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Photo: The ordinations of Eleven women to the Episcopal Priesthood to break the barrier against women priests and bishops, July 29, 1974. Photo by William F. Steinmetz for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
I am one of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women to put a crack in the stained glass ceiling by responding to God's call to us to become ordained to the Episcopal priesthood on July 29, 1974. We were ordained by two retired bishops and one resigned bishop who were prominent for their justice and civil rights activities. My book, Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, was first published by Paulist Press in 1978 following the 1976 General Convention which recognized the Philadelphia Ordinations by simply creating a new canon law stating that women and men who were called, trained and qualified were eligible for all three ordained Holy Orders of Ministry, deacons, priests and bishops. Nothing further was needed because there had never been a canon law prohibiting women from being priests and bishops, and women had been ordained as deacons since 1855, first called to serve the poor and the ill in southeastern United States. "Deacon" means "servant" in classical Greek, and the patriarchal church had no objection to women functioning as servants. Deacons' liturgical role is to read and preach the Gospel during services, and to be available as pastoral ministers in following the teaching, preaching and healing ministry of Christ.
If you're not familiar with the practices of the Episcopal Church, the main function of priests is to celebrate (lead) the Holy Eucharist (also called the Mass or Holy Communion). The other primary functions of priests, sometimes called "the ABCs of the priesthood", are to pronounce Absolution in the forgiveness of sins after sincere confession, to offer Blessings, and to Consecrate the bread and wine of Holy Communion. It also has a threefold ordained ministry of deacons, priests and bishops. The primary function of bishops is to oversee all the parishes and other institutions such as hospitals and schools within the geographical area of the diocese, and also to confirm new members while visiting the parishes, and finally to ordain members called and approved to enter one or more of the three Holy Orders as deacons, priests, and some who are first elected, as bishops. The primary ordination to the diaconate is best defined by one of its main functions in the ordination rite: "To interpret the needs of the world to the church." I love that. It's why some full ministry deacons and deacons who are also priests are bi-vocational, in that they also have a profession or job in the secular world. I've known many devout deacons and priests who are also physicians, scientists, teachers, and even politicians. (Think of United States Senator, Pastor Raphael Warnock.) Deacons also serve liturgically by reading the Gospel at services and by preaching and assisting with Holy Communion. They visit people in hospitals and their homes and take them Holy Communion from the "reserved sacrament" ~ bread and wine already consecrated by a priest.
For decades women deacons were discriminated against while performing their services by being sent to remote places to help people in greatest poverty and need~ Appalachia, Native American Reservations, and remote rural dioceses for instance. These were vital places and the presence of an ordained person was vitally important to letting the people know they were not forgotten. But sometimes the ordained women sent to them were forgotten. In the ordination service for all three orders of bishops, priests and deacons there is the sentence, "you are ordained and set apart for this ministry." Sometimes the women would joke that they felt that they had been "ordained, set apart and set aside." Besides that, they were the only ordained ministers in the Church required by canon law not to marry. Women in religious orders as nuns were celibate by choice, but ordained women had no choice. Roman Catholic priests and Episcopal deacons are the only ordained clergy who lived in forced celibacy, until 1970 when the Episcopal Canon Law on Deacons was changed to eliminate that rule by bringing men and women under the same customs and rules. Since male deacons could marry, finally women in the diaconate could marry too.
It took women in secular society no end of hardships in demanding suffrage in order to vote as the citizens we were and are, but while women achieved the secular vote in 1920, women in the Episcopal Church had to wait 50 years longer before the doors of our legislative body, the General Convention, finally opened to them in 1970.
As soon as the laywomen delegates were seated and empowered with voice and vote, the first thing they did was call for the elimination of the sexist canon law which had enabled discrimination against their sisters in the diaconate by calling them "deacon/esses" when "deacon" is not a gender word. The artificial suffix has been used to indicate that the person in question is somehow "not the real thing." Imagine calling a woman doctor a doctorette, or doctoress! It would be insulting and dismissive. This is an important lesson in the unconscious power of language: Language can be misused to reinforce prejudices. When it is deliberate it is insulting. When it is unconscious, it is harder to correct. but it must be corrected, not just because it is wrong, but because it is hurtful. It is harmful. Imagine a situation in which a fully trained and qualified surgeon were sent to an emergency situation and told she could not perform the life-or-death surgery because she was only a "doctorette," and they had to wait until a real surgeon came. That's crazy, foolish, and downright stupid. And it can be deadly. Spiritual emergencies arise, too, and if a person needs the Sacrament of Holy Unction~ healing with laying-on-of hands and blessed oil~ and she or he were denied it because the person who came to administer it was a woman, it would be a wicked miscarriage of justice and hope. It would be like saying to a physician, "No, you can't use that medicine for this person in pain. You're only a woman." That would dismiss not only years of training and qualification, but divine help for a spiritually and emotionally hurting person as well.
