Renegade Bishops Face a Showdown

More than two decades after the Episcopal Church first authorized the ordination of women priests, the church’s highest policymaking body moved Thursday to bring a conservative San Joaquin Valley bishop into compliance, along with two others in Illinois and Texas who have refused to ordain women.

The overwhelming vote by deputies at the church’s triennial two-house legislature, known as the General Convention, orders a task force to visit the three holdout dioceses and directs the three bishops who have refused to ordain women to develop an action plan for full compliance.

The ordination of women has long been controversial in various member churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Church of England estimates that up to 400 of its male priests have left and become Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox since the Church of England began ordaining women in 1992.

In the United States, most Episcopalians thought the issue had been settled 24 years ago. The church authorized the ordination of women deacons in 1970, and in 1976 authorized the ordination of women as priests and bishops. Today there are an estimated 2,000 women among the church’s 15,000 priests, and eight women bishops.

But three of the church’s bishops have steadfastly held out against ordaining women as priests. The holdout bishops advance arguments similar to those made by the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, which last month rewrote its statement of beliefs to exclude women as senior pastors. Those denominations hold that because Jesus did not choose any women as his apostles, today’s Christian churches have no right to ordain women.

Thursday’s resolution noted that the San Joaquin diocese had made some progress toward ordaining women. Indeed, a representative of San Joaquin’s Episcopal bishop, the Rt. Rev. John David Schofield, maintained Thursday that the diocese is already in compliance with church law.

The diocese has one woman priest working as an assistant rector in a parish, said Nancy Salmon of Visalia, a member of the diocesan executive committee. Although that priest was ordained elsewhere, the diocese also has seven women among 28 current candidates for ordination as either deacons or priests, she said. Schofield was not in attendance here. His Fresno office said he is recovering from heart bypass surgery.

The other two dioceses, in Fort Worth and Quincy, Ill., have taken a harder line.

“We’re not going to comply,” said the Rev. Ryan Reed of Fort Worth. “We’re not going to compromise the Catholic faith.”

The Rev. Canon Charles Hough III, chief aide to Fort Worth Bishop Jack Leo Iker, was similarly adamant.

“You can’t legislate matters of faith, and we’ll go to the wall on that,” he told reporters. He argued that the national Episcopal Church, not the Fort Worth diocese, was out of step with major Christian churches in the Catholic tradition, including other Anglican provinces and the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

Iker has an arrangement with the neighboring bishop of Dallas that allows women in the Fort Worth diocese who wish to be ordained to go to the Dallas bishop to enter the process. After ordination, a female priest could return to the Fort Worth diocese. But, in an unusual arrangement, she would report to the Dallas bishop, not to Iker.

The bishop’s stance has caused girls and women to leave the church, according to one prominent Episcopal lay person from the diocese.

“They don’t want to be confirmed at the hands of a bishop who believes their sex is not proper for ordination,” said Katie Sherrod of Fort Worth, who is editor of an Episcopal women’s magazine.

In floor debate, proponents of women’s ordination disputed the contention that denying women ordination was theologically based or that the three dioceses were being singled out for punishment.

“This is not about theology,” said James E. Bradberry of the Diocese of Southern Virginia. “This is not about coercion. It is about access to the mainstream of the church for women.”

The resolution approved by the House of Delegates is expected to be approved by the House of Bishops, the convention’s other body. On Thursday, the bishops concurred with a the House of Deputies resolution which for the first time officially acknowledged homosexual couples in the church but rejected proposals to develop liturgical rites to bless same-sex unions.