Women Priests in the Episcopal Church

Abstract

This portion of a poem by Alia Bozarth-Campbell, written after her "irregular ordination" as a priest in the Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974, summarizes the challenge to the Church and its response concerning a major tenet of its belief system—that women should not be priests. The irregular ordination of eleven women on that date marked a turning point in a conflict within the Church over whether or not to allow women to be priests. A challenge to a tenet of a religious system has the potential to weaken or even destroy the entire system—a system that is often one of the strongest and most influential belief systems that human beings have. Thus, an examination of the Church's response to the conflict perhaps can reveal general strategies for coping with conflict in other contexts.