Philadelphia Eleven

The Philadelphia Eleven are eleven women who were the first women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974, two years before General Convention affirmed and explicitly authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood.

Background

In the Episcopal Church, a member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, no canon law existed prohibiting the ordination of women as deacons, priests and bishops. However, the custom of ordaining only men was the norm. Women had been admitted to a separate order of "deaconesses". Although they were typically understood by themselves and their bishops to be in holy orders, these 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. By custom women were denied ordination to the priesthood.

During the first half of the twentieth century women in the Episcopal Church had begun exploring ways to increase their participation in the life of the church. Many women became church workers or directors of religious education. The movement gained explicit momentum in 1970 when laywomen were seated with voice and vote for the first time in General Convention, the bicameral legislative body of the Episcopal Church, and called for a vote to eliminate the canon law on "Deaconesses" so that male and female deacons would be treated equally. In 1965, James Pike, Bishop of California, recognized Phyllis Edwards as a deacon in his diocese. She had been ordained a year earlier under the old canon law using the term "deaconess".

This increased awareness led to the General Convention of 1970 eliminating canonical distinctions between male deacons and female deaconesses. It made clear that women who had previously been made deaconess and were seeking ordination to the priesthood would be recognized as full and equal deacons. The Episcopal Church was then presented with the issue of whether to ordain women as priests and bishops too.

A resolution was put forward by the women deputies at the 1970 General Convention to approve women’s ordination to the priesthood and episcopate. It failed to pass the House of Deputies, but nonetheless had much positive support. The Anglican Consultative Council met for the first time in 1971 and considered the issue of women’s ordination to the priesthood on a communion-wide level, resolving that women should be allowed to be ordained priests under certain local conditions. Thus in an effort to prepare for the next General Convention in 1973, a group of female professional church workers, deaconesses, female seminarians, and their supporters met in 1971 to form the Episcopal Women’s Caucus, a national coalition to plan future advocacy work for women’s ordination. However, when similar legislation failed to pass at the 1973 General Convention because of a parliamentary technicality, some of the women began to plan new strategies, 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.”Hein & Shattuck (2004), p. 140

In November 1973, several women who were deacons met with bishops who supported their cause, only to find them unwilling to ordain women to the priesthood until General Convention had settled the issue. On December 15, 1973, when five women ordained as deacons presented themselves at a priestly ordination service in New York, Paul Moore, Jr., Bishop of New York, allowed them to participate but declined to lay hands on their heads at the moment of ordination. The women and a large part of the congregation walked out of the service in protest.Sumner (1987), p. 22

By July 1974, as supporters of women’s ordination to the priesthood grew restless, three retired bishops stepped forward and agreed to ordain a group of qualified women deacons. The bishops were: 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,Hein & Shattuck (2004), p. 141“Bishops Urged to Reconsider Ordination Plans” (1974)

Eleven women who were deacons presented themselves as ready for ordination to the priesthood, and plans for the service proceeded. The women who became known as the “Philadelphia Eleven” (or “Philadelphia 11”) were 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.Sumner (1987), p. 23

Ordination service

The ordination service was held on Monday, July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha, at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, where Suzanne Hiatt served as deacon, and whose rector was civil rights advocate Paul Washington. Beginning at 11 o’clock in the morning, the service lasted for three hours. The eleven women serving as deacons presented themselves to Bishops Corrigan, DeWitt, and Welles, who ordained them as priests.

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,” 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.” The crowd numbered almost two thousand supporters and a few protesters. 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. Once these statements had been made, the bishops responded that they were acting in obedience to God, noting that “hearing God's command, we can heed no other. The time for our obedience is now.” And they proceeded with the ordinations.

José Ramos, 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. 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 Patricia Merchant Park, one of the leaders of the Episcopal Women’s Caucus and the second woman to be regularly ordained as a priest in 1977 after General Convention had given its endorsement, served as deacon. An iconic photo of the service was published on July 30 in ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' and picked up worldwide.

Aftermath

Two weeks after the ordination service had taken place, on August 14–15, Presiding Bishop John Allin convened an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. 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…”Sumner (1987), p. 24 Then Arthur A. Vogel, Bishop of West Missouri, raised his objection. He was considered the most theologically astute of the bishops, and 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. To declare the ordinations invalid would be to flout hundreds of years of orthodox definition for the criteria of valid ordination. The House of Bishops listened and changed its position, declaring the women irregularly ordained instead. The irregularity involved was one of protocol. 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. This was the detail in every case and the one breach of canon law requirement that could qualify their be regarded as irregularly ordained priests. Through no fault or lack of effort of their own, they were unable to fulfill a canonically required point of protocol. Despite their anger, the bishops listened to Vogel, a highly respected theologian, and they conceded the point. The bishops also admonished Episcopalians not to recognize any of the eleven women as priests until the next General Convention could decide on their ecclesiastical status.

When the House of Bishops met again at its regularly-scheduled meeting in October in Oaxtepec, Mexico, however, the body endorsed “in principle” the ordination of women to the priesthood, which it had assented to as well at its meeting in New Orleans