Secular suffragists had been jailed, beaten and force fed to gain their citizen's rights, but Episcopal women who were ordained as deacons were required to remain unmarried, wear dark blue garb with veils that resembled nuns' habits though they were not nuns, and worst of all, they were not recognized as the ordained women they were. Their garb resembled nun's habits and they were sometimes called "Sister" which further confused them with nuns. That all changed, thanks to the first female delegates (also known as deputies) to our national legislative body, the General Convention, who had the right to vote. Once they freed their ordained sisters from such forced features of oppression, some of those ordained women in their eighties were so glad to have advocacy in the legislative body of the church that a few of them, liberated from their dark suits and veils, were heard to say, "I can get married!" They had had to wait over 50 years for the privilege which came with the simple recognition of who and what they were.
Many Episcopalians, including some of the more than five thousand women priests, were and perhaps still are not even aware of this history, the costs paid by their foremothers for them to be able to respond freely to God's call for them to serve as spiritual leaders and sacramental ministers. Awareness increased greatly in 2014 on the 40th anniversary of the Philadelphia Ordinations with the publication of Dr. Darlene O'Dell's book, The Story of the Philadelphia Eleven, and the release of the award winning documentary film, The Philadelphia Eleven for the 50th anniversary in 2024. The film has had a profound impact on many people who learned these things for the first time. And now once again, pandemic sexism is pushing women down, back and away. The defunding of public broadcasting is making it impossible to screen such educational and illuminating historical programs and special shows as "The Story of the Philadelphia Eleven." The only way to see it will be to buy a CD, and that option will only be available for a few months according to the producer, Time Travel Productions.
That news makes it all the more imperative that the public record of the Philadelphia Ordinations and their background and participants has a permanent digital source, at least in the form of a current revision of the book. That is why I am determined to create a third edition of Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey . . . adding to the original subtitle the words spoken by Dr. Charles Willie in his sermon during the Philadelphia Ordinations when he said (I paraphrase), "Today, we gather together to bring new life and new health to our church in this act of tender loving defiance." (The italicized words are not a paraphrase but his literal words.) The book is now to be called Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey of Tender Loving Defiance.
Since my book Womanpriest as an historical (and personal) testament was first published by the Roman Catholic Paulist Press in 1978, other books have used the elided word "womanpriest" in their titles as well. Most recently a scholarly book discussing the history of women in the Roman Catholic Church has been published under the name Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church (Catholic Practice in North America), so I felt it necessary to revise the title of my book with clear distinction from the books that followed it using that title. Why the elision, showing the two words as one? To emphasize that our priestly ordinations have given the Church the opportunity to revise its ordained ministries to become more whole, more creative, more open and exemplary through the charisma~ the gifts of the Holy Spirit~ which women's experiences, visions and values have given, freeing our brothers to enter and engage in a similar authenticity and integrity in their ministries. This is not meant to divide women and men, but to free both to bring their full lives into their service to God as loving ministers to creation and the human family. I use the word "elide" to describe this, as defined by the Online Dictionary: Elision is "the process of joining together or merging things, especially abstract ideas." [Based on The Oxford English Dictionary]
I wrote in the first edition of Womanpriest that my prayer was that the day would come when these gifts would become integrated without being lost, and the two words, "women" and "priests" together would have been integrated simply to signify a whole priesthood in the one word, "priests." It was not our intention simply to add female patriarchs to the church. My husband's mother was once asked, "Why does Alla want to be a man?" The answer was, "Do you think that her husband and other male priests want to be women so that they can wear pretty long dresses in public?" That caused some thoughtful discussion. We do not want to be men, we want to be treated as the human beings that we are, and not tacitly or by some evil law excluded on the assumption that women are not fully human. Society's all-male institutions actually say so outright, but rarely with regret or apology. They are admitting that they still believe that women are not human, but objects to be organized by and for men. The Vice President of the United States says that women should not be allowed to work outside the home, that their work is to be mothers and grandmothers and nothing more. Perhaps he would allow that single women could work in menial jobs. It was shocking to hear him say it, as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to say. His own loving and devoted wife was a prominent and successful attorney, but she gave it up to spend all of her time taking care of their children. And she is lonely, because her husband is away so much directly the course of his career. He is not expected to compromise in order to care for their children, but she is. They are surely wealthy enough to be able to afford trustworthy child care and allow both of them to remain active contributors who use their talents and training to do good work in the broad sphere of the world as well as the smaller sphere of their shared family life. But they are free to follow their own lights in this regard. They are both free, or should be.
