Guest post by Dr. Ed Mazza PhD, edmundmazza.com. p/c OSV News photo/Neon.
In 2024, Conservative “darling” Sydney Sweeney was the protagonist in the horror movie Immaculate (above) in which she manages both to mock Our Lady and promote pornography: “The film contains blasphemy, sacrilegious jokes, gory violence, including torture and infanticide, grisly images, partial upper female nudity…”[1]
Yet moral outrage of the Woke-Left over the recent Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ad recently had many Conservatives—including many Catholics—cheering a victory for Sweeney and the cause of Tradition and Beauty.[2]This reaction, however, only goes to show just how poorly catechized today’s Christians are and how far the Overton Window has shifted in recent decades.
The first fashion choice in history as Genesis depicts, was Adam and Eve’s “fig leaves.” But why cover-up what God created true, good and beautiful? Scripture, in fact, says the couple started out “naked and unashamed.” Nudity only became shameful after the incident with the serpent. The naked body now is no longer the portal to being viewed a co-equal person in dignity, it is the precursor to being treated like a useful object.
For example, in a recent study by Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske, men who were shown pictures of bikini-clad women simultaneously demonstrated brain scans wherein the region of their brains associated with tool use lit up.[3]Some of them, in fact, showed no brain activity in the region that normally recognizes fellow human persons with thoughts and intentions.
Surely it was for reasons such as these that Jesus himself declared: “I say to you that whosoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart and if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better to lose one of your members than that your whole body be cast into hell” (Matt. 5:28-29).
Christ’s Church teaches, therefore, that there are mortal sins which can damn an unrepentant soul to hell; however, three conditions must all be present: 1) the thought, word, or deed must be a serious one, 2) the person’s intellect has to judge it is seriously wrong, and 3) the person’s will has to fully consent to do it anyway.
To keep our intellect and will in check would be challenging even under optimal conditions, but ever since the Original Sin of our first parents, human nature has been vitiated, our reason and will no longer operate at peak capacity. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
We are, in fact, captive to our senses. Sense knowledge, for example includes our imagination and memory which have the power to reproduce the images we originally obtain from the use of our five outer senses. One can even construct new images or fantasies, from the material gained from former sensory experiences. Then there is sense desire, so named because it is an automatic reflex in us which desires any good or attractive object set before us either in reality or in the imagination.
Before a man freely chooses to lust after a woman, for example, he first experiences sense desire at the actual sight of her (either in reality or imagination), the desire, being automatic, is never a sin in itself. A man experiences the tug of attraction but until his intellect has made a conscious judgement and his will has freely chosen to want her sexually, he has not lusted, nor is he guilty of hellfire.
But if it is wrong for a man to sexually desire any woman other than his wife, it is also wrong for any woman other than his wife to unduly provoke his sense desire.[4] This is why women in traditional societies have always been cautioned to practice the virtue of modesty, to cover, not exaggerate the female form.
Unfortunately, in the West, beginning in the “Roaring ‘20s,” the leaders in fashion and entertainment increasingly “sold” women on immodest attire. (It’s not for nothing that St. Jacinta recounted that Our Lady of Fatima told the child seers that “Certain fashions will be introduced that will offend Our Lord very much.”)
