Then I was a small child, and the Mass just a fragile year or two away from its post-Vatican II transformation, I lived across the street from four brothers. Donald was my age, Billy and Bobby were nearer my older brother, and Jimmy was too old to hang around us much. My parents were very friendly with their parents, and one evening, when we were all gathered in the house across the street, we kids wandered away from the adults’ talking to play a game in Bobby’s room. We were playing “Mass.”
It was a religious version of the “playing grown-up” make-believe that kids love—like playing school or pretending to be mommies and daddies. Only this was much more special, because priests and the great thing they did at Mass were about the most special thing there was. We hunted the closets for bathrobes to wrap ourselves in, cleared the bureau top of everything but the lace-edged linen scarf, got down the crucifix and set it on the bureau, and assembled on a side table whatever else—bowls and cups and cloths—we thought we’d need.
Then Bobby assigned us roles. He got to be the priest (he was one of the older boys, but he also had special claims because our game had been his idea, and anyway, he tended to grab the generalship in our war games). A couple of the other boys were chosen as altar boys. Girls, everyone knew, could not be altar boys, but they could be nuns—and nuns were powerful people to families who patronized parochial schools. Of course, nuns didn’t actually say Mass or manage the book or bells, but they occupied front pews, and knelt the straightest and followed Mass the closest, and prayed the rosary from great beads suspended from the waist. So that was quite important enough a position for me, and we found a rosary to string on my bathrobe belt, and something to pass for a veil.
Then the Mass began (we knew nothing then of lectors, song leaders or eucharistic ministers). Bobby and the other boys processed from the closet to the bureau and began imitating the Latin of the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar in something reminiscent of the Pentecostal speaking in tongues. We were all very young; I couldn’t have been more than five, and the oldest of us was still a year or so shy of altar boy age, so none of us had learned any of the Latin prayers and responses, beyond the et cum spiritu tuo’s.
We were all too young, but the boys were already looking forward to becoming altar boys, and our game that evening revealed the straight line that led, not always, but often enough to matter, from altar boy to priest. And priests knew all about that straight line too. They understood that, although most altar boys would not be called to the priesthood, all had signed up for a kind of service that would encourage consideration of such a vocation, by encouraging a special reverence for the Mass and for the human being chosen by God to celebrate it.
In an era when the sacrificial aspect of the Mass was stressed, altar boys assumed something of the role of the page or squire who assisted the knight-warrior in his battle against sin and death. In recent years, when the Mass as meal is stressed, and the folksiness and natural, non-liturgical demeanor of many priests calls to mind the behavior of hosts at a dinner party, and the altar is bustling with other adults like lectors and eucharistic ministers, altar boys seem more like ungainly waiters and busboys than stern servitors of a celebrant following the example of his great High Priest. So when you rewrite the job description that way, why be surprised that waitresses as well as waiters are applying? And why be surprised that fewer children of either sex are enthralled by the idea of priesthood, however many girls may think the Church should be an equal opportunity employer?
The great American altar girl controversy is, in its devastating earnestness and well-meaningness, and its jolly Little-League tomboy triviality, an exasperating and depressing index of the superficiality of American Catholicism. The theological realities we should be grappling with, praying over and pondering are Christ’s sacrificial offering on Calvary, reenacted in the Eucharist. “What does that mean?” we should be asking, in fear and awe. “Lord, I am not worthy,” we should be saying, in horrified recognition of the banality of most of our actions, ambitions and desires.
Instead, all too many of us are absorbed in the democratic struggle to prove we’re just as worthy as the next guy. Lord, cut me into a piece of the action. This is not the attitude upon which great spiritual movements are built.
Several years ago I read an article written by Evelyn Waugh in the ’50s, in which he described the flourishing condition of the Church in America. He wrote of the hordes pouring through church doors on holydays, the huge numbers of Catholic families cheerfully sacrificing to send their children to Catholic schools, the young men and women crowding into seminaries and convents. Though Waugh heartily disliked America, he argued that America would be the great spiritual center of the Church in the next era. His article makes shaming reading today.
My brother and his friends became altar boys in time to memorize their Latin responses, a few years before they had to relearn them in English. And then the liturgies, in our parish at least, got sloppy and just plain folksy, and the dress and appearance and demeanor of succeeding altar boys did likewise. Meanwhile, our younger nuns, who were a pretty liberated bunch, hiked their skirts up inches above the knee as they lectured on ecology, the Vietnam War, the altruism of the younger generation and the materialism of their parents.
And from my altruistic parochial school class, and from my sister and brother’s classes, I do not recall any boys or girls entering the priesthood or religious life. Nor did any of my high school class, or any of the classes around me. I myself do not know any nun that I first knew in school. I know no priest that I first knew from school or as neighbor or a friend’s friend or relation.
Altar girls certainly didn’t cause this situation, and neither did the retirement of the Latin Mass. But a stripping of our religious sensibilities in the past 25 years has permitted us to discuss the question of altar girls—and of female priests—in the dessicated rhetoric of equal rights and coed Little Leagues.
Children are jealous of their rights and status, and they squabble constantly about whose turn it is to be the leader, or who goes first. But children also sense when something important is happening; they sense when adults are recognizing that something is so important that it must supersede complaints about you-were-first-last-time. Even as a small child, I don’t recall ever begrudging the priesthood to boys, because I knew it had to do with Jesus, and the Last Supper, and the crucifix on the wall. It had to do with Jesus asking certain men to do something with their lives—as, in another way, he asked certain women to do something with theirs. Many more years of reflection have left me with thoughts a bit more sophisticated, but no truer. And that is why more than jockeying for position was going on, that evening long ago, when we all donned bathrobes and laid out the bureau top for Mass.