move in, and having been found solely within tombs, it seems like they primarily served a funerary and liturgical function.
Based on Ephesians 5 and the visions of the supper of the lamb in the book of Revelation, liturgical lace has been described as a way for the Church to symbolize itself as a virginal bride celebrating the divine marriage with the heavenly spouse.
Its characteristics with the exaggeration of three-dimensional qualities of needle lace; creating patterns which could be divided into parts allowed for the production of large-scale ecclesiastical items like vestments and church furnishings that were "conspicuously extravagant.
[10] Superpelliceum, cuius forma nunc multiplex atque ad merum ornamentum redactum est, cavendum ne tum forma tum etiam nimia elegantia indecens sit.In 1912, the Benedictine monk Lambert Beaudoin recommended the use of lace and advised that the best liturgical lace was the one that was sown directly on the liturgical vestment.
[12] In the 1950s, as the trend was to give "imitate the nature of things, truth and substance", the tendency was to reject the transparency of lace as frivolous.
While the Second Vatican Council encouraged the beauty of the celebration, contradictory esthetic standards have led to conflicting positions on the use of lace in liturgy.
[16] In the wake of the pedophilia crisis,[17] some went as far as to accuse liturgical lace of feminizing the celibate priesthood by "appropriating a female persona" and enacting "homoerotic aspects".
[18] Bordering homophobic slur, some critics referring to a "homosexual question" in the Catholic Church have stated that "the exaggerated taste for lace has ceased to make us smile".
[19] Since the 1990s however, younger generations have been keen on restoring the use of liturgical lace despite being considered as "retro" backwardism by those who presumed it was a return to the past.
However, Pope Francis has expressed a rather mitigated opinion saying ironically that liturgical lace or merletti described by La Croix journalist as "retrograde accouterments"[21] were merely a "tribute to grandmothers" and needed some aggiornamento sixty years after the Council.