Richard Nixon is recorded to have said to another man in a phone call when they were commiserating about a male politician having been voted out in favor of a woman, "We never should have allowed women to be educated." It isn't as if sexism is past history anymore than racism is. They are both still with us in vicious and deadly ways. Women still get beaten, raped and murdered by husbands and boyfriends. This does not happen to me on a similar scale.
It's true that there are now women bishops, and even one woman so far who has served as our Presiding Bishop, the head of the whole Episcopal Church in the United States, a role which is called archbishop in other parts of the world. Just a few days ago the Anglican Church in Wales elected its first female archbishop. Archbishops oversee all other bishops in a large jurisdiction, usually in a country or a portion of a country. The Archbishop of Canterbury whose office is in London is our historical worldwide overseeing bishop.)
In the old hierarchical model, women remained clustered at the bottom of the ladder with a very few who were called to serve from the top rung, but there is still a huge space in between where women find themselves excluded from the authority of leadership in parish ministries, often resented by their male counterparts and bosses. While this is part of the process of radical change in organizational dynamics, it need not be part of the prevailing sin that is still pervasive in patriarchal churches, where women are still not just excluded but abused in all kinds of ways, in the service of male insecurity and rivalry. For men having to prove themselves superior to women as well as other men is too much for them. I find it shocking that in an institution where humility is regarded as the highest virtue, men are still climbing all over each other to prove which one is or should be the at the top. If they regard women as nothing more than added competition, no wonder they resent our presence. But it must be pointed out again and again that ministry is not a category for proving who is superior. We are all called to serve, not to dominate. Since women are human, we, too, must resist the temptation to be like the men in sheer competitiveness. We are all servants of God and fundamentally equal to one another in both potential and action.
The irony is that through history there have been more women members of the churches, and they have been the key fundraisers without whom basic church projects (including the building of beautiful cathedrals) could not have been accomplished. So while women in the priesthood are more than of anthropological interest, for our survival as those who serve in the spirit of the teachings of Christ and following his own rabbinical style of leadership as teachers and liturgical leaders, we are still very much in process. This is historical, more than personal in its flow, but it is both of those things: historical and personal. Deep justice and positive change take a very long time to be realized. They do not often happen in a single generation, and when they do, they remain vulnerable. There are far-right people today who still yearn for a second civil war in the United States. They do not want us to be United because they love and seek opportunities for conflict and domination, even bloodshed. It is a form of adrenaline addiction. That is why so many human institutions that start out in good will and peace remain vulnerable to selfishness, and lead to insecurity acted out in atrocities.
While the newly elected Anglican Archbishop of Wales is a woman, the Southern Baptist Convention recently voted not only to forbid women pastors, but to fire those women who have already served as pastors for years, and to exclude churches that refuse to do so. Progress is not linear. It is often unnecessarily painful because justice is uneven and messy. Reality is uneven and messy. But we must not give up on it. We must persist in living and serving with integrity according to inspired lights as they manifest, and yes, as they are sometimes savagely put out, only to go underground until the atmosphere is ready for their re-emergence and rekindling.
My book, Womanpriest, came out with a revised edition by Luramedia Publications in 1988. I am presently writing a third edition of the book with new material and important old material that the revised edition publisher left out "to save money." I lost the battle to preserve the powerfully inspiring sermon preached by the Harvard sociologist and prominent Episcopal layman who was vice president of the General Convention's House of Deputies at the time, Dr. Charles Willie. During the 25th anniversary celebration of the Philadelphia Ordinations, Dr. Willie said to me, "Thank you for including my sermon in your book. It's the only place where it's been published." My heart sank. I did not tell him about its exclusion from the revised edition, but I promised myself to create a third edition when I was able, and to restore his sermon to its rightful place at the heart of the story.
