Via Father Z: Should the altar girl decision be reversed? My position as a former altar girl

From Father Z: The formidable William Oddie, a columnist of the UK’s best Catholic weekly, The Catholic Herald, has an opinion piece on the 1994 interpretation of the Latin Church’s Canon Law which permitted service at the altar by females.   Keep in mind that this service was already being done abusively in many places before this interpretation of the law.   Many people at the time thought that this decision was a mistake.  Many people today think that the decision was a mistake.  William Oddie thinks the decision was a mistake.

At the end, I will include a WDTPRS POLL.  RELATED POLL HERE.

With my emphases and comments.  Remember: there is also a combox open on the site of The Catholic Herald.

The 1994 statement permitting girl servers was a mistaken tactical retreat which led to a fall in priestly vocations. It’s time to withdraw it

Undoing the damage will take time: the sooner the Church starts to clear up the mess, the better

By William Oddie

The rector of the Catholic Cathedral of Phoenix, Arizona, has decided that girls will no longer be allowed as altar servers (though they will continue elsewhere in the diocese). [For links... here. NB: the decision in Phoenix is sparking meaningful conversation across the globe.] His reason is simple: he thinks that an all-male sanctuary promotes vocations to the priesthood. “The connection between serving at the altar and priesthood is historic,” he says: “it is part of the differentiation between boys and girls, as Christ established the priesthood by choosing men. Serving at the altar is a specifically priestly act.” I’m not sure, to be pedantic, that that’s entirely orthodox (in the context of the Mass, only the priest himself performs specifically priestly acts), but one knows exactly what he means: what the server does is intimately related to the Eucharistic action and can be seen as an intrinsic part of it: the server is a kind of extension of the priest himself; if there were no servers, the priest would do what they do. According to Fr Lankeit, 80 to 95 percent of priests served as altar boys.  CONTINUED 

 Here is my response from Father Z's blog: 


As a former altar girl I agree with Oddie, at least for the most part. I grew up in a small town in MD which was actually in the Wilmington, DE diocese where I started out being an altar server at the end of 5th grade and I graduated from 8th grade in 1991 so I guess my diocese or parish interpreted the law in this fashion before it was declared in 1994. I had a few pro-feminist nuns in my parish so it’s actually not much of a surprise that the rules would have been broken. I would limit the girls to being a cross bearer. This way the girls can still feel like they are still involved with the Church but without doing any of the more overt seminarian functions. I really enjoyed my time as an altar server and having assisted priests and bishops at Mass. It was truly an honor for me and probably helped my faith to flourish in a number of ways and that is why while I would eliminate girls as being altar servers I would say that they should still be allowed to be cross bearers. Just have them sit with their families during Mass. I think having girls serve alongside boys as altar servers is confusing to the guys when the Church only has male priests. It sends mixed-signals to the guys – girls are okay to serve alongside me now but it’s not okay later. The role of altar server should be a stepping stone to the priesthood, in their discerning whether they are called to the priesthood or not.

Bishop Olmsted, Church Teaching and a Complicated Situation

Perhaps you remember last spring when there was controversy when Bishop Olmsted rebuked Sister Margaret McBride who served as the administrator of St. Joseph hospital, and on the hospital’s ethics committee, which authorized an abortion to save the mother’s life. It was an extremely complicated situation. The patient, a pregnant woman, had pulmonary hypertension which threatened her life. Unfortunately her pregnancy aggravated her illness and heightened her probability of dying from it. An abortion was procured at St. Joseph Hospital by the approval of Sister McBride. St. Joseph’s was (and as of today still is) a Catholic hospital, obliged to adhere to Catholic doctrine regarding abortion. Bishop Olmsted caught flack because people thought that he excommunicated Sr. McBride when that wasn’t the case at all. According to Canon Law Sr. McBride by her very actions excommunicated herself (latae sententia) from the Church by her action (Canons 1329 and 1398). She facilitated the direct killing of a human being. She may have saved the woman’s life, but that noble end does not justify the intrinsically evil means. Now Bishop Olmsted has said that he will strip St. Joseph’s hospital of its Catholic status if the hospital refuses to guarantee compliance with Church teachings. My praises go out to Bishop Olmsted for standing up for the Catholic faith and Church teaching and ensuring that a Catholic hospital abide by Church teaching.

From USA Today:
Two months of discussions followed but, according to Olmsted, did not resolve the question of whether the procedure was allowable. In the November letter, Olmsted said that he did not believe CHW intended to change its policies.


Olmsted's three demands were contained in a Nov. 22 letter sent to Lloyd Dean, president of Catholic Healthcare West. The bishop wants the hospital to give him more oversight of its practices to ensure it complies with Catholic health-care rules, provide education on those rules to medical staff and acknowledge that the bishop is correct in a dispute over a procedure the diocese says was an abortion.

"There cannot be a tie in this debate," Olmsted wrote. "Until this point in time, you have not acknowledged my authority to settle this question."
"Because of this, I must act now," he wrote, to ensure "no further such violations" take place at the hospital and to "repair the grave scandal to the Christian faithful that has resulted from the procedure."

The hospital personnel are using the principle of double effect to justify their actions but that does not apply in this case.  In my next post I will cover the principle of double effect.

Church Abuse Scandal, New York Times & the Problem with “hucusque vigens”

A canon lawyer and The New York Times are in agreement - that the Church's canon-law system exacerbated the sex abuse crisis in the United States.

Nicholas P. Cafardi, a canon lawyer, explains why he agrees with the New York Times article called,“Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal,”:

It is rare when issues of canon law make the front page of the New York Times and even more rare when the secular media gets their canonical issues right. But the Times story of July 2, 2010, “Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal,” did just that. As the Times reported, it truly was a failure in the church’s canon-law system that exacerbated, if it did not help to cause, the clergy child sex-abuse crisis in the United States.

When the crisis first broke in the mid-1980s, U.S. canon lawyers (me among them) thought that the new Code of Canon Law, promulgated in 1983, limited the canonical prosecutions of priests who had sexually abused minors to crimes that were reported within five years of their occurrence. The new canon 1362 said that the statute of limitations on such crimes was five years after their commission.

The problem with that statute, of course, is that it takes children much longer than five years to come to terms with an instance of abuse and begin to tell people about it. The literature suggests that the average time for a child to figure out exactly what was done to them, how wrong it was, that it was not their fault, and that they have nothing to fear from telling people about it, is about twenty years. So a five-year statute on child sexual-abuse crimes is unrealistic to begin with. CONTINUED