A simple altar boy policy at my parish has unleashed a media firestorm. Hundreds of parishes in this country, and some entire dioceses, do not permit altar girls, so why the outrage? It is because I tried this in San Francisco, the city I love, the city that was founded in 1776 as a Catholic mission, the city whose churches flourished for a time, but the city that has once again become mission territory.

Clergy often remark that the Church in America, and certainly in Europe, has reverted to mission territory. Africa and Asia, to whom we sent missionary priests for 300 years, are now supplying priests for American parishes. But not only priests. Here in San Francisco, my Sunday offertory cannot even meet minimal operating expenses; we must ask poorer parishes to fund us. In an effort to jumpstart the parish, we’ve increased our clergy from one priest to two, and we’ve invested in a first-class choral program. Our parish cannot afford these up-front costs, but many friends from former parishes in the Central Valley have sent money to help this “missionary church” in wealthy San Francisco. People do not fill the churches in our cities like they used to, but the faith is growing in this lovely city of St. Francis.

Two months ago I implemented an altar boy policy that reflected the norms of the Catholic Church, particularly the 2001 directive of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship regarding female altar servers. This document says that “it will always be very appropriate to follow the noble tradition of having boys serve at the altar.” If girls are invited to serve the Mass, “it would remain important to explain clearly to the faithful the nature of this innovation, lest confusion might be introduced, hampering the development of priestly vocations.” I explained to our school parents the reasons why we are declining the “innovation” of altar girls, pointing to the essential connection between the Church’s male priesthood and the acolytes who assist them in their high priestly office. This beautiful big parish church that we’ve been given to administer needs more members to sustain its irreplaceable mission of word and sacrament in the city. To revive a parish we look first to the sacred liturgy, and among other improvements we wish to strengthen the altar server, lector, and sacristan programs. We consider that developing an all-boys and father-son acolyte program will strengthen the community as it has in many parishes by bonding boys and focusing their efforts on the Mass as sacrifice offered by the priest. We are also training our lectors, and most of them are female, many of them girls from our school.

Still, some members of our church, and of our school in particular, were not happy with the new boys-only acolyte program.  Somehow CBS got wind of this unhappiness. The night before the massive Walk for Life in San Francisco, complete with grim anchorpersons and shocked reporters live-on-the-scene, KPIX portrayed our parish as demeaning women in their lead story on the nightly news. Television and newspapers around the country grabbed the story, and a storm of controversy ensued. Of the hundreds of emails and calls from across America, Ireland, England and Australia, almost every one from the San Francisco area was condemnatory, and almost every one from outside our area was supportive.

But it is precisely in the storm of controversy surrounding the altar girl question that I see a first step towards greater faith in our parish and school. For years the school has operated somewhat independently of the parish. Laudably, it needs no funding from the parish; it manages its own staffing; its principal and faculty choose curricula; Masses are planned by teachers and students. It has been many years since parish priests or nuns have taught children at my school. Only 42% of its families are Catholic, many are not attending Mass regularly, and a number of faculty are not Catholic. I know and love my school principal and faculty, and I am coming to know and love the parents and students, but these are the unfortunate facts. It is precisely in this roiling controversy that parish and school have taken the first step in facing these anomalies. And this is certainly a step toward greater faith, because all of us want the school and parish to flourish, and we know we must make sacrifices to allow God to do this work.

Vatican II (Lumen gentium 25) defines a Catholic as one who exercises “religious submission of will” to the Church’s teaching authority. At the parish level, this simply means trusting your priest. Catholics used to trust their priests, and there are various compelling reasons most do not trust them today. But to be Catholic means to regain that trust, both in the Church as mater et magistra and in the local bishop and priest. How can priests serve their flocks as spiritual fathers if their spiritual children do not trust them?

Parish and school are at a turning point. Some will undoubtedly leave the school and some the parish and some will leave the faith (hopefully only for a season) because they cannot bring themselves to trust the Church. But those who face the inconsistencies that have obtained at Star of the Sea for many years will grow deeper in their faith. In a time when churches are empty, every pope, bishop, and priest must be a reformer. I see reform all around me, and reform is the only hope for the Church. This little controversy is a part of the difficult process of pursuing a course that is intended for the good of the entire parish, not only through the encouragement of vocations, but also a purified focus on the ultimate goals of the Church. A friend described this as a difficult but necessary process. May God give us the strength to embrace this constant reform of our faith and practice as Catholic Christians.

