Personally, I don’t find it at all
difficult to accept
being relegated to the pews.

An open letter to
some of my women friends

By Elizabeth Altham

A few weeks ago one of you mentioned a daughter’s serving on the altar at St. Cunegonde and another asked if I didn’t mind not being able to be a deacon. These should not be such vexed questions, but they are; so I’d like to approach them sideways at first.

    You’re all probably aware that in the secular law, there are procedural protections so important that they cross the line into substantive rights—protections like proper notice of legal proceedings and two witnesses to the signing of a will. Similarly, I imagine you’ll agree, in other areas of life there are formalisms, manners, conventions—rules that look optional until someone breaks one and you’re looking in bewilderment at the smashed crockery and wondering who let what out of its cage. If you’ve ever had a man let a door slam in your face when your arms were full, or if you know anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a unilateral no-fault divorce, you know the ‘60s feminists’ snarls on those two scores were ill advised.

    I submit that putting women and girls on the altar was breaking what looked like a minor town ordinance, but was in fact one of a lot of interwoven conventions that used to work together as procedural protections amounting to critically important substantive rights. (I say breaking, not changing, because the rule about girls was widely broken in much of the U.S., before it was changed. More in a moment about this remarkable way of doing business in the Catholic Church.)

    If I were raising three daughters sixty years ago, I would have been confident that if they had sound faith and morals and reasonably good manners, the Church and the world in general would treat them well. If they married, the Church and the world would hold their husbands to certain standards. If they were called to religious life, their orders would keep to a predictable and proven rule, and would care for them properly, even if they became ill or disabled or very old. Whatever they did with their lives, the Church would provide priests, the Mass and the sacraments.

    But I am raising three daughters now, and I am not confident. At best the Church mounts no effective opposition to no-fault divorce; at worst the bishops connive at it, for it is under their authority that the tribunals insist upon civil divorces before hearing annulment cases. If some cad marries one of my daughters and then divorces her, she will have little recourse—more likely none. I’ll probably murder him, but that is not exactly normal recourse. Stability, once an obvious feature of every religious community (and an actual vow among the Benedictines), is now so rare in religious life that it gets feature stories. There’s a disastrous practical consequence, also, of the decline in religious vocations. If one of my children decides to become a nun, she has little assurance that there will be any younger sisters coming along behind to care for her when she is old. And above all else, under the present dispensation, when will the diocesan seminaries again overflow? At about the same time as the wolfbane blooms in Baghdad.

    Because there’s a necessary corollary to a priest’s sharing the responsibility of the altar with women: he is also sharing the authority. Responsibility and authority cannot function apart from each other. Now, as George Gilder has observed, it is perfectly all right for very small boys to be under the authority of women; but it is not all right for older boys. A boy of twelve or thirteen with a solid Catholic formation probably won’t leave the Church because there are women on the altar. He’ll feel a natural resentment, not a great feature for his Inner Experience of the Liturgy, but he won’t leave. He won’t continue to serve Mass, though.

    This is not a thought that comes naturally to many people these days, so I’d better buttress it with a couple of examples. My neighbor Ed, who is eleven, and extremely bright, and generally of a pleasant disposition, has been suspended from school twice in two months on account of personal wrangles with his female teacher. He is more respectful of his father and of other adult males, however, than the average boy these days. I made bold to suggest to his father that Ed might do better with a man; his father instantly agreed, but explained that this large public school has no male teachers in Ed’s grade. My friend Mary, who is a judge, was invited to address a forum in a public high school about balancing careers and children. When she began to speak, a few boys began the chant: “Kill the bird, kill the bird,” and a majority of the rest took it up—a lot of deep resentment against female authority among working- and middle-class suburban boys. Older boys accept the authority of men, particularly of men who are good at things—coaches, boot-camp drill instructors, even teachers, masters of ceremonies and priests—but the authority of women gets their backs up.

    Girls on the altar make matters much worse. Give just a hint of power, just a trapping or two of power, to ninety percent of eleven-year-old girls, and you get bossiness. It’s as sure as when the eleven-year-old girl or boy mixes vinegar with baking soda to make rocket fuel. Very few girls know how to wear authority gracefully until they aren’t girls any more. The boy who will knuckle under to Lucy Van Pelt, I don’t want in the priesthood. The alternative is war on the altar.

    Sure, I know some splendid priests who never were altar boys. We all do. But is this the time to discourage boys from serving? To encourage them to regard religion as girl stuff and priests as sissies who willingly share authority with women and make them—the boys—sit with the girls?

