Celebrating women clergy: 9-16-14
September 16, 2014
If you read this piece I wrote this summer in The National Catholic Reporter, you know that it was 40 years ago that the first women were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church.
Those ordinations first were deemed irregular and invalid, though the church later came around to declare them valid.
Why am I raising this subject again here today? Because it was on this date in 1976 -- more than two years after those renegade ordinations in Philadelphia -- that the 65th triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church officially approved the ordination of women.
So today is a day to celebrate women in ministry, whether you're Episcopalian or not.
When the church voted to ordain women, it also regularlized, as the term went, the ordination of the 11 women ordained in Philadelphia in 1974 and the four women later ordained in Washington, D.C.
The Episcopalians, of course, were not the first branch of Christianity to move in this direction. My own denomination, now called the Presbyterian Church (USA), began ordaining women in 1956, for instance, and the United Church of Christ did so earlier.
Because the Anglican tradition began in England as a split from the Catholic Church, the subject of ordaining women inevitably raises the question of whether the Catholics ever will ordain females as priests.
I would not bet against that happening, but ask me in 2114 how close I think we are to that happening. I'll have a better sense of it then.
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SAVING BIBLE HISTORY
The guy who runs Hobby Lobby is creating a big Bible museum in Washington, D.C. It's good to collect this historical material, but it would be even better if somehow we could get people to read the Bible and understand its central message instead of trying to make it a science or history book.
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