Washington, USA - As the thousands gathered at the National Cathedral rang out a deep “amen” and then burst into cheers, Katharine Jefferts Schori formally took office as chief pastor and presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, making her the first woman to hold such a post in the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Despite the joyous welcome from her supporters, Bishop Jefferts Schori begins her nine-year term as intensifying disputes involving homosexuality threaten to fray the Episcopal Church and rupture its ties with the 77-million-member global Anglican Communion. Several bishops in the United States and leaders of many Anglican provinces overseas have said they will not acknowledge her in the role, largely because they are at sharp odds over her openness to gay men and lesbians in the episcopate and her support of blessings of same-sex marriages.
In a homily about finding one’s home in God and welcoming all others into that home, Bishop Jefferts Schori touched on the fractures within her church and voiced hopes of repairing them. “We cannot love God if we fail to love our neighbors into a more whole and holy state of life,” she said. “If some in this church feel wounded by recent decisions, then our salvation, our health as a body, is at some hazard, and it becomes the duty of all of us to seek healing and wholeness.”
The ceremony’s opening encompassed the different traditions the church tries to embrace, including those of American Indians, who led the procession with their songs and offering of sage and cedar incense, and the full-throated singing of the traditional hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy.”
But the ceremony’s true beginning came minutes later, when Bishop Jefferts Schori, who was outside, knocked three times on the cathedral’s western doors with her staff. She entered in violet and green vestments and was greeted by the departing presiding bishop, Frank T. Griswold. In the cathedral’s nave, she accepted the Book of Gospels, the water of baptism, the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the primatial staff that marked the start of her tenure as the 26th presiding bishop of the 2.4-million-member Episcopal Church.
The ceremony celebrated Bishop Jefferts Schori’s meteoric rise in the Episcopal Church. She was ordained just 12 years ago, after leaving a career as an oceanographer. The Episcopal Church itself only began to ordain women officially in 1976. Bishop Jefferts Schori, 52, quickly rose from serving as an assistant rector at a church in Corvallis, Ore., to becoming bishop of Nevada in 2001. At the church’s triennial general convention in Columbus last June, she was elected from a field of seven candidates by bishops, clergy members and lay representatives.
Her election, however, profoundly alienated many theologically conservative Episcopalians and Anglicans overseas. Three dioceses in the United States do not ordain women and refuse to recognize her as the new presiding bishop. But the most daunting challenges that Bishop Jefferts Schori faces involve her support of the consecration in 2003 of an openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church and her backing of church blessings of same-sex couples.
Since June, eight of the conservative Episcopal bishops have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, to provide another primate, one whose theology is closer to their own, to oversee them. On Friday, the diocese of Pittsburgh, led by a conservative bishop, adopted a resolution calling for “alternative Primatial oversight” and for its “withdrawal of consent for inclusion” in a regional grouping of Episcopal dioceses,.
Dissident Episcopalians have found enthusiastic support among primates of Anglican provinces in Asia, Latin America and Africa, whose churches are booming and where attitudes toward homosexuals are generally far more conservative. In the fall, the rector of a church in Virginia, the Rev. Martyn Minns, became bishop of a missionary Nigerian Anglican church in the United States, a move many think is meant to establish him as an alternative for disaffected Episcopal congregations to turn to for oversight.