It's probably not the biggest question facing the Catholic Church today ... but it still deserves to be asked: Why does the clergy dress so funny? The answer is surprisingly secular.

A Clothes Call ... Clothing was probably the last thing the Apostles and early Christians had on their minds in the years following the crucifixion. Because they believed the second coming of Christ was imminent, they didn't bother to formalize many aspects of their new religion. Clerical dress was no exception - nobody gave any thought to what priests should wear during Mass; they just wore the same clothes that laypeople did. As author Adrian Fortescue put it in his book The Vestments of the Roman Rite, "Every vestment now worn by a Latin priest, every one worn by a Latin bishop (except the mitre), represents an article of ordinary Roman dress, such as was worn by Christians all over the Roman Empire in the second, third and fourth centuries."

Fashions changed over time, but the priests didn't. They stuck with the same clothes they had always worn ... until their garments became so different from what everyone else was wearing that they were associated exclusively with religious life. Some examples:

THE MITRE

Description: The pointed hat that popes and bishops wear. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as "a folding hat, made up of two equal, cone-shaped parts that rise to a divided peak at the top." It gets its name from mitra, the Greek word for "turban."

Origin: Why does the pope wear a pointy hat? To keep his head warm - at least that's what it was for in the old days. Much like today, the popes of antiquity were elderly men who needed protection from the cold. So they wore simple cone-shaped hats, "the headgear of respectable men of the period," when they went outdoors. The hats didn't become purely ceremonial until much later.

Historical Note: The mitre started out as a short pointed cap, but by the twelfth century it had grown much taller and evolved from the closed cone shape into the open, two-pointed (one in front and back like they do now. That created a problem. The points reminded people so much of the devil that they became known as horns ... so the popes rotated their hats ninety degrees. They've worn them that was ever since.

THE ALB

Description: The floor-length white robe the priest wears over his street clothing during Mass.

Origin: The alb is a direct descendant of the Roman tunic, a shirt-like garment that reached all the way to the wearer's feet. Its name comes from tunica alba, which means "white tunic" in Latin.

THE CINCTURE

Description: The ropelike belt the priest uses to tie the alb around his waist.

Origin: Loose tunics were the mark of uncouth foreigners in the Roman Empire, where it was considered "slovenly, effeminate, and disrespectful" to wear a garment that wasn't gathered at the waist. People used just about anything as belts ... even ropes.

THE STOLE

Description: The scarf-like vestment the priest wears over the alb.

Origin: Magistrates and public officials of the Roman Empire were stoles as a symbol of their authority. Priests wore them, too, after the empire converted to Christianity.

THE CHASUBLE

Description: The large outer garment the priest wears at Mass.

Origin: The chasuble was the raincoat of the Greco-Roman world. Today's version is shaped like a pancho - it's almost long enough to touch the floor in front and back but is short enough on the sides for the priest to stick his hands out. The original version was much more cumbersome: It was long all the way around, kind of like a skirt you wore around your neck, and had a hood. It got its name from casula, the Latin word for "little house," and was so bulky that a deacon had to stand behind the priest during Mass and gather the garment so that it wouldn't fall over his hands.

THE ROMAN COLLAR

Description: The stiff Roman collar is the standard street shirt for priests. Only the white part is called the collar; the black part is called a "rabat."

Origin: "Originally," says the Reverend Henry McCloud in his book Clerical Dress and Insignia of the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman collar "was nothing else than the shirt collar turned down over the cleric's everyday common dress in compliance with a fashion that began toward the end of the sixteenth century. For when the laity began to turn down their collars, the clergy also took up the mode."

... But that's only half the story. The clergy also adopted the fad of lining their collars with fancy lace and needlework, which made them more beautiful but also more difficult to clean. So a third custom arose: covering the collar with a changeable sleeve of white linen to protect it from dirt. The modest-minded Pope Urban VIII banned the use of lace in 1624 ... but he didn't ban the protective sleeve. "Thus," McCloud says, "the narrow band of white linen used to protect the collar in the course of a few centuries became what is known today as the Roman collar."