Eight hundred thirty-four. That is the number of habits that Conventual Franciscan Brother Augustine Kelly has made over almost 50 years of serving as a tailor for his community.
Brother Augustine, who ministers at the National Shrine of Maximilian Kolbe at Marytown in Libertyville, is part of an 800-year tradition of hand-sewing Franciscan religious habits.
Hand-sewing habits has largely fallen by the wayside in many religious communities, so much so that Brother Augustine calls it a dying art. Even in his own community, he is one of the only people in the U.S. that makes habits by hand.
Conventual friars around the world reach out to him, he said, adding, “We get requests from all over, especially friars passing through the country who stop by Marytown.”
Brother Augustine is sharing his knowledge with a friar from Kenya, now on sabbatical at Marytown, who plans to make habits for his fellow friars when he returns to Africa.
“No friar knows how to make habits in Africa. There isn’t. I have not seen,” said Franciscan Father Boniface Nzioki Muia. “So I should be the first one. I think more friars need to know how to make them.”
Brother Augustine came to his role as tailor with some experience.
“I was always interested in sewing and costumes and theater stuff as a kid,” he said. “Then when I became an altar boy, I was quite fascinated with the vestments and stuff. I was kind of self-taught.”
When he entered the order, he taught high school. Then his provincial asked if he could make habits. At the time, some religious women were making them for the community.
He always has another job in addition to tailoring, such as serving as sacristan.
“Tailoring was always my first love,” said Brother Augustine, who has lived at Marytown since 1999.
Franciscan habits are in the shape of the cross, which is a symbol of taking on Christ’s crucifixion. That hearkens back to the shape of clothing St. Francis donned after giving his life to God.
Francis’ original habit was very simple. That is not the case today.
“There are a lot of pieces to a habit,” Brother Augustine said. “It takes me about 10 hours to make a habit.”
Like many things in the life of a Franciscan, making a habit involves prayer.
“I, personally, when I begin a habit, I offer up the work and the time for all the intentions of the friar I am sewing for,” Brother Augustine said. “It makes me feel like some of me goes with him in all of his ministry. And the friars know that.”
Women’s religious communities have made habits for the friars in the U.S. over the years, which is probably why not many friars have learned, Brother Augustine said.
“To me, there is something really nice about having it made by someone in your own community. And the friars tell me that,” he said.
All Franciscans wear a cord or rope around their waists that ties and hangs down to the side with three knots tied in it. The knots symbolize their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
At one time, the friars made their cords on handlooms, Brother Augustine explained. Today they rely on manufacturers, but finding the right kind of rope sometimes proves difficult.
“You really don’t just want to go into Ace or Lowe’s and pick up some boat rope or something like that,” he said.
When his source for cord dried up, a Google search led him to a manufacturer in Blue Island called Erin Rope Corporation, whose name appealed to his own Irish roots.
He wrote to the company explaining that he was writing for the friars and that they were in “a state of cord crises” and sent a sample of a spun polyester cord that they wanted to use.
A week later the company’s founder called Brother Augustine and they traded stories about which counties their families came from in Ireland.
The company ended up donating 30,000 feet of cord to the friars. Brother Augustine, in turn, has shared the company’s largess.
“I’ve given it to our friars all over the country, some of it to the OFMs, Capuchins, other branches. I’ve given a lot of it to the Poor Clare nuns who still use this cord,” Brother Augustine said. “That was quite a donation.”
Each habit he makes comes with a new cord.
“I always tell the friars to take the knots out before you wash the cord. Otherwise, the knots get stuck in there and you can’t get them out,” Brother Augustine said.
While not required by his community, Brother Augustine wears his habit everywhere he goes.
“I’ve had very good experiences wearing the habit out in public. Sometimes people are just fascinated by it and they are drawn to you. And sometimes people will just say silly things to you because they don’t know what to say and they want to break the ice so they can talk,” he said.
Lots of people ask for prayers, and he stops and prays with them on the spot. And if some people stare or get angry at him because of what his habit represents, he doesn’t mind because there is a higher purpose at work.
“If, like, for one brief moment someone’s mind is raised, not because, of me, but because of what I represent, raised out of this world to maybe something a little spiritual, that’s a good thing,” Brother Augustine said.
One of the reasons St. Francis changed his style of dress after his conversion was to take on the attire of poor or outcast.
“In the writings of Francis, we hear a mention of a penitent garb and a pilgrim garb,” said Franciscan Friar Jerry Bleem, a resident priest at St. Peter’s in the Loop and an adjunct associate professor of fiber and material studies at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Francis’ original habit was unbleached and undyed, Bleem said.
“That kind of dirty gray is exactly the color they would have worn, the early friars, what’s called mean cloth, coarse cloth, not fine cloth. And, of course, the very interesting thing is Francis’ father was a cloth merchant and dealt in fine cloth,” he said.
