Man, I can’t get over how many altar boys they use in the Tridentine Latin Mass. At the High Mass, there’s roles for 4 or more altar boys, but it’s not uncommon to have a ton of altar boys. The FSSP congregation of St. Philippine Duchesne has what seems like 3 dozen altar boys marching down their aisles and perching beside the altar.

I was an altar boy from when I was 11 until maybe 13, and generally wasn’t very good at it. I’d chalk it up to training. The dozen or so boys in my class in Catholic School who signed up to be altar boys were trained in a 2 hour session by the school custodian who was in seminary when he was a younger man. Otherwise, we learned it “on the job”. There wasn’t much to do, so I don’t think the custodian was going to spend much time prepping us for Mass when he had floors to sweep instead.

We’d typically have 2 altar boys, one who was in charge of holding the book and ringing the bells, the other would help walk up the cruets and hold the water/basin and towel for when the priest washes his hands. Most of the time, the altar boys would prefer to take the non-bell side because you didn’t have to be as responsible for as much—not that there was much to do anyway. Later, they’d add two more servers, but the extra two didn’t do anything other than walk up and down the aisle with the priest at the beginning and end of Mass.

I never really got the hang of where to stand and how to hold the sacramentary book for the priest. Monsignor Curtin would try to push me into place and push my hands up to hold the book higher, but I would forget and do it wrong the next time. The bell-ringing server manned a small set of altar bells during a couple points during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The bells sat by the kneeler pad on the side of the altar steps over by the credence table. Sometimes I’d miss my cue for when to ring them—but most of the other altar boys had the same problem. Again, spotty training.

Besides the wine and water cruets, we also had to walk the bowls of unconsecrated hosts from the credence table up to the priest at the altar table. The bowls back then were short, squatty ciborium footed bowls rather than tall chalice-looking ciboria, though I haven’t seen those at St. Joseph’s for years now. At the Sunday Masses, there’d be a heavy gold pitcher full of tart communion wine too—but I haven’t seen that in years, either. That’s the thing about the Novus Ordo—if you don’t like the way the priest offers the mass, just wait a few months and something will change.

One day when I was bringing the ciboria from the credence table over to the altar, I kicked the bells halfway across the sanctuary. Monsignor swung his head over in horror while I hurriedly put the ciborium bowls on the corner of the altar table, then scrambled to fetch the bells back to their position by the kneeler pad. Monsignor would later tell me that he thought I dropped the ciborium full of (unconsecrated) hosts and that it’d take a while to clean up the hosts and refill the bowl with new ones. That would have been way worse.

The year after the next, the Knights of Columbus took over altar-boy training; and all of us current servers were asked to re-train. Because re-training was held during school hours, we all jumped at the opportunity to get out of English period and brush up on serving; only the old retired Knights were holding training, since all the non-retired Knights were at their jobs, and some of the old guys were a little mixed up in how we were supposed to do the job. I don’t think they’d thought much about how to train us. There were a bunch of new parts, like bowing or genuflecting when we criss-crossed the sanctuary, but there was some confusion as to whether we should bow or genuflect and if we should face towards the tabernacle against the wall or the massive crufix suspended way above it, or if we should bow or genuflect towards the altar table out in the middle of the sanctuary, if we had to kneel during all of communion or if we had to stand in our stations during all of communion—it was all pretty confusing for them and us. I figured it was just old guys being old and mixed up, little did I know it was symptomatic of the whole Church trying to re-invent the Mass and retain the Mass at the same time.

Sometime thereafter, I asked to be taken of the server schedule. I was pretty confused as to what to do, and didn’t really feel like it was all that important. I was just about the last of my classmates to be still serving anyway, and figured it was something better suited to a new crop of 5th graders anyhow.

We all wore the black & white cassocks and surplices then, but they were pretty really pretty worn out and ratty. All of the white surplices had little burn holes in them from leaning across the candles and a lot of the black cassocks were frayed at the sleeves and hems. Shortly after I gave up being an altar server, they mercifully and sadly replaced all the worn out altar boy wear with boring plain white polyester albs and a white rope cincture more befitting the new co-ed servers. This was an improvement in my 13-year-old mind from the dorky cassocks and surplices, but I thought they looked a little… plain.

All in all, I never understood why men of my parents’ generation were so excited about being an altar boy. It really just wasn’t all that cool. But to hear them talk, it was a really special honor to be a server at Mass. Ho hum. There wasn’t much to it.

So when I first found the Latin Mass as an adult, I was really taken aback by the servers. Why did they need any more than 1.5 servers?! And they all wore the black & white cassocks and surplices that I wore as a child. The B&W’s looked great, really. In a way I wasn’t expecting them to look—they seemed to fit the feelings of the Mass, in a tidy formality that the white polyester robes just didn’t seem to capture. But here were divisions of altar boys marching in procession to bring in the priest to the Holy Mass. And as each of them marched up the sanctuary steps, they smartly genuflected and parted, filing in to flank the altar. And during the mass, they crisscrossed the altar in rigid efficiency and I began to think—aha! This is why the grown men today so fondly remember being altar boys, this was really something to be proud of! I think the youngest boys were around 8 years old, the oldest appeared 15 or 16 years old, and the young boys seemed to be in “training” for the day where they could ring the bells or present the ciboria or position the missal around the altar, or the coolest job of all—handling the cencers to incense the priest, congregation and the other altar boys. Of course they’d be proud! There was choreography involved, responses that were the job of the altar boys to assist in the mass—for most of the prayers, the altar boys were the only ones who could hear what was going on, since the priest was talking to the Lord, not announcing the prayers to the crowd. Clearly these kids weren’t trained by a custodian on his lunch break or by confused septuagenarians with happy-hour plans at the K of C hall's bar next door.

That was a special role, it wasn’t just the lame parts like book-holding or just kind of standing on a side-step. Sure, there were those parts too; nearly a dozen of the altar boys seemed to be particularly cast to just stand there in the sanctuary in their B&W’s at attention. But those boys don’t seem out of place, I wonder if they see their job as important cast members, or if they feel like they’re just there to stand around. From my seat in the pew, I think it’s great. If there was just one or two extra, then it wouldn’t have seemed so neat to me. But in a chorus of a dozen extra servers, it is pretty cool.

Pretty cool? I wouldn’t have ever thought I’d say that about being an altar boy. I think I understand how so many of altar boys would want to become priests one day, since they had been so close and so intimate to the action of a Mass that could sometimes seem so distant. My altar boy time was just the opposite, the Mass had been re-thought to so be so open and public that the altar boys seemed more like conspicuous props on display rather than players in the sacrifice of the Mass.

Hey, I understand why we ended up with an open and public Mass. Conceptually, I even agree with it. But sometimes I wonder just how much we lost when we threw out the bathwater.

Saint John Berchmans, patron of altar servers, Pray for us!