Marthas abound . . .

I attend Mass almost daily but do take some issue with the abundance of females running about the altar. It seems to me that women should be helping out when there aren't any men available to be lectors or extraordinary ministers. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, when they started allowing girls to serve Mass, it was to help out when there were not enough boys to do the job. Now, boys often have to sit out Mass because the girls are scheduled ahead of them.

No matter what people claim, serving at the altar is not a step to the religious life for a girl whereas it could be for a boy. If my history serves me right, serving at the altar, in the olden days (!), was one of the actual steps to becoming a priest.

The claim in our current parish is that there are not enough boys to serve Mass. Uh, in a parish with probably over 1,500 families, everyone just gave birth to only females? Like in the workplace, these days, females are taking away jobs traditionally held for men and it can be bad for moral, hard for men to support their families, and ultimately a problem for the economy.

In my entire life, I've only seen one altar boy who was a bit of a vanity freak in caring what he looked like, preening at the altar, and admiring himself in any nearby reflections. Just about every female server at our parish is constantly fussing with her hair, looking about, and refusing to take an active part in serving the Mass! More than once, there have been a line up of servers kneeling at the altar when it comes time to ring the bells for Consecration and I've personally witnessed the girl assigned to ring the bells hurriedly pass the bells down the line to the boy. When asked if she doesn't know how to ring the bells, she said, "I know how, I just didn't want to."!

My husband trained altar boys for over twelve years and he always told the boys that if the congregation notices them, they aren't doing their job. Ninety-five percent of the girls serving Mass want to be noticed.

In my humble opinion, we might be losing some prietly vocations when boys hesitate to become an altar boy because the girls have taken over. Seems to me we have more Marthas than Marys in church these days.