No, my apologies. Once I reread your comment, I see you weren’t calling me a liberal. I don’t hold liberals in high regard. So I was a little insulted. My fingers hit the keyboard before I engaged my brain. And, no, I don’t buy any liberal rhetoric.
No problem
Message about their worth to our beloved church. This is one area the girls are allowed to serve. To take this privilege away to promote vocations among the boys is sending a message to those girls. It isn’t a kind message. As I said in post # 14------"This is a horrible message to send to the girls. “Hey, you’re wonderful, just not good enough!” or “Don’t really need you girls, need the boys more!” "
You see, I just don’t buy this. Not one bit. This is where I think the liberal feminist mindset has infiltrated.
Firstly… these are kids. They don’t have the same kind of “everything that doesn’t go my way must have some deeper ideological meaning” mindset. More often than not, they just say “why!” and if you tell them they accept it after being upset for a while that they didn’t get their way. So unless a specific pastor tries to make a statement in that way, or if some girls parents have got an axe to grind, no girls will think that way.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the message being sent is not unkind and I don’t buy the way you’ve framed the message being sent. “Wonderful but not good enough”? Well, see, this goes back to a liberal mindset - everybody is wonderful, you can never do anything wrong, and if someone stops you from doing something you find a way to nail them and call them a bigot. We’re not all that wonderful, we are sinners, and nobody actually deserves or has a right to serve the altar. One could even say that because men are naturally more inclined to be sinful and distracted at Mass God is calling them to a great challenge. There is no “good enough” because nobody is. In any case, we’ve become too politically correct here. Even if it were true that someone wasn’t good enough. So what? People don’t get jobs because they aren’t good enough! This is more general speaking and not related to the altar boy thing, because I don’t believe it sends that message anyway.
As for sending the message of “Don’t really need you girls, need the boys more!”. Well, what’s the problem there? Girls know only men can be priests. Teach a child that this is trying to promote a vocation. No more priests - no more Mass, no more sacraments. We need priests. This is undeniable, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed to say it. But we also need women. As I have mentioned in this thread, women play an equally as important role in the Church. It is only a specific kind of axe-grinding feminist ideological stance that will target male only altar boys and cite it as an instance of girls being thrown to the side. Women have other duties and roles that the boys don’t get to do or aren’t encouraged to do. Think about it this way. If there was a war on my front step and they were calling up men to fight. On the other side, women were encouraged to help in manufacturing of weapons to help the war effort. Imagine I went the a factory and said “Oh so the message you send is that you don’t need men, you only need women, huh!”. Well… that’s not true at all. The message we’re sending is that you have a different role in our efforts, and forcefully and obstinately trying to choose this particular role doesn’t make it any less true that you have other roles. The analogy is obviously weak but you see the point.
I have talked to quite a few seminarians. Sometimes, I go to Mass at the Basilica, archbishop’s church, several seminarians attend. They come to our parish frequently, since our pastor mentors them. Not one, to date, has pointed to altar server service time as an inspiration to the priesthood. All of them point to Blessed John Paul II, WYD, or both as their inspirations.
That’s an empirical thing. I believe Father Z posted stuff recently with statistics about seminarians who served altar. In any case, perhaps these men who cited JPII as inspiration DID serve altar and it DID inspire them, but they found that it was not the sole reason but it played a big part, and they prefer to cite a time or person when they actually made up their minds about their vocation. Having a vocation myself, I can tell you lots of small reasons how I knew I had one. But if someone asks I will point to a specific person and moment in time which relates closely to that time where I decided to pursue my vocation.
