Religion: The Women’s Rebellion

The altar of Philadelphia’s Episcopal Church of the Advocate was bannered with the words of the Apostle Paul: “In Christ there is neither male nor female.” The crowd, some 1,500 people who had packed the church to witness the ordination of eleven new Episcopal priests, jubilantly sang and prayed. But a few in the throng were anything but joyous. When Bishop Daniel Corrigan asked if there was “any impediment” to the ordinations, five Episcopal priests took the microphone to reply.

The ceremony was “unlawful and schismatical,” charged one. Shouted another: “God sees you trying to make stones into bread! You can only offer up the smell and sight and sound of perversion.” The protests were just the beginnings of a gale that buffeted the U.S. Episcopal Church last week. The reason: all eleven persons ordained as priests were women.

Women still cannot legally become priests in the U.S. Episcopal Church.* Like other churches that do not ordain women—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Missouri Synod Lutheran—the Episcopal Church has refused to do so basically because Jesus and all of his apostles were men. Most other U.S. Protestant bodies reject that reasoning and ordain women.

The idea of women priests is gaining force among U.S. Episcopalians. At the church’s 1973 convention, the House of Bishops was known to favor it, and a majority of clergy and laity in the House of Deputies apparently voted for it, but because split delegations were counted as negative votes, the measure failed.

Episcopal women have been moving up toward priestly rank since 1970, when the church first allowed them to become full-fledged deacons: members of the lower clergy authorized to perform baptism, marriages and other liturgical acts, but not to consecrate the Eucharist or pronounce absolution of sins, which only priests can do. There are now some 120 women deacons.

The eleven women ordained are all deacons, most of them seminary graduates, whose backgrounds vary widely. The oldest, Jeannette Piccard, 79, piloted many of the stratospheric flights of her late husband, Balloonist Jean Piccard. Marie Moorefield, 30, a graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School and a chaplain trainee at Topeka State Hospital in Kansas, grew up as a Southern Baptist and became an Episcopalian just five years ago. Nancy Hatch Wittig, 28, who is slated to take up duties at a Morristown, N.J., parish this month, is married to a Methodist pastor.

Each of the eleven now risks suspension as a deacon for participating in the ordination. Presiding Bishop John M. Allin, who just took over administration of the 3.1 million-member church in June and was not even officially informed of the ordination plans, declared that all bishops involved are bound to bar the women from exercising priestly functions. He also summoned the House of Bishops to an emergency session in Chicago next week to discuss the rebellion. The saddened Allin told TIME “The question now before us is not orders, but order.”

The women were clearly out of order. In a joint letter to friends, they admitted that the ordinations were “irregular,” even while contending they were “valid and right.” None of the eleven had the required approval of her bishop and diocesan standing committee of clergy and laity. Moreover, the quartet of bishops who ordained them lacked authority on other grounds as well. The Rt. Rev. Robert L. De Witt, 58, the resigned Bishop of Pennsylvania; the Rt. Rev. Edward Randolph Welles II, 67, the retired Bishop of West Missouri; and the Rt. Rev. Daniel Corrigan, 73, the retired bishop who had headed domestic missions, all apparently ignored a canon that forbids retired bishops to perform “episcopal acts” unless so requested by the local bishop. There was no such request. The fourth participant, the Rt. Rev. José Antonio Ramos, 37, of Costa Rica, was acting out of his jurisdiction. The four could be suspended or deposed by a church trial court.

Just who began the 1974 Philadelphia revolution is unclear. One important influence was the Rev. Edward G. Harris, co-dean of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., who issued an impassioned call in June for the immediate ordination of women. Another major backer, who delivered the sermon at the ordination, was Harvard Professor Charles V. Willie, a layman and a black who is vice president of the church’s House of Deputies.

In his sermon, Willie likened the eleven ordained rebels to the blacks of the ’50s who refused to go on sitting at the rear of the bus. Many of the women struck a similar note of exhausted patience, arguing that only action would finally move the church. “God has been calling me all my life,” said Katrina Swanson, 39, whose father, Bishop Welles, ordained her. “The time is right.” With the Episcopal Church now in a gathering storm over the issue, some of the women’s staunchest sympathizers are questioning whether it was.

*Or anywhere else in the Anglican Communion except Hong Kong, which took advantage of the Anglican Consultative Council’s 1971 endorsement of ordaining women if a national church body so wills.