Because of that, what he chose to wear was significant and not without thought, Bleem said.
The Franciscans were known as the “gray friars” because of the color of their habits, Bleem said.
Bleem hypothesizes that the brown that eventually became the usual color for the Franciscans came from using nuts for dye.
“It’s not surprising to me,” he said. “The friars could have easily gone out, gathered nuts and dyed their cloth from that gray, or the unbleached, to the achievable nut brown, because the only dye that was possible prior to the middle of the 19th century was natural dye.”
Some Franciscans, such as the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the religious community co-founded by Auxiliary Bishop Robert Lombardo, have gone back to wearing gray.
In some cases, color changes can happen by accident. In the case of the Franciscans at St. Peter’s, over the years, the habits started moving toward black because of the standard dying process. When given a swatch, fabric makers typically go a shade darker, Bleem said.
After about 10 reorders of fabric, the color was almost black.
“People kept saying, ‘Why do you guys wear black? I thought you wore brown,” Bleem added.
So they moved to a standard brown color ordered from a manufacturer so the color would be consistent.
But variations in the color of habits is not new to the 800-year-old Franciscan family, Bleem said.
“Again, prior to the middle of the 19th century, everything was a natural dye. There were friars that wore blue,” Bleem said. “There were friars that wore gray, that wore black, that wore brown.”
Pope Leo XIII brought the Franciscan communities of the world together in 1897 and the Order of the Friars Minor decided they would wear brown.
For the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago, a community founded by Bishop Lombardo on the West Side in 2010, figuring out how to best make habits is an ongoing journey.
When the first sisters entered the community, they had to design every part of their habit, said Franciscan Sister Jess Lambert, one of the seamstresses for the community. It has evolved since then.
They used the habit of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal — Bishop Lombardo’s community — as their starting point.
“They took one of his old habits and gave it to a seamstress who basically took it apart and made a female version of it,” Sister Jess said.
The veil has been its own journey with several iterations.
“The veil, we had version 2.0 and 3.0. We were competing with Apple for a while,” Sister Jess joked. “It took a few versions to get it right.”
The sisters wanted their veils to completely cover their hair.
“The mechanics of the veil are difficult because you need it to stay on your head kind of like a cap and not be a lot of pressure,” Sister Jess said. “There’s obviously a desire to cover the hair because of the symbolic nature of covering your hair like a bride. Most [communities] just have a headband, but with a headband, you have hair exposed.”
Around the time Sister Jess joined, a costume designer worked with them to design a new veil and Sister Jess was able to employ her engineering skills to standardize it.
“I don’t have a great sewing background, but I’m crafty and I was able to learn it fast,” she said. “And then with my engineering background I can make them standard.”
She’s made a try-on kit so she can see what works best for each person.
“It’s kind of a guess, because they have hair when we’re doing it and they are trying it on. But when they don’t have hair anymore or its very, very short, the dynamics of it adjust,” Sister Jess explained. “So there’s always kind of an adjustment period where they’re getting used to it.”
Sewing is shared by a couple of members, but Sister Kate O’Leary, one of the first two women to join the community, is the head seamstress.
They have some outside sewing help from volunteers, but Sister Jess does a lot of the day-to-day fixing of veils or mending habits.
The seamstresses also make skirts for the female postulants.
There are always adjustments to the habit design because the community is still working out what works best for the sisters’ busy lives.
Unlike some Franciscan communities, the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago wear habits at all times, except to sleep.
Each member receives two habits upon entering the community, and they are replaced as they wear out. Most members have three — their “nice” habit, their everyday habit and their gardening habit.
“You have your really old habit that is thin that you wear for the laundry and the garden. Like it might be too old and you probably shouldn’t wear it in public,” Sister Jess explained.
Then there is the “everyday habit” sisters wear most of the time.
“And then for the cardinal’s events or for dinners or something like that, you wear your nice habit,” she said.
Sisters can throw their habits in the washer and dryer and patch holes when they get them.
“If you can get a simple patch and it looks clean and it looks nice, you’re good,” she said. “But once, you know, you’ve ripped something somewhere or you’ve got some weird patches, we’re making sure we’re making you a new one.”
Sister Jess’ work repairing habits goes in waves over the course of a year, doing a lot of catch-up work in the summer when she is not teaching.
“During the summer, two to three times a week, I’m replacing someone’s veil frame,” she said. “Since we’re Franciscans I reuse a lot of stuff.”
“I just really enjoy sewing. If I could do it all of the time I would,” Sister Jess said. “It’s just really tangible and you can see your progress. And it uses whatever secret engineering gifts that made me want to be an engineer.”
Religious habits still hold the special meaning that they did in the time of St. Francis.
“We are both body and soul. What we wear certainly represents something, it speaks to something. And St. Francis wanted to wear a poor tunic to be a poor man to reflect our Lord’s life that way,” she said. “It’s very recognizable in today’s day and age that we belong to God.”