POLITICS: A kerfuffle over Altar Girls – USSA News

My Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — feed today has been filled with complaints because His Holiness Pope Leo XIV held Mass yesterday at a diocesan church in Rome with, Heaven forfend! altar girls as well as altar boys. Some of the complaints were trivial, that the altar server on the left was wearing tennis shoes, but most were that girls should not be allowed to serve at or near the altar, or anywhere in the chancel or sanctuary.

From Wikipedia:

During the Second Vatican Council. The Church discussed whether lay women could be servers at mass, although the matter would ultimately remain unchanged. Later in 1980 the Catholic Church would reaffirm the 1917 Code of Canon Law which stated: “A woman is not to be the server at Mass except when a man is unavailable and for a just reason and provided that she give the responses from a distance and in no way approach the altar.”

In 1994, Pope John Paul II changed canon law, removing the church wide ban on allowing women and girls to serve as altar servers. The decision was devolved to Bishops, who could choose whether to allow or disallow girls to serve as altar servers, but overall removed the Church wide ban.

Full disclosure: when we were parishioners at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1990s, both of our daughters were altar servers. They were also in parochial school for part of that time.

As we moved around for my career, we have been members at St Mary of the Assumption in Hockessin, Delaware, and, from 2002 through 2017, St Joseph’s Church in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Though my daughters did not serve there, there were altar girls as well as altar boys.

Now we are members at St Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Ravenna, Kentucky. St Elizabeth’s is a very small parish, with only 24 families as parishioners. We have been extremely fortunate in that we have three new, serious catechumens this year, and this is where the service of girls as altar servers has become most important. Following the shutdown of the churches due to the COVID-19 panicdemic — not a typographical error, but spelled to reflect exactly how I saw it — we lost our previous altar kids, who left the parish and never returned, and were it not for one single girl, we’d have had exactly zero altar servers for two entire years.

Since then, we have added two more altar servers: her younger brother and even younger sister. All of our altar kids come from one devout family.

How devout? The father serves as a Eucharistic Minister, meaning he offers the chalice of sacramental wine for parishioners, and the mother serves as a lector, or the person who reads the first two readings of the Mass and the Responsorial Psalm.

The numbers are pretty simple: in our small parish, we have two male lectors, myself being one of them, and two male Eucharistic ministers, though a third was added just last Sunday. The others are ladies, and they do just as fine a job as anyone else.

With the kids having been at St Mark’s in Richmond while the two younger altar kids go through their Confirmation classes, adult men in our parish, usually me, though one of the Eucharistic ministers also takes a turn, have been the altar kids.

Some kid: I’m 72¾ years old!

Perhaps some larger parishes have a sufficient number of men and boys who volunteer for these positions, and actually I was kind of voluntold, but let me be blunt about things: without the ladies, we would not have the staff we need.

The Church has this problem all across the world: a shortage of men taking the positions they once held. And part of this is something that our separated brethren — our word for Protestant Christians — suffer as well: too many men, too many fathers, not coming to church. At St Elizabeth’s, it isn’t as noticeable, but we are too small to be statistically significant. Too many fathers staying at home on Sunday, letting the mother bring the kids to church. This sends a message to boys growing up: church isn’t all that important to men, and don’t think the boys don’t get that message. To my friends who don’t believe that girls should serve in the chancel, my message is simple: get more boys, more men, to serve at Mass. Otherwise don’t complain about a problem you aren’t helping to solve.