What is an expression for a priest not wearing official attire?
Is there an English expression for a priest or monk not wearing his religious attire? (any Christian doctrine, or even more general).
Clarification: I'm trying to say that someone looks like an Orthodox priest who's not wearing vestments, not find a term/expression for priests who have, for any reason, no been wearing theirs.
I didn't include the Orthodox part in the original question since I was looking for a more universal expression, not a religious term, Orthodox or not.
Aside from a hair-splitting distinction among some Catholics (see below), there is no official term, and you will find a variety of choices:
- layman's clothes is probably the most obvious way to make a distinction between clothes worn by clerics and clothes worn by non-clerics.
- More formally, one could refer to lay dress or lay costume, as a neat parallel to clerical dress or costume.
- More generically, at least in American English, street clothes are the ordinary clothes people wear in public, as opposed to specialized garments such as sportswear or work uniforms.
- You could borrow the term civilian clothes, in more casual usages; usually this term is used to contrast street clothes from a police or military uniform. The slang civvies may be suitable in some cases.
- As Josh61 has indicated, police who do not wear a uniform are plainclothes officers, or work in plain clothes.
- Rarer is conversation is mufti, already mentioned by bib. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this meaning is from 1816, of unknown origin, perhaps from mufti's costume of robes and slippers in stage plays, which was felt to resemble plain clothes.
In Catholicism, it depends on what you mean by religious attire. There are various various types of clerical dress for different purposes, and while the customary daily dress is the cassock, in many countries, at least among secular priests, the cassock has been replaced by the clerical suit.
This is not a newfangled development. The clerical suit was long preferred in Britain in order to distinguish Catholics from their cassock-clad Anglican cohorts, and in the U.S., it was adopted at one or the other Councils of Baltimore as a precaution amidst strong, sometimes violent anti-Catholicism in American society. But to some traditionalists, the cassock is the only acceptable public costume, and therefore the clerical suit is not "official" attire.
Perhaps you could say in mufti
Plain clothes worn by a person who wears a uniform for their job, such as a soldier or police officer: I was a flying officer in mufti
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Plainclothes :
dressed in ordinary clothes and not a uniform while on duty.
ordinary clothes, as distinguished from uniform, as worn by a police detective on duty
- a plain-clothes policeman.
- a plain clothes priest ( Joyce's Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah)
Layman's attire or layman's clothes. From "Martin Luther: The Man and the Image," by Herbert David Rix: "he (Luther)...changed his identity by putting on a layman's attire for his evenings out." "John P. (a fellow Augustinian monk) ran off because he was guilty of shameful behavior that disgraced us all. The police found him in layman's clothes in a brothel."
A Google search easily finds many other examples of these expressions in literature.