©MS 2026

I’ve been thinking about putting a veil on my head.

Not wearing one, exactly. Not yet.

Mostly thinking about it.

And apparently, I am incapable of wondering whether I might adopt a devotional practice without eventually finding myself several browser tabs deep asking questions about Saint Paul, canon law, Vatican II, Spanish lace, and what Catholic women were actually wearing on their heads two hundred years ago.

But I think that is part of discernment for me.

There is something about veiling that has been quietly catching my attention. I have noticed more Catholic women doing it. I have seen the beautiful lace mantillas, the little chapel veils, the scarves. I have heard women describe covering their heads before the Blessed Sacrament as an act of reverence, humility, or simply a physical reminder that they are entering sacred space.

And something in that makes sense to me.

I am increasingly interested in the physical language of faith—the small things we do with our bodies because sometimes the body understands a gesture before the mind has found all the words for it. We kneel. We genuflect. We make the Sign of the Cross. We touch holy water to our foreheads. We hold beads between our fingers while we pray.

So the idea of deliberately covering my head before God does not feel entirely strange.

But being drawn to something is not the same thing as understanding it.

And I want to understand it.

I Don’t Want to Begin With the Answer

The easiest thing would probably be to decide that I want to veil and then go looking for reasons that support the decision.

There are plenty available.

Spend enough time reading about Catholic veiling online and you will encounter some remarkably confident statements. Women have always veiled. Saint Paul requires it. The Church used to require it. Vatican II abolished it. Vatican II absolutely did not abolish it. Black is for married women. White is for unmarried women. Lace is traditional. Lace is actually modern. The Church veils what is sacred, and women veil because women are sacred. Orthodox women never stopped covering their heads.

Some of those things may be true.

Some may be partly true.

Some may be customs that have slowly transformed into rules as they passed from one person to another.

I don’t know yet.

That is precisely the point.

I don’t want to begin with the conclusion and work backward until I have assembled enough history to justify it. If I eventually choose to veil, I want to understand what I am actually inheriting.

And if I eventually decide that veiling is not a devotion that belongs in my spiritual life, I want that decision to come from understanding too.

So I started pulling at the thread.

Research Has Become Part of the Discernment

What began as a fairly simple personal question has grown into something much larger.

I wanted to know what Saint Paul actually said about women covering their heads and what his words would have meant to the Christians hearing them.

Then I wanted to know what happened afterward.

Did early Christian women veil? Did medieval Catholic women? When did lace enter the picture? Where did the mantilla come from? Was there really a Church law requiring women to cover their heads? What actually happened after Vatican II? Why do some Orthodox Christian women still cover with scarves? Do black and white veils really mean anything?

And underneath all of those historical questions is the one I actually care about:

What does the gesture mean when a Catholic woman chooses it now?

Because that is the situation I would be entering.

I am not being told that I must veil.

I am considering whether I want to.

That makes the why enormously important.

And somewhere along the way, I realized that the research itself had become part of my discernment.

Not an obstacle before I could begin discerning.

The discernment.

I am learning what the practice has been so that I can listen more carefully to what is drawing me toward it now.

So I’m Going to Share the Research

This has grown far beyond one article.

So over the coming months, I am going to share what I have been learning as I follow Catholic women’s head covering backward through Christian history and then forward again into modern devotional life.

I am approaching this as a student.

I am not trying to convince Catholic women to veil. I am not trying to convince them not to. I am certainly not interested in manufacturing another rule for women to follow where the Church herself has not given one.

I want to understand.

And perhaps sharing that process can offer something else too: a witness to what discernment can look like when we encounter an old devotional practice and wonder whether it might belong in our own lives.

We can be curious before we are certain.

We can investigate the history instead of accepting the first beautiful explanation we hear.

We can distinguish what the Church teaches from what Catholics have practiced, what particular cultures developed, and what individual women have found meaningful.

And then we can pray about what remains.

I still don’t know whether I will ultimately veil.

Maybe I will put one on and discover that the physical gesture does exactly what I hope it might do: quiet something in me and turn my attention toward God.

Maybe I will discover that I love the history and theology more than I love actually wearing one.

Maybe I will end up somewhere I haven’t considered yet.

I don’t know.

For now, I am comfortable there.

Before I decide what this small piece of cloth might mean in my own spiritual life, I want to understand what it has meant before it reached me.

So I am going to follow the thread backward.

And see where it leads.