Episcopalians: Communion from a Woman

At the Church of the Holy Spirit in Salinas, Calif., one Sunday last month, Mrs. Phyllis Edwards, 48, walked to the altar to minister at 8 o’clock Holy Communion. Dressed in a deaconess’ dark blue, nunlike robes surmounted by a deacon’s stole, Mrs. Edwards calmly intoned the prayers and then distributed the bread and wine of Communion, which had been consecrated by the church’s rector at a previous service.

The parishioners thereupon became the first Episcopalians in the U.S. to receive communion from a woman. The service took place — where else? — in the diocese of California’s experiment-loving Bishop James A. Pike, who is de termined to ordain Mrs. Edwards to the diaconate. A widow with four chil dren, she is now one of about 70 active Episcopal deaconesses authorized by the church to perform social work and teach the catechism.

“Serious Division.” Unlike male deacons, for whom the office is normally a one-year prelude to ordination as a priest, deaconesses have not been al lowed to distribute Communion or administer sacraments to the sick. Pike believes that he can change this rule because of a word-switch in canon law made by the church’s General Convention last year; women now are “ordered” deaconesses by a bishop, instead of “appointed.” The convention also dropped the canonical provision that deaconesses must be single or widowed, but Mrs. Edwards says, “I have no desire to marry again.”

Most clerics think that the change is purely verbal and balk at Pike’s plan Bishop Francis W. Lickfield of Quincy, Ill., head of the Anglo-Catholic American Church Union, warned that the step could create “serious division” in the church. In the end, Pike postponed the ceremony until he can argue his case before next fall’s House of Bishops meeting.

St. Paul’s Misogynism. Pike believes that “there is no viable theological objection to women in holy orders,” and it is an argument that is slowly but surely taking force in Christianity. More than 70 U.S. Protestant churches accept women clerics; within the past decade, women have been ordained ministers in the Lutheran state churches of Denmark and Sweden and in a dozen Reformed and Evangelical churches of France, Germany and Eastern Europe.

Even in the Roman Catholic Church, where bishops overwhelmingly reject the idea, at least a few theologians wonder about the possibility of change. In a recent book, Peruvian Jesuit José Idigoras argued that there was no difference in the rites of ordination for deacons and deaconesses in early Christianity, and that St. Paul’s misogynistic teachings (“I permit no woman to teach”) must be interpreted in light of women’s position at the time. Some members of the St. Joan’s International Alliance, an association of equality-seeking Catholic women, have petitioned Rome to allow women the dignity of the priesthood.