This third edition will also include the inspiring stories of new people who are significant lights in this ongoing saga~ the now-retired American Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the heroic Bishop of Washington, D.C., Mariann Edgar Budde, and Sister Angela, an Anglican Australian Poor Clare nun who became a priest for her own community after shaping its buildings from a mountain with her skills as a professional sculptor. She also followed the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in healing the cancer which threatened to steal her life a quarter century too soon. I am so eager to tell you her amazing story of faith and healing! Naturally, the new book will include new prayers and poems such as "Before Jesus" as well as the beloved older prayer poems, "Bakerwoman God" (which has been put to music) and "Passover Remembered." A British composer asked my permission to use passages from that poem in a larger cantata, and my poems, "Dance then to Everything" and "Belonging," also known as "Stars in Your Bones" have been put to music. "Water Women" won first prize as best religious poem of the year in a consortium of religious journals for The Witness Magazine. It was commissioned and set to music by the prominent Pacific Northwest composer and conductor, Joan Szymko and performed by the Orange County Women's Chorus in a concert called "Caravan," which was a fundraiser for refugees. My poetry is in all three anthologies of the series for Harper Collins Publishers which include Earth Prayers, Life Prayers and Prayers for a Thousand Years. And some of those poems are in the revised edition of Womanpriest~ A Personal Odyssey of Tender Loving Defiance.
I have been slow in writing the revision because of having worked hard three years ago on my 22nd published poetry collection, Diamonds in a Stony Field, Selected Poems 1982 - 2022, and the revision of Moving to the Edge of the World, a trilogy of poetry collections which is at the printer's right now~ and also dealing with a chronic neuro-endocrine pain amplification and sleep disorder. It's hard to go into creative overdrive with nerve pain and extreme fatigue, but I have been determined to do it out of a sense of the importance of historical preservation.
I am asking for financial support because this third edition is going to be under my own name as publisher, guaranteeing there will be no more problems with conventional publishers, and because it is digital and as part of my ongoing literary estate, it will never go out of print. All royalties will go into the estate and after my death they will continue to be donated to the World Wildlife Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The new subtitle will honor the history of women spiritual leaders, past present and future, whose stories were, are and will be personal and worldwide, going back to the 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich and forward toward the Unknown. There will always be a host of women who are spiritual persons of the highest caliber and constant advocates for peace and justice for all.
Speaking of history, the Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Worldwide Anglican Communion. Its name changed after the American Revolution at the same time that the colonists differentiated themselves from England by identifying their own authority and integrity as the United States of America with a bicameral Congress instead of a bicameral Parliament. Here's an interesting parallel synchronicity: "From July 28 to August 8, 1789, representative clergy from nine dioceses met in Philadelphia to ratify the church's initial constitution." [Google AI] The first American Book of Common Prayer for the newly named Episcopal Church was created that same year. Including the standard revisions of the 1928 and 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the event known as the Philadelphia Ordinations is the greatest major change in the Episcopal Church since then, and it took place during the same time frame (July-August) and in the same city of Philadelphia two hundred years later!
The United States government inherited its democratic structure from the principles and motivation of Britain, with its 13th century Magna Carta largely informing the emphasis on freedom of speech, religion and independent autonomy of our own Constitution. ["Independence" and "autonomy" are not necessarily redundant. According to Google AI: "While both independence and autonomy relate to self-governance, independence emphasizes freedom from external control and reliance on others, while autonomy focuses on the ability to make one's own choices and act in accordance with one's own values and beliefs. Essentially, you can be independent (self-reliant) without being autonomous (self-directed), and vice versa."] Our original government carried those principles over by inspiring Anglican colonists to call their American church the Episcopal Church. "Episcopal" derives from the Greek word, "Episkopos," which means "overseer," referring to leadership by bishops as those who oversee and govern local areas known as dioceses, instead of being under a pope ["Papa" in Italian] as chief patriarch. While it remains in full communion with the Church of England in England, "the Mother Church" as its loving American daughter, the Episcopal Church is very much fully grown into its own national authority. The Anglican Church in Scotland is also called the Episcopal Church to differentiate it from the official Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church. What's in a name? All of human history! Our sister Anglican Church in Canada is still called the Anglican Church, having ongoing close ties to the Mother Church in England as Canada has to Great Britain. Each separate country's branch of the Church of England has its own Book of Common Prayer and makes its own contributions to the Worldwide Anglican Communion. In New Zealand, the prayer book is simply called, A New Zealand Prayer Book. It represents "an adaptation and revision to better suit the local and contemporary needs of the Anglican Church in New Zealand." Inspired by its local tribal history, A New Zealand Prayer Book has some of the most poetic and inclusive prayers in the world, emphasizing the beauty of God's Creation and global justice for humankind and Nature before the Holy One equally.
