Catholic journalist and historian gets wrapped up in error-strewn commentary on the indivisibility of biblical cloaks.
Who: Catherine Pepinster
What: Christian (Catholic)
Where: Former editor of the Tablet
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Catherine Pepinster – Pepinster get’s wrapped up i | RSS.comAI transcript of the Radio 4 broadcast
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This is the SecondThought review of the BBC broadcast of 12 April 2025 by Catherine Pepinster. Pepinster was introduced as a Catholic commentator.
There were blessedly few logical errors in this broadcast. There was a smattering of factual gaffs. There was also very little apparent purpose.
On the strength of this broadcast, it’s difficult to imagine Pepinster was ever employed as a newspaper editor. I guess we all have our bad days. Pepinster is an accomplished journalist and in 2004 left her role as executive editor at the Independent on Sunday to become the first woman to edit the Tablet, Catholic newspaper, in 176 years of its history.
I’m at all sure what her broadcast was about. Certainly it’s about cloaks but why? It was short on message and short on point. It was not at all short on cloak. I thought perhaps it was an obtuse joke, and the message was deliberately hidden. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely; the Star-Trek meaning of cloak did not feature in this narrative.
Before we go any further, here’s an edit of Catherine’s opening:
PEPINSTER: If you’ve ever watched The Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, you might remember a moment of chivalry from Ringo Starr that goes horribly wrong. Ringo is strolling near a building site, spots a puddle and lays his coat across it for a beautiful young woman to step on. She goes straight through into the muddy hole in the ground.
Walter Raleigh had more success with his cloak over wet ground, enabling Elizabeth I dainty shoes to remain dry.
On my first listening my impression was that she was using the significance of cloaks in the context of Palm Sunday (symbolic of submission and respect) to introduce the concept briefly mentioned at the end; that of The Seamless Cloak, as a school of thought.
PEPINSTER: Tomorrow, Palm Sunday, is the day when Christians remember Jesus coming into Jerusalem on a donkey, with a rapturous crowd waving palm tree branches. It’s a moment of jubilation … the crowd want to honour him, and so they lay their cloaks before him.
Catherine goes on to note how important cloaks were at this time to their owners and, hence, gestures involving cloaks carried significance:
PEPINSTER: For people at that time, a cloak was the most important item of clothing they possessed. It was usually seamless, made from one piece of heavy fabric with a hole for the neck. You might carry crops home from the field in it and use it as a blanket at night.
Back, though, to modern Catholic cloak philosophy.
This Seamless Cloak (or Seamless Garment) appears to be a simple analogue for the church as an undivided whole, apparently popularised as a school of thought in Catholic circles to rein in errant Catholics who were inappropriately yoking the entire church of Rome in support of single-issue campaigning, typically against abortion. The point being, I think, that this is just one aspect of being pro-life which is just one aspect of being Catholic. Hence, one should be a rounded Catholic and not one who picks just favoured cherries.
Now, assuming Catherine is well versed in all things Seamless Cloak, and the change it wants to be within this church, listening to her distil the essence and relevance of it might have been enlightening and interesting.
But she did not. And it was not.
Let us return to those deviations from logic and fact lurking among the folds of all those cloaks. Reference was made to the laying down of cloaks and palm fronds in front of Jesus as he made his way into Jerusalem. Pepinster noted that this is more than chivalry.
PEPINSTER: … so they lay their cloaks before him. It’s more than chivalry—easing his way into the city over rough ground. It suggests submission and respect.
It is not chivalry at all, Catherine.
Unlike Elizabeth and the young woman, who were both walking and apparently in need of cloaks to keep dry their footwear, Jesus was somewhat significantly riding a bloody donkey. He was in no way concerned for the preservation of his dainty shoes or in need of his way into the city over rough ground to be smoothed. He was riding a donkey! Pepinster manages to undermine her own point. It’s minor but I think it’s emblematic of a muddle the permeates this whole broadcast.
We are also told that it was forbidden in Jesus’ time to accept a cloak from someone as payment for a debt.
PEPINSTER: Under the law at Jesus’ time it was forbidden to take that outer garment from someone as payment for a debt.
This is plainly false. Jewish law noted (in both Exodus and Deuteronomy) that any cloak held as security for a debt must be returned by nightfall.
One imagines that this discouraged the acceptance of cloaks as collateral, increasing the likelihood that everyone, no matter their circumstances and indebtedness would at least have their cloak as a blanket to sleep under at night.
This law was not, though, a prohibition from using the cloak to settle the debt.
While on the subject of Old Testament law, that chapter of Exodus also insists that a sorceress cannot be allowed to live and that if a man seduces a virgin and sleeps with her, he must pay the bride price for virgins.
I’d much rather hear from Catherine how it was that a god infused the laws it imposed on its subjects with so much misogyny. Much more interesting than law on debt security. Bride price? What a concept? And that you get to discount that price in the absence of virginity. Charming.
Also worth noting that the mandatory killing of sorceresses was not accompanied by any need to slay sorcerers, Potters, Dumbledors or older Weasleys. It’s only the sorceresses, the Grangers and the baby of the Weasley clan that need watch out for death dealing local god enforcement units.
Perhaps another day Pepinster will explore the likelihood that these books were written by men, not by any gods you’d wish to exist and certainly not by women.
Much as I’ve enjoyed this digression, the views of the church on the content and the origin of the scriptures cannot be blamed on Pepinster. We can though hold her to account for misrepresenting those scriptures when attempting to make her points.
I fear that Pepinster also makes rather too much of the cloak being seamless. The Roman guards who drew lots for Jesus’ cloak were not guided, I suggest, by seams but by practicality. Jeans have seams but you’d expect a Roman guard with his eye on a pair of Wranglers would be entirely unhappy with just a leg.
The value of a cloak was not in its lack of seams, it was very much in its cloakfulness. Half a cloak would have been only marginally more useful than half a donkey.
Moreover, Catherine makes here another factual error. Among the Jewish population of Judea and Galilee, outer cloaks were commonly of a type called himatia, and these were constructed from two pieces of fabric sewn together at the shoulders. A simpler item constructed from a single length of cloth with a hole for the head (called a tunic or chiton) was commonly a design used for under garments but rarely seen as a primary outer cloak. If Pepinster can’t get the basics of cloaks right in a broadcast about, cloaks, we really are up a creek with Apple Maps (long past its tell by date perhaps but this Jack Whitehall gag still makes me smile).
Finally, and really as an illustration of my defeat in seeking to understand what the frock Catherine was hoping to communicate, I give you these sentences:
PEPINSTER: The cloaks cast before Jesus mirror that moment when the crowd offer him, in humility, what’s most precious to them—their cloaks.
The cloaks cast before Jesus mirror the cloaks cast before Jesus? Catherine, that’s brilliant. I don’t know how you do it.
There is little coherence here. Just cloaks. Donkeys, misogyny and cloaks.
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