For you are all one in Christ Jesus

Last Saturday I joined a group of people for a session organized by the Vicar and the Rev. Jessica Schapp, Missioner for Christian Formation, that watched a documentary on the Philadelphia 11; a movie about the first 11 women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1974. I found the documentary very moving and insightful. It depicted the events surrounding the ordinations, the years following and the sometimes unpleasant machinations of the Church that occurred around this struggle for parity and justice.

The Episcopal Church, through the three retired Bishops willing to defy the convention of the time, first ordained women in 1974. Although no canon law that prohibited the ordination of women existed, the custom had always been to ordain just men. The struggle for acceptance of those groundbreaking ordinations took longer, even though the Church had determined decades earlier that there were no Scriptural reasons not to ordain women as priests.  At first, they were considered “irregularly” ordained and were not allowed to exercise their sacramental ministry. The Bishops who ordained them were castigated, and the male rectors who invited them to celebrate and preach in their parishes were brought up and convicted on charges of disobeying a “godly admonition” from their bishops in ecclesiastical court. It was a years-long struggle, moving forward in slow, often painful steps, continuing with the election and consecration of the first Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris who became the Suffragan Bishop in the Diocese of Massachusetts in 1989. Interestingly, the son of one of those first female priests the Rev. Alison Cheek, Tim is now a Professor at UBC and was present with us on Saturday.

In the Anglican Church of Canada, the ordination of women to the priesthood first occurred in 1976 and was less contentious than in the Episcopal Church two years earlier. The Diocese of New Westminster was one of the first four dioceses [Cariboo, Huron, New Westminster & Niagara] that ordained women on November 30, 1976, with two priests the Rev. Elspeth Alley and the Rev. Virginia Briant ordained here at the Cathedral. The Cathedral’s Susanne Cruikshank was present for those ordinations and had written a reflection of her remembrance of the events.

The first Canadian woman Bishop was Victoria Matthews, consecrated in the Diocese of Toronto in 1994 as a Suffragan Bishop. Bishop Matthews then became the first female Diocesan Bishop in 1997 when she was installed in the Diocese of Edmonton. Bishop Matthews then went on to serve as the Bishop of Christ Church in New Zealand. In 2019, the first female Primate in the Anglican Church of Canada was installed, the Most Rev. Linda Nicholls.

I remember that acceptance was not universal at first, and the process of full acceptance was slow. When I was ordained Priest by Bishop Matthews in 2004 a fellow priest said to me, “I hope you don’t want to work in the Church of England (CoE).” By being ordained by a female Bishop, my ordination was considered “irregular” by the CoE and I would not have been able to function as a priest. This changed in about 2010 when England consecrated their first female Bishops, but my understanding is that there are still parishes and dioceses in the CoE that will not accept the validity or regularity of women priests and bishops.

In the early 2000’s there were priests in the Dioceses of Edmonton and Rhode Island, where I served under Bishop Geralyn Wolfe, who would not recognize the sacramental authority of their female bishops. They would refer to the bishops as their ordinary and acknowledge their administrative authority but not their sacramental authority. In one particular case when the Bishop visited the parish, the rector would welcome them, then sit in the congregation during the service and not receive communion from the bishop.

As part of our small group discussions following the documentary on Saturday, Mother Jessica asked us what we thought of the Church depicted in the historical clips showing a male-only Church. She pointed out that some of us would remember it and others would not have experienced it. For me, I found the images of that time and place in the Church to be strange. I cannot remember a Church without female deacons, priests, and bishops and seeing those old clips felt strange. I shared with my small group that not only were female priests and bishops what was used to, I had never served as a priest under a male bishop until Bishop John was elected in the Diocese of New Westminster. Prior to that, I served under Bishops Victoria, Geralyn, Jane and Archbishop Melissa. I am truly thankful for their ministry and guidance, and I am grateful to the pioneering women in the Philadelphia 11, their male allies and all those who followed them in the struggle for justice that helped to move the Church to a more equitable state of being.