My two grief books, Life Is Goodbye/Life Is Hello~ Grieving Well through All Kinds of Loss and A Journey through Grief will be included in this big project. Other books will be newly promoted, but I don't think they need new editions: Lifelines: Threads of Grace through Seasons of Change and Wisdom and Wonderment: Thirty-one Feasts to Nurture Your Soul, along with At the Foot of the Mountain: Nature and the Art of Soul Healing, along with several poetry collections. Love's Prism~ Reflections from the Heart of a Woman and Stars in Your Bones: Emerging Signposts on Our Spiritual Journeys [by Alla Bozarth, Julia Barkley and Terri Hawthorne] as well as Soulfire~ Love Poems in Black and Gold are likely to remain out of print but some copies may be found Online. The same applies to my academic book, The Word's Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation . They will all be represented in the Episcopal Church Archives after my death.
In summary~ A documentary film, The Philadelphia Eleven, about the history of women's ordinations as bishops, priests and deacons in the Episcopal Church, was produced by Time Travel Productions and was released and distributed in film festivals for the 50th anniversary celebration in 2024. It won "Best Documentary" at the Boston Film Festival. The producer Margo Guernsey had planned for it to be shown on public television, but with the threat by the new administration to end public broadcasting or at least its most worthwhile programs, it can now be seen only by purchasing a CD, which will be available for only a few more months. As a permanent follow up I am currently creating new material for the third edition with a new subtitle of Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey of Tender Loving Defiance, adding the last four words from the ordination sermon preached by the Harvard sociologist and Vice President of the Episcopal Church's General Convention House of Deputies in 1974, Dr. Charles Willie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V._Willie
The publisher of the revised edition of Womanpriest refused to include his sermon in the book "to save paper." I fought and lost the argument to keep it in. His powerful sermon expresses "the why and wherefore" of the event, which inspired and positively affected the lives of men and women all over the world. At our 25th anniversary liturgy at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, Dr. Willie pulled me out of the procession to wish me the Peace of Christ and say in my ear, "Thank you for including my sermon in your book. It's the only place where it's been published." I vowed to create a third edition someday and put it back in by my own authority as publisher. Now is the time when I can finally do it, with your help. I have taken out a second mortgage on my home to help but there is still not enough money for the undertaking. It is going forward as an act of faith and love. My agent and publicists insist that I finally have a bona fide website instead of the blogs I've been using as free websites, in order to organize my presence Online into one place where all my books can be ordered, which will have links to the blogs. The website which is being created costs $4,400. Go Fund Me has every request start at $1,600. Ever dollar counts and helps and I'm grateful for it!
I am also revising my two grieving well books, A Journey through Grief, and Life Is Goodbye/Life is Hello, which has been in print through its original and revised editions for 43 years. It's time for new editions.
People have written and called me through the years to tell me that my books have literally saved their lives or given them courage to fulfill abandoned dreams. This is why I want to make them known and available to many more people whose lives they might save or dreams they might help to fulfill. Readers of Womanpriest have told me that reading it gave them the encouragement they needed to return to their lost dreams and bring them into reality, or to follow their own inner calling to priestly ministry. It is their testimony that moves me to make Womanpriest and the two grief books (which readers have told me saved their lives) permanently known and available throughout the English-speaking world. My agent wants to enter these books in book fairs which will extend to the whole English-speaking world. This will be done by creating new digital editions of them and republishing them under my own name through Ingram, with instructions to forward all royalties to the World Wildlife Fund or the Southern Poverty Law Center after my death. Please help to make this plan possible by contributing if you can, and by sharing this proposal with everyone you know who might be interested and able to help. Thank you with all my heart! Alla Bozarth
Organizer
Alla Bozarth
Organizer
Sandy, OR