Monday, November 21, 2011
What do you think about girl altar boys?
The Washington Post is running a poll on girls serving at the altar. You can vote here. The feminists in the Church always frame girls serving as an "equality" and "non-discrimination" issue, but, if that's true, they obviously see it as a wedge issue toward female ordination. The equality and discrimination claim can equally be used to say women have "Which I think is part of the problem. What do you think?
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"Yes" and "no" are currently running neck-and-neck.
ReplyDeleteI voted no, for the following reasons:
-- Altar boys have long been a proving ground for vocations to the priesthood. Only males have vocations to the priesthood. Altar girls (a) discourage authentic vocations to the priesthood, and (b) set girls up for disappointment. The altar girls movement is clearly to advance women's ordination, and the girls themselves are just being used as pawns.
-- Girls just simply look undignified and out of place on the altar. They really don't belong there. To convert a fatuity by Gloria Steinem into something really useful: the Church needs altar girls like a fish needs a bicycle.
-- Girls do not need to invade and overrun every single province traditionally held by boys. Boys need to have their own space. where they can be themselves and nurture their masculinity. We need manly men, not a world full of Alan Aldas and Michael Kinsleys. In addition to being part of the Quixotic battle for women's ordination, altar girls are also a front in feminists' war on boys.
Altar girls were a huge mistake. The experiment needs to be dumped.
Where's the poll? I can't get it to come up with the article. Is it the paper or is it my computer? Did they take it down?
ReplyDeleteI can remember some years ago - when our two girls were about the 9-10 range - one of the "powers-that-be" at a particular small parish we attneded at the time suggested our girls may want to serve...
ReplyDeleteI said, "No, thank you. We (my wife and myself) think that allowing girl servers may hinder a young male from serving - thus, it may hinder a possible vocation to the priesthood." (our girls had no problem with this at all)
The man replied in shock, "Oh, Kevin." (like I had three heads or something)
It is estimated the number of priests who were altar boys when they were young is well over 70%
Why, in this day and age of vocations to the priesthood dropping like a rock, do bishops and priests continue to allow girls to serve at the altar of Sacrifice - when the evidence is so abundantly clear we need priests - is beyond me.
Yet, could this have been their agenda all along? One wonders.
Catechist Kevin
Personally, I don't care for it, but how do you put the genie back in the bottle?
ReplyDeleteDitch the altar chics!
ReplyDeleteThey look absolutely foolish up there and totally out of place.
Aside from that, it is cruel. For what purpose are they there? Just so the feminists in the Church could prove a point?
Try pasting this into your browser.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-buzz/post/poll-should-girls-be-allowed-to-be-altar-servers/2011/11/18/gIQAlL5ZhN_blog.html
I prefer Altar boys, however the Bishop of Richmond allows it. He is the ordinary and this is his Diocese. In my parish it is my responsibility to teach the serversand to insure that they are doing what is required. I do not actely seek out girls to be servers, which is what I do with the boys. They wear Cassock and Surpluses, we use Communion patens and I watch them like a hawk. In this day and age when this is allowed one can but pray. BTW I tell them that I would prefer boys and explain all the history to them. These girls and boys are quite pious and they take the Mass seriousely. I do not discourage devotions or vocation. Richard
ReplyDeleteI see no reason why girls shouldn't be altar servers. Women are Eucharistic ministers and lectors, so why not let them serve on the altar?
ReplyDeleteWell,the first time I ever saw girls serving mass was in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusaleme in Rome back in 1983! I was shocked to see it but then as I saw it Paris and Vienna and Seville, I just got used to it. It seemed strange when I cam back to the United States in the '90's not to see it, but now I guess it is just about everywhere. After all if a woman can do a greater ministry--e.g. Extraordinary minister of the Eucharist--a girl can do a lesser ministry, altar server.
ReplyDeleteI am shocked that so many of you have negative views on female alter servers! Should women also be denied the opportunity to serve as lectors, Eucharistic ministers, and ushers? How on earth can a girl alter server look "undignified?!" I am shaking my head in disbelief. Of course girls should be allowed the ministry of serving at the alter. Who knows? Perhaps they will one day raise a future priest!
ReplyDeleteAre there really parishes that don't allow them? Shame on them!
Update: As an aside to our daughters and our decision not to let them serve - we have three boys - two of them at "the age" for serving (11 & 12).
ReplyDeleteHowever, they *do not* want to serve because they are painfully shy and *do not* want to "get up in front of everyone" and have them "looking at them."
Something to be said here for the Ad Orientem posture (true, those serving at the altar of Sacarifice -even during this posture - do not always "face east" but, it would be helpful, I surmise).
