I think it starts with the boys, and very early.
First, (and it seems to have been borne out in a study) children whose father is a regular churchgoer, tend to be churchgoers as adults. Those whose fathers don’t, don’t, regardless of what the mother does or doesn’t do.
Second, and as retrograde as this will make me sound, I think it was a mistake to change boy servers’ cassocks to the unisex garb girl servers wear and, perhaps, to have girl servers at all. Call it sexist if you wish, but boys were once essentially drafted to be altar servers; to learn a very difficult set of Latin responses and the intricate choreograph of very exacting server movements. It was a disciplining thing, and a challenge; vastly different from the essentially listless role servers have now. I recall being told by the parish priest long ago that acolytes were once grown men who, in the catacombs, were to save the priest and the sacrament from violent hands, to the death if need be. He told us we were unlikely ever to have to rise to such an occasion, but that it was our duty all the same. As a boy I actually considered how I might save the priest and the Blessed sacrament from violent hands. I really did. Now, there was a manly charge and a heroic role for a boy!
Is any man now grown old enough to remember being assigned, in the seventh and eighth grades, to be a crossing guard? We had “Sam Browne” belts complete with a badge, and accompanied the younger kids across streets at school. We literally had the “authority”, or so we believed, and probably rightly, to stop traffic and escort the little kids across. And we were to protect them from all harm of any kind, not just from traffic. If some bully troubled them, we saw it our role to jump into protective action, and we sometimes really did.
When I was in Catholic grade school, we received one or both of two Catholic magazines each month. There were devotional articles in them and “comic book” like stories. One I recall vividly, about a young squire to a knight in the Crusades. Yes, it lacked today’s “political correctness” in a big way; no apologies for being Christian warriors. The adult male knights were quintessentially heroic, and the squire emulated their action and their devotions, sometimes besting the knights at least in the latter if not in the former. There were other serial stories like that. Some had to do with boys who had gone astray in some manner and who were brought back to virtue by virtuous and very manly boys, often with the aid of a priest. And yes, both moms and dads were objects of respect, even veneration in those stories. Neither were ever portrayed as bumblers or jokes.
How in the world did churchmen in our own day lose sight of that incredible exercise of psychology?
I am sometimes amused that when I was a server at the big events like Midnight Mass, it was considered a challenge to remain kneeling on a hard floor during Communion which was, then, an extremely long time, given that everybody in the parish went and there were no Eucharistic Ministers. Every muscle screamed for us to sit down, but we wouldn’t. Try it with nothing at all to lean on for even ten minutes, let alone fifteen, twenty. It was an offering, you see, to God; a challenge to holy heroism. Perhaps we couldn’t manage to roll in thorns or wear hair shirts, but we could kneel on aching knees while incense from the censers streamed up into our eyes or we struggled to hold a large candle steady the entire time. Perhaps we couldn’t be as pious as the girls, day to day. Perhaps we were always in trouble with the nuns where the girls almost never were. But we had our role, and it was to be heroes in the pinch.
In the processions, the very young boys wore red cassocks with plain white surplices. We then graduated to black, very priest-like cassocks with plain white suplices. Then we graduated to black cassocks with lace surplices. Teenage boys serving (and yes, they were there) wore white cassocks with purple cuffs and collars. It was almost like perservering to the point of finally being, what? Almost a monsignor? Rather similar to a bishop? It took years of service to merit that, but we did it. And even the biggest rascals treated it seriously.
I do not say that girls should have no role in liturgies. They once did, and never did I hear any complain of it, even though it was different. So, okay, girl servers are here to say. But can’t the boys at least have their own garb? Do they absolutely have to “dress like the girls”? Can they not be distinctively boys?
Boys really have no role anymore that’s peculiar to them. Most servers in most parishes now are girls to the near exclusion of boys. Boys have no “story” that is their own. No demanding task. No challenge. There’s no encouragement to the kind of heroism that makes a boy encourage himself to rise to the occasions of a holy and exemplary manhood.
Even modern church architecture is, in my mind, wrong for boys. So many of the modern designs are “return to the womb” architecture. That’s the exact wrong thing for a boy. Boys need grandeur; something bigger than themselves. Something to inspire awe. And it sure doesn’t hurt for their fathers to be awe-inspired either. It looks like that sort of thing is receding in church architecture, God be thanked, and not a moment too soon.
Once boys are lost to the Church, it’s extraordinarily difficult to get them back as men. And, the less the men are challenged to be holy men; holy to the point of heroism, the less likely they are to insist that their sons train to be holy men as well.
That’s my take. You can talk K of C or cooking hot dogs all you want, and I’m not putting it down. But it’s the boys. It’s the boys. It’s the boys.
