In many Catholic parishes, 'altar boys' are really girls

ATLANTA

As soon as she was old enough, third-grader Ellen Clarke joined the first wave of girl altar servers, helping break up a club reserved for Roman Catholic boys for centuries.

Seven years later, the 15-year-old is still serving, but now she's surrounded by other girls helping out priests and deacons on Sundays at Atlanta's Our Lady of the Assumption church.

Altar serving has become so popular with girls that they outnumber the boys in many parishes. That's exactly what some in the church feared when the Vatican allowed female servers in 1994.

Before girls could serve, many parents pushed boys into altar serving, especially in churches with shortages. Girls have now taken over in some parishes, which has made it easy for boys to drop out. That's bad news for a church already suffering from a priest shortage -- because altar serving has always been a prime recruiting ground for future priests.

"Girls can't do that much in the church. I guess that was a way to get more girls involved," said Clarke, who wore jeans and a T-shirt while practicing recently for Easter services. "I do it to give back to the community, and it makes going to church a lot more interesting."

In less than a decade, girls have flocked to the altar in some churches. At Our Lady of the Assumption in Atlanta, they make up 44 of the 75 altar servers.

Crossing denial

Why is the activity so popular among girls?

"Whenever a group is denied a possibility for doing something, that makes it particularly attractive in some ways," said Lynne Arnault, director of women's studies at Le Moyne College, a Jesuit school in Syracuse, N.Y.

Now that they've finally got a chance to serve, girls want to do it, Arnault said.

No one keeps track of the exact number of altar servers nationwide, but altar girls have become an increasingly familiar sight carrying the cross, washing the priest's hands and lighting candles during Mass, say priests and parishioners.

At least two dioceses in the United States -- in Arlington, Va., and Lincoln, Neb. -- still don't allow girls to be altar servers.

Some clerics worry that girls will continue taking over altar serving duties, simply because boys and girls often don't like participating in the same activities. Most servers participate between fourth and ninth grades.

Twelve-year-old Molly Rolfes said it doesn't matter to kids who wears the white robes on any given Sunday because most servers volunteer for similar reasons -- to get more out of church and to be able to participate rather than sit, kneel and stand for an hour.

"There's not as many distractions -- you're paying attention to what you have to do instead of what's going on around you," she said. "As guys get older, they think it's uncool."

But many boys said they enjoy serving. "I don't really care about the girls," said 13-year-old Andrew Bowman. "The Mass goes a lot faster when you're part of it."

And priests such as Monsignor Stephen Churchwell say letting girls on the altar has increased overall youth interest in Mass.

The church still struggles to find boys who might want to become priests, "but being a server doesn't automatically lead you to be ordained a priest," said Churchwell, a priest at St. Luke the Evangelist in Dahlonega.

There hasn't been enough time to tell whether fewer altar boys will lead to difficulties getting men to enter the priesthood, said the Rev. Mark Huber of the Lincoln diocese.

But it's up to the bishop of the diocese to decide who may become an altar server, and in Lincoln, he decided to stick with the boys-only tradition, Huber said.

"There was a thought that having altar boys may help promote the idea of vocations to the priesthood in the future," he said. "It's certainly something that helps promote the possibility."

The bishop in Arlington is still praying over the decision of whether to allow girls, said spokeswoman Linda Shovlain.

"He's going to make a decision when he's ready to, once he's come to a peace in his heart," she said. "On both sides, there are very strong opinions. It's one of the divisive issues in our diocese."

Altar girls may be a step toward the Catholic church someday allowing women as deacons or priests, said Mike Reineck, who trains and schedules servers at Our Lady of the Assumption.

"It reflects the growing changes in the church, trying to make the church more contemporary," he said. "As the church grows, they have to continue to recruit priests -- you could double the probable candidates."

But Arnault said that, in the long term, it seems unlikely girls will entirely take over altar serving duties.

"After a while, the novelty wears off," she said. "I would expect that almost equal numbers of boys and girls would be interested."