Eight Reasons Why Men Only Should Serve at Mass

Mass Celebrating the Closing of the Year for Priests

To raise the possibility of an all-male liturgical ministry is to invite tribulation. Those who prefer the traditional arrangement of male altar servers, lectors, and so on are nervous about vocalizing their convictions, let alone acting upon them. This in itself is significant: Regardless of where one stands on the issue, it should give us pause that many Catholics, from the pious in the pews to prelates in the Vatican, stand in fear of being stigmatized as supporters of a 4,000-year-old tradition, faithfully kept by God's chosen people from the days of Abraham until the Catholic Church began changing its practices in the 1970s.

But let us have courage and look again with fresh eyes. Such an investigation is necessary, especially if we wish to continue admitting women into the service of the sanctuary. G. K. Chesterton once complained of would-be reformers that they "do not know what they are doing because they do not know what they are undoing." His grievance was that reformers either do not sufficiently study the original rationale for the thing they are dismantling, or they assume "all their fathers were fools." Yet advocates for female liturgical ministers might go further and say that our fathers were not fools but worse: oppressors, sexists, misogynists. This forces us to ask: Are sins of bias the real reason behind an all-male liturgical ministry? What precisely are we undoing?

To address these questions, we turn to eight distinctions...

Inside Catholic: Eight Reasons Why Men Only Should Serve at Mass

H/T Pewsitter