Catechist Kevin
Anonymous (Nov. 22, 8:26 a.m.,
ReplyDeleteDo you think the Church was wrong for 2000 years? I'm not being facetious or sarcastic. Did the Church have serious reasons for not allowing girls to serve at the altar from the beginning?
I recently read an interesting article about the connection between the altar of sacrifice, the Holy Eucharist, and the priesthood. In the middle ages, when religious orders did not have frequent visits from a priest, the abbess was authorized to give Communion to her sisters. But she was not permitted to do it from the altar. This is not an equality issue, but one that relates to the Fatherhood of God and the priest being an alter Christus with the altar boy being an acolyte. In some countries the word for altar boy in literal translation means "little cleric" or "little monk."
The feminists understand the link between altar boys and the priesthood and generally discuss women's ordination in the same articles. They fight for altar girls based on "nondiscrimination" and "equality." Altar girls is a wedge issue for them leading to the natural follow-up that not allowing female ordination is based on descrimination.
And the fact is that young boys in the latency period tend to drop out of altar service when the girls join. Read the comments on many websites from people sharing their parish experience of disappearing altar boys after girls are introduced.
As for lectors and LEMs, they do not perform their apostolates at the altar. I think there is a significant issue here both in substance and symbol that would be fruitful to study.
At the bottom of this altar gal nonsense is pride - yes, pride. It is the ole' feminist thing - whatever a man can do, we can do as well and better...that includes serving at the altar. Once the feminist mentality starts to fade away (please God let it be sooner rather than later), altar girls will become an embarrassment of the past.
ReplyDeleteI say ditch all women at the altar, including EMs.
This is from Fr. Zs blog on the issue (by "DCM") - it bolsters our position of not allowing our girls to serve at the altar at Holy Mass:
ReplyDelete"I’m a man of 27 years. I served the altar from the age of 11 until even now. However, I try and avoid it as much as possible to give the younger men (boys) an opportunity to test their vocations to the priesthood. When I was in a parish growing up, we had more than 70 altar servers.
My parish had a very rigorous training of servers and a structured hierarchy. Girls were scattered throughout the hierarchy; we had about ten of them. From that crop, by the by, four men attended seminary, and two girls went to the nunnery. Once that particular pastor left, the dynamic changed. **The new pastor wanted to be inclusive and started recruiting more altar girls. Now, there are about 15 altar servers, ten of them girls, and the five boys left are the younger brothers of the girls. None are discerning any religious vocation.** (stars added)
If boys are not taught that serving the altar is a type of apprenticeship, they’ll reject the notion of priesthood when it comes time for them to consider it.
I still serve now when called or asked, but I’m married now, and have accepted my vocation. I don’t want to get in the way of young boys making their discernment."
Catechist Kevin
I voted no! It wasn't done as far as I know before the pastoral VII council and the Freemason Annibale Bugini, protestant Novus Ordo facing the people. A good article on this is:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.catholicplanet.com/RCC/altar-girls.htm
Altar girls were rather clearly, based on timing alone, an aspect of militant feminism. It was a move to support the goal of female priests. There seems to be a failure on the part of modern society to recognize the distinction between male and female and to reject all differentiation of separate and proper division of roles between the sexes. Thus we see rampant androgynous claims and the rise in visibility if not in frequency for homosexual roles.
ReplyDeleteThe Church has made it clear that women priests were not envisioned in the mind of God. For whatever reason this appears to have been declared. As such then women have no priestly role. Participation in the liturgy on the part of girls and women is certainly to be encouraged, but the acolyte is a minor order on the road to the priesthood. Before Vatican II women could not participate with the priest at the altar although they could serve by reading the responses from beyond the communion rail (I know most of you don't remember the communion rail but it divided the church into sacred reserved space and general worship space.)
The modern Catholic simply has no sense at all of the ancient liturgy. It was steeped in symbolism and tradition and everything carried a sacred meaning which could be explained by someone knowledgeable. We have lost most of that understanding and indeed all the rest of the understanding of the faith so that the modern Catholic is essentially ignorant. This explains why they are so easily converted into Protestants. If you don't know the faith you are in no position to defend it or defend yourself.
Add me to the surprised that this is even an issue. Of course the church changes. As someone who is both a seminary drop out and old enough to remember when there were no girls, I can say with good authority that female altar servers, LEMs, Lectors, etc. have very little bearing on the current shortage of candidates for the priesthood. That comes from other issues too numerous and complicated to list here. As someone who volunteers quite a bit with the youth of my current (very large) parish, I'd say we have about 60% males and 40% females serving at Mass. The girls are very studious and add a nice sense of decorum. As it is, we lose about 80% of our servers when they enter high school. I'd hate to see what a "server shortage" we had if we eliminated the girls.
