Scottish Episcopal Church Ordains Women as Priests
Episcopal News Service. January 19, 1995 [95003]
With the ordination of 42 women as priests in a single day, the Scottish Episcopal Church stepped beyond years of struggle to join the majority of Anglican provinces that now ordain women.
In his sermon at St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh, where 15 women were ordained December 17, Primus Richard Holloway noted the deep wounds women have suffered as the Scottish church wrestled with the issue. "The debate about the ordination of women in our church has been a strange affair," he said. "On the one hand it has been a debate about theology, about the nature of authority, about women in the abstract. But there are no women in the abstract. There is only Elizabeth, and Jane, and Rosemary, and Alison and Pamela -- actual women with feelings and needs, longings and hopes."
For the women awaiting ordination, Holloway said that "it has been... not an interesting theological debate, not an exercise in church reformation, but a felt injustice, a quite personal pain, an institutionalized rejection, an actual oppression. That is why many good women have lost patience and left us."
The Scottish Episcopal Church voted in principle to ordain women before the Church of England did, but agreed to delay the final legislation until after the English church acted. The Scots took that final step June 16, 1994, in a vote that Holloway called "historic" but "late in the day, as far as the Anglican Communion is concerned."
At the same time, he said at the cathedral ordinations, "there are those for whom our work today will bring pain. It is a pain I cannot understand, but it is a pain I must acknowledge and find, if possible, ways to assuage."
On the same day as the Edinburgh ordinations, another 27 women were ordained in five other Scottish cathedrals. Four more were scheduled to be ordained in January, which will mean that one in seven Scottish clergy will be a woman.
In comments printed by the Glasgow Herald newspaper, Sheila Cox, 53, a mother of four, called the Edinburgh service "something precious."
She served as a deacon for six years before coming finally to her ordination as priest. "The interdenominational support -- both Protestant and Catholic -- was wonderful," she said.
During the service, members of the Roman Catholic group, Catholic Women's Ordination, demonstrated outside the cathedral to support those being ordained and to call on their own church to accept women priests.
On the day after the ordinations, Cox celebrated the Eucharist for the first time for the Sunday service at St. Mark's Scottish Episcopal Church, Portobello, a congregation that once opposed the ordination of women. While a minority within the Scottish church has strongly opposed the ordination of women, the debate has not been marked by the "nastiness and viciousness" seen in the Church of England, she said.
"There has been a lot of pain, but, on the whole, quiet pain," she said. "I think the Church has been very sensitive to those who couldn't accept us as well as being supportive to those of us waiting."
Jane Freebairn-Smith, one of the women ordained at the cathedral, served as a lay worker with the Church of England before coming to Glasgow in 1972. She was made a deacon in 1988 and now works as a member of the cathedral staff. She told The Herald she did not think her ordination as a priest would make a difference to her work "except to give a new kind of authority. Previously we felt pain rather than frustration, especially when we were asked to do work for the church but were denied the authority within it."
With December's ordinations, six of Scotland's seven dioceses are served by women clergy. In the Diocese of Moray, where the previous bishop was an implacable opponent of women's ordination, two women deacons will soon be eligible to be ordained as priests.