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WOMEN'S ORDINATION

feminism

The rebirth of feminism was one of the crucial movements of the 1970s. Women demanded and received admission into the professional world, and ratification of the ERA, which would outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex, became one of the most hotly debated issues of the decade. In this context there was an inevitable attempt to advance the position of women in religious groups, including the right of women to ordination to the highest priestly office. Liberal groups, including Reformed Jews, who ordained their first woman rabbi in 1972, had relatively little difficulty in permitting women to exercise their highest spiritual office. Some Protestant denominations had long ordained women to the ministry, and other Mainline Protestant denominations extended that right in the latter half of the century. In 1970 both the American Lutheran church and the Lutheran Church in America authorized women's ordination.

Schism over Ordination

Religious conservatives saw this acceptance of women in the pulpits as clear evidence of the general liberalism of the Mainline denominations and equated it with a decline in traditional religious beliefs. Women's ordination seemed an explicit rejection of Paul's admonition to women to keep silent in the churches (1 Cor. 14:34). This violation of tradition led to the creation of splinter groups, such as the Presbyterian Church in America, which found the ordination of women one of the prime reasons for leaving the Southern Presbyterian church. Conservatives in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod saw women's ordination as one of several reasons to stay aloof from close connection to other Lutheran churches. The struggle over women's ordination was most bitter in those churches that centered their worship on the celebration of the Eucharist rather than the sermon. Here Communion was a miraculous repetition of Jesus' sacrifice of himself for his followers rather than a commemoration of the Last Supper. In these churches priests could be ordained only by bishops, who traced their authority back to the original church, where Jesus' disciples were all males. Breaking the centuries-long tradition was not only a repudiation of history but a reevaluation of the nature of the Mass itself.

Triennial Convention

The most spectacular struggle took place in the Episcopal church. In 1970 the denomination's Triennial Convention rejected ordination of women even though more than 50 percent of the denomination was female and the official organization Episcopal Women had voted that the church approve their ordination. Instead, women were seated as delegates in the House of Deputies for the first time, and deaconesses were given the same status as deacons (a step below the priesthood) in the church. When the House of Bishops blocked women's ordination at the next triennial meeting, some bishop proponents decided to act unilaterally. In July 1974 four bishops ordained eleven deaconesses as priestesses. Others ordinations followed in spite of suspension of these new priestesses by various bishops and the difficulty these women priests had in finding a place to carry out their ministries. In 1976, responding to growing demands for change, the Triennial Convention finally approved women's ordination. Following the pattern in other denominations, various Episcopal parishes around the nation began to leave the church to establish new structures faithful to their understanding of the nature of the all-male priesthood, the tradition of the Anglican church, and the old Book of Common Prayer.

Catholic Refusal

The Roman Catholic church refused to consider women's ordination, even though a coalition of women's religious groups organized to support that change and a liberal organization of priests, Priest for Equality, endorsed their ordination. When Pope John Paul II came to the United States in 1979 and addressed an audience of women religious at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., he was stunned when Sister Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, confronted him by saying, "The church must respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of our church." He quickly recovered himself and did not change his position on the issue that the priesthood was reserved for males.

Mormon Change

In 1978 Spenser Kimball, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, announced that women could give prayers in all services open to them. The highest services in the church were still restricted to men, however.