" There's nothing wrong, intrinsically, in keeping up with fashion. It springs spontaneously from human sociability, from the impulse which tends to be in harmony with one's fellow men and the customs of the people among whom one lives.

God does not ask us to live outside our times, to ignore the dictates of fashion to the point of becoming ridiculous, dressing contrary to the tastes and habits common to our contemporaries, without ever worrying about their likes and dislikes. Hence, even the Angelic St. Thomas affirms that there is no vice in the outward things man uses, but that vice results when man makes immoderate use of them, either by making himself strangely different from the others, for his own sake and without regard for the customs of those with whom he lives, or by using these things --- in harmony with or in excess of the use of others --- with an inordinate attachment for an overabundance of clothes, for a luxury too frantically pursued, when humility and simplicity would have been sufficient to satisfy the requirements of dignity. And the same Holy Doctor goes so far as to say that feminine adornment may be a meritorious act of virtue, when it is in conformity with custom, with a woman's place in the world, and chosen with good intention, and when women wear ornaments in keeping with their station and dignity, and are moderate in adapting themselves to current fashion. Then even the act of adorning themselves will be the expression of that virtue of modesty which sets the style of walking, standing, dressing, and all the exterior movements.

In following fashion, too, virtue lies in the golden mean. What God asks is always to bear in mind that fashion is not, and cannot be, the supreme rule of conduct; that above fashion and its dictates are higher and more imperious laws, superior and immutable principles, that can in no case be sacrfices to the whim of pleasure or caprice, and before which the idol of fashion must be ready to abdicate its fleeting omnipotence. These principles have been proclaimed by God, by the Church, by the Saints, by Christian reason and morals, as marking the borderline beyond which no lilies and roses can grow and blossom, where neither purity, modesty, decency, nor feminine honor can spread their radiance, but where there prevails and dominates an unhealthy atmosphere of superficiality, insincere talk, bold vanity, vainglory no less of the soul than of clothing. These are the principles which St. Thomas Aquinas points out for feminine adornment and which he recalls when he teaches what should be the order of our charity, or our affections: the good of soul must precede that of our body, and to the advantage of our own body we must prefer the welfare of our neighbor's soul. Is it not, then clear that there is a limit which no style of fashion can make us overstep, and beyond which fashion works the ruin of one's own soul and those of others?

Some young women may say perhaps that a certain style of clothing is more convenient, and also more healthful; but if it becomes a serious and imminent danger to the salvation of the soul, it is certainly not healthy for the spirit: it becomes a duty to renounce it...

IF, for mere personal pleasure, one has not the right to endanger the physical health of others, is it not perhaps still less permissable to compromise the health, nay, the very life, of their souls? If, as some women claim, bold fashions do not have a pernicious influence on them, what do they know of the effect they may have on others? What assurance have they that they do not arouse evil incentives?...

If some Christian women suspected the temptations and the downfall they cause in others by their dress and overfamiliarity, to which, in their levity, they give such scant importance, they would be horrified by their responsibility."

- Address to the Delegation of Young Women of Catholic Action, May 22, 1941