Philadelphia Eleven
Harvard University professor Charles V. Willie, who was also the vice president of the House of Deputies at the time, preached a sermon entitled, “The Priesthood of All Believers,” which began, “The hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth,”[19] followed by Dr. Willie’s declaration that “as blacks refused to participate in their own oppression by going to the back of the bus in 1955 in Montgomery, women are refusing to cooperate in their own oppression by remaining on the periphery of full participation in the Church.”[14][17][20] The crowd numbered almost two thousand supporters and a few protesters.
[14] In the middle of the service when Corrigan said, “If there be any of you who knoweth any impediment or notable crime (in these women), let him come forth in the name of God...” several priests in attendance proceeded to read statements against the ordination.
[17] José Antonio Ramos,[21] Bishop of Costa Rica, was also present at the service but did not participate in the act of ordination due to his young and active episcopate.
[17] Barbara C. Harris, who was senior warden at Church of the Advocate and would later become the first woman ordained bishop in the Episcopal Church on February 11, 1989, served as crucifer for the service[22][23] Patricia Merchant Park, one of the leaders of the Episcopal Women’s Caucus[24] and the second woman to be regularly ordained as a priest in 1977 after General Convention had given its endorsement, served as deacon.
[26] At first, the House declared the priestly ordinations of the eleven women to be invalid, stating that “we express our conviction that the necessary conditions for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church were not fulfilled on the occasion in question, since we are convinced that a bishop’s authority to ordain can be effectively exercised only in and for a community which has authorized him to act for them…”[27] Then Arthur A. Vogel, Bishop of West Missouri, raised his objection.
The women had completed the normal pre-ordination process of theological education, examinations and meetings with their bishops and diocesan representatives, and most had gained the necessary signed lay and clergy testimonials vouching for their character and preparation, but their local standing committees were timid about aftermath and refused to give their endorsement.
[28] This was in no way an overturning of its decision that the priestly ordinations of the Eleven had been irregular, and the body further urged its bishops to refrain from ordaining more women to the priesthood “unless and until such activities have been approved by the General Convention” meeting in 1976.
Alison Cheek, Jeannette Piccard and Carter Heyward celebrated communion together at an ecumenical service at Riverside Church in New York City on Reformation Sunday, October 27, 1974.
[30] The following month, Alison Cheek and Carter Heyward were invited to celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday, December 8, at Christ Episcopal Church in Oberlin, Ohio, by the rector, Peter Beebe.
[30][31] These events didn't go unnoticed by the larger church, and in the summer of 1975 both Wendt and Beebe were brought to ecclesiastical trial by their dioceses and convicted of disobeying a “godly admonition” from their bishops against permitting the women to celebrate the Eucharist.
[35] As supporters of women’s ordination to the priesthood continued to organize and plan for the 1976 General Convention amid all of this turmoil, the Church was surprised by a second ordination service, this time held in Washington, D.C. On Sunday, September 7, 1975, at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, George W. Barrett, retired Bishop of Rochester, NY, ordained four more women who were deacons to the priesthood.
Edwards had been recognized as a deacon by James Pike in 1965, potentially changing the status of the many women who for some decades had been ordained or instituted in a revived order of "deaconesses," but who had not consistently been regarded as members of the clergy.
[38] Over 1,000 people attended the service including the rector William Wendt, Peter Beebe, several of the Philadelphia Eleven priests, and again retired Pennsylvania bishop Robert L.
[48]: 88 A graduate of Lake Erie College and Bexley Hall Seminary, she was ordained as a deacon on January 6, 1973, in the Diocese of Rochester, where she served at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Webster, New York.
Bozarth's 10th anniversary poem for the Philadelphia Ordinations, "Passover Remembered," has become an ecumenical touchstone and is broadly used by women and men in leadership in Roman Catholic religious communities and others in various traditions.
[48]: 161 In 1996 she joined the Greenfire Community and Retreat Center in Tenants Harbor, Maine, where she served as a facilitator, teacher, and counselor, and later became active with St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rockland.
[48]: 388 After earning a degree from Cornell University in 1966, she served as an administrator of the Cornell/Hofstra Upward Bound Program at the Union Settlement House in East Harlem from 1967–1969.
[48]: 388 Following this ordination, Heyward and fellow priest Suzanne Hiatt were hired as assistant professors at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in January 1975, where she received tenure in 1981.
With opposition to women’s ordination growing, Robert DeWitt proposed ordaining Hiatt as a priest at ETS in December 1973 without the church’s blessing.
On July 10, 1974, Hiatt helped to organize a meeting in Philadelphia to plan an ordination service for women at the Church of the Advocate, where she was serving as a deacon.
Hiatt was the John Seely Stone Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology at the seminary from 1993 until her retirement in 1999, also becoming the Acting Director of the Congregational Studies Program in 1997.
Because her husband suffered from acrophobia, he remained seated in the gondola from where he advised Jeannette as she piloted their plastic high altitude hot air balloon into the stratosphere in 1934.
[76] Piccard served as a priest associate at St. Philip’s Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota and on her death bed was made an honorary canon of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis.
Katrina Martha van Alstyne Welles Swanson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1935, the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Episcopal clergy.
[83][84] The family spent a year in Botswana through an exchange program in 1966, where her witness of the inequality between the sexes in the church led her to become a champion for women’s leadership and ordination.
[30] She spent several years raising her family before reentering parish ministry in New Jersey, serving as rector of St. John the Divine Episcopal Church in Hasbrouck Heights from 1982–1988.
[85] McGee was the first female chaplain and assistant director of campus ministry at American University’s multi-denominational Kay Spiritual Life Center from 1972–1980.
The family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1981 where she worked as a priest and social worker with the chronically mentally ill, a private practice psychologist, an associate chaplain at Trinity College, and a part-time professor at Yale Divinity School.
[85][86] In 1987 McGee was hired as rector of St. Paul’s & St. James Episcopal Church in New Haven as well as assistant professor at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
[87] In 1965 she was refused appointment as an ambassador to Tanzania or Uganda due to being a woman, so she filed a grievance with the State Department for sex discrimination which was found in her favor in 1969.
