Awaiting Recognition

For the women who have been ordained Episcopal priests, their ministries are and have been a far more important goal than women's liberation. In interviews last week, the Revs. Suzanne Hiatt and Katrina Swanson, 1958 and 1956 graduates of Radcliffe, agreed they never felt oppressed by Harvard's predominantly male population. During their college days, both women say they gained a strong sense of their own purpose, and their faith in Episcopalianism was confirmed.

It was all very natural for Swanson. Coming from a family with four Episcopal clergymen in it, Swanson says, "You're molded to do the things that are important to other members of your family." She recalls her father, the Rt. Rev. Edward R. Welles, being "a little surprised" when she told him her destiny was the priesthood. But he accepted the idea quickly and eventually helped plan and execute the Philadelphia ordinations.

Swanson speaks painfully about the things her father and her husband, also a priest, are forced to endure. Recently, she says, her husband was fired from all liturgical functions in his Kansas Cityparish because of the pressure their bishop applied. "It's like in the Bible when religious leaders called in a man's family and not the man himself for doing something wrong," she says bitterly.

It was social action, not women's rights, that started Hiatt on the way to her church career. After graduating from Radcliffe, where she wrote her honors thesis in American History on a subject concerning Episcopalianism, she had the choice of working for the Girl Scouts or the Central Intelligence Agency. She chose the Girl Scouts, eventually becoming a community organizer and welfare rights advocate. In 1961, after the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) started to admit women as graduate students, she returned to Cambridge.

"My feeling was that it was ridiculous to train people for a profession you don't let them into," Hiatt argues. But she decided to go anyway, with the intention of working actively toward the goal of women's ordination. Hiatt, a canonical resident of Pennsylvania diocese, was the first woman ordained to the deaconate--the junior clerical orders that first admitted women in 1970--from the state of Massachusetts.

The Rev. Carter Heyward, perhaps the most vocal and outwardly radical of these priests, was called to the priesthood at an early age. "I always had some sense of belonging," says Heyward, who teaches at EDS in Cambridge. "But I shelved all notions of being ordained in the back of my mind because I wasn't really thinking of it as a realistic possibility."

But ordination became a possibility after a group of women interested in becoming priests started to plan for it, following the rejection of women priests by a 1970 church convention.

Heyward's doctoral dissertation topic is entitled "Toward an Androgenous God: A Theology of Sexuality." She speaks of it while referring to her ministry, "We have lost a sense of who God is and who we are in God's image. God is as much a mother as a father, a sister as a brother. People don't realize this because they tend to give God a name, a sex and a role."

Of her womanhood, and of her openly hostile attitude toward the church Heyward says, "I am a woman but that's secondary. My vocation now is to be doing what I'm doing and that includes doing battle with the Episcopal church.

The Rev. Emily Hewitt is currently a first-year student at Harvard Law School. Despite the furor caused by the ordinations, Hewitt remains an extremely private person, refusing interviews or publicity. Her classmates at the Law School are unaware of her priestly status. Those who discover it are surprised, and often mention her dedication to the law. Heyward, who knows Hewitt well, having lived for many years in the same diocese as the law student, calls her friend "extraordinarily holy and fabulously committed." Walter J. Telfer, chairman of the Church and Ministry Department at Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, where Hewitt taught until this September, says Hewitt feels that learning the law is the best way she can serve her ministry, by representing those who cannot afford lawyers.

For the past 18 months, these women have found the debate within the church over their ordinations disquieting. They would have preferred it another way; they had hoped for approval and reconcilation, not silence and sympathy. But the women accept a symbolic role for now, confident that their time will come.