Sri Lankan Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith has mandated that girls are not permitted to serve as altar servers in parishes within the Archdiocese of Colombo. “No girls should be invited to serve at the altar ...

ATLANTA — As soon as she was old enough, third-grader Ellen Clarke joined the first wave of girl altar servers, helping break up a club reserved for Roman Catholic boys for centuries. Seven years ...

As I sit and wait, thousands of thoughts are running through my mind. Where is everyone? What if I have to do this all by myself? Will I remember my cues? That was how I felt on my first day of altar ...

When she was a young girl, Logan Crotty dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest. She had always had an insatiable desire for intimacy with God and for a place of importance within God's mission, the ...

To many boys in many parishes, serving at the altar has become a “girl thing.” There’s no better time to encourage boys to change their thinking than the Jan. 31 feast of St. John Bosco, “Father and ...

When I was a young girl attending Mass with my family at St. Mary's Catholic Church in the 1960s and '70s, I don't ever remember wanting to be an altar server. So the fact that I ended up becoming one ...

David Kim, a Catholic altar server, stands for a portrait before a Mass at the Princeton University chapel in Princeton, N.J., on Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao) David Kim, a ...

Twelve-year-old Katie spills out of the car, all 4-foot-7 of her, and walks to the side entrance of the imposing Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in north Baltimore. She passes under the “Maria Immaculata” ...