Altar Girls’ Rise Sparks New Hope

Sitting on a pew toward the front of St. Angela Merici Church in Brea, Mary Lou Mannion watches--with more than a bit of pride--as her two daughters follow the priest onto the altar during a recent 8 a.m. service.

Mannion, 45, remembers her own childhood, when girls could never play such a role. Her father trained altar boys at this very parish, so she knew all the Latin prayers by heart. She knew when to ring the bell and how to genuflect.

“I could help train the newer boys but I was never allowed on the altar,” she said. So her daughters “are kind of fulfilling my dreams.”

Practically overnight, altar girls have become commonplace in Catholic churches in Orange County and nationwide. Since Vatican approval came in 1994, clergy have welcomed girls as an answer to the shortage of willing boys.

But while altar service is often a first step toward the priesthood for boys, that path remains firmly blocked for girls.

Now called “altar servers,” the boys and girls follow centuries-old rituals in assisting priests: 15-year-old Natalie and 11-year-old Katrina pull on their white robes in a back room. On the altar they light candles, genuflect and handle the wine and water.

Judi Kasper, who with Mary Lou Mannion helps trains altar girls at the church, jokes that she’s still trying to send a clear message that the altar boys don’t have first dibs on favored altar positions such as handling the water and wine.

All the same, “I still have some of the older boys who tend to lord it over the girls a bit,” she said.

The debate over women on the altar goes back to at least the 5th century, when women were considered unclean and therefore not allowed to enter the altar, theologians say.

Those feelings carried over into the debate over altar girls, said John Crossley Jr., a religion professor at USC. “The more conservative members of the church felt that just like the priesthood, people working on the altars had always been male,” he said.

But “the more progressive felt . . . there has never been an official proclamation that women could not serve on the altar.”

In April 1994, Pope John Paul II settled the matter by allowing altar girls at Masses where local bishops and priests agreed. Many bishops had already supported the notion of having altar girls and began implementing the new plan immediately, including the now-retired Bishop Norman F. McFarland in Orange County.

For decades leading up to that decision, church leaders debated the role females should play in the church. But popular acceptance came swiftly, said George St. Laurent, a prominent Catholic scholar and religion professor at Cal State Fullerton.

“For a long time there was some resistance” to altar girls, he said. “But it was finally broken down. Really, practically overnight, young girls began to appear and now they are commonplace” in the nation’s 20,000 parishes.

In Orange County, many churches report that girls make up as many as half the altar servers.

At St. Angela Merici, for example, 51 of 105 altar servers are girls. At St. Justin Martyr Church in Anaheim, 31 girls serve, said Paul McMillan, who helps train servers.

This month, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange will hold an annual ceremony for altar servers, giving special recognition to those who have served for two and five years. It will be the first time that girls, such as Natalie Mannion, have served long enough to receive the five-year recognition.

While boys occasionally grumbled about having to serve, for girls like Natalie it was a privilege long closed to them.

Her parish was among those to have altar girls for a short period during the mid-’80s. That practice stopped shortly after McFarland took the helm of the Diocese of Orange in 1987 and said churches must wait for the pope’s word on the matter.

“It’s about time they acknowledged us, but I’m forever grateful they gave us the opportunity,” said the ninth-grader, who attends Rosary High School in Fullerton. “I wanted to be involved and I thought it would be really cool,” she said.

Maura O’Neil, who teaches religion at Cal State Fullerton, places a high value on just having girls on the altar.

“Seeing altar girls dress in ritual clothes does something to one’s consciousness and makes them realize they can be on the altar,” said O’Neil, who was active in a 1970s movement to push for the ordination of women.

Female priesthood is the next step, she said, “but I think it’s going to take a long time.”

Indeed, because altar service was traditionally a training ground for the priesthood, the debate naturally raised the prospect of women in that role.

The Vatican proclaimed in 1977 that women did not physically resemble Jesus Christ and weren’t at the Last Supper and thus could not be priests. And Pope John Paul II reasserted the rule in his 1994 letter “On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone.”

“That was supposed to silence all the voices,” Crossley said. “But it hasn’t. . . . This issue is very much alive.”

Natalie Mannion hopes priesthood will someday be an option for her.

“There’s a lot of things nowadays that they didn’t let girls do before,” she said. “I hope this will be one of them.”