The exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination was on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Cloisters from 10 May to 8 October 2018. Some 200 garments and ornaments dating from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century were shown, as were some 40 (from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) from the Vatican. The material from the Vatican was installed apart in the Met’s Anna Wintour Costume Center. The other items were displayed in the Medieval galleries in the Met and in the Cloisters, many in close proximity to medieval works of art. In this paper I discuss the rationales the curators and administrators of the Met and the Vatican proposed for mounting the exhibition and their descriptions of the purposes it aimed to serve, particularly important given the exhibit’s timing, a moment of grave crisis in the Church, which had commenced long before the show opened but accelerated sharply while it was on view. I then discuss the range of reactions to the exhibit and Gala. Finally, I comment on two broader themes. First, the place of wealth and display in the Catholic Church and particularly the Church’s adoption of material tokens of secular power and magnificence. Second, the relationship between the fashions exhibited in New York, papal and secular, on the one hand, and, on the other, a hypothetical Catholic imagination (or imaginations), as well as the varied motivations that may lead designers and artists to appropriate religious symbols, images, and stories for their own secular purposes.