    The boys I observe serving at the old Mass seem to take positive pleasure from their involvement in an all-male endeavor. They are as precise as military cadets—after all, the complex rubrics have much in common with marching drill, and with advanced football plays. Even those who will not become priests will surely have gained the precious practical knowledge that there are important responsibilities that they can fulfill and women cannot; this is a marvelous foundation upon which they can build as responsible husbands and fathers, the kind I want for sons-in-law. I should think even boys who never serve at Mass gain some of that knowledge from watching their peers do so.

    Gilder has another relevant insight. (Fallen) men, he says, are not naturally responsible any more than they are naturally monogamous. They are as willing to abdicate responsibility, given a reason to suppose someone else will take it over, as they are to philander if we put up with it. The welfare state probably causes more single mothers than philandering does. If we tell men, by clambering onto the altar, that someone else is willing to take on that responsibility, we are cutting the ground out from under our daughters’ feet. The priesthood is a very hard life. Only masochists and sissies are going to volunteer for it if we rob it of its unique authority and its uniquely male esprit. Who will advise our daughters when we are gone, and baptize our grandchildren?

    Personally, I don’t find it at all difficult to accept being relegated to the pews. After six and a half days of taking responsibility for making life happen, I welcome an hour or so during which someone else is in charge. I love being allowed to subside under my mantilla and to know that nobody is even going to look at me, much less demand that I adjudicate the possession of a pen or the allocation of chores. For any of you who find it difficult to let go the reins, I offer the thought that, really, at Mass, it is God who is making things happen, not us, anyhow. If that does not work you might try offering it up in the interest of the common welfare, or for your sins or your friends’ intentions. It is a small price to pay for the knowledge that neither we nor our daughters are going to be responsible for chasing one potential priest off the altar.

    Besides, do we want to associate ourselves with the tactics by which the girls got there in the first place? Their pastors broke the rule; their bishops declined to enforce it; the Pope, apparently because he is disinclined to chastise his subordinates, went along in the end. The certainty that those who have authority over us will follow the rules is a procedural protection like the certainty that if someone sues us we’ll have proper legal notice and our day in court. Even in the case of a clearly good change, to go along with tactics that undermine that procedural protection is short sighted. It’s knocking a brick out of the constitutional wall of the Church. It’s like not calling the police to ask if anyone’s reported the wallet you found as lost, or skipping what your mother told you about cleaning good silver: you may well not be able to foresee all the consequences, but it’s a safe bet some of them will be unpleasant, or worse.

    My friends tend to be competent women, women who hate, as much as Peter Wimsey did, to see a thing badly done. I share with you the impulse, when we see men messing something up, to get in there and fix it. Well, the new Mass is always in some ways going to be badly done (that’s another conversation); we aren’t going to fix it by adding the muddle of sex roles to the general stew.

    Ah, you say. Here comes the unacceptable part. What are our proper roles as women? I really don’t think it has to be such a vexed question, perhaps because it’s been fairly ordinary for women in my family to be educated. My great-great-aunt graduated Vassar in 1898 and was arts and architecture editor of a major encyclopedia; my mother, who yearly raised an entire classroomfull of “uneducable” children two or three grade levels, always held that aunt up as an example of what a competent woman could do. It isn’t just my family: Harriet Vane supported herself very nicely on detective stories, and got a classical scholar to defend the genre as moral—and classical. But she and my mother agreed that a family needed one head, that if a tree were falling or a house burning somebody had better be in a position to say jump.

    As many of us as of the men are plenty smart and diligent enough to excel in academics; as many are competent and conscientious enough to excel in medicine, law and business. Perhaps because of the female authority problem, however (“Kill the bird!”), and perhaps because of the male responsibility problem, and no doubt for reasons of his own, Christ established a male priesthood. It’s very difficult for us to stand out of the way while the men make messes, but that is exactly what we have got to do. In the past thirty years a whole Sherwood Forest has fallen on the Church and there are pyromaniacs all over the place. We cannot expect priests to exercise responsibility, or normal men to become priests, especially now, if we deny the unique authority of the priesthood—an area, like biological fatherhood, in which we’re never going to be able to exercise the responsibility for making things happen. However diligently—and in general, we are more inclined to diligence than men are—we try to be part of the solution, on the altar we’re only going to be part of the problem.

    If we need consolation, while enduring a particularly novus Novus Ordo Mass, we can remember that men made it up; it’s their job to fix it. Think of the black mantilla as an unsubtle reminder to them.

Mrs. Elizabeth Altham is the managing editor of the Latin Mass magazine. She has also served as contributing editor of Sursum Corda. Currently she resides in Hamden, Conn. This is her first article in HPR.

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