As women clear one barrier in the Episcopal Church, challenges still lie ahead
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Later this week, Sarah Mullally will be officially installed as the new archbishop of Canterbury. This will make her the first woman ever to lead the 85-million member Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of Anglicanism. NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose reports that while many women are celebrating the moment, they are also keenly aware of the challenges ahead.
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JASON DEROSE, BYLINE: In Hermosa Beach, California, a bit of church history is told in a window.
RACHEL NYBACK: What I love about this piece of stained glass is that you see the first woman who was called in the Diocese of Los Angeles to serve as a priest, and she was hired here at St. Cross.
DEROSE: That's Rachel Nyback, the current rector of St. Cross Episcopal Church. It's been 50 years between the first female priest here and the first female archbishop of Canterbury. That's a long time in a person's life but not long at all in the life of the church.
NYBACK: We've made it over this barrier, but it doesn't mean equality has been achieved, and it's something that we have to keep working on.
DEROSE: Keep working on, says Nyback, because of what many women called to ministry still face today, the stained glass ceiling.
NYBACK: OK, you can be a female priest, but there aren't jobs for you, or you can only be an associate. Or when you're ready to go get your own parish, we only have these small parishes over here that really are meant for you.
DEROSE: Because of that stained glass ceiling, when Sarah Mullally's name arose as a possibility to lead the Anglican communion, it raised a lot of interest.
NORMA GUERRA: Well, at first, I was a little doubtful, you know, if it was going to really happen.
DEROSE: Norma Guerra is a priest in the Diocese of Los Angeles.
GUERRA: And when I found out that it really did, I was happy. You know, it's such an awakening and recognition of the women's role in the church.
DEROSE: Guerra knows Mullally has her work cut out for her, given that she's replacing Justin Welby, who resigned over mishandling sex abuse. But Guerra has confidence in what the new archbishop of Canterbury brings to ministry. She served in the Church of England as a priest for more than two decades and was most recently the bishop of London. Prior to becoming a priest, she was an oncology nurse.
GUERRA: Leadership, full of compassion and with a perspective of reconciling of unity.
DEROSE: Pressing concerns in the Anglican Communion right now. Some more conservative members, especially in Africa, want to break up the communion because they reject welcoming LGBTQ people and female leadership. After Mullally was named last fall, those churches threatened to leave. Despite those challenges, Guerra is grateful for those who led her church to this moment.
GUERRA: I don't know if I would have made it here without my sisters that came before me.
DEROSE: In a framed photo on her office wall, Guerra poses with one of those sisters, Rev. Carter Heyward. In 1974, Heyward was one of a small group of women ordained against church rules in Philadelphia. It took another two years for the Episcopal Church to officially recognize their ordinations.
CARTER HEYWARD: So I figured it would take a while - that the 11 of us who had been ordained would be, really, pariahs and would not ever really be seen as sort of good priests by many Episcopalians. And that has been the case.
DEROSE: But Heyward says five decades of women's ordination have changed the church for the better.
HEYWARD: Expanding justice to those who have been excluded, making sure that people understand the life, the work and the constant ongoing presence of Jesus as a risen Christ.
DEROSE: Today, over half of all Episcopalians are women, but women make up just 40% of priests and about 30% of bishops - facts, Heyward says, that bear witness.
HEYWARD: You can be respectful and kind to the people who oppose you, but you do not need to permit them to stop you.
DEROSE: One leader who hasn't let resistance stop her is Chicago bishop Paula Clark.
PAULA CLARK: I am the first woman, I'm the first Black woman, And I am also a person who's disabled, or differently abled - the way I say it.
DEROSE: Clark, who suffered a brain bleed shortly after her election, thinks back to an international meeting of Anglican bishops she attended in the U.K. a few years ago.
CLARK: We were broken into small groups. And I was the only woman in the group. I was told that I should be with the rest of the wives.
DEROSE: Clark says she also experiences discrimination closer to home.
CLARK: Right now, there are parishes in the Diocese of Chicago, where I am unwelcome because I'm a woman, and I go anyway.
DEROSE: Go anyway. It's a refrain for many women in ministry. Go in the footsteps of those who've gone before.
NADIA STEFKO: If you look at the south side of the nave, all of the windows on the lower level here are all exclusively women saints of the church.
DEROSE: When Rector Nadia Stefko processes into worship at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church just north of Chicago, those saints remind her that she walks in a long line of female leadership.
STEFKO: First, we've got St. Anne here. Then we've got Mary - Mary, the mother of Jesus. Who have we got here? Then we've got Martha. We've got St. Hilda.
DEROSE: Also in this parish is one of the newest priests in the Diocese of Chicago, Shannon Page.
SHANNON PAGE: Our tradition is full of these stories of women who had deep experiences of God, and those stories are also our stories.
DEROSE: Page turns to a pew under one of those windows.
PAGE: I have a 2-year-old daughter, and now I'm just thinking that's kind of cool that she sits on this side, too. I wonder if she's also looking at the women, seeing herself, her stories in this space.
DEROSE: A holy space, where past and present meet to face the future. Jason DeRose, NPR News.
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