Philadelphia Eleven

Dear Friends in Christ,

Last Monday, July 29th, was the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Episcopal church. The Philadelphia Eleven, as they came to be known, were ordained as priests on Monday, July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha, at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, two years before General Convention affirmed and explicitly authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood. Although no canon law existed prohibiting the ordination of women the custom was to only ordain men and women were denied the right to be ordained to the priesthood. Women did not even have equal rights as deacons and were only admitted to a separate order of "deaconesses" who were treated differently from men ordained as deacons. By custom they were celibate and wore a blue habit-like garb which was often assumed to be that of nuns.

The General Convention of 1970 eliminated the canonical distinctions between male deacons and female deaconesses and paved the way for women who had previously been made deaconess and were seeking ordination to the priesthood to be recognized as full and equal deacons. At the same General Convention, a resolution was put forward by the women deputies to approve women’s ordination to the priesthood and episcopate but failed to pass the House of Deputies. When similar legislation failed to pass at the 1973 General Convention because of a parliamentary technicality, some of the women began to strategize, feeling that they could not wait another three years for women’s priesthood to be legislatively approved. Suzanne Hiatt, a deacon, stated a shared sentiment among these women that their “vocation was not to continue to ask for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest.”

In July 1974, three retired bishops, Daniel Corrigan, retired bishop suffragan of Colorado; Robert L. DeWitt, recently resigned Bishop of Pennsylvania; and Edward R. Welles II, retired Bishop of West Missouri, stepped forward and agreed to ordain a group of qualified women deacons.

Deacons Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig, presented themselves as ready for ordination to the priesthood. Almost two thousand supporters and a few protesters attended the service. When Corrigan asked, per the ordination service in Book of Common Prayer, if anyone knew of any reason these women should not be ordained, several priests in attendance proceeded to read statements against the ordination. Once these statements had been made, the bishops responded that they were acting in obedience to God, and they proceeded with the ordinations.

Two weeks after the ordination, an emergency meeting of the house of Bishops held at O’Hare airport in Chicago tried to declare the ordinations invalid, but Arthur A. Vogel, the Bishop of West Missouri, told his colleagues that they had no theological grounds for declaring the ordinations invalid because they were performed by bishops in good standing according to the Ordination Rite in the Book of Common Prayer and by laying-on-of-hands within the Apostolic Succession.

When I heard my call in 1974 in the Church of England, I never reconsidered that one day women would be ordained, or that it might be what God was calling me to. I had

only become the first girl in the church choir the year previously. We have come a long way since then. No one thinks twice about a woman at the altar, and women bishops are the becoming the norm rather than the exception. And yet, women’s hard-won rights are being threatened and taken away. Rather than continuing to make progress we seem to be taking several giant steps backward. I will forever be grateful to the courageous women whose boldness and conviction paved the way for my own ordination, and on this anniversary I not only remember and honor the women who fought for me to do what I do, but also pledge to continue that fight so our daughters and granddaughters keep those hard-fought rights.

Yours in Christ,

Rev. Jane