Female altar servers

The evolution of the ministry of altar servers has a long history. In the early Church, many ministries were held by men and women. By the early Middle Ages, some of these ministries were formalized under the term "minor orders" and (along with the diaconate) used as steps to priestly ordination. One of the minor orders was the office of acolyte. Formerly, it was strictly forbidden to have women serving near the altar within the sacred chancel (infra cancellos), that is, they were prohibited from entering the altar area behind the altar rails during the liturgy, except to clean or in convents of nuns. In his encyclical Allatae Sunt of 26 July 1755, Pope Benedict XIV explicitly condemned females serving the priest at the altar with the following words:

Pope Gelasius in his ninth letter (chap. 26) to the bishops of Lucania condemned the evil practice which had been introduced of women serving the priest at the celebration of Mass. Since this abuse had spread to the Greeks, Innocent IV strictly forbade it in his letter to the bishop of Tusculum: "Women should not dare to serve at the altar; they should be altogether refused this ministry." We too have forbidden this practice in the same words in Our oft-repeated constitution Etsi Pastoralis, sect. 6, no. 21.

The references to "the Greeks" pertains to the Orthodox practice of ordaining women as deacons. With the practice of private Masses (Mass by a priest and one other person, often offered for a deceased person), scandal was an additional reason not to have a woman or girl alone with a priest. However, it has been customary in convents of women for nuns to perform the ministry of acolyte without being formally ordained to that minor order. So in a sense, women were the first altar servers as it was only at the beginning of the modern era when it became customary for men, particularly young boys, to substitute for acolytes in parish churches without being ordained to minor orders. This practice was needed when the Council of Trent developed the seminary system where men in minor orders would go away to schools for training to be a priest rather than study under a parish priest.

Around the time of the Second Vatican Council, some dioceses without authorization allowed girls in the lay ministry of altar servers. For example, this practice started as early as 1965 in Germany. The Vatican sought to put an end to such experimentation with the 1970 instruction Liturgicae instaurationes, and affirmed that only males could serve the priest at the altar. However, the practice nonetheless continued in some places, and the Vatican reaffirmed the prohibition against female altar servers in the 1980 instruction Inaestimabile donum.

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