By Jordan Baker
For years, self-confessed rugby addict Jessica Langrell’s ambition was to represent Australia at the Olympics. She had a shot, too; she was invited to a training squad. “My biggest dream was lined up in front of me,” she says, and she turned it down.
Langrell swapped her leather ball for a nun’s habit. Under her new religious name, Sister Mary Grace, the one-time surf lifesaver from Manly moved to a convent in New York and wears a veil, cape and scapular, with a heavy rosary at her hip.
Sisters Rose Patrick O’Connor, Marie Vertas, Mirium Bethel and, far right, Mary Grace. Credit: Steven Siewert
Her antiquated outfit is a radical choice these days. After Vatican II modernised the church in the 1960s, most religious orders swapped old-fashioned robes for plain clothes that allowed them to move less conspicuously in the community.
Grace could have chosen any one of the venerable religious orders that still exist in Australia, most of which no longer have habits. Instead, she went to a New York-based order that does. “Something about it captivates you,” she says.
She speaks of strangers who’ve burst into tears at the sight of her old-style habit; who’ve beseeched the sisters to pray for sick relatives, and shared with them their deepest fears. “I’ve only ever experienced [the habit] as a bridge to people,” she says.
Her decision reflects a push by young Catholics to resurrect the old traditions of their faith. For nuns, it’s the bride-of-Christ habit; for priests, the cassock; and for churchgoers, the mantilla (lace veil), the Gregorian chant, and the increasingly contentious Latin mass.
Young Catholics are proselytising on social media and glamorising traditional garb such as veils.
Some say the trend is about defiance, a public proclamation of faith in what they perceive as a hostile world. Others say it reflects a growing conservatism in the Australian church, of the kind that’s already put many Americans on an angry collision course with a more progressive Pope in Rome.
Young people argue it’s about embracing what’s unique and beautiful about the Catholic faith, while the more cynical argue it verges on the shallow and performative; an expression of the social media generation’s preoccupation with personal brand.
“It’s easy to dismiss them,” says theologian and sociologist Tracy McEwan, who has researched the religious conservatism of young Catholics, “but it’s a very powerful movement. It’s a valid and meaningful source of religious identity.”
Despite religious life being in decline, especially for women, new orders are still cropping up around the world. Most of them have an element of traditionalism, such as habits.
Sisters from the relatively new order Missionaries of God’s Love, at St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Warrnambool. Credit: Nicole Cleary
The wimpled Sisters of Mary Morning Star, founded in 2014, have opened a convent in Brisbane. A cloistered, silent Carmelite order has opened a convent on the NSW-Victorian border, and a young woman from Sydney’s Maroubra has just made her final vow.
Another young Australian, former ABC cadet journalist Nancy Webb (now Rose Patrick), has also joined the Sisters of Life (her brother has been ordained in Toowoomba).
The Canberra-based Missionaries of God’s Love Sisters, founded in 1987 but not yet recognised by Rome (they’re a few sisters short), wear brown skirts, take a vow of “radical poverty” (they live entirely on donations), and are attracting at least one recruit a year.
“It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life, but also the most rewarding,” says Wollongong postulant Rachel Walsh, 23.
Isobel Stewart, 30, a former teacher from Warrnambool said she doesn’t mind depending on donations. “It’s like everything else faded away,” she said. “My parents … very much instilled the truth that these things [such as possessions and money] provide limited enjoyment and limited comfort. It’s not long lasting.”
Isobel Stewart, from Warrnambool, has taken a vow of radical poverty.Credit: Nicole Cleary
Father Sam French – a 31-year-old known as the TikTok priest – is open about embracing traditional attire, and discusses it with his 63,900 followers. He wears a long, black cassock, which most Australians would identify with Eastern Orthodox clergy.
“We’re living in an increasingly post-Christian world in some sense,” he says. “[Wearing the cassock] is a particular way of bearing witness to one’s own faith. There may have been a time when the thought was that to wear clerical outfit in public was an undue exercise of power. That doesn’t really work in the world today.”
French has drawn on old traditions in his new line of priestly merchandise, which features a hoodie ($80) depicting a priest prepared for an exorcism with the slogan “Catholic priests, the original ghostbusters”, and a “go to confession” mug and bucket hat.
It’s not just new clergy embracing old-fashioned practices. Young Catholics are flocking to parishes such as the Maternal Heart of Mary in Sydney’s inner west for sung masses in Latin, using the pre-Vatican II liturgy. Women and little girls cover their head in lace veils.
