You appear to be missing the point here. Your contention is that
nobody is taking the place of boys. Hence you see no problem with Altar girls as they do not take the place of boys, but increase the number of servers available. Quite clearly in this case and in many others girls are taking the place of boys.
Leaving aside the idea that at least some boys have been put off serving entirely lets say that the number of Altar girls has doubled the number of Servers. That being the case and given that most Parishes have a set number of 6/8/10 or however many servers at each Mass unless the number of Masses or the number of servers per Mass have
doubled since Altar girls were allowed then they have taken the place of boys. I’m not sure quite what your “personal experience” is on that but I don’t know of many if any Parishes which have doubled the number of Masses, or servers at each Mass, since allowing Altar girls.
Another point is that
girls do not have the same permission. Male Acolytes are instituted to perform the function, should they not be available as they are not in most cases the lay can serve. However girls are only allowed with the Priest’s permission, he decides if they are allowed to serve and thats presuming the Bishop has given permission. An individual boy or groups of boys may also be allowed/not allowed to serve and I suppose theoretically a Bishop/individual Priest could decide for Pastoral reasons to not have any children serve. However the initial presumption is in favour of boys being allowed to serve.
Perhaps you should look at
this. As you’ll be able to see the Pope states that he was an Altar boy, although perhaps he just hasn’t done as well in his studies as all the Priests you know. You do know of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI don’t you, Supreme Pontiff, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? Interestingly he uses the word “consequently” he also refers to a “long journey on this path”, starting as an Altar boy ending as Pope.
Interesting tactic trying to throw in the old sexism bit, it is a fairly weak one though and given that your entire argument is based on you, your feelings and your Parish I really don’t think its going to do much good.
Your whole contention in this is, and I quote, “Girls don’t take boys’ places”. Now are you saying that it is not a fact that for hundreds of years it was exclusively males who served at the Altar and for hundreds of years the vast majority, maybe not all but certainly most, Parishes had enough men/boys to fulfill those roles? Or are you saying that people are actually having mass hallucinations when we see Altar girls at every Mass when once there were were Altar boys?
The fact is the reason for all male Priests is grounded in our religion, the reason is the same for only having male Acolytes. The accepted practice until recently of only having Altar boys was an expansion of that. The whole point is that the Altar boys were learning from someone who had taken exactly the same path before them and at some point they discovered that they had the same calling as the Priests they served with just as Pope Benedict did and just as a lot of other Priests did and still do. So are you placing the feminist/cultural idea that girls should do exactly the same things boys do ahead of that? After all some people would love to have women priests in 10 or 20 years looking back and saying “back in those days, the people doing
my job were men”.
Still waiting for any valid studies which back up your view, or perhaps an acceptance that your initial statements were in fact quite seriously flawed although thats probably expecting too much
![Roll eyes :rolleyes: :rolleyes:](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png)
.