ReplyDelete"Should women also be denied the opportunity to serve as lectors, Eucharistic ministers, and ushers?"
ReplyDeleteIf is was up to me yes. I would also go back to women wearing hats. Men and woman have different roles; women do not have to act like men to be fulfilled. St Paul says that women should be quiet in church and not have authority over men. I don't like that last bit but so be it.
A question: In ages past, were women commissioned to bring the Sacred Host to the sick?
I am shocked that so many of you have negative views on female alter servers! Should women also be denied the opportunity to serve as lectors, Eucharistic ministers, and ushers?
ReplyDeleteNow that you mention it -- and speaking as a woman who once served in all these capacities except usher in former days -- YES. The presence of women in the sanctuary during Mass has changed the whole ethos of the Mass, and not for the better.
Ushers I'd get rid of altogether anyway as a highly distracting and completely unnecessary presence at Mass. I'd also eliminate 99.99999% of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, on the grounds that, except in extraordinary circumstances, unconsecrated hands should not touch the Sacred Species. That is the special province of the priesthood, and priests need to take back their turf. (And yes, I do oppose Communion in the hand.)
OK, I get it now. Y'all are just opposed to anything modern in the church. So let's bring back the days when heretics were murdered, indulgences were given to those who could pay for them, and the title of bishop was passed from father to son (which is why the whole celibacy thing come to be in the first place). No? But those were the good old days, right?
ReplyDeleteTimes change. And yes, the church changes, too. Y'all are getting way too caught up in the little things and forgetting that the true message from Jesus is to love God and to love one another. The rest of it is just fluff.
Thanks, Sue, for demonstrating the fallacy of the false alternative. If you oppose girl altar boys you must support burning heretics. LOL!
ReplyDeleteI'm more struck by the notion that the Church should be "modern." What can that possibly mean?
ReplyDeleteThe Church didn't burn heretics, the secular state did. The church did determine that they were heretics. Of course these were the days when you could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. The Church has always been in the forefront of reform such as placing restrictions on the power of nobility to abuse those over which they ruled. It was called chivalry.
Before someone can rail against the Church and claim that something modern is an improvement they need to be more specific.
Mary Ann nailed the fallacy of the false alternative. The selling of indulgences was also a canard. The indulgences were not sold although certainly they were promoted egregiously and confusion in the minds of the unlearned could produce that impression. Martin Luther made the most of it.
The reality is that history has mostly been written by Protestants and distorts the record so that the Church is commonly accused of things that are exaggerations and sometimes bald faced lies. Do some critical research the case begins to fall apart. Almost all the myths about the bad old Catholic Church are exaggerations and distortions promoted by the enemies of the Church. Indeed, most of the carnage down through Christian history has been done by heretics. It's a matter of record. When there was violence it was Arians attacking the orthodox and chasing out duly ordained bishops like Athanasius.
All of these kinds of things were done in the name of the modernism of their day. The Church changes, but only in the sense of acquiring a deeper understanding of the deposit of faith. Accommodating the Zeitgeist is not good change but deterioration. The Church today is a shabby and deteriorated version of the Church of my youth because the laity are not longer schooled and the clergy and bishops have so often failed to live up to their responsibilities. We need a restoration and invigoration of the faith, not more of the spirit of modernism.
If that makes me old-fashioned then I will stand with the Church of the Fathers and be old-fashioned rather than stand with the modernists whose agenda is destroying the Church.
Plato remarked that any change that is not made as a remedy for evil is itself an evil. People who think traditional worship and traditional devotions are evil either operate from ignorance or really need to examine their consciences.
ReplyDeleteI hate to contradict Ray but he is wrong. The Church did sell indulgences. Julius II, at the insistance of his banker, Agostino Chigi of hte great Sienese banking house, authorized the granting of indulgences to those who made a financial contribution to the building of Saint Peter's Basilica. Julius' successor, Leo X Medici, widely expanded this program and it was he who authorized the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel to conduct the campaign in Germany that drew Luther's attention. But, more to the point, if one can grant an indulgence for prayers said, or works of charity performed, why not for the pious act of contributing to the building of the shrine over the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles?
ReplyDeleteAs for the burning of heretics, Ray is wrong there also. First it is an artificial distinction between secular power and Church when Church and State are united as they were in Spain, Portugal, France, and Papal Italy--the four countries where the Inquisition was strongest. Incidentally, the Inquisition was called the chambre ardente --the burning chamber--in France. The inquisatorial judges, all clergy, not only determined the innocence or guilt of the accused but passed the sentence, Perhaps they did not (usuall) light the fire, but in sentencing the "heretics" to death they, the Churchmen, can be said to have "put them to death." Better to admit that the Church has done wrong things in history, or things that appear wrong by our modern standards, than to whitewash history.