Looking Backward

From Women Priests: Yes or No?
By Emily C. Hewitt & Suzanne R. Hiatt, pp. 9-16,

Published by the Seabury Press, New York, 1973.

It has been a little more than fifty years since the Anglican Communion first set about to study the “proper place” of women in its life and ministry. That study itself did not spring full-blown from the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but had its own history of fifty prior years of debate and controversy over the proper role for deaconesses and nuns in Anglicanism. So it is safe to say that the question of the ordination of women is not a new aberration thrust upon us by the renascence of ideas of women’s liberation in the 1970s.

Solemn Assemblies

To say we have been studying this and related questions for fifty years and more is not to say that we have reached any agreed-upon conclusions. Anglican theological inquiry on this subject has been exhaustive. In fact, a World Council of Churches gathering in 1948 remarked on the volumes of work done on the subject by Anglicans as well as on the dearth of action to implement that work.(1) A quick check of almost any of our seminary libraries will reveal shelves of books and pamphlets on the ordination of women, most showing little evidence of use. (In researching this book, we came across one key document which had last been checked out to one of us ten years ago. Though the document dates from the 1930s, these were the only two dates it had ever been circulated.)

When one takes a chronological look at Anglican documents,* two interesting patterns emerge. The first is that interest in this question seems to wax and wane within the church in a way that can be directly correlated with the interest of secular society in the changing roles of women. In the church, as in secular society, interest in expanding woman’s role seems strongest during and just following the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps women gain confidence in their ability to participate more fully in society because of the massive societal breakdown in periods of war. Wars in this century have tended to open up new vistas for women. Suddenly in an emergency society discovers that women can do all kinds of things of which they had been thought incapable, simply because those things must be done and the men are not available to do them. Both the early 1920s and the late 1940s were marked by advancements in women’s political and economic rights, though in both eras women were soon sent back home by waves of returning veterans in need of their jobs.

It is clear in looking at the chronology of church studies on women that the issue of women in the church is most marked in the 1920s and the late 1940s as well as at the present time. Less was produced in the 1930s and the 1950s, and by and large documents from those eras seem to retreat from earlier affirmations of the role of women.

It was in the 1940s in a wartime emergency situation that the first woman priest was ordained in the Anglican Communion in the Hong Kong Diocese of the Holy Catholic Church in China. She was forced to resign her orders, not by the people among whom she had served, but by outraged English bishops. Anglicans did not deal seriously with the question again until the 1960s, when that same see, the Synod of Hong Kong and Macao, this time under the leadership of another bishop, persistently began raising the question again. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, there are again women priests in the Diocese of Hong Kong.

The second pattern that emerges when one looks at the chronology of Anglican debate on this subject is that over the years we have engaged in á kind of Alphonse-Gaston minuet over who should have jurisdiction. Time and again studies have concluded with a call for further study. A brief review of the most recent debate in our own church will serve as a case in point.

The 1964 General Convention at St. Louis changed the canon on deaconesses to read “ordered” where it had previously read “appointed.” On the basis of that change, Bishop James Pike of California appointed a deaconess to be in charge of a parish, since he considered her to be ordained. He underlined this action by conferring on her in a ceremony the stole and New Testament, traditional marks of the diaconate.

The resultant furor led the House of Bishops meeting in 1965 to commission a study on the larger question of the role of women in ministry. This commission on “The Proper Place of Women in the Ministry” made a preliminary report to the House of Bishops at their 1966 meeting and recommended that study be continued. The bishops referred the matter for further study and asked that the subject be debated at the 1968 Lambeth Conference of world Anglican bishops. Lambeth did take it up, but referred it back to the national churches for further study.

The South Bend Convention of 1969 set up a joint Commission on Ordained and Licensed Ministries to report back to the next or a subsequent convention. This commission reported to the 1970 Houston Convention, recommending the full and immediate ordination of women. A resolution embodying the recommendations of the commission report was voted down in the clergy order of the House of Deputies. The House of Bishops agreed to discuss the matter at their 1971 meeting. When the matter came up at that meeting, the bishops decided it needed further study and referred it to yet another commission. And that is where the matter stands at this writing.

Meanwhile Back in the Church

So the church has debated and referred the question for so long that it is acquiring a certain amount of expertise in putting it off. However, life goes on and the witness of women in the ministry and in the world grows ever more insistent. In 1958, in an apparently quiescent period of the debate, Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge took an important but not widely noticed step. The school changed its policy to admit women and non-postulants as degree candidates for the Bachelor of Divinity degree, the standard professional degree for ordained clergy. Though other seminaries of the Episcopal Church had from time to time admitted women as special students and had granted other degrees to women, ETS was the first to admit a number of women on the same basis as men and to do so as a matter of policy. There was no talk of ordaining women in the rationale for the move. It was justified on the simple basis that theologically educated women were needed in the Episcopal Church, especially in the then expanding fields of college work and specialized ministries.

