Tridentine Mass vs. Novus Ordo Mass: Girl Altar Boys

Important: If you are new to this series, please read THIS first.

There is a deeper level to the title of this post. For those who closely follow His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke, you’ve probably already drawn the connection between the title and his commentaries on the “Feminism of the Church”.

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Now, I want to be clear when I make this post that it is very certainly known that I am not a sexist, a misogynist, or anything related to those terms. I love women as my spiritual sisters in Christ and I hope to marry one obviously, so I’m not certainly not trying to say that women are incapable of serving at the Altar. If you are tempted to think that while reading, try to look for the deeper meaning.

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One of the most apparent changes that you will likely see at your typical Novus Ordo Mass are girl altar boys. However, this discussion gets quite into the weeds, ironically.

To be sure, several parishes do not allow this, and in fact the decision to have girl altar boys is not universal to the Novus Ordo. But just as sure, the Tridentine Mass cannot have girl altar boys. Or put differently, the altar boys at a Tridentine Rite of Mass must be boys/men.

This is not sexism. I think the best way to explain why, if it’s not apparent on its face, is by example.

The word for altar boy in Italian is Chierichetto. This translates literally to “little cleric/priest”. The altar boy is quite simply an early pathway to the priesthood. People might not want to accept that it must be that way, but it’s quite true, and I think it is hard to argue against that.

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His Eminence Francis Cardinal Arinze, former Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, speaks about this exact topic. He discusses this reference to the “little priests” serving the Altar of God. He also brings up a great point, which is that the young men serving as altar boys will naturally want to emulate the priest, if he is a good priest. They will say “I want to be like him.”

This reminds me of a short little documentary I just watched today, wherein a young man is discerning the priesthood as a monk. The interviewer asks him, “When did you know that you want to be a priest?” His response was, “Well, I was five years old. We were homeless, and my brother had just died. But my family was at Mass and as the priest held up the Host, I knew. I thought to myself, ‘that’s whom I want to be. I want to be like that priest.'”

As an economics student, I know that an individual case study doesn’t necessarily make a good argument, because it could just be an anomaly. So here is a little more data on this…

The phenomenal blog, OnePeterFive, wrote about this issue in a much more thorough sense than I will, but here is a quote of what it wrote, with some data:

“…the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released the findings from the 2014 Survey of Ordinands to the Priesthood. Prepared by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) for the USCCB, the survey was completed by 365 ordinands, an impressive 77 percent response rate…

“Of the 365 men surveyed this year, a whopping 80 percent had been altar boys during their formative years. In comparison, only 52 percent of ordinands had been lectors, less than a third had been youth ministers and only 15 percent had ever attended a World Youth Day or a Steubenville Youth Conference.”

That’s an amazing percentage. Of course, this correlation does not necessarily mean causation, as intro stats teachers are so quick to point out, but there’s something there. i think we all can sense that.

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In fact, I believe Cardinal Arinze later goes on to say that having girls serve as altar boys is unfair to them. Surely women serve and have the same respect and awe for the duty of the priest; but we dress them up (inappropriately, I will add in a minute) as priests, and we let them serve in the sanctuary, knowing that they will never be allowed to enter the seminary.

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Now on to dress… As Fr. Z. nicely puts, the Cassock and Surplice are proper to clerical dress, and therefore cannot be and should not be worn by women. Because women cannot be priests, by Pope St. John Paul II’s infallible statement in Sacramentum ordinis, it is not proper for them to wear clerical garb. You might ask, why should men not called to the priesthood be allowed to wear clerical dress, then? An answer, perhaps, is that just as marriage is oriented towards procreation — that is, men and women are oriented towards procreating, even if one or both is unable to actually have children — men are oriented towards the priesthood. That might be a little confusing, so let me try again from the opposite site. Because the primary end of marriage is procreation and two men or two women cannot naturally procreate, union between homosexuals can never be marriage. Because women can never be the proper matter for the priesthood, women are never oriented towards a clerical life.

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This is a very complex topic, which you can probably sense, and I’m probably not prepared or qualified to speak on a much deeper level. I can point you towards additional sources in addition to the ones I have linked, which have spoken about this.

Is this a grave change from the Tridentine to the Novus Ordo Rites of Mass? eh. It certainly does not invalidate the Mass or make it illicit; but, with that said, we do have a crisis in the acceptance of vocations. No one knows if this is the reason why, but let me speak from my home parish (another example 🙂 ). Our Traditional Rite of Mass has 30 altar boys. Not all serve each week, in fact the priest told me and my mom that he has to make a schedule for them, but I would certainly bet each would want to serve each week. I watch the boys grow up and gain further responsibilities each week. This Parish churns out vocations like I can’t believe; and of the 30 altar boys that serve at my Parish, I would be surprised if 5 or 10 of them don’t either enter the seminary or very, very seriously consider it.

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Lastly: This could be fixed in the Novus Ordo. Some Parishes have tried to fix this. HERE is a semi-recent example.

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