Fifty years later came twin twisted phenomena: the Sexual Revolution and the “Spirit” of Vatican II. Leaders of fashion and entertainment now pushed the envelope of women’s wear beyond all bounds, but worse still, virtually all Western bishops and clergy kept complicitly silent. Let no one persuade you different: the two “missiles” that did more to obliterate the faith of believing Catholics in the ‘70s were the Novus Ordo Missae and women wearing designer jeans (the two often enough combined for an even greater toxic effect). As Calvin Klein himself once confirmed: “Jeans are sex. The tighter they are, the better they sell.”[5]
As early as 1930, Pope Pius XI issued guidelines to protect feminine dignity: “A dress cannot be called decent which is cut deeper than two fingers breadth under the pit of the throat, which does not cover the arms at least to the elbows; and scarcely reaches a bit beyond the knees. Furthermore, dresses of transparent material are improper.”[6]
Such standards are laughable today, but they are an indictment of practically every stich of clothing our daughters (and mothers!) currently buy and wear. Those Traditional Catholic women who sacrifice in the face of the whirlwind need to be congratulated as the Roman philosopher Seneca praised his mother for not following fashion: “Never have you fancied the kind of dress that revealed no greater nakedness by being removed.”[7]
Or, to quote another philosopher, the late Dr. Alice Von Hildebrand, “You can tell the way that a woman is by the way she dresses and today you can only say, I don’t know what you can say, that they dress? They undress, with no respect for their body whatsoever.”[8]
While faithful Catholics may dispute the number of “finger’s breadths” capable of inciting lust in an already sex-saturated environment, or whether the elbow to the shoulder is really racy territory, clearly, we as a Church and a society have failed to fathom the actual depths to which we have fallen. Consider what Pope Pius XII declared on November 8 in his address, “Moral Problems in Fashion Design”:
“No matter how broad and changeable the relative morals of styles may be, there is always an absolute norm to be kept after having heard the admonition of conscience warning against approaching danger:style must never be a proximate occasion of sin. […] An excess of immodesty in fashion involves, in practice, the cut of the garment. The garment must not be evaluated according to the estimation of a decadent or already corrupt society, but according to the aspirations of a society which prizes the dignity and seriousness of its public attire. […] It is often said almost with passive resignation that fashions reflect the customs of a people. But it would be more exact and much more useful to say that they express the decision and moral direction that a nation intends to take: either to be shipwrecked in licentiousness or maintain itself at the level to which it has been raised by religion and civilization.”[9] (emphasis mine)
Then there is the Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics of 1975 which blamed lust in men, among other factors, on “the neglect of modesty”:
“The frequency of the phenomenon in question is certainly to be linked with man’s innate weakness following original sin; but it is also to be linked with the loss of a sense of God, with the corruption of morals engendered by the commercialization of vice, with the unrestrained licentiousness of so many public entertainments and publications, as well as with the neglect of modesty, which is the guardian of chastity.”[10]
Even the current Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) teaches the same doctrine:
-2521 Purity requires modesty, an integral part of temperance. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden…
-2522 …Modesty is decency. It inspires one’s choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet.
-2523 There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies.
Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, the late Archbishop of Bologna (and Dubia author) concurred when he wrote in 2013:
“Sexuality is particularly linked to the concept of personal intimacy…The essential link between sexuality and intimacy is modesty…Modesty is the nonrevelation of the person to eyes that would degrade her, as an object to be used. Tragically, the person herself may consent to be degraded. This, it seems to me, is the deep meaning of Jesus words concerning adultery in the heart [Mt. 6:27-28]. The eyes of conjugal love can see the person without degrading her. Conjugal love is chaste, while unchaste love is a contradiction in terms.”[11](emphasis mine)
American culture is now replete with degradation. Take our annual celebration of Halloween. Not only has it grown more gruesome, it has also grown more indecent. Take this self-admission by a popular dating app:
“This devilish tradition was born out of the freedom Halloween provides to celebrate our sexuality and bodies. No matter how provocative, we can dress as sexy as we like without fear of judgment. It’s fitting, then, that women — given their historic struggles against oppression — are far more likely to use Halloween to dress up (or strip down) into something seductive. Some 72% of women are likely to wear a sexy outfit this year, compared to just 43% of men.”[12]
When it comes to film, fashion, and the Culture War, we simply cannot use the evil means of immodesty to achieve a good end. We’re not doing our young women any favors by encouraging them to accentuate their flesh in the cause of conservatism.
[1] https://catholicreview.org/movie-review-immaculate/
[2] https://www.axios.com/2025/08/07/american-eagle-sydney-sweeney-backlash
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/bikinis-women-men-objects-science
[4] Those women who say it’s entirely the man’s problem should remember Galatians 6:2: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ,” and not reply cynically as did Cain: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Gen 4:9.
[5] https://thefashionbookworm.com/2023/11/19/moment-november-19-1980-cbs-bans-brooke-shields-calvin-klein-advert/
[6] Acta Apostolicae Sedis 1930 (vol. 22, pp. 26-28). http://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/documents/AAS%2022%20[1930]%20-%20ocr.pdf
[7] Lucius Annasus Seneca. Moral Essays. Translated by John W. Basore. (The Loeb Classical Library: 1928-1935), 3 vols.: Volume II.
[8] Alice Von Hildebrand, Dark Night of the Body, (Roman Catholic Books: 2013).
[9] https://www.ecatholic2000.com/cts/untitled-295.shtml
[10]§7; https://www.fiamc.org/bioethics/declaration-on-sexual-ethics-1975/
[11] Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, Dark Night of the Body.
[12] https://pure.app/content/en/journal/pure-halloween-survey