Friday, March 13, 2009

Altar girls?

Letter to the Editor of The Tablet, published 14th March 2009.

From Richard Duncan

Like Fr McCoy, I cannot be sure what St Paul would put in a letter to Blackfen. But if he were writing to Cambridge, he might well repeat his advice to the Corinthians about those with strong consciouses given way to those with weak consciences in the interests of charity. He might conclude that an extraordinary-form Mass on a Saturday evening with female altar servers was not entirely consistent with that advice, even if he deprecated the fact that those who were uneasy with the policy were resistant to liturgical change and motivated by the exaggerated antiquarianism that he rightly, if implicitly, deplores.

Fr McCoy and others may derive amusement and satisfaction by teasing traditionalists by doing things he knows they will disagree with, but to me, it is a policy that, in Edmund Burke's words, 'has very much the constructinon of a fraud.'

Richard Duncan

No comments:

Post a Comment