Is it allowed? · Catholicism
Caudacauda · Latin, tail
Whether a tail may be worn.
The Church has two thousand years of moral theology, a Catechism of 2,865 numbered paragraphs, and an official whose title means tail-bearer. We read the relevant parts. The answer is yes, under the usual conditions, and St. Thomas Aquinas argues it better than we could, so we let him.
I · Summa, Q. 1, A. 1The question, disputed
Question 1 · Article 1
Whether a tail may be worn
Objection 1. It would seem that a tail may not be worn. For man is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and God has no tail.
Objection 2. Further, the Apostle says: “Know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). But a fox is not put in a temple.
Objection 3. Further, a pleasure not ordered to procreation is disordered. But a tail does not procreate.
On the contrary, the Catechism teaches that the Creator himself willed that spouses should find pleasure and enjoyment of body and spirit, and that “the spouses do nothing evil in seeking this pleasure and enjoyment” (CCC 2362).
I answer that, every human act is judged by three things: its object, its intention and its circumstances (CCC 1750). The object here is to wear a soft thing, and a soft thing worn is not evil in its object, or every scarf would be a sin. The intention may be delight, play, or the delight of one’s spouse: the first is lawful within measure, the second is a virtue, as will be shown from St. Thomas below, and the third is commended. It is the circumstances that decide: between spouses, at a fitting time, and so that the marital act, when there is one, remains what it is and open to life. Under these conditions the tail takes nothing from the act that the act requires. It is therefore licit.
Reply to Objection 1. God has no hair either, and we are permitted to grow ours. The image of God is in the rational mind, not in the silhouette (Summa I, q. 93, a. 6).
Reply to Objection 2. Solomon carved the walls of the Temple with cherubim, palm trees and open flowers (1 Kings 6:29). To adorn a temple is not to profane it.
Reply to Objection 3. The tail is not put in place of the act; it is worn during it, and the act itself is unchanged, which is exactly the kind the Church approves of.
II · Summa II-II, q. 168On play, according to St. Thomas
In the Summa’s second part, between modesty and dress, St. Thomas asks a question few people expect from him: whether there can be a virtue about games (II-II, q. 168, a. 2). He answers that there can. The soul gets tired, as the body does, and its rest is play. The virtue is eutrapelia, a word he takes from Aristotle: a turning well, being good at play.
To make his point he tells a story about St. John the Evangelist. Some people were scandalized to find the old apostle playing with his disciples. John asked a man with a bow to shoot an arrow, and then another, and another, and asked if he could keep it up forever. The man said the bow would break. So would the mind, said John, if it were never unbent.
Petplay, as its name says, is play.
…in like manner man’s mind would break if its tension were never relaxed.
Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 168, a. 2
Two articles later (q. 168, a. 4) Aquinas asks whether a lack of play can be a sin, and says yes: someone who never plays, and is a burden to others because of it, is boorish, and boorishness is a vice. Never wearing a tail is not yet a sin. But Thomas would ask you why.
III · CaudaThe Church’s official tail-bearer
The Latin for tail is cauda. It is also the Latin for the train of a vestment, and in particular of the cappa magna, the great silk cape that cardinals and bishops wore with a train so long that someone had to carry it.
That someone was the caudatarius, in Italian the caudatario: a cleric whose office, for centuries, was to walk behind a prince of the Church holding his tail. In 1546 Pope Paul III organized the caudatarii into a college of their own.
We do not say this to make a point. We only observe that the Church has had, for longer than most countries have existed, an official tail-bearer, and that it is not for a tail shop to say the institution was wrong.
Cauda gave Italian its coda, the tail at the end of a piece of music. In the polyphony of Notre-Dame de Paris around 1200, the long wordless passages of a conductus were called caudae: tails, sung in church.
IV · PatronsA patron saint for every animal
October 4
St. Francis of Assisi
Tamed the wolf of Gubbio, who had been eating the townspeople, by talking to him. The wolf lived out his life in the town, fed at every door. Patron of animals; on his feast day many parishes bless them.
