I wondered that myself…I would like to hear the history behind altar serving…if anyone knows of it?
I don’t know if this is true or not, but the sisters in my grade school told us that long ago, back when Mass was said in the catacombs, there was always the possibility that persecutors would suddenly attack, and that the servers were grown men whose duty it was to guard the priest and the sacrament against such an invasion. Nowadays, they told us, that danger had passed, and young boys were servers in memory of that older need. But, they said, one never knows, and if someone should attack, we, as the guardians of the Eucharist, were obligated to do our level best to protect it.
As boys, of course, that prospect filled us with a bit of apprehension, but also with a great sense of purpose. We were the protectors of the priest and the Eucharist! Now there was a task worthy of a hero! As boys, we were being trusted with the most noble and manly of all imaginable tasks.
Even the secular world has begun to realize boys in this society underachieve relative to girls. It is my belief that boys require a great deal of challenge; more so than do girls, who seem to fit into proper attitudes and useful roles much more easily. Men are the same way. To be motivated, men must be challenged much more sharply than is the case with women. Unfortunately, too often in the Church, as is now becoming obvious in American society generally, there really is no “challenge” role for boys; particularly one that is gender-specific. Girls seem to know naturally “who they are”. Boys have to build “who they are” from a zero baseline. That’s why boys need to have “boy specific” roles and are not challenged or comfortable with being faced with the same duties or tasks as girls have. That, I think, is why one sees a lot of altar girls nowadays, but few altar boys. There is no defining “boy role” in the Church anymore. That, I think, is a very good reason for using boys exclusively as altar servers. Unchallenged boys; boys with no role definitions or models other than the natural outlawry of their peers, turn into Huns and Tartars; not into knights and priests. That’s precisely what we see so much of today.
I am sure some girls felt bad not being altar servers back before girls could be altar servers, but I have never met one, though I have asked dozens of women about that.
Finally, I think the Church could usefully consider a point I learned long ago in politics. That is, if you want someone to do something, you don’t wait for them to volunteer; you ask them to do it. With men that is particularly important. You ask a particular man to do something, face-to-face, and most likely he’ll do it. You sit around and wait for him to do it on his own, and you’ll wait forever. Women, on the other hand, probably volunteer 10-to-one over men for Church functions.
I’m not putting women down here, and don’t want to deprive them of anything truly important. I am married to a woman, after all, and have four daughters and five granddaughters, for whom I pray for happy, holy and fulfilled lives. But I truly do believe the emphasis in the U.S. Church on feminization has gone too far, and as a result, I think the boys are being given the message that the Church as an institution has little interest in them. In truth, among many of the feminist activists in the American Church who seem to determine so much, they’re right in thinking it.
