What is the rationale for having altar boys assist in the Mass? Where did the practice come from?
The practice has no biblical sanction, in fact the Bible says that a man must be twenty-five before he can be placed in the service of the Temple. An altar boy is a degeneration of the position of acolyte who was a functionary in the early Church in Rome and Carthage and later elsewhere from as early as the middle of the third century. They were not boys however and the earliest record of the Church in Rome from a letter written by Cornelius bishop of Rome, to Fabius bishop of Antioch in 251, shows they had forty six priests, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty two acolytes and fifty-two exorcists, lectors and doorkeepers. The predecessor of Cornelius, Fabian had divided Rome into seven ecclesiastical regions and set a deacon over each one. It appears from the records we have that the sub deacons were placed in charge of the acolytes. Thus the regional distribution in the last of the third century in Rome would have been one deacon to a region with a subdeacon and six acolytes to a
