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I agree with you 100%. My recollections mirror yours...I can clearly remember, as a young girl, thinking how it was somehow very wrong that our teachers, Sisters who had devoted their entire adult lives to their faith, could not set foot upon the altar...but any number of smart ass male contemporaries of mine could. At the age of 12.

I don't see female altar servers as the biggest problem facing the Church in America today. I see my Diocese, which paid out millions in pedophelia cases, asking the faithful for more offerings; I see Catholic education being priced out of the reach of the middle class ($6000 a year for HS in our Diocese); and I see the gross hypocrisy of 'catholic' (purposely with a lower case c) politicians being allowed free reign to use their faith as a prop rather than a theology they live by (think any Kennedy). I would be much more impressed if more Bishops spoke out against Catholic pols who vote against the ban on partial birth abortion rather than taking aim at 12 years girls as altar servers. Or clapping. The current controversy is more akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic .

I suggest to you that your accurate perception of problems in the Church (all of which are temporal) are a direct result of the abuse of Her Liturgy.

This is a synthesis. Defiance of authority, pervert clubs, treachery, and the 'reductio ad absurdum' which is the current liturgical practice in many places has led DIRECTLY to the pedophile problem, the money problems, and the "priest shortage" in certain well-defined Diocesan areas.

And this defiance and treachery was what began the whole process, well before the II Vatican Council was held. It was defined clearly as "modernism" in the early 1900's.

As to keeping women from the altar--this practice is a linear descendant of both Jewish Temple practice AND the Church's CERTAIN understanding of the inviolability of the male priesthood. It IS a synthesis. The altargirlie thing was a grave error based on the feminist heresy--a form of indifferentism--that women and men are all the same except for a few minor details which are irrelevant.

This error has enormous social repercussions outside the Church, as well--the 'women in combat zones' problem being only the most obvious and recent.