At communion, the priest places the eucharist not in the hands, a post-Vatican II practice, but on the tongue, which adherents believe is an expression of humility, and ensures they don’t lose even a crumb of what has been transformed into the body of Christ.
Young Catholics are proselytising on social media, posting pictures of ornate churches, ornate rosaries, and summer “catholic girl” outfits on platforms such as Instagram, under hashtags such as #tradcatholic and #catholiccore.
One in five people identify themselves as Catholic; it remains Australia’s most dominant religion. Like others, it’s declining. In the five years to 2021, national average mass attendance fell by a third to just over 400,000. The fall was most dramatic among women, who used to be the most active churchgoers but now only barely outnumber men.
A #CatholicCore post.
A 2022 global survey, co-authored by McEwan, identified a divide among Australian Catholic women. Younger ones were more conservative than their elders and their overseas counterparts, and were more invested in traditional beliefs and practices.
While older women were more hungry for reforms such as introducing female priests or allowing divorcees to get married, younger devotees had little interest in relaxing rules on sex, contraception and the priesthood.
McEwan had already begun tracking this increasing devoutness. In an earlier study, she looked at religious practices in the decade to 2015, and found a doubling of the young women saying the rosary regularly.
They were the only cohort to say God had become more important in their life, and to grow in their belief that bread and wine truly became Christ’s body and blood.
Young people told this masthead the old practices give them a sense of the grandeur and beauty of their religion. As Sam French’s brother John, whose Catholic TikTok account has 113,000 followers, puts it, “so much of the traditional garments, art and culture is so beautiful,” he says. “The experience of beauty draws us into the author of that beauty itself.”
The papacy of Pope Francis has been opposed by many Catholic conservatives.Credit: AP
But this conservative push is causing tensions within the church, as conservatives, who grew in dominance during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict, lock horns with progressives, and particularly the Jesuit Pope, Francis.
The Latin mass has become emblematic of this power struggle, particularly in America, where so-called “radtrads” (radical traditionalists) argue the watering down of traditional practices are causing the slow decline of the church.
Conservative Benedict gave priests more freedom to celebrate mass in its 1962 form, before the Vatican II ruled it could be performed in the local language rather than Latin to make it more accessible to churchgoers. But Francis has intervened against its spread three times. Critics say he’s discriminating against traditionalists.
The issue has not boiled over in Australia, but it’s simmering. When Pope Francis intervened in 2021, the priest at St Michael’s, Belfield, where a brawl erupted between trans activists and members of the conservative religious group Christian Lives Matter early last year, said the move had caused him shock, hurt and bewilderment.
“This papal document has left so many people who love the traditional Latin mass feeling ostracised, hurt, pushed to the fringes and feeling almost punished for their rightful love for this ancient liturgy,” Father Andrew Benton said in a social media post.
The Society of St Pius X’s Australia and New Zealand chapter also regards the old mass as truly Catholic, centred on God, and fruitful (full of saints and martyrs), and the new one as half-Protestant, centred on man, and “barren”.
This publication was refused permission to allow a photographer into the Maternal Heart of Mary, run by the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter. The priest told parishioners from the pulpit not to talk to “secular media”, for fear the church’s practices may be misunderstood.
Some argue the conservative push is a challenge to the modernising practices of Vatican II. They say it risks a schism in the Catholic Church between the traditionalists and progressives, and is undermining the infallibility of the Pope.
‘If you wanted to have rock pop Christian music, Hillsong does it 100 times better.’
Father Sam French, also known as the TikTok priest
But Sam French says there need not be a conflict between traditional practices and the post-Vatican II church.
There was no mandate that habits and cassocks should not be worn. The decision was left to individual orders, and there were no rulings against mantillas, or Gregorian chants, or kneeling to receive the eucharist on the tongue.
“It’s not a rejection of Vatican II but more a rejection of the affectations of ′70s culture in general,” he says. “I think that’s what a lot of young people in the church are rejecting today.”
For French, who is the vocations director for the Broken Bay diocese, it’s about embracing unique, recognisable elements of Catholicism in a world in which “faith is not popular”.
“People don’t want to have one foot in and one foot out, they want to embrace faith wholeheartedly and go all in.
“What comes along with that is a proclaiming of the beauty and traditions that are very recognisably Catholic; that set you apart in some sense. If you wanted to have rock pop Christian music, Hillsong does it 100 times better.”
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