Mantille

The mantille is a light veil appeared in Spain and worn traditionally by the catholic women with the Messe.

Definition

The mantille is, according to the 8th edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy, long and broad scarf of Soie or Dentelle whose Spanish women cover the head and the shoulders by crossing it under the chin. Its name is a diminutive of Spanish manta , cover, and thus means small cover.

Traditional use

The use of the mantille developed at XVIe and XVIIe century in Spain, date on which it makes its appearance on the tables of Velazquez. However, it is only at the XVIIIe century that its use spread yourself in the highest levels of society. The queen Isabelle II promotes the use at the XIXe century of it.

The mantille is then the usual cover-chief of the catholic women to the mass, cover-chief justified by the reading of chapter 11 of the first epistle to the Corinthians:

5. Any woman, on the contrary, who requests or who prophesies, the nonbuckled head, dishonors its chief: it is as if it were rasée.
6. Because if a woman is not veiled, that it cuts also the hair. However, if it is ashamed for a woman of having the cut hair or of being shaven, that she voile.
7. the man should not cover the head, since it is the image and the glory of God, while the woman is the glory of the man.
8. Indeed, the man was not drawn from the woman, but the woman was drawn from the man;
9. and the man was not created because of the woman, but the woman was created because of the man.
10. This is why the woman, because them angels, must have on the head a mark of the authority on which it depends.
11. However, in the Lord, the woman is not without the man, nor the man without the woman.
12. Because, just as the woman was drawn from the man, in the same way the man exists by the woman, and all comes from Dieu.
13. Judge yourselves: is it suitable that a woman requests God without being buckled?

The canonical code of right of 1917 will thus go until making compulsory the cover-chief for the women to the Church.

Current use

The port of the mantille, like whole cover-chief by the women with the mass, fell in disuse starting from the Années 1960, and codes it of canonical right of 1983 does not refer more to an obligation for the women to cover itself with the Church.

However, the use was maintained in the communities traditionalists, which consider that the omission of the code of 1983 does not mean the abrogation of the preceding rule.

Lastly, the mantille is always carried by the women having an audience with the Pape, although the use is not constant any more with same exactitude only before. Thus, if Mary Robinson, former Protestant president of Ireland, Raissa Gorbatchev, wife of the former general secretary of the PCUS Mikhail Gorbatchev, and Angela Merkel, German chancellor, were presented without mantille in front of the Pope, the personalities present at funerals of Jean-Paul II and at the inauguration of the pontificate of Benoit XVI came with a mantille, just as the wives of the catholic sovereigns, or Bernadette Chirac do it.

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