When girls start serving the supply of altar boys dries up

Father Z has a poll on whether an all-male sanctuary fosters vocations to the priesthood. You might have guesse that I voted yes. Go on over and vote.

And he also has a link to this most interesting article by William Oddie at the Catholic Herald.
The bolds are Father Z's but I too was struck by the emphasized paragraph and it does describe, in a way, the feminization of the Church, a feminization that drives men out of the pews:

" . . . as soon as girls appear, the supply of altar boys tends simply to dry up.

The first time this occurred to me was in the house of friends with whom I was staying in France. One of the guests at dinner one evening was Archbishop André Vingt-Trois of Tours (now Cardinal Archbishop of Paris). The subject of conversation at one point was the way in which, in the local Parish Church, presumably in an attempt to involve women in the celebration of the Mass, not only were all the readers women but so also were all the servers girls; my wife (not I) compared it to a farmyard, with the priest as the cock strutting about in the middle of a flock of hens. Archbishop Vingt-Trois said that the priest may have had no choice over the all-girls serving team: “Once the girls arrive, he said, the boys disappear: you can’t see them for dust” (his explanation was much more graphic in French). And he was adamant that though there were, of course other factors contributing to the decline in priestly vocations, the decline in the number of all-male sanctuaries was certainly one of them.

You know, I have been a leader and the boss of men during my long career as a journalist and television producer and communications advisor in government, but I love it that in my church, the bells ring, the men process in (maybe a boy or two) and they take over.