We've Been Here Before

Tomorrow is La Fête Nationale du Québec - St. Jean-Baptiste Day - and I will be returning to normal blog topics! One thing we learned when reading about the event on the internet recently is that St. Jean-Baptiste Day (which had its European origin as a pagan summer solstice holiday) has traditionally been the day when swimming pools open. And sure enough, today the fountains in the children's wading pool started up, so my writing is accompanied by the squeals I've come to associate with summer in Montréal.

Before leaving the subject of the Columbus General Convention, I wanted to write one final post adding a little historical perspective. Since I do happen to be straight, several people have asked me about my "entry point" into the issue of gay and lesbian rights and inclusion. For me, it was my experience as less-than-equal by virtue of being a woman. That was true both in society in general - no American woman born fifty years ago can possibly say she hasn't felt this - and in the Episcopal Church, which didn't grant full ordination rights to women until 1976. I did a lot of research on women's ordination for my book on Bishop Gene Robinson, and discovered that the same language and the same tactics - including the establishment of endless committees and delays "for further study"  - were used then in order to keep the power where it had always been. For the book, I interviewed the Rev. Nancy Wittig, one of the "Philadelphia Eleven": the first women who were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church in an "irregular" ordination in 1974. This is a passage from the book that deals with the actions of the General Convention that led up to that defiant act by frustrated women and bishops. We don't have the same situation now, since a gay man has already been legally ordained and approved by General Convention three years ago. What we have is an attempt to undo the damage, making Gene's election a one-time anomaly. That will not stand, in the long run, but it's instructive - and perhaps even a little bit encouraging - to see the pattern and know that justice eventually won out.
 

In 1972, during one of their annual meetings, the House of Bishops had tested the issue [of women's ordination] with a vote, and come out 74-61 in favor of ordaining women priests, but at the next General Convention, at Louisville in 1973, the ordination of women again failed to pass in the House of Deputies, because of a rule which said that if the votes of a diocesan delegation to the House of Deputies was split, (such as a “yes” vote from the lay delegation and a “no” vote from the clergy), the vote of the entire delegation would be recorded as a “no”. The lay deputies voted in the affirmative, but the clergy vote in Louisville was even more anti-women than at the previous convention.

...In Louisville, the [progressive women who made up the Episcopal Women’s Caucus]  got together and experienced strong camaraderie, and discussed how they could organize and help one another. “It wasn’t really an organized effort yet,” Nancy remembered. “There were some of us who were young and shot our mouths off—and I was certainly one of them—who knew some of the history of Phyllis Edwards and Bishop Pike.”

“Deaconesses” had in fact been allowed in the Episcopal Church since 1889, but did not have the same authority as male deacons, who were considered members of the clergy. Both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion had stressed this point that deaconesses were “not clergy”, although they had gone back and forth on the question of whether the conferring of deaconess status by the laying-on of hands was, in fact, a conferring of “holy orders.” Didn’t the Church believe that something incontrovertible happened—a permanent change ultimately emanating from God— when someone was ordained by laying-on of hands, rather than being simply appointed? That was the underlying question. In the 1960s this debate gathered steam. In 1964 the General Convention changed the canons to state that deaconesses are “ordered” (like male deacons, priests, and bishops) rather than “appointed.” The following year, 1965, the controversial bishop James Pike of San Francisco recognized Deaconess Phyllis Edwards as a regular deacon, setting off tremendous protest within the hierarchy – and it would take five years of argument before the church voted to allow women deacons to be ordained, with the same authority as their male counterparts.

“People in power don’t easily give over some of that power and authority—it has to be taken,” Nancy stated. “I felt that for women’s ordination to succeed, it couldn’t be a matter of one bishop and one woman. That had been the beginning of the end for Pike—the church pursued him and tried him for heresy—and I am convinced to this day that it was really over the ordination of Phyllis Edwards as a deacon. So the lesson to be learned from that was ‘don’t do anything by yourself, work as a community.’”

“In the church, women had been attacked and accused of not being able to do things on our own—the big joke, of course, was that we all got up and went to the bathroom together. But the Holy Spirit worked in the feminist movement to educate those of us in the church and outside of the church to realize that we would have to band together to survive. And we did.”

In addition to the fight over women’s ordination, the Louisville convention had also seen a tremendous struggle in the House of Deputies over the election of John Allin, a conservative, as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Allin succeeded John E. Hines, who had been a staunch supporter of the church’s role in the civil rights movement, and perhaps one of the most progressive presiding bishops in the church’s history.

His election may have been part of what Nancy Wittig called “the beginning of a backlash”. It came from the more conservative priests and bishops who finally realized that women were serious about being ordained not just to the deaconate, but to the priesthood—and saw this as simply too much.

“Not only would they have to share,” Nancy said, “but it had been a boys’ club, with all that boys’ clubs do—they had not only been the holders of all the power, but they had also been the holders of a lot of dirty secrets. And I suspect on a gut level that some of them knew that if women began to get wind of this, it was not going to be life as usual. All clubs that are just for the people in power are like that. And that was before we really knew how to talk about the power differentials between men and women emotionally, socially, politically, economically—all of that—and all of those things were mixed up in the argument over women’s ordination.”

From Chapter 3, "Sisterhood," of Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Gene Robinson by Elizabeth Adams, quoted here with the permission of the publisher, Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, NY.

Comments

[dale]

I'm so looking forward to reading this, Beth. Yes, the struggles are very like, especially rhetorically.