Altar Servers on the Feast

This past Sunday, our parish celebrated its feast day with Masses (Ordinary Form, English with Latin responses) and a potluck.

The feast of the Holy Rosary is actually today, but since it is our patronal solemnity, the Archbishop has given permission to move the celebration to the nearest Sunday.

One of my volunteer gigs there is to coordinate the Altar Servers and MC at the more complicated Masses. These were definitely complicated.

We had every Altar Server in the parish scheduled at one of the two Masses – that’s 6 for the 8:00AM Mass and 10 for the Noon Mass. There was only one no-show, and we had a Server from St. Joseph parish to fill in the gap.

There were obviously some changes from an ordinary Sunday Mass that they had to take into account. Thurifer and boat bearer. The sung responses were in Latin. We replaced the Confiteor with the Asperges. There were torches in the opening procession and at the Eurcharistic Prayer through the end of Communion.

That’s a lot of moving parts.

We always joke that we’ve done well if there are no collisions and no unexpected fires.

They did magnificently. There were a few missteps, but really nobody outside of the sanctuary noticed. They did very well, and I’m extremely proud of them.

After the Noon Mass, we had Altar Server assessments, and we passed one Apprentice Server to Junior Server, and two Juniors to Senior.

Now all I need to do is to find an assistant….