After the noon Mass on Friday, a CBS reporter cornered me, so to speak, for an impromptu interview saying “We have been told you are barring girls from the altar!”  One must wonder why CBS is suddenly so interested in religion. Perhaps they simply wanted to invent a new angle on the storyline that “the Church Hates Women” the night before the massive Walk for Life in San Francisco.

But I want to explain our decision to phase out altar girls to you who believe in the Church and her teachings. Altar girls have been permitted for the last 20 years, but for the previous 1900 years they were not permitted. Even now this decision is up to the local bishop.

Fr. Driscoll and I asked and received Archbishop Cordileone’s blessing to train only boys going forward. In fact, girls are still serving at our parish, but we are transitioning into a boys-only program for two reasons. First, in a mixed altar-server program, boys usually end up losing interest because the motivation to excel and compete with male peers is removed in a mixed program. Rather, Fr. Driscoll and I want to develop the leadership potential in our boys, for which single-sex programs are clearly more effective. We want to nurture our altar boys to become strong men, sound in their faith and open to the priestly or married vocation God may be calling them to.  Why is CBS not hassling the boys’ academies, the boy scouts, or the male fraternities of San Francisco? Why do we support female-only programs like all-girls schools, sororities and the girl scouts? We approve of other single-sex programs for a good reason.   Second, and much more importantly, altar service is intrinsically tied to the priesthood and serves as jumping off point for the seminary. If the Catholic Church ordained women, altar girls would make sense, but the Catholic priesthood is a male charism. Nothing awakens a desire for the priesthood like service at the altar among the brotherhood of young men. At the risk of generalizing, I suspect young men might just be distracted from the sacrifice of the Mass by young women serving with them.

I know change is hard, but I’m asking you all to trust me on this one. Buying into certain socially-bankrupt principles , like co-ed everything does not help us in the long run. We are Catholic, and we think differently than non-believers!

To read our official statement on the altar boy policy, click here.

Domine non sum dignus

Today Holy Mother Church gives us the Gospel passage that we repeat three times at every Mass: “Domine, non sum dignus, sed tantum dic verbo….” Lord, I am not worthy, but only say the word…” The pagan centurion believes that Christ can heal his son, and Jesus declares that nowhere in Israel, even among his own chosen people, has he found such faith. Let us pray that prayer, just before receiving Him in Holy Communion, with at least as much faith as the “pagans.”

If possible, live at peace with all men

Speaking of which, some of you may have seen our sleepy parish in the evening news on Friday. The breaking news story is that Star of the Sea is returning to the Catholic practice of only boys serving at the altar. As one parishioner observed, “girl altar boys never made much sense to me.” I was leaving Mass on Friday afternoon when a reporter from KPIX ran up with his cameraman. He had heard that our parish was no longer training “altar girls” and rushed right over to make an issue of it. He was very nice during the interview, but the news story that night was just a little short of vicious. CBS mostly showed angry parishioners, and both anchor woman and reporter bore grim expressions condemning the Catholic Church for being so hateful to women. I tried to explain that service at the altar is intrinsically tied to the priesthood, which is a male vocation, but CBS didn’t air most of what I said.

St. Paul urges us in the epistle: “do not repay anyone evil for evil…if possible, live at peace with all men.” It is not always possible to live at peace with all, not even with our own spouses and family members, and certainly not with non-believers such as CBS. But we must believe in God’s grace and try our best. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him.” Those of us who hold fast to a more traditional way of life, who adhere to the authentic teachings of the Catholic Church, are sorely tempted to repay the evil this evil generation dishes out to us with evil thoughts, complaints, and even bitterness. We must not give in to that temptation. I think of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who suffered unimaginable torments from “the pagans,” and yet who said to his fellow inmates at Auschwitz: “do no hate the guards…. Do not hate the guards.” St. Paul commands us: “do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil by good.”

