Women priests who were caught in ‘conscience clause’ hope the church remembers their stories

[Episcopal News Service] The historic ordinations of the Philadelphia Eleven on July 29, 1974, and General Convention’s vote on Sept. 15, 1976, to allow women to become priests and bishops were not the end of the women’s ordination struggle.

Many women faced ongoing discrimination for years, none more so than those who were caught in the web spun by the non-canonical but widely used escape hatch, referred to as the “conscience clause,” the House of Bishops gave to those who objected to women’s ordination.

The Episcopal Church Canons, as of Jan. 1, 1977, called for equal access to the ordination process for both men and women. However, meeting in October of that year, the House of Bishops gave cover to any process gatekeeper who refused to follow the canon because of “his or her conscientious objection.” They said “no bishop, priest, or lay person should be coerced or penalized in any matter” for that objection. The bishops also refused to accept Presiding Bishop John Allin’s offer to resign after he had told them he was “unable to accept women in the role of priest.” In what appeared to be a change of heart as his term was ending in 1985, Allin said that his role as presiding bishop had been “to keep the two sides in conversation and to have the church do what she said she would do — ordain women priests.”

The conscience clause had no official standing because it had not been considered, much less approved by both houses of General Convention. It simply was announced during the October 1977 House of Bishops meeting and included in a pastoral letter calling for unity in Christ. However, it took 20 years and an act of General Convention (Resolution A052) to eliminate the loophole.

Nevertheless, some Episcopalians, especially bishops, persisted for another two decades, imposing sometimes circuitous arrangements to skirt but not violate the canons. Some arranged to have other bishops handle the ordination process for women. Then-Bishop of Eau Claire William Wantland said shortly after the 1997 General Convention that he would resign when his successor was ordained and consecrated in early 1999, citing the canonical change as one of his reasons. Until then, he imposed a moratorium on all ordinations.

Many Episcopalians “have no idea about what the early women went through,” the Rt. Rev. Chilton Knudsen, who served as the bishop of Maine from 1998 to 2008, told Episcopal News Service recently.

She knows firsthand because she had to deal with the conscience clause after then-Chicago Bishop James Montgomery ordained her in June 1980 to the transitional diaconate. He had said that “as an Anglo-Catholic, he could not lay hands on a woman to make her a priest,” Knudsen told ENS. “Once she was a priest by someone else’s hands, he accepted, as a good [Anglo-Catholic] that she was ordained but, he could not be the one doing it.”

It wasn’t just Montgomery who objected. The diocesan Standing Committee refused to approve women for priestly ordination. The committee made women transfer their process to other dioceses. Knudsen chose the Diocese of Indianapolis. They did not have to move geographically to those dioceses, only canonically. “We just moved on paper,” she said.

During her meeting with Indianapolis’ Standing Committee and Commission on Ministry to discuss her ordination, their first request was that she tell them about her relationship with Jesus Christ. The relevance of the question surprised her.

“I burst into tears because of all the interviewing I had to that point [in the Diocese of Chicago], no one ever asked me that question,” she said. Instead, she’d been asked things like what her husband thought and who took care of their son while she was in class at seminary. And they told her she’d never make a living as a priest.

In yet another workaround, Indianapolis delegated her ordination and those of the other women from Chicago back to that diocese and to its bishop suffragan, the Rt. Rev. Quintin Primo Jr.

Primo “was really our champion,” Knudsen said. Primo got Montgomery to agree that the ordinations could take place at the Chicago cathedral. The cathedral was packed on Feb. 24, 1981, she recalled, and many attendees called it a turning point in the life of the diocese.

But Montgomery “paid the price with his Anglo-Catholic friends” for allowing the ordination, Knudsen said. “He was criticized by those who were opposed to anything looking like an accommodation to the ordination of women.”

The Rev. Elizabeth Wigg-Maxwell, who had been the first girl acolyte in her parish in Minnesota, ran into a roadblock in that diocese during the early 1980s when she wanted to pursue ordination. The Rt. Rev. Bob Anderson, then the bishop of Minnesota, told her no because of the tensions in the House of Bishops surrounding the issue. Wigg-Maxwell began contacting other bishops, some of whom told her she would have to move to their dioceses before she could begin her process. That was not an option, however, because she was helping her family care for their father in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

She and another Minnesotan, Sue von Rautenkranz, who later became the archdeacon of the Diocese of Washington, drove from Green Bay to New Orleans, Louisiana, for the 67th General Convention “to see what we could do.”

“I sat outside of the House of Bishops and talked to bishops as they came in and went sort of pleading my case,” a recently retired Wigg-Maxwell said, evoking the image of the biblical persistent widow who demanded justice from the local judge.

Eventually, then-Michigan Bishop Coleman McGehee Jr. said she could go through the process in his diocese without having to move there. However, the parish she found to sponsor her entry into the process first wanted her to go back to Wisconsin and persuade the bishop there to let her in. The rector convinced the discernment committee that it was a fight Wigg-Maxwell would lose.

Bishops have often been the focus of the conscience clause, but the Rev. Jane Milliken Hague experienced its force at the parish level. As a college senior in 1977, she went to meet with the rector of her home parish in Connecticut about pursuing ordination.

“I couldn’t believe it. His assistant was the one who met with me,” she told ENS. “The assistant just said, ‘I just have to say that you’re going to have to find another parish because the rector’s never going to agree to ordain[ed] women.’ And that was the end of the conversation.”

A few years later, Hague, who is now interim priest-in-charge of St. Paul’s, Brunswick, Maine, was working in Washington, D.C., and served as a National Cathedral tour guide. One day standing in there “with light pouring on me and it was like, ‘Okay, I guess I’m supposed to be, you know, pursuing ordination.’”

She found a parish where the rector agreed she could begin the discernment process. However, he eventually said no to her and to women’s ordination generally. A member of the parish apologized to her a few years later and offered to write to the bishop to explain what had happened so that there was no “stain” on her record. “At the time, I was busy having babies and not really thinking about ordination, but it made me feel better,” Hague said.

It wasn’t until 15 years or so later that she had what she calls a “spiritual awakening” and “I began to feel the call to be ordained again.”

Hague resisted at first. “It took me a long, long, long time to reconcile the fact that it wasn’t God’s Word that turned me down. It was humans,” she said. “If I was, in some way, feeling the call for ordination again that maybe it was OK, that may be the first time I was right as well. I call it ‘the recall.’ God tried again.”

Eventually, then-Diocese of Washington Bishop John Chane ordained her a deacon in June 2011. Bishop Mariann Budde succeeded Chane in November of that year. In January 2012, because of that timing and the fact that, alphabetically, Hague led the ordinands that day, she became the first priest Budde ordained.

“As hard as that was, and it was devastating, I’m glad now that the world has changed, and that I could be ordained,” she said. “I’m not angry anymore because what has happened has happened.”

Knudsen, who has mentored 35 of the church’s 53 women bishops and bishops-elect, said she’s grateful for the life she’s lived in the church. “I’m also grateful for the number of women, including many women I have ordained” who have made the journey as well.

– The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is a freelance writer who formerly was a senior editor and reporter for Episcopal News Service.