Standing before Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning and 11 other bishops, the Very Rev. Geralyn Wolf was consecrated as the 12th Bishop of Rhode Island on a chilly, sunny Saturday, Feb. 17. An old athletic injury preventing her kneeling, the former dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, Ky., received the prayers, accolades, and the invocation of the Spirit for her ministry in the tiny area and 63 parishes of the diocese.

She became the second woman diocesan bishop in the U.S. and the third worldwide in the Anglican Communion.

Prominent in the service were women and ethnic groups from points of the new bishop's ministry. One gospellor was the Rev. Josephine Denby, a deacon from Bishop Wolf's former parish, St. Mary's, in Philadelphia. The gospel was read a second time in Spanish by Deacon Ann Pelletier of Providence. The Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris, Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts and the church's first woman bishop, participated along with Bishop Mary Adelia McLeod of Vermont, the American church's first woman diocesan. Co-consecrators also included Bishops George Hunt, 11th Bishop of Rhode Island (now interim bishop of Hawaii), Edwin Gulick of Kentucky, and Frank Griswold of Chicago, who also was the preacher.

Bishop Griswold's sermon began with a remembrance of Bishop Wolf's baptism as a young woman at his parish of St. Andrew in Yardley, Pa., in 1971. He asked her to create a ministry of openness.

In an interview with a reporter from the Providence Journal, Bishop Wolf described her first encounter with Christ as a 5-year-old girl on the street outside a church in Rockville Centre, N.Y. She "had a profound sense of the presence of God. I don't know how I knew, but I had a sense that this was Jesus. Warm, loving, pleasant . . . I think I have spent the rest of my life discovering the Jesus I met at the age of 5."

At her consecration, she was surrounded by the Jewish family of her childhood. "I cannot help but honor my daughter's accomplishment," said her father after the service.

(The Rev.) Peter Michaelson