Episcopal priestesses

Christian Century, Jan 2, 2002 by Mark Oppenheimer

FOR MANY YEARS, Suzanne Hiatt taught a course on "Death and Dying" to seminarians. When she got sick last year, she got to see how the actual experience compared to her class notes. "What I never thought of was how clergy behaved on a hospital visit. What I learned when I was in the hospital allegedly dying is: they're terrible at it. They don't want to talk about the illness. They say, `How are you? Isn't the weather lovely?'"

I talked to Hiatt in October in a Cambridge hospice, where she is dying of thyroid cancer. One of Hiatt's vocal chords is paralyzed and has collapsed on top of her larynx, so her voice was raspy. But she looked happy as she began to tell me about the day in 1974 when she and ten other women, "the Philadelphia Eleven," were ordained Episcopal priests at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. Defying church hierarchy, three retired bishops laid hands on these 11 women, who thenceforth were the first American women to be Episcopal priests. The "irregular ordinations," as they were called, forced the issue, putting the Episcopal Church in a vise that threatened to crack it in two: Were these women priests or not? The church resolved the issue two years later when it changed its canons to permit ordination regardless of gender.

The Philadelphia Eleven were all white, and either middle class or rich. Several were lesbians. One, Jeannette Piccard, was a famous balloonist who had once held the world record for highest altitude achieved by a human being. At the time of the Philadelphia ordination, she was 79.

Almost all of them had some experience with the civil rights movement. Hiatt had begun working with an all-black Girl Scout troop soon after graduating from Radcliffe. Carter Heyward had worked at the Henry Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side of New York, an experience that had forced this North Carolina girl to think about her "black maid's exclusion from our dining room table," as she later wrote. Betty Bone Schiess had lived with her husband in Algiers for a year. Alia Bozarth-Campbell wrote a poem about the parallel between women's rights and civil rights: "When they call me libber/I hear nigger."

In the 1970s, when the issue of women's ordination was loosening Episcopalians' girdles, the Philadelphia Eleven were a touchy subject. A woman named Mary Ann Peters wrote in 1975, "The women's movement within the Church no longer needs screaming, protesting, button-wearing suffragettes who merely antagonize others within a seemingly Christian community." Nancy Hatch Wittig, one of the Philadelphia Eleven, had a cool answer: "I heard the gospel long before I heard of the women's movement."

Certainly that was true for Hiatt, who told me that she had always wanted to be a priest. "I thought it would be fun to march up and down that aisle, talking to people, being helpful to people. But as a child I put it out of my head and thought about other things girls could do, none of which sounded like much fun. I was baptized at age 11, because my parents had never got around to it in Hartford, where we lived before Minneapolis. So [my brother] John and I were baptized with all these infants. John at 14 was acutely embarrassed, but I, at 11, thought it was fun, and I was moved by it.

"We went home and had a party--being Episcopalians, we had a drink. I went out on a neighbor's swing and thought, `Wheeeee! Now I'm a member of the church, now I'm a Christian. Now we'll see who gets to walk down aisles.'"

As a teenager, Hiatt drifted from religion. Before leaving for her freshman year at Wellesley, she received a letter from the college asking what religion she was. "I was offended by the letter. I figured they asked because they had a bad habit of putting all the Jews together. And in some parts of the world, Hiatt is a Jewish name. I said I didn't have a religion, but sent in a late-adolescent pantheistic letter. They gave me a Quaker roommate. I think they thought Quakerism was so exotic they put us together to let us fight it out." But the roommate told her, "I wrote a pantheistic letter just like you did!"

Hiatt later transferred to Radcliffe. After college and her job with the Girl Scouts, she worked with the Episcopal Church's Indian mission efforts, then studied English literature in Edinburgh. One day she walked into St. Giles Cathedral, "frankly to get warm. It was a medieval cathedral. It had the beautiful painted statues. It was empty, and it was a workday. I wandered around, and then sat down on a radiator. I thought, `What am I going to do with my life?' And a voice said, `You're going to be a priest. It's what you've always been called to do.' And I thought, `No, this is a Presbyterian church.' And the voice said, `That's true, but you're called to be a priest.' That's what you'd say is a true call to the priesthood."

Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge (now Episcopal Divinity School) admitted women for study, even though the church would not ordain them as priests. "There were five women," Hiatt said. "Only the young ones would admit they were called to the priesthood. The kind of thing blacks have to put up with forever, we put up with--being called `Sugar' and `Sweetie' and `Honey.' They'd come out and say offensive things, like `Why don't you go home?'" One administrator told a female student that one reason women had been admitted was to keep the male students from using foul language. Hiatt would eventually join the faculty of the school.