September 30
St. Jerome
Took a thorn out of a lion’s paw, and the lion stayed at the monastery. (See the pedantic note below: the lion may not be his.) Patron of translators, so of this page too.
August 16
St. Roch
Caught the plague nursing its victims and went off to die in the woods, where a dog brought him bread every day until he recovered. He is always painted with the dog.
January 17
St. Anthony the Great
Father of monks, patron of animals and livestock, and nearly always painted with a pig at his feet. We don’t make a pig.
November 3
St. Hubert
Was out hunting on Good Friday when a stag turned to face him with a crucifix between its antlers. He gave up the hunt for the Church. (The story was borrowed from St. Eustace, who had it first.) Patron of hunters, which we are not.
March 17
St. Gertrude of Nivelles
An abbess invoked for centuries against rats and mice, and so, lately and by a logic every cat understands, adopted as the patron saint of cats.
The cat tail →Jerome’s lion first appears, in nearly the same story, in the life of St. Gerasimos, a monk on the Jordan in the fifth century. The usual explanation is that Latin readers mixed up Gerasimus and Geronimus. The Orthodox still tell it of Gerasimos.
V · Canon lawFridays, fasting, and the pew
Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays (canon 1251), and in many countries at least on the Fridays of Lent. Our tails contain no meat. They are as Lenten as a fish.
Before Communion, Catholics fast for an hour from food and drink, water and medicine excepted (canon 919). A tail is not food and does not break the Eucharistic fast. Please do not test this.
Mass is standing, sitting and kneeling. Our fox tail is twenty-eight inches: let it fall to the aisle side, and mind the person kneeling behind you.
What counts as meat has always been negotiable, and the best case is a tail. In 1191 Gerald of Wales reported that great and religious persons in Germany ate the tail of the beaver in times of fasting, as a fish. A history of New France (1744) says the beaver had been “judicially declared” a fish by the physicians of Paris, and that the theologians then allowed it on fast days. In Venezuela, legend has it, the capybara got the same ruling. We mention this because a tail can turn out to be technically a fish, and ours turns out to be technically a polymer.
VI · ConscienceConfession, and further reading
Wearing a tail is not a sin and does not need to be confessed. If you would like to bring it up anyway, the seal of confession is absolute: a priest may not reveal what he hears, for any reason, to anyone (canon 983). Your tail is safer there than anywhere else on earth.
And if you want something to read on the way, John Paul II gave 129 Wednesday audiences, from 1979 to 1984, on the body and the meaning of married love. Collected, they are called the Theology of the Body. Their main idea is that the body is not an embarrassment to be managed but a gift, and that it means something.
The old moral manuals, before the Second Vatican Council, were frank about what spouses may do: touches and caresses that lead up to the marital act are lawful, provided the act itself is completed in the natural way. Even some English editions printed those pages in Latin, to keep them from the general reader.
VII · LatinA little Latin
- Cauda
- Tail; also the train of a vestment.
- Caudatarius
- The official who carried a cardinal’s train. Literally, the tail-bearer.
- Licitum
- Lawful, permitted. The word you want.
- Eutrapelia
- The virtue of play, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas.
- Finis operis / finis operantis
- The end of the act itself, and the end the person has in mind. A tail has the first (being worn); you supply the second.
- Remedium concupiscentiae
- A remedy for desire: one of the traditional ends of marriage, in the old Code of Canon Law (1917, canon 1013).
- Adiaphoron
- Wrong church. That one is the Protestants’.
- Sed contra
- “On the contrary”: where the Summa brings in the authority that settles it.
Go in peace. The tail is optional.
Other traditions, each on its own page
JudaismOrthodox ChristianityIslamProtestantismHinduismBuddhismWritten with real sources and a straight face, by a shop, not a scholar. For a ruling that binds you, ask your rabbi, priest, imam, pandit, teacher or pastor. We did not ask ours.