During the 1960s as other seminaries began to admit women, signs of an actual if not a theoretical change in the ministry of women continued. The two church-sponsored training houses for women workers, Windham House in New York and St. Margaret’s House in California, closed during the decade as a result of decreased enrollments. Many of their potential students chose seminary instead. The number of women choosing the order of deaconess or applying for certification as professional church workers declined, as women working for the church began to carve out new and more independent roles for themselves. As they became as well educated as the clergy with whom they worked, it became increasingly clear that women were hindered from doing those things they’d been trained to do by their lack of the official sanction of ordination. (2)

At this writing, all Episcopal seminaries admit women students. A few do not allow them to study for the Master of Divinity degree (which has recently replaced the B.D. as the standard degree for clergy), and some have only one woman student. But the educational bars to women in the ministry have quietly been removed in the last decade, despite the prolonged and inconclusive debate on the parliamentary level. There are an increasing number of women in the church who are fully qualified educationally for ordination to the priesthood.

But the most remarkable development in the midst of all the recent debate has come as a result of the action of the Houston Convention clarifying the status of women in the diaconate. From the late nineteenth century on, the status of deaconesses had been unclear in the official mind of the church (though very clear in the minds of the deaconesses), and they were regarded as clergy in some dioceses, as lay ministers in others. Lambeth 1968 cleared the way for deaconesses to be declared within the diaconate and thus for women to be ordained deacons. The Houston Convention made the necessary canon changes to implement that understanding of women in the diaconate, with the added provision that women deacons shall meet the same requirements for ordination as men.

Prior to the Houston Convention there were about seventy deaconesses in the American church. Many of these women were retired after long and valiant service to the church, but there were few young women serving in this order of ministry. In the two years since Houston and the recognition that women deacons are in the same clergy order as men deacons, there have been nearly twenty women ordained deacons in the American church. Though exact numbers are unavailable because figures are constantly changing, there are now about fifty more women in the process of applying for Holy Orders in approximately thirty dioceses.

Thus, though the debate on the ordination of women has not moved far, the situation of women in the church has been quietly changing over the past decade. Almost unnoticed, women were canonically enabled to serve as lay readers by the 1969 Convention in South Bend. This was followed by their admission to the House of Deputies at Houston and the recognition that they may be ordained to the diaconate. With these developments, the debate over the ordination of women to the priesthood has subtly shifted from abstract questions to the reality of particular, qualified women deacons questioning the limitations on their ministries.

The Shadows of Realities

The debate on the place of women in the church has continued, but in the last few years events rather than pronouncements have shrunk the debate to one area alone. Though women are still badly outnumbered by men at all decision-making levels of church life, there remains no theoretical barrier to their participation except at the level of admission to the priesthood. Women may serve as delegates to diocesan and national conventions; as diocesan council, committee, and standing committee members; and in many parishes (though by no means all), as vestry members, and senior and junior wardens. We also have woman acolytes, crucifiers, lay readers, and deacons. Some of these developments are very recent and new roles for women remain unimplemented, but in many parishes and most dioceses they are theoretically possible. In the American Episcopal Church, only the priesthood-and by implication the episcopacy-remains closed to persons of the female sex regardless of qualifications or vocation.

Today the ground of the debate on the proper place of women in the ministry has shrunk to whether they should or should not be barred from the priesthood. Though an increasing number of Episcopalians are engaging in this debate, it is interesting to note that it is difficult to predict who will be for, and who will be opposed to, the ordination of women. In most matters that come before the church for debate and action, clear alliances of like-minded people can be identified. Often the Anglo-Catholics, the evangelicals, the liberals, the conservatives, the blacks, the whites, the clergy, the laity, the women, the men, the youth, the elderly can be expected to have views as a group on a particular issue. The issue of the ordination of women to the priesthood seems to cut across all these or similar groupings. While capable of raising the most heated discussions, this issue does not on the whole seem to be a vehicle for factional strife along any familiar lines. Perhaps this is because the issue is so emotionally charged and highly personalized that each person has to work out his or her own position in an individual way.

The emotional nature of the issue has been suggested by the late C. S. Lewis:

With the Church . . . we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us . (3)

We differ with Lewis in this: we are convinced that any “awful shadows of realities” which impinge on the debate over the ordination of women to the priesthood should be named and discussed. In fact, we believe that they should be emphasized. They should be emphasized because the “old” arguments against women in the priesthood-biblical, theological, ecumenical, practical-not only fail to convince, they often obscure good reasons for opening the priesthood to those women who are called to serve.

We therefore preface our discussion of the traditional arguments against women in the priesthood with an exploration of some emotional and psychological attitudes toward priesthood and toward women, which may be-in Lewis’ words-"dealing with us" in the debate.

* See Appendix A.

Notes

1. Revised Interim Report of a Study on the Life and Work of Women in the Church (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1948), p. 18.

2. A poignant example of this hindrance is noted by Elsie Gibson in her book When the Minister Is a Woman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). She quotes an Episcopal laywoman, trained as a chaplain and working in a hospital: “When I call on patients . . . I am usually taken for a volunteer. . . To try to explain my role is very awkward even if a patient is interested and asks . . . . How mystifying it would sound if I said that I was a certified church worker . . . . I would appreciate beyond measure the designation of ‘chaplain.’ My ministry would be made infinitely easier” (pp.155-56).

3. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), p. 239.

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