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What We Have Touched and Seen: Woman, Priest, and Sacramental Person

1997; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2615-2282

Mary Ellen,

Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

The question of women in ordained/sacramental ministries in the Anglican communion has been with us for 135 years, since the revival of the order of deaconesses in the United States. The first step towards including women in the priesthood, however, was taken neither in America nor in Europe, but in wartorn southern China in 1944, when the Right Reverend R. O. Hall, bishop of Hong Kong, ordained Florence Li Tim Oi, the most qualified indigenous candidate in his diocese, to the priesthood.Soon after, under pressure from the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Li Tim Oi agreed to refrain from exercising the functions of her priesthood, and for years thereafter was lost in the turmoil of Communist China. She was allowed to emigrate to Canada in 1981, and before she died in the early 1990's, she witnessed the consecration of the first woman bishop, the Right Reverend Barbara Harris, Suffragan of Massachusetts.No woman was ordained to the priesthood until 1971, when a later bishop of Hong Kong ordained two successors to Li Tim Oi and later a third. The canon enabling women to have access to the process for ordination to the priesthood passed the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States in 1976, and became effective on January 1, 1977. By the time the author was ordained in the Diocese of New York on January 10 of that year, forty-one other American women had been consecrated as priests.In all this time there has been much debate over the question of the proper ministry of women, some of it theological, some highly emotional, some sociological, and some of interest primarily to canonists. Volumes have been written in recent years about the experiences of the early women ordinands in the United States, but there has been, in the main, little reflection on the priest as sacramental person from the perspective of a woman priest. The role of women as priests was explored to a degree during the debates over the passage of the canon, but it is arguable that the fantasies about archetypal Womanhood advanced by some of its proponents were as offensive as some of the scurrilous remarks of the opposition.Roles and ModelsWhile one should be as leery of making generalizations about women priests as about any considerable group, it is probably accurate to say that one thing those of us who were pioneers had in common was a lack of role models. Some of us were more inclined to adopt the prevailing male model than others, but none of us were accepted in a way that would have made it easy to do so. Add to this the fact that many of us were either established professionals or products of the various liberation movements of the sixties and early seventies, and it is easy to see that we were a group inclined to distrust glib definitions of roles, especially in a hierarchical and male-dominated institution. Some of us became parish priests in more or less the usual mode of diocesan clergy, but others explored less usual paths, becoming spiritual directors, chaplains, teachers, and tent-maker pastors of all sons. We tended to gravitate, whether by choice or force of circumstances, into team ministries and parish clusters, rather than the single-priest parish of our forefathers.Once there, we found that we had to invent ourselves as we went along, and each had her own battles to fight. Some of us had to justify our very existence at every turn; others were readily accepted, but had to explain that the model of ministry we sought to embody was not necessarily that of universal mother or nanny. In fact, it took a long time for people to realize that we were as diverse a group as any comparable sample of our sacerdotal brethren.A Ministry of Word and SacramentWomen priests in their role as teachers were not as difficult to accept as they were in their roles as preachers and proclaimers of the Word with the whole magisterial authority of the Church behind them. The idea of women in roles of authority in the Church was alien, and many of us were uncomfortable with taking on such a role if it meant buying into a hierarchical, as opposed to collegial, model of ministry. …