The Real Story

CBS invented and aired a story on how the Church hates women the night before the massive Walk for Life yesterday. Satan is behind all this, for he wants to destroy human life, and destroy it in its most precious sanctuary, the wombs of our mothers. Consider the real news story: In 1968 Martin Luther King had been assassinated, which led America to guarantee civil rights for all Americans. Just five years later, though, America’s Supreme Court reversed itself not only by denying civil rights to another class of citizens but by legalizing killing them. This new discrimination was not based on race but on age. As of January 22, 1973 in the United States, if you were under a certain age you had no civil rights even to the right to live.

January 22, 1973 was the end of the rule of law in this country, even though its consequences have only gradually become apparent. As we began to accept abortion in the late 1960s, family life began to disintegrate, the use of drugs escalated, violence came to our schools, and our streets became unsafe. The civil rights issues we thought had been resolved in the 1960s have erupted again this year in Ferguson, New York, and everywhere, because a nation that sanctions abortion will never be a nation that respects all its citizens. Yesterday, 60,000 walked down Market Street in an effort to overcome evil with good. We are tempted, certainly, to give up on America when the media, the government, and the education system are all under the sway of the evil one. But we cannot give up, and we cannot stay home. We need to pray, we need to speak, we need to walk. God bless all of you who do so. Let us continue to pray, especially through the Immaculate Heart of our Blessed Mother. This nation is consecrated to the Immaculate Conception, and in the end, her Immaculate Heart will triumph.

“Speak, O Lord…”

We have been created to know, love, and serve God. To know Him is to love Him, and to love Him is to serve Him. But do you know Him? My non-denominational Christian brother asks me occasionally if I have a “personal relationship” with Jesus, and it’s a good question. Do you ever ask yourself as you sit in this big drafty church once a week if anyone is actually listening? Do I know Jesus, or do I just know about Jesus?  In the first reading the boy Samuel hears God calling his name in the middle of the night, but “at that time Samuel was not familiar with the Lord…” Once he realizes who it is (with the help of the priest Eli), Samuel dares to speak back to God, but carefully addressing him as Lord as the Lord’s servant, and a servant who is listening: “Speak, O Lord, thy servant is listening.” It’s a perfect description of the “personal relationship” between a Christian and the Lord Jesus.

Friendship

Until I was about 13, God was not real for me. I did my prayers, but I didn’t “listen” when I prayed, nor imagine that anyone was actually listening to me. In 8th grade I joined a charismatic youth group and saw people speaking and listening to God as a person. My mother had been doing this all her life, but I never realized it until I saw people my own age praying from the heart. I too began to pray from the heart. Christianity, more than any other region, is friendship, with God and with the communion of saints. We should be careful not to despise, or neglect, friendship—notice that Samuel needed Eli to teach him how to pray, as I needed my mother and my youth group friends.

In the Gospel, Andrew brings his brother Simon to Jesus. Christ looks at Simon, straight in the eyes, and says, “You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Kephas” (which means Peter, or Rocky). “I know you Simon, and I like you. I want to be your friend, even though I am your Master and Lord. Good friends change each other for the better, so I am going to change you—your name for starters.” For our part, we must seek His friendship, and be humble enough to receive the transformation that comes from friendship. We seek a relationship with Christ in dedicated prayer and a real effort to follow his teachings. “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

Glorify God in your body

Once we know and love God as our friend, we desire to serve him as our Lord. Our powerful second reading, from 1 Corinthians, addresses one area of service that we find it hardest to obey: submitting our bodies to the glory of God. Brothers, says Saint Paul, “your bodies are not your own—they belong to God, so glorify God in your bodies.” We live in the aftermath of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. In 1971 a book articulating and justifying so-called sexual freedom came out called Our Bodies Ourselves. It claimed that we own our own bodies, and we can do whatever we want with them. That claim is false. Our bodies are not our own. They have been given to us; we didn’t make them, and we don’t own them. They are given us for a higher purpose, just as the earth and everything in it is given to us, not to exploit, but to respect and cultivate. We are stewards of the land, the air, and the sea, and we are stewards, not owners, of our bodies.

Two years after Our Bodies Ourselves came out, the Supreme Court legalized abortion based on that same faulty logic. The mantra used to justify the killing of unborn children became “it is my body and I’ll do what I want with it.” But any embryologist will tell you that the unborn child is genetically distinct from his or her mother’s body, even though the two individuals enjoy the closest of intimacies.

Our bodies are sacred, temples of God’s Holy Spirit. That’s why 60,000 of us will be marching in San Francisco this coming Saturday, to speak truth and reason to the irrational culture of death spawned by the so-called Sexual Revolution. Everybody’s body is a gift of God, “so glorify God in your bodies.” If we know Jesus, we will love Him, and we will serve Him with all our body and soul. Let’s serve him this Saturday by walking our bodies down Market Street, with all patience and charity to those who oppose us, testifying to the truth about the human person.

Click here to visit the Walk for Life West Coast website

“Charlie Hebdo prides itself in declaring nothing sacred,” said one French commentator on NPR after the massacre on Wednesday. Does anyone else see the contradiction in that statement?

If Charlie Hebdo insists that nothing is sacred, how can it then insist that their own lives are sacred? Of course Charlie would say that I am equivocating. We take “nothing is sacred” in a literary sense, not in a literal sense. Even if Charlie mocks everyone, it’s understood that it maintains an underlying respect for the lives of the very objects of its mockery. But is that so? What if a person’s religion is more important to them than their own lives? On what basis does Charlie declare human life more sacred than religion?

I will tell you on what basis everyone is [rightly] declaring human lives more important than religious beliefs: on Christian principles. To mock the gods of the Persians or the Egyptians or the Romans meant death, as it does in Islam. Only with Christianity did respect for the human person become enshrined in religion itself (as in “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”). Jesus himself taught freedom of religion, and respecting human life became an act of religion itself. But secular France has cast off religion….

 “Night will not fall on our country; we will light a candle…” one Frenchman said. A candle to whom? Candles are a Christian tradition symbolizing prayer to God, but you say you don’t believe in God. Night has already fallen on France because you have extinguished the Christian principles of reason and social order. You have already chosen anarchy, and do you now fault extremists for acting on your principles? “This is an attack on freedom…” another said. What freedom? If you mock the very idea of “truth,” what is the basis of your freedom? You have proclaimed murder licit (euthanasia, suicide, infanticide, and abortion)—on what basis do you now claim that the killing of these 12 men is wrong?

We can and must condemn these murders, but we can only do so on the basis of Christian principles. Secular France cannot defend itself from anarchy and social collapse if it denies a power, a truth, and a law higher than itself. It will have to engage the subjective irrationality of radical Islam on its own terms. It cannot claim that it follows a law higher than the terrorists. France has sown the wind. It will reap the whirlwind.

I wish you a blessed and merry “Little Christmas,” as the Irish call January 6. In the south of Ireland, so Wikipedia tells us, the men all take on the household duties on this day while the women go to parties or shop for those after-Christmas bargains with their sisters, mothers, aunts, and daughters.

Herod wants to be a star

The Wise Men followed the Christmas Star and, on this day, find Jesus all brightly shining under the Star’s beam. King Herod also saw that star, but what did it mean to him? Absolutely nothing. Poor Herod (first, his name is positively frightful) considered himself a rising star in the Roman Empire. He became governor of Galilee at age 25, and to consolidate his position banished his first wife and their son, sent hundreds of priests to their deaths, and finally murdered his second wife and their children. And of course he killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem in a fanatical attempt to maintain control. He spent his life seeking to be a star rather than to follow a star, leaving a trail of blood, destruction, and anguish behind him.

Wise Men look up not down

No one can see the arresting beauty of the Star, or the Babe, or his Mother, unless he looks up, beyond himself. The Wise Men looked up, studying the heavens. They prayed to God rather to themselves. “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart, a simple look turned toward heaven; it is a cry of recognition and of love…” wrote St. Therese. They recognized God, while Herod recognized nothing familiar in this world, a stranger to himself and a monster to others.

There’s only two ways to go in this life: up or down. I can be a Herod, or I can be a Wise Man. I can choose to complain, to rant, and to despair, or I can choose to thank God, to edify, and to rejoice in the life God has given me. This joy is not just the power of positive thinking; it is “a cry of recognition and of love.” We recognize that God loves us, and that nothing is beyond Him.

No one wants to be a Herod, not even Herod. No one wants to kill babies, or their own wife and sons. But unless we study the heavens like the Magi, we will sink with him into that chaos. Prayer enlarges the heart and makes it capable of receiving the infinite God. Take the trouble to pray, to look up instead of down, to seek and expect joy. Take the trouble to stop in the church, or stop at an open window, and to look up instead of down.