Perhaps I would not go as far as Lucius Cary, the Viscount Falkland, the 17th century Tory leader, who insisted that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change” — but I know what he was getting at. (The change England got in his time was Oliver Cromwell.) The decision to permit girls to become altar servers could serve as a case in point.
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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
I do not want to seem peevish about girls serving Mass. I have nieces who serve. I am proud of them. They serve in a dignified and pious manner. But there are cultural implications to the presence of girls on the altar that deserve out attention. I’m afraid the wags were right when they predicted that the day would come when Catholics all over the country would stand outside after Mass and wax nostalgic about the era when there used to be altar boys in their parish.
I know. It hasn’t come to that. There still are altar boys around. But, from what I can see, not that many, certainly not many boys of high school age. What happened? I think it is pretty clear. Older boys are unwilling to take the catcalls from their friends about caring for the candles and linens on Sunday with Suzie Brown.
This is a change of decided proportions. When I was a boy, there was nothing unmanly about being an altar boy. Quite the contrary. Some of us used to say that we learned all our vices in the altar boys. That was an exaggeration, of course. But it was true that altar boy meetings on Friday afternoons put you in the company of some of the most, well, mischievous characters in the parish. The hour before the meetings began was filled with a series of escapades in neighborhood candy stores, alleys, playgrounds and parish basement areas that led many of us to look forward to the meetings all week long. There was no reason to “deny” being an altar boy. There was nothing “soft” or weak about it.
The altar boys were on the town’s athletic teams, regulars in the playgrounds and at Boy Scout meetings. I can remember when I was a young altar boy in the 1950s, seeing some of the prettiest girls in the neighborhood waiting to be walked home after Christmas midnight Mass by the older altar boys. They were the guys in the parish with the lettermen sweaters and Flash Gordon haircuts.
Even the hoody types seemed a bit in awe of the fact that we would get up at five o'clock to serve at the “nun's Mass.” They'd say, “You're crazy to do that.” But they would say it in the way that some enlisted men might deride those who volunteer to jump with the 82nd Airborne. Well, okay, okay, that’s an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say that it was possible for the altar boys of that era to imagine that they were perceived in such a “heroic” manner by their peers. But that is the point. You did not lose any boyhood status by serving Mass. In the current jargon, it was “cool” to be an altar boy. Nowadays that is not the case.
Uh-oh…I can hear the sighs of protest, see the finger-wagging and scolding that will greet that last paragraph in certain circles in the modern Church. Feminist and New Age-types will insist that serving at Mass should not be the early stages of some Catholic good old boy network. I can hear the schoolmarmish voices of reproach admonishing that upstanding and “sensitive” young men should learn to rise above their macho derision of “girl's work,” and be a real man. You know, like Alan Alda.
Christianity by its very nature seeks to soften the warrior spirit of the male. There is something gentle, something receptive rather than assertive — yes, feminine — about its call to serve rather than conquer and dominate our fellow men and women. It refines us, civilizes, ennobles. The hunter, the warrior, the soldier in the Europe of old, the Europe of Altar and Throne — and the American Catholic of more recent memory — would leave his weapons, and what they represent, outside the narthex when he attended Mass. He became a new man, reborn in Christ, a man in but not of this world, when in attendance at the liturgies of the Faith.
Through the centuries, Catholic men have been willing to live this dualism, at some periods and in some places more than others. But to demand that they openly and institutionally adopt the external style and bearing of some male auxiliary of the League of Women Voters is asking too much. And I suggest that the feminists have just such a transformation in mind; that the call for altar girls is part of a package being pushed by ideologues within the Church who have no love for the Church and who seek to reshape us to satisfy the likes of Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton.
One would think that those updating Catholics who have pushed for decades now for “relevant” and “meaningful” liturgies — everything from folk Masses to puppet Masses to church murals picturing Christ as a Third World guerrilla — would have been willing to find room to “indulge” the cultural identity of the mainstream American male when they considered the question of girls serving Mass. That they bristled at this notion instead suggests a zealotry informed more by feminist ideology than by the best interests of the Church.
