Yesterday I posted a rather startling photo from 1984 of a Milwaukee priest celebrating Mass, dressed as a clown.
The photo above is from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel archives, this time from 1982, involving the same Milwaukee priest, Fr. Edward Hussli. The topic, again, concerns female altar servers.
Some choice clips from the article:
- Parishes that have altar girls, he said, want to keep a low profile because they don't want to stir up ultra-conservative Catholics, who don't approve of women taking any part in the liturgy.Read the whole article here.
- Although the chancery is aware that several parishes have altar girls, the archdiocese has not addressed the question.
- Father Edward J. Hussli, associate pastor of St. Agnes, said it was an injustice to girls to deny them the opportunity to serve at Mass. "We're trying to eliminate all the masculinity from Scripture and the service, and here in one area, we're denying girls the opportunity to serve on the altar," he said.
- "We thought it would be really good for the girls learn at an early age that they can be accepted in different lay roles of the church," said Carol Richards, coordinator of the program [at St. Alphonsus]. Remembering her feelings as a girl attending Mass, Richards said, "I always wondered how come the boys could cross the altar rail and we never could. It was OK for me to clean the altar afterwards, but I wasn't good enough to be up there for the liturgy."
I could write for days about the various issues in this article. This article is 30 years old. Are we really better off?
HT my anonymous friend.
3 comments:
Are we really better off? Not by much. It's going to take serious leadership at the local level, à la Cardinal Burke, to stem the liturgical madness. The liturgical abuses by now have become totally normative. Those practices which started off in dissent have settled in and become the norm, to such a degree that no one even questions them anymore. Milwaukee is at the epicenter of much of this. It's one of those 'death by a thousand cuts' scenarios. So many things have been altered and tweaked that, what we now see when it comes to liturgy has little to do with what Vatican II envisioned. Again, the sad thing is that most people are oblivious to this, so much so in fact that, when we talk about Latin, Gregorian Chant or Communion on the tongue, we are the odd balls and fringe 'traditionalists.'
A horror story: A young teen-age girl came into the sacristy in the shortest possible cut-off shorts to serve Mass a few years ago.
My other horror story: I wore very immodest clothing for years, even to Mass.
The moral of the stories:
The modesty of girls/women in their attire AND their modesty in not serving is connected to Our Blessed Mother standing silently at the foot of the Cross.
Can we really say that boys dress any more appropriately? It seems to be a serious issue not connected to a specific gender.
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