Former Modesto priest at Catholic church in S.F. bans girls as altar servers

The Rev. Joseph Illo, formerly the priest at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Modesto, now is in San Francisco, where his church has become one of a handful around the country to prohibit girls from being altar servers.

Illo told Bay Area television station KPIX that he decided to train only boys to assist him at Mass after he was assigned to Star of the Sea Church last year because being an altar server is preparation for the priesthood, which women are ineligible to join.

“If the Catholic Church ordained women, altar girls would make sense, but the Catholic priesthood is a male charism,” Illo said in a statement posted on the church’s website Sunday. “Nothing awakens a desire for the priesthood like service at the altar among the brotherhood of young men. At the risk of generalizing, I suspect young men serving with young women might just distract them from the sacrifice of the Mass, and perhaps even from a priestly vocation.”

His statement also said boys often lose interest in altar service when the programs are co-ed because girls typically do a better job.

“A boys-only program gives altar boys the space to develop their own leadership potential,” his statement reads. “In the past 10 years, a significant number of schools are returning to single-sex education for this reason, and male-only organizations like the Boy Scouts or college fraternities exclude female membership to allow the boys to develop specifically male gifts. We support female-only programs like all-girls schools, sororities and the Girl Scouts for the same reason.”

Girls and women have been permitted to serve Mass alongside priests since Pope John Paul II approved the practice in 1994. Illo’s parish is now the only one in the Archdiocese of San Francisco that will exclude girls from serving at the altar. Such a decision is “a pastor’s call,” archdiocese spokesman Chris Lyford told the San Francisco Chronicle.

At Star of the Sea Church and its school in the city’s Richmond District, some parents and students disagreed with the move, parent Nancy Bye, who serves as liaison between the school and the parish, told the Chronicle. “I think it is a few people,” Bye said. “I think a lot of the people who are upset are not parishioners.”

Several individual U.S. parishes and the diocese in Lincoln, Neb., also do not allow girls as altar servers.

Illo served more than 20 years in the Stockton Diocese – the last 12 as pastor of St. Joseph’s – before leaving in the summer of 2012 to become a chaplain at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula in Southern California.

This story was originally published January 28, 2015 at 1:38 PM with the headline "Former Modesto priest at Catholic church in S